Computation and Language
Papers
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Friday 4 September
Although automatic text simplification (ATS) is critical for accessibility, its progress has not matched the rapid evolution of broader natural language processing techniques. This paper investigates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the quality of ATS for low-resource languages using Large Language Models (LLMs). The paper introduces a novel reward function, designed to guide LLMs toward a targeted simplification style with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that combines the SARI metric with specific penalty components. The effectiveness of GRPO with this reward function is motivated and demonstrated by post-training IberianLLM-7B-Instruct on the ASSET dataset. After post-training on the English ASSET, the model's ATS performance improves on two curated Catalan benchmarks while also successfully suppressing previously observed negative behaviors. Cross-lingual transfer learning is explored by translating ASSET into Catalan and Spanish and post-training the model on each version, but these fail to show a significant improvement on the out-of-domain benchmark.
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML
Minimax Rate for Diffusion-Guided Local Intrinsic Dimension Estimation based on Fokker-Planck Equation
Diffusion-guided methods have recently emerged as effective tools for probing the intrinsic geometry of high-dimensional data. Understanding their accuracy requires quantifying both (i) finite-scale approximation error relative to the true local intrinsic dimension (LID) and (ii) estimation error from finite samples. We address these two questions for the FLIPD field (Kamkari et al., 2024; arXiv:2406.03537), defined at the population level through the logarithmic scale derivative of a Gaussian-smoothed density and admitting a Fokker–Planck representation. For $\alpha$-smooth densities on a regular $d$-dimensional manifold, we establish a uniform $O(\sigma^2)$ approximation bound relative to the manifold dimension $d$. Under expected integrated squared loss, we prove a minimax lower bound of order $(n\sigma^d)^{-1}$ for estimating the FLIPD field from $n$ observations when $n^{-1/(2\alpha+d)}\le\sigma\le\sigma_0$. A plug-in FLIPD estimator based on the empirical denoising score matching (DSM) solution attains a matching upper bound. Thus the minimax rate is of order $(n\sigma^d)^{-1}$ and it becomes $n^{-2\alpha/(2\alpha+d)}$ at its smallest scale.
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Cryptography and Security
Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent Ransomware Detection and Family Attribution
Sandbox execution and memory forensics are among the most resources intensive stages of malware triage. Static analysis can scale to millions of files while dynamic and memory analysis require minutes per sample. Because multimodal ransomware detectors often apply every modality to every sample, costs and latency rise even when static evidence suffice.We proposea cost aware Hierarchical Multi Agent System (HMAS) that frames evidence acquisition as a budgeted sequential decision problem enabling timely ransomware detection. Specialist agents generate schema validated risk signals for each modality while domain controllers aggregate evidence and coordinate analysis. The orchestrator starts with static evidence and escalates only if confidence is low or signals disagree. A locally hosted language model provides a limited, accoutable review without replacing the deterministic pipeline. Experiments on 16 ransomware families show 94.12% binary accuracy (F1 0.9376, ROC-AUC 0.9989). For multi class family attribution, it achieves 98.90% accuracy (macro-F1 0.9748). The system resolves 57.95% of the samples using static analysis alone whhile only 6.21% require the full pipeline. Compared with exhaustive cost of 12.0 units,the proposed system reduces te average cost to 6.724 units, representing approximately 44% saving. Zero day experiments further examine generalization to unseen ransomware families. Additional evaluations examine cost sensitivity and component level contribution. LLM-assisted review provides only marginal improvement in F1 while introducing additional computational overhead. Overall, the results show the potential of adaptive hierarchical multi agent orchestration to balance ransomware detection performance, family attribution analysis cost and decision latency.
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Computation and Language
A Systematic Comparison of Multilingual Interpretability Methods Reveals Anisotropy-Driven Failures
Multilingual language models develop shared cross-lingual representations, and various interpretability methods claim to quantify this sharing. These methods have been developed largely in isolation, and when they disagree, it is unclear whether the disagreement reflects a property of the model or an artifact of the measurement. We compare four sharing metrics (CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO) across 21 base models from five families (125M-14B parameters) and correlate each with cross-lingual transfer on five downstream tasks. We find that the metrics differ in their quantification of cross-lingual sharing in these models and suggest that the disagreement traces to anisotropy, the tendency of representations to cluster in a narrow cone of the embedding space. Only ILO's correlation with cross-lingual transfer (Spearman's $\rho = 0.90$) survives controls for model size, family, and per-task variation. We therefore recommend ILO as the primary sharing metric, to be reported alongside anisotropy diagnostics.
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Robotics
Strict Modes Everywhere - Bringing Order Into Dynamics of Mechanical Systems by a Potential Compatible With the Geodesic Flow
Strict nonlinear normal modes provide very regular families of oscillations within conservative mechanical systems. However, a strict normal mode will generally be an isolated curve within the configuration space of the system. In this letter, we design a potential that will densely fill the configuration space with strict normal modes such that each configuration belongs to one mode and each mode passes through a common point, the equilibrium. As the potential can be realized by (nonlinear) elastic elements it can be used to execute a variety of periodic trajectories very efficiently. Most of the required torques will come from the elastic elements in the system and not from the actuators. We also design a controller stabilizing the system to a desired target mode and a controller performing swing-up and compensating dissipated energy. Finally, we showcase the approach for a two DoF manipulator. The experiments show that the approach performed well for the example system.
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Machine Learning
Federated Attack Campaign Detection via Contrastive Encoding of Threat Indicators in Gradient Updates
Detecting orchestrated cyberattack campaigns that span multiple organizations traditionally requires sharing sensitive telemetry and threat intelligence across institutional boundaries and country borders, a barrier that Federated Learning removes by training shared threat detectors directly on local data. We propose FedIoC, a modular framework in which clients fold locally available structured threat indicators into their gradient updates; we instantiate the client-side encoder with a supervised contrastive loss over IoC-matched flows. Within each training batch, flows that match any known indicator pattern form the positive set; the contrastive objective pulls their learned embeddings together and pushes non-IoC embeddings away, so that campaign-relevant structure is, by design, expressed in the gradient direction. Clients sharing indicators for the same attack campaign then produce aligned gradient components, which the server clusters by the cosine similarity of their updates to recover global campaign patterns without any direct IoC transmission. We evaluate FedIoC on two public threat-detection benchmarks distributed across FL clients that each observe only a fragment of every active campaign and hold disjoint indicator sets derived from their local telemetry. In this regime the FL server recovers cross-organizational campaign cohorts directly from gradient geometry. We contribute FedIoC as a modular framework for this setting, and use it to pinpoint the non-IID gradient structure as the main driver of recovery and to define the open problem of designing encoders that improve on it.
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Information Retrieval
Inventory-Grounded Policy-Level Optimization for Training-Free AI Search
Early in deployment, an AI search system typically operates over a frequently updated product catalog, so the available items and their properties cannot be treated as stable knowledge that can be encoded in fixed prompts or strategies. Fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and static prompt patches fit poorly: labels are scarce, rewards drift with inventory, model releases are costly, and prompt fixes quickly stale. We present Inventory-Grounded Policy-Level Optimization (IGPO), a training-free approach for fixed AI search pipelines. IGPO separates policy from environment facts: it learns Policy Guidelines for acting on runtime inventory evidence rather than memorizing available items. Online, IGPO grounds each query by probing the inventory and constructing an inventory portrait, then injects relevant Policy Guidelines into the retrieval and selection prompts. Offline, stochastic rollouts are grouped by query – mixed outcome groups directly yield contrastive signal, and an inventory-guided exploration loop distinguishes missed retrieval routes from cases where no matching support is found under the observed inventory evidence. Since May 2026, IGPO has been deployed in a commercial smart-assistant AI search system. A 14-day online A/B test of the complete IGPO treatment shows a 3.17% relative CTR lift and a 38.9% reduction in audited bad cases.
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Artificial Intelligence
CPR-IE:A Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency Metric
Comparing intelligent systems under deployment constraints requires more than predictiveaccuracy.This paper develops Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency (CPR-IE) as a protocol-relative ordering by representational economy, predictive quality, and resourceburden. The analysis separates two questions-how raw resource consumption is represented, andhow the resulting attributes are aggregated. Proportional-increment composition uniquely yieldslogarithmic cumulative burden, and context-independent ratio response yields power responsesto compression, prediction, and burden; with reference normalization the representation is I(C,P,T).We prove Pareto consistency, unit invariance, boundary behavior, trade-off identities, ranking-stability regions, and cross-task aggregation. A translog parent model makes interaction restrictions explicit, and further results establish cardinal and ordinal identification, sub-Gaussianfinite-sample ranking guarantees, robust selection under exponent uncertainty, and deterministicregret bounds. Minimum description length, algorithmic complexity, proper scoring rules, varia-tional inference, and Landauer's principle motivate measurement choices but do not entail theformula. CPR-IE is a constructed efficiency representation, not a universal law or a definition ofintelligence itself.
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Computation and Language
Recurrence Is Not Enough: Causally Validating Multilingual SAE Translation Features in Gemma 2 and 3
Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to explain and steer language-model behavior, but it remains unclear whether a feature found in one language context plays the same causal role when processing prompts in another language. We study this question using translation-initiation features (Wu et al., 2026). We reproduce the SAE feature discovery method from Wu et al. in Gemma 2 and extend it to multilingual settings that vary prompt language, source language, and target language. We then test whether features that recur across settings affect translation behavior by amplifying or ablating their activations during inference. We also examine whether the method can be applied to Gemma 3. In both models, we observe an identical finding: although we can find more than 20 features that activate frequently across all discovery settings, causal validation shows that nearly all have small or inconsistent effects. In contrast, one feature – Gemma 2's (L10, 5717) and Gemma 3's (L20, 2456) – consistently improves COMET scores when amplified and degrades them when ablated across 23 language settings. These results show that feature recurrence can overstate cross-lingual transfer, while identifying a language-agnostic translation-initiation direction in Gemma 2 and Gemma 3.
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Robotics
CoLMIN: LLM-based Multi-Decision Path Negotiation for Cooperative Autonomous Driving
Multi-vehicle cooperative autonomous driving enhances the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems through information sharing among connected vehicles, demonstrating significant potential for improving traffic safety. LLM-based approaches leverage strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enable effective inter-vehicle negotiation and improve cooperative driving performance. However, driving decisions in complex traffic scenarios are inherently multi-solution in nature. As a result, existing negotiation-based methods often converge prematurely to suboptimal solutions, hindering consensus formation and limiting the practical deployment of cooperative autonomous driving systems. To address this challenge, we propose CoLMIN, the LLM-based multi-decision path negotiation framework for cooperative autonomous driving, achieving stable decision consensus through multi-decision path negotiation and reflective reasoning. To achieve stable and high-quality consensus in cooperative autonomous driving, CoLMIN consists of three key components: (i) an LLM-based Multi-Intent Negotiation module (LMin), which adopts a Negotiator-Evaluator paradigm and generates multiple candidate driving intentions for joint evaluation; (ii) an Evaluation-based Shallow Reflection Module (ESRM), which analyzes negotiation outcomes and provides feedback to guide subsequent negotiations, thereby accelerating consensus formation; and (iii) an LLM-based Deep Reflection Module (LDRM), which performs long-term reflection over negotiation histories to mitigate cognitive fixation and prevent the system from converging to suboptimal solutions. Experimental results in the CARLA simulation environment demonstrate that CoLMIN significantly outperforms existing methods in challenging interactive driving scenarios.
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Artificial Intelligence
When Financial Fine-tuning Fails: A Three-Level Detectability Analysis of Numerical Hallucination in Domain-Adapted Language Models
Financial large language models are increasingly deployed for summarization of reports and disclosures, where numerical hallucination poses significant practical risks. While prior work often attributes such hallucination to insufficient numerical reasoning, this assumption has not been systematically tested under controlled fine-tuning settings. In this paper, we conduct a cost-effective, controlled study of numerical hallucination in financial summarization across three model variants: a base instruction-tuned model, a domain language-adapted model (FT-A), and a numeracy-enhanced domain model (FT-A+B+C). We introduce a three-level detectability taxonomy distinguishing between overt hallucination (currency-denominated fabrication), covert-explicit hallucination (professional-convention numbers), and covert-implicit hallucination (ungrounded quantitative claims). Our results reveal that domain fine-tuning substantially degrades numerical restraint at all detectability levels. While the Base model maintains near-zero hallucination rates (5.4%), FT-A exhibits 82.5% overt hallucination and FT-A+B+C reaches 98%. Contrary to intuition, numeracy supervision amplifies rather than mitigates hallucination across all levels. We identify template injection—the insertion of memorized canonical values regardless of input content—as a primary hallucination mechanism in fine-tuned models. These findings demonstrate that numerical hallucination in financial summarization is driven by the degradation of numerical restraint through domain adaptation, not by insufficient numerical reasoning. We recommend that evaluation protocols assess hallucination across all detectability levels and that deployment practices include explicit mechanisms for grounding-aware generation or abstention.
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Artificial Intelligence
MedFlow: Class-Aware Multi-Scale Generation for Medical Time-Series Synthesis
Synthetic medical time-series generation can alleviate data scarcity and support the development of reliable clinical prediction models. However, existing methods mainly focus on matching the overall distribution and temporal dynamics of real data, which does not necessarily ensure strong downstream utility on imbalanced medical datasets. Clinically informative patterns often occur at heterogeneous temporal scales, while rare minority-class characteristics can be obscured by dominant population patterns. To address these challenges, we propose MedFlow, a class-aware multi-scale flow matching framework for medical time-series synthesis. MedFlow employs a vector-quantized multi-scale tokenizer to represent medical sequences at complementary temporal resolutions, capturing both coarse clinical trends and fine-grained dynamics. We further introduce Token Marginal Guidance, which incorporates class-conditional token statistics directly into the flow matching process to steer generation toward class-specific regions of the learned tokens. This mechanism strengthens minority-class patterns, while preserving the global and tail distributions of real data. Experiments on four public datasets covering electronic health records, EEG, and ECG signals demonstrate that MedFlow consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art diffusion-based baselines across downstream prediction tasks. On average, it improves AUPRC by 5.8%, reduces Context-FID by 88.6%, and achieves 3.8$\times$ higher sampling throughput.
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Artificial Intelligence
Hierarchical Possession-Aware Graph Pointer Network for Pass Receiver Selection
Pass receiver selection is a fundamental task in football analytics, aiming to predict the intended receiver under a given game state. This task is challenging with event-centered freeze-frame observations, a broadcast-like setting that provides only partial and variable player visibility without complete trajectories or stable player identities. The model must therefore reason over anonymous visible candidates, opponent pressure, and recent context under partial observation. To address this setting, we propose a Hierarchical Possession-aware Graph Pointer Network (HPGPN), which formulates pass receiver selection as variable-size candidate prediction over visible teammates. HPGPN jointly models current player interactions, local event context, and possession-level temporal dynamics. It represents the current pass situation with a graph, incorporates fixed event context, and uses dynamic possession history to capture how the attacking sequence evolves. Candidate representations are refined hierarchically by integrating spatial, contextual, and historical evidence, and a glimpse pointer head scores the receiver candidates. Experiments on public football event and freeze-frame data show that HPGPN improves pass receiver selection performance. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of graph-based interaction modeling, fixed event context, and dual-branch dynamic possession-history modeling.
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Computer Vision
Linguistic Trajectory Encoding for Efficient Long-Horizon Spatial Memory in Embodied Agents
Embodied agents performing long-horizon tasks require a memory representation in which the state transitions of dynamic objects remain queryable in natural language across hours-to-days observation horizons. Existing systems either drop fine-grained motion (clip-level video-language embeddings), keep it only as raw coordinates (geometric SLAM), or organise it around immediate task context (agent working memories). None of them gives the agent a per-object timeline whose state transitions are themselves queryable in language. Our key contribution is Linguistic Trajectory Encoding (LTE), which compresses dynamic object motion histories via a hybrid representation combining natural language descriptions, sparse spatial anchors, and visual anchors. LTE adapts compression to motion complexity by anchoring periods without reliable observations to the last seen location, while representing motion with geometric waypoints and linguistic descriptions to preserve accuracy. To evaluate these capabilities across extended time horizons, we construct the Spatial Memory Benchmark (SMB) from EgoLife multi-day recordings, targeting capabilities absent in existing benchmarks: semantic trajectory retrieval and long-horizon object retrieval. On SMB, the LTE-based system achieves $45.3\%$ success in semantic trajectory retrieval and $48.7\%$ in long-horizon object retrieval, outperforming structured-memory and VLM baselines (best prior: $31.9\%$ and $34.4\%$). LTE achieves trajectory compression by factors of $8.7\times$ to $26.1\times$ with sub-second query latency on $24$\,h video. On Ego4D natural-language queries, the system reaches $28.75\%$ / $55.10\%$ R@1/R@5, $+15.80$ / $+31.30$ pts over EgoVLPv2.
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Artificial Intelligence
Whose record is this? Diagnosing and authorizing record use in personalized multimodal models
Contextualized visual personalization can retrieve a true record yet apply it to the wrong visual subject. We formalize when a record may condition an answer as record authorization: subject presence ($P$), record-edge validity ($E$), and answer support ($S$) must all hold. We call violations visual memory misbinding (VMM). We construct RecordAuth-Diag, a 3,690-case matched diagnostic suite that changes one image–record edge while holding the query, question, record text, and image multiset fixed. Card removal and nonce relabeling attribute these failures to supplied records. Raw-bank failures span Qwen-, Phi-, and Gemma-family interfaces: Gemma-3-4B-IT reaches 63.69% local unauthorized use at 25.75% clean recall. CoViP remains at 26.02%, versus 22.49% for its Qwen backbone at similar clean recall. Typed pre-generation authorization reduces Qwen card exposure on RecordAuth-Diag from 43.63% to 3.06%, while positive recall changes from 86.26% to 60.90%. Full $P\wedge E\wedge S$ validation uses 560 localized DAVIS cases: top-1 relevance and typed authorization have comparable release (28.93% and 28.39%) but 6.79% and 0.89% unsafe release, respectively. Of the 33 additional unsafe cases removed, 27 are support, 4 edge, 2 clean, and 0 boundary cases. Thus the observed increment is an $E\wedge S$ decision dominated by support, not an edge check alone. Appearance supplies $E$ evidence only conditional on $P$; authenticated subject tokens instantiate the missing presence witness as a sufficiency control. The claims concern the evaluated contracts, not natural prevalence, consent, or visual identity
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Computer Vision
Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation of CLIP for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval
Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos that contain moments relevant to a text query. Since the target moment occupies only a portion of the video, PRVR requires retrieval based on fine-grained understanding beyond coarse video-level matching. However, existing methods often rely on frozen CLIP frame features, which lack temporal understanding. Even with recent progress in parameter-efficient CLIP adaptation, video-level predictions can still be supported by imprecise frame-level evidence. In this paper, we propose an Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation (ITA) framework for PRVR. First, our Backbone-Internal Temporal Adaptation allows the last few visual transformer layers to attend over groups of neighboring frames. This provides temporally aware frame embeddings while keeping CLIP frozen and training only adaptation parameters. Second, we introduce Affinity-Weighted Gradient Propagation to address the weakly supervised nature of PRVR, softly aggregating top-$k$ frames based on text-frame affinities and propagating learning signals to multiple query-relevant frames. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PRVR benchmarks, demonstrates robust cross-dataset transfer, and retrieves substantially more accurate frame-level evidence within ground-truth query-relevant moments. Our code is available at github.com/hynnsk/ITA.
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Robotics
HaptiNet: Networked Haptic Robots Enable Physical Co-presence in Geographically-Unconstrained Rehabilitation
Cooperative rehabilitation enhances engagement, task performance, and social-motor interaction, yet it demands physical co-presence: users must transmit forces, coordinate movements, and infer intent through haptic contact. Telerehabilitation promises to expand access for patients constrained by distance, mobility, or clinical disparities, yet current techniques remain predominantly audiovisual while leaving users haptically and physically isolated. Here, we introduce HaptiNet, a networked haptic robotic system enabling physical co-presence for geographically distributed users via force-mediated interaction. Each robotic terminal features a low-inertia, long-stroke design with high force-feedback capacity, tailored for haptic rendering in upper-limb training. Building on these terminals, HaptiNet creates a distributed haptic network with an imitation-learning-based delay compensator, enabling users to physically perceive and coordinate with one another over distance. We validated HaptiNet in 284 healthy participants and 111 patients with neurological impairments across progressively realistic settings, including laboratory tests, cross-city deployments, and clinical applications. HaptiNet preserved task-level force rendering consistency across single-user and multi-user scenarios. Compared with solo and visual cooperative training, haptic cooperation improved task performance by 24% and 22%, respectively, while also boosting engagement and interpersonal motor synchrony. Across three intercity links totaling approximately 4,000 km, HaptiNet maintained stable haptic interaction among patients with neurological impairments, producing a 3.87-fold greater baseline-to-training score improvement and a 106% higher patient-applied effort over the solo condition.
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Machine Learning
How Faithful Is Attribution for Sales Forecasting? A Counterfactual Study
Deep models for sales forecasting, such as WaveNet-style dilated convolutional networks, are accurate but opaque: when a single model predicts sales for one of many series, it offers no account of why. We add a post-hoc, architecture-agnostic counterfactual interpretability layer to a multi-series WaveNet forecaster trained on the full Corporacion Favorita grocery dataset (174,685 series over 1,688 days). The method decomposes each forecast into contributions that sum exactly to the predicted value, avoiding the allocation artifacts we observed with additive SHAP-style attribution. We evaluate faithfulness with a deletion/insertion protocol and find a statistically significant effect on both tests (deletion gap 0.22, p<0.001; insertion gap 0.27, p<0.01; robust across five background-sampling seeds), establishing that the attributions reflect genuine model behavior rather than plausible-looking artifacts. We then characterize, honestly, where attribution is and is not informative: reliance on the promotion signal is heterogeneous across series (median ratio approximately 1.0, with roughly 20% of series showing a strong effect), and the model captures the shape of the weekly sales cycle (day-of-week r=0.78) while systematically under-predicting its amplitude. Our contribution is not improved accuracy but an interpretability layer with a rigorous faithfulness evaluation and a candid account of its limits.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC
Policy Iteration for Domain Randomized Linear Quadratic Systems
In this work, we study policy optimization under domain randomization for linear quadratic control, focusing on learning a single state-feedback controller that minimizes the average cost across systems with uncertain dynamics. We propose a policy iteration algorithm with a step-size rule that preserves stability across all sampled systems at each iteration. We show that the method yields monotonic improvement of the sample-average objective and that a stabilizing step size always exists. Under standard smoothness assumptions, the iterates converge subsequentially to stationary points, and under a gradient-dominance condition, we obtain a global linear convergence rate.
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Artificial Intelligence
ProtLingo: Efficient Protein Language Modeling via Conditional Memory and Expert Routing
Proteins perform diverse cellular functions, and even single amino-acid substitutions can alter stability, activity, or molecular interactions. Protein language models (PLMs) provide a scalable approach for modeling such sequence–function relationships from unlabeled sequences, but increasing the size of dense Transformer backbones often brings substantial computational cost without consistently improving mutation-sensitive prediction. We introduce ProtLingo, an efficient PLM framework that augments a pretrained single-sequence backbone with conditional local memory and sparse expert routing. ProtLingo maps contextual residue representations into route-specific discrete codes, composes centered local windows into latent $N$-gram addresses, and retrieves reusable residual signals associated with recurring local sequence contexts. In parallel, selected feed-forward blocks are upcycled into sparse Mixture-of-Experts layers with shared and routed experts, enabling residue-dependent computation while activating only a subset of parameters. Experiments on protein fitness prediction, FLIP benchmarks, and supervised contact prediction show that ProtLingo achieves competitive performance with a 150M-scale backbone, including strong parameter efficiency on mutation-effect prediction and preserved long-range structural representations.
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Computation and Language
Can Activation Steering Capture Multidimensional Authorship Style?
Activation steering has shown promise for controlling LLM generation along well-defined attributes, but it remains unclear whether it can handle the multidimensional and hard-to-define nature of authorship style. We ask whether structured contrastive prompting along rhetorically-motivated dimensions can construct rich style representations directly in activation space, bypassing the need for natural language style descriptors or dedicated training. We find that the resulting directions share a common authorship backbone while conflicting on aspect-specific residuals that carry genuine stylistic signal, explaining why naive aggregation fails. We operationalize this in Aspect-Aware Activation Steering (A3S), a training-free framework that merges per-aspect contrastive directions with interference-aware aggregation and tunes steering strength per instance. A3S improves authorship style transfer where it is genuinely multi-aspect, outperforms a trained baseline in preference evaluations on out-of-domain benchmarks, and keeps target-exemplar overlap consistently low.
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Computer Vision
An Attention-Guided Global and Local Fusion Framework for Lesion-Focused Image Classification
Lesion-focused image classification presents a core analytical challenge, as discriminative signals are often sparse, spatially dispersed, and easily obscured by background noise, while conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) process entire images uniformly and may dilute signal relevance. This study hypothesizes that adaptive fusion of global contextual information and lesion-focused local information can improve classification performance compared with using either representation independently. We propose a three-branch, attention-guided deep learning framework built on Densely Connected Convolutional Network-121 (DenseNet-121) to improve feature attribution, interpretability, and classification reliability. The architecture consists of a global branch that learns representations from full images, followed by Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to generate attention maps that highlight prediction-relevant regions and produce masked inputs, and a local branch enhanced with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to extract refined spatial and channel-wise features from these focused regions. An adaptive fusion branch integrates global and local representations by learning instance-specific weights, allowing dynamic prioritization between contextual and localized information. The framework is evaluated on a synthetic Spot Pattern Dataset (SSPD) and three benchmark datasets, including skin lesion, guava leaf, and grape leaf image datasets, where the fusion branch outperformed the individual global and local branches, reaching 97.75% accuracy on the skin lesion dataset and 99.64% on the guava leaf dataset. The results highlight the value of attention-guided architectures in healthcare analytics by improving model transparency, strengthening feature relevance, and supporting more reliable data-driven decision-making in medical image analysis.
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Machine Learning
Learning-Augmented Algorithms: Guarantees, Construction Mechanisms, and System-Level Implications
Learning-augmented algorithms use fallible predictions while retaining formal performance guarantees. This survey synthesizes prediction interfaces, error measures, consistency–robustness trade-offs, and five representative construction mechanisms across online optimization, caching, learned data structures, graph problems, and mechanism design. An orthogonal theorem-level axis distinguishes achieved upper bounds from matched asymptotic dependence. Formal guarantees are separated from empirical systems evidence, with explicit treatment of prediction cost, feedback, and composition. The resulting synthesis states sufficient conditions for limited end-to-end reasoning and delineates open problems in cost-aware prediction, endogenous error, semantic predictors, and benchmarking.
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Cryptography and Security
Injected and Leaked: Actively Inducing Side-Channel Leakage Using Electromagnetic Injection and Hardware Nonlinearity
Electromagnetic (EM) side-channel leakage and injection are typically treated as distinct physical phenomena, threatening data confidentiality and integrity respectively. This work investigates how EM injection can be used to amplify side-channel leakage that is otherwise infeasible. We introduce a novel framework for Injection-Induced EM Side Channels to enable integrated, closed-loop EM security analysis. Our theoretical modeling and experimental measurements reveal that nonlinear hardware components, such as ubiquitous amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, and power converters, can modulate secret electrical signals onto an injected EM carrier and thus upconvert low-frequency secrets into measurable EM emissions. By tuning the injection frequency and amplitude, adversaries gain the ability to actively shape the effective spectrum and entropy of the resulting leakage. We design InjectEave attack and demonstrate eavesdropping on the audio played through wired and wireless headphones from up to 30 m away with accessible RF equipment, as well as in through-wall scenarios, and characterize injection-induced EM leakage of other low-frequency secrets such as power consumption of smart home devices and analog sensor inputs. Case studies further demonstrate how the proposed techniques enable closed-loop eavesdropping and manipulation of landline-phone conversations. Finally, we analyze the broader security challenges and mitigations.
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Computer Vision
CLON: Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding for Zero-Shot 6D Pose Front-Ends
Novel-object 6D pose pipelines depend on front-end hypotheses that retain target instances under clutter and occlusion without overwhelming downstream pose estimation. We introduce Cue-Calibrated Linguistic Object Onboarding (CLON), a training-free proposal-and-matching front-end. CLON converts multi-view CAD renderings into compact linguistic memories that provide object-specific conditioning to a frozen proposal generator. Constructed offline and reused across scenes, these memories augment generic prompts before segmentation; subsequent template verification assigns object identity. As a complementary onboarding step, CLON derives fixed cue weights from template statistics for semantic, appearance, and geometric verification. On seven BOP-Classic-Core datasets, CLON improves detection AP by 8.2 percentage points (pp), segmentation AP by 6.2 pp, and downstream pose AR by up to 4.1 pp over the evaluated CNOS and SAM-6D front-ends. In a real-world localization-to-grasp study under clutter and occlusion with 100 trials per method, CLON's improved localization doubles grasp success relative to the strongest evaluated baseline. Controlled ablations evaluate linguistic conditioning, multi-view construction, and verification. Analysis of a smaller candidate set with higher class-agnostic recall on five datasets.
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Hardware Architecture
A Piecewise-Linear Approximation-based Energy-Efficient Error-Optimized Unsigned Square Rooter for Accuracy-Critical Applications
Approximate computing improves energy efficiency in error-resilient applications, but square root units remain challenging due to the trade-off between hardware cost and computational accuracy. This paper presents an energy-efficient, error-optimized, piecewise-linear approximation-based unsigned square rooter (EOSQR) for 2n-bit inputs that achieves high accuracy with low hardware complexity, using only simple arithmetic and shift operations. The EOSQR design is implemented in Verilog-HDL and evaluated on a 16-bit benchmark synthesized on an Artix-7 FPGA. Compared to representative state-of-the-art approximate square rooters, EOSQR achieves the lowest error among accuracy-critical designs while delivering 61.91 percent resource savings, 77.54 percent power savings, and 53.11 percent latency reduction relative to a precise restoring array-based square rooter. To enable holistic evaluation, a Composite Efficiency Metric (CEM) is introduced to jointly capture accuracy and energy efficiency. EOSQR is further validated across representative image-processing workloads, including Sobel edge detection, K-means colour quantization, and K-nearest-neighbour (KNN) classification. Experimental results demonstrate that EOSQR achieves high computational accuracy with a superior CEM-based accuracy-hardware efficiency trade-off while maintaining visual quality and classification performance, making it well-suited for real-time edge-embedded systems.
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Artificial Intelligence
DODR: Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space
Autoregressive (AR) large language models formulate reasoning as token-level probabilistic sampling, which induces three fundamental defects in complex logical reasoning: error accumulation, probability substituting necessity, and the linear-chain information bottleneck. This paper proposes the Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space architecture (DODR), which reconstructs reasoning as reasoning-graph computation in a high-dimensional linear-algebraic space. Reasoning states are represented as snapshot vectors whose primitives are semantic units (phrases or sentences) rather than tokens, and each inference step is a deterministic matrix operation with no token sampling. Peirce's three inference types are formalized as three trainable matrix operators: a rank-deficient deduction operator (information collapse), a full-rank induction operator (information expansion), and an abduction operator defined as the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of deduction (information hypothesizing). We prove that the operator set is minimal and complete given Peirce's trichotomy, that no single "super-operator" can realize all three types (a rank obstruction), and that reasoning graphs are Turing-complete with contractive backflow converging by Banach's fixed-point theorem. Experiments on 503 sample records (420 deduplicated samples) across dedicated and end-to-end settings show: deduction loss converges to 1.40e-05; induction achieves 0.9996 generalization coverage with 20/20 hard vetoes on counterexamples; abduction solutions exceed the random baseline by 28x with judgment accuracies of 72.5% (58/80, Wilson 95% CI [61.9%, 81.1%]) and 81.7% (49/60, CI [70.1%, 89.4%]); frozen operators attain 100% (60/60) on unseen cross-domain deduction. The architecture provides a structural zero-hallucination guarantee and a three-layer continual-learning mechanism. All data and code are released.
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Computer Vision
CoMLP: Cooperatively-Gated MLPs for Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Information Fusion in Medical Image Segmentation
Multi-modal medical images and clinical reports provide complementary anatomical, functional, and semantic information for medical image segmentation. Effectively exploiting these heterogeneous sources requires fine-grained cross-modal information fusion that preserves subtle spatial details while capturing semantic dependencies across modalities. Existing fusion approaches frequently rely on cross-attention, whose computational burden increases rapidly with spatial resolution, making dense cross-modal interaction difficult on high-resolution feature maps, particularly for volumetric medical images. In this work, we propose CoMLP, a cooperatively-gated MLP module for fine-grained cross-modal information fusion in medical image segmentation. CoMLP models cross-modal dependencies through cooperative cross-gating, built upon complementary regional and dilated MLP interactions, to capture local and global cross-modal dependencies. We further develop a multi-source fusion architecture in which CoMLP performs both inter-image fusion across imaging modalities and vision-language fusion between visual features and textual reports, enabling heterogeneous information to be integrated without relying on dense cross-attention. Extensive experiments on five medical segmentation benchmarks, covering 2D/3D images, clinical reports, multiple imaging modalities, and diverse anatomical regions, demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art multi-modal and language-guided segmentation methods. Ablation studies further show that fine-grained interaction at high spatial resolutions and complementary local-global fusion are critical to the performance gains. These results demonstrate the potential of MLP-based interaction as an effective alternative for fine-grained cross-modal information fusion in medical image segmentation.
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Machine Learning
Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning: A Survey
Graph representation learning (GRL) serves as a canonical paradigm for modeling complex networks. However, real-world AI systems inherently manifest as evolving heterogeneous entities with complex interactions, posing significant challenges to static or homogeneous modeling. To address these complexities, representation learning for Dynamic Heterogeneous Graphs (DHGs) has emerged as a vital approach for learning low-dimensional representations that simultaneously preserve structural semantics and temporal dynamics. This survey presents the first systematic review of DHG representation learning methods. We first introduce a unified formal definition that encompasses both discrete-time and continuous-time DHGs from the perspective of temporal granularity. Building upon this formulation, we propose a novel algorithm-centric taxonomy that categorizes existing literature, including early embedding-based approaches, graph neural network (GNN)-based models, and relatively recent Transformer-based DHG methods, while explicitly highlighting their intrinsic modeling biases with respect to dynamic granularity. Furthermore, we summarize representative applications of DHG representation learning, along with commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss promising research directions that guide future advances in this rapidly evolving field.
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Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion Language Models for Mobile Edge Agentic AI: Foundations, Applications, and Challenges
Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a non-autoregressive alternative for mobile edge agentic artificial intelligence (AI) by refining tokens through iterative denoising rather than left-to-right decoding. Compared with autoregressive Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), DLMs can update multiple uncertain tokens in parallel and exploit bidirectional context throughout the generation process, enabling more flexible quality-latency trade-offs beyond fixed sequential decoding. These properties are particularly attractive for edge agents, where partial refinement, early exit, and constraint-guided correction can reduce response delay and communication overhead while improving robustness under noisy, incomplete, or dynamic contexts. This survey reviews DLM foundations and analyzes their suitability for edge settings under latency, memory, energy, bandwidth, privacy, and reliability constraints. We cover resource-efficient architectures, training and inference acceleration, compression, edge/cloud deployment, communication-aware serving, Internet of Things (IoT)/wireless applications, and evaluation of DLM-based agents. We further discuss open issues in long-context state management, split inference, trustworthy execution, multimodal grounding, and reproducible benchmarking. The goal is to connect DLM modeling properties, including bidirectionality, parallel refinement, controllability, and quality-latency elasticity, with system-level requirements of future mobile edge intelligence.