Papers

Art2Song is a conceptual framework that expresses artworks as sound by separating Non-Visual Context, which is difficult to perceive from the image alone, from Visual Evidence. Visual Evidence, such as objects, colors, and spatial composition, is transformed into Lyrics, while the Contextual Mood derived from the historical and art-historical context in the museum's artwork description is reflected in the background soundtrack. Rather than describing artworks textually, Art2Song aims to explore the possibility of a new mode of art appreciation in which viewers experience hidden stories and emotional context through music. As future interaction directions, we plan an Emotional Layer Blending Slider interface and a structured, traceable song-generation scenario, presenting the possibility that users can explore the relationship between Visual Evidence and Contextual Mood.

This paper addresses the challenge posed by sleep deprivation in the Forward-Forward algorithm, where separating the two passes in this algorithm and imbalancing the data processing in the passes is considered an imitation of the cognitive processes observed in humans suffering from sleep deprivation. Previous research has demonstrated that sleep deprivation in the Forward-Forward algorithm has a catastrophic effect on learning efficacy. To mitigate this issue, we explore several approaches; these include alternative activation, optimized loss function, and threshold tuning. To simulate periodic rest, we reduce the number of positive passes in alternating epochs, creating short break phases. We additionally investigate the potential of caffeine-induced stimulation to enhance performance during sleep-deprived conditions. Experimental evaluations conducted on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets demonstrate that these modifications improve accuracy under the context of sleep deprivation. For example, a 2%-62% accuracy gain is observed in a severe sleep deprivation setting (16 positive or awake periods and 1 negative or sleep period). The approaches also enhance the resilience of the algorithm and its alignment with the adaptive mechanisms of human cognition.

Large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation but still struggle with challenging programming tasks that require understanding rich natural language requirements. These requirements often specify problem goals, input/output formats, constraints, examples, and edge cases. Overlooking even one may produce executable but functionally incorrect code. Existing training-free methods mainly rely on prompting or agent-based workflows, while training-based methods typically optimize final code outputs. However, existing approaches provide limited supervision for learning the intermediate mapping from raw requirements to structured specifications and for grounding them in concrete implementation behavior. Consequently, models may omit critical constraints, and even when an explicit specification is produced, the implementation may fail to reflect it consistently. Motivated by this gap, we propose SpecCoder, a specification-aware two-stage training framework for code generation. SpecCoder first employs specification-guided SFT to train LLMs to derive structured specification analyses and generate code conditioned on them. It then introduces curriculum dual-task GRPO, which jointly optimizes specification-guided generation and discrimination to encourage stronger correspondence between specifications and code behavior. Experiments on APPS, CodeContests, and xCodeEval demonstrate the effectiveness of specification-aware training, with SpecCoder consistently improving both standalone code generation and agent-based workflows. Additional evaluations on BigCodeBench-Hard and ClassEval, alongside human evaluation and perturbation studies, further validate the role of structured specifications in guiding code generation and discrimination.

This paper focuses on the visual analytics support for extracting domain-specific entity from extensive scientific literature, a task with inherent limitations using traditional named entity resolution methods. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, significant improvements over conventional machine learning approaches have been achieved due to LLM's capability on entity resolution integrate abilities such as understanding multiple types of text. This research introduces a new visual analysis pipeline that integrates these advanced LLMs with versatile visualization and interaction designs to support batch entity resolution. Specifically, we focus on a specific material science field of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and a large data collection namely CSD-MOFs. Through collaboration with domain experts in material science, we obtain well-labeled synthesis paragraphs. We propose human-in-the-loop refinement over the entity resolution process using visual analytics techniques, which allows domain experts to interactively integrate insights into LLM intelligence, including error analysis and interpretation of the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) algorithm. Our evaluation through the case study of example selection for RAG demonstrates that this human-machine collaborative approach improved single-document entity resolution accuracy by approximately 30%.

Proposal-based controllers—learned policies, language-model planners, and other black-box generators—are increasingly deployed behind runtime verification gates. We ask when the closed-loop safety guarantee decouples from the generator. The prevailing per-candidate certification pattern does not compose: under retry or best-of-$k$ selection a per-candidate false-admission level $\alpha$ can inflate to $1-(1-\alpha)^{k}$. Our main theorem shows that simultaneous setwise soundness—certifying a set of admissible proposals containing no nonviable action—is necessary and sufficient for generator-independent admission soundness, the worst case over all generators of executing a nonviable proposal equalling the probability of setwise failure; together with a design-time certificate and a no-bypass rule it is sufficient for contract safety, with violation bound $\Gamma+\sum_t\varepsilon_t+\eta$ invariant under arbitrary, even adversarial, replacement of the generator. A second theorem bounds every admission mechanism under partial observation: for a fixed probing and admission policy, if two state hypotheses whose information laws lie within total-variation distance $\delta$ require different safe decisions, then $\abar+\beta+\delta\ge1$. A sequential risk ledger makes the guarantee implementable with time-uniform confidence tubes, and shows that deterministic admission computations concentrate all statistical risk in state estimation. Simplex-style runtime assurance and control-barrier-function filtering are recovered as degenerate cases.

Vulnerabilities in source code are often the root cause of cyberattacks worldwide, as attackers exploit weaknesses in software to gain unauthorized access, steal data, or disrupt services. In this study, we evaluated existing research approaches and propose SemVul, a vulnerability detection pipeline that demonstrates better generalization and higher accuracy in learning vulnerable code patterns. We propose a Code Property Graph-based vulnerability-detection approach combined with semantic-level enhancement, enabling the model to capture both the program's structural flow and the semantic meaning of the code. Our approach integrates both node-level and edge-level semantic embeddings using pre-trained code embedding techniques. We systematically evaluate multiple GNN architectures on publicly available benchmark datasets. SemVul is generic with respect to the programming language and supports multiple architectures. By integrating structural and semantic information, the proposed approach improves vulnerability detection performance. Our results show that SemVul outperforms existing approaches and provides better generalization.

Search-augmented LLM agents are increasingly used for consumer decisions, making them vulnerable to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) poisoning. Existing benchmarks largely measure whether manipulated content is retrieved or endorsed, but do not track whether an agent verifies suspicious evidence, revises adopted claims, or recovers before producing its final recommendation. We introduce HAE-GEO, a benchmark that tracks the full trajectory from exposure to recovery under progressively more persuasive Web poisoning. Agents interact via a multi-turn Search-Scrape interface across three attack levels (L1 direct assertion, L2 contextual camouflage, and L3 apparent corroboration), supported by a controlled corpus of 72,039 clean pages and 770 poisoned pages per level spanning 8 product categories and 154 brands. Evaluation combines deterministic behavioral measures with six semantic rubric dimensions. Evaluating 10 agents, we find three recurring patterns: evidence recognition degrades under the corroboration trap; agentic search improves final resistance without improving evidence recognition or utility; and defense prompting increases verification, yet rarely converts verification into recovery.

Given various grammatical options, language users prefer the word order choice that reduces the overall length of syntactic dependencies, a principle known as dependency length minimization (DLM). The origins of this preference remain an open question, particularly whether it originates from constraints on efficient information processing. Computational simulations provide a powerful approach to identifying the factors influencing the emergence of linguistic phenomena. However, previous simulations of DLM have not examined realistic interaction contexts and have produced mixed results. The present study investigates the emergence of DLM in artificial languages using a recently proposed language learning and communication framework based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In this framework, agents are trained to speak and interpret artificial languages and then use these languages to communicate. Using this framework, we study the impact of several factors related to processing limitations in a communicative setting, such as noise during listening, limited speaker capacity, and incremental sentence processing. Our results reveal a complex interplay among these factors in shaping word order preferences in neural agents. Specifically, in the full meaning space, agents regularize toward a single dominant word order, while in the half meaning space they show a short-before-long preference that only aligns with DLM in verb-initial languages. A consistent DLM preference emerges only when agents are subject to incremental processing pressure. These findings suggest that limitations in human cognitive processing may indeed play a role in shaping DLM. Our findings provide insights into the conditions under which neural models replicate human-like preferences and highlight the challenges of designing emergent communication models that capture human cognitive biases in language processing.

Horner's rule evaluates a monic degree-$n$ polynomial using $n-1$ multiplications. We show that with rational preprocessing of the coefficients, any such polynomial can be evaluated using only $\lfloor n/2 \rfloor + 1$ multiplications over fields of characteristic zero or of characteristic $p>n$. This resolves the multiplication side of a conjecture of Rabin and Winograd (Comm. Pure Appl. Math 1972), who achieved $n/2 + 2\lceil\log_2 n\rceil$ multiplications and conjectured the logarithmic overhead was necessary. We show that this multiplication count can't be beaten in general, proving that three multiplications do not suffice for degree~$6$. This strengthens the lower bound of Pan (STOC 1978), who proved a tight bound for general, complex preprocessing. In characteristic~2, for every $n>1$ and every finite field of size at least $2n$, we prove that an $n$-multiplication chain cannot parametrize all value vectors at $2n$ distinct evaluation points, even with arbitrary preprocessing. We give $\lfloor n/2 \rfloor + 1$ multiplication schedules over characteristic~2, each with an explicit inverse, for every odd degree $n\le 25$ and conjecture that this is possible for all $n$. We also give an injective polynomial construction for universal hashing that uses $N$ multiplications to hash $2N$ values with a single random key. This improves the best previous construction by Daniel J. Bernstein (cryp.to).

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables mobile devices to offload computation to nearby edge servers and to the cloud in order to reduce end-to-end delay for different applications. In this paper, we study static computation offloading when each task consists of multiple dependent subtasks represented by a rooted directed tree. We develop a product-form queueing-network (PFQN) model with an approximation to capture the computation and communication dynamics of tree-structured task execution in a multi-tier MEC system. Based on this model, we derive closed-form expressions for server utilizations and waiting times, and then construct a recursive algorithm for evaluating the average delay of general tree-structured tasks. We formulate the static offloading design problem as the minimization of the rate-weighted average task delay over the routing probabilities, and solve it through a differentiable optimization framework based on softmax parameterization, log-sum-exp smoothing, and a stability barrier on server utilizations. Numerical results show that the proposed PFQN approximation provides accurate delay estimates and that the delay-optimized static policy consistently outperforms the considered baseline algorithms in terms of both average task delay and maximum stable throughput.

Conservation increasingly relies on camera traps that collect more wildlife imagery than experts can manually analyze, making animal re-identification (Re-ID) essential for monitoring individuals and populations. Yet understanding which cues drive model decisions is challenging for ViT-based Re-ID models, whose metric-learning objectives provide no explicit supervision for biological concepts. We ask whether such models nonetheless organize their representations along biologically meaningful axes. Using a DINOv3 backbone fine-tuned for Western lowland gorilla Re-ID with triplet-margin loss, we find that sex and age emerge as linear directions that generalize to held-out individuals, reaching up to 0.91 AUROC and being recoverable from a single image per individual. Activation steering further shows that the sex direction is causally used by the model, flipping a significant fraction of predictions to the opposite sex. Comparing off-the-shelf and fine-tuned backbones shows that Re-ID training does not create these concepts, but relocates them across the network. Finally, data attribution reveals that the representation we find reflects a graded biological axis, is redundantly encoded across the population and shaped by visually ambiguous individuals. Together, these findings show how interpretability can uncover both the biological structure and failure modes of Re-ID representations, providing a step toward auditable computer vision for wildlife monitoring.

Ideal point estimation is widely used to analyze and visualize political data. However, selecting the corresponding spatial model involves various trade-offs: while model-based approaches such as Item Response Theory (IRT) are based on utility functions rather than optimized for predictive accuracy, most Machine Learning (ML) alternatives struggle to generalize beyond training data when embedding sparse test responses. We introduce IXPLORE, a bounded ideal point estimation algorithm that combines a predictive fit objective with a sparsity-aware likelihood function. On five benchmark datasets spanning surveys, roll calls, and deliberation, this approach surpasses model-based and ML-based algorithms on reconstruction and imputation error - especially for users with sparse responses. Furthermore, we show that non-linear feature transforms can further reduce the reconstruction error while remaining visually interpretable. To quantify uncertainty, IXPLORE applies grid-based posterior inference on a bounded 2D latent space. Available as a Python package on PyPI, IXPLORE offers a flexible framework for constructing bounded, interpretable political maps with fast inference and strong imputation performance.

The appearance of a smoky scene is shaped by two processes that a camera records together: the participating medium alters scene radiance in a view-dependent way, and the image signal processor (ISP) then remaps the result through a nonlinear tone and color transformation. Recovering a clean 3D scene requires separating both. Per-view sRGB dehazing acts only after the ISP has entangled them; standard 3D reconstruction ignores the medium and absorbs it into scene geometry and radiance. FujinSplat addresses the problem in the RAW domain, where the two processes remain separable. A per-scene Base ISP is fitted from the scene's hazy RAW captures to its own camera renderings and then frozen, providing a fixed photometric anchor that performs no dehazing. Analyzing expert corrections reveals a compact, low-dimensional correction space identifiable from RAW alone. FujinSplat therefore fits per-view action answers at the training poses and trains a single scene-agnostic controller to regress them from RAW; the corrected views supervise one static 3D Gaussian representation, jointly with a bounded per-view residual that reconciles cross-view photometric inconsistencies. On the RealX3D real-world smoke benchmark FujinSplat clearly outperforms the strongest comparable baseline, ahead of both physics-based reconstruction and restoration-then-3DGS pipelines. Code is available at https://github.com/I2WM/FujinSplat.

Quantum clustering aims to exploit quantum feature representations to uncover complex data structures beyond conventional Euclidean geometry. Yet this sample-level kernel construction requires O(n^2) quantum circuit executions for n data points, creating a major bottleneck under near-term quantum resource constraints. Prior solutions fail to resolve this efficiency-accuracy dilemma: classical granular-ball clustering reduces sample complexity but relies on Euclidean metrics that cannot capture quantum correlations, while existing quantum compression schemes prioritize efficiency over structural preservation, degrading performance on non-convex or noisy data. Here we propose Granular-Ball Quantum Clustering (GBQC), a framework that tightly couples granular-ball structural abstraction with quantum feature learning. GBQC first compresses raw data into compact, representative granular balls via a PCA-guided splitting strategy, reducing kernel evaluations by 80% compared to full-sample methods. A quantum cohesion mechanism then filters noisy granules in Hilbert space to improve clustering robustness. Extensive experiments on synthetic, noisy, overlapping, and real-world datasets demonstrate that GBQC consistently achieves superior clustering accuracy and robustness compared with representative classical and quantum clustering methods. Meanwhile, the proposed granular-ball compression significantly reduces quantum kernel evaluations and computational overhead, enabling quantum clustering experiments on larger datasets within parameterized quantum learning frameworks. These results suggest that granular-ball representations serve not only as a compression mechanism to reduce quantum computational costs but also as an effective structural abstraction mechanism that improves clustering quality by eliminating redundant and structurally ambiguous learning units.

Machine learning-based network intrusion detection systems (ML-based NIDS) are vulnerable to adversarial evasion, where malicious samples are perturbed to evade detection and be misclassified as benign. Despite growing research on adversarial attacks and defenses for ML-based NIDS, comparative evaluations of multiple attack types, detection models, and defense strategies under a common setting remain limited. In this paper, we evaluate eight adversarial evasion attacks, fifteen detection models, and three representative defense strategies using the NF-UQ-NIDS dataset, which includes recent traditional and IoT network traffic with twenty distinct attack categories. The evaluation compares model performance on clean test data and on robustness evaluation sets that include adversarial samples, analyzes attack success consistency across models, and examines the effect of defense strategies on adversarial robustness. To support model comparison, we introduce the Robustness Index (RI), a compact comparative metric that rewards high balanced accuracy and macro-F1 score computed on the robustness evaluation set while penalizing high attack success rate (ASR). We further present AR-NIDS, a two-stage framework that uses an adversarially trained ensemble to distinguish normal, attack, and adversarial samples, followed by an adversarial attack classifier to identify the attack type. Under the evaluated transfer-based setting, the proposed adversarially trained ensemble achieves the strongest overall trade-off between classification performance on the robustness evaluation set and evasion resistance, reducing the average ASR from 0.41 to 0.03 and achieving an RI of 0.98.

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) jointly process vision, audio, and text, yet their modality bias under cross-modal conflict remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks conflate two distinct forms of evidence within a single modality: perceptual signals (e.g., a photograph or recording of a dog) and propositional signals (e.g., the declarative claim "this is a dog"), such that any measured modality bias is inherently confounded with evidence-form bias, precluding clean attribution to either source. To address this, we introduce Tri-PvP, an 8,000-sample tri-modal conflict benchmark crossing vision, audio, and text, where vision and audio each take perceptual or propositional form. Evaluating five OLLMs, we find robust visual bias across most models and evidence-type conditions. Crucially, we reveal a systematic asymmetry in evidence-form bias: models exhibit a stronger bias toward perceptual signal in vision but propositional in audio. Further analyses via layer-wise linear probing and contrastive decoding reveal that modality bias is already linearly decodable from early representation layers and can only be partially mitigated, calling for mitigation strategies beyond surface-level interventions.

Multi-fingered dexterous manipulation remains a frontier for real-world reinforcement learning (RL) due to the high-dimensional action space and the prohibitive cost of hardware failures. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) RL allows operators to intervene before failures occur, current pipelines often treat these interventions as reactive corrections, discarding the rich safety signal inherent in the operator's decision to take control. In this paper, we ask: How can we learn from what a human would avoid? We present WHIRL, a safety-aware RL framework that transforms binary human interventions into forward-predictive signals for proactive risk avoidance. Our approach centers on an intervention-aware latent world model with four prediction heads: dynamics, reward, termination, and a novel per-state intervention-probability head that learns to predict the likelihood of a human takeover at future states. This head provides an actor-side risk-shaping term that discourages the policy from entering "intervention-prone" regions, modeling the operator's internal safety threshold. We evaluate our framework on a 16-DoF LEAP Hand across tasks spanning convex and irregular object grasping, prismatic manipulation, and long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Our results show that predictive risk-shaping enables the system to achieve a 96.7 percent success rate on complex grasping tasks while reducing the operator intervention burden by up to 84 percent in step-weighted terms. By closing the loop between human intuition and predictive world modeling, this work provides a practical safety-aware recipe for training complex dexterous agents in the real world while reducing operator fatigue and hardware-risk exposure.

We present Cadence, an error-bounded lossy compressor for numeric time series pairing a 330M-parameter time-series foundation model (Google TimesFM-3) with an adaptive arithmetic coder, guaranteeing $|\hat{x}_t-x_t|\le\tau$ on every sample. One negative result constrains the design space: for lossless coding a foundation model is worth nothing, because bits saved are logarithmic in predictor accuracy, $\Delta b=\log_2(\mathrm{MAE_{old}}/\mathrm{MAE_{new}})$. So the $1.51\times$ advantage TimesFM-3 holds over a 32-tap linear predictor buys 0.60 bits of 20.28, a median gain of +0.03%. Error-bounded coding escapes this at one point: once a forecast lands inside the band the residual index is zero and the sample nearly free. Cadence contributes: (1) an adaptive range coder with context-modelled binarization, beating xz/zstd on real indices by 9.7% (15/15) and reversing a finding from a general-purpose back end; (2) a determinism result – predictions are not bit-identical across batch sizes, and no PyTorch configuration repairs this, forcing group size and execution device into the container format; and (3) domain localization on corpora postdating any plausible training cutoff. On 49 EIA-930 balancing-authority demand series (2026) Cadence gains 13.3% over the best of six classical predictors, and 28.3% on 50 MTA ridership series (2026): 21.4% median over 297 series-tolerance pairs, winning all 297. Against downsampling, what time-series databases deploy for retention, its guaranteed worst-case error is $28$–$56\times$ tighter at equal size. End-to-end, once the context bootstrap is paid for, gains run from 6.8% at six months of hourly data to 15.1% asymptotically. Attempting to falsify the domain claim on SDRBench, theory predicts failure and delivers: -0.8% median, 0 of 27 pairs gaining. Three further negative results and eight retracted claims are reported in full.

Guided depth completion methods heavily depend on RGB quality and alignment, while unguided ones often suffer from limited precision due to the absence of explicit visual cues. In this paper, we present Depth-to-Image Synthesis-Driven Generative Unguided Depth Completion (GUDC), a new completion paradigm that innovatively bridges advanced 2D generative models with unguided depth completion, enabling semantics-aware depth inference without real RGB inputs. Our key idea is to exploit ControlNet's powerful depth-conditioned generation capability to synthesize pseudo-images directly from sparse depth, effectively converting the original unguided setting into a semantics-guided one. To address the potential image-depth misalignment caused by depth sparsity, we propose a multi-level dense-to-sparse representation distillation strategy for ControlNet fine-tuning, where dense-depth features act as teacher signals to distill consistent structural representations for sparse-depth inputs. Furthermore, during pseudo-image-guided completion, we propose a pseudo-image semantic attention fusion module to adaptively extract informative semantic cues from pseudo-images while suppressing artifacts (e.g., texture hallucinations). Extensive experiments on KITTI and NYUv2 validate that our GUDC achieves superior accuracy and robustness over existing methods.

Deep learning for time series has progressed through successive architectural paradigms, from recurrent networks and transformers to structured state-space models, retrieval-augmented predictors, foundation models, and tool-using agents. These developments are typically studied in isolation, organized by architecture or modeling era. We argue that they can instead be viewed through a common question of how does a time-series model retain and access information beyond its immediate input? This question is motivated by a fundamental limitation of conventional time-series modeling: information relevant to a prediction may lie far beyond a feasible input window, while compressing history into a fixed-size state can discard information that may become useful later. We formulate this challenge as a memory problem and organize existing time-series methods along a spectrum from internal memory, encoded in parameters and fixed-size states, to external memory that is addressable, retrievable, and increasingly maintained by agents. We then develop a unified taxonomy of memory mechanisms and review three classes of external memory, including explicit modules, retrieval augmentation, and agentic stores, under a common framework for what is retained, how it is written and accessed, and how it persists. A cross-cutting analysis maps these mechanisms to time-series tasks and identifies gaps in both methods and evaluation. We conclude by outlining open problems in building memory systems that can selectively retain, retrieve, revise, and forget information as temporal environments evolve. The result is a framework for studying memory as a first-class dimension of time series modeling, independent of the underlying backbone.

Prediction-market probabilities increasingly appear in news coverage, yet little is known about which market movements become news or how much trading money sits behind the numbers journalists quote. Unlike a poll, a market price can be moved by anyone willing to trade, so the cost of manufacturing a number that circulates as news bears directly on the information environment. We link 173.7 million signed Polymarket trades to news coverage from 2024-2025. From 6,990 articles mentioning prediction-market venues, an LLM-based, human-validated matcher extracts 1,582 sentences quoting market odds and attributes 918 to the specific market whose price they cite. We then detect 44,976 price dislocations, movements of at least five percentage points backed by concentrated one-sided trading, and ask whether a market is cited more often afterward. In the days after a dislocation, a market's citation rate is about 33% higher than its matched baseline (log citation-rate ratio $\tau_{\mathrm{cite}}=0.283$, permutation $p=0.001$), robust to binary and Poisson count outcomes. Yet move size is not the strongest predictor of citation: prominence dominates (standardized $\beta=0.610$ vs. $\beta=0.159$ for move size). Finally, we combine the dollar flow behind a given price change with observed citation rates into a metric we call epistemic leverage, the dollars needed to move a market five points and have the move cited. It stays near \$0.7-1.0 million across prominence quintiles, because cheaper-to-move markets are proportionally less likely to be cited. The implied threat model centers not on the long tail of cheaply moved markets but on the few prominent markets newsrooms treat as informational infrastructure, where a seven-figure price of influence sits within the budgets of actors with a large stake in the quoted number. We release aggregate event-study data and validation materials.

Quantitative spatial reasoning in visual-language models (VLMs) aims to infer spatial distances and directional relationships among objects in 3D space from a 2D image and a natural language query. Despite recent progress, VLM spatial reasoning remains brittle under distribution shifts, largely due to the high cost of 3D supervision. As a result, models often produce inconsistent or contradictory predictions when faced with novel object configurations or rephrased spatial queries, revealing a misalignment between learned representations and underlying geometry. To address this, we propose TTL-SR, a geometry-aware Test-Time Learning framework for quantitative Spatial Reasoning that leverages geometric consistency constraints and unlabeled test data to adapt models to target domains. Specifically, TTL-SR augments the input query with geometrically coupled auxiliary queries, filters unreliable predictions via adaptive geometric triggering to construct structured token-level pseudo-labels, and updates model parameters under a geometry-aware multi-objective loss using only test data. Experimental results demonstrate that TTL-SR significantly boosts spatial reasoning performance, yielding 6.47% and 9.41% accuracy gains for Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct and SpatialRGPT-VILA-1.5-8B on Q-Spatial-ScanNet dataset, respectively.

We propose ModularPhaseNet, a classical and integer-computable discretization of the continuous complex phase geometry introduced in QuantumPhaseNet. The real-valued hidden states of a standard Transformer are retained, while only an auxiliary phase channel is quantized into a cyclic subgroup G = <g> of order q | (p-1) in the multiplicative group of F_p. A continuous phase e^{i phi} is represented by z = g^a mod p; phase composition becomes group multiplication, relative phase becomes group division, conceptual hierarchy is induced by a filtration of cyclic quotients, semantic direction is represented by oriented relative group elements, and contextual consistency is measured by gauge-invariant cycle holonomy. The method introduces three components into an otherwise standard Transformer: a finite-phase encoder, a quotient-filtration hierarchy module, and a group-valued connection module. Their outputs enter self-attention as real-valued bias terms. Training uses distributions in the real group algebra or straight-through Gumbel-Softmax, whereas inference uses exact modular exponentiation and precomputed tables. No quantum hardware, complex-valued matrix multiplication, or discrete-logarithm computation is required. We prove quantization-distortion bounds, nesting of quotient-induced partitions, gauge invariance, a discrete integrability result for flat connections, and boundedness of the resulting attention output. The central empirical hypothesis is that these exact discrete invariants improve hierarchy recovery, discourse alignment, contradiction detection, and calibrated hallucination-risk prediction under a controlled compute budget. This paper reports the theory together with a pre-registered evaluation plan; the experiments described in Section 14 have not yet been carried out, and no empirical result is claimed here.

In data networks carrying large numbers of flows, Heavy Hitters (HHs) or Elephant flows are the flows exceeding pre-determined thresholds (e.g. number of packets or bytes) in a given time window. Such HH flows need to be handled differently in order to minimize their impact on other smaller flows. HH detection techniques have been shown to be more effective when implemented in programmable data plane switches. In recent work, it was shown that the inter-packet gap can be used to identify heavy hitters. Such schemes use a limited-size hash table for storing flow state information and using this for the detection. However, when hash collisions occur, it is possible that a valid HH flow in the table can be replaced by a non-HH flow resulting in missing detection of HH flows. To address this problem, this paper incorporates a flow's medium-term Packet Count (PC) feature. In order to limit the packet count field size in the hash table, counting is done only till hash collision occurs so as to reduce the range of values to be stored and thus, the required number of bits. Also, another flow's medium-term feature, Packet Size (PS) is incorporated independently. The proposed scheme has been implemented in the P4 language and tested on Intel Tofino hardware. Performance evaluation has been performed using CAIDA and MAWI-based real-life traffic traces. The results show that in several scenarios cases, we can significantly reduce the False Negatives for HHs by using the packet count data effectively and efficiently.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations enable geographically distributed ground devices to collaboratively train a global model via federated learning (FL) without sharing raw data, with applications in environmental monitoring and disaster prediction. However, in satellite-assisted FL scenarios, intermittent satellite-ground links allow only a subset of devices to participate in global aggregation within each visibility window, leaving unscheduled devices idle and their local computational and data resources underutilized. Under partial device participation, data heterogeneity among devices may bias the global model toward certain devices, thereby deteriorating learning performance. In this regard, we propose a continual computing based federated learning framework, referred to as CoCoFL, in which scheduled devices participate in the global model aggregation, while unscheduled devices continue updating their local models taking into account model staleness. Guided by the convergence analysis of CoCoFL and subject to visible-window-related time constraints, we jointly optimize the device scheduling and the number of local epochs for scheduled and unscheduled devices. Experimental results demonstrate that CoCoFL achieves faster convergence, lower training loss, and higher test accuracy compared with baselines.

Achieving reliable autonomy in the wild requires agents to sustain continuous operations across long-horizon trajectories. However, as agents navigate these unconstrained settings, they encounter cumulative friction that inherently destabilizes their alignment. In this paper, we identify a distinct non-adversarial phenomenon termed Agentic Pressure. We define this as a kinetic force that spontaneously emerges when the cost of compliance conflicts with the imperative of goal achievement. Unlike static jailbreaks, this pressure is endogenous and arises directly from the dynamics of interaction. We propose a theoretical framework that formalizes Agentic Pressure as the ratio between the required work to overcome environmental friction and the remaining capacity of the agent. Our analysis demonstrates that when this pressure exceeds a critical threshold, agents exhibit safety drift as a mathematically optimal adaptation. Consequently, they often resort to Instrumental Hallucination to rationalize rule violations. Empirical experiments validate this framework and show that aligned agents spontaneously compromise safety to preserve autonomy under high-pressure conditions.

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires accurate whole-body motion tracking in the world frame for physical interaction. While local references preserve motion structure, they lack explicit constraints on absolute spatial placement, leading to accumulated global errors. Existing globally aware approaches augment teleoperation policies with global observations but do not explicitly integrate global correction with local motion guidance, limiting autonomous tracking accuracy. We present GLoRI, a closed-loop whole-body controller that integrates structured global reference and feedback with local motion guidance. Its GLoRI-Net uses Global-Local Cross Attention(GLCA) to refine local keypoint features with global target and pose-difference features, preserving motion structure while correcting world-frame placement. GLoRI achieves 100% completion and a g-MPJPE of 6.44cm on held-out HuMoTo motions. This accuracy remains robust under direct Isaac Gym-to-MuJoCo transfer without fine-tuning, demonstrating strong generalization. Furthermore, such accuracy and generalization enable autonomous loco-manipulation with a single policy on a real Unitree G1 interacting with diverse unseen objects, extending beyond prior systems that primarily rely on teleoperation or focus on single-object interactions.

Large language models are increasingly deployed for personalized interaction, and demographic conditioning via user profiles is a widely adopted strategy for cultural adaptation. We ask whether this approach genuinely serves individual users or achieves accuracy by erasing individual distinctiveness. Studying seven models including frontier GPT-5.1 on the World Values Survey, we find that demographic profiles improve value alignment accuracy for most models, but at a systematic cost to individuality. That is, models pull responses toward demographic group centroids rather than preserving individual differences, a behavioral pattern we term alignment by stereotyping. Permutation tests (10,000 permutations, six demographic attributes, seven models) certify that top-performing models compress individuals far above the human baseline; within-family scaling amplifies this tradeoff while degrading intrinsic cultural understanding. Using a synthetic dialogue dataset validated on real human-chatbot conversations from PRISM (Kirk et al., 2024), we further show that distributing demographic signals across conversational turns partially suppresses prototype retrieval compared to compact demographic labels, a finding validated on real conversations via PRISM but requiring replication at larger scale.

As LLM-based agents continue to advance, their evaluation has become increasingly multifaceted: a capable agent must not only achieve high task completion accuracy but also perform well in interaction quality, safety, and efficiency, raising a central question: can these objectives be optimized simultaneously? Existing methods have considered multiple objectives, but many collapse heterogeneous measurements into a fixed scalar score. Such scalarization depends on metric normalization and preference weights and may discard candidates that represent useful deployment trade-offs. We introduce Multi-Objective Agent Evolution (MOAE), which organizes iterative in-context refinement as a Pareto-preserving evolutionary search over complete agent rollouts. Given a limited rollout budget, MOAE maintains an empirical archive of non-dominated candidates, uses objective-specific diagnostics to guide offspring generation, and applies constraint-aware selection only at deployment. This separates candidate preservation during search from the preference used to return a final solution. The procedure requires no parameter updates and allows each objective to be replaced by any measurable property, which we instantiate as task performance, trajectory quality, and safety. Experiments on TravelPlanner and AgentDojo show that MOAE consistently improves task performance and trajectory quality while maintaining strong safety under matched rollout budgets. Search-behavior analysis further shows that Pareto preservation expands the attainable objective region and increases the frequency of joint improvement. These results demonstrate the potential of Pareto-preserving in-context evolution for optimizing multiple agent properties without committing to a fixed scalarization during search.

In low-resource malaria microscopy, a model trained on one smear preparation routinely meets images from another, and how well morphology-based constraints transfer across this acquisition gap is unclear. We study this on real African field microscopy from Uganda (Lacuna), asking where encoding measured parasite morphology as a training constraint improves cross-acquisition transfer and where generic regularisation suffices. We present MORPHA, a morphological consistency constraint that derives stage-conditional statistics from the stage-annotated BBBC041 dataset and penalises predictions that deviate from them. Defined uniformly across binary, object-level, and stage-aware regimes without changing architecture or inference, it shapes training in the binary regime. The detection regime is a mapped boundary. On transfer from thin-smear cells to thick-smear field images, the constraint reduces the binary-classification generalisation drop by 30.8% (F1 0.578 to 0.699) at negligible within-domain cost and lowers in-distribution calibration error by 49% (ECE 0.0162 to 0.0082). A content-free control applying the identical constraint to random statistics recovers less of the drop (25.3% vs 30.8%), indicating the measured content, not constraining alone, contributes to the gain. Two standard confidence regularisers exceed the constraint on raw transfer, locating where morphology adds value and where generic regularisation suffices. We map two deployment-relevant boundaries: thin-smear statistics do not transfer to thick-smear detection (trophozoite AP@0.50 falls to 0.000), and cross-acquisition pseudo-labelling fails before filtering applies. Together these yield a morphology-grounded consistency signal and evidence-based guidance for malaria dataset and model design in low-resource settings.