Papers

We study sparse Mellin spectral recovery from geometric samples. Dilation covariance is shown to generate the Hankel structure directly, rather than only after reduction to a classical exponential-sum model. For complex exponents, incommensurate sampling scales remove the logarithmic aliasing that persists at a single scale. A second recovery channel is obtained from the minimal Hankel pencil: contour winding counts spectral nodes regionally, while Rouché-type bounds certify isolated nodes and unresolved clusters under noise. The associated contour margin has an explicit degeneration rate as the sampling ratio approaches one. Numerical experiments show that the auxiliary scale improves both identifiability and resolution, and that certified contour counts can remain reliable beyond the regime of accurate pointwise recovery.

Accurate aerodynamic prediction is critical for designing fuel-efficient and safe transportation systems such as aircraft and automobiles, yet traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations remain computationally expensive and expertise-intensive, severely limiting their use in iterative design and real-time analysis. Existing deep learning surrogates suffer from two major limitations: (i) they are evaluated on datasets with narrow flow-condition ranges, leaving their performance under complex flow conditions undemonstrated; (ii) they treat global flow conditions as a single vector injected uniformly across all surface points, ignoring that different geometric regions experience distinct local flow phenomena, which degrades prediction accuracy under complex flow conditions. To address these limitations, we propose the Flow State Attention Network (FSAN). FSAN separately encodes point cloud and flow conditions, then partitions the geometry into multiple flow states via learnable soft assignments, and uses flow features to update these state representations, which in turn influence point cloud features through state changes. This enables fine-grained, state-specific interaction between geometry and flow information. Extensive experiments on two well-recognized aerodynamic benchmarks demonstrate that FSAN achieves the highest accuracy among the methods compared in this work at a higher computational cost. On Emmi-Wing, FSAN reduces the Relative L2 (REL-L2) error by over 20% compared to the strongest baseline (Transolver), and on DrivAerNet++, it achieves a 10% reduction compared to the strongest baseline (AdaField). These results establish FSAN as a promising neural surrogate on public benchmarks with diverse flow conditions and geometries.

Modern power systems are growing increasingly complex as they integrate diverse generation sources to meet rising demand, making accurate load forecasting challenging. Recent advances in time-series foundation models (TSFMs) resulted in promising performance in zero-shot univariate load forecasting tasks. However, real-world load forecasting often involves multiple target variables and requires the integration of exogenous variables, raising important questions about the utility of TSFMs in realistic settings. In this study, we position Chronos-2, a recently developed model by Amazon, as a representative multi-channel TSFM that supports univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed forecasting, and conduct a systematic investigation of how such models can be used for real-world load forecasting. While prior work has evaluated Chronos-2 on a limited number of energy-related tasks in a zero-shot setting, its performance relative to established task-specific deep learning models and its behavior when adapted using task-specific historical data remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we evaluate Chronos-2 on two real-world utility datasets, ISO New England and ENTSO-E, and benchmark it against widely used task-specific deep learning models. Our results show that Chronos-2 benefits substantially from task-specific fine-tuning and achieves strong short-horizon forecasting performance, but its zero-shot accuracy lags behind task-specific models and its forecasting error grows more rapidly with increasing forecast steps. Overall, this study provides a detailed characterization of the strengths and limitations of TSFMs such as Chronos-2 in grid load forecasting and offers practical insights into how a pretrained TSFM can be effectively adapted for operational load forecasting applications.

Computational modeling of emotion has long faced a tension between descriptive, "snapshot-based" appraisal models and granular, signal-driven architectures that often lack appropriate psychological grounding. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the first high-fidelity computational implementation of the Goal-Directed Theory (GDT) of affect. In this framework, affect is not a post-hoc label but a functional byproduct emerging from the continuous interplay between discrepancy detection and action selection within an agent's internal processing cycles. We evaluate the model through a series of principled simulations (Dice/Corridor tasks) designed to isolate affective signatures and dynamics during multi-step goal pursuit. Results demonstrate that complex affective profiles, like an anticipatory "lift" and a failure "crash", emerge naturally from simple interactions between goal-discrepancy and action-selection expectancies without requiring additional dedicated modules. By ensuring every computational component maps directly to components of the psychological theory, this work establishes a transparent, testable framework that enables a continuous "simulation-empiry" research loop. Our work contributes to moving the field beyond "black-box" heuristics toward a granular, mechanistic understanding of affect, integrated into the core of agent behavior.

Video foundation models increasingly rely on large-scale pretraining data, yet the end-to-end data pipelines behind them remain largely closed and difficult to inspect or reuse. Researchers seeking to understand how video data recipes affect model pretraining often need to build substantial infrastructure before testing even a focused hypothesis. We present VIDAFORGE, an open research infrastructure that represents a video data recipe as an executable five-stage workflow from raw videos to training datasets. A decision in this workflow can be varied to construct alternative datasets while preserving how every sample was produced. To demon strate this research workflow, we compare data recipes with different coverage and quality in early from-scratch pretraining of Wan 2.1 and V-JEPA 2.1. Across both learning objectives, the broader-coverage recipe achieves the highest downstream benchmark scores, while loss-based evaluation favors different recipes. This study demonstrates how VidaForge connects data-recipe choices to downstream model performance. We further release VIDAFORGE-3M, containing 3.14 million scene level clips totaling 6,475 hours, with fine-grained annotations and curation signals for video data-recipe research.

Diffusion models have general generative abilities but struggle to align with specific objectives. Fine-tuning can improve alignment, yet its training cost is often prohibitive. This led to training-free methods that apply objective-guided terms in sampling to bias the generation distribution toward designated regions, e.g., high-reward areas. However, these methods face two issues: (1) the strong directional bias narrows the pretrained distribution and generation diversity, and (2) indiscriminate constant guidance fails to prune redundant signals, hurting both quality and efficiency. To address the above challenges, we propose SwiftExplorer, a plugin that mitigates distribution collapse caused by excessive diversity loss and reduces compute costs. First, we adopt an Inheritance-Restart exploration mechanism to avoid early convergence, while exploration also increases the likelihood of high-reward trajectories. Additionally, it balances diversity and fidelity, adding diversity without causing a distribution over-shift. Second, our Quality-Efficiency arbitration mechanism improves guidance by removing incorrect signals, and it reduces computation by dynamically stopping generation when completeness and marginal reward gain are optimal. In an extensive number of experiments and different types of evaluation metrics, the proposed SwiftExplorer achieves excellent performance on all metrics, including preference, fidelity, diversity, and richness.

Reward hacking during reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can induce reward seeking and broad misalignment in language models. Studying this misgeneralization is important for developing better threat models and countermeasures, but is often infeasible due to the cost of RL on large models. As an alternative, we propose studying emergent misalignment from iterative DPO, which preserves important properties of RLVR while reducing costs and enabling training on popular finetuning APIs. In practice, we find that training GPT-4.1 with iterative DPO on a single-turn reward hacking environment induces covert misaligned power-seeking and alignment faking, the first openly available (semi)-online training pipeline to induce these concerning forms of misalignment. We also find that training Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct with the same pipeline induces both misalignment and improved instruction following accuracy, showing that iterative DPO can be used as a testbed for selective generalization. Overall, we think iterative DPO can help democratize and accelerate the study of emergent misalignment from RLVR.

Although professional workflows leverage large language models widely, the interpretation for auditing unconstrained free-text generation is usually intractable if such generation demands legal, operational or financial workflow. We hereby demonstrate a text based system called SerenAI - inspired by world-models, it is a state transition system that outputs verifiable predictions rather than merely text: Provided with a description of the environment, state, and actions, the generated output contains 4 items: causal deltas that causally effect the given state, a next state that can logically follow from the given state and action, a validity reward, and a termination signal. For the released proto-model, we employ 2 steps of adaptation training, namely parameter efficient fine-tuning followed by verifier based RL over 50,000 exampled cause and effects in 12 environments spanning 10 reasoning domains. Compared to an initial internal evaluation of an 8B open-weight baseline, SerenAI increased JSON validity from 85.0% to 93.2%, schema validity from 55.0% to 84.0%, exact structured-output match from 0.0% to 41.5%, causal-delta exact match from 0.0% to 41.5%, resulting-state exact match from 0.0% to 42.0%, reward exact match from 1.0% to 80.5%, and termination exact match from 38.0% to 81.5%. These support the narrower claim that verifier-compatible adaptation can improve structured transition prediction. They do not yet establish legal-grade reliability. Accordingly, the paper also specifies a validation protocol for evidence-grounded legal workflows, calibration, human oversight, and sovereign on-premise deployment.

Annotators routinely disagree on laughter boundaries and subtle chuckles, yet temporal laughter localization typically evaluates against a single reference annotation. We show that this disagreement is structured rather than random noise. Re-annotating the SMILE-Temporal benchmark (672 videos, 1,683 events) with 3-5 annotators per video (alpha = 0.757), we find systematic patterns: disagreement is 1.73 times larger at offsets than onsets, far more common for chuckles than full laughs (77% vs. 20%), and predictable from event attributes (AUC = 0.831). Evaluating against a single annotator breaks down under this structure: system scores shift by 0.246 F1 depending on the chosen ground truth, correctly ranking systems only 69.7% of the time (vs. 80% against all annotators). We propose a disagreement-calibrated evaluation that scores predictions against the full annotator distribution using conformally calibrated tolerance bands (wider at offsets, 0.727s, than onsets, 0.5s). The per-annotator annotations and analysis code are available at https://github.com/WSCSports/MTLLFM-temporal-laughter-localization.

All-in-one medical image restoration seeks to recover heterogeneous clinical images with a single model, but PET, CT, and MRI differ substantially in degradation statistics, anatomical contrast, and output-space bias. A fully shared network can entangle modality-specific residual errors, whereas separate modality-specific networks sacrifice the practical advantages of unified deployment. We therefore recast all-in-one restoration as a question of where limited adaptation should be placed: policy selection, feature execution, or output calibration. We propose MARR, a compact restoration framework that constrains multi-modality adaptation into degradation-aware policy routing, modality-private residual execution, and image-domain residual correction without requiring degradation labels or separate modality-specific models. The policy branch forms a routing prompt from input statistics, latent content, and modality identity, and uses it only as a control signal. Prompt-gated modality-private adapters then perform lightweight residual refinement at intermediate decoder stages, while zero-initialized modality-specific output heads calibrate the final image-domain residual without perturbing the initial shared prediction. On an all-in-one PET, CT, and MRI restoration benchmark, MARR outperforms thirteen methods re-trained under the same protocol, achieving PSNR values of 37.34 dB, 33.85 dB, and 32.09 dB on PET, CT, and MRI, respectively, and the best modality-average PSNR of 34.43 dB. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/CHB-learner/MARR.

In this paper, we investigate the constrained capacity of discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-precoded faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling over frequency-selective channels with finite-alphabet inputs. With a cyclic prefix (CP) and cyclic suffix (CS), the FTN and multipath induced intersymbol interference (ISI) is decomposed into parallel eigenchannels, whose gains are jointly determined by the folded FTN spectrum and the channel frequency response. Based on this decomposition, we derive the constrained capacity for finite-alphabet constellations and formulate a mismatched decoding achievable information rate for DFT-precoded FTN signaling without CP/CS, quantifying the finite-block rate loss caused by imperfect diagonalization. We find that even under mismatched decoding, FTN significantly improves upon Nyquist transmission.

Fine-grained mobile traffic demand forecasting is essential for long-term planning of 5G and future 6G networks, including radio upgrades, site densification, backhaul expansion, and spectrum activation. This paper proposes the Traffic Demand Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer (TD-STGT), a graph neural forecasting framework for predicting changes in wireless mobile traffic demand across fine geographic grids. The framework uses a population-scaled demand proxy developed from crowdsourced mobile measurements and daytime population information. Experiments across five Canadian metropolitan regions show that TD-STGT achieves the best performance in forecasting grid-level demand changes, reaching a $\Delta R^2$ of 0.462 and reducing $\Delta$RMSE by 5.7% relative to the strongest baseline. The proposed model provides a practical tool for identifying areas with increasing demand pressure and prioritizing future mobile-network capacity upgrades.

An image-augmentation pipeline must deliver a complete batch before a model can use it. We compare seven input paths from five libraries, starting with RGB JPEG files and ending with a synchronized CUDA float16 batch. We manually matched transformation recipes and parameters across libraries to make the workloads as comparable as possible. The experiment uses 57 selected recipes, a batch size of 256, and one NVIDIA L4 machine. Throughput and peak process GPU memory are recorded together in 759 measurements. On the 11 recipes shared by all paths, DALI and AlbumentationsX have median throughputs of 5,029 and 4,679 images/s, with median peak GPU memory of 2,086 and 1,852 MiB. Broader pairwise comparisons favor AlbumentationsX on 26/26 TorchVision recipes, 50/51 Kornia recipes, and 25/26 Pillow recipes. DALI is faster than AlbumentationsX on all 22 shared recipes, with a median throughput ratio of 1.18x. A separate census reports coverage of the 118 entries in a selected AlbumentationsX RGB catalog. The study measures input preparation at fixed settings; it does not measure model training, numerical equivalence, or the best attainable configuration of each library. Benchmark code: https://github.com/albumentations-team/benchmark.

LLMs' performance on machine translation (MT) tasks is often dependent on the data availability in the specific domains and language pairs that they are trained upon. To examine if Multiword Expressions (MWEs) still set a bottleneck for LLMs regarding language understanding and translation, we report the system performances from the WMT2026 Test Suites shared task, for which we used the publicly available multilingual parallel corpus AlphaMWE as the test suites. We received 31 MT systems' outputs covering English to Chinese (zh), Polish (pl), German (de), Arabic (ar) including Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and two dialectal ones (Egyptian and Tunisian Arabic). We carried out automatic evaluations using BLEU, ChrF, BERT-score to select the Top3 systems per language pair, followed up with human evaluations on the selected systems. Our findings show that: figurative/MWE phenomena remain challenging; automatic metrics sometimes disagree; human evaluation uncovers language-specific errors hidden by aggregate scores; human evaluation re-ranks the top-3 systems.

Convex optimization on polytopes arises in many areas of science. When the polytope is given implicitly or has exponentially many vertices and facets, standard methods may not apply or be ineffective. This is the case for moment polytopes, such as the entanglement polytopes, which play a foundational role in quantum information and algebraic complexity. They give rise to important entanglement measures and tensor parameters such as the quantum functionals, yet general effective methods for computing these quantities have been elusive. In this paper we address this challenge. We develop a first-order framework called Hadamard mirror descent to optimize suitable convex functions over moment polytopes and, more generally, the gradient sets of geodesically convex functions. It operates locally and does not rely on any explicit description of the polytope. Our framework extends mirror descent, an effective and widely used framework for convex optimization, from the Euclidean setting to Hadamard manifolds, and is motivated by a recent work by Hirai, which we interpret as a Hadamard version of mirror flow. Applying the framework to entanglement polytopes yields the first efficient first-order algorithms to compute the quantum functionals, the symmetric quantum functional, and the G-stable ranks, as well as a new direct algorithm for the non-commutative rank.

Recent advancements in deep learning allow robotic agents to interact with dynamic and unstructured environments. Of special interest is the integration of physico-geospatial world knowledge into such systems, either by using physics-aware machine learning models, knowledge graphs to model relationships or spatio-temporal and logical reasoning. In the present work, we introduce an approach to augment the output of pre-trained, unmodified VLMs used for scene interpretation by integrating semantic descriptions, OpenStreetMap building data and street information with positional, temporal and metric information obtained from our sensory systems, fusing this information using LLMs. We apply this concept to an outdoor recording within a university campus, achieving an F1-Score of 0.83 in the task of grounding buildings and 0.64 for path surface grounding on our pilot evaluation set. The results demonstrate the conceptual capability of the proposed solution to deliver physico-geospatial grounded natural language descriptions. Code and results are available at https://datahub.rz.rptu.de/hstr-csrl-public/publications/physico-geospatial-grounded-scene-interpretation

Object-centric video models represent scenes with slots, yet exposed geometry can vary in meaning with appearance. In Invariant Slot Attention (ISA), explicit position and scale can disagree with the decoded center and extent; edits can yield unexpected motion or resizing, and replacing appearance can shift geometry. GeoCo-SAVi promotes geometric authority and semantic alignment. Its spatially equivariant, object-wise decoder makes position and scale effective commands: changing them moves or resizes the rendered support. Factual position alignment ties position to the decoded center, and normalized attention overlap discourages duplicate allocation. Appearance transplantation aligns geometry semantics across objects, so recipient geometry governs layout while donor appearance supplies shape. On Obj3D, GeoCo-SAVi matches ISA reconstruction, reduces latent-position-to-decoded-centroid error by nearly 90%, and reduces appearance-induced size variation while producing the expected translation and scale responses. On 250 MOVi-C videos, it improves reconstruction and instance grouping over both same-protocol references, and video editing over STAITUS. GeoCo-SAVi transforms explicit geometry into compositional control, making both position and scale more readable and editable. Project page: https://GeoCo-SAVi.github.io/.

Can exploratory UAV waypoint sequences be generated from multimodal onboard observations and a fixed-dimensional recurrent internal state without maintaining a persistent global map in the deployed policy? We investigate this question through CAVEAT, a diffusion policy conditioned on a recurrent internal state updated from fused LiDAR, visual, and pose features and trained from trajectories generated by the map-based FUELv2 expert. Rolling inference partially warm-starts consecutive predictions, while a temporary local signed distance field provides heuristic obstacle guidance. Simulation results evaluate both inference mechanisms and compare CAVEAT with its demonstration-generating expert. Proof-of-concept experiments on a Flyability Elios 3 demonstrate partial exploration of a previously unseen indoor environment and target-directed visual servoing using a separately trained policy.

Reconfigurable, multiplexed power electronic devices (M-PEDs) can provide more effective, flexible operation for applications in active distribution networks, enabling the mitigation of thermal constraints and voltage violations. To-date, operational approaches of these M-PEDs have not been described, a significant issue as a result of their relative complexity as compared to conventional PEDs. This work proposes a state machine-based control philosophy that can be used to manage the mutually exclusive selector- and current-control signals for M-PEDs. Two control approaches are described using this philosophy: an Off-Load approach, suitable for systems without time-critical network constraints; and a Hot-Swap approach, implemented when the impact of transients must be minimized. Simulations illustrate the evolution of the state machine for a back-to-back voltage source converter topology. It is concluded that the proposed state machine-based control philosophy enables M-PED operation whilst managing the additional complexity of this promising converter topology.

Western blot (WB) images are widely used as key evidence in biomedical research. Recent scientific misconduct cases reveal that WB imagery is increasingly fabricated, making WB forensics a major concern for research integrity. However, while the progress of forensic detection techniques often relies on advances in forgery-generation techniques, the development of WB forensic techniques has been hindered by the lack of standardized appearance attribute definitions, image datasets, and controllable generation frameworks for WB imagery. To address this limitation, we present a controllable WB image synthesis framework, named GAN-Blot, for generating realistic synthetic WB images. We introduce a formulation that decomposes a WB image into a structure component and a style-reference component, enabling independent control over local protein-band geometry and the global visual appearance of a synthetic WB image. GAN-Blot integrates a dual-path autoencoding design with several style-alignment loss terms to enable implicit control over structure-style synthesis without predefined semantic appearance attributes. We further contribute a synthetic WB dataset containing more than 46K images and propose four evaluation protocols for controllable WB synthesis. Extensive experiments show that GAN-Blot can generate WB images with high fidelity in both protein-band structure and visual style. Under blind inspection, the generated images can fool domain experts and are not reliably distinguished from authentic WB images by existing detectors and screening platforms. These results demonstrate their utility as challenging controlled cases for validating and developing WB forensic methods.

Behavior-cloned visuomotor policies can remain accurate near their training distribution yet fail when object position and camera viewpoint change together. A successful reference trajectory contains the geometry needed to transfer the same interaction, but the policy must align that geometry with the current scene and remain sensitive to it during denoising. To address these challenges, we present MemCorr-DP, a diffusion policy that lifts frozen RoMa v2 matches into explicit 3D relations between the current scene and the reference trajectory. A counterfactual paired objective assigns opposite behaviors the same physical state and noisy action while retaining reference-specific denoising targets. Mixed-condition fine-tuning then adapts the policy from ground-truth geometry to measured correspondence errors. Our strongest evaluation places the Door in the outermost position bands beyond the training support and changes the query camera by $\pm15^\circ$. Under this combined shift, MemCorr-DP achieves 96.67% closed-loop success, compared with 88.00% for a visual Transformer with the same action architecture. Objective ablations and reference interventions show that behavior responds to the selected reference, while matched controls favor the complete relation set over future motion or centroid geometry alone. These results support explicit 3D reference relations as a robust conditioning interface when spatial and viewpoint changes are compounded in the evaluated task.

While LLM attacks span prompt optimization, multi-turn context manipulation, retrieval poisoning, and model backdoors, white-box defenses are typically evaluated on isolated attack families. Consequently, whether heterogeneous attacks leave internal representation shifts that generalize to unseen threat mechanisms remains unknown. We present MechAudit-40, a systematic evaluation of 40 attack mechanisms across five open-weight model architectures. Threat-specific success criteria, 100,000 matched clean-attack representation pairs, predefined categories, and grouped holdouts isolate genuine attack-induced displacement from target scale, corpus bias, and data-leakage shortcuts. Across this testbed, attacks induce structured multi-depth trajectories rather than isolated layer spikes. While raw peaks are non-portable across architectures, target-calibrated profiles preserve transferable geometric signatures: under complete mechanism holdout, hidden states alone recover the threat category of unseen attacks with 82.5% accuracy. Guided by this finding, we design MechAudit, a runtime auditor that operates under strict zero-oracle constraints without requiring clean baseline traces or attack metadata. MechAudit detects 81.1% of held-out attack executions at a 0.70% false-positive rate and maintains 78.1% recall when an entire functional category is withheld. In matched comparisons, MechAudit is the only detector that avoids mechanism-level coverage collapse, maintaining over 50% recall across all 40 mechanisms. Internal representations thus support cross-mechanism attack-exposure auditing against calibrated benign references, but decouple from downstream task compromise and parameter integrity.

Assessing the literary quality of narratives requires evaluating interpretive dimensions (cultural representation, emotional depth, and philosophical engagement) that existing NLG metrics cannot measure. We introduce SAGE, a six-layer evaluation framework that separates rule-based assessment of observable textual properties from LLM-based evaluation of interpretive qualities drawn from cultural theory, affect theory, and existentialist philosophy. Each interpretive layer is assessed through multi-round iterative LLM evaluation with independent cross-validation, achieving measurement-grade reliability (98.8% convergence, >94% inter-rater agreement) stable across evaluator models. Validated on 600 evaluations across 100 short stories, our central finding is a systematic capability boundary: emotional-psychological representation approaches human levels, while cultural critique and philosophical depth exhibit approximately double the gap. LLM-generated narratives score below even commercial genre fiction on all three layers. We interpret this as a boundary between pattern-reproducible literary capacities learnable from training corpora and stance-requiring ones demanding cultural positioning and philosophical engagement that pattern matching alone cannot provide.

Professional box-lacrosse statistics summarize outcomes but provide limited information about shot quality or the roles behind scoring opportunities. This study develops a documented framework for estimating expected goals (xG) and attributing recorded offensive involvement using 1,006 manually annotated Rochester Knighthawks shot attempts, including 151 goals, from 13 consecutive 2025-2026 National Lacrosse League games. Logistic regression, random forest, and extremely randomized trees were evaluated across three nested feature sets using Leave-One-Game-Out cross-validation and a training-fold base-rate benchmark. The contextual baseline random forest had the lowest observed pooled log loss (0.4189) and Brier score (0.1260), improving on the benchmark by 1.22% and 1.50%; five of nine specifications did not beat the benchmark. Adding two-man-action and pick-type fields did not improve the primary metrics. Core Offensive Impact attributes recorded involvement through shooter xG and shot-based expected assists for final passers. Expected Pick Value (xPV) compares a qualifying pick's observed-state probability with a no-pick counterfactual. Its magnitude was indistinguishable from model noise. Its directional pattern exceeded 200 row-permutation replicates, but limited tail resolution and failure to preserve game-level pick composition make the diagnostic descriptive rather than inferential. Accordingly, xPV is reported only as an exploratory augmented component. Given the single-team, 13-game sample, the results are an initial case study rather than league-wide or causal estimates.

Conference program organization, the task of assembling accepted papers into a technical program, is labor-intensive. Papers must be grouped into topically coherent sessions under hard operational constraints, and existing methods rarely achieve both at once. To address this problem, we present TaxoConf, a system that organizes conference programs around a conference-specific topic taxonomy. TaxoConf constructs a canonicalized multi-parent taxonomy over the accepted papers and represents each paper by its frontier of most specific topics. It derives a specificity-weighted optimal-transport distance between papers from this taxonomy, then solves a binary integer programming problem that assigns papers to sessions by minimizing within-session distance subject to all hard constraints. On benchmarks built from four 2025 conferences, TaxoConf attains the highest session coherence (4.62 out of 5) and the closest agreement with human-curated sessions (NMI 0.761) while incurring no constraint violations. TaxoConf has also been deployed to generate the technical program of SIGIR 2026, where the organizers accepted the initial output with only a few edits, preserving 91.8% of oral assignments and the entire poster program while requiring no correction of hard-constraint violations, and an on-site survey of 47 attendees rated the overall program quality 4.26 out of 5. The system is publicly available at https://taxoconf.com.

Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution (MDI-QKD) removes detector side-channel vulnerabilities by delegating measurements to an untrusted relay that, when shared by several user pairs, acts as a Bell-state measurement (BSM) hub. Channel loss still limits the reach of MDI-QKD links, so long-range services rely on trusted relays for key forwarding. As MDI-QKD moves toward metropolitan deployment, a key network-planning question arises: how should BSM hubs be placed on existing fiber infrastructure to minimize the use of trusted relays? In this work, we formalize this challenge as the MDI-QKD Hub Deployment (MHD) problem. We first prove that the MHD problem is NP-hard, and then formulate it as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formulation for MDI-QKD network planning that captures the structural features specific to MDI-QKD, namely a shared BSM hub, two-link user-to-hub routing, and loss-balancing constraints, while jointly determining hub placement, user-to-hub assignment, and trusted-relay demand allocation. Our solution accounts for realistic budget and capacity constraints, including practical insights from real-world deployments of commercial MDI-QKD solutions. Numerical evaluations on three metropolitan topologies (12 to 50 nodes) at realistic geographic distances show that topology structure governs trusted-relay demand: hub placement alone eliminates all trusted relays in compact urban meshes, while in sparse topologies, relaxing the loss-balancing constraint removes the dominant source of trusted-relay usage at no additional infrastructure cost. The key-rate threshold at which trusted relays first appear shifts monotonically with the network diameter, i.e., the largest shortest-path distance between any node pair in fiber kilometers, delineating the feasibility boundary of pure MDI-QKD deployment.

In recent years, diffusion stochastic differential equation (SDE) inversion and inversion-free methods have become prevalent for training-free image editing, as they can achieve faithful reconstruction without tuning. However, existing approaches remain inefficient, exhibit limited plasticity, and struggle to accurately preserve unedited regions. To address these issues, we propose MIEdit, a training-free editing framework based on SDE inversion. MIEdit introduces a predictor-corrector multi-history-step scheme to achieve superior editing quality with fewer steps. We further mitigate heterogeneity and conflict between the multi-conditioned noise residuals and gradient terms during sampling, improving stability and editing plasticity under large edits. MIEdit also includes Inversion-Time Automatic Semantic Angle Masking (IASM); it leverages classifier-free guidance to automatically generate semantic angle masks during inversion and applies them throughout the sampling process for regional constraints, without extra user inputs. We additionally construct EditEval++ (30 fine-grained tasks, 1,000+ image-text-mask triplets) for comprehensive evaluation; experiments show that MIEdit outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. Project page: https://whywwwzzzg.github.io/MIEdit/.

The optimal transport (OT) map provides a geometric transformation for aligning probability distributions and has become a useful tool in machine learning. However, existing estimators of the OT map still exhibit a gap between sharp statistical guarantees and practical parametric estimation based on stable training objectives. Theoretical estimators achieve minimax optimal convergence rates, but they are typically nonparametric and can incur demanding implementation design or inference costs. Practical estimators are parametric and scalable, but their statistical guarantees remain underexplored, and their min-max, adversarial-like training objectives can be sensitive to optimization algorithms. We propose BROT (Barycentric Regression for Optimal Transport), a simple two-step method that first computes the unregularized OT plan and then fits a deep neural network (DNN) to the induced barycentric targets by least-squares regression. Under standard regularity conditions, we prove that the DNN estimator of BROT attains the minimax convergence rate, when the ground-truth OT map is Lipschitz. Numerical studies on synthetic datasets and an image dataset show that BROT provides accurate map estimates, strong target distribution matching, and competitive transport costs, compared to existing estimation methods. Experiments on two downstream tasks, single-cell perturbation prediction and unsupervised domain adaptation, further suggest that the accurate estimation of BROT can translate into stronger task performance.

Backward search over a run-length compressed Burrows-Wheeler transform (RLBWT) takes one step per pattern character, even when long stretches of the pattern match material that recurs throughout a highly repetitive collection. We describe shortcuts: for a precomputed set of pairs $(\alpha,\beta)$ of strings, a backward search that has just matched $\beta$ and finds $\alpha$ immediately to its left in the pattern can cross $\alpha$ in one step. Since a shortcut is taken only after its pair has been recognized in the pattern, the search returns a report of the shortcuts it took along with the usual BWT interval. Our motivation is pangenome graphs, where such pairs mark the places where a pattern passes through a vertex, so the report gives the path a match takes through the graph. We work out the case of a single linear reference $R$, with $\beta$ ranging over the length-$\ell$ windows of $R$ starting at multiples of $\ell$, and $\alpha$ over the $2^t \ell$ characters preceding such a window. We show that the search counts correctly, that under stated conditions it crosses a stretch of the pattern matching $m$ consecutive windows of $R$ with $O(\log m + m / 2^\tau)$ shortcuts, where $2^\tau \ell$ is the longest shortcut, and that the shortcuts can be built efficiently from the RLBWT. On the Pizza&Chili cere collection of 37 genomes, shortcuts make backward search 2.3 to 4.2 times faster on exact patterns of length 200 to 1000, and 1.7 to 2.0 times faster with 1% of the characters substituted, for 86% more space. On 11 gigabases of genomes of seven bacterial species, they make it 1.6 to 1.9 times faster on exact patterns for 32% more space. On whole chromosome 19 haplotypes against 16 to 64 others from the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, shortcuts in both directions make Boyer-Moore-Li search for maximal exact matches of length at least 1000 about 8 times faster.

Digital systems are becoming more integrated, autonomous, and cooperative. AI agents, future mobile networks, and machine-to-machine economies point to one trend: spontaneous, cross-organizational, unplanned interactions between non human entities (NHEs). Trust establishment for them remains an open problem. Federation is the natural candidate, but established approaches, from OpenID Federation 1.0 and SAML to Federated Identity Management, presuppose what this setting denies them: manual, ahead-of-time configuration and a common trust anchor, whether pre-established members or a shared provider. Trust domains must therefore federate without being prefigured to do so: plan for unplanned interactions. This paper examines whether prominent Identity and Access Management (IAM) approaches, namely SPIRE, Workload Identity Federation (WIF), and OpenID Federation 1.0, can support such federation. Drawing requirements from disparate fields (medical, mobile networks, agentic AI), it argues that SPIRE is the most promising starting point, but needs three extensions to meet them all: token exchange, letting a home domain mint scoped, audience-bound tokens from a foreign workload's SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document (SVID); remote attestation, so a trust decision targets a specific workload rather than a whole domain; and a distributed-ledger layer that anchors trust roots, carries federation governance, and publishes the shared keys the other two depend on.