Papers

AI data centers may face power supply shortages during certain periods, requiring operators to shift large language model (LLM) inference workloads spatially to maintain service rates. However, existing workload-shifting methods typically assume that any data center with sufficient computing resources can immediately serve shifted requests, which may lead to infeasible transfers and unserved demand. This letter proposes model commitment (MC), a mixed-integer linear programming framework that jointly schedules model deployment and cross-site request routing under power constraints and electricity-price signals. First, MC formulates the intertemporal coupling introduced by model replica loading. Second, it translates prefill and decode latency requirements into the amount of demand that each replica can serve. Case studies based on real-world data show that MC enables AI data center operators to achieve a 100% service rate under time-varying grid conditions and reduce total operating cost by 29.0%.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based motor-imagery brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) vary across subjects and sessions, complicating personalization from limited calibration data. Federated learning can exploit shared representations without centralizing raw EEG, but existing federated MI studies largely assume regular synchronization. We introduce NEXUS-MI, a gateway-coordinated federated personalization framework that treats synchronization as a coupled learning-and-communication control problem. Raw EEG and classifier heads remain local, while an edge coordinator maintains the shared backbone. We evaluate NEXUS-MI through offline replay using BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a (BCICIV-2a; 9 subjects, 4 classes) and OpenBMI (54 subjects, 2 classes). Session 1 supports backbone learning, and Session 2 provides limited-calibration personalization and held-out testing. An ideal-link reference and six heterogeneous-link policies characterize gateway participation, buffering, stale-update admission, and backbone-download control. The principal comparison holds delayed-update handling fixed while contrasting non-adaptive and communication-aware synchronization. Paired subject-level comparisons use Holm adjustment, and robustness across five matched realizations is assessed by hierarchical bootstrap. Communication-aware coordination reduced server-to-client backbone traffic by approximately 42% on both datasets, while cohort-level accuracy differences were small and realization-dependent. Cohort averages also concealed subject-level vulnerability, with losses reaching approximately 12 percentage points on BCICIV-2a relative to the ideal-link reference. These findings establish gateway synchronization as an explicit design variable in federated MI personalization and motivate joint evaluation of personalized accuracy, communication cost, update freshness, and subject-level reliability.

Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become the standard way to scale training for large language models (LLM), but the resulting policy lag biases the critic toward the stale behavior policy. Existing work on asynchronous LLM training corrects the actor and leaves this bias unaddressed, while the off-policy value correction of classical RL does not carry over to long-horizon agentic tasks, since a short correction horizon leaves the regression target free of the reward and a long one lets the product of importance ratios drift exponentially with the trajectory length. We propose BRACE, an anchored Bellman-residual correction for stale value models. BRACE bounds the correction horizon to a prefix of policy tokens and anchors a constant-weight Monte-Carlo tail beyond it, which separates policy correction from reward propagation. BRACE delivers a $9.8\%$ relative improvement in mean@1 on BrowseComp-Plus over the strongest baseline, runs $2.46\times$ faster per step than synchronous training, and remains stable $50$ updates off-policy.

In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation (CE) algorithm for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems that exploits the unique characteristics of the delay-Doppler (DD) domain channel. Specifically, the time-frequency (TF) domain input-output relationship (IOR) is derived in a compact form by focusing solely on the non-zero elements of the TF domain channel matrix. Based on this compact IOR, a coarse TF domain CE is first performed using a linear minimum mean square error estimator. Then, the resultant TF domain estimates are transformed to the DD domain through a unitary transformation for further refinement. We reveal that the effective DD domain channel matrix can be viewed as an aggregation of multiple DD domain channel responses with different phase shifts. This allows us to devise a threshold-based estimation for DD domain channel parameters with high accuracy. The estimated DD domain channel parameters are then applied to form a refined estimate of TF domain channel. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve substantial performance gains over conventional OFDM channel estimation techniques under the same pilot deployment.

Long-term language-model agents rely on external memory across interactions. Atomic memories are particularly useful: their fine-grained semantic boundaries enable precise retrieval and direct comparison between observations. Yet accumulating atoms inevitably become redundant, overlapping, or conflicting. Existing methods often ask an LLM manager to add, update, delete, or rewrite memories directly, coupling semantic interpretation, storage decisions, and content generation in one error-prone operation. We introduce ROAM, a relation-guided framework that uses atomicity for management while allowing richer answer-time representations. ROAM classifies incoming–stored atom pairs as independent, equivalent, directionally subsuming, or conflicting, then organizes observations into active Primary and supporting Evidence roles. Fusion subsequently combines complementary details and temporal changes into compact, potentially non-atomic views. Only Primary views are retrieved for answering, preventing redundant or outdated atoms from competing independently. Across models and evaluation settings, ROAM improves answer accuracy by up to 29.8 percentage points. Ablations show complementary benefits from different relations and consistent gains from fusion beyond role organization. Mechanism analysis further finds 15.6-point higher answer-critical source recall and an 11.5-point lower confounder-token share. ROAM remains robust across manager scales.

Frontier gains in language-model reasoning come from reinforcement learning on reasoning traces and are concentrated in domains with a cheap, sound verifier. We argue the field's binding constraint is the verification gap: no scalable, incorruptible reward for reasoning outside formal domains. We make four contributions. (1) Theory: in a joint-Gaussian model of best-of-N selection, verifier-gold correlation rho is the exact exchange rate between test-time compute and capability, and an unsound verifier pays a polynomial penalty N^(1/rho^2); a margin-free copula form predicts realized soundness of real LLM judges to 4% median error. (2) Demonstration: in program-synthesis testbeds with executable ground truth, including a pre-registered scaled replication, unsound verifiers lose Soundness-under-Pressure as optimization grows (0.94 to 0.32 at N=4096) while a sound verifier improves monotonically; reality-anchored settlement beats a frozen verifier under i.i.d. and adversarial pressure, driving the hacking gap from ~0.27 to ~0; soundness scales log-linearly with settled labels, with on-policy settlement ~10x more label-efficient than random labeling. With real LLM judges and unit-test execution as gold, a weak judge loses soundness under best-of-N (p<0.001), a stronger judge is more robust, and selection alone manufactures +0.53 hacking gaps from honest samples. Under real GRPO training, a frozen reward model traces the full overoptimization curve (executed reward collapses 90%) while the same model refit on a 10% settlement stream preserves 6x the executed reward. (3) Paradigm: proof-carrying cognition, where reasoning steps are typed probabilistic claims priced by a self-built world model trained only on held-out reality and settled by proper scoring rules. (4) Benchmark: we specify Soundness-under-Pressure as the headline metric for a reality-settled reasoning benchmark.

Procedural memory lets language agents reuse successful routines, but reuse presumes that a stored routine remains applicable. We study what happens when that presumption is deliberately violated. The study combines a retrospective, human-assisted interface-adaptation case from BrowserGym TimeWarp with controlled frozen-memory comparisons on synthetic shopping decisions. During the documented WebShop V1-V6 development path, interface-specific code was adapted while the separately stored high-level procedure was not reported to change; this phase does not constitute an autonomous memory-agent evaluation. In the controlled phase, an early pilot produced one task on which two memory conditions selected a more expensive item while the no-memory condition selected the reference minimum. Follow-up probes did not establish a recurring row-order or identity-binding pattern. We then tested four forms of mismatch: changed quantities, a different evidence representation, a conflict between local and global optimization, and distributed promotion evidence, across 32 formal cells. Each cell used one temperature-0 generation with the same local qwen3:8b configuration and no adaptive retry. Across these pairs, none of the predefined diagnostic interference signatures appeared on the tasks for which they were defined when current-task evidence was explicit and sufficient. The result identifies a tested region of non-interference: a procedural memory can be mismatched without becoming behaviorally disruptive. It does not establish general safety or a mechanism. The remaining question is which additional conditions turn applicability mismatch into observable, memory-caused error.

SymbolicLight V2 combines sparse event computation with continuous-state processing in a hybrid neuromorphic language architecture. Extending V1's spike-gated dual paths, it adds graded signed events at further projections and softmax-free local attention. We implement the 194M-parameter model on an Alveo U50C FPGA using digital fixed-point arithmetic and on an ARM CPU using sparse integer execution. Across three same-checkpoint FPGA implementations at 175 MHz, active-row weight gathering and valid-state KV loading raise decode throughput from 474.6 to 643.2 tokens/s for a 32-token prefix and 128 outputs. Estimated gross card energy falls from 0.06087 to 0.04407 J per generated token, a 27.6% reduction. Complete-request energy, including prefill, falls by 24.4-27.7% across three prefix lengths. An independent idle split attributes 82.8% of gross card energy to loaded idle, explaining the benefit of shorter token latency. Against the recorded RTX 5090 compiled-FP32 baseline, integer FPGA execution uses 89.1% less estimated card energy during short-context decode; arithmetic precisions differ, and the GPU baseline is not the lowest-energy tested configuration. On four Cortex-A76 cores of a ROCK 5T, complete requests reach 65.4 tokens/s at 9.80 W and 0.151 J per generated token at the adapter's AC input. These results connect event sparsity to omitted computation and data movement. The mechanisms also support other dedicated V2 implementations: increasing throughput by a greater factor than active power lowers energy per generated token. Evaluation holds the deployed checkpoint fixed; its quality trails a same-budget dense control, so the results do not establish equal-quality efficiency.

Agentic AI has enabled capabilities in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously resolve repository-level GitHub issues. However, due to the reliance on limited static description of issues, existing agentic approaches suffer from incorrect localization and incomplete validation. Solely relying on this information can bias LLM reasoning toward the narrow scope of the issue description, leading to incomplete patches that fail to address the underlying issue. In this paper, we present XAgent, an execution-guided agentic framework that analyzes dynamic behavior and additional program context to localize and validate issues. The experimental results on the SWE-bench-lite dataset demonstrate that XAgent outperforms other existing approaches, achieving a resolve rate of 62.0% and a function localization accuracy of 72.8%, while maintaining cost efficiency. Our analysis further shows that XAgent successfully resolves 7 additional issues that the top existing baselines fail to address. This work highlights a shift from static, description-oriented patch generation toward dynamic execution-guided issue resolution, opening new opportunities for LLM-based coding agents to achieve more robust and generalizable software maintenance.

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, a large number of retrieved chunks are concatenated to form the input context so that users can receive high-quality responses based on external knowledge. As a result, the input context length increases substantially, leading to a larger prefill workload and, in turn, a longer time to first token (TTFT). While previous works that reuse precomputed key-value (KV) caches effectively reduce TTFT for long-context inputs, it remains unclear whether response quality is preserved when the input context becomes very long. In this paper, we propose a combined approach that (i) fine-tunes the model while taking KV cache concatenation into account and (ii) selectively recomputes a subset of the KV caches. By applying both techniques, we demonstrate improved accuracy for long-context inputs. Experiments on the RULER benchmark show that, for a 124k-token input, our method improves the RULER score by 9.7 point over the baseline that recomputes KV caches only. Moreover, TTFT is reduced by 80% compared with full attention.

Churn models typically identify high-risk customers but do not specify which feasible retention action should be considered or why that action is appropriate. We present CARRE (Counterfactual Action Retrieval and Reason Evaluation), a three-stage framework that combines retrieval-augmented candidate generation, cost-aware counterfactual scoring, and large language model (LLM) reasoning. CARRE retrieves a predefined catalog of retention actions, estimates model-predicted churn-risk changes under explicit feature transformations, and generates a structured churn reason and a profile-grounded explanation for the selected action. On the IBM Telco Customer Churn dataset, CARRE achieves 79.8% greater mean model-predicted risk reduction than the plain SHAP baseline and 80.4% greater reduction than the cost-controlled SHAP+Cost baseline across 313 high-risk test cases; its cost-normalized efficiency is 10.5% higher than that of plain SHAP. On a 136-case reason-stratified evaluation sample, diagnosis-driven prompt refinement increases weak-label agreement from 79.4% to 90.4%, with no auxiliary-plan constraint violations; because the same sample was used for error diagnosis and re-evaluation, the post-refinement result is not an independent estimate of generalization. For 135 explanations generated using the pre-refinement v2 reason outputs, two cross-vendor LLM judges assign mean scores ranging from 4.02 to 5.00 out of 5, although one judge saturates on actionability, and a deterministic audit finds no contradictions among 66 verifiable profile claims. Retrieval ablations show that k=5 provides the best evaluated compromise between high candidate coverage and downstream reasoning agreement in this dataset. These results illustrate how retrieval, model-based counterfactual scoring, and language generation can be separated and jointly evaluated in a prototype churn-prescription pipeline.

Social intelligence enables agents to read social context, infer intent, and adapt over sustained dialogue. As language models become autonomous collaborators, it is central to building effective and trustworthy human-AI interaction. Existing reinforcement learning methods optimize single-turn utterances and sparse outcome rewards, producing short-sighted policies that struggle to manage goal-relationship tensions across multi-turn interactions. We propose SocialRL, a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework addressing both challenges. First, we apply multi-turn reinforcement learning using PPO that propagates delayed outcome rewards back to each turn, enabling long-horizon planning. Second, we design six process reward dimensions capturing the goal-relationship trade-off, including goal advancement, relational attunement, contextual coherence, etc. A reward model dynamically generates fine-grained scoring criteria for each dimension, while a stage-aware weight schedule prioritizes relationship-building in early turns, goal advancement mid-way, and balanced closure late. Across multiple social-dialogue benchmarks, SocialRL improves Goal Achievement by an average of 9.2 percentage points over the corresponding Base models. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SocialRL across synthetic and real social scenes, as well as standard and challenging social scenarios.

Methane plume detection from satellite imagery is constrained by incomplete observations: public satellites provide complementary spatial, spectral, and atmospheric evidence, but real plume cases rarely contain fully paired multi-sensor measurements because of revisit schedules, cloud coverage, acquisition quality, and the transient nature of emissions. Most learning-based detectors rely on single-sensor inputs, especially Sentinel-2 (S2), leaving many reported plume cases unusable. We construct MethaneUnion, a temporal multi-sensor dataset built from Carbon Mapper plume reports and matched S2, Landsat 8/9 (L8/9), EMIT, and Sentinel-5P (S5P) observations. Built on MethaneUnion, MethaneFuse learns from heterogeneous satellite observations under partial sensor availability without requiring complete four-sensor measurements. MethaneUnion expands usable coverage from 3,211 valid S2-matched plume cases to 8,981 reported plume cases with multi-sensor observations. At the representative 480 m setting, MethaneFuse achieves 84.87 F1 and 93.62 AUROC, improving over the strongest baseline by 5.65 F1 and 8.30 AUROC points while reducing false positives by 8.19 points. Sensor-availability experiments show that MethaneFuse improves detection when S2 is available and transfers plume knowledge to L8/9, EMIT, and S5P when S2 is unavailable. These results demonstrate the value of learning from incomplete heterogeneous sensor observations for practical methane plume detection.

Real-time MRI (rtMRI) captures the dynamics of the entire vocal tract during speech, but labeled data are scarce and the modality - single-slice, grayscale, low-resolution - differs substantially from the natural videos that video foundation models are trained on. We introduce Arti-JEPA, a joint embedding predictive architecture to model vocal tract rtMRI by continuing its self-supervised objective on about 62h of unlabelled vocal-tract videos, and evaluate the frozen representation on three tasks: cross-domain phoneme prediction (on typical speakers), fluent-vs-disfluent classification (a corpus containing stuttered speech), and characterizing pre/post-operative transfer (after partial glossectomy). Three key findings emerge. (1) A temporal video prior decisively outperforms per-frame image encoders, and latent prediction (V-JEPA) is at least as strong as pixel reconstruction (VideoMAE), with the edge on fine-grained phonemes. (2) Domain adaptation is task-dependent: it roughly doubles cross-domain phoneme prediction $\kappa$ (to 0.352) but does not help binary stuttering classification. (3) Arti-JEPA was able to recover phoneme signal from pre/post glossectomy speech — an in-domain probe decodes patients at least as well as a typical speaker, indicating that the residual transfer gap is cross-speaker/domain misalignment, not surgical signal loss, and post-operative decoding does not fall below performance on pre-operative speech. Together, these position a frozen, domain-adapted rtMRI encoder as a reusable measurement tool for articulatory and clinical speech science.

As large language models are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented legal agents, they introduce agentic hallucinations where tool-call and reasoning errors cascade into fabricated holdings and miscited authority. However, existing legal benchmarks evaluate only single-turn QA with outcome-level metrics, while agentic hallucination benchmarks lack legal-specific diagnostic capability. Neither answers to what extent and how a legal agent hallucinates along its trajectory. To address these limitations, we introduce LexAgentHallu, a legal agentic hallucination benchmark designed to evaluate to what extent and how legal agents fail along multi-step trajectories. Built through a four-stage expert-in-the-loop pipeline, LexAgentHallu contains 3414 instances across 17 legal categories and 6 task types. Each instance is annotated under a dual-layer hallucination taxonomy of 7 high-level categories and 27 fine-grained subclasses, covering both substantive errors and agent-procedural failures. We further design fine-grained metrics that quantify to what extent and localize how each failure occurs along an agent's execution path. Our evaluation across 18 proprietary and open-source agents uncovers a Right-Answer-Wrong-Reason effect and reveals that hallucination subclasses cluster rather than scatter, forming distinct agentic framework, legal task, and category profiles. These findings, invisible to outcome-level evaluation, validate the diagnostic power of LexAgentHallu for evaluating agentic hallucination in law.

Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) substantially boost warehouse throughput, but routing large-scale AGV fleets remains challenging. Classical Multi-Agent Pathfinding solvers suffer from exploding combinatorial complexity and super-quadratic runtime, while relying on idealized grid or piecewise-linear motion models that mismatch real-world kinematics. Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions improve flexibility via decentralized agent policies but depend on discretized spatiotemporal representations, require millions of episodes to converge, and incur full-map observation at every step, which leads to large models, slow convergence, and high inference latency that violates real-time industrial control constraints. To address these bottlenecks, we propose HiRAD, a hierarchical RL framework for continuous-space AGV routing with real-time guarantees: (1) a step-level spatiotemporal representation that translates continuous motion into a differentiable RL problem, (2) a hierarchical strategy that splits heading choice from velocity control to reduce the action space, and (3) an asynchronous event-driven decision pipeline that lowers inference complexity from O(n^2) to O(n) and cuts per-step latency by as much as 71 percent. Across random graphs and two warehouse maps, HiRAD reduces makespan by 45 percent to 63 percent and shortens end-to-end runtime.

Diffusion language models generate text by refining a fixed-size block of token positions through many forward passes, a loop that does not match the per-forward execution unit used by most LLM serving systems. A dense MoE runtime binds all work to the refinement-iteration clock: it rebuilds similar routing structure on every forward, recomputes expert outputs for positions whose logits are already dead, and sends those positions through dense expert-parallel collectives. This paper presents \sys{}, a serving system that treats the diffusion block as a compilation unit. \sys{} compiles a small block plan for the block-clock structure of one diffusion block and refreshes every value that can affect a live decode decision on the iteration clock. \sys{} realizes this plan along three dense axes of an MoE forward: \atlas{} compiles a coverage-driven active expert support per layer while recomputing gate logits every iteration; \lsp{} keeps full sequence shards as model state but routes only live, newly decoded, and refresh-required positions through fresh routed-expert computation; \freshlane{} carries this fresh token–expert worklist through expert-parallel dispatch, kernels, and combine, then restores the dense logical shard at the layer boundary. We implement \sys{} on 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and evaluate it on three open-weight block-diffusion MoE models (LLaDA-MoE, LLaDA2.0-mini, and LLaDA2.0-Flash, spanning 7B to 100B total parameters) across GSM8K, HumanEval, MGSM, and MT-Bench. \sys{} improves end-to-end execution time by up to 2.7$\times$ over the strongest surviving baseline under the same 8-GPU placement and remains feasible at the largest batch sizes where multiple baselines run out of memory, while preserving task quality relative to the dense reference.

Degree-six triangular-lattice interconnection networks offer substantial minimal-path diversity, but their additional directions complicate deadlock-free routing under wormhole flow control. We study a finite hexagon-shaped mesh and its periodic torus quotient in a common six-direction coordinate system. For the finite mesh, we construct a minimal partially adaptive routing relation that uses one virtual channel and forbids only two directed turns. For the torus, we prove that every source-destination pair has a unique closest lattice lift, but that the same two-turn physical routing relation still has a cyclic one-VC resource CDG for every n >= 3. We eliminate this residual periodic dependency by combining two virtual channels with Hamiltonian coordinates and group-specific datelines. Each same-group segment crosses its dateline at most once, which permits a global rank on VC-labelled channel resources. We prove minimal all-pairs connectivity for both physical routing relations and acyclicity of the complete resource CDG for the proposed one-VC mesh and two-VC torus constructions. For a single static bidirectional link failure known before a routing epoch, we further rotate the turn rule toward the failed orientation and replace a failed hop by a same-group two-hop triangle bypass. This restricted extension preserves all-pairs connectivity and the original VC counts, with at most one additional hop relative to the healthy shortest-path distance.

We present the PccDiffuser, a conditional diffusion framework for continuum robots that learns a multimodal distribution over complete configuration-space paths and samples multiple candidate solutions in parallel, which are subsequently converted into an executable trajectory by time allocation considering actuator constraints. Under the piecewise constant-curvature model, we use exponential co-ordinates to describe the robot kinematics, and use graph neural network to encode a variable number of environment obstacles. Analytical differential kinematics is incorporated in the denoising process to improve terminal accuracy and whole-body clearance. On a mixed test set comprising workspace with zero to four obstacles, PccDiffuser achieved a success rate of 91%. Compared with existing sampling- and optimisation-based benchmarks, it delivered both a higher success rate and greater computational efficiency, with the latter advantage becoming more substantial when sampling more candidate solutions. Experiments on a three-section tendon-driven continuum robot further demonstrate consecutive planning, multi-solution planning, and whole-body obstacle avoidance.

This paper revisits TEE-assisted BFT under a universal partial-TEE model, where an arbitrary subset of replicas execute inside TEEs while the remaining replicas operate without hardware trust guarantees. We show that heterogeneous trust changes the structure of quorum formation and fault tolerance. In particular, we derive a tight resilience bound f < max {n/3, m/2}, where n is the total number of replicas and m is the number of TEE-enabled replicas. The result reveals a sharp threshold phenomenon: TEEs improve fault tolerance only once they exceed two-thirds of the deployment. Guided by this characterization, we introduce two protocol principles: (1) a dual-quorum construction that safely combines TEE-only and mixed quorums, and (2) a TEE-leader fast path that leverages hardware-enforced non-equivocation to reduce both consensus and view-change latency. We realize these ideas in Raftel, which is, to our knowledge, the first HotStuff-style BFT protocol designed explicitly for arbitrary partial-TEE deployments, and in chained-Raftel, a pipelined variant that further accelerates mixed-trust execution. We implement both protocols atop Intel SGX and evaluate them in LAN and WAN environments. Our results show that Raftel achieves up to 625 TPS with sub-670 ms latency in WAN settings, outperforming HotStuff by up to 308 TPS in throughput while approaching the performance of fully TEE-assisted protocols.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enhances the robustness of models against distribution shifts but faces two critical challenges: error accumulation from noisy pseudo-labels and catastrophic forgetting of source knowledge. Uncertainty-based approaches designed to mitigate error accumulation often yield overconfident or computationally expensive estimates, while strategies intended to prevent forgetting via prototype replay rely on static representations that easily become misaligned as the model adapts. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel framework, Distilling Image Prototype for Guided Test-Time Adaptation (DIPTTA). The core of the proposed approach is the introduction of a Distill Image Prototype (DIP), a compact set of synthetic images that serves as a dynamic and regenerative anchor of source knowledge. This prototype enables a dynamic feature replay mechanism that continuously generates feature prototypes aligned with the current state of the model, thus effectively preventing catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, the DIP anchors a source-calibrated uncertainty estimation method, which provides a less biased measure of sample reliability by leveraging stable source knowledge, thereby robustly suppressing error accumulation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DIPTTA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under severe domain shifts. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiwenWang919/DIPTTA.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) localizes the video segment that matches a natural-language query. Many queries describe an action performed by a particular entity. Existing methods often encode the query as a whole or use general video-text interactions, without explicitly checking whether the action and entity occur together. They may therefore select a segment that contains both concepts but not the event described by the query. We propose Interaction Aligned Action-Entity Video Temporal Grounding (IAE-VTG), which models this rela?tionship at both the representation and training assignment levels. First, the Fine-grained Disentangled Interaction Module (FDIM) separates action and entity related query information and aligns it with complementary motion and appearance features. It then combines token-level interactions to build representations that capture the relationship between the action and entity. Second, Interaction-Sensitive Assignment (ISA) adds this interaction evidence to bipartite matching, so training targets are selected using both temporal overlap and semantic compatibility. This reduces supervision from temporally plausible but semantically incorrect proposals. Experiments on QVHighlights, Charades?STA, and TACoS show that IAE-VTG consistently improves strong baselines and achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on standard grounding metrics. Additional analyses show that the method is especially effective when similar actions or entities appear at multiple times and produces more reliable assignments for complex events.

Healthcare systems, mental health, and public well-being are increasingly affected by cyberbullying and harmful online interactions. This paper presents CareGuard, an early-warning framework designed to support healthcare-driven mental health protection and proactive online safety through the detection of cyberbullying-related content using advanced natural language processing techniques. CareGuard integrates zero-shot semantic labeling with fine-tuned transformer-based models, including BERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa, to enable robust and context-aware classification across sensitive cyberbullying categories. To improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary computation in healthcare-oriented monitoring settings, the framework incorporates an emotion-aware filtering mechanism alongside cosine similarity-based semantic screening, allowing the system to focus on semantically relevant and emotionally salient content. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CareGuard effectively balances detection accuracy and computational efficiency, highlighting its potential for scalable deployment in healthcare systems, mental health monitoring, and online safety applications.

Generalized Arimoto–Blahut (AB) algorithms are widely used in information theory and quantum optimization, but monotonic objective decrease and numerical stabilization do not guarantee global optimality. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the global optimality of full-rank AB fixed points for convex differentiable objectives under linear constraints. An AB fixed point is globally optimal if and only if the AB update direction and the objective gradient differ by an element of the constraint normal space at that point. The same compatibility condition characterizes agreement between individual AB and mirror-descent (MD) updates, whereas pathwise equivalence requires it along the entire common trajectory. Thus, an AB algorithm may follow a trajectory different from MD and still reach the global optimum. We also develop a posteriori optimality certificates based on feasible directional derivatives, including finite-difference upper bounds on the objective gap that require only objective evaluations. For channel relative entropy between dephasing and depolarizing channels, we analytically identify the global minimizer as the unique full-rank AB fixed point, although pathwise equivalence fails. Numerical experiments illustrate convergence of AB and MD along different trajectories and validate the certificates. By contrast, an amplitude-damping example shows that a monotone AB iteration can stabilize at a suboptimal fixed point, whose nonoptimality is detected by the finite-difference certificate. These results provide structural and computable criteria for assessing global optimality in quantum AB algorithms.

Source-level analysis of interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) is relevant to presurgical evaluation and treatment planning because it helps characterize where epileptiform activity is likely to arise. Beyond detecting whether an IED is present, this setting requires assigning IED-positive activity to clinically meaningful brain-region categories. This setting is challenging because source-region evidence in short electroencephalography (EEG) windows can be subtle, partial, and affected by subject variability, class imbalance, and imperfect multimodal context. We present EEGBind, an EEG-centric multimodal binding framework for five-class source-level IED classification. EEGBind treats EEG as the primary modality and binds synchronized video-context features around an EEG-centric representation. Instead of relying on early or overly strong multimodal fusion, which may perturb the source-sensitive EEG representation, EEGBind uses video context as auxiliary evidence for robust classification. A view-consistent repair stage is further used to improve hidden-set robustness while preserving the learned source-class boundary. On the NeuroMM 2026 Grand Challenge Track 3 NMM-Source-IED benchmark, EEGBind achieves 0.8395 on weighted-F1 and outperforms strong competitors. These results support EEG-centric multimodal binding as a practical strategy for source-level IED classification. The open-source code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/NeuroMM2026_IED_Detection.

This paper proposes an advanced realization principle for wideband multiuser multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MU-MIMO OFDM) transmitters, where the conventional transmitter-side baseband chain is physically synthesized in the wave domain. For design and optimization purposes, this fully wave-domain wideband MU-MIMO OFDM transmitter implemented by a cascaded SIM structure is functionally partitioned into two cascaded SIM blocks. The first block, denoted as SIM_1, integrates symbol loading and channel-adaptive MU-MIMO precoding updated at the channel-coherence timescale, mapping the user streams to a virtual port-subcarrier representation. The second block, denoted as SIM_2, acts as an offline-configured sampling-rate modulator that materializes the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) and cyclic prefix (CP) insertion directly in the wave domain. This baseband-free architecture establishes a virtual-to-physical transition from information bits to radiated CP-extended OFDM waveforms. To account for practical nonidealities, SIM_2 is optimized to fit the ideal multi-port CP-OFDM operator, and its residual response is mapped into an effective coupling matrix. Then, SIM_1 is optimized in a communication-oriented manner by jointly adapting discrete phase shifts and stream-subcarrier power loading to maximize the sum spectral efficiency. Results demonstrate the convergence, architecture trade-off, wave-domain OFDM materialization accuracy, and competitive performance of the proposed baseband-free transmitter.

Low-bit attention accelerates Transformer inference by moving the $QK^\top$ and $PV$ matrix multiplications to FP8 or FP4 matrix engines. However, the softmax path often evaluates shifted-score exponentials in higher precision, forms a temporary probability block, and quantizes it before low-bit $PV$ multiplication. This exp-then-quantize path creates a mismatch between a high-precision probability producer and a low-bit matrix consumer. We propose EFQ-Softmax (Exp-Free Quantization for Softmax), a low-bit probability-generation method that directly maps shifted attention scores to block-scaled E2M1 operands. For each microscaling block, EFQ-Softmax selects an exponent-only scale from the local maximum, maps the shifted scores to a normalized residual domain, and generates nonnegative E2M1 probability codes using a single affine rule. The resulting operand is used consistently in both the $\widetilde{P}V$ numerator update and the $\widetilde{P}\mathbf{1}$ denominator update. The FlashAttention-style row-maximum update, historical rescaling, high-precision accumulation, and final normalization remain unchanged. We evaluate end-to-end quality on Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, and WAN2.2-TI2V-5B, and separately measure kernel-level performance on the A5 vector unit. EFQ-Softmax improves the Qwen3-8B seven-task mean from 0.6749 with MXFP4 to 0.6773 and the Qwen3-VL nine-task mean from 0.7826 to 0.8000. On WAN2.2, it maintains temporal consistency and visual quality comparable to the FP16 and MXFP4 baselines under VBench. On the A5 vector unit, EFQ-Softmax reduces the vector-stage latency of the fused probability-generation kernel by 40.33% on average across sequence lengths from 16K to 128K. These results show that direct low-bit probability generation can replace the conventional exp-then-quantize path while preserving end-to-end model quality.

Text-aligned speech tokenization methods have emerged to better align speech tokens with LLM token spaces, enabling more effective utilization of pretrained LLMs. However, they rely on offline automatic speech recognition (ASR), leading to two key limitations: (i) the need for complete utterances before tokenization, precluding real-time streaming, and (ii) vocabulary mismatch between ASR and LLMs, which reduces acoustic granularity from the subword to the word level. We introduce StreamAlign, a text-aligned speech tokenization framework that enables streaming tokenization for real-time speech-text joint modeling. StreamAlign performs online speech-text alignment by combining character-level RNN-Transducer alignment with word-level ASR guidance, mitigating ASR-LLM vocabulary mismatch while preserving recognition accuracy. A proactive word boundary classifier anticipates word completion at chunk boundaries, reducing tokenization latency from 560 ms to 270 ms. On LibriSpeech, StreamAlign achieves the lowest WER and highest UTMOS among evaluated tokenizers. Furthermore, StreamAlign-SLM, a spoken language model trained on StreamAlign units, outperforms other end-to-end spoken language models in speech continuation while achieving the strongest overall consistency on SALMon and spoken StoryCloze.

Customers rely on specific product attributes to compare products and make purchasing decisions, but e-commerce catalogs are messy and unstructured, making it difficult to identify which attributes matter most and extract them at scale. Standard Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) systems treat all attributes equally, producing large, inconsistent attribute sets that do not reflect the factors consumers use to differentiate products. We introduce a two-stage LLM pipeline that first discovers a compact, ranked schema of purchase-discriminative attributes for each product category, then extracts their values from catalog text using a fine-tuned compact LLM (Qwen3-4B) with Hyper-Parallel Decoding (HPD). This pipeline achieves 85% extraction accuracy, on par with the foundational LLM it was distilled from, while reducing inference costs by 92% over foundational LLMs, enabling production-scale use for product discovery and catalog enrichment. The resulting category-level structured representations effectively constitute automatically constructed product knowledge bases, providing consistent, comparable attributes across varied product categories that can ground downstream knowledge-intensive applications.

For a graph $H$, the $H$-freeness edge-deletion problem is the algorithmic problem of finding, for an input graph $G$, the minimum number of edges of $G$ whose deletion turns $G$ into an $H$-free graph. We show that for every graph $H$ containing a cycle, this problem is NP-hard. This proves a conjecture of Gishboliner, Levanzov and Shapira, and completes the characterization of the complexity of the $H$-freeness edge-deletion problem, answering a question of Alon, Shapira and Sudakov.