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Computer Science

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Wednesday 9 September

Machine Learning

Learning with Covariance Matrices: Principal Component Analysis Meets Learning with Graphs

This feature article provides an overview of the theoretical foundations for coVariance neural networks (VNNs), i.e., graph neural networks (GNNs) operating on covariance matrices as graphs. Covariance matrices are ubiquitous across domains, and hence, the deployment of GNNs often leverages graphs of pairwise statistical dependencies. Existing theoretical contributions on GNNs consider abstract graph representations and cannot accommodate the data-driven nuances associated with covariance matrices. This tutorial brings into focus various novel theoretical insights via mathematical analyses of VNNs that have broad signal processing implications, including: (i) a conceptual equivalence between VNNs and principal component analysis (PCA)-based information processing; (ii) refined stability bounds on predictive outcomes in the presence of finite sample-induced covariance matrix perturbations; and (iii) refined characterization of transferability of VNNs across multiscale datasets. The theoretical insights discussed herein provide the underlying principles and justification towards adopting VNNs over workhorse PCA-based learning pipelines, in applications where covariance matrices are useful descriptors of data structure. We also convey how impact of these foundational advances permeates to principled designs and applications of learning methods across broad domains where covariance matrices emerge. Notably, we elucidate the conceptual insights facilitated by VNNs to the specific task of characterizing brain age gap for neurodegenerative conditions using neuroimaging datasets, a timely problem in computational neuroscience. Broader impacts to other application domains are discussed as well.
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All authors Saurabh Sihag, Andrea Cavallo, Elvin Isufi, Gonzalo Mateos, Alejandro Ribeiro

Computer Vision

Artificial Intelligence Literacy and Sustainable Development: An Ethical Governance and Development Goals Framework

AI literacy provides foundational competencies that support ethical, transparent, and sustainable technological development, although higher-order capabilities such as governance, critical evaluation, and strategic decision-making extend beyond basic literacy into advanced levels of AI competency. This study positions AI literacy as a governance capacity that complements and strengthens all 17 SDGs. It introduces a six-level taxonomy of artificial intelligence reasoning and ethics that extends traditional learning models by incorporating ethical judgement and strategic foresight. This taxonomy forms the foundation of an integrated framework linking education, governance, and sustainable development. A survey of 300 participants from diverse professional backgrounds within a national context which reveals strong technical awareness but limited ethical and governance readiness, highlighting critical gaps in public capacity to manage artificial intelligence responsibly. Findings show that ethical reasoning and reflective thinking are the strongest predictors of sustainable and trustworthy artificial intelligence use. The study proposed to embed literacy-based competencies into curricula, institutional policies, and governance mechanisms to accelerate equitable and responsible progress toward sustainable development goals
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Robotics

Coastal Environment Generation with HoloOcean

Marine robotic simulation provides a safe and inexpensive method of developing and testing algorithms for unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) and unmanned surface vessel (USV) autonomy and perception before full field deployment. However, these simulations are often limited by the availability of simulated environments. Current marine robotics simulation suites offer manual ways to edit or create environments, but they require existing data or specialized knowledge of the environment system. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Unreal Engine 5 level generation pipeline that enables automatic creation of coastal environments for HoloOcean. Our pipeline relies on a user-provided overhead image of a coastal scene. The pipeline then uses the image to generate height map data, as well as automatically select assets and place them in the environment.
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Information Theory

Risk-Averse Decision Making via Quantum Measurement Design

Quantum measurements are conventionally optimized to maximize the average of a utility that depends on the true state and on the measurement outcome. However, when the outcome of the measurement is used as an action within a larger decision-making system, the average utility does not capture the risk of poor outcomes. This letter addresses the design of quantum measurements that maximize a risk-averse objective given by the optimized certainty equivalent (OCE), a family of criteria that includes the average utility and the conditional value at risk (CVaR) as special cases. For a piecewise linear gain function, defining the OCE, thus including the CVaR, the problem is shown to reduce to a finite number of semidefinite programs, for which a dual formulation is derived. For the discrimination of two states, a closed-form solution is obtained that takes the form of a Helstrom measurement. Numerical results show that the optimized measurement improves the lower tail of the utility distribution at a moderate cost in average utility.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Deep Learning-Based Detection of Electrical Faults and Power Quality Disturbances in Aerospace Power Systems

More Electric Aircraft require fast and reliable monitoring of high-frequency electrical networks, yet most power quality disturbance and fault diagnosis methods are developed for conventional 50 or 60 Hz grids. This work presents a hardware-aware deep learning framework for multiclass detection of electrical faults and power quality disturbances in a 400 Hz aerospace power system. A high-fidelity simulation model inspired by the Boeing 787 electrical architecture generates voltage and current waveforms for 21 normal, disturbance, switching, open-circuit, and short-circuit conditions. Two datasets, each containing 73,500 samples, are formed from one-dimensional time-series signals and short-time Fourier transform time-frequency representations. Signal-processing augmentation, domain randomization, and class-specific generative adversarial networks increase waveform diversity, and the time-series dataset is released through IEEE DataPort. We compare 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory networks, CNN-LSTM hybrids, ResNet, MobileNet, and VGG models under common training conditions. A compact ResNet provides the best accuracy-complexity tradeoff, achieving 96.94 percent software test accuracy with 175,685 parameters. After 8-bit quantization and deployment on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale Plus MPSoC ZCU102, the model achieves 95.87 percent accuracy and a measured mean neural-network accelerator latency of 6.90 ms per input record. The results establish simulation-based, accelerator-level feasibility for embedded edge AI in aircraft electrical health monitoring and motivate future end-to-end data acquisition and experimental validation.
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Systems and Control

Multivariate linear regression without prior assumptions

Recovering the linear relationships that govern a system from noisy measurements is a basic task across the physical and engineering sciences. Because every measured variable may carry an unknown amount of noise, classical regression must commit in advance to a set of structural assumptions: ordinary least squares requires a declared input-output partition with input variables being noise-free, total least squares assumes equal noise variance across all variables, and generalized total least squares additionally requires the noisy-variable partition and variances to be known beforehand. Kalman~\cite{Kalman:1982} showed that any procedure returning a unique linear model from inexact data must rest on such unverifiable a priori assumptions – “prejudices” – that cannot be checked against the data itself, and that removing them leaves the identification problem fundamentally indeterminate. Whether these prejudices can instead be resolved directly from the data has remain unresolved. Here we show that an iterative generalized-eigenvalue algorithm, QZ-IPCA, recovers the noisy-variable partition, noise variances, number of linear relations, and regression coefficients of a multivariate linear system simultaneously, using only the raw data. Across all possible exhaustive noise configurations of a five-variable benchmark network, QZ-IPCA correctly identifies model structure and recovers coefficients with error below 6.4%. It outperforms ordinary least squares even when given the best partition, and succeeds in rank identification precisely where standard total least squares falls once noise variances differ across variables. These results show that the assumptions conventionally required for multivariate regression are not necessary, recasting model identification as a problem solvable from data geometry alone.
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All authors Mayank S.K. Gupta, Deepanjhan Das, Arun K. Tangirala, Shankar Narasimhan

Numerical Analysis

Invariant domain preservation for hybrid point-value and cell-average discretizations of hyperbolic equations on general meshes

This paper presents a unified invariant-domain-preserving (IDP) framework for hybrid discretizations of hyperbolic conservation laws, including active flux and PAMPA methods, in which cell averages are updated conservatively while cell-boundary point values evolve under a possibly non-conservative operator. The main challenge is to preserve admissibility for these two coupled sets of states under a single local stability condition, without adding evolved degrees of freedom or relying on post-update repairs. For the point-value update, we introduce an admissibility transform based on a barrier–Legendre map for convex admissible interiors described by concave constraints, and prove that the inverse map is globally defined and Lipschitz continuous on the relevant sets. For the conservative cell-average update, we establish a structural obstruction theorem: the single-state continuous physical flux built from admissible boundary traces alone cannot provide a conservative IDP guarantee, for any prescribed CFL number, when internal reconstruction values are uncontrolled. This identifies the missing local control that must be supplied by an additional IDP flux mechanism. To realize this mechanism explicitly, we combine cell average decompositions (CAD), geometric quasilinearization, and local a priori scaling to construct admissible, generally discontinuous trace states before flux evaluation. Under an explicit trace-based CFL condition, with constants determined by local CAD weights and trace-state wave-speed bounds, the coupled hybrid update preserves the prescribed invariant domain. Concrete third-order schemes are developed on triangular, Cartesian, convex quadrilateral, and general convex polygonal meshes. Numerical results demonstrate the designed order of accuracy for smooth solutions and the strict preservation of physical admissibility.
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All authors Shengrong Ding, Shumo Cui, Remi Abgrall, Kailiang Wu

Computer Vision

AgroVisNet: A lightweight Convolutional Network and the BD-PlantDX Expert-Validated Benchmark for Radish, Potato and Pointed Gourd Disease Classification

Automated plant disease diagnosis is increasingly deployed on farmer-held devices in regions where agronomic expertise is scarce and network connectivity is unreliable. Three obstacles limit its practical value: public benchmarks are dominated by a small set of non-native crops, region-specific datasets are rarely validated by domain experts, and the architectures that reach competitive accuracy carry parameter budgets that are unsuited to low-cost hardware. We propose AgroVisNet, a compact convolutional network trained from scratch, together with BD-PlantDX, an expert-validated benchmark of 12,432 field images spanning 12 classes of radish, potato and pointed gourd in healthy and diseased states, collected across the Bogura and Nilphamari districts of Bangladesh. AgroVisNet couples grouped bottleneck residual blocks carrying sequential channel and spatial attention with multi-scale depthwise blocks and a dual-pooling classification head, reaching 290,572 trainable parameters. On BD-PlantDX the model attains 99.52% test accuracy and 99.52% weighted F1, exceeding all six ImageNet-pretrained lightweight backbones evaluated under an identical protocol while using 8.7 to 16.8 times fewer parameters and 1.3 to 8.5 times fewer multiply-accumulate operations. Exported for deployment, the model quantises to a 0.46 MB full-integer network at a 0.22 percentage-point accuracy cost and classifies an image in 8.40 ms on a single CPU. Across five random seeds accuracy remains at 99.57 +- 0.10%, a ten-variant ablation isolates the contribution of each component, and the same architecture transfers without redesign to two independently collected datasets at 98.71% and 99.05% accuracy. Grad-CAM evidence indicates that predictions rest on lesion-bearing leaf regions rather than on background cues.
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Networking

HAPS-RIS or HAPS-Relay: Which Outperforms Under Impairments with NOMA in 6G NTN?

This paper investigates the performance of high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-assisted communication systems employing either reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) or relay stations (RS) under non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. Practical system impairments, including hardware impairments (HWI) and imperfect channel state information (CSI), are explicitly considered. The results show that HAPS-RIS outperforms HAPS-RS in terms of both sum-rate and energy efficiency under non-ideal conditions due to its passive nature, which avoids noise amplification. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that RIS element allocation and user spatial distribution significantly impact NOMA performance, where increased user separation and proper allocation enhance channel disparity and improve system efficiency. Despite its higher sensitivity to imperfect CSI, HAPS-RIS can effectively compensate for performance degradation through large-scale RIS element deployment, maintaining a performance advantage over half-duplex RS-based systems. These insights provide useful design guidelines for impairment-aware HAPS-assisted 6G communication systems.
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All authors Bilal Karaman, Faicel Khennoufa, Ilhan Basturk, Metin Ozturk, Ferdi Kara, Sezai Taskin, Halim Yanikomeroglu

Machine Learning

Semigroup-JEPA: Latent Dynamics Consistency for Zero-Shot Physics Generalization

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models learn a compact latent representation of the world that supports prediction and planning, but their capability to learn physics and generate physically realistic dynamics remains hitherto untested. In this work, we introduce SemiGroup-JEPA (SG-JEPA), which extends the LeWorldModel framework by supplying the parameter governing the physics to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through an autoregressive latent rollout. To evaluate the model's ability to generalize out of distribution, we design dynamical tasks under different gravitational fields that, despite obeying the same physical law, exhibit qualitatively different dynamics, ranging from floating motion in weak gravitational fields to rapid bouncing in strong ones. In contrast to DINO-WM, SG-JEPA reduces open-loop prediction error by up to 2 times on two-dimensional datasets, and increases control success rate up to 2.5 times for three-dimensional robotic datasets, for which we train independent diffusion policies. To explain this advantage, we develop a linear feature model that separates local law-conditioned error from its recursive amplification under rollout. Guided by this model, we find that back-propagating the multi-step rollout loss into the representation trains the encoder to keep the features that the predictor can carry forward, and that those are the features the dynamics depend on, so most of the gain comes from the encoder learning better features rather than from the predictor learning better dynamics. See project page at https://sg-jepa.github.io.
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All authors Andy Zeyi Liu, Haoran Sun, Lucas Baker, Randall Balestriero, John Sous

Logic in Computer Science

A Formal Framework for Noisy Runtime Verification

We introduce the logic EDMon—an epistemic dynamic logic meant to model monitorability concepts in noisy runtime verification. Its syntax and semantics are defined and explained and the connection between EDMon and monitorability and noisy runtime verification concepts is explored. We then demonstrate that EDMon is sufficient to capture many of the results in the noisy runtime verification literature and catalog its relation to nearby logics and describe a large class of its theorems.
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Multimedia

AnimateCanvas: Learning Implicit Motion Planning from Composable Kinematic Cues

Professional character animation requires both natural motion and precise, versatile control. For example, creators often define the timing of a specified action, control the motion range of the character's arm swing, or specify the route the character walks through–effectively placing various kinematic cues on a motion canvas. This motivates us to propose AnimateCanvas, a model that supports cue-conditioned implicit motion planning to faithfully and coherently connect all cues, dense or sparse, full or partial, into one full-body motion sequence. Specifically, AnimateCanvas represents heterogeneous kinematic cues on a shared motion canvas, where position and rotation values are specified across body joints and time. A shared flow-matching model generates motion conditioned on this canvas, with optional language and input motion; cue imputation keeps the specified canvas values fixed in both training and sampling. To learn coherent completion across different cue sets, we train with a compositional cue sampler that varies the timing of cue application, the positions or rotations specified, and how they are combined. Together, these designs enable a single generator to integrate heterogeneous kinematic cues into coherent full-body actions, giving creators fine-grained control over selected frames, joints, and position or rotation channels. We evaluate this planning ability on temporal, root, and body-part cues–alone and combined–as well as language-guided editing, and naturally extend it to sequential generation and motion repair. AnimateCanvas achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal completion, spatial control, sequential generation, language-guided editing, and motion repair, while retaining strong text-to-motion capability.
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All authors Zeyu Ling, Di Kang, Qing Shuai, Yuxin Wen, Jing Li, Zhanke Wang, Heng Li, Chunchao Guo, Changqing Zou, Linchao Bao

Computer Vision

Advanced Brain Tissue Imaging with Data-Consistent Diffusion Priors in Laminographic X-Ray Nanoimaging

Nanoscale imaging of mammalian brains is critical for connectomics. X-ray laminography enables high-throughput imaging of extended, plate-like biological specimens. However, the tilted acquisition geometry leads to incomplete Fourier-space coverage, giving rise to a missing-cone of information. Conventional reconstruction methods cannot recover unmeasured information within the cone, resulting in artifacts that distort fine brain structures. While resolving these requires modeling 3D structure, direct 3D deep learning approaches are limited by data scarcity and computational cost. Here we introduce LUCID (Laminography with Unified Consistent Diffusion), a framework that combines multi-view diffusion priors with projection-domain data consistency. LUCID integrates complementary 3D structural information while enforcing strict alignment with the laminography forward model. On simulated datasets, LUCID substantially improves spatial fidelity and restores missing Fourier components, outperforming baseline methods. Applied to experimental laminography data, LUCID generalizes robustly despite being trained exclusively on fully sampled tomographic volumes, and effectively recovers unmeasured Fourier information.
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All authors Wenxuan Fang, Abraham L. Levitan, Ana Diaz, Carles Bosch, Adrian Wanner, Andreas T. Schaefer, Mirko Holler, Tomas Aidukas, Nicholas W. Phillips, Yuxin Zhang, Alexandra Pacureanu, Manuel Guizar-Sicairos, Luis Barba

Systems and Control

The U.S. Interconnection Queue System: Cascading Vulnerability Analysis and a Resilience Engineering Framework

As of 2025, the U.S. interconnection queues, the grid-access gateway for new generation and storage, contain roughly 8,200 projects totaling 2,061 GW of capacity. Only 13% of capacity queued in 2000-2020 (19% by project count) has reached operation. We argue that the queue architecture is vulnerable to self-reinforcing project withdrawal cascades arising from restudy and cost reallocation, independent of study delays. Adapting failure contagion models from financial and interdependent infrastructure networks, we model the queue as a complex adaptive system and test it with a statistical analysis of withdrawal temporal clustering and co-withdrawal across seven ISO/RTOs and a stylized network contagion simulation of cost-sharing interdependencies with circuit-breaker interventions. Using LBNL project-level data through 2025, we find temporal clustering (dispersion indices 5.0-102.4; p < 0.001) and identify 39 monthly withdrawal bursts with the largest cluster-dated, reaching 67.4x the regional mean. Withdrawal timing is concentrated within technology categories in all seven regions (1,000-permutation test; z = 2.58-4.78, p <= 0.005). Co-withdrawal within cohorts is significant only in four regions (0.5-1.8 percentage points). The model yields net cascade amplification of 1.0-1.5x at low-to-moderate connectivity (average network degree k = 3-10). At k = 20 a phase-transition-like shift to systemic instability occurs, exceeding 8.7x amplification at a 10% shock (97.7% cascade size); a boundary condition of the stylized network that disappears under pro-rata redistribution. Capping per-neighbor cost reallocation reduces cascade magnitude by up to 20% relative to no intervention, with a 44% lower mean per-neighbor transfer. These findings characterize the interconnection queue as critical infrastructure with cascading vulnerability whose severity is conditional on cost allocation design.
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Artificial Intelligence

JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition

Real-world GUI usage frequently involves workflows that span multiple devices and platforms, requiring the transfer of intermediate results, maintenance of shared state, and coordination across heterogeneous environments. However, existing GUI benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate agents on single-device, statically defined tasks, thus leaving such cross-device capabilities largely unexamined, resulting in an overly optimistic assessment of agents' readiness for real-world usage. We introduce JarvisGUI, a dynamic benchmark that evaluates GUI agents on cross-device workflows requiring coordinated interaction across heterogeneous platforms, including Android, Windows, and Ubuntu. Specifically, JarvisGUI formulates GUI tasks as input-output transformations under a lightweight type system, which allows us to automatically compose multi-step, cross-device workflows and dynamically evaluate agent performance within a unified framework. By evaluating agents in virtual environments spanning multiple operating systems, JarvisGUI reveals that state-of-the-art open-source GUI agents struggle with the state-transfer awareness, cross-platform contextual reasoning, and long-horizon dependency management required for real-world workflows, exposing a critical capability gap invisible to existing benchmarks.
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All authors Zixiang Chen, Yuheng Lu, Zihao Cheng, Zeming Liu, Jizeng Bai, Ziye Huang, Zhiyin Lin, Zihan Li, Yuhang Guo, Yunhong Wang, Haifeng Wang

Logic in Computer Science · Cross-listed from math.LO

Compact totally separated types

Perhaps surprisingly, there are infinite types that can be exhaustively searched mechanically in finite time. We use ideas from topology to build plenty of them, referring to searchable types as compact types, and we use ordinals to measure their logical complexity. We consider two systems of ordinal notations under which a single notation denotes both a discrete ordinal and a compact one, with an embedding of the former into the latter whose image has empty complement. A boolean valued function decides which points in the image of the embedding are isolated and which are topological limit points. The first system consists of the traditional Brouwer codes and the second is an inductive-recursive universe generalizing them. The discrete ordinals so obtained are trichotomous, and the compact ones have the least element property for complemented subsets, but these two desirable properties cannot be fulfilled simultaneously in a constructive setting. The ordinals obtained from Brouwer codes further enjoy a boolean Leibniz principle, which has the notion of total separatedness as its topological counterpart. This extends previous work from Gödel's system T to intensional Martin-Löf type theory with univalent universes, and is formalized in Agda in the TypeTopology repository.
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Computation and Language

Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning

Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: models primarily reason in English regardless of the language they are prompted in. This is inaccessible for non-English-speaking users, risks losing the intent of the original question, and forgoes knowledge more readily expressed in the target language. In this work, we advance L2 reasoning, the ability of a model to reason consistently in the language of the user's prompt, thus building an in-language bridge between the prompt and the answer. We approach this problem from a data-centric angle, investigating how to optimize data composition and scheduling in SFT for reasoning generalization. Building Tiny Aya L2-Thinker at 3.35B scale, we achieve an L2 reasoning rate above 93% across 60 languages on 6 benchmarks spanning math, commonsense reasoning, instruction following, open-ended generation, and cultural reasoning while keeping performance strong. We show the path to generalizing L2 reasoning to held-out languages goes through broader language coverage, readily available multilingual non-reasoning data, and a sufficient English reasoning backbone. These findings indicate that reasoning is a language-agnostic behavior that can be transferred across typologically diverse languages through careful data mixing and without requiring reasoning supervision in every target language. We release our model weights and multilingual reasoning data to support further research on accessible, in-language reasoning.
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All authors Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Ananya Sahu, Alejandro R. Salamanca, Daniel D'souza, Alexandre Berard, Thomas Euyang, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer

Artificial Intelligence

ConvMem: Convolutional Memory for Long-Context Reasoning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they often struggle with extremely long contexts due to fixed context limits. To address this, sequential approaches like MemAgent extend the effective context by reading text in segments and iteratively updating a fixed-size memory. However, this sequential paradigm suffers from high latency and requires costly reinforcement learning (RL) training, which can lead to overfitting on specific datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose ConvMem, a training-free, highly parallelizable framework that reformulates long-context reasoning as a hierarchical convolution. Inspired by CNNs, ConvMem treats an LLM prompted with a specific query as a convolutional kernel. This kernel summarizes text segments hierarchically, shortening the reasoning path from a linear chain into a logarithmic tree. Specifically, ConvMem integrates Configurable Strides and Skip Connections to ensure robust evidence capture and propagation, while employing Multi-Kernel Convolution to decompose complex queries into disentangled semantic channels. This design not only mitigates error accumulation but also enables massive parallelization across both text segments and reasoning threads. Experiments on RULER-HotpotQA and RULER-2WikiMultiHopQA demonstrate that ConvMem outperforms training-free baselines and avoids the risk of overfitting to parametric priors often observed in RL-trained models on out-of-distribution tasks.
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All authors Hongming Zhang, Zhaozhen Gu, Fengshuo Bai, Ming Hao, Qingyang Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang, Shiyang Tang, Yanna Wang, Bo Xu

Machine Learning

Forgetting Only What Matters: Layer-Selective Unlearning toward Robust LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers a practical alternative to full retraining, but many existing methods apply broad or fixed parameter updates that can degrade utility and remain brittle under deployment changes such as post-training quantization, where forgotten knowledge may partially re-emerge. We propose Forgetting Only What Matters via Unlearning Layers (FOM-UL), a layer-level unlearning framework that selects transformer layers using a forget-to-retain significance score. This score identifies layers with high influence on the forget set and low sensitivity to the retain set, allowing FOM-UL to concentrate updates where they are most effective while leaving most of the model unchanged. This targeted update strategy improves the forgetting-utility trade-off and provides an empirical path toward quantization-resilient unlearning by reducing the chance that small, diffuse updates are erased by low-bit rounding. Across TOFU, KnowUnDo, and MUSE-style evaluations, FOM-UL reduces residual memorization compared with strong GA, NPO, KLD, SURE, ReLearn, and LUNAR-based baselines while preserving retain-set utility close to the vanilla model. Under 8-bit and 4-bit post-training quantization, FOM-UL maintains stronger memorization suppression and utility preservation than competing methods, and adversarial prompt evaluations show lower recovery of forgotten content. Overall, FOM-UL provides an efficient unlearning strategy that improves targeted forgetting, utility preservation, and deployment robustness without claiming formal guarantees of erasure.
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Information Theory

Mobility Information Capacity in the Sky: A Gaussian Channel Perspective

Existing airspace capacity metrics mainly quantify occupancy or flow, although the same number of aerial vehicles may result in different motion alternatives. This letter establishes mobility information capacity as an information-theoretic measure for low-altitude wireless networks. It quantifies the maximum information that trajectory observations reveal about intentional maneuver inputs under a given maneuver-resource budget and environmental uncertainty. For a common fixed feedback architecture, we formulate a lifted linear-Gaussian mobility channel and derive its finite-horizon log-determinant capacity. Cost and uncertainty whitening gives the spatiotemporal mobility eigenmodes, whose optimal maneuver-resource allocation follows water-filling. When the number of nondegenerate modes grows linearly with time and their efficiencies become asymptotically symmetric, we arrive at the Shannon-like law $R_M^{\rm G}=\frac{B_M}{2}\log_2(1+\mathrm{MNR})$, where MNR is the mobility-to-noise ratio. The proposed measure opens a motion-centric capacity perspective for the sky, while remaining a distinguishability baseline rather than a collision- or geometry-constrained airspace capacity.
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All authors Weijie Yuan, Fan Liu, Shuangyang Li, Lin Zhou, Pingzhi Fan

Computation and Language

Do speech foundation models really learn words?

Self-supervised speech foundation models are now used in a wide array of downstream applications, including traditional speech recognition and as the basis for tokens in speech-aware language models. Attempts to understand their usefulness have largely focused on probing their representations' ability to discriminate phonemes and words. However, discriminative ability for words need not imply specialized representation of words per se. Good discrimination of words may be explained by good encoding of word form (phonemes) rather than form-independent word representations encoding identity or syntactic/semantic properties. By partialling out phoneme information using residualization, we show that, in later layers, HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 do in general learn representations which encode words with reasonable fidelity independently of local phonetic content. We show that this simple approach to disentanglement can enhance higher-order linguistic information in word discovery tasks.
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Robotics

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous UAV Exploration in Wildfire Response

This study develops a deep reinforcement learning framework for training Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agents to navigate and monitor simulated wildfire environments. Results show that agents learn increasingly stable and effective behaviors over time, as demonstrated by converging loss trends, improved reward signals, and more consistent navigation patterns such as fire-boundary tracking. Overall, these findings highlight the potential of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based UAV systems for autonomous wildfire monitoring and suggest that environmental structure and reward design influence policy effectiveness.
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Multiagent Systems

Glyph: A Multi-Strategy Agentic System for Column Description and Sensitivity-Ontology Tagging of Enterprise Data Catalogs

Enterprise data lakes accumulate tables faster than human stewards can document or classify them, leaving columns with missing descriptions and unassigned governance labels. This documentation debt undermines data discovery, access control, and regulatory compliance. We present Glyph, a production system that frames two coupled problems, column description generation and column type annotation for data classification, as cooperating LLM agents orchestrated as stateful graphs. The Descriptor grounds generation in the pipeline source code that produces each column, retrieved on demand from an enterprise GitHub via a reasoning–acting tool loop (active Retrieval-Augmented Generation). The Tagger assigns labels from a governed 275-leaf Data Classification Ontology by running three complementary strategies in parallel (a description tagger, a line-of-business regex tagger, and a metadata tagger backed by a fine-tuned contrastive encoder over a vector database), then fuses their ranked outputs with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). We fine-tune a 6-layer MiniLM metadata encoder with an in-batch contrastive objective, lifting same-tag retrieval on an in-distribution held-out split from NDCG@10 0.55 to 0.92 (MAP@100 $0.19 \rightarrow 0.90$) relative to the stock base encoder. We report end-to-end multi-label tagging quality under a recall-weighted F2 objective across three evaluation groups, an ablation isolating each strategy and the RRF fusion, and the engineering decisions that distinguish Glyph from prior column-type-annotation work and from commercial value/regex sensitivity scanners: value-free and code-grounded design, per-tag provenance, and graceful degradation. Together these make multi-agent LLM cataloging auditable and operable as a production service.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.ST

Algorithmic stability via ensembling

Algorithmic stability refers to the property of an algorithm being insensitive to perturbations of the input data, where the type of perturbation may vary depending on the setting. In this work, we develop a general framework to quantify the extent to which any ensembling strategy defined via averaging can yield stability guarantees for any type of data perturbation. Our main theoretical result is a guarantee on the stability of this ensembled algorithm, given in terms of the norm of a certain covariance operator that describes the ensembling process. We show how our general framework yields interpretable and intuitive insights in several examples of perturbations of practical interest, and provides much sharper guarantees than those obtained from privacy considerations.
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Computers and Society

Emergency Department Revisit Quality Review Screening: Exploring Human Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence Support

Background: Emergency Department (ED) return visits are commonly reviewed for quality assurance, but are often limited (e.g., to revisits within 48-72 hours) to increase actionable finding yield while minimizing chart review burden. Those limitations may lead to missed quality improvement opportunities. Methods: We conducted an exploratory, retrospective study of randomly selected ED visits to a multihospital health system having an ED revisit within 1-14 days to the same health system. Given only each visit's primary diagnosis, raters (2-3 clinicians and GPT-4 large language model [LLM]) assessed characteristics of the diagnosis pairs, including the "target": whether a pair warranted further assessment. Informed by rater response analyses, an algorithm leveraging an LLM-populated knowledge graph ("KGA") was created to automatically screen for potentially concerning pairs, then preliminarily assessed. Results: 99 diagnosis pairs were included. GPT-4 responses poorly correlated to clinician raters, rating nearly all (94%) pairs as warranting follow-up (4.4-13.3 times more than clinicians). However, prompt engineering was minimal. Among clinician raters, revisit medical gravity was consistently significantly associated with the target, while a differential diagnosis/complication composite was significantly associated on unadjusted, but not adjusted (though less powered) analysis. The KGA achieved 83-100% positive predictive value for at least one clinician rater determining further assessment was warranted based on the diagnosis pair. Conclusion: These results can inform next steps for improving screening with LLMs like ChatGPT. Further research is warranted to validate this preliminary work's finding that the KGA may enable enhancing the scope and yield of screening without substantially increasing reviewer workload.
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All authors Jonathan A. Handler, Marlene I. Robles-Granda, Jacob E. Mefford, Jeremy S. McGarvey, Gregory S. Podolej, Colleen J. Klein, Matthew D. Dalstrom, William F. Bond

Cryptography and Security

TrajMark: Ownership Attribution and Segment-Level Tamper Localization for Coding-Agent Trajectories

Watermarking the final patch produced by a coding agent provides provenance evidence for the submitted artifact, but does not authenticate the visible process that produced it. Behavioral watermarking methods primarily provide a global detection or identifier-recovery signal, so a locally edited trajectory may retain sufficient ownership evidence without revealing which protected region has become inconsistent. To address this limitation, we propose TrajMark, a training-free, symmetric-key, visible-only trajectory watermarking framework that separates robust ownership attribution from fragile local integrity verification. Our framework consists of two complementary layers: a sparse owner layer that encodes a six-bit deployment identifier by rewriting a keyed subset of naturally occurring READ actions into masked linear equations, and a localization layer that inserts linked Q12 ordinary, group, and terminal seals to commit to protected critical-action segments. This separation allows ownership evidence to accumulate robustly across trajectories, while local modifications perturb nearby keyed commitments and expose the affected protocol region. We further provide a design-level analysis of owner recoverability, integrity collision probability, structural overhead, and localization behavior. Across three coding-agent frameworks and three LLMs, TrajMark recovers the exact owner in all evaluated clean full-watermark batches. Under exhaustive eligible single-site attacks it detects 95.5%-100% of edits, and under random single-action corruption it localizes 95.8% of modified sites to an accepted protocol region rather than to the individual action. Owner marking adds no trajectory actions; the integrity layer adds explicit read-only seals, and matched Pass@1 is 26.9% versus 26.3% for unwatermarked runs.
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All authors Bokang Zeng, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Jiaojiao Jiang

Systems and Control

Low-Altitude Platform Stations for Dense Urban Connectivity

This paper evaluates the downlink performance of 5G non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) realized via low-altitude platform station (LAPS)-mounted base stations, and compares it against conventional 5G terrestrial network (TN) in a realistic dense urban scenario. Using a 3GPP-compliant multi-cell hexagonal layout with 19 sites and 57 sectors, we model LAPS altitudes ranging from 100 to 1000 m and evaluate the average effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and user throughput via system-level simulations. Results show that LAPS-based NTN deployments can significantly outperform terrestrial 5G in per-user throughput, provided the LAPS altitude is properly chosen to balance increased line-of-sight probability against inter-beam interference.
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All authors German Svistunov, Azim Akhtarshenas, Matteo Bernabè, David López-Pérez

Artificial Intelligence

Fortunate Recall: Ontology-Driven Memory Lifecycle Management for Persistent Coherence in LLMs

Current LLM memory systems treat all personal facts identically, so stores grow without bound while retrieval precision degrades. The core challenge is lifecycle management: which memories should persist, which should be replaced, and at what rate, conditioned on the behavioral type of each fact. Fortunate Recall (FR) is a composable policy layer that classifies personal facts into a 10+1 behavioral ontology and applies category-specific lifecycle policies (differential temporal decay, slot-key supersession, event-time validity, and category-aware retrieval routing) as deterministic functions over LLM-extracted metadata. FR-Bank, our infrastructure-independent implementation, reaches a 76.9% pass rate on LifecycleBench, a new 516-question temporal-disambiguation benchmark, ahead of Mem0, A-MEM, Memory-R1, and MemoryOS (61% to 70.5%), and 75.2% on the full LongMemEval-S under the canonical Wu et al. judge protocol, so lifecycle policies impose no measurable cost on standard retrieval. A pre-registered ablation locates the gains: replacing the typed layer with three generic lifecycle primitives leaves correctness statistically unchanged (-1.7pp, 95% CI [-6.0, +2.7]), so the generic lifecycle metadata carries the correctness advantage, while the behavioral ontology carries calibration, halving downstream confabulation (12.0% vs 24.2%, p<0.001). End-to-end, FR-Bank cuts confabulation from Mem0's 45.1% to 22.4% over answered queries and from 32.2% to 13.0% over all queries while answering more of them correctly (31.2% vs 18.6%); the ranking replicates on the open-weight Kimi K2.5. The decomposition transfers to BEAM, an independently built benchmark: 46.8% correct vs Mem0's 32.9% over 280 questions, with the ontology's benefit concentrated in contradiction resolution and saturating near seven policy clusters. The ontology, benchmark, and code are released.
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Software Engineering

Towards Scalable and Cost-Efficient Vulnerability Detection: A Study on Automatic Query Generation

Static analysis remains a cornerstone of software security, yet the effectiveness of tools such as CodeQL is often limited by the substantial manual effort required to develop high-coverage query suites. While large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a potential solution for automated code reasoning, their practical utility in generating structured, executable security queries remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to evaluate the ability of LLMs to synthesize CodeQL queries using vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database. Through this investigation, we explore the potential of using LLMs as an automatic CodeQL query generator. Subsequently, we systematically evaluate the performance of various LLM architectures across a diverse set of real-world vulnerabilities, measuring their ability to improve detection coverage and precision. Our findings reveal that LLM-generated queries significantly enhance the baseline CodeQL queries, yielding 82% improvement in average F1-score. Furthermore, we provide a detailed cost- benefit analysis showing that while direct LLM-based scanning of entire repositories is often computationally and financially prohibitive, leveraging LLMs to synthesize CodeQL queries offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative for large-scale vulnerability detection. Our results suggest that LLMs can effectively bridge the gap between unstructured vulnerability reports and formal static analysis specifications, offering a scalable path toward comprehensive automated vulnerability detection.
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All authors Ivana Clairine Irsan, Ratnadira Widyasari, Huihui Huang, Ting Zhang, Yue Liu, Ouh Eng Lieh, Shar Lwin Khin, Kang Hong Jin, David Lo

Computation and Language

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

The growing complexity of content moderation policies presents a critical challenge for their consistent operationalization. While foundation models possess the basic capabilities needed to confront this challenge, whether they can reliably moderate online content remains an unanswered question. In this paper, we systematically compare two competing paradigms for Vision-Language Model (VLM) guidance: an instruction-driven approach where models reason from policy precepts, and an example-driven approach where they generalize from prior precedents. We ground this investigation in ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated, in-the-wild posts from the Bluesky platform. Our experiments reveal that foundation models can substantially outperform Bluesky's deployed moderation system, nearly tripling its $F_1$ score (0.60 vs. 0.22) on Random Posts in the benchmark, with both instruction- and example-driven paradigms achieving comparable peak effectiveness. Our findings thus chart a path toward reliable and adaptable policy operationalization at scale.
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All authors Ayan Majumdar, Shounak Paul, Pushpdeep Singh, Ines Abdelaziz, Sayeh Jarollahi, Seungeon Lee, Krishna P. Gummadi, Ingmar Weber, Abhisek Dash