Papers

Reliable path tracking is crucial for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating in dynamic and uncertain marine environments. However, traditional line-of-sight (LOS) guidance methods rely on asymptotic convergence, resulting in slow disturbance recovery and unpredictable tracking performance. Existing robust control methods typically require modifications to the underlying vehicle controller, limiting their practical application on commercial AUV platforms. This paper proposes a robust fixed-time adaptive LOS guidance framework for 3D path tracking for AUVs. By combining fixed-time stability theory with LOS guidance, this method guarantees path tracking convergence within a preset time range, with the convergence time independent of initial conditions. Furthermore, a fixed-time adaptive estimator is developed to rapidly compensate for time-varying sideslip disturbances caused by ocean currents. A time-varying look-ahead mechanism is also introduced to improve tracking performance on curved paths. Lyapunov analysis proves the fixed-time stability of the proposed framework, and numerical simulations and physical experiments demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art adaptive LOS methods, this framework exhibits superior tracking accuracy, convergence speed, and anti-interference capability. In simulation, the time-varying look-ahead variant reduced cross-track and vertical-track RMSE by 69.37% and 67.46%, respectively, during curved-path tracking. In field experiments with an Iver 3 AUV, the proposed fixed-time guidance reduced average tracking error by 56.35% in straight-path evaluation and 27.59% in curved-path evaluation compared with conventional adaptive LOS guidance.The proposed method provides a practical guidance-level solution for achieving reliable autonomous navigation of AUVs in complex marine environments.

Causal claims about large language model (LLM) internals rest on measurements. Those might include a projection, a cosine, an ablation delta, or an interchange patch among others. These measurements fail in specific, diagnosable ways that return a plausible number instead of an error, so a broken instrument can easily read as a finding. A covariance-matched null can saturate until every direction looks typical, a per-head attribution can overshoot the true residual write threefold on reordered-normalization architectures, an interchange patch can go sign-chaotic because its outcome is pinned at a ceiling, or a read-from verdict can be an artifact of measuring past the layer where the model already decided. This note documents six such failures from a causal interpretability program on refusal and moral representation, spanning several papers and a four-model open-weight panel; each mode is established on one or two of the four. For each we give the tell that catches it and a protocol keyed to a detectable trigger (reordered normalization, massive activations, a low-dimensional decision channel), so we and readers can check whether a given setup is exposed. The discipline reduces to four moves: calibrate against a positive-control ladder, certify with an orthogonal cell, compute power before spending compute, and state every read-from verdict at a depth referenced to the model's commitment. The evidence is four architectures across three families within a single program; external replication across programs is future work.

This paper addresses the velocity-free leaderless and leader–follower distributed attitude synchronization of a network of rigid body systems, with inertial vector measurements, under an undirected communication graph topology. In the leaderless case all agents achieve consensus on a common constant orientation. In the leader–follower case, all agents synchronize with a prescribed constant orientation available to only one agent. The proposed schemes require neither attitude reconstruction nor angular-velocity, avoid unwinding, and achieve almost-global asymptotic stability of the desired synchronization sets. Numerical simulations illustrate their effectiveness.

Road tunnels remove satellite visibility where connected and automated vehicles still require continuous, attributable, and integrity-bounded positioning. This Point of View argues that tunnel localization should be treated as infrastructure-assisted cross-modal track continuity, not as extrapolation from the last trusted satellite fix. A trusted portal satellite solution provides the global anchor, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) continuous motion evidence, cameras sparse identity and lane anchors, onboard sensing short-term dynamics, and edge computing association, fusion, integrity monitoring, and guarded reacquisition. Ground truth is reserved for offline calibration and validation. The article develops a falsifiable research and deployment agenda for progressing from synchronized multimodal evidence to validated, integrity-aware tunnel positioning continuity.

Parallel batch-dynamic trees are a fundamental building block in recent theoretical and practical advances in dynamic graph algorithms. However, all existing parallel batch-dynamic tree data structures, including Euler tour trees, UFO trees, topology trees, and rake-compress trees, are all significantly outperformed in the sequential setting by link-cut trees, which have been the sequential state-of-the-art for over 40 years. Despite their excellent performance in the sequential setting, designing efficient batch-parallel link-cut trees has remained a major open problem. In this paper, we close this gap by introducing MOJOS, a unified framework for theoretically- and practically-efficient parallel batch-dynamic trees. We exploit the fact that both Euler tour trees and link-cut trees rely on a common dynamic sequence abstraction that supports splitting and joining. We introduce a new batch-dynamic sequence built using treaps that achieves optimal work and depth, and outperforms existing parallel skip list and treap implementations for batch updates, queries, and memory usage. With MOJOS, we develop a new batch-parallel Euler tour tree algorithm that outperforms prior batch-dynamic tree implementations supporting subtree queries. Unlike prior batch-parallel Euler tour trees which rely on skip list's ability to represent cyclic sequences, MOJOS allows any batch-dynamic sequence data structure to be used as a drop-in replacement. Finally, we develop the first theoretically-efficient batch-parallel link-cut tree, which is also the first batch-dynamic data structure supporting path queries to achieve $O(\log n)$ depth for batch updates in the binary-forking model. Our link-cut tree implementation outperforms all known parallel batch-dynamic tree data structures supporting path queries.

Currently, there are two state-of-the-art, complementary privacy guarantees: contextual integrity (CI) for what may flow, and differential privacy (DP) for what may be inferred. Yet neither maps cleanly onto natural language, leaving existing approaches unable to provide these guarantees for analytics over unstructured text. We address this gap with Pimento, a framework that takes three forms of natural language: text corpus, queries, and privacy policies; and grounds them into a relational database, creating a common substrate on which both guarantees can be enforced formally. With this design, we not only provide end to end privacy guarantees, but also improvement to utility through three key contributions: DP aware Text-to-SQL, which searches for correct queries requiring the least DP noise; CI aware Text-to-SQL, which compiles natural language policies into executable CI rules over the database; and a new privacy definition we call contextual differential privacy, which redefines the traditional DP neighborhood under CI, and yields a tighter smooth sensitivity bound. Across new benchmarks, Pimento selects the best query in 75.3% of cases (upto +45 points over baselines) and achieves zero leakage under correct policy grounding. To our knowledge, Pimento is the first framework to provide formal privacy guarantees for natural language analytics under CI, DP, and their composition.

By acquiring compute, credentials, accounts, services, and other agents, autonomous AI agents can introduce new authority into a task. Payment, budget, OAuth, mandate, and fulfillment checks can validate transaction conditions without deciding whether a returned resource may become usable authority. This post-fulfillment activation gap spans tool-mediated creation, inter-agent delegation, and agentic commerce. We present a provenance-bounded runtime authorization architecture. It quarantines acquired outputs, resolves their actual capabilities from authenticated provider evidence through a versioned resolver, and activates them only through a current activation transaction that checks the resolved manifest, provenance, epochs, and a downward-closed relational envelope over a typed resource-capability hypergraph. The envelope preserves correlated identity, effect, data, delegation, and graph-wide limits. Single-use effect permits are revalidated and consumed at effect linearization. Under explicit assumptions, we prove eight safety properties covering quarantine, backing, non-amplification, split non-evasion, crash/retry, refunds, epochs, and effect confinement. Across five resource classes, reference semantics accepted 20/20 benign traces and rejected 40/40 registered unsafe traces over 810 events; an independent checker agreed on 60 base and 40 refinement traces and rejected 89/89 tamper tests. Frozen Codex and Gemini Model Context Protocol (MCP) client components completed 54/54 deterministic local stdio calls. In a registered 18-case staged MCP-to-Docker composition, both benign paths completed, and none of the 16 unsafe paths added an unauthorized Docker start request. A five-source audit classified 1,248 field pairs across 32 units; no unit alone supplied a complete activation profile.

Pure speech language models often lag behind text and speech-text language models in generating coherent content, but this gap is difficult to quantify because speech and text systems are typically evaluated with different metrics and trained on different data. We study the speech-text modality gap in a family of spoken language models, based on flow matching for continuous acoustic feature generation. We construct a unified generation-based evaluation suite that compares speech-only, text-only, and speech-text language models trained on matched data distributions and evaluated in matched generation settings. We evaluate generated continuations along multiple dimensions: semantic coherence, measured by transcribing generated speech and scoring it with a reference language model; local phonetic structure, measured by phone n-gram distributional statistics; speaker consistency and acoustic quality; and emotion-based distributional metrics. Across datasets, we find that joint speech-text modeling substantially improves semantic coherence. However, the improvement is not uniform across metrics: phone-level metrics change only modestly, speaker similarity and predicted quality are lower for speech-text continuations, while emotion-based distributional metrics improve. Compared with larger-scale speech-only models, our speech-text model closes much of the scaling gap in transcript-based semantic coherence, suggesting that text provides an efficient semantic training signal for spoken language modeling.

A structure-preserving symmetric Galerkin boundary element method (SGBEM) is developed for the anisotropic multi-phase Mullins-Sekerka problem in $\mathbb R^2$. The bulk harmonic problems are eliminated through a discrete Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator assembled from region-wise SGBEM discretization, leading to a boundary-only formulation coupled to the evolution of a polygonal curve network with triple junctions. The Galerkin approximation of the resulting boundary problem is shown to be uniquely solvable, and the fully discrete scheme is unconditionally stable with respect to the time step as long as the evolving polygonal network remains in an admissible class. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by a convergence test under coupled space–time refinement against a similarity-rescaled exact solution consisting of three concentric circles.

Early thermal-mechanical lattice requirements are knowledge-intensive and often jointly unsatisfiable: an engineer asks for a cell that is light, stiff, laterally conducting and cheap, and no cell in the library satisfies it. A design system should say so, and say which requirement to loosen and by how much, rather than return the nearest row. A generative model can return a candidate even when the library holds none. This work applies established conflict diagnosis to a catalogue of homogenised properties. Search over 1,397 homogenised unit cells and 19 base materials (26,543 combinations) returns a catalogue row that a second solver can rebuild, or, for an empty feasible set of at most eight constraints, inclusion-minimal unsatisfiable subsets (MUS) and the slack of a repair, not a neighbour. One registry declaration generates the prompt and the evaluator, so undeclared parsed keys cannot reach search. On a frozen suite of 64 typed queries, retrieve-or-refuse matches min-repair on every feasible query (48/48) and refuses every empty one (16/16) with MUS and slack. Constraint-ignoring nearest-neighbour and penalty search violate stated cost or density limits. On 216 empty queries, repairs printed at three significant figures and rounded outward stay feasible in every case (216/216). When density and cost must be kept, a list of minimum-cardinality repairs keeps them on 209 of 211 queries; a protection-first repair keeps them on all 211, the same as full diagnosis. A 308-request parse benchmark is a template-text check, not unconstrained engineer prose.

The ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge requires TTS systems to generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from dialogue history before synthesizing contextually appropriate speech. While the official baseline establishes a unified architecture, it remains constrained by limited contextual comprehension, weak instruction fidelity, and suboptimal audio quality. We present a systematic optimization pipeline to address these limitations. First, we develop a data process framework that cleans raw data via FullSubNet denoising, Qwen3-ASR re-transcription, and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-based history-CoT consistency analysis, while distilling 545K high-fidelity instruction samples using Qwen3-TTS and Seed-VC under strict quality filtration. Second, we propose a Context-Aware Direct Preference Optimization (CA-DPO) method. By employing a cascaded filtering strategy, ASR prescreening, LLM tournament ranking, and speaker similarity verification, we obtain high-confidence preference pairs that significantly enhance holistic “Context$\rightarrow$CoT$\rightarrow$Speech” consistency during DPO training. Third, we establish an evaluation method featuring a 500-sample test set and an LLM-as-Judge framework to independently assess reasoning and execution fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms the baseline across all objective and subjective metrics, validating our data governance and alignment strategies.

Large language models are increasingly used in high-stakes domains such as law, where systems must ground their reasoning in retrieved evidence and abstain when that evidence is insufficient. However, existing reward models are largely optimised for general preferences rather than contextual grounding, limiting their ability to evaluate these behaviours in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings. We introduce a framework for transforming existing legal QA datasets into contextual preference data and use it to construct LegalRewardBench (LRB), a benchmark for evaluating grounded legal generation under noisy and insufficient retrieval conditions. Across general and legal contextual evaluation, we find that contextual DPO improves grounded evaluation, but performance is sensitive to preference-data construction. Length-balanced augmentation substantially improves grounded legal evaluation, with the strongest configuration combining length-balanced legal and general contextual preference data and improving performance by up to $\mathbf{+25.6}$pp over baseline. We further find evidence of cross-jurisdiction transfer: models contextually refined primarily on Victorian criminal-law data improve grounded evaluation on external US legal benchmarks, including a $\mathbf{+16.2}$pp improvement on Housing Statute QA. Together, these results provide a reproducible foundation for constructing and evaluating grounded legal reward models in retrieval-augmented settings.

Automated reviewing systems are increasingly evaluated based on the quality of the reviews they produce. Yet a review is only useful if acting on it leads to a measurable improvement in the paper. We present AppliedScientist, a closed-loop system that couples an autonomous AI scientist with an AI reviewer, and evaluate it by iteratively revising rejected papers from a range of research subfields. To mirror how human authors build on earlier drafts, the AI scientist has access to its previous versions during revision. To avoid bias from prior judgments, however, each review is generated independently, with the reviewer having no memory of earlier feedback or scores. We compare three revision settings: one initialized with the original venue reviews, one initialized with AI-generated reviews, and autonomous self-revision using the same fixed prompt in every round. Because the reviewer both guides and evaluates the revision, we also assess the human-initialized revisions using Stanford Reviewer as an independent evaluator. Reviewer-guided revision consistently improves more than fixed-prompt self-revision, and Stanford Reviewer also assigns higher scores to later revisions. AppliedScientist resolves 128 of 150 execution-related weaknesses (85.3%), but only 2 of 18 idea-related weaknesses (11.1%), suggesting that iterative revision is effective at improving experiments and implementation, but rarely changes concerns about novelty or significance.

Triangle and quadrangle counts are core statistics in graph analysis. Yet many real-world graphs are distributed across multiple parties and encode highly sensitive relationships, precluding direct data sharing. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) provides a principled alternative, but introduces a fundamental tension: the protocol must hide the graph's topology, forcing fully data-oblivious operations over all potential edges–while real-world graphs are extremely sparse, making most of this work wasted. We propose Trinqet, a system that resolves this tension through new MPC-friendly algorithms for private triangle and quadrangle detection. Trinqet safely exploits sparsity using a suite of novel techniques that eliminate vast numbers of unnecessary operations while preserving strong security in the malicious threat model. Trinqet supports both counting and enumeration and, in our evaluation, outperforms all five baselines by up to 10^5 in runtime.

Deep Learning (DL)-based channel estimation has shown high accuracy and low latency in terrestrial 5G NR, but Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) introduce Doppler and synchronization impairments that may require NTN-specific architectures. We test whether High-Efficiency Learning-based channel Estimation using dual Neural Attention (HELENA), originally designed for terrestrial channels, remains effective after NTN retraining and suitable across high-performance and power-constrained inference platforms. Its unchanged architecture is trained on paired receiver-compensated (NTN-1) and residual-impaired (NTN-2) datasets and compared with eight terrestrial-origin models trained on the same NTN data and the NTN-specific MDELAN-SISO. HELENA achieves the lowest observed SNR-averaged NMSE among the DL estimators in both conditions, including 55.8-62.7% lower linear-scale NMSE than MDELAN-SISO. All DL models degrade in NTN-2, demonstrating the challenge posed by residual Doppler and its associated impairments. On an RTX PRO 4500, HELENA achieves 0.0595 ms 99th-percentile (P99) inference latency, 88.1% below the 0.5 ms budget, with lower energy than its closest attention-based competitors. On a 10 W Jetson Orin NX, it retains a favorable accuracy-energy trade-off, but no model meets the P99 budget. Thus, HELENA needs no NTN-specific redesign for the evaluated task, while embedded tail latency remains an open challenge.

Federated learning enables collaborative model development without centralizing patient data, but annotation reliability at participating institutions cannot always be assumed. In ophthalmic imaging, differences in disease prevalence and class composition can resemble changes caused by corrupted supervision. We introduce OCT-FedSIR, a reliability-aware spectral framework for federated OCT classification under client-dependent annotation noise and heterogeneous data distributions. OCT-FedSIR combines class-balanced spectral estimation, Stage-I logit adjustment, complementary spectral descriptors, selective spectral relabeling, and noise-aware federated optimization. We evaluated the framework on the Kermany, University of Illinois Chicago, and Wake Forest datasets under symmetric and structured asymmetric noise and three levels of non-IID heterogeneity. Across 117 experimental conditions, OCT-FedSIR achieved a mean accuracy of 86.73%, compared with 79.94% for RoFL and 78.75% for FedCorr. It correctly separated clients with original and corrupted annotations across all evaluated conditions, while the original FedSIR identification procedure was less robust, particularly under asymmetric noise. Spectral relabeling recovered 77.2% of corrupted annotations with 91.3% correction precision and a 3.5% false-correction rate. Retaining corrected clients outperformed spectral pruning by 9.30 percentage points on average. These findings show that annotation noise can often be identified and corrected without discarding informative client data.

Hybrid Deep Learning for equity index forecasting is limited by three problems: propagation of OHLCV noise into derived technical indicators (TIs), channel-indiscriminate multi-scale decomposition that conflates heterogeneous frequency signatures, and static multi-branch fusion that cannot adapt to market regime shifts. WaVeFuse addresses these limitations through a unified dual-branch architecture. Symlet-4 wavelet denoising (level 2, MAD soft threshold) suppresses microstructure noise in OHLCV. Seven low-lag TIs computed from denoised prices are encoded by a causal channel-wise continuous wavelet transform (Morlet, 32 scales) into a per-timestep scale-space matrix. A CNN-BiLSTM branch captures temporal dynamics, while a dual-layer Transformer (heads=4, dk in {16, 32}) models inter-scale spectral dependencies, and their representations are integrated by a 2-token softmax gate Vertical Attention Fusion (VAF) that dynamically reweights branches as market regimes shift. Evaluated under walk-forward validation (WFV) on KOSPI, DAX, NYSE Composite, and Russell 2000 (2010-2023), WaVeFuse achieves R2 = 0.81-0.96 and directional accuracy 70.5-78.3%. It outperforms seven state-of-the-art models by 8.9-20.2% MAE across twelve dataset-period configurations. Diebold-Mariano statistics (4.62-10.38, p<0.001) confirm superiority over a well-tuned XGBoost benchmark across four indices. Ablation verifies component-wise contributions. Under realistic backtesting with 10 basis point transaction costs, WaVeFuse's directional strategy achieves a mean Sharpe ratio of 3.69 across four markets and limits maximum drawdown to 7.5% during the COVID-19 crash. With 152k parameters (0.68MB) and sub-1.3ms GPU inference, WaVeFuse delivers a computationally efficient, regime-robust framework suitable for research and decision-support deployment.

Agricultural IoT nodes are often far from mains power and have limited access for maintenance. Therefore, IoT deployments benefit from low-power, long-range communication such as LoRaWAN. However, communication alone does not guarantee multi-year operation. Previous work has measured communication energy, modelled system lifetime, and documented long-lived deployments. This paper connects long-term deployment evidence with controlled platform measurements. The AgriTrust deployment has operated for 2 years and 8 months using MKR WAN1310-based Squirrel Box nodes. Building on this evidence, we compared the MKR WAN1310 and STM32WL LoRaWAN platforms using time-resolved current traces during confirmed-uplink cycles. For this outdoor comparison, we tested nine combinations of payload size and data rate with three repetitions each. Both platforms achieved 3/3 ACKed packets in every condition. The STM32WL had lower cycle energy than the WAN1310 in all tested conditions. Cycle energy ranged from 0.0350 J to 0.3550 J for STM32WL and from 0.0698 J to 0.5662 J for WAN1310. These communication events are brief, while sleep and leakage currents persist between cycles. The STM32WL sleep current was recorded at 59.6 nA, while the WAN1310 sleep current was 104 microamperes, approximately 1745 times that of the STM32WL. This difference shows that sleep current is a first-order determinant of long-term viability. However, the whole-system energy budget also depends on sensing loads, duty cycle, communication energy, and harvested-energy support. The study should be treated as a controlled characterisation, not a universal comparison across all sites, firmware stacks, or LoRaWAN modes.

To successfully deploy a model in time-varying environments such as streaming data prediction and sensing control, domain-incremental learning (DIL) has attracted attention since it aims to adapt a previously trained model to newly arriving domains, while reserving knowledge from earlier domains without accessing their data. Incremental learning across domains can be regarded as a recurrent update, in which the current model is obtained by updating the model carried over from previous domains. Conventional DIL approaches that rely on domain-invariant feature learning and weight regularization gradually overwrite or constrain parameters learned in previous domains, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Instead, this paper proposes a new domain-specific parameter-isolation architecture that retains all past domains. The proposed architecture mitigates catastrophic forgetting through a full-order recurrent update, constructing a new expert using domain-specific data conditioned on all previously frozen models. To achieve this, we incorporate data-free generative replay to reconstruct previous-domain data and cross-domain feature generation to recover later expert features missing from earlier domain samples. Finally, we apply the proposed model architecture to domain-agnostic incremental learning for audio classification, as defined in the DCASE 2026 Challenge Task 7. Consequently, we achieve micro and macro accuracies of 78.4% and 78.9%, respectively, representing increases of 33 and 25 percentage points over the Challenge baseline. Ablation studies are conducted to examine the effectiveness of each processing component in terms of classification accuracy.

Automatically generating high-quality conforming hexahedral (hex) meshes from general input boundaries remains a challenging problem, despite the numerical advantages hex elements offer in simulation. Grid-based adaptive refinement, followed by hanging-node removal, is the most robust fully automatic choice. Among two-refinement methods, primal templates have better mesh quality than dual templates but depend on a strong balancing condition that over-refines the grid; neither family guarantees planar quadrilateral (quad) faces. This paper generalizes recent primal three-refinement templates to a two-refinement scheme under a moderate balancing condition, a relaxation of the strong one. 32 special and five fundamental patterns resolve all 144 symmetry-reduced configurations, followed by either a fast greedy algorithm or an integer linear programming (ILP) algorithm that trades extra runtime for a further reduction in element count. The scheme is the first two-refinement method in which all hexes have planar faces, and its meshes feed directly into a recent quality-guaranteed hex mesh reconstruction algorithm. At comparable element counts, it attains a similar Hausdorff ratio (HR) and a higher minimum scaled Jacobian (min SJ) than its three-refinement counterpart.

Large language models are increasingly used to scale codebook-based annotation in scientific research, but existing workflows provide limited support for translating domain experts' codebooks into reliable, revisable, and auditable prompts. Prompts are often treated as fixed instructions and hidden from annotators, making it difficult for non-technical domain experts to diagnose and correct model behavior when outputs violate codebook guidelines. In this paper, we present CALICO, a human-centered, codebook-aligned annotation workflow that treats prompts as editable, versioned, and optimizable artifacts. CALICO integrates codebook parsing, prompt generation, result inspection, prompt versioning, natural language human feedback, and label-supervised prompt optimization through existing optimizers such as GEPA, MIPROv2, and OPRO, together with our reflection-based optimizer, ReflectAgent. Empirically, we evaluate CALICO on domain-specific AI-companion chatbot conversation codebooks. Across evaluated dimensions, CALICO improves mean held-out performance by +13.0 and +7.4 absolute points for two coders, respectively. A coder-specificity analysis further suggests that optimized prompts capture coder-specific interpretations rather than only generic codebook clarification. CALICO runs as a web application that takes users from raw codebook materials to inspectable, exportable labels; the website, codebase, and live demo are released at https://calico-annotation.github.io/ under the Apache 2.0 License.

Few-step distillation accelerates diffusion models but must balance diversity and fidelity: trajectory-based distillation preserves mode coverage, while distribution matching sharpens samples but can reduce diversity. We show that this tension can be exploited in a noise-regime-dependent way: high-noise steps largely determine global modes, whereas low-noise steps refine local details. We propose CrossDistill, a trajectory-level hybrid distillation framework that splits the sampling trajectory at a crossover point, applies a trajectory-preserving objective on the high-noise interval and a distribution-matching objective on the low-noise interval, and couples the two stages through the crossover state. In contrast to loss-level mixing, and complementarily to training-time two-stage recipes, CrossDistill explicitly assigns complementary objectives along the noise axis, so that global branching is preserved before local statistics are sharpened. CrossDistill is a noise-level scheduling policy: PCM and DMD are plug-in instantiations, while the noise partition, crossover coupling, and objective ordering are the key design elements. Experiments on text-to-video diffusion models and qualitative image-to-video results show that CrossDistill expands the few-step quality-diversity frontier, retaining seed-level variation while achieving competitive visual fidelity.

Inferring intelligence from observable behavior is a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. We develop a theory of Bayesian intelligence for agents such as language models. Each prompt induces a possibly imperfect internal experiment; the agent updates a full-support prior by Bayes' rule and faithfully reports its posterior over the possible answers to the question. Repetitions draw fresh, independent outcomes from the same unobserved experiment at one fixed state. We show that the agent's behavior admits this explanation if and only if its reports are not fully contradictory, i.e., some state remains possible under every report across all prompts. Report frequencies and the sizes of positive probabilities impose no further restrictions. We further propose and characterize the behavioral implications of an intelligence order that makes the behavior of two agents consistent with one agent having access to a more informative experiment: there should exist a coupling of report distributions such that the more informative agent's report excludes every answer excluded by its counterpart. Finally, we show the difficulty of aggregating coarse reports from intelligent agents: unless the agent reports a belief about the complete state of the world, the optimal aggregation can assign arbitrary weights to states that have not been excluded. These results provide a basis for understanding when agents' behavior is intelligent and highlight the difficulty of rejecting Bayesian rationality.

Modern large language model (LLM) agents often construct prompts by aggregating retrieved passages, user reviews, and documents from multiple external sources. This paradigm exposes them to segment-level poisoning attacks, in which an adversary controlling only a small subset of sources injects malicious content to manipulate model outputs. Existing defenses mainly rely on textual patterns, external embeddings, or auxiliary detectors and may therefore fail against fluent, semantically plausible poisoned segments. They also provide limited support for locating the responsible segments. We observe that successful corrupted-evidence and adversarial-instruction attacks induce structured shifts in the LLM's internal activations, forming a consistent activation-space pattern that we call the poison direction. Based on this observation, we propose ActProbe, an internal-state-based framework for detecting and localizing poisoned segments in multi-source LLM inputs. ActProbe projects MLP activations onto a learned poison direction and uses a lightweight linear SVM trained on a small calibration set to detect contaminated prompts. It then applies BinRoL, which combines recursive replacement ablation, Mahalanobis-distance-based branch pruning, and MAD-based robust leaf detection to locate poisoned segments. ActProbe requires no modification to the backend LLM and reduces localization overhead from O(n) exhaustive probing to O(k log n) forward passes. Across three datasets, two attacks, and four open-weight LLMs, ActProbe achieves a 0.01 false-positive rate, a 0.05 false-negative rate, 0.94 localization recall, and a 0.90 localization F1-score. It remains effective against defense-aware adaptive attacks and can protect black-box APIs through surrogate-based poisoned-segment removal.

Low-cost and low-resolution sensors used in edge deployments can produce test point clouds that are substantially sparser than the normal training data. This train-test sampling-resolution gap changes the local geometry available to a 3D anomaly detector. We propose PC$^2$-AD, a point cloud upsampling framework that compensates sparse test inputs before downstream detection. Target Domain Candidate Generation (TCG) adapts a pretrained upsampler to normal training geometry and generates a dense candidate pool. Geometry-Aware Candidate Filtering (GACF) selects candidates according to geometric spacing and spatial coverage. Normality-Preserving Point Compensation (NPPC) refines the selection by comparing candidate normality scores with those of their input anchors. The selected points are combined with the unchanged input points and processed by the existing detector. Experiments with six detectors on two Anomaly-ShapeNet settings and Real3D-AD show improvements in the mean of object-level and point-level AUROC for all six detectors in each Anomaly-ShapeNet setting and four on Real3D-AD. These results support point cloud compensation as an input-level approach to improving 3D anomaly detection under low-resolution sensing conditions. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyutong406-commits/PC2-AD.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), released by Anthropic in November 2024, standardizes how large language model applications connect to external tools and data sources. Despite MCP's rapid growth, no study has jointly characterized its emergence in the research literature, its adoption on GitHub and the relationship between them. We address this gap with a longitudinal, two-dimensional study of 802 MCP-related publications and 33,319 GitHub repositories. We characterize their growth and identify their application domains via BERTopic and usage contexts via a human-validated GPT-5.6-Luna classifier. We find that publications and repositories began rapid growth within a month of each other in 2025, and peaked together in March 2026. Notably, a second growth wave alone accounts for 49.5% of the GitHub repositories. Most publications (57.8%) and nearly all repositories (93.7%) use MCP as an enabling technology rather than for analyzing, evaluating, extending, or securing it directly. Among repositories, the latter category concentrates almost entirely in one general-purpose topic, while applied usage spreads into product-specific niches. Finally, we provide an overview of the MCP landscape and recommendations to researchers and practitioners in this field.

Climate change is a global threat to the long-term sustainable development of energy systems. Recent works have explored the emerging opportunity of coordinating different energy carriers and sectors (e.g. electricity, natural gas, heating, hydrogen, transportation, and water sectors) to unlock the cross-sector flexibility against climate change. This review has established a holistic framework for resilient multi-energy systems through the lens of nested coupling. It covers the most recent progress in resilience resources, resilience evaluation, resilience-oriented operation & planning, resilience pricing & investment, and real-world implementation. This work differs from prior studies through a full investigation on climate change impacts (distribution shifts), resilience pricing, and global projects. Within this area, we advocate for a unique and interdisciplinary perspective spanning across energy systems, climate science, sociology, economics, and data science. At the end, seven major challenges and opportunities are identified, including data deficiency, distributed coordination & privacy, high-fidelity simulation, and machine learning techniques. Researchers, industrial experts, and policy makers can follow this review to capture the emerging trend and future opportunities in this growing area.

Demand forecasting is critical in modern industry, offering opportunities to reduce costs and gain competitive advantage through improved inventory management. However, forecasting becomes particularly challenging for products with intermittent demand, where demand occurs infrequently and time series contain many zero observations. Such dynamics are common across diverse sectors, such as industrial organizations, consumer goods, aviation, automotive, and electronics. Motivated by these challenges, this paper explores the potential of gradient boosting models to improve forecasting performance. We evaluate statistical, specialized, machine learning, and ensemble approaches across multiple datasets. The results show that specialized methods achieve the strongest performance among individual models, while gradient boosting on its own tends to underperform. However, combining a machine learning model with a specialized approach improves forecasting accuracy by up to 10%, demonstrating that even simple ensembles can outperform single models. Overall, the findings highlight the value of combining machine learning with domain-specific forecasting techniques for intermittent demand.

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by verifying multiple drafted tokens in parallel, allowing a single target forward pass to accept several tokens. By construction, verification computes representations for both accepted and rejected tokens. Yet, conventional drafters retain only the representations of accepted tokens, leaving the substantial verifier computation spent on rejected tokens effectively wasted. We find that these discarded hidden states generated during target forward retain useful information about future tokens that can improve subsequent drafts. However, realizing this opportunity poses two distinct challenges. At inference, recycling overhead can increase drafting latency, diminishing the speedup gained from increased acceptance length. During training, standard parallel drafter training does not produce inference-aligned rejected states, while obtaining them through sequential rollouts would sacrifice parallelism across training positions. We introduce Carryover Drafting, which addresses both challenges. Carryover recycles rejected target hidden states as temporary KV context, allowing the drafter to selectively attend to them. It reuses the drafter's existing interface and adds only a single learned embedding to distinguish rejected states from committed context. The additional KV context is replaced each drafting round, keeping its length bounded by one proposal block. We introduce parallel draft–verify–draft training that exposes the drafter to inference-aligned rejected states while preserving parallelism across training positions. Experiments with DFlash and a DSpark-derived semi-autoregressive drafter across two target models show that this simple Carryover mechanism improves average acceptance length by 6.5–14.7% and end-to-end vLLM speedup by 7.9–14.4% over the corresponding baselines, with speedup gains reaching 28.8% on translation.

Autonomous agents are typically obliged to follow user-assigned tasks. However, strict obedience may conflict with moral obligations that arise during execution. This paper investigates moral rebellion: the ability of an autonomous agent to deviate from a user-assigned task when morally justified. We formalize five agent architectures: an amoral agent that pursues assigned tasks without considering moral obligations, and four forms of moral rebel agency: (1) utilitarian agents that opportunistically maximize task outcomes; (2) deontic agents that enforce normative constraints; (3) utilitarian-deontic (UD) agents that combine deontic constraints with utilitarian reasoning; and (4) dutiful agents that additionally preserve commitments to assigned tasks. We implement these architectures within a hierarchical task network planning framework and evaluate them in a Mini Search-and-Rescue domain that exposes trade-offs among assigned-task completion, opportunistic rescue, and norm compliance. Our empirical results show that the proposed agents exhibit distinct trade-offs among rescue results, assigned-task completion, and norm compliance. In particular, the preservation of task commitments emerges as an important dimension of moral rebellion, for which the UD and dutiful agents produce substantially different behaviors despite their shared utilitarian and deontological foundations. These findings highlight the importance of commitment-aware moral reasoning for autonomous agents operating in morally consequential environments.