Papers

Attention pays, at every layer and for every input, the cost of searching for whom to connect. We ask how far one can get with wiring that is fixed, sparse, and simply rotated from layer to layer. Treating the $n$ positions of a sequence as the vertices of a $\log_2 n$-dimensional hypercube and connecting each position, at layer $\ell$, to its neighbour along dimension $\ell \bmod \log_2 n$, information from every position reaches every other in $\log_2 n$ layers with $2n$ links per layer instead of $n^2$. On a synthetic task that is unsolvable unless all positions are reached, this rotation matches all-to-all wiring at $1/32$ of the links, while the same sparse pattern held fixed across layers fails; what matters is that every dimension is touched, not the order. On character-level language modelling of a public corpus (the first $12$M characters of enwik8), a hybrid that keeps two attention layers among sixteen sparse ones reaches $0.06$ bits-per-character lower held-out loss than a fully attentive model of the same width at the same step budget (three seeds each, no overlap), with $1/7$ of the links, $42\%$ fewer parameters, and $2.4\times$ less wall-clock time; the purely rotated schedule is level with the hybrid. The same ordering holds on a second corpus of mixed Japanese, English and code, where the gap widens to $0.16$. The usable learning-rate window is four to eight times wider than attention's on both. We also report what did not work - learned coordinates, and a "dynamics" variant whose apparent gains turned out to be an artefact of a saturated kernel - and the measurement discipline (frozen corpus, full-coverage evaluation, seed spread as the bar for ranking) that we found necessary to say anything at all at this scale.

Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) locates a target in satellite imagery using drone or street-view queries. Existing methods train separate detectors for each viewpoint, leading to parameter redundancy and impeding cross-view knowledge sharing. Moreover, top-ranked satellite candidates are often visually similar, so visual appearance and categorical labels alone are insufficient to resolve such ambiguity. To address these, we propose MVLGeo, an efficient framework designed to unify multiple viewpoints and reduce model redundancy. First, we introduce environmental contextual text from the query view as cues to distinguish visually similar candidates via Vision-Language Reranking (VL-Rerank). Second, we design a multi-view Mixture-of-Experts architecture (MV-MoE) with a shared encoder and view-specific experts to reduce redundancy and promote knowledge sharing, while cross-view contrastive learning aligns their representations for consistency. Third, we introduce an adaptive elliptical prior (ESAM-Prior) as auxiliary positional encoding for anisotropic geometric perception. Extensive experiments on the CVOGL benchmarks confirm that MVLGeo, as a unified model for multiple query viewpoints, achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating robustness to input degradation and generalization across viewpoints. Code and models will be available on GitHub to facilitate future work.

State-of-the-art Text-to-SQL systems are typically multi-agent pipelines centered around two fundamental tasks: schema linking and SQL generation. However, existing work trains separate models for each task, failing to leverage the synergy between these interrelated tasks. In this work, we propose DualSQL, a new Text-to-SQL system consisting of two agents powered by a single model backbone. The agents share the same model weights and agentic scaffold, enabling joint optimization through a robust multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) framework. We design three database access tools to facilitate effective multi-step reasoning grounded to interactions with the databases. To improve training and avoid model collapse, we introduce a set of rollout guardrail mechanisms that stabilizes multi-agent RL training, supporting DualSQL to keep improving during training. We also introduce a new SQL correctness metric, robust execution match (REX), to more accurately judge SQL correctness and assign reward signals. Being trained on only 3755 examples, DualSQL-4B achieves an impressive 68.0% execution accuracy on the BIRD development set, matching previous 7B models. DualSQL-8B further improves to 71.1%, outperforming previous state-of-the-art single-model solutions with 32B parameters. These results demonstrate the strength of joint multi-agent reinforcement learning for building high performance Text-to-SQL pipelines.

Methodological progress in artificial intelligence (AI) for electronic health records (EHRs) depends on our ability to determine which algorithms work better, and under which conditions. However, such progress is thought to be hindered by difficulties in reproducibility and in defining clinically meaningful evaluation tasks. We empirically study these barriers by re-implementing 12 historical and recent algorithms within a shared evaluation framework and evaluating them on two clinical datasets, MIMIC-IV and NWICU. We compare two complementary task families: expert-authored clinically meaningful tasks and generated tasks defined from randomly sampled event codes and prediction horizons. We ask whether relative algorithms comparisons transfer across task families and datasets, whether residual task heterogeneity contains useful methodological structure, and what a controlled comparison reveals about progress over the last decade. We find that aggregate pairwise comparisons transfer strongly across evaluation settings, including from randomly generated tasks to clinically meaningful tasks and across datasets. At the same time, clinically meaningful tasks exhibit greater task-method interaction, providing preliminary evidence that task properties can help explain when particular modeling choices are advantageous. Finally, newer algorithms do not consistently outperform earlier approaches: gradient-boosted trees remain highly competitive when paired with a modern, wide and sparse representation of the EHR. Together, these results suggest that useful methodological knowledge may require less task engineering than commonly assumed, while highlighting the importance of understanding the structured heterogeneity that remains across tasks and methods.

Visible-infrared object detectors are used for robust perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. Current physical attacks apply conspicuous patches to spatially aligned target regions, which are noticeable to human observers. Meanwhile, most of these methods only perturb the appearance within the aligned region, without explicitly targeting the correspondence between modalities or the fusion process. In this paper, we propose CamoShift, an adversarial framework for visible-infrared object detection. By combining visual camouflage with object-level infrared shifting, CamoShift breaks cross-modal spatial alignment and disrupts fusion. Specifically, the Semantic Camouflage Module (SCM) generates a stealthy camouflaged patch that can be attached to the host object and maintains its effectiveness in the infrared branch through an RGB-IR adapter. The Object-level Spatial Decoupling Module (OSDM) shifts the infrared target evidence in a scale-aware manner, so as to break object-level correspondence and disrupt cross-modal fusion. Then, the Harmonic Adversarial loss (HarAdv loss) further balances attack strength and visual stealth during optimization. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to target both visual stealthiness and attack success in visible-infrared object detection. Extensive experimental results show that CamoShift achieves a superior balance between attack effectiveness and visual stealth. Code and models will be available on GitHub.

We prove that counting perfect matchings is $\#P$-complete under polynomial-time Turing reductions on each of three classes of simple, unweighted graphs: monotone graphs, unit interval graphs, and chordal permutation graphs. The monotone result settles the exact-counting complexity left open by Dyer, Jerrum, and Müller (JACM 2017), complementing their rapid-mixing theorem. Inspired by quantum circuits, our reductions implement a circuit simulation using globally coupled matching-transfer operators. The key construction is an exact projection, implemented by a polynomial-length sequence of normalized transfers, that restores tensor-product locality and makes encoded gates composable. Interpolation-based cancellation then reduces circuit evaluation to unweighted perfect-matching counts in all three classes. We also place Dyer and Müller's class QChains within the distance-hereditary graphs and give an $O(n^2)$-arithmetic-operation counting algorithm for the latter, improving the $O(n^4)$ bound obtainable from Curticapean and Marx (SODA 2016). Together with prior results, these advances complete the exact-counting classification of the graph classes in Dyer and Müller's diagram (SIDMA 2019).

In this paper, we present a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) quantization method based on activation entropy. Although quantization reduces memory and computational costs, it can substantially degrade performance. In particular, performance decline is pronounced in quantized MoE models, where individual experts have a small number of parameters that are sensitive to low-bit representation. Considering that MoE operates as an ensemble model with collaborative contributions from routed experts, a significant performance decline of a particular expert due to quantization can harm model performance. Therefore, we propose Colla-Q, a bit-allocation framework to maintain balanced performance across experts through an activation-entropy-based bit-width allocation algorithm. This approach encourages each expert to operate collaboratively in the quantized model, thereby 1) improving the overall MoE performance and 2) reducing the dependence on the calibration dataset. Since uniformly adjusting each expert's performance facilitates robustness and stability of the MoE model, the proposed MoE quantization method can generalize more consistently across different calibration datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mmai-laboratory/Colla_Q

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) are effective methods for solving expensive optimization problems (EOPs), where surrogate models replace most expensive evaluations and critically influence the final optimization results. In recent years, tabular foundation models have advanced rapidly, and the Tabular Prior-data Fitted Network (TabPFN) has been adopted as a surrogate model for EOPs due to its strong predictive capability, demonstrating promising performance. Motivated by its potential as a surrogate model in SAEAs, this work conducts a comprehensive study that combines extensive experiments with in-depth theoretical analysis to investigate the effectiveness of TabPFN. Specifically, we perform experiments across both offline and online SAEA settings, covering diverse problem scenarios such as single-objective, multi-objective, constrained, combinatorial, mixed-variable, and engineering optimization problems. In addition, we further analyze the advantages and limitations of TabPFN within SAEAs and provide practical guidelines for its application in different optimization settings. Results show that the effectiveness of TabPFN is highly problem dependent, and it cannot replace conventional surrogates universally. Overall, TabPFN should be adopted selectively according to data availability, landscape complexity, search space characteristics, and its role within the algorithm. Customized model management strategies and role-specific algorithm design are necessary to fully exploit its advantages and avoid its pitfalls.

Leaf counting is an important task in plant phenotyping for monitoring plant growth and estimating crop yield. Most existing methods rely on RGB images, but their performance is often affected by occlusion, lighting variations, and other real-world challenges. Additional modalities, such as depth and thermal images, can provide useful complementary information. However, multimodal leaf counting remains underexplored. Also, many existing methods assume that all training data are available simultaneously, which is impractical in real agricultural settings, where data is collected over time from multiple sources. To address these challenges, we propose MCLC-NET, a multimodal continual learning framework for leaf counting. It learns tasks sequentially using a memory-based strategy with a memory buffer to retain important samples from previous tasks. We also introduce MMLC, a real-world multimodal leaf-counting dataset designed for a domain incremental scenario (DIS) in CL. It contains RGB, depth, and thermal images collected across different crop types under varying environmental conditions, arranged in three orderings: crop-wise, time-wise, and mixed. Experimental results, averaged over three random seeds, demonstrate that MCLC-NET consistently outperforms existing methods across all three task orderings, achieving the lowest AMSE of 0.675$\pm$0.027, 0.542$\pm$0.069, and 0.745$\pm$0.057, respectively.

Large language model (LLM) agents augmented by tools can automate complex, multi-step tasks, such as web navigation, code generation, and workflow orchestration, by acting on external systems through tool calls. However, hallucinations, distributional instability, and adversarial manipulations in LLMs, and the irreversible consequences of certain tool calls can lead to harmful outcomes. These risks call for safeguards that can check requirements across a trajectory, both before actions execute and when recorded behavior is evaluated. We present ContrAgent, a contract-based framework for symbolic temporal supervision of LLM agents. ContrAgent captures an agent's behavior as a sequence of tool calls and formalizes it as a trace over a fixed set of checkable predicates. It then specifies required behaviors using assume-guarantee contracts in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTL$_f$). Each contract is compiled to a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) that serves two roles: gating agent actions online and evaluating recorded traces offline. A contract library, acting as a reusable knowledge base, is maintained independently of the agent's model and can be applied across different agents within the same task domain. We show the effectiveness of our approach on four benchmarks spanning both roles, where ContrAgent is competitive with LLM-judge, classifier, and guardrail baselines while producing deterministic, reproducible verdicts and, in the online mode, orders of magnitude lower per-call latency.

Many real-world processes exhibit long-range dependence, where the current state depends on a slowly decaying trace of past states rather than on the most recent state alone. This paper studies system identification for discrete-time fractional-order linear time-invariant systems from a single observed trajectory of length $t$, a setting that captures such non-Markovian dynamics through the Grünwald–Letnikov difference operator. Unlike Markovian systems, fractional-order systems couple estimation across the entire history, making both statistical analysis and practical identification more challenging. We propose Fractional-Order Ordinary-Least-Squares Grid-Search (FO-GS), a simple two-stage estimator that exploits the diagonal structure of the fractional-difference operator to decouple the identification problem row-wise. Under the stability assumption, we establish high-probability, non-asymptotic error bounds for estimating both the fractional order and the system matrix in the heterogeneous setting, with both estimation errors scaling as \(\mathcal{O}(t^{-1/2})\). Through experiments, we show that FO-GS outperforms existing baselines in recovering both the fractional order and the underlying system dynamics.

Agentic AI systems often approach the same task through multiple workflows that differ in reasoning strategy, verification structure, and compute cost. A natural deployment policy is to use the workflow with the highest average performance, but this can be suboptimal because different workflows may succeed on different instances. We study a portfolio-and-selector paradigm in which a firm runs multiple workflow executions and selects the final answer after observing their outputs. Additional executions may uncover correct answers that the best standalone workflow misses, but they consume compute and introduce plausible distractors that complicate final selection. We formulate this as a workflow portfolio problem in which the firm jointly chooses run size and allocation across workflow types. We summarize selector quality through an odds-lift index and derive sharp bounds on the value of workflow variety. For finite workflow pools, we develop exact formulations, linear programming relaxations, randomized rounding procedures, and computable performance certificates. For large implicit workflow classes, we derive a finite-dimensional dual and an ellipsoid method using a pricing oracle to identify workflows with high weighted accuracy net of recurring compute cost. Under a weak condition, the method obtains a near-optimal solution to the relaxation with polynomially many oracle calls. We evaluate the framework on three datasets: ABCD, Schema-Guided Dialogue, and HotpotQA. Relative to the best standalone workflow, portfolio optimization improves held-out selector accuracy by 3.1, 7.5, and 0.9 percentage points, respectively. Dual-guided workflow generation adds 3.5 points on ABCD and 24.1 on HotpotQA, with no additional gain on Schema-Guided Dialogue.

Humans often observe others before interacting and adjust their behavior accordingly. Robot navigation in crowds, however, often represents pedestrians mainly by observed geometric states, leaving individual differences in interaction tendencies implicit. We propose PRISM (Predictive Representation of Interaction Style and Motion), a framework that infers interaction traits from passive observations of human-human interactions. PRISM encodes human trajectories into a continuous ordinal latent space with a transformer encoder trained by Rank-N-Contrast loss, and pairs each inferred trait with a temporal-stability score supplied to the navigation policy. In randomized crowd simulations, PRISM reduces collision rates over the geometry-only baseline and yields small improvements in navigation-time and path-length metrics. These results suggest the utility of passive latent-trait inference for social navigation in dynamic crowds.

Visible-infrared object detection (VIOD) detects objects with oriented bounding boxes from paired visible and infrared images. Existing methods depend on costly dual-modality annotations. Semi-supervised learning can reduce this burden, but extending it from single-modal detection to VIOD is challenging. In the practical image-pair-level setting considered here, only a few pairs are labeled in both modalities, while the rest are completely unlabeled. This limited supervision creates three challenges: (i) too few labeled boxes for robust cross-modal alignment; (ii) pseudo-label errors caused by branch-wise misses accumulate during self-training; and (iii) tail-class annotations become critically scarce as the labeling budget decreases. We propose Aligned Consensus Teacher (ACT) for label-efficient VIOD in this setting. Its Cycle-Consistent Region Alignment (CRA) combines cycle consistency and sparse anchors with reliability-weighted regional matching. Cross-Modal Consensus Mean-Teacher (CMC-MT) forms consensus pseudo labels under pair-preserving views to recover branch-wise misses and supervise unlabeled pairs. Text-Guided Cross-Modal Instance Augmentation (TG-CMIA) uses a vision-language scene prior to compose tail-class instance pairs while preserving RGB–IR offsets. To the best of our knowledge, ACT is the first framework to study semi-supervised VIOD under this image-pair-level setting. Experiments on DroneVehicle and VEDAI show consistent gains across annotation ratios. With 10% labeled pairs on DroneVehicle, ACT reaches 94.3% of the mAP obtained by the same detector under full supervision. Code and models will be available on GitHub to facilitate future work.

Large language model agents tune GPU kernels and serving engines through a closed loop of propose, measure, and keep, but the measurements behind this loop are not trustworthy. We characterize four failure modes from a four-day pilot corpus of 619 model calls: strawman baselines manufacture speedups, absolute times do not transfer across machines, saturated tasks nullify comparisons, and infrastructure defects impersonate science. We present AutoTuneBench, a benchmark and measurement protocol that makes trust architectural. The protocol is frozen as code with test-enforced provenance; a database-level validator rejects out-of-protocol results; anti-cheat checks run outside the agent's modification surface; comparisons follow pre-registered readouts; and measurements anchor to externally published results, grounded in paired-seed statistics with a 5% cross-run coefficient-of-variation cap. Honest measurement rewrites the headlines: our best kernel reads 10.6x against a naive baseline but 2.03x against the honest one; one configuration delivers 1.174x on one machine and 1.0049x on another; a pre-registered on/off comparison nulls at a shared wall (2.4840 vs 2.4957\,ms); and the KernelBench Level-1 suite admits 51% of tasks with median speedup 1.0001x over PyTorch eager. The protocol, the two-engine corpus (vLLM and SGLang), and its audit trail are released as open artifacts.

Learning-enabled robotic manipulation increasingly relies on robot simulators for policy training and evaluation before real-world deployment. Inside a simulator, a 3D asset contains two separate geometries: a visual mesh used for rendering and a collision mesh used for physical interaction. For computational efficiency, the collision mesh is deliberately a coarse approximation that need not have the same geometry as the visual mesh, a legitimate and pervasive discrepancy we call the Visual–Collision Gap (V–C Gap). We show that the V–C Gap opens a new and practical attack surface, and propose Collision Mesh Poisoning (CMP), the first poisoning attack against robotic manipulation delivered through the 3D asset supply chain. An attacker modifies only the collision mesh of a 3D asset, leaving the visual mesh and all other components unchanged. A policy trained and evaluated with the poisoned asset behaves normally throughout simulation, yet degrades, fails, or creates physical safety risks once deployed in the real world. Since current asset review practices cover malware, copyright, and format compliance, but not visual–collision consistency, poisoned assets can be distributed through legitimate supply chain channels. We evaluate several defenses and our results show that they are insufficient to defend against CMP, highlighting the need for new defenses.

AI-driven penetration testing has been demonstrated with premium frontier models such as GPT-4, but the per-engagement token cost makes continuous, automated testing unaffordable for the smaller organisations that need it most. This paper presents PentestChain, a ten-phase automated penetration testing framework that couples a curated, deterministic exploit map with a cost-aware AI cascade-a local Ollama model (qwen2.5-7b) first, then free-tier OpenRouter and Cerebras, with a rule-based fallback that always produces output-and exposes the full pipeline through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with eleven tools. We make three contributions. First, we treat US-dollar cost per engagement as a measured, first-class evaluation metric and show that a 7B-parameter local model, kept off the critical path by a deterministic backbone, sustains end-to-end operation at zero measured paid-API cost. Second, we analyse the attack surface that an MCP-exposed offensive engine introduces, grounding a four-position threat model in the 2025 MCP incident record (the CVE-2025-6514 remote-code-execution flaw in mcp-remote, the postmark-mcp supply-chain backdoor, and the tool-poisoning-rug-pull-line-jumping class), and contribute four mitigations. Third, we specify a reproducible, containerised evalua-tion protocol aligned with the standardised testbeds now expected at top-tier venues-AutoPenBench, a Cybench subset, and the PentestGPT 182-sub-task benchmark-with multi-trial statistics (more than 10 trials per configuration, pass-at-k, non-parametric significance tests and effect sizes) and direct, same testbed reproduction of the PentestGPT and PentestAgent baselines rather than citation of their published numbers. On the legacy targets measured to date, the framework detected 26 services, enriched 34 CVEs, produced

Many real-world robotic applications require dynamically sensitive manipulation, where success depends not only on reaching a target state but on maintaining stable object dynamics throughout execution. We study the stable transport of liquid-filled containers, where a robot must move objects to target locations while suppressing sloshing and preventing spillage. Unlike conventional pick-and-place, this task imposes stringent requirements on motion smoothness and trajectory-level stability, exposing clear limitations in existing systems. Specifically, fluid simulation remains too costly for online reinforcement learning; human teleoperation introduces unintended accelerations that induce sloshing during imitation learning; and current policy pipelines optimize for task completion rather than dynamic stability. We propose a synthetic-to-real framework coupling physically validated data generation with a hierarchical, diffusion-based controller. The scalable data pipeline synthesizes grasps, filters unstable poses via a vision-language model, and validates transport trajectories through fluid simulation. The policy is organized with a high-level module that translates language and visual observations into SE(3) control targets, and a latent diffusion controller that first plans efficiently in a compact latent space and then decodes dense action chunks, enabling the high control frequency needed for smooth and stable motion. Extensive experiments show our system outperforms state-of-the-art manipulation policies in transport smoothness and dynamic stability. Our project page: https://fetch-my-beer.github.io/

We study the convergence of Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) gradient flows for sampling from probability distributions known up to a normalisation constant. By combining Wasserstein transport with Fisher-Rao birth-death dynamics, WFR flows balance exploration and selection. These flows have been recognised as a promising mechanism to accelerate convergence beyond Langevin dynamics. We show that for a class of strongly log-concave target distributions satisfying additional curvature conditions, WFR flows preserve strong log-concavity, in contrast to Wasserstein flows which enjoy this property only in the Gaussian setting. Exploiting this result, we derive explicit non-asymptotic convergence rates for the symmetrised Kullback-Leibler divergence, without requiring a warm-start as required in current estimates. In particular, we show that the convergence rate decomposes additively into Wasserstein and Fisher-Rao contributions, thereby confirming a recent conjecture within this setting. These results provide refined convergence guarantees and further develop the theoretical foundations of WFR gradient flows for sampling and Bayesian inference.

Dexterous grasp synthesis has advanced rapidly in generating stable and physically plausible hand poses, but real-world manipulation requires grasps that preserve the function implied by the task. We study open-vocabulary task-oriented dexterous grasp generation, where a robot must infer functional intent from free-form language, ground it in multi-view visual observations and object geometry, and generate an executable high-degree-of-freedom grasp. We present OpenDexGrasp, a unified data and generative modeling framework for this setting. OpenDexVerse provides dual-source supervision organized by the Coverage-to-Alignment (C2A) Recipe: OpenDex-Scale offers large-scale semantic and geometric coverage through automatic grasp synthesis and vision-language annotation, while OpenDex-Align supplies high-quality embodied alignment through human teleoperation and category-level transfer. OpenDexGrasp learns a shared perception-action latent representation that couples open-vocabulary vision-language context with dexterous action generation. Affordance grounding and grasp generation provide complementary supervision over this latent space, enabling direct generation of task-consistent dexterous grasps without a separate affordance-to-pose inference stage. Extensive simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrate improved functional alignment, physical feasibility, generalization to unseen categories, and real-world execution success. Additional details and videos are available at https://opendexgrasp.github.io/.

The Sinoatrial node (SA), also called natural pacemaker, is responsible to initiate the heart electrical activity, usually represented by electrocardiograms (ECGs). Abnormalities at the SA node can produce disordered heart rhythms or, in other words, cardiac arrhythmia that are visualized in the ECGs. The development of control strategies to stabilize the cardiac rhythm at the natural pacemaker can provide efficient ways to deal with and avoid some heart pathology. This paper investigates the use of a robust controller based on sliding modes for cardiac rhythms at the SA node in order to induce normal rhythms from pathological responses. Embedded into this controller, a Gaussian process regressor is utilized to predict and compensate modeling uncertainties and disturbances. A mathematical model that presents close agreement with experimental measurements is employed to represent the heart functioning. The adopted model comprises a network of oscillators formed by sinoatrial node, atrioventricular node (AV) and His-Purkinje complex (HP). Three nonlinear oscillators are employed to represent each one of the nodes that are connected by delayed couplings. The boudedness and convergence properties are investigated with a Lyapunov-like stability analysis. In order to evaluate the ability of the control law to deal with interpatient variability, the heart model is assumed to be not available to the controller designer, being used only in the simulator to assess the control performance. The results show that, by applying the proposed control scheme, abnormal rhythms can be avoided, turning the ECG closer to the expected normal behavior and preventing critical cardiac responses.

LLM serving is typically offered as a shared, multi-tenant service, where high-demand workloads from one client can cause latency SLO violations for others. Existing solutions for performance isolation equalize client throughput in the long run, for example through queueing and batching fairness. However, these approaches do not provide latency isolation guarantees; as a result, well-behaved clients can still experience significant degradation to their token-level latencies. In this paper, we present FairInference, which provides the novel {\delta}-token fairness guarantee: for a well-behaved client, if a token is generated in d time units in isolation, it will be generated within d + {\delta} time units in multi-tenant execution, providing strong latency isolation guarantees for LLM serving. To achieve this, FairInference addresses a key challenge of LLM serving: bounding delays from sharing GPU resources without support for fine-grained scheduling or resource allocation. In FairInference, the scheduler enforces per-token deadlines, while bounding the delays from GPU compute sharing and accounting for the additional delays introduced by the shared KV caching in GPU memory. We show that FairInference effectively bounds token-level latency spikes for well-behaved clients and improves overall throughput compared to state-of-the-art LLM serving systems.

The integration of large-scale foundation models with physical embodiments has led to significant advancements in robotics known as Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). These agentic AI systems autonomously perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world situations. This survey comprehensively analyzes GPAI systems, focusing on their architectural foundations, current applications, and key limitations. We introduce a taxonomy of five distinct approaches: Robot Foundation Models (RFMs) for cross-platform skill transfer; Vision-Language Action (VLA) models for end-to-end multi-modal perception and control; Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for human-like movement generation; Diffusion Policy Models (DPMs) for diffusion model-based temporally coherent action generation; and World Foundation Models (WFMs) for physics-compliant simulation and data generation. We examine how these approaches complement each other: WFMs generate training data for VLAs and DPMs, RFMs enable cross-platform deployment of learned policies, while LBMs provide motion priors for natural behavior. Through examples across autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, healthcare robotics, and humanoid systems, we identify significant performance improvements and summarize promising research directions in data-efficient learning, sim-to-real transfer, edge-compatible architectures, and safety frameworks. These insights advance embodied AI for IoT-connected environments where intelligent agents interact with networked sensors, actuators, and edge devices.

Frontier open-weight language models increasingly use Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures to expand model capacity while activating only a small subset of experts per token. Local inference must nevertheless keep the complete expert pool available, which remains far beyond consumer-grade RAM and VRAM capacity even after quantization. SSDs provide practical capacity at this scale, but turning that capacity into executable model memory requires efficient expert delivery, coordinated management of SSD, RAM, and VRAM, and CPU–GPU hybrid execution under bounded bandwidth. We present SSD-LLaMA, an SSD-native local MoE inference system that addresses these challenges with an SSD I/O pipeline optimized for expert delivery, a native three-tier storage hierarchy that delivers and retains experts dynamically, and balanced CPU–GPU hybrid execution. SSD-LLaMA executes every selected expert without pruning or substitution. Across three frontier MoE model families, SSD-LLaMA improves prefill token rate by 1.52$\times$–4.19$\times$ and decode token rate by 2.10$\times$–15.58$\times$ over the evaluated baselines. We also achieve higher than 1 token/s for running trillion-parameter model with a single RTX 5090 and no more than 32GB RAM.

One-step action generation can substantially reduce the inference cost of vision-language-action (VLA) policies, but its effect on closed-loop task success remains an open question. This technical report studies a GR00T N1.7 variant in which the iterative diffusion-transformer action head is replaced by a one-step drifting action head, together with an overlap-conditioned extension for asynchronous chunk replacement. All multi-seed drifting runs were trained on two NVIDIA A800 GPUs. On LIBERO, the action head reduces the mean model-forward time of the action head from approximately $45.3\,\mathrm{ms}$ to $5.0\,\mathrm{ms}$, while the measured backbone-plus-head time falls from approximately $70.0\,\mathrm{ms}$ to $30.6\,\mathrm{ms}$. However, this speedup is accompanied by a systematic reduction in task success. Across three drifting seeds, success is $64.0\pm4.0\%$ on LIBERO-Spatial, $52.0\pm1.0\%$ on LIBERO-Goal, and $26.0\pm2.6\%$ on LIBERO-Long. The low seed variance indicates that the degradation is not explained by random initialization alone. We report the result as a speed–success trade-off rather than an overall improvement, and discuss likely contributing factors including deterministic one-step mode averaging, batch-dependent geometry estimation, long open-loop chunk execution, and the fact that synchronous LIBERO evaluation does not exercise the asynchronous overlap path.

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify graph structures (e.g., nodes, edges, or subgraphs) that deviate significantly from expected patterns, which supports critical applications in fraud detection, spam identification, network intrusion, etc. Despite the growing methods in the field, existing approaches follow a one-model-per-dataset paradigm, limiting their transferability across diverse real-world scenarios due to task heterogeneity, label scarcity, and domain variability. In this work, we introduce FoundAna, a GNN-assisted Foundation Model for Graph Anomaly Detection - the first foundation model framework designated for generalizable, cross-graph anomaly detection by combining GNNs and transformers. FoundAna integrates an anomaly detection-specific GNN component with a standard transformer encoder augmented by four complementary positional encodings, which enable the model to capture both local and global structural information. Specifically, the positional encoding enriched node representations are passed through attribute and adjacency decoders, and the reconstruction errors serve as the anomaly score. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets spanning financial, social, and citation network domains demonstrate that FoundAna consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code implementation and Supplementary materials are here: https://github.com/FoundAna331/FoundAna.

Open-weight large language models are rapidly entering hiring pipelines, yet their discriminatory failure modes – and the regulatory exposure these create under the EU AI Act high-risk classification (Annex III) and U.S. EEOC adverse-impact analysis – remain poorly understood. We present the first systematic, multi-model audit of open-weight LLMs that treats job-posting language as the primary experimental variable, evaluating six models (Llama 3.2, Mistral, Gemma 3, Qwen 3, Phi 3, DeepSeek-R1) across four controlled experiments that jointly probe recruiter-simulation and job-seeker-simulation tasks. We find that (1) agentic posting language depresses recruiter recommendation scores for female candidates (r_rb = 0.309, p_Bonf = 7x10^-5; model-fixed-effects r_rb = 0.448), while communal language partially reverses the penalty; and (2) coded-exclusion language suppresses non-White recruiter scores at large effect sizes (r_rb = 0.646-0.758) and, on the job-seeker side, selectively deters non-White personas from expressing interest – operationalizing a chilling-effect mechanism at scale. A label-ablation experiment isolates the explicit demographic persona label as the primary causal driver, and Word Embedding Association Tests corroborate these findings at the representational level (d = 1.01-1.45 under Caliskan et al.'s multi-word gender attribute lists). We translate these results into a concrete pre-deployment audit protocol – posting-vocabulary scoring, persona-conditioned LLM probing, and adverse-impact flagging against the four-fifths threshold – that operationalizes the documentation and risk-management obligations Annex III imposes on high-risk AI in recruitment.

Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) is widely used to record electrical activity directly from electrodes inside the human brain, making it an attractive modality for neural decoding. However, progress in iEEG decoding, especially toward general-purpose foundation models, remains difficult to measure reliably: datasets are task- or institution-specific, limiting evidence of generalization across tasks and recording environments, and preprocessing choices can strongly influence performance, making model improvements difficult to distinguish from preprocessing gains. Thus, we introduce iMINDBench, an iEEG Multi-Institution Neural Decoding Benchmark that evaluates models on a shared suite of fifteen decoding tasks across three naturalistic movie-watching datasets. The benchmark additionally defines standardized preprocessing tracks and fixed evaluation splits to support consistent model comparisons. Using iMINDBench, we find that the evaluated pretrained systems generally outperform baselines within their respective preprocessing tracks, while strong spectral baselines remain competitive across institutional datasets. In our scaling study, adding up to 25 times more supervised data from other subjects or institutions yields only small or task-dependent gains over within-session training. Together, these findings highlight the need for iEEG models that improve on strong preprocessing baselines and make more effective use of data across subjects and institutions. Project website: https://imindbench.github.io/

We consider the determinant maximization problem under partition constraints: Given an $n\times n$ PSD matrix A and a partition matroid $M$ on $[n]$, find a base $S$ of $M$ that maximizes $\det(A_{S,S})$. We give an $e^{O(k)}$-approximation algorithm to find such a set $S$, where $k$ is the rank of $M$. This improves upon the current $k^{O(k)}$-approximation, and matches the current $e^k$-estimation guarantee, up to $O(1)$ factors in the exponent. Our algorithm is based on rounding the geometric max-min relaxation due to Nikolov-Singh'2016, using a continuous potential-driven process, and several new structural and analytic properties of this relaxation.

Synthetic data can reduce the cost of collecting and annotating training data for robotic perception, but generating sensor observations that preserve the characteristics relevant to downstream perception remains challenging, particularly for sonar imagery. In this work, we investigate whether conventional image-fidelity metrics adequately reflect the downstream perception performance of GAN-generated synthetic sonar data. We employ a Pix2Pix conditional generative adversarial network with four discriminator configurations characterized by different receptive fields: PixelGAN, PatchGAN-16, PatchGAN-70, and ImageGAN. The models are trained using sonar imagery from two datasets and evaluated using conventional image-fidelity metrics, including Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Squared Error (MSE). To complement these pixel-level measures with task-oriented evaluation, YOLOX-S, YOLOX-L, and Faster R-CNN detectors are trained exclusively on real sonar imagery and subsequently evaluated on the GAN-generated images using identical test samples and annotations across all discriminator configurations. The results reveal a discrepancy between image-fidelity and downstream object-detection performance: the configuration achieving the best SSIM, PSNR, and MSE does not consistently yield the best detection performance. In particular, PatchGAN configurations achieve strong downstream detection results despite not achieving the highest pixel-level similarity scores. These findings suggest, for the datasets and models considered, pixel-level image-fidelity metrics alone may not consistently capture the task-relevant realism of synthetic sonar observations and motivate the use of task-aware evaluation for synthetic sensor data intended for robotic perception.