Papers

Let $B$ be the bluebird combinator with reduction rule $Bxyz \to_{w} x\left(yz\right)$, let $M$ be the mockingbird combinator with reduction rule $Mx \to_{w} xx$, and let $I$ be the identity bird combinator with reduction rule $Ix \to_{w} x$. A fixed-point combinator, called a sage bird by Smullyan, is a closed term $Y$ such that, for a fresh variable $x$, $Yx$ is equivalent to $x\left(Yx\right)$ under these reduction rules. For a fixed variable $x$, we construct an invariant $\mathrm{Tr}_{x}\left(u\right)$ of a $BMI$-term $u$ with respect to $\to_{w}$. This invariant traces the occurrences of $x$ in the leftmost-innermost reduction sequence of $u$. We then prove that $\mathrm{Tr}_{x}\left(Yx\right) \neq \mathrm{Tr}_{x}\left(x^{r}\left( Yx \right)\right)$ for every $x$-free $BMI$-term $Y$ and every $r\geq 1$. Consequently, there exists no fixed-point combinator in $BMI$-combinatory logic. This provides a negative answer to the problem posed by Smullyan in 1985.

A medical model's benchmark score does not establish that the same conclusion holds under a different evaluation. This study tests whether claims about model ranking, score reliability and screening performance survive changes in cohort, prompt, negative spectrum, specified prevalence and operating threshold. We audit three medical vision-language models (BioMedCLIP, CheXficient, and MedSigLIP) and a general-domain OpenCLIP comparator on 12,200 chest radiograph records from four datasets (Montgomery, Shenzhen, TBX11K, and VinDr-CXR). Five fixed prompt families yield 244,000 model–image–prompt scores. No model leads every cohort and reliability criterion. Prompt-family changes alter AUROC in 21 of 48 multiplicity-controlled comparisons. Replacing healthy controls with sick non-tuberculosis controls reduces AUROC by 0.075–0.306 across all four models. On VinDr-CXR, the three medical models distinguish tuberculosis from no-finding controls substantially better than from pneumonia or lung tumor; their AUROC point estimates for both named diseases fall below 0.5. CheXficient has documented VinDr-CXR pretraining exposure, which limits the interpretation of its results. Thresholds chosen for 95% sensitivity on TBX11K training retain that constraint by point estimate in only four of sixteen target evaluations. A five-seed supervised source model reaches 0.999 AUROC on TBX11K validation but 0.629 on each of two external cohorts. Conservative exclusion of perceptual-overlap candidates narrows this gap without closing it. These retrospective, single-task results show that discrimination, score reliability and threshold retention support different portability claims. Evidence for chest X-ray tuberculosis screening should identify the complete evaluation specification rather than attribute clinical portability to a checkpoint alone.

We present CRISP (Contact-RIch Simulation Platform), a high-fidelity physics engine tailored for complex multi-contact simulations such as tight-tolerance robotic manipulation. Achieving high physical fidelity in robotic simulation requires both expressive modeling of geometry and contact interactions, as well as accurate numerical resolution via robust collision detection and contact solvers. However, existing simulators often either rely on limited support for geometric representations and simplified modeling of contact interactions, or employ numerical resolution methods whose accuracy or robustness is inherently constrained. Accordingly, we develop a new simulator that supports diverse geometric representations with accurate optimization-based collision detection, and combines contact modeling with robust augmented Lagrangian-based contact solvers. This integration enables efficient and consistent detection of contact information across complex geometries while accurately resolving multi-contact constraints without problematic relaxations, which is essential for simulating contact-intensive and sharp interactions. We validate the physical fidelity of our simulator against state-of-the-art platforms and further demonstrate its capabilities through complex robotic manipulation scenarios. CRISP is publicly available at https://github.com/INRoL/crisp.

In this paper, we prove that a mean system utilization smaller than one is a necessary condition for the feasibility of real-time systems. Such systems are defined as stable. Stable systems have two distinct states: a transient state, followed by a steady-state where the same distribution of response times is repeated infinitely for each task. We prove that the Liu and Layland theorem holds for stable probabilistic real-time systems with implicit deadlines, we provide an analytical approximation of response times for each of those two states and a bound of the instant when a real-time system becomes steady.

We present the first complete machine learning method for accelerating plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) in materials under the projector augmented wave (PAW) formalism. We formalize seven criteria that a Complete Neural Electronic Initializer must satisfy for practical end-to-end PAW DFT acceleration. Applying these to prior work reveals two structure-dependent components, augmentation occupancies and spin initialization, whose absence prevents existing acceleration methods from providing complete reference-free initialization. We show that omitting these components can eliminate or reverse the acceleration obtained via models that only predict the smooth valence density. We satisfy the missing requirements by introducing AugNet, a general equivariant model for PAW augmentation occupancies, and the first general spin density model for materials, which predicts the smooth spin-difference density and spin-difference PAW augmentation occupancies using predicted magnetic moments to constrain the global magnetic state. Combined with existing valence density models, our full method satisfies all seven criteria and forms a fully reference-free electronic initializer for materials DFT, requiring no electronic quantities from a converged target calculation. We show that perfect initialization could cut PAW DFT wall time by 40-52%, and our method recovers up to 62% of this saving, reducing end-to-end DFT wall time by up to ~25% on unseen structures while preserving converged energies.

Topology optimization (TO) represents a significant step towards automating the design process: given a working simulation, TO can produce a viable prototype at the press of a button by differentiating the simulation and iteratively improving the design. In practice, however, TO is riddled with “magic numbers”—hyperparameters whose tuning significantly affects the outcome. Finding the right values typically requires not only deep problem-specific knowledge but also extensive trial-and-error. While practitioners can use surrogate-assisted hyperparameter optimization as an alternative, this approach requires strictly limiting the number of hyperparameters through careful problem formulation. Here, we propose differentiating TO itself using automatic differentiation. This yields “hypergradients” that allow us to tune these hyperparameters in tandem with the primary optimization. We show that evaluating just one or two steps of TO is sufficiently informative and that the method scales favorably to thousands of hyperparameters at an expense comparable to only a few standard TO runs. We demonstrate this approach on stress-constrained and compliance problems, with the latter utilizing a neural parameterization of the density field.

Gender inequality remains a persistent structural feature of the labour market, shaping women's lifetime earnings and economic security. As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms organisational practices, there is growing concern that existing disparities may be unintentionally amplified through task automation, unequal access to upskilling opportunities, and differential returns obtained from technological change. In this paper, we examine how exposure to AI-driven innovation varies across male- and female-dominated occupations, with particular attention to differences across the skill and wage distribution. Using a novel dataset that links occupational characteristics to measures of AI exposure, we analyse how recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and broader AI technologies are distributed across the labour market. Our findings show that, while AI exposure is generally concentrated in higher-skilled and higher-paid occupations for male-dominated occupations, female-dominated occupations display relatively uniform levels of exposure across both high-skilled, high-paid, and low-skilled, low-paid occupations. Moreover, we find that LLM-related exposure is higher in female-dominated occupations, while exposure to broader AI innovation remains more concentrated in male-dominated occupations. A triangulation of these results with existing literature suggests that women, particularly those in the most vulnerable positions (lower-skilled and lower-paid female-dominated occupations), may face greater exposure to forms of AI associated with task automation, job restructuring, reduction of wages and limited career progression.

Emergency department (ED) decision-making relies on heterogeneous clinical information, including patient history, vital signs, laboratory results, and electrocardiograms (ECGs). Vision–language models (VLMs) can jointly process these modalities, but strong predictive performance does not necessarily imply meaningful use of the correct patient's ECG. We term this failure mode ECG Mirage: apparent multimodal capability without useful dependence on patient-specific ECG information. We distinguish two forms: ECG neglect, where ECGs provide little predictive benefit, and ECG confusion, where matched ECGs outperform no-image inputs but not mismatched ECGs. To evaluate these behaviours, we compare predictions obtained with matched ECGs, outcome-discordant mismatched ECGs, and no-image inputs while holding the clinical text and prediction targets fixed. Across four VLMs on MDS-ED, matched ECGs provide no consistent advantage for either ICU admission or clinical deterioration prediction. We then train four restricted visual prompts using supervised learning followed by conditional direct preference optimisation, while keeping the VLM backbone frozen. The resulting models achieve balanced accuracies of 70.6% for ICU admission and 67.5% for deterioration and increase the matched-versus-mismatched performance gap to approximately 16.5 and 5.5 percentage points, respectively. Overall, our study identifies ECG Mirage in multimodal clinical prediction and introduces visual prompt tuning as an efficient mitigation strategy.

Deep learning-based visual odometry (VO) has achieved significant progress, yet most existing methods focus on a monocular approach, which suffers from scale ambiguity. Stereo VO provides real metric by its nature, but remains less studied in deep learning VO due to its high computational cost and modeling complexity. Recent advances in stereo matching and optical flow estimation have made dense visual correspondence increasingly accurate and reliable, but their complementary geometric information has not been fully exploited for VO. In this paper, we present SFVO, a correspondence-driven stereo VO framework that directly builds upon pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models. SFVO exploits pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models to estimate stereo and temporal correspondences. Instead of learning pose directly from images, SFVO maps learned correspondences into geometric constraints and predicts which points are trustworthy. To improve the reliability of visual correspondence-based geometric constraints, we introduce decoupled confidence maps for rotation and translation. This design better aligns the characteristics of visual correspondence and 6-DoF transformations. Extensive experiments on outdoor and indoor datasets demonstrate that SFVO achieves robust and accurate pose estimation with strong generalization capability. The code will be released.

Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to generate precise actions by reasoning over contact forces, robot configurations, and interaction histories beyond visual observations. Existing methods passively condition on force feedback rather than actively predicting future contact dynamics, limiting their ability to generate high-precision actions. To address this problem, we introduce Predictive Sensorimotor Representation (PSR) learning, a framework that learns a hierarchy of predictive representations from multimodal sensorimotor signals and integrates them into the action stream of a visuomotor policy. Specifically, during a pretraining stage, a multimodal Transformer is trained to learn a hierarchy of predictive representations by jointly forecasting future interaction dynamics. The learned hierarchy subsequently augments the action stream, enabling the resulting policy to exploit contact-relevant cues at multiple depths. We further instantiate PSR within a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, resulting in PSR-VLA, and evaluate it on six real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks. Experimental results show that PSR-VLA achieves 91.7% overall success, improving over $\pi_{0.5}$, ForceVLA-$\pi_{0.5}$, and ForceVLA2-$\pi_{0.5}$ by 30.0, 22.5, and 19.2 percentage points, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSR for force-aware, contact-rich manipulation. Videos of the tasks and stability tests are available at https://psr-vla.pages.dev/.

Manipulating objects requires understanding not only their motion, but also the physical properties that determine it. For articulated objects, these include inertia, friction, and mechanisms such as springs or door closers, whose effects can vary with configuration and velocity. Such properties are not directly observable from appearance: visually identical doors may require very different effort to manipulate. Existing digital-twin pipelines recover primarily kinematics or assign static physical parameters from visual and language priors, which can yield physically implausible estimates. As a result, state-dependent mechanism dynamics remain unidentified and are not represented in standard asset formats. We present ForceTwin, a system for identifying physics-informed digital twins of articulated objects from instrumented human interaction. A person probes an object using a handheld force-sensing gripper, providing synchronized poses and interaction forces from which we estimate the articulation, parametric dynamics including inertia, Coulomb friction, viscous damping, and a structured neural residual capturing state-dependent mechanism forces. ForceTwin nearly halves the inertial-parameter error of a VLM prior. As a feedforward dynamics model for impedance control on a Spot and a Franka FR3, ForceTwin achieves 87% goal completion across nine object-embodiment pairs, compared with 60% using VLM-prior and 57% using kinematics-only twins, with the largest gains on objects whose strong mechanisms cause both baselines to stall. We further use the identified twins to train whole-body door-traversal policies and deploy them in the real world. Project Page: https://timengelbracht.github.io/forcetwin-website/

Skills can improve the performance of Large Language Model (LLM) agents by providing task-specific procedural guidance, while skill optimization further improves their effectiveness through iterative refinement. However, existing skill optimization methods typically represent skills as unstructured natural-language instructions, creating two key challenges: 1) Unstructured skills often lack explicit workflow-level guidance and contain substantial redundancy, making them difficult for LLMs to execute; 2) the vast search space of unconstrained natural-language skills makes skill optimization ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose representing skills as graph-structured natural-language artifacts. In graph-structured skills, each node represents an execution step together with its operational guidance, while directed edges encode context-dependent transitions between steps. Compared to unstructured skills, graph-structured skills can provide clear workflow-level guidance. Moreover, the proposed graph-structured skill can also facilitate skill optimization. Building on this structured representation, we introduce GraphSkillEvo, a population-based evolutionary optimization framework with mutation and crossover operators for graph-structured skills. By maintaining multiple candidate skills and combining effective components, GraphSkillEvo enables broader and more comprehensive exploration of the structured skill space than purely LLM-based iterative self-refinement. Extensive experiments across five agent benchmarks demonstrate that GraphSkillEvo consistently outperforms the strong skill optimization baseline SkillOpt, improving average accuracy by 4.01% on GPT-5.4-nano and 1.76% on GPT-5.4. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruisun7/GraphSkillEvo.

Behavioral failures can make a transformer appear to lack a world model even when it has learned faithful representations of its environment. We demonstrate this in TaxiGPT, a transformer trained on random walks through Manhattan whose failures have been interpreted as evidence of an incoherent internal map. Through mechanistic analysis and causal interventions, we show that the model represents intersections and streets, tracks its position, and uses a goal compass to navigate. We trace its failures to interference between superposed intersection features, which disrupts localization within the internal map. Affordance packing, which groups representations of intersections with the same legal moves, helps limit the consequences of these errors. Finally, we propose mechanistic indicators that we use to compare models and show that world-modeling capacities emerge at different stages of training. Our findings motivate a shift from asking whether a model has a world model to mechanistically studying its world modeling: the interacting capacities through which it represents its environment and uses those representations to guide behavior.

We develop single-loop stochastic projected damped extragradient methods for nonconvex–(strongly) concave minimax optimization, with complexity guarantees for both game stationarity (GS) and optimization stationarity (OS). Our approach combines a stochastic projected damped extragradient (SPDE) method with a recursive variance-reduced variant, VR-SPDE, both of which retain a single-loop structure. Under an unbiased stochastic gradient oracle with uniformly bounded variance, SPDE finds an $\varepsilon$-game-stationary point with stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexities of $O(\kappa\varepsilon^{-4})$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-5})$ in the nonconvex–strongly concave and nonconvex–concave settings, respectively, where $\kappa=L/\mu$. Under an additional mean-square Lipschitz condition on the stochastic gradients, VR-SPDE improves these GS complexities to $O(\kappa^{3/2}\varepsilon^{-3})$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-9/2})$, respectively. For an $\varepsilon$-optimization-stationary point, SPDE achieves SFO complexities of $O(\kappa\varepsilon^{-4})$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$, while VR-SPDE achieves $O(\kappa^{3/2}\varepsilon^{-3})$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$, in the two settings, respectively. These OS guarantees match the best-known bounds achieved by multi-loop methods while preserving a single-loop implementation. To the best of our knowledge, our results provide the best-known SFO complexity guarantees among single-loop stochastic first-order methods for the respective stationarity criteria and problem classes.

Robot assistance is particularly crucial in unfamiliar tasks, where users must understand task requirements while coordinating with the robot. Previous research offers mixed evidence on the role of robot proxemics in user engagement: some studies suggest closer proximity enhances interaction, while others report it can feel intrusive. In this work, we argue that perceptions of intrusiveness depend not only on proxemics but also on the frequency of robot interventions, and are strongly influenced by individual traits such as personality and demographics. We conducted an experiment with 32 participants who interacted with two assistive robots that provided similar task support but differed in their intervention strategies. Results indicate that overall engagement remains stable across conditions, yet affective responses and perceived intrusiveness vary significantly with personality traits. Moreover, personality shapes interaction dynamics differently depending on the robot's behavior. These findings emphasize that effective human-robot interaction should account for individual differences, tailoring robot behavior to maintain engagement while respecting each user's unique affective and behavioral profile.

Entropy minimization is a standard objective for test-time adaptation (TTA), but it can fail in imbalanced binary segmentation. Unlike image classification, dense segmentation aggregates thousands of pixel predictions, allowing the larger predicted class to dominate the update, pull minority predictions toward itself, and produce a degenerate mask as predictions saturate and their entropy gradients vanish. We theoretically establish this collapse in a shared-shift model. This analysis motivates Balanced-Anchor Prompt Adaptation (BAPA), which combines two complementary modules. The Class-Balanced Anchors (CBA) module selects high-confidence anchors separately from each predicted class and gives foreground and background equal total loss weight, preventing the larger region from dominating the update. Dynamic Prompt Adaptation (DPA) refreshes these anchors after each prediction update and optimizes only text-side prompt residuals while keeping the vision-language encoders frozen. This prompt-only update refines the foreground-background decision boundary without altering the pretrained dense visual representation. Across experiments from four domains, BAPA achieves the highest mean Dice among the evaluated methods. Factorized ablations further validate the complementary roles of CBA and DPA, supporting balanced prompt adaptation as an effective alternative to entropy minimization for test-time binary segmentation.

Latent world models enable planning by predicting the effects of actions in a learned representation space, but their predictions can become unreliable when test-time conditions differ from training. Existing test-time adaptation methods address this by updating parts of the pretrained model, often modifying millions of parameters and requiring a choice of which internal components to adapt. We introduce Sandwich-Residuals, a lightweight alternative that keeps the pretrained world model frozen and learns only small residual corrections around the predictor. The residuals are optimized online using the model's self-supervised prediction error and require no rewards, labels, or source-domain data. Across 21 conditions on the AdaJEPA benchmark, our method achieves $1.3\times$ the success rate of the frozen model while retaining 95% of the performance of the strongest AdaJEPA variant and adapting 97-99% fewer parameters. Under compound shifts, this advantage increases to $1.9\times$ the success rate of the frozen model, while remaining comparable to internal block adaptation. We further demonstrate the same adaptation principle on a DINO-WM model for 3-D manipulation. These results suggest that effective test-time adaptation of world models does not necessarily require modifying their pretrained internal weights.

Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are rarely deployed as unchanged pre-trained models. They are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or preference optimization such as DPO and GRPO. This raises a practical question for audio deepfake forensics: do fingerprints learned from a foundation generator remain valid after adaptation? We present GenTraceBench, a controlled benchmark spanning five TTS architectures, 16 pre-/post-training variants, and 49,728 utterances generated with fixed texts and speaker prompts. Under a train-on-foundation, test-on-adapted protocol, we evaluate binary detection, closed-set attribution, and open-set verification. DPO and GRPO generally preserve fingerprints, whereas some SFT and pre-training-data changes cause substantial drift; effect sizes vary across three forensic backbones. Repeated training runs confirm the largest W2V-BERT attribution drop, while a data-mixture control with comparable speech quality shows that composition change need not cause drift. In W2V-BERT verification, multi-shot enrollment reduces EER for the SFT condition from 44.4% to 11.0%, whereas the SingNet-only condition remains at or above 45% EER.

Effective exploration in high-dimensional continuous control remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning. Planning-based methods address this by combining online planning with learned policies and value functions, but their components can become misaligned during training: learned sampling policies may diverge from planner behavior, while planning distributions stored in replay become stale as the model and value function evolve. Reanalysis can refresh these targets, but at substantial computational cost. We propose GEM-MPC, an MPPI-based reinforcement learning method that improves the interaction between planning and learning. GEM-MPC uses MPPI to combine a policy trained to clone the planner with a KL-regularized policy that explores around it, providing complementary exploitation and guided exploration within planning. We further introduce Gated Prior Distillation, which selectively learns from stored planning distributions only when they provide a better target than the current prior, reducing the impact of stale planning data without requiring full reanalysis. Across continuous-control benchmarks, GEM-MPC consistently outperforms existing planning-based baselines under lower computational budgets.

Designing effective Human-Robot Interaction in task-oriented settings requires carefully balancing user engagement with socially acceptable levels of robot intrusiveness. In this paper, we examine how different robot intervention strategies shape user experience, interaction dynamics, perceived intrusiveness, and sense of support. We compare two approaches: a continuous engagement-seeking robot strategy, and a context-aware strategy that selectively intervenes based on the user's state and task context. Both approaches rely on multimodal behavioral cues, including body orientation and attentional signals, to guide robot actions. We evaluate these strategies in a user study with 32 participants performing a task in a simulated hospital environment. Our findings show that higher interaction frequency does not necessarily lead to better engagement. Instead, we observe a systematic trade-off between perceived support and intrusiveness, influenced by factors such as physical proximity and user effort. These results provide empirical evidence that effective engagement in HRI depends on adaptive, context-sensitive intervention policies.

This paper shows that there are intimate connections between the quadratic transform technique for solving fractional programming (FP) problems and the Schur-complement technique in matrix analysis. We demonstrate that the quadratic transform technique is related to two aspects of the Schur complement: (i) the linear matrix inequality (LMI) condition for positive semidefiniteness and (ii) the matrix determinant formula. Specifically, we establish that the quadratic transform and the Schur-complement LMI condition imply each other. This connection allows us to provide new interpretations of the auxiliary variable in the quadratic transform, and it allows us to rederive the Schur-complement determinant formula. Furthermore, this connection leads to generalizations of the quadratic transform in FP and the Schur-complement LMI that can accommodate generalized matrix inverse. As an application in information theory, we apply the generalized FP framework to the least-favorable-noise minimax formulation of the Gaussian vector broadcast channel sum capacity problem. When the least-favorable noise covariance is singular, matrix-inverse-based Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) analysis would require a careful analysis of the input and output spaces of the channel. We show using generalized FP that an auxiliary-variable representation of the singular matrix fraction directly yields the reciprocal multiple-access channel and recovers the uplink-downlink duality relation for sum capacity.

As robots transition from performing repetitive tasks to collaborating with humans, understanding human intent becomes crucial to effective interaction. Anticipation enables robots to predict human actions, while proactivity allows them to take initiative and guide human behavior toward optimal outcomes. Although research has largely focused on how robots infer and respond to human intentions, less attention has been paid to how robots communicate their own intent. This paper introduces visual proactivity, a novel, simple yet effective approach that enables robots to communicate their intentions through visual feedback, influencing human behavior and enhancing transparency and fluency. We develop and evaluate proactive robotic behaviors in a human-to-robot handover scenario, where a user study validates human perception of reactive, anticipatory, and proactive behaviors. The results demonstrate that effective visual proactivity fosters better alignment and coordination, paving the way for more intuitive human-robot collaboration.

We present an architecture that enables data owners to combine private data into data pools using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and manage these pools by issuing narrowly scoped computational rights, encoded as Digital Rights Tokens (DRTs), to third-party data analysts. Each DRT binds specific open-source code to a pool and is issued and redeemed on a distributed ledger. Data analysts can obtain the right to execute open-source code on the combined sealed data inside a TEE and receive the result from this code execution, but not the underlying data. We argue for a control-centric view of privacy in which creators retain ex ante control over how their data is processed. A reference implementation runs WebAssembly (WASM)/Python jobs over sealed datasets and records redemptions on Solana, illustrating the feasibility and limitations of the platform.

Reliable robotic grasping benefits from estimating the evolving physical interaction and selecting a grasp-dependent compression target. Tactile sensors provide direct interaction measurements but require dedicated hardware at deployment. We introduce ZeroTouch, a tactile-supervised framework that predicts dense contact deformation, the instantaneous six-axis wrench, and a grasp-dependent desired compression target from wrist RGB observations, gripper state, and local gravity direction. Tactile measurements are used only as privileged supervision during training and are not required at deployment. On the full validation set, the complete architecture reduces normal-force MAE from 2.017 N for a state-only baseline to 0.531 N. In physical evaluation with 20 trials per condition, ZeroTouch achieves 95% success on an unseen object, 80% in a seen-object/unseen-grasp condition, and 90% under a content/load shift. Under the same evaluation protocol, OpenVLA achieves 25%, 40%, and 55%, while SmolVLA achieves 10%, 25%, and 35%, respectively.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are poised to revolutionize wireless multicasting by enabling extended coverage and reliable operation in obstructed environments. These benefits, however, can be undermined by security vulnerabilities arising from practical deployment factors. This work addresses three such critical factors, (i) the discrete nature of RIS phase shifts, (ii) the presence of colluding eavesdroppers, and (iii) the inefficiency of static illumination beams, each threatening security if not properly accounted for in system design. To mitigate these issues, we formulate a joint resource allocation problem that minimizes the wiretap signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) across all eavesdroppers by co-optimizing the RIS configuration and the base station (BS) beam management. This yields a complex, nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP), which we equivalently reformulate into a tractable mixed-integer quadratically constrained program (MIQCP) solvable to global optimality. Numerical results confirm that the proposed scheme significantly bolsters security, suppressing the wiretap SNR by up to 58% compared to existing baselines.

Chinese social media has generated a vast and continually evolving lexicon of internet buzzwords whose meanings are often non-literal and deeply rooted in local cultural and pragmatic contexts. Existing research has primarily focused on interpreting these buzzwords within Chinese, leaving largely unexplored whether LLMs can transfer such culturally grounded knowledge across languages and accurately convey the intended meanings in English. This cross-lingual capability is also critical for safety, as harmful expressions may obscure their offensive content through culture-specific homophony, euphemism, irony, or coded language. In this paper, we investigate the ability of advanced LLMs to understand Chinese internet buzzwords across languages. To this end, we introduce CIBuzzBench, the first benchmark for cross-lingual Chinese-to-English understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords. CIBuzzBench comprises 3,001 Chinese internet buzzwords annotated with English meaning explanations, English equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness labels. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks: Meaning Explanation, Cross-lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection. We evaluate representative state-of-the-art proprietary and Chinese LLMs under both English- and Chinese-prompting settings. Our results show that LLMs continue to struggle with the cross-lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords, particularly in fine-grained non-literal interpretation, robust equivalent matching under option perturbations, and calibrated harmfulness detection. These findings highlight the persistent challenges posed by culturally grounded language phenomena for multilingual LLMs and safety-oriented evaluation. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SuperYFan/CIBuzzBench.

This paper proposes and analyzes a high-order finite volume element method on curved-edge quadrilateral meshes for elliptic equations. Unlike existing theories, which are primarily based on straight-edge meshes, this study is the first to establish an analysis of the stability and optimal convergence of the finite volume method on curved-edge meshes. By constructing a dual mesh based on Gaussian points, we overcome the accuracy degradation issues caused by geometric deformation and Jacobian non-uniformity of curved-edge meshes. We prove the coercivity of the discrete bilinear form under weak mesh regularity conditions, thereby obtaining an optimal error estimate in the energy norm. Furthermore, using orthogonality and the Aubin-Nitsche technique, we derive an optimal $L^2$ error estimate. Numerical experiments cover problems with constant and anisotropic coefficients, different dual partition strategies, complex curved boundary domains, and interfaces with large deformations. Numerical results indicate that this method consistently achieves the optimal convergence order in both the $H^1$ and $L^2$ norms on a variety of curved-edge meshes. Compared to straight-edge meshes, curved-edge meshes offer significant advantages in approximating complex curved boundaries and demonstrate better resistance to distortion in cases involving sudden changes in coefficients and large deformations at interfaces. This paper provides a unified theoretical framework for the finite volume element method on curved-edge meshes and verifies the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.

Fully autonomous tractor-trailer systems are increasingly deployed in logistics, agriculture, and industrial environments, where precise and robust path-tracking capabilities are essential. However, the articulation between the tractor and the trailer introduces additional nonlinearities and significantly complicates lateral and longitudinal control, particularly during reversing maneuvers. This paper introduces a novel path-tracking algorithm specifically designed for articulated vehicles with a single trailer. The proposed method combines a lateral control law applied at the trailer level with a short-horizon predictive adjustment of the tractor steering angle, ensuring stable convergence toward the desired path in both forward and backward motion. The approach is geometry-based and requires no per-vehicle calibration or training. Simulation studies in a high-fidelity physics simulator show steady-state or final lateral errors of $0.02$–$0.05$~m on straight-line, circular, and reverse docking trajectories, which is of the same order of magnitude as, or lower than, the errors reported in the literature. Real-world experiments on a small-scale tractor–trailer robot, with the whole controller running on a low-cost microcontroller, further confirm the feasibility of the approach, with lateral errors below 13~mm during repeated reverse docking maneuvers despite a pose detection latency of about 200~ms.

Cybersecurity risk quantification remains challenging due to limited operational data and difficulties in quantifying Loss Event Frequency (LEF). This paper introduces the Loss Event Frequency Security Analyser (LEFSA), a probabilistic framework that reformulates LEF estimation as machine-level Cyber Loss Event (CLE) prediction combined with hierarchical infrastructure-level aggregation. LEFSA estimates calibrated machine-level CLE probabilities from operational cybersecurity telemetry and aggregates them across infrastructure layers while accounting for machine-level dependencies. This provides a foundation for scalable, explainable, and operationally applicable cyber risk estimation at the level of machines, services, business processes, and the entire organization. The framework was evaluated using proprietary Managed Detection & Response telemetry from 23 organizations using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. XGBoost achieved the strongest predictive performance, with a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.90 and consistently low calibration error across evaluation periods. The results demonstrate that operational cybersecurity telemetry contains substantial predictive information for future CLE occurrence, supporting probabilistic machine-level modeling and hierarchical aggregation as a promising foundation for quantitative, data-driven cyber risk management.

Multi UAV missions in complex environments require the system to understand both the surrounding scene and the intent of a human operator while maintaining feasible task allocation as mission conditions change. This paper presents AgenticSwarm, an agentic framework for semantic perception and adaptive task allocation in heterogeneous multi UAV missions. An agent interprets aerial imagery and natural language instructions to construct a grounded mission representation that links perceived objects and regions with task requirements, capability constraints, and mission dependencies. This information augments a constrained task allocation process in which obstacle aware path feasibility, energy consumption, and protected return home requirements are incorporated before assignment. During execution, changes such as UAV failure, battery degradation, or task modification trigger residual mission reconstruction from the current system state, while completed work and reconnaissance progress are retained. AgenticSwarm is evaluated across five diverse Gazebo environments and an indoor real test environment, demonstrating its ability to connect semantic reasoning with constrained allocation and adaptive multi UAV mission execution. Compared with a Grounding DINO+SAM~2.1 perception baseline, the SAM3-based pipeline improves class-aware recall by 25.2 percentage points (pp) and semantic label accuracy by 29.5 pp. Ablating residual mission replanning increases mean repeated work from 0% to 61.7% and post-event recovery time by 58.6%, highlighting the contribution of adaptive replanning to mission execution.