Papers

This paper presents a novel framework integrating Bayesian physiological modeling with optimal control strategies to achieve uncertainty-aware, personalized hemodynamic regulation during fluid resuscitation. An uncertainty-aware variational autoencoder state-space model (UVAE-SSM) was first developed to capture the dynamical relationship between mean arterial pressure (MAP) and fluid infusion using limited data, while explicitly modeling aleatoric uncertainty (i.e., randomness in the measurements, such as sensor noise). Then, a Bayesian nonlinear state-space model (BNSSM) was developed by utilizing Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) to capture epistemic uncertainty arising from physiological and patient-specific variability, enabling the creation of a virtual patient generator (VPG). Building on this uncertainty-aware modeling framework, a stochastic radial basis function model predictive control (sRBF-MPC) algorithm was designed to track the MAP target while satisfying physiological constraints. Finally, an online fine-tuning algorithm was developed to adapt the nominal UVAE-SSM using streaming VPG data, enabling progressive personalization during closed-loop therapy. Simulation results across unseen animal subjects and an independent human clinical dataset demonstrated the strong predictive accuracy and cross-population generalizability of the UVAE-SSM and BNSSM models. Closed-loop evaluations confirmed that the proposed sRBF-MPC framework achieved stable MAP regulation while providing better risk-aware control compared to quadratic MPC (Q-MPC) and stochastic quadratic MPC (sQ-MPC). Overall, the proposed framework accounts for inter- and intra-patient variability through online model adaptation, offering a promising step toward uncertainty-aware, personalized hemodynamic modeling and control in critical care.

The energy dissipation law and the maximum bound principle (MBP) are two important physical features of the well-known Allen–Cahn equation. In this paper, we develop and analyze novel second-order linear numerical schemes for a class of Allen–Cahn type gradient flows. Our scheme is based on the generalized scalar auxiliary variable (GSAV) approach and a novel second-order exponential time-differencing Runge–Kutta (ETDRK2) method. The resulting formulation overcomes a longstanding difficulty in combining these two techniques while retaining both the MBP and energy stability. We prove that the proposed scheme unconditionally preserves both the MBP and energy stability. In addition, rigorous error analysis is carried out for the proposed scheme, establishing second-order accuracy in both time and space without imposing any coupling condition between the time step $\tau$ and the spatial mesh size $h$. We also present some numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme and its preservation of the theoretical properties.

The performance improvement of high-power flat BLDC motors has accelerated the development of dynamic robots. However, many commercially available servo motors assume operating voltages of 48 V or lower, which limits the maximum rotational speed. Dynamic robots require rapid energy generation, so this voltage constraint restricts motion performance. Therefore, driving motors beyond the rated voltage is desirable to increase the instantaneous maximum speed. On the other hand, semiconductor devices used in motor drivers have a trade-off between voltage rating and current capacity. Conventional drivers using Si MOSFETs have difficulty achieving both high-voltage and high-current operation. Although GaN FETs are promising, compact drivers that can be mounted on the rear side of flat BLDC motors remain limited. In this study, a motor driver for high-power flat BLDC motors using GaN FETs is developed. The effect of delay compensation in the high-speed region beyond the rated operating range is also investigated. In the experiments, under 96 V operation, a continuous current of 30 A was achieved with a heat sink attached. A peak current of 80 A and a maximum electrical frequency of 3110 Hz were confirmed. A high-speed load lifting experiment driven by a LiPo battery 24S (100 V) was also conducted, demonstrating applicability to dynamic robot operation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a prominent paradigm for mapping multimodal inputs, including semantic instructions, visual observations of the scene, and proprioceptive observations, to robot actions. Most state-of-the-art models predict actions in the end-effector pose space as sequences of action chunks. Training and evaluating these models requires large-scale collections of real-world demonstrations, pairing robot actions with the corresponding visual and proprioceptive observations. Collecting such data on real hardware typically relies on human teleoperation, making the process costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present an open-source sim-to-real experimental protocol that addresses this bottleneck: expert trajectories generated in simulation are replayed open-loop on a real Franka FR3 setup, where the corresponding real visual and proprioceptive observations are recorded and converted into a format compatible with VLA training. The same deployment stack is then reused, in closed-loop, to evaluate a trained policy on that setup, so that data collection and evaluation share an identical hardware configuration. Because each real recording is paired with the simulated trajectory that produced it, the protocol also yields a direct measurement of the sim-to-real gap. We release the collected datasets on Hugging Face together with the pipeline source code https://gitlab.isir.upmc.fr/kappel/sim2real_public_chunk_control.

In many delivery settings, a receiver may already hold a lower-quality or lower-resolution representation of an image, obtained through an independent transmission. Conventional codecs encode a subsequently requested higher-quality representation without exploiting this incidental side information, whereas conditional codecs generally assume a prescribed source of side information that is always available. We instead consider an opportunistic setting in which side information may or may not be present. We introduce a single entropy model that conditions on a previously decoded latent when available and falls back to a standard hyperprior otherwise. The proposed adapter maps the side-information latent to the prior signal required by the entropy model, allowing the same model to support multiple target and side-information quality combinations. The analysis and synthesis transforms remain frozen, enabling retrofitting of an existing learned codec while preserving its latent representation and reconstruction path. When the receiver holds the quality immediately below the target, the proposed method reduces the rate of the subsequent transmission by up to 46%, or by 52% when an additional hyper-latent is transmitted. In the absence of side information, the rate penalty remains below 4%, and the reconstructions are bit-identical across the conditional and fallback modes.

Adaptive optimization methods such as AdaGrad and Adam are widely used in modern deep neural network training, but their adaptive scaling is primarily designed for vector-valued parameters and does not explicitly exploit matrix structure. Recent matrix-aware optimizers demonstrate the benefits of structured optimization, yet a general theoretical framework for deriving matrix-aware adaptivity comparable to that of AdaGrad remains lacking. In this work, we develop an Online Mirror Descent framework with adaptive proximal functions for matrix-valued parameters, providing a principled methodology for deriving matrix-aware adaptive optimization through online regret minimization. By introducing row-wise and column-wise matrix proximal functions, our framework explicitly reveals the trade-off governing adaptive scaling: increasing the scaling factors reduces the gradient-dependent dual norm term while increasing the cost of evolving the proximal geometry. In the row-wise setting, this trade-off becomes separable under diagonal parameterization, allowing the adaptive scaling for each row to be derived independently by minimizing its corresponding row-wise regret bound. The column-wise counterpart follows directly by applying the row-wise construction to the transposed matrix. This framework yields Row-wise Matrix AdaGrad and Column-wise Matrix AdaGrad as concrete instantiations, with regret guarantees that are strictly tighter than those of entry-wise AdaGrad under row-sparse or column-sparse gradient structures. Experiments on matrix factorization and stacked deep MLP training further demonstrate the benefits of matrix-aware adaptive scaling, yielding improved optimization performance in both settings and enhanced optimization stability and trainability at larger learning rates and greater network depths in the latter.

In classification-oriented adaptive sensing, posterior samples characterize uncertainty at the current measurement state and can serve two roles: they may guide the next sensing direction, while their class labels provide votes for the candidate classes and determine whether sensing should continue. We focus on the stopping layer that turns these votes into a declaration, without modifying the posterior sampler or sensing directions. A natural plug-in rule declares when the observed vote share exceeds a threshold. We show that this threshold is not itself a confidence guarantee: when the underlying vote mass equals the threshold, the plug-in rule declares about half the time. As alternatives, we calibrate a fixed-sample rule and a finite-horizon sequential rule to a prescribed false-declaration probability, and study exact curtailment, which stops a fixed-pool rule once its final verdict is forced. We then derive how one-round declaration probabilities determine posterior-sample cost and classification accuracy along a sensing path. On MNIST with DDRM and a fixed PCA-guided probe sequence, curtailment saves up to 62% of posterior samples. Among the evaluated rules at matched operating points, sequential stopping reduces the cost the most. At a high accuracy, that same sequential rule can trade more posterior samples for fewer measurements.

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-performance, instance-adaptive compressed sensing through posterior sampling, without task-specific policy training. Existing methods select sensing probes by maximizing total posterior signal variance and are therefore primarily reconstruction-driven. We introduce a classification-driven extension motivated by the closed-form posterior covariance of a class-conditional Gaussian mixture model, which decomposes into within-class and between-class uncertainty. Using calibrated soft classifier outputs, we estimate these uncertainty terms from diffusion posterior samples and propose a classification-oriented criterion for selecting the dominant sensing direction in the unmeasured subspace. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 compare the resulting classification accuracy, measurement cost, and reconstruction quality with those of reconstruction-oriented counterparts. The results identify regimes in which semantic posterior uncertainty yields a more favorable classification–measurement trade-off and quantify the associated reconstruction cost.

Multimodal survival models can combine complementary prognostic information from whole-slide images and genomic profiles, but effective fusion remains challenging amid external cohort shift and computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose MIST, multimodal survival prediction with genomic-guided histology attention. MIST represents genomic features as tokens and allows them to query compact foundation-model-derived histology context tokens before survival prediction. This design enriches molecular information with histology context rather than merging separately encoded modalities only at the final stage. Training combines discrete-time survival prediction with genomic feature masking, WSI dropout, and paired WSI-genomics contrastive alignment. Across four external evaluations in colon, renal, lung, and glioblastoma cohorts, MIST improves external C-index over standard fusion baselines in the primary comparisons. These results support genomic-guided histology attention as a compact and effective strategy for multimodal oncology outcome prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/samiyavuuz/MIST .

Background: Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) can use behavioral data to adapt support to changing contexts, but many rely on predefined rules and manual configuration. Objective: We developed a proof-of-concept sleep JITAI using an AI agent to review personal data, evaluate reminders, adapt interventions, and record decisions for human review. Methods: Running in Home Assistant on a configurable schedule, the agent follows a reusable skill file to review 30 days of sleep and behavioral data, including physical activity, smartphone use, and bedtime routines, to identify patterns and create or update automated reminders. Results: Initial runs demonstrated technical feasibility, successfully completing data review and intervention decisions while limiting reminders to three per day and saving decision records. Conclusions: Agentic AI may enable flexible, adaptive sleep JITAIs. The architecture supports future comparison with fixed or rulebased interventions, requires human oversight, and could extend to other health behaviors.

Given a compact semantic scene graph, long-term indoor video relocalization estimates a map-frame trajectory after lighting and furniture changes. Visual methods rely on appearance and become unreliable under these changes; localizing one frame at a time from object classes and geometry instead leaves sparse, ambiguous evidence. We introduce VideoReloc, whose adaptive clips use odometry to gather spatial evidence until object and motion criteria are met, adapting query length to the observed scene. Its run-level decision rechecks conflicting placements using evidence accumulated across connected clips, stabilizing the trajectory beyond adjacent-clip tracking. Hypothesis-first registration proposes poses from object triplets and verifies each using clip-wide object centers and box surfaces. Orientation-aware refinement uses box faces, gravity and wall directions to resolve ambiguity in camera orientation and refine the full pose. This reframes sparse-map relocalization as verification of spatially extended video queries, moving discriminative support from stored appearance to temporal context and permitting a 100 kB map of class-labelled boxes. On RIO10 and ReplicaCAD, the all-frame localization success rate at 1 m/10$^\circ$ is 73.5% and 61.1% under causal evaluation, rising to 90.6% and 74.8% with clip closure. The evaluated per-frame scene coordinate regressors reach up to 47.6% and 49.8%, respectively, with maps of 12.6-42 MB. Project page: https://videoreloc.github.io

Contact-rich motion planning (CRMP) is essential for robotic manipulation and locomotion, yet remains computationally challenging due to combinatorial contact decisions. Existing methods typically avoid broad evaluation of contact-mode sequences through search heuristics or optimization reformulations. We revisit broad evaluation in light of modern GPU hardware and introduce Contact-Mode Expansion with parallel Trajectory optimization (CoMET), which combines GPU-parallel trajectory evaluation with greedy contact-mode expansion. On planar pushing benchmarks, CoMET is competitive with optimization-based, sampling, and tree-search baselines in solution quality and planning time, matching the full-enumeration reference on nearly all instances with fewer evaluations and shorter planning times. Ablations suggest that much of the performance gain comes from the high-throughput trajectory evaluator. In bimanual nonprehensile manipulation, GPU-friendly local mode expansion achieves higher planning success than the tested adaptive tree search as the mode space grows. These results demonstrate that broad explicit mode evaluation provides a simple yet effective alternative for CRMP.

We study how far a simple statistical pipeline can go on univariate time series anomaly detection under a strict selection protocol. The method extracts a small pool of statistics over sliding windows, scores each window with a transductive robust (MAD) model, and selects a feature subset per domain on a held-out tuning split. On TSB-AD-U it reaches $0.529$ per-series VUS-PR, above the best neural ($0.45$) and statistical ($0.44$) entries on the public leaderboard and within $0.06$ of the strongest pretrained foundation model, several of which use more supervision than ours. Ablations locate the cause: across three selection strategies and a hindsight oracle the score moves by $0.031$, and across the aggregation grid by $0.096$, while changing the candidate pool moves it by $0.226$. The candidate pool sets the ceiling; the search over it is second-order. We therefore generate a pool per domain by prompting a multimodal LLM with in-context example windows from that domain. The generated pools match the hand-crafted one under matched selection, and the two cover different domains: selecting over their union improves on the generated pool in all twelve generator-seed pairs and lifts the pipeline to $0.588$, matching the performance of the best entry on the leaderboard.

Traditional unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are designed to flag or localise deviations from a normative distribution, ignoring the underlying generative mechanisms of the anomalies. Yet the nature of an anomaly is often as important as its presence. We reformulate UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem, in which the objective is to infer the most probable corruption responsible for each observation. Our framework yields a probabilistic anomaly score as the energy of the inferred corruption parameters, and serves as a principled recipe for developing new UAD algorithms. We derive several existing methods as instances of the general framework, each corresponding to the same energy score under different modelling choices. Experimentally, we study the framework's components in a controlled setting, and improve object-class AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset by 2.3% by adapting the underlying corruption model. Finally, we validate the framework on a brain MRI benchmark, achieving strong detection performance while producing estimates of pathology intensity, bias, and geometry. Code is available at https://github.com/jgmyles/inverse-uad.

Previous research suggests that the congruency between common VR input devices - such as controllers or hand tracking - and their visual representations (e.g., hand or controller avatars) influences user experience and performance. However, the specific effects of input-avatar combinations remain underexplored. We study the effects of common input devices (hand tracking and controllers) and visual representations (hand and controller avatars) on performance and perceived success in target acquisition tasks. We included both grasping and pinching gestures across 16 combinations of input, avatar, and target size. Results indicate that hand tracking benefits from any form of visual representation - even when mismatched - achieving up to 5.8% greater accuracy compared to having no avatar, likely due to its reliance on visual feedback in the absence of a physical prop. Controllers were generally preferred and offered faster task completion. However, mismatched avatars had a stronger negative effect with controllers, particularly when the virtual gesture did not align with the physical action, leading to a 5.6% drop in accuracy compared to the matched condition - suggesting that inaccurate feedback can be more disruptive than having no avatar feedback at all.

Architectures with periodic activation functions have already been shown to be beneficial in comparison to monotonic counterparts for a wide range of applications of physics-informed neural networks. Here, we investigate a network architecture which uses the complex exponential function, generating pairs of sine and cosine outputs as activation functions. Testing it against comparable, sine-activated multi-layer perceptrons for the task of temperature reconstruction from sparse velocity data for cubic Rayleigh-Bénard convection reveals significant improvements in the reconstruction quality without a substantial increase in computational cost per training step. Vice versa, the improved architecture enables reaching similar reconstruction qualities for a fraction of the expense. Analyzing the mathematical structure of these networks points to the improvements being rooted in the property of passing both a sine and cosine function forward. This way, the subsequent layer is able to adapt the phase of the provided latent periodic functions, and doing it individually for each of its neurons.

Defenses against jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) operate at different pipeline stages, such as input modification or output guard, but it remains unclear which defenses to deploy at each stage and how to combine them. Prior empirical studies, fragmented by inconsistent attack-success-rate definitions and experimental settings, have evaluated defenses largely in isolation. Here we present the first systematic study, to our knowledge, of defense combinations both within and across pipeline stages, under a consistent threat model of direct, black-box, single-turn attacks. Our decision framework standardizes evaluation through a principled attack-success-rate formulation with controlled query budgets, together with explicit fairness rules. Across 19 attacks and 15 defenses, we find that no single defense is universally best, but well-chosen combinations achieve substantial safety with minimal utility degradation, yielding practical recommendations for layered defense pipelines.

Navigating toward human callers is an important capability for rescue robots operating where visual contact is degraded or occluded. We present AcousticDiffusion, a semantically conditioned, audio-guided diffusion policy for human-directed navigation. A frozen pretrained audio recognizer processes 10.24 s windows, with speech gating and distress-aware prioritization converting recognition outputs into source-level navigation roles. Microphone-array direction-of-arrival measurements are recursively integrated into a robot-centric Bayesian bird's-eye-view belief field. Ego-motion compensation aligns successive observations, progressively constraining source position while preserving bearing-induced range uncertainty. The semantic belief, recent acoustic observations, audio features, and robot state condition a diffusion model that generates waypoint trajectories. On a synthetic-navigation validation set using recorded audio, AcousticDiffusion achieves a mean end-point bearing error of 11.20 degrees, with 91.78% of trajectories aligned within 30 degrees of the caller. Distractor rejection ranges from 89.20% to 98.99%, and the policy favors a HELP-designated caller over a competing speaker in 91.07% of windows. Deployed online on a ZSL-1 quadruped without additional retraining, it achieves a mean bearing error of 64.9 degrees, compared with 98.2 degrees for A* and 90.4 degrees for RRT, with a mean planner compute time of 6.07 ms. Despite imperfect acoustic localization, the reported mean final source distance is reduced from 3.96 m for the classical planners using ODAS-derived (Open embedded Audition System) guidance to 2.48 m, a 37.4% improvement. These results demonstrate the framework's ability to translate uncertain acoustic observations into closer approaches to human callers.

As deep learning models continue to advance, knowledge tracing models have achieved higher accuracy. However, these gains come at the cost of reduced interpretability, which is crucial for practitioners in educational settings to adopt new methodologies. Additionally, deep learning models are prone to overfitting, particularly when dealing with the small datasets that are common in educational applications. In this paper, we propose a novel regularization technique designed to enhance the robustness of deep-learning-based knowledge tracing models, while simultaneously improving their interpretability. Our method addresses both the interpretability and overfitting challenges, making it more feasible for real-world educational applications.

As services are increasingly centralized in public clouds, understanding the nature of Internet Background Radiation (IBR) hitting these particular environments is an important part of understanding their overall security posture. Classical network telescopes, long the cornerstone of IBR research, face hurdles here: their surface area is shrinking, and their well-known address ranges are easily avoided. We present a multi-cloud view of IBR in this paper. We deploy a passive, distributed network telescope with 336 IPs across five major cloud providers. We compare traffic from our cloud telescope with data from two classical telescopes, a large well-known (/9 + /10) and a small unknown /16, to analyze observational biases. To enable a fair comparison across very different telescope sizes, we tune a scan detection algorithm to determine appropriate thresholds. Our findings reveal that IBR in the cloud is strongly provider-dependent rather than geography-dependent, highlighting the necessity of multi-cloud deployments for comprehensive visibility of IBR in the cloud. Our cloud telescope also captures a distinct set of scanners, confirming that scanning activity is not uniform across the IPv4 space, and we confirm that small, distributed telescopes are ill-suited for observing random events like DDoS backscatter. Our work underscores that monitoring must evolve beyond classical telescopes to include diverse, multi-cloud vantage points to accurately capture IBR.

Most multilingual dysarthria-severity systems either train on a single aetiology-language pair or pool heterogeneous aetiologies into one label space. We test that pooling assumption with four matched HuBERT-base contrastive embedding models under a shared backbone, training recipe, corpus registry and held-out evaluation: one mixed-aetiology baseline and three aetiology-specific models for cerebral palsy (CP), Parkinson's disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Training combines clinically labelled speech with ordinal pseudo-labels from a training-free phonological profiling method [1], [2]. On speaker-disjoint, leakage-filtered held-out subsets, the per-aetiology models outperform the mixed baseline across all three target aetiologies: CP (macro F1 0.829 vs 0.676, +22.6 % relative), PD (0.715 vs 0.511, +40.0 %) and ALS (0.788 vs 0.596, +32.3 %). On CP, adding 144 SAP and 44 CDSD pseudo-labelled speakers lifts macro F1 from 0.786 to 0.829 over a clinical-only CP model (+4.3 percentage points). Training data span three to seven languages per aetiology. We position this as a controlled comparison of label-space design choices and discuss pseudo-label calibration, split hygiene, and confidence-thresholded deployment as important limitations for future work.

A pretrained robot foundation policy may execute most of a long-horizon task yet repeatedly fail at a few critical subtasks. Collecting additional full-task demonstrations for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) requires operators to repeat behaviors the policy already performs well. Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning offers a promising path to bridge this gap, but existing approaches struggle to solve long-horizon tasks using only sparse rewards. We present PARTS (Policy Adaptation with RL on Targeted Subtasks), a real-world subtask RL framework that concentrates practice at these bottlenecks while allowing training rollouts to proceed with minimal human intervention. The frozen pretrained policy supplies nominal actions throughout execution, while agent-generated selectors and success verifiers activate residual corrections and provide local outcome rewards. These rewards support learning from successful subtasks even when complete-task successes are scarce. Training combines online RL with success-reweighted retraining, and each retrained residual policy is redeployed to collect further experience. Humans identify bottlenecks during setup and perform physical resets when needed. On bimanual YAM and single-arm Franka tasks, PARTS improves complete-task success from 32% to 61% and from 50% to 95%, respectively, using tens of minutes of real-world RL rollouts per task on average. Compared with existing real-world RL fine-tuning methods, PARTS raises full-task success by more than 25% under the same robot-rollout budget while requiring less human involvement.

Learned world models may have compact interventions even when their recurrent state is high-dimensional, but it is unclear what happens to such a correction after it enters the model. We study this question in a controlled recurrent world model where prior work identified a checkpoint-specific rank-4 interface for one-shot counterfactual velocity interventions. The correction rapidly leaves this fixed entry subspace during autonomous rollout. Nevertheless, a low-rank image obtained by transporting the entry directions through the factual recurrent Jacobian chain continues to capture most of the nonlinear correction. Restarts using the tangent-predicted correction preserve substantial counterfactual future function. This transport/function pattern recurs across independently trained structured-GRU models and a parameter-matched LSTM initialized with a privileged compact correction. We further characterize a finite-horizon future-response operator over the full recurrent carrier. Patching shifts its leading future-sensitive directions toward the matched native-counterfactual organization, and the local operator accurately ranks finite perturbation effects over the registered direction panels at the patched and native-counterfactual basepoints. A separate full-amplitude assay finds substantial factual-endpoint tangent residuals and supports response reconfiguration in two of three checkpoints. Together, these results show that compact intervention structure can persist as a moving, state-dependent local geometry embedded in high-dimensional recurrent dynamics, without implying a fixed or dynamically closed low-dimensional state.

The satisfiability problem for word equations asks whether variables can be replaced by words so that the two sides become equal. For regular word equations, in which each variable occurs at most once on each side, satisfiability is NP-complete. For general quadratic word equations, in which each variable occurs at most twice in total, satisfiability is NP-hard, but its membership in NP remains open. We consider an intermediate class: quadratic word equations with a linear side, where each variable occurs at most once on one designated side. We show that the Nielsen graph of an equation $U=V$ in this class, with total length $N=|U|+|V|$, has diameter $O(N^{12})$, measured over reachable pairs of vertices. Together with the known NP-hardness for regular word equations, this result establishes NP-completeness of satisfiability for this class. We also show that each strongly connected component is isomorphic to the length-preserving reachability graph of a regular equation, and that the condensation graph has depth at most $|U|+2|V|$.For arbitrary quadratic word equations, we further show that Nielsen paths can be shortened to a length polynomial in the equation size and the number of prefix operations between variables repeated on opposite sides. This yields NP membership for subclasses defined by variable occurrence arrangements.

3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds faces a fundamental dilemma: voxel-based methods achieve efficiency at the cost of geometric quantization, while point-based methods preserve fidelity but suffer from prohibitive computational bottlenecks. Specifically, point-based architectures are crippled by slow downsampling strategies (e.g., FPS) and expensive dynamic neighbor queries (e.g., k-NN) coupled with costly continuous interactions. To tackle these systemic inefficiencies, we propose PointLAM, a highly efficient and powerful point-based architecture driven by two synergistic innovations. First, to resolve the downsampling bottleneck, we develop the Laplacian Point Sampler (LPS). LPS employs an implicit discrete Laplacian high-pass filter and Doubly Sorted Sampling to achieve fast, structure-aware foreground preservation. Second, to overcome local modeling latency, we design the Local Hadamard Aggregator (LHA). LHA decouples spatial indexing from feature representation using transient grids, and replaces complex continuous interactions with a Hadamard Gating mechanism for topology-aware, attentive modulation. By coupling this local gating with Bi-Directional Mamba (BDM) layers for global sequence modeling, we formulate the Local Attentive Mamba (LAM) block. Powered by this architecture, PointLAM achieves competitive performance on nuScenes and Waymo for point-based detectors. It rivals highly optimized voxel competitors while requiring a fraction of the computational footprint, demonstrating marked superiority in detecting small instances and handling extreme sparsity. Project page: https://pointlam.github.io/.

This paper presents a novel online coverage path planning (CPP) algorithm, called TRACE, for real-time coverage of unknown environments. TRACE is built upon a hierarchical coverage tree that provides a global representation of the evolving connectivity of the uncovered space. As the environment is incrementally revealed and covered, newly discovered obstacles and covered cells may fragment the remaining uncovered space into disconnected regions. TRACE recursively expands the corresponding tree nodes to explicitly represent these regions and organize them for subsequent coverage planning. Based on the updated tree, an incremental global tour is maintained to guide the coverage process. TRACE locally refines only the affected portions while preserving the visiting order of unchanged regions, thereby reducing the computational burden of global replanning and maintaining a consistent coverage progression. Guided by the global tour, a local planner generates back-and-forth coverage paths and switches to global-tour-aware planning to efficiently complete the target regions. Theoretical analysis establishes the computational complexity and complete coverage property of TRACE, and derives an approximation bound for the incremental global tour refinement. The performance of TRACE is evaluated through extensive high-fidelity simulations and real-robot experiments using a mobile robot. Comparative evaluations against six existing CPP methods demonstrate significant improvements in coverage time, path length, overlap ratio, and number of turns.

Computational notebooks make problem-solving visible, but typically only one notebook at a time. Meanwhile, in data science platforms like Kaggle, one competition can accumulate hundreds of notebooks. Effective collection-level analysis requires characterizing recurring solution patterns across all notebooks, as well as isolating specific notebooks for closer examination and learning. However, standard notebooks provide no common basis for this. Their workflows are nonlinear, cells declare no intent, and identical code can serve different ends, leaving hundreds of notebooks as separate documents. In this paper, we present Notrix, an interactive visual analytics tool for profiling hundreds of notebooks as one collection. Inspired by a formative study (N = 11), Notrix classifies every cell into one of thirteen machine learning (ML) stages, turning each notebook into a stage sequence, and clusters those sequences by structure rather than by code. To keep the representation constant as the scope narrows from the whole collection to a single cell, Notrix features three coordinated views—Workflow, Structural Matrix, and Detail—that appear at all four levels of granularity. In a within-subject study (N = 17) using two Kaggle collections of over 400 notebooks each, we observed participants answered questions about all notebooks more accurately with Notrix (median 88% vs. 50%) while opening 80% fewer notebooks per minute. Notably, four of the fourteen answered it without opening a single notebook (interaction logs, N = 14). Participants also reported significantly lower mental demand, temporal demand, and stress with Notrix (Holm-Bonferroni adjusted).

Modern AI workloads increasingly rely on scale across architectures that interconnect multiple datacenters to form a single "AI factory", overcoming the power and cooling constraints of individual sites. However, extending Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) across wide area networks (WANs) introduces fundamental challenges: multi-path packet reordering, high latency, and packet loss that severely degrade performance. While erasure coding (EC) has emerged as a promising mechanism for loss recovery, its effectiveness critically depends on efficient packet arrival tracking implemented in hardware. We present COmpact Multi-path Erasure-coded Tracking (COMET), the first fully hardware-offloaded packet-arrival tracking design implemented on an FPGA-based network interface card (NIC) for multi-path RDMA over lossy WANs. COMET employs a scalable cache-based architecture that supports operation at high link rates. Our evaluation shows that COMET sustains line rate operation at 400 Gbps and beyond. Critically, COMET decouples on-chip memory footprint from link Bandwidth-Delay Product (BDP), and its cache-based architecture (COMET Cache) enables supporting 6 times more concurrent connections than state-of-the-art (SOTA) SoC-based designs. These results demonstrate that scalable, fully hardware-offloaded packet-arrival tracking is practical on FPGA-based NICs at current data rates, and its architectural scalability extends to emerging 1.6 Tbps NICs and beyond.

Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can replace human annotators in preference-based reward learning, but sequential API requests and single-environment data collection make training slow and costly. We present RAPID (Reward learning with Adaptive Parallel Image Diversity), a system that couples GPU-parallel rollout with data-aware policy updates, single-request preference labeling, automatic reward stabilization, and representative image sampling. We evaluate these components on five Franka Panda manipulation tasks in IsaacLab. Parallel rollout and adaptive updates provide the first substantial reduction in training time: under matched two-stage prompting, mean runtime falls from 9.18 to 3.13 hours. With all RAPID components enabled, training completes in 1.15 hours using 896 rather than 19,840 API calls per run, and aggregate final success rises from 86.3% to 98.7%. This represents an 8.0$\times$ end-to-end speedup and a 95.5% reduction in API usage. An offline evaluation with Gemma~3 12B and GPT-4.1 mini demonstrates that single-request prompting reduces labeling latency and cost across both models. Code is available at: https://github.com/rapid-vlm/rapid-vlm-rl.