Papers

We developed an anatomy-aware deep learning framework to synthesize post-contrast breast MRI from pre-contrast images, emphasizing tumor and background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) regions. This retrospective study included 649 patients with 6,251 paired pre-contrast and post-contrast images. The framework integrates breast mask consistency, lesion-region supervision, and BPE-region supervision into an image-to-image translation model. Evaluation included quantitative image quality metrics, a reader study with two breast radiologists, and downstream Ki-67 classification. The proposed method outperformed Pix2Pix, Pix2PixHD, diffusion-based synthesis, and mask-supervised baselines in whole-image and regional evaluations. Ki-67 classification showed no statistically significant performance differences across real- and synthetic-image training and testing settings, although this does not establish equivalence. These findings suggest that anatomy-aware supervision improves synthesis fidelity and support further investigation of synthetic post-contrast MRI for contrast-free imaging workflows.

Legal contracts are structurally complex documents in which contradictions may emerge across distant and interconnected provisions. Although large language models (LLMs) improve legal language understanding, contradiction analysis remains a human-centered and evidence-grounded review task. We present ContraVis, a visual analytics system for human-in-the-loop contradiction analysis in legal contracts. The system models contracts as typed paragraph graphs that combine explicit contractual references with semantic relationships between paragraphs. This graph plays a dual role: it conditions LLM reasoning and serves as the interactive representation the analyst explores, keeping model context and human inspection aligned across coordinated views. In a controlled comparison, graph-conditioned reasoning recovered more injected contradictions than standalone LLM analysis as contract length grew, while surfacing additional candidates for analyst validation. A formative study with contract-domain lawyers indicated that in-context evidence comparison supported contradiction validation, and we distill design implications for evidence-grounded, LLM-assisted document review.

Target-oriented face de-identification models aim to anonymize the identity of a target individual across different images or video frames, such that the target can no longer be reliably recognized, while maintaining key characteristics of the visual data. Such models commonly leverage generative encoder-decoder architectures to manipulate facial appearances, enabling them to produce realistic high-fidelity de-identification results, while ensuring considerable attribute-retention capabilities. However, target-oriented models also carry the risk of inadvertently preserving subtle identity cues, making them (potentially) reversible and susceptible to reconstruction attacks. To address this problem, we introduce in this paper a novel (robust) face de-identification approach, called HYDRO, that combines target-oriented models with a dedicated diffusion process specifically designed to destroy any imperceptible information that may allow learning to reverse the de-identification procedure. HYDRO first de-identifies the given face image, injects noise into the de-identification result to impede reconstruction, and then applies a diffusion-based recovery step to improve fidelity and minimize the impact of the noising process on the data characteristics. To further improve image fidelity and better retain gaze directions, a novel Eye Similarity Discriminator (ESD) is also introduced and incorporated it into the training of HYDRO. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate that HYDRO exhibits state-of-the-art (SOTA) fidelity and attribute-retention capabilities, while being the only target-oriented method resilient against reconstruction attacks. In comparison to multiple SOTA competitors, HYDRO reduces the success of reconstruction attacks by 85.7% on average.

Three adaptive global tracking controllers for fully actuated Euler-Lagrange systems, with verifiable performance improvement over existing designs, are reported in this letter. Two of these controllers ensure global exponential convergence under a weak interval excitation condition. Besides, one of the proposed controllers features a simple adaptive PID-like structure that-unlike classical solutions-avoids the need for additional filtering. We adopt a composite adaptation architecture, invoke a novel parameterization of the system dynamics and use a high performance estimation scheme recently introduced in the literature. Real-time experiments and a comparative study with a learning-based adaptive controller on a two-degrees-of-freedom manipulator arm illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.

Large language models are increasingly applied to high-risk domains such as law, yet complex legal reasoning remains limited by two structural challenges. First, existing RAG and GraphRAG methods emphasize lexical or semantic similarity while overlooking normative relations among legal provisions. Second, vanilla Chain-of-Thought prompting may generate plausible rationales without enforcing the normative structure of legal reasoning. To deal with the bottleneck of pipelines in the legal reasoning domain, we propose LEGO, a dual-module framework that synergizes Legal Expert GraphRAG and expert Chain-of-thought for complex legal reasoning. ExpertGraphRAG uses an expert-annotated civil code graph encoding these normative relations with a greedy normative-coverage retrieval algorithm to dynamically extract instance-specific provision subgraphs, while ExpertCoT organizes the retrieved provisions and case facts into structured Provision-Fact-Conclusion reasoning. With a Qwen3-8B backbone, LEGO achieves 40.53% exact-match accuracy on LawExamQA_Civil, outperforming the evaluated RAG and CoT baselines and performing comparably to the evaluated larger models, while remaining robust on multi-hop questions. It also achieves the best results among the evaluated baselines on the open-ended benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm the individual and complementary contributions of both modules, demonstrating LEGO's effectiveness in improving LLMs' complex legal reasoning ability. Code and dataset can be found in the link: https://github.com/BLK-WHT/LEGO

We study the long-time behavior of Wasserstein gradient flows for interaction energies \[ \mathsf E[\mu] = \frac12\iint_{M\times M}K(x,y)\,\mathrm d\mu(x)\,\mathrm d\mu(y) \] on a closed manifold $M$. For kernels diagonal in a Laplace eigenbasis with nonnegative spectral coefficients, we prove a differential inequality relating the relative entropy to the energy gap. Consequently, for any nonnegative initial density $u_0\in L^p(M)$, $p>1$, the energy gap is integrable in time and satisfies \[ \mathsf E[\mu_t]-\mathsf E_{\min}=o(t^{-1}). \] If all spectral coefficients are positive, the flow converges weakly to the constant measure. These interaction energies need not be geodesically convex in Wasserstein space, and the associated flows contain no diffusion; their global convergence therefore does not follow from standard Wasserstein gradient flow theory. The kernels covered by our results include zonal kernels on spheres, kernels arising in transformer models, regularized Riesz kernels, and inverse fractional Laplacian kernels. We also investigate the sharpness of the $o(t^{-1})$ rate. For any smooth kernel in this class with infinitely many positive spectral coefficients and any $\delta>0$, we construct a solution of the linearized flow whose energy is comparable to $t^{-1-\delta}$ along a sequence of times tending to infinity. Moreover, for any $\delta>0$, by choosing a suitable inverse fractional Laplacian kernel on the flat torus, we construct an exact solution of the nonlinear Wasserstein gradient flow whose energy is comparable to $t^{-1-\delta}$. The nonlinear construction is based on uniform-in-time estimates for the evolution of the dyadic Fourier coefficient blocks and a blockwise energy-persistence argument. These estimates also yield a uniform-in-time quantitative comparison between the nonlinear Wasserstein gradient flow and its linearization.

We present a laser-tracker-assisted hand-eye calibration method for camera-equipped mobile robots. The method combines laser-tracker-based 3D metrology with camera-based 2D observations. Building on our previous laser-tracker-assisted camera-to-robot calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots, we present a generalized formulation for calibrating the camera pose in the coordinate system of tracker-localized mobile robots. The new approach relaxes assumptions of our previous method on robot and camera configuration by chaining multiple calibration targets resulting in a more general approach supporting various camera-equipped mobile robot systems.

We focus on the problem of rearranging multiple objects within a constrained workspace via pushing using a team of car-like robots. While the use of multiple robots offers the potential for more efficient execution, the need for conflict resolution and the kinematic constraints arising from physics, robot design, and the workspace boundary make this problem especially challenging. Our key insight is that by exploiting the structure introduced by the car-like kinematics of the domain, we could relax the problem into an ordered assignment of Dubins curves to robots. To this end, we introduce MultiPush, a reinforcement-learning based framework that jointly determines an efficient schedule of pushing tasks and their allocation to available robots by leveraging a constraint-aware traversability graph. Across extensive simulated trials with up to 14 objects and teams of two to four robots, MultiPush reduces the makespan by up to 16% compared to the baselines while requiring up to 2.9 times faster planning time. We demonstrate MultiPush on a real-world scenario involving the rearrangement of 12 objects by two and three robots (1/10-scale racecars) in a constrained space.

Runway walking requires coordinated control of posture, stride, foot placement, and whole-body motion to effectively present clothing and convey a distinctive style. However, humanoid robots used in fashion shows typically rely on locomotion policies optimized primarily for stability and walking speed, limiting their ability to reproduce expressive, human-like runway motions. In this work, we present an end-to-end framework that transforms monocular runway videos into deployable humanoid locomotion policies through motion recovery, robot retargeting, motion correction, policy training, simulation-based evaluation, and physical deployment. We evaluate the proposed framework on the Booster K1 humanoid robot using runway-style catwalk motions. The learned policy completed every physical trial without falling, while reproducing the characteristic narrow foot placement and coordinated movement of the legs, torso, and arms. The results demonstrate that our proposed training framework enables the Booster K1 to perform stable and expressive catwalk motions, highlighting its potential for humanoid robotic applications in fashion shows and other performance-oriented scenarios.

We investigate humanoid locomotion with a fly-inspired recurrent controller and identify the pathways supporting its deployed behavior. The controller couples 3,609 continuous neural states to a simulated Unitree G1 through body-observation projections, a motor-neuron-labelled readout, and joint servos. We formulate this neural-body feedback system and evaluate a fixed checkpoint across seven terrain instances, three speeds, and three initial yaw offsets. It completes 61/63 conditions under a survival-and-forward-progress criterion; a privileged reference completes 62/63. At nominal yaw, resetting the recurrent motor state before every policy call changes success from 19/21 to 0/21. Conversely, depth and upstream-state substitutions at 252 recorded states leave actions unchanged, with zero measured descending output throughout the intact rollouts. Recorded trajectories and state-matched images connect these findings to sustained movement, lateral drift, and termination events. The study characterizes an embodied recurrent control system whose tested locomotion is supported by direct body-and-command input and carried motor state, providing a concrete basis for subsequent comparisons of circuit structure and control resources.

In the chip testing problem, we are given $n$ chips, strictly more than half of which are good. Chips can test one another in pairs; a good chip always reports the status of the other chip correctly, whereas a bad chip may report arbitrarily and adversarially. The goal is to identify a single chip that is guaranteed to be good. The problem originates in system-level fault diagnosis and is closely related to the "knights and spies" puzzle. The standard textbook solution is a halving recursion that tests disjoint pairs in rounds and keeps one chip from each consistent pair. We present the Backtracking Candidate Elimination (BCE) algorithm, a sequential alternative that scans the chips once while maintaining a current candidate and a stack of retained chips. Every chip is tested at most once as the incoming chip; when a test is inconclusive the candidate and the incoming chip are discarded together, and the algorithm backtracks to the most recently retained chip. BCE uses at most $n-1$ tests and $O(n)$ time, needs no parity case analysis, and works online. Its correctness follows from two invariants: the retained chips all have the same type, and every discarded pair contains at least one bad chip. We explain how BCE can be viewed as the Boyer-Moore majority vote algorithm with its counter replaced by a stack of physical witnesses, and why that replacement is needed. We also give an early termination rule and a variant for the weaker model of one-directional tests.

Natural Visibility Graph (NVG)-based representations provide a promising approach for capturing structural patterns in sequential network traffic. However, whether different cyber-attack classes exhibit distinctive topological signatures in such representations remains insufficiently understood. This study investigates the discriminative and structural characteristics of NVG-based network traffic representations using the CSE-CIC-IDS2018 dataset. Seventy-six numerical traffic features were independently transformed into NVGs within overlapping frames of 40 observations, and ten graph-theoretic metrics were extracted from each graph, resulting in 760 topological descriptors per frame. The discriminative capability of these representations was evaluated using a multi-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) with stratified five-fold cross-validation. The model achieved an average accuracy of 96.20% and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.9566. To characterize class-specific topological differences, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were combined with Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate correction and effect-size measures. Of the 10,640 attack-versus-benign comparisons, 7,777 (73.1%) remained statistically significant after FDR correction, with 4,844 exhibiting large Cliff's delta effects. The strongest global differences were predominantly associated with backward-traffic and packet-length-related features combined with connectivity, clustering, and centrality measures. These findings indicate that NVG-derived representations can provide strong discriminative capability while revealing class-dependent topological patterns associated with different cyber-attack classes.

Hexapod robots can achieve static stability with fewer actuated joints than bipeds or quadrupeds, yet many platforms still use 3-DOF legs, increasing weight and continuous torque requirement with limited gain in locomotion capability on flat, inclined and moderately rough terrains. We release Spiderbot, an open-source hexapod that uses a 4-bar linkage with a passive spring to mechanically support body weight, with a 2-DOF per-leg design that substantially reduces energy consumption. This mechanism substantially offloads gravitational torque during standing stance consuming only 1.5W (reduction of over 90% over the unsprung version and up to 96% over other similar hexapods). The passive spring compensation extends to payloads of up to 3.25kg with no additional torque requirements. The platform enables long-duration deployments on a modest battery budget and costs under \$400, making it suitable for large-scale multi-agent experiments. We validate the locomotion capabilities of the platform with an RL policy trained in mjlab, including successful sim-to-real transfer, despite the complexity of the mechanism. The platform is evaluated on flat and rough terrains, slope up to $15^\circ$ and step obstacles. We release all the CAD files, assembling instructions, and full training and deployment code along with the model checkpoints at https://erc-bpgc.github.io/SpiderBot/.

For multimodal large language models, when images or speech conflict with accompanying text, measured text reliance can entangle modality preference with evidence position. Earlier studies of text bias often used a fixed evidence order or moved task instructions with the evidence, leaving the contribution of order unclear. In this paper, we use a paired comparison that keeps the instructions and evidence content fixed and swaps only the positions of the two sources to quantify this potential influence. Across vision and speech models, placing an image or recording after conflicting text consistently shifts answers toward its content. We also revisit previous studies and analyze why their experimental settings can lead to misleading conclusions. These findings reveal cross-modal evidence noncommutativity: the same evidence can lead to different judgments when its order changes, and placing perceptual evidence later can increase the model's reliance on its content.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) play an increasingly important role in numerous applications ranging from traditional knowledge representation to serving as memory for LLMs to support downstream tasks. However, their construction is labor-intensive; thus, in recent years, numerous approaches for automizing this process have been proposed. Compared to the popularity of construction approaches that focus on textual input data, methods for semi-structured inputs remain underrepresented and as a result, no comprehensive benchmark and evaluation suite exists to judge the quality of mapping predictions and generated KGs. This is problematic, as a KG's quality has direct influence on the downstream applications it supports and thus, strong evaluation mechanisms for their construction are urgently needed. In this work, we thus focus on the evaluation of KG construction from semi-structured data and present a benchmark and evaluation pipeline for KG construction that combines the quality dimensions (1) syntactic validity, (2) semantic accuracy, (3) consistency, (4) conciseness, (5) completeness, and (6) pragmatic quality measured on a KG's ability to provide answers to competency questions. This work contributes a realistic task definition, extends current state of the art evaluation frameworks, allows evaluation of systems that predict mappings and RDF data alike, and combines evaluation of both KG construction and downstream usage. We provide a comprehensive metrics suite, provide ten expert-curated datasets from seven domains, and showcase evaluation using two reference systems.

We describe deploying imaging AI at six hospitals through PACS-AI, an open self-hosted platform. The binding constraint is not model accuracy but infrastructure to route studies, display results, capture feedback, and audit what runs. At one center, angiography models completed 515 of 607 jobs (84.8%); failures reflected absent diagnostic views, and 78.1% of 638 clinician ratings were positive. Publishing honest readiness levels for every model is itself a governance practice.

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a flexible framework for learning unknown functions from noisy measurements while quantifying predictive uncertainty, making them well suited for estimation in multi-agent systems. However, when measurements are collected by multiple agents, maintaining a unified GP model without centralized processing requires efficient distributed algorithms that can operate using local measurements and communication with neighboring agents. In this work, we develop two distributed recursive GP (RGP) algorithms for multi-output GP regression: ADMM-RGP and PDMM-RGP. We analyze the stability and convergence of both algorithms and develop parameter selection strategies to accelerate convergence, thus reducing the communication burden. The proposed methods are validated on a real-world multi-output wind dataset, and their convergence behavior is examined across communication graphs with varying connectivity. Numerical experiments demonstrate that ADMM-RGP and PDMM-RGP can significantly reduce communication relative to the state of the art, while maintaining comparable estimation accuracy and network-wide consensus.

We study online inverse linear optimization with a fixed unknown linear utility: in each round, an environment presents a compact action set, the learner recommends an action from it, and the environment returns an action that maximizes the utility over the same set. When the utility vector and the actions lie in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean unit ball, we give a randomized algorithm whose regret—the cumulative utility shortfall relative to optimal actions—is $O(\sqrt d)$ in expectation for every time horizon, without knowledge of the horizon. The dependence on $d$ is optimal up to a constant factor by the known $\Omega(\sqrt d)$ lower bound for horizons $T\ge d$. Our algorithm maintains matrix multiplicative weights on polynomial feature spaces at geometrically spaced scales. It selects a recommendation distribution by solving a linear program and updates its score matrices by comparing the available actions with the feedback action. With rational oracle outputs and feedback actions, an implementation computable relative to a linear-optimization oracle preserves the $O(\sqrt d)$ regret bound. Whether the same rate is attainable with running time polynomial in the dimension, horizon, and input length remains open.

Offline top-k evaluation often ranks one held-out relevant item together with sampled negatives. When several candidates receive exactly the same score, the tie-breaking rule becomes part of the ranking. A common implementation stores the relevant item first and then applies a stable sort, which preserves input order among equal scores; the relevant item therefore wins every tie. We call an evaluator row-order invariant when permuting the input candidates without changing their identities, labels, or scores leaves the final ranking unchanged. We audit this property by holding candidates and scores fixed and changing only the tie-breaking rule. On 30,000 Amazon Beauty & Personal Care rows, NDCG@10 for a rating-weighted attribute-overlap score is 0.85 under input-order tie-breaking. A deterministic hash tie-break based on user and item IDs lowers it to 0.17. The exact expectation under uniform random tie-breaking closely matches the mean over 100 independent hash seeds, while a residualized attribute score with few exact ties is nearly unchanged. MovieLens Tag Genome shows the same pattern for an attribute-overlap score, whereas item popularity is nearly unchanged. We derive expected Hit Rate and NDCG at cutoff k when the relevant item is randomly ordered among candidates with the same score, and we provide a practical reporting checklist. The same issue can occur in sampled or full-catalog evaluation whenever exact ties affect top-k membership or rank.

Learned context planning selects evidence atoms before an answer model reasons over them. We test whether this learned selection improves long-context multiple-choice QA after strong retrieval, routing, budgeted-selector, and reranking controls. Our primary diagnostic uses all 503 LongBench-v2 MCQ questions with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. The planner is SFT-trained on outcome-selected traces from 140 training and 28 development questions; because the 503-question analysis includes those questions, it is partly transductive. At an 18k-character budget, anchored hybrid retrieval reaches 36.18% accuracy and BM25 reaches 35.98%, while the best direct planner-guided method reaches 34.19%. On the untouched 152-question test split, anchored hybrid remains higher (42.11% versus 36.84%). Leakage-safe routers cannot convert a large oracle gap. Under tight budgets, the best planner is ahead by only 0.40 points at 6k and loses at 9k; planner-guided reranking has a +1.79-point estimate at 6k with a paired interval crossing zero and ties the control at 9k. Packing-order and score-flatness analyses did not identify a stable mechanism. Under this setup, learned planning is a weak relevance signal rather than a replacement for strong retrieval.

Reproduction studies can produce mixed outcomes. Reported values may differ while the ordering of the compared methods remains the same, a result may hold only under some experimental conditions, or a released implementation may fail to reproduce a result that the model can still reach. The terms repeatability, reproducibility, and replicability describe how a follow-up study relates to the original experiment, but not which parts of the original claim are supported by the new results. We introduce claim calibration as a way of stating the strongest claim supported by a follow-up study, together with the conditions under which it holds and the parts that remain untested. We apply this perspective to five original–follow-up paper pairs from recommender-systems research. The cases show that agreement in numerical values, method rankings, statistical results, and overall conclusions does not always coincide, and that follow-up studies often support only part of the original claim. Based on these observations, we propose a Claim Evidence Profile for reporting the original claim, its scope, the reproduction target, the reported results, the calibrated claim, and the parts of the original claim that remain unresolved.

Training Universal Differential Equations (UDEs) traditionally relies on backpropagating through numerical ODE solvers, creating memory footprints far exceeding the capabilities of edge microcontrollers. We present Lie-Taylor jet matching, a solver-free training framework that fits a hybrid vector field directly to the first and second time-derivatives of observed system states. These derivatives, the truncated Lie-Taylor jet, are estimated online via Savitzky-Golay filtering, yielding fully analytic gradients without automatic differentiation software. We evaluate whether eliminating the solver compromises accuracy against a conventional baseline (fixed-step RK4 integration, multiple shooting, exact discrete adjoints, Adam) sharing identical dynamics, noise models, network architectures, and metrics. While naive derivative matching degrades under sensor noise, our noise-adaptive mechanisms close and reverse this gap: full-rate phase-shifted sampling, a reservoir buffer, cosine-annealed optimization with weight averaging, on-device noise estimation, and polynomial-misfit quality gating. On a damped pendulum and chaotic double pendulum, our method matches or exceeds baseline accuracy at matched data windows and recovers unmodeled damping coefficients. Across noise levels from 0% to 5%, it attains a geometric-mean relative field error of 0.65x that of the baseline within 108 kB of static memory, compared with megabytes of solver tape. On an ESP32 microcontroller, the on-device run reaches a field error of 0.0020 and recovers the damping coefficient to c = 0.400 (true 0.400) within 61.3 kB of static memory and 7.24 ms per update (18.1% duty cycle at 25 Hz), confirming real-time on-device training is feasible without a numerical solver.

Providing students with experience from chip specification to fabricated silicon can strengthen chip-design education, but integrating tapeout into regular teaching is difficult to scale, especially across universities with different curricula, schedules, regulations, and technical infrastructures. This article discusses the implementation experience and lessons learned from a cross-university approach developed within the Edu4Chip European project. The approach combines aligned learning outcomes, local Master's implementations, and a shared design-to-silicon framework across five European universities.

Planning is a common yet complex activity shaped by constraints to satisfy and preferences to balance. Travel planning, as both an everyday activity and a frequent benchmark for evaluating intelligent systems, offers a rich context for examining how constraints and preferences emerge and evolve. While recent AI systems have achieved impressive results in generating personalized itineraries, they often assume that users can articulate stable goals upfront. To understand how real-world planning unfolds, we conducted a two-part interview study: one with eight travelers reflecting on their planning experiences, and one with nine travel agents sharing professional practices. We trace the dynamics of constraints and preferences as they are surfaced, refined, and coordinated throughout the planning process, and identified 11 actions revolving around constraints and preferences, which shaped the planning process. We offer design heuristics for planning tools that better support human-AI collaborative actions to support the fluid, contingent nature of planning.

Large imbalanced tabular datasets make repeated gradient-boosted tree training expensive. Existing coreset methods often lose accuracy when most majority examples are removed. We present CRISP (Coreset Reduction via Importance-Stratified Pruning), a linear-time method that allocates a negative-class budget across quantile strata of a proxy-model score. Sample weights account for unequal inclusion probabilities. At 95% negative-class reduction on a production fraud dataset, CRISP trains on approximately 1.70M of 25M rows and retains 99.7% of full-data Average Precision. This is a 93.2% reduction in total training rows. On public CriteoPrivateAds, CRISP has the highest mean Average Precision at each tested rate from 90% to 99.4% majority reduction. Sparkov results are mixed at lower rates, but CRISP has the highest mean at 99.2% and 99.4%. Ablations identify budget allocation and inverse-propensity weighting as the main sources of the production-dataset gain.

A fundamental challenge in RF sensing is that Doppler signatures observed by a link entangle the target's motion with the sensing geometry, resulting in limited applicability to unconstrained real-world settings. In this paper, we establish a new foundation for physically interpretable RF sensing that disentangles reflector speed from geometry, jointly recovering the speed, geometry factor, relative amplitude, and width of each dominant Doppler ridge. More specifically, we first develop a compact parametric representation of WiFi spectrograms and establish its low-dimensional structure through a systematic computer-vision analysis of a large and diverse human-activity dataset, thereby providing a tractable foundation for learning. Building on this representation, we then design a physics-informed autoencoder whose structured bottleneck and differentiable RF forward model enforce physically meaningful estimates of reflector speed and geometry. We further introduce a synthetic-to-real training framework, eliminating the need for real WiFi training data. We extensively validate the proposed framework under both known and time-varying geometries, using both independently generated synthetic test sets and 31 real WiFi experiments. The results demonstrate the superior performance in speed and geometry extraction, robustly recovering the underlying geometry, speeds, Doppler-ridge amplitudes, and ridge widths across all settings, while substantially outperforming the strongest baselines.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasting in regions affected by load shedding is challenging because reliable historical observations are scarce. This study proposes a transfer learning framework combined with Conformalized Quantile Regression (CQR) to improve PV power forecasting and provide reliable uncertainty estimates under severe data scarcity. A source-domain PV dataset from Alice Springs, Australia, is used to pretrain a temporal forecasting model, which is then adapted to simulated Bangladesh PV data representing different levels of historical availability. Experimental results show that transfer learning reduces RMSE by up to 23.7% when only one month of target-domain data is available and by 13.7% with three months of data. The proposed Transfer Learning plus CQR framework achieves 94.3% empirical coverage with three months of target data while producing prediction intervals that are 14% narrower than those obtained without transfer learning. These results demonstrate that combining transfer learning with conformal uncertainty quantification can improve both point forecasting accuracy and uncertainty reliability when target-domain PV data are severely limited.

The inclusion of generative audio in the music production process has led to an increase in hybrid music tracks that blend authentic human performances with AI-generated stems, challenging traditional AI music detectors which operate in a binary setting. In this work, we propose a stem-agnostic framework for identifying synthetic audio sources within hybrid musical mixtures. We introduce the inspectrogram, a novel time-frequency representation that maps localized probabilities of synthetic content across the audio spectrum. By combining the inspectrogram with a Wiener filter estimating target stem energy dominance, a single CNN model evaluates whether the specific stem is generated. Trained on rendered hybrid mixtures and evaluated across various stem classes, our model achieves strong performance on high-frequency sources such as vocals, drums, and guitar, but struggles on the low-frequency, narrow-band bass. We conclude that the quality of separation impacts the detection accuracy and identify source separation as a primary bottleneck and a crucial direction for future research.

Fairness audits in production ML typically occur once, at deployment, on a single domain. Both fail in practice: fairness can shift after retraining or a changing user base, and interventions validated on one dataset are rarely tested across the heterogeneous domains an organization deploys. We present FAPE (Fairness Auditing for Production Environments), a four-stage framework evaluating a single post-processing intervention, Fairlearn's ThresholdOptimizer, across eight domain evaluations: criminal justice, income prediction, legal admissions, credit lending, agricultural lending, a multi-domain benchmark corpus, healthcare, and education. Each is scored on demographic parity and equalized odds difference, plus disparate impact ratio and accuracy cost where computable. Intervention effectiveness tracks baseline disparity magnitude: across model-domain pairs the constraint improved disparity in 9 of 14 high-disparity cases and worsened it in 3 of 4 near-fair ones. Each of the five high-disparity exceptions reverses under one of two measurement checks, a minimum group size or thresholds fit on held-out data. A CUSUM monitor started at deployment, tested on a simulated shift, separates constrained models that never met a 0.1 parity convention from those that met it and later regressed. A single deployment-time audit is therefore an unreliable guide, which argues for baseline-disparity screening and continuous monitoring

The increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications leads to severe access congestion in conventional base station (BS) networks. Meanwhile, the low transmit power of IoT devices requires larger diversity gains from the system design. Therefore, low-cost traffic management and signal enhancement mechanisms become essential. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are increasingly significant due to their flexibility and efficiency. Using reflection, refraction, and amplification, RISs can act as innovative relay nodes to overcome spatial limitations caused by blockages, and improve the coverage range of existing infrastructure. However, more extensive applications of RISs remain to be explored. In this paper, we propose to deploy co-sited RISs on BSs and use the integrated access and relay (IAR) architecture to enable wave-domain task-offloading between BSs, without requiring extra infrastructure or incurring extra decoding latency. Considering the fixed and dynamic sub-carrier schemes, we show the performance improvement in cell-free networks and cellular networks. In addition, we investigate the effect of RIS elements allocated to each IoT device in both cell-free and cellular networks. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of IAR BSs for future communications design.