Papers

Many real-world systems exhibit higher-order interactions among groups of entities that cannot be captured by pairwise relationships alone. Graph Transformers and Graph Neural Networks increasingly rely on positional encodings to enrich graph representations, yet existing positional encodings are computed solely from the original graph and therefore cannot directly capture observed higher-order interactions. Topological Deep Learning addresses this limitation by lifting graphs to simplicial complexes, but typically requires performing message passing or attention on higher-order neural network representations. We introduce a representation learning paradigm that enriches graph representations with higher-order topology through positional encodings, enabling standard graph learning models to exploit lifted incidence structure without modifying the backbone. We derive a theoretical characterization of the expressivity of higher-order positional encodings, proving that node-level operators induced by higher-order lifts can mix graph Laplacian frequencies in ways that scalar graph spectral filters cannot. Guided by this theory, we instantiate higher-order positional encodings using Hodge Laplacians derived from clique complexes. Experiments with Graph Transformers on ZINC and controlled synthetic benchmarks demonstrate improvements in predictive performance, while a fixed-1-skeleton experiment shows that the pipeline can transmit higher-order information when cells are supplied independently of the graph. Together, our results establish higher-order positional encodings as a principled bridge between graph positional encodings and topological deep learning.

Decoded quantum interferometry (DQI) is a polynomial-time quantum algorithm introduced by Jordan et al. (Nature 2025). For a natural optimization problem, known as optimal polynomial intersection (OPI), it achieves approximation guarantees in regimes where all known classical algorithms require exponential time. Besides time, space is another central resource: storing and manipulating a massive input can be very challenging, especially when logical qubits carry substantial fault-tolerant implementation overhead. This motivates the following question: does DQI yield quantum advantages in memory, and can we prove it unconditionally? We give an affirmative answer to this question in the streaming setting. In particular, we consider a natural generalization of OPI using Hermite interpolation and Hasse derivatives, which asks for a low-degree polynomial satisfying as many constraints on its values and derivatives as possible. As a concrete example, we show [Quantum efficiency.] An adaptation of the DQI algorithm produces a polynomial satisfying $93\%$ of the constraints; moreover, it only reads the input stream in one pass, uses polylogarithmic space, and has polylogarithmic computation time per stream entry. [Classical hardness.] Any classical algorithm that produces an answer satisfying just $76\%$ of the constraints requires polynomial space, even if it can read the input stream with polynomially many passes and can use unlimited time. Our result provides a complete tradeoff curve for the tunable parameters, and implies that DQI has provable quantum advantages for the original OPI problem.

In distributed storage systems, redundancy enables a single data object to be reconstructed using several disjoint groups of servers. The resulting service rate region (SRR) captures all combinations of object request rates that the system can support simultaneously without overloading any individual server. We analyze the SRR of binary codes obtained via the Plotkin-type construction. We demonstrate that each recovery set for an information object of the Plotkin-type code $\mathcal{C}_p$ induces a corresponding recovery set for the same data object characterized by the underlying code $\mathcal{C}$. Furthermore, by characterizing the recovery sets structure of $\mathcal{C}_p$ in terms of the recovery set structure of $\mathcal{C}$, we identify the additional recovery sets introduced by this construction. Using the associated recovery hypergraphs, we establish bounds on the SRRs of $\mathcal{C}_p$ and iterated code $\mathcal{C}_{p^m}$ in terms of the SRR of $\mathcal{C}$. We consider the family of first-order binary Reed-Muller codes and show how the recovery structure, and consequently, the service rates of R$(1,m)$ for arbitrary $m$ can be recursively derived from a generator matrix of R$(1,2)$ through our results for successive Plotkin-type constructions.

Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) improves the efficiency of large language model post-training but introduces stale rollouts generated by earlier policies. Theoretical understanding of how this staleness affects convergence and how to mitigate its impact remains limited. We derive a convergence bound for GRPO-style algorithms that explicitly characterizes the tradeoff between the gradient estimator's second moment and bias. For trajectory-level importance-weighted estimators, our analysis shows that once the second moment is uniformly controlled, delay enters the bound through the bias introduced by clipping or rescaling. Guided by this insight, we propose a novel group mass capping GRPO (GMC-GRPO) method, which minimizes a ratio-based bias bound within a class of weighted estimators sharing a common second-moment guarantee. We establish convergence guarantees for asynchronous GMC-GRPO and show that, compared with TIC-GRPO, it improves the threshold dependence of the fourth-order delay term from $O(\epsilon^{-4})$ to $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ as $\epsilon\to0$, where $1+\epsilon$ is the ratio threshold. Under local policy overlap, the delay-dependent term decreases as $G^{-2/5}$ after tuning the step size, where $G$ is the group size. For fixed behavior and current policies, the bias introduced by group rescaling also vanishes as $G\to\infty$, whereas the bias from trajectory-wise clipping can persist. Experiments across Qwen3 models and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate improved robustness to stale rollouts, with GMC-GRPO achieving the best performance among stable baselines under large rollout delays.

Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising approach for improving diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography, a task that remains limited by the intrinsic tension between local diffusion information and global anatomical plausibility. In this work, we systematically evaluate recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and Transformer models for iterative tractography, with particular attention to training strategies, input representations (including convolutional neural network (CNN)-based embeddings and end-of-sequence (EOS) tokens), and hyperparameter selection. We introduce a generation-validation phase enabling supervision at the streamline level during training, allowing supervision despite the mismatch between local loss functions and global streamline quality. Using the ISMRM2015 tractography challenge dataset, our models achieve the highest reported performance to date. Through controlled experiments, we quantify the impact of missing bundles, noisy or imperfect training streamlines, and invalid fibers in the training set. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our best-performing models for in vivo data from the Tractoinferno database. Overall, our results highlight both the potential and the limits of sequence-based deep learning models such as Transformers and RNNs for tractography, and emphasize the need for improved phantoms and evaluation methods for in vivo validation. We provide takeaways and recommendations for future researchers training and validating sequence-based supervised methods for tractography.

By 2030, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are projected to reach 40 billion, with fast-paced technological advancements in fields such as industry, healthcare, agriculture, automobiles, and building/home automation systems. This expansion has created a large attack surface for cybercrime, as the majority of these devices open the door for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities, as they lack adequate built-in security. Cybercriminals launch malware attacks to compromise systems or steal sensitive data, and once a system is compromised, a ransom is typically demanded for its release. Current cybersecurity measures in place are being outpaced by the rapid growth of the IoT, which is accompanied by a subsequent growth in malware variants being created per day. Recognizing this pitfall, this research examines and proposes a novel approach to malware detection and classification to safeguard devices from further attacks and make IoT systems more robust and secure. The framework proposed utilizes a Structured State Space Sequence (S4) model, which discretizes sequences of malware samples in a sequence and captures long-range dependencies, essentially identifying the "cause" and "effect" hidden within malware execution flow. This study presents two novel contributions: the first empirical application of the S4 model for malware analysis, and a comprehensive comparison of its performance against other deep learning architectures, laying the stepping stone for future research in this new paradigm.

Multimodal agents commonly generate free-form reasoning before each action. For small models, limited model capacity can result in lengthy reasoning that provides little useful guidance for action generation while incurring substantial inference cost. To address this challenge, we introduce Selection-based Structured Reasoning (SSR), a framework that reformulates reasoning as selection instead of open-ended generation. SSR represents recurring high-level reasoning as pre-specified, reusable natural-language candidates. At each turn, the model selects from these reasoning candidates based on their likelihoods given the current context, without requiring an auxiliary task head. Using pre-specified reasoning traces enables parallel scoring, where teacher-forced prefilling computes token likelihoods concurrently within and across candidates using a shared context KV cache. We evaluate SSR on seven multimodal search benchmarks using 2B and 4B models. Across multiple reinforcement learning objectives and supervised fine-tuning, SSR delivers significant efficiency gains without sacrificing task performance. SSR achieves an average success rate competitive with leading search agents of the same scale, while reducing per-turn reasoning latency by over 90% and total per-question model inference latency by 28-54%. Project page: https://zfy0314.github.io/ssr-webpage/.

Protein mutation effect generation asks a model to describe the functional consequence of a point mutation in natural language. Existing protein-to-text systems typically encode mutation information into undifferentiated representations, overlooking the organization of mutation-induced evidence across structural and biochemical factors. We propose RipplePLM, a mutation-aware generation framework centered on Direct-Distal Cross-Attention (DDCA). By constructing a residue-level Mutation Perturbation Field from pre-trained protein language models, DDCA leverages predicted contact maps to organize mutation representations into two pathways: the mutation site's immediate contact neighborhood and its multi-hop distal context. To complement this structural decomposition, we further introduce the Property Latent Chain (PLChain), which injects expert-guided supervision of biochemical property changes (e.g., thermostability and optimal pH) into the LLM hidden-state pathway through latent property tokens. On MutaDescribe, RipplePLM improves over mutation-specific baselines on temporal and structural splits; under a matched-backbone comparison, average structural-split ROUGE-L increases from 22.23 to 35.65. Expert evaluation further shows a higher proportion of biologically accurate or relevant descriptions than the mutation-specific baseline. Additional ablations, representation diagnostics, and low-$N$ fitness regression experiments further support the effectiveness of the learned mutation-aware representations. Code: https://github.com/Lyu6PosHao/RipplePLM.

Deep generative networks have recently achieved unprecedented performance in precise image and video editing using sophisticated textual prompts. However, the effectiveness of such models heavily depends on access to very large supervised and annotated image datasets, which can be very difficult to obtain. This is particularly true for satellite instruments, which very rarely overlap with labelled data, and suffer from domain shifts in the rare occasions they do. In this paper, we investigate the potential of flow matching models for unsupervised domain adaptation of satellite radiometer images. Our main contribution is a novel unsupervised method that achieves precise domain alignment by leveraging parts of the deterministic ordinary differential equations in flow matching models, conditioned on different satellite instruments. A key strength of our approach is its ability to preserve essential information while adapting across any domains since the perturbations are in theory bijective. Extensive experiments conducted on the GPM-Core constellation show the benefit of our conditional domain adaptation, particularly in improving rain precipitation estimation from radiometer imagery.

Should low-precision transformer inference use stochastic rounding (SR) or round-to-nearest (RN)? The answer depends on where in the network you look. We isolate this effect by holding the numerical format fixed and varying only the rounding rule at individual operation sites. To enable experiments at freely chosen precisions, we extend the PRISM vectorized rounding library to arbitrary virtual precision via a variable-precision stochastic rounding (VPSR) algorithm, proving that the rounding decision is evaluated exactly in hardware floating point. We develop two analyses providing complementary insight into this site-level trade-off. First, a probabilistic forward-error bound for linear projections shows that SR's error envelope grows as $O(\sqrt{n} u)$ in reduction length $n$, versus $O(n u)$ for RN, a gap that widens rapidly at low precision and is most pronounced in the long multilayer perceptron (MLP) down-projection. Second, a second-order decomposition of expected cross-entropy loss change at the output softmax into signed drift, drift curvature, and a Fisher-weighted variance penalty reveals why the two sites behave oppositely: MLP noise is predominantly a uniform logit shift to which softmax is invariant, so SR's variance is largely discounted; head noise is non-uniform across the vocabulary and is not. On DistilGPT-2 at $t=6$ significand bits, observations match theory: SR in the MLP raises perplexity to 1.15x the full-precision reference, versus 2.21x for RN. At the language-model head, the ordering reverses because SR introduces non-uniform variance, whereas deterministic RN carries none. In a mixed-precision configuration (MLP output at $t=6$), assigning SR to the MLP and RN to the head brings perplexity within 1.10x of the full-precision reference, a 28% reduction over matched-bit RN.

Dynamic resource assignment, the real-time allocation of task streams to heterogeneous processing nodes, is the backbone of modern computing infrastructure. While learning-based schedulers excel in research, industrial deployments still rely on hand-written rules that operators can read, audit, and execute within tight latency budgets. LLM-based Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) promises to automate writing such rules. However, existing AHD frameworks were developed for combinatorial problems fully specified to the LLM, and they learn only from a scalar fitness score. In real systems, the behaviour that determines a good heuristic, such as processor speeds or power consumption, is unknown a priori: the score reveals which heuristic performs better, but not why. This missing information is recorded in the system logs that every evaluation produces. Exploiting it is non-trivial: logs are massive and noisy, the relevant signals depend on the objective, and their content and format vary across hardware and software stacks, so they can neither be fed to an LLM as is nor processed by a fixed parser. We propose TRACE, which couples an evolutionary AHD loop with an agentic knowledge-extraction workflow. A Reasoner agent analyzes the log schema in light of the objective and formulates hypotheses about the system dynamics; a Coder agent writes and executes schema-specific code to test them, producing insights or executable tools for the evolved heuristics. We evaluate TRACE on a synthetic cloud benchmark and a 5G vRAN scenario built from industrial testbed measurements and operational traffic traces. TRACE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art AHD methods in resource assignment problems and yields more auditable heuristics at under 2% overhead.

The design of satellite constellations for Earth observation requires balancing spatial coverage, revisit time, cost, and operational complexity. This paper considers the problem of designing the orbits of a given number of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellites to maximize the spatial and temporal resolution achieved over a prescribed set of ground targets. This kind of problem is inherently nonconvex and possibly combinatorial, making its solution computationally demanding for large constellations and target sets. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage optimization strategy that separates spatial-coverage design from temporal-resolution optimization, thereby reducing the complexity of the overall problem. Two variants of the method are developed. The first employs continuous decision variables during the spatial-optimization stage, whereas the second discretizes these variables and reformulates the problem as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem. The latter formulation enables the use of efficient classical QUBO solvers and is directly compatible with quantum-annealing hardware. The proposed framework provides a scalable approach to the design of heterogeneous LEO and VLEO Earth-observation constellations and establishes a pathway for exploiting emerging quantum-optimization technologies in satellite mission design. Preliminary simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy.

We introduce an approach for collection-grounded B-roll sequence generation. Given a user's video collection, a directive given in natural language, and a target duration, the goal is to produce a multi-shot sequence that complements the user's primary footage (A-roll) while preserving the collection's characters, settings, objects, and style. This task is challenging as one must choose the visual evidence from hours of captured footage that should guide the generation of each shot in the sequence. We address this challenge with MemComposer, a three-stage system that turns raw footage into a structured memory with visual references (characters, settings, objects, and style) and uses it to plan, retrieve, and generate grounded B-roll sequences. First, in a one-time offline stage, MemComposer constructs an entity-centric memory from raw video. Second, it uses the memory and user directive to plan a grounded sequence and retrieve conditioning frames for each shot. Third, it iteratively generates and critiques the sequence to enforce identity, setting, and sequence-level consistency. We evaluate MemComposer in a user preference study along two dimensions: prompt adherence and visual alignment to the user's collection. Against an ungrounded text-to-video planner, MemComposer wins 60.0% of prompt-adherence and 92.8% of visual-alignment comparisons, showing the grounding benefit of collection memory and reference retrieval. Against retrieval-only sequences assembled from captured footage, MemComposer wins 94.5% of prompt-adherence comparisons, showing the value of generating missing shots, while retrieval-only sequences are preferred for visual alignment in 58.2% of comparisons.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a powerful framework for learning coordinated behaviors through interactions with the environment. Developing MARL policies requires balancing expressive modeling of complex and multimodal action distributions with efficient training and execution. Generative policies, particularly diffusionbased policies, can faithfully capture complex and multimodal behaviors, but costly iterative sampling hinders their scalability in online multi-agent settings. We propose an Online MARL framework via one-step Flow model (OMAF) that combines expressive generative policies with efficient one-step action generation. OMAF employs a Transformer-based flow policy to capture complex coordination behaviors, while its approximate path score surrogate provides a principled route to synchronized flow policy optimization. To enable stable and sampleefficient learning, we further develop a joint optimization scheme coupling softmax Q-value estimation with a joint flow policy objective for coordinated policy learning. By eliminating iterative sampling, OMAF dramatically reduces training overhead without sacrificing policy expressiveness. Extensive experiments across 10 standard tasks from MPE and MAMuJoCo show that OMAF consistently achieves superior performance, with up to 3.4x higher returns and 10.5x sample efficiency improvement compared with baseline methods. These results validate the effectiveness of OMAF as an expressive and computationally efficient one-step flow policy paradigm for online MARL.

We make highly accurate numerical estimates of basic properties of the invariant measure for Liverani-Saussol-Vaienti intermittent maps, an archetypal slowly mixing dynamical system. We solve the challenge of precise and efficient estimation for a map with non-uniform expansion, where the transfer operator does not have a spectral gap. We do this using an Abel function, which solves the neutral dynamics, and which we can compute accurately via an asymptotic expansion. Our work covers both finite and sigma-finite invariant measure cases. In particular, we obtain the first practical estimates for the parameter far from zero, including the sigma-finite case. This opens the door to much deeper numerical study of intermittent dynamics than was previously possible. A driving motivation for this work is the upcoming proof of optimal rates of memory loss which works equally for finite and infinite invariant measure cases. No prior results on rates of memory loss for dynamical systems with infinite invariant measure exist, with a single exception of a recent paper by I.Chevyrev and A.K. on null recurrent Markov chains.

A surface photographed under even light presents nearly the same appearance from every angle; the same surface under uneven light does not. Exposure changes between views, illumination varies within a single image, and locally strong light sources leave one region bright and its neighbor in shadow. Multi-view reconstruction methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting treat these lighting artifacts as if they were properties of the scene, entangling capture-specific illumination with the geometry and color they recover. We present EvenSplat, a framework that separates the two. EvenSplat couples an image-space illumination decomposition with an illumination field carried by the Gaussians, so that the same explanation of the lighting is shared between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional views of the scene; a camera-response network and a local exposure-compensation module absorb the global and residual differences that remain across training images. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets and diverse forms of uneven illumination (cross-view exposure, spatial illumination variation, and high-contrast lighting) on both real-world captured and simulated benchmarks, EvenSplat generally outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under high-contrast illumination.

As LLMs take up the role of authoring charts using visualization domain-specific languages (DSLs), the human constraints that shaped those languages may no longer apply, as what is easy for a person is not necessarily easy for a model. To understand how LLMs might work better with DSLs, we explore where and how they fail with current DSL designs. We evaluate 10 JSON-style visualization DSLs with 41 tasks across 3 LLMs, then assess the generated specifications with JSON and rendering checks, and qualitative coding of failed cases. Analyzing how this specification generation process fails, we identify four recurring failure patterns, link each to specific DSL features, and discuss design considerations for future DSL designs.

While the literature on blockchain-assisted intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) for Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks is mature, existing systematic reviews suffer from two critical limitations: they overlook the structural shift toward modern Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) architectures, and they conflate blockchain's distinct functional roles into a single monolithic category. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) addresses these gaps by proposing a three-axis taxonomy that classifies proposals by detection-system class (NIDS, HIDS, EDR/XDR), blockchain functional role, and response-automation maturity. Synthesizing research published in high-impact venues between 2019 and 2026, we provide a rigorous gap analysis exposing why a genuine per-endpoint blockchain-anchored response loop remains nearly nonexistent due to latency, deployment, and community mismatches. Furthermore, we evaluate structural, cross-cutting challenges persisting across the literature, including consensus latency on constrained devices, post-quantum cryptographic vulnerability, smart-contract attack surfaces, and the adversarial vulnerability of evolving LLM-based detection engines. Finally, we outline a comprehensive research agenda centered on hybrid on-chain/off-chain orchestration to bridge the gap between decentralized trust and rapid response automation.

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) has emerged as a reliable and cost-effective technique of grounding the generative capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into relevant, up-to-date, external knowledge. Despite presenting several benefits, such as reducing hallucinatory behavior, they also introduce new attack surfaces, including leakage of private information and vulnerabilities against data extraction attacks. In this paper, we introduce $\immrag$, an adaptive and automatic data extraction attack procedure operating in a black box setting against image-returning MRAG, a configuration in which the retrieved visual artifact is itself the response. Each query blends an attacker-held shadow image with an image already recovered from the system, and relevance-weighted resampling steers subsequent queries towards regions of the embedding space that still yield novel retrievals. Unlike current extraction attacks that aim to persuade the model towards data leakage by placing a malicious query as a textual prompt, $\immrag$ embeds the malicious instructions inside a user-given input image. We evaluate $\immrag$ on three plausible and distinct real-world scenarios: medical assistant, document-focused helper and general purpose tool. The experiments involve the study of the effectiveness of the attack on multiple CLIP-family retrievers, as well as the impact of various generators. A single 2500-query run reconstructs up to 611 distinct radiology images, 566 document scans and 416 general-purpose images under local-feature correspondence, and reaches up to $5.6\times$ as many distinct datastore items as a non-adaptive baseline. Our results show the urgent need for safeguards specifically designed for multimodal data.

Urban environments are shaped by design choices with long-term implications for health, safety, and quality of life, yet evaluating proposed interventions remains costly, time-consuming, and often impractical. Existing geospatial vision methods largely focus on monitoring urban indicators from aerial and street-view imagery, rather than proposing interventions and estimating their effects on such indicators. Moving beyond recognition, we introduce the problem of discovering interventions that improve target indicators for a given aerial or street-view image. We argue that a black-box indicator model, combined with a generative editing model, can serve as an implicit digital twin for testing intervention hypotheses. We present VIDA-Geo , a multi-agent system that explores this intervention space by coordinating segmentation, diffusion-based inpainting, and indicator scoring models to produce interventions that are both perceptually realistic and aligned with real-world policies. We evaluate our system on 8 indicators across aerial and street-view imagery, measuring changes in factors such as perceived safety and greenery. Our approach outperforms existing baselines in many cases, achieving up to 2X higher perceptual quality and policy alignment scores. Finally, our model provides users with multiple candidate interventions, supporting an expert city-planner-in-the-loop workflow.

Low-precision inference is widely adopted in edge AI to reduce computational cost and memory footprint. However, existing open-source accelerator platforms provide limited end-to-end support for CNNs following the standard TensorFlow Lite integer inference scheme. This paper presents ZTA-Q, an open-source RISC-V-based platform that enables accurate deployment of TensorFlow Lite INT8 models. In addition to extending operator support, ZTA-Q provides a configurable post-processing datapath for studying how circuit-level approximations, including reduced multiplier precision, shared shift scaling, and simplified rounding, affect model accuracy. The proposed system is implemented on a Digilent Arty A7-100T FPGA and operates at 83.3 MHz. Evaluations on representative CNN models show that with LUT, register, and DSP overheads of 26.3%, 12.6%, and 150%, respectively, ZTA-Q limits the degradation in both top-1 and top-5 accuracy to within 0.25 percentage points.

How can we understand what a music foundation model has learned internally? Most interpretability approaches, such as probing and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), focus on identifying individual features with minimal structural assumptions. We argue that many concepts are better understood as structured relations rather than isolated features. This is especially prominent in music, where tonal structures are organized in the space of pitch and time. For example, concepts such as chords or keys are naturally expressed as structured sets (e.g., the 12 transpositions of a chord or the diatonic system within a key), rather than isolated features. In this study, we shift from feature identification to structure-based analysis, asking whether the learned inner representations of music foundation model emerge as organized structures over features. To this end, we introduce a framework that uses pitch transposition as an inductive bias to induce ordered orbits via multi-view SAE alignment. Concretely, we generate pitch-shifted input pairs and align their SAE representations to discover structured groups of pitch-related features. Experimental results show that this approach recovers orbit structures corresponding to chords, keys, and melodic patterns across two state-of-the-art music foundation models, while requiring only minimal grounding (e.g., a few anchor examples) to interpret entire concept families.

We present LiteReality-Agent, an agentic system for reconstructing real indoor environments as realistic, articulated, and simulation-ready 3D scenes from RGB-D scans. At its core, LiteReality-Agent formulates 3D reconstruction as a coding problem, in which a coding agent gathers evidence using specialised tools and iteratively edits a Python script, Room.py, which can be executed to produce a 3D digital twin of the room. With this formulation, we develop a robust observe-edit-verify harness that supports evidence gathering, measurement, verification, layout optimisation, simulation readiness, and quality control throughout the reconstruction process. LiteReality-Agent produces high-quality reconstructions suitable for simulation and downstream embodied AI tasks. Furthermore, as agent capabilities continue to improve rapidly, the system introduced by LiteReality-Agent remains a strong orchestration framework for future agents: it equips them with specialised tools, structured workflows, and robust verification mechanisms that substantially improve reconstruction quality and reliability. We demonstrate that LiteReality-Agent produces reconstructions that are more geometrically accurate, visually realistic, and simulation-compatible than those generated by recent frontier models, such as Astra and Fable. We therefore view LiteReality-Agent as a practical and important building block for robust real-to-sim systems. Both the source code and the data-capture application are publicly available. Code:https://github.com/LiteReality/LiteReality-Agent/

Natural language descriptions can provide rich semantic representations of audio-visual urban scenes, yet datasets that jointly describe both auditory and visual information remain limited. In this paper, we introduce AVSD-Scenes, a paired audio-visual scene description dataset for urban environments. The dataset contains 12,291 audio-visual scene descriptions generated from the TAU Urban Audio-Visual Scenes dataset. To construct the dataset, we first generate audio- and visual-based descriptions using Qwen2-Audio-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, respectively. These modality-specific descriptions are then combined using large language models, namely Qwen3-14B, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506, and Gemma-3-27B-it, to produce multimodal descriptions that capture complementary information from both modalities. We benchmark AVSD-Scenes using semantic alignment, cross-modal retrieval, scene classification, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, and human subjective assessment. Results show that multimodal descriptions improve semantic alignment and cross-modal retrieval performance compared with modality-specific descriptions while preserving strong scene-discriminative information. The generated descriptions achieve up to 94.5% accuracy in urban scene classification, while combining audio, visual, and description embeddings further improves accuracy to 95.4%. Furthermore, the descriptions remain highly scene-discriminative even when scene labels are removed from the prompting instructions, indicating that they capture semantic information derived from the audio-visual content rather than merely reflecting label information.

This paper proposes a local recursive least squares (RLS) estimation strategy for discrete-time adaptive fuzzy control of nonlinear systems represented in quasi-Linear Parameter Varying (qLPV)/Takagi–Sugeno (TS) form. Unknown nonlinear terms are approximated by a constant-consequent TS fuzzy model, and the consequent parameters are updated by a membership-function-weighted RLS law with a forgetting factor. The proposed estimator keeps a different covariance for each rule, considerably reducing the memory footprint of the least-squares updates. The adaptation is also simplified since each rule is only adapted when it is active. From these properties, we are capable of showing that the adaptation law ensures bounded local adaptation errors. Building upon this adaptation law, Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) synthesis conditions are presented for matched, sector-bounded and norm-bounded unknown nonlinearities, guaranteeing ultimate uniform boundedness of the adaptive control system in closed loop. Three numerical examples are presented to illustrate the adaptive control conditions in the three cases: a planar manipulator with unknown gravity direction, a two-tank system with unknown coupling, and a Brushless DC (BLDC) motor acting as thrust for an efficiency vehicle.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models unify visual perception, language understanding, and action generation, offering new opportunities for automation in additive manufacturing (AM). However, deployment in AM remains challenging because adapting these models to unseen robot embodiments is costly, and performance can degrade under environment changes. In this work, we present a framework for deploying OpenVLA-OFT on a FAIRINO FR3 robot in a fixed AM workcell. A data pipeline converts monocular real-world demonstrations into OpenVLA-compatible TFDS/RLDS datasets to support adaptation to the FR3 embodiment. At runtime, each inference request predicts an eight-step chunk of 7-D actions. The FR3 executes each chunk open loop before capturing a new observation, providing closed-loop feedback between chunks. The system uses a cloud-edge architecture in which the FR3 client streams observations to a remote inference server through a FastAPI interface. In 42 physical A-to-B object-transfer trials, evenly split between red and blue targets, the system succeeded in 39 (92.9%). All three failures occurred during final placement, when insufficient release-height control caused the object to topple. An illumination sweep identified a low-error luminance range of 85-125 on a 0-255 scale, with the lowest mean spatial error at 95.

In this paper, we study the number of bits required to construct a dynamic dictionary with optimal time for $\texttt{rank}/\texttt{select}$ operations. Using the standard (multiplication) Word-RAM model with $w$-bit words, we construct a data-structure for a dynamic $\texttt{rank}/\texttt{select}$ dictionary for a set $S\subseteq\{0,1,\cdots,u-1\}$ of $n$ elements that, given a parameter $1\leq k\leq \log^*w$, uses $$\operatorname{lg}\binom{u}{n}+\mathcal{O}(n\log^{(k)}w)\text{ bits}$$ taking optimal $\mathcal{O}(k+\log_w n)$ time (worst-case) for all operations. We show optimality for $n=w^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ by extending the lower bound of Li, Liang, Yu, and Zhou [FOCS 2023] to super-polynomial universes: any dynamic dictionary for $n\leq \sqrt{u}$ elements that uses $\operatorname{lg}\binom{u}{n}+\mathcal{O}(n\log^{(k)}n)$ bits requires $\Omega(k)$ time for operations. Lastly, we extend the data-structure to a dynamic fully indexable dictionary (that also supports $\texttt{rank}/\texttt{select}$ on the complement of $S$).

Human hand-object demonstrations provide a scalable source of data for dexterous robot learning, but transferring them across embodiments requires physically feasible retargeting. Existing physics-based methods typically optimize each demonstration independently, leading to either limited success under finite simulation budgets or training costs that grow with dataset size. We introduce FlashDexRetarget, an RL framework for multi-reference dexterous retargeting. We formulate retargeting as multi-reference tracking, jointly learning a single policy across many demonstrations with off-policy RL and geometric supervision of the demonstrated interactions. This shared training formulation amortizes optimization across references while enabling the policy to track diverse hand-object interactions. On a 50-motion benchmark from TACO, OakInk2, and HOT3D using XHand and Sharpa Wave Hand as target embodiments, FlashDexRetarget retargets 90% of demonstrations using about 30 GPU-hours, compared with about 46% at about 3,000 GPU-hours for CHORD. This corresponds to about 100 times lower training compute and a 44-percentage-point improvement in retargeting success. Ablations examine the key design choices, while experiments with up to 1,000 motions and real-world replay further demonstrate the scalability and practical applicability of our method.

Random Clifford operators have numerous applications in quantum computing, including randomized benchmarking, classical shadows, and quantum authentication. However, sampling and implementing uniformly random $n$-qubit Clifford incur near-quadratic complexity due to the size of Clifford group. We introduce a cryptographic way to overcome these barriers: trapdoored Clifford operator distributions whose samples are computationally indistinguishable from uniformly random Cliffords, yet implementing them can be much faster given the trapdoor. We construct a distribution of trapdoored Clifford operators whose elements can be sampled and implemented in near-linear time under a variant of the learning parity with noise assumption. Our constructions allow fast tableau action on Pauli labels for classical simulation, and also can be optimized to admit polylogarithmic-depth implementation. Along the way, we construct trapdoored matrices over finite fields that support efficient multiplication by both a matrix and its inverse, resolving an open question left by Vaikuntanathan and Zamir [SODA'26]. We use these constructions to obtain faster protocols based on random Cliffords. We also explore their applications to the worst-case to average-case reductions for matrix and Clifford problems including the iterated matrix multiplication and Clifford circuit synthesis. In particular, we show the hardness of batching Clifford circuits: synthesizing circuits that apply the same Clifford to multiple registers is at least as hard as worst-case matrix multiplication, even when synthesis succeeds on a small constant fraction of random Cliffords. This extends to approximate implementations by general quantum circuits.

Model specifications define how large language models (LLMs) should behave, guiding alignment training, inference-time behavior, and evaluation. Yet these specifications may themselves contain defects: two individually reasonable principles may prescribe incompatible behavior when applied to the same situation, leaving no response that satisfies both. Detecting such inconsistencies is challenging. Formalizing natural-language specifications risks losing subtle distinctions, while behavior-based testing cannot reliably distinguish specification defects from differences in model behavior. We introduce VeriSpec, the first approach to directly detect inconsistencies in model specifications by auditing the specification text itself. Our key insight is to preserve the specification in natural language while using an LLM as a verifier. VeriSpec extracts structured, context-aware rules, constructs a topic-guided graph to cluster behaviorally related rules at the same authority level, and applies LLM-as-verifier reasoning to detect inconsistencies. Applying VeriSpec to the OpenAI Model Spec, we extract 405 rules and manually validate five inconsistencies, all reported to its developers, who responded positively and have initiated internal discussions. Compared with five baselines, VeriSpec identifies the most validated inconsistencies, achieves the highest precision (38.5%), and incurs the lowest cost per validated inconsistency ($11.12). These results establish direct specification auditing as a practical complement to behavioral alignment evaluation, catching defects at the source before they shape any model. The code is available at https://github.com/HIPREL-Group/VeriSpec.