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All of arXiv

Monday 21 September

Functional Analysis

Lipschitz-free spaces are strongly unique preduals

We prove that the Lipschitz-free space $\mathcal{F}(M)$ is the strongly unique isometric predual of $\mathrm{Lip}_0(M)$ for every metric space $M$, solving a longstanding open problem of Weaver. The result is proved first for length metric spaces by analyzing the behavior of Lipschitz functions on paths in $M$ and the topological properties of subspaces of functions vanishing on certain barrier-sets of $M$. Then, the result is extended to general metric spaces by embedding them into length spaces in such a way that the restriction operator for Lipschitz functions is weak$^*$ continuous with respect to their selected preduals. Finally, we also give a counterexample to the codimension-one inheritance assertion used in Weaver's original proof for bounded and geodesic metric spaces.
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Machine Learning

NAVIR: Neuromorphic Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Robust Human-Robot Interaction on Edge Hardware

Voice-controlled interaction in industrial settings is hampered by acoustic noise, which severely degrades audio-only speech recognition. Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) addresses this by fusing lip-motion cues with the audio stream, but state-of-the-art pipelines rely on three-dimensional convolutions, recurrent units, and attention modules that exceed the budget of typical edge devices. We present NAVIR, an end-to-end AVSR system targeting the BrainChip Akida neuromorphic processor, which natively supports only sequential two-dimensional convolutional inference. The pipeline factorises spatial and temporal encoding into separate AkidaNet-based modules: a per-frame visual encoder, a temporal video encoder, and a spectrogram audio encoder, fused by a lightweight predictor head and decoded by constrained beam search. Models are trained with connectionist temporal classification on noise-augmented audio and then fine-tuned with quantization-aware training. On the GRID benchmark, the quantized audio-visual model reaches 14.0% word error rate (WER) under noise on the unseen-speaker split and 3.3% WER on the overlapped-speaker split, against 22.5% and 11.8% for audio-only baselines, and it attains 98.6% command accuracy at 1.5% WER on a task-specific industrial-command corpus. Operation-count analysis indicates a 13-fold energy advantage of the spiking formulation over its artificial neural network counterpart at 27.6% mean firing rate. On-board measurements show roughly 5-fold lower energy per inference than a Raspberry Pi central processing unit on the lip-reading model, and over 100-fold lower than a laptop graphics processing unit, while sustaining 14.5 inferences per second. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete multimodal AVSR pipeline running on neuromorphic hardware of this class.
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All authors Leonidas Delimpasis, Panagiota Moraiti, Antonis Porichis, Panos Chatzakos, Michail Karamousadakis

Algebraic Topology

Equivariant generating hypotheses for finite groups

We prove that no nontrivial finite group $G$ satisfies the equivariant generating hypothesis of Bohmann, even when all $RO(H)$-graded homotopy groups are tested for every subgroup $H\leq G$. For each $G$, we construct ghosts on finite $G$-spectra with arbitrarily long nonzero composition powers. We also prove that the homotopy-module functors are nonfull and construct non-equivalent finite $G$-spectra with isomorphic full homotopy modules. A central ingredient of our proof is the natural ghost operation $\Psi=(p-[C_p/e])(1-g)$ on $C_p$-spectra. Motivated by Ma–Xu's examples in the motivic settings, we apply this operation to both a two-cell complex and products of complex projective spaces with cyclic permutation action, which produces arbitrarily long nonzero ghost powers. We also construct a ghost on an explicit four-cell complex that is detected in the derived category over the group ring.
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All authors Sihao Ma, XiaoLin Danny Shi, Zhouli Xu, Shangjie Zhang

Cryptography and Security

Name2Pkg: Lightweight One-Class Android Malware Screening via Name-Package Correspondence Modeling

Deep learning-based malware detection has been widely adopted in security-critical services. Most detection methods rely on internal features extracted from APK files or runtime behavior. However, extracting these features is computationally expensive. This limits their use in large-scale, early-stage screening. Malicious apps may exhibit weak correspondence between their user-facing app names and package names, providing a low-cost screening signal. We present Name2Pkg, a lightweight one-class classification method. It leverages only the app name and the package name. We formulate malware screening as a sequence anomaly detection problem. A character-level sequence-to-sequence model estimates the conditional likelihood of a package name given the app name. The length-normalized negative log-likelihood serves as the anomaly score. We train the model and calibrate the threshold using only benign data. Using a dataset of 67,129 real-world applications, Name2Pkg achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.982 and malware recall of 0.885 at an achieved false-positive rate of 0.044 on held-out test data. It has a 3.57 MiB checkpoint and a CPU inference latency of 28.20 ms per sample. Name2Pkg provides an efficient and effective pre-filtering signal for large-scale security systems.
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All authors Changyeop Sung, Yeonjae Kang, Jaeho Shin, Huy Kang Kim

Computers and Society

Critical Data Studies in the Anthropocene

This chapter introduces the concept of the Anthropocene into critical data studies, a field that has, for the past decade, explored the entanglements between datafication and politics. With the scaling up of contemporary datafication alongside generative computing, it is essential to expand these debates, both theoretically and methodologically, to consider the logics of extraction and exploitation inherent in the politics of artificial intelligence. Critical data scholars are called to interrogate how dominant narratives around the materiality of contemporary datafication either obscure or reveal its environmental impacts, along other key questions such as who benefits from these logics. To illustrate this, this chapter brings two case studies from Spain and Chile and explores how the infrastructure of contemporary datafication intersects with existing power structures, influencing which social and environmental consequences are recognized, addressed, and neglected. Finally, it invites critical data scholars to keep exploring the politics of data, infrastructure, and the Anthropocene by blending discipline boundaries between science and technology studies, media, geography, and political ecology.
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

IceCube Upgrade status and perspectives

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments one cubic kilometer of deep-glacial ice between 1450 m and 2450 m below the surface at the geographic South Pole to detect neutrinos via Cherenkov radiation of relativistic charged particles produced in their interactions. This detector is responsible for a number of key observations in neutrino astrophysics, which include the discovery of a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux and, more recently, the galactic plane. During the austral summer of 2025/26, five new strings equipped with new photosensor designs were deployed as a dense infill in the middle of the existing detector. The science goals of this detector are twofold: Firstly, given the higher photocathode density, an improved atmospheric neutrino event selection and reconstruction at a few GeV can be achieved for enhanced capabilities to study neutrino oscillations. Secondly, novel calibration devices will improve the knowledge of the optical properties of the glacial ice and the detector response. These new calibration results will be applied to archival IceCube data, improving angular and spatial resolution of all detected astrophysical neutrino events. The IceCube Upgrade also serves as a first step towards the next-generation neutrino telescope at the South Pole, called IceCube-Gen2.
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Machine Learning

Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Childhood Stunting in Bangladesh: Fairness and Temporal Robustness Assessment

Childhood stunting remains a major public health concern in Bangladesh and reflects long-term growth failure influenced by child, maternal, household, socioeconomic, and health-service factors. This study used nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data from 2007 to 2022 to develop machine learning models for population-level prediction of childhood stunting and to assess temporal robustness and subgroup fairness. Children aged 0-59 months with complete anthropometric and predictor data were included. Data from the 2007, 2011, and 2014 survey rounds were used for model development, while the 2018 and 2022 rounds were retained as temporal test datasets. Twelve feature-selection approaches were assessed, and the KNN permutation importance-selected predictor set was used for final model evaluation. Eleven machine learning models were evaluated: ten conventional algorithms and one pretrained tabular foundation model, TabPFN. Performance was assessed using balanced accuracy, AUROC, F1-score, Brier score, and expected calibration error. Subgroup fairness was examined by child sex, place of residence, and socioeconomic status. The final analytic sample included 18,844 children, of whom 35.05% were stunted. In the development hold-out test dataset, TabPFN showed the highest observed balanced accuracy overall at 67.58%, while AdaBoost showed the highest observed balanced accuracy among conventional models at 67.51%. In temporal testing, the highest observed balanced accuracy was found for Gradient Boosting in BDHS 2018 and XGBoost in BDHS 2022. Model performance varied across survey rounds and subgroups, highlighting the importance of temporal validation, subgroup fairness assessment, and transparent interpretation in public health prediction modeling.
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Robotics

Tactile-JEPA: Topology-Aware Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Distributed Tactile Sensors

Tactile sensing is an essential modality for robots performing contact-rich, dexterous manipulation, particularly under visual occlusion. While pre-trained image encoders are standard in robot learning pipelines, tactile encoders are still commonly trained from scratch from raw, noisy signals, which might limit their expressivity. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches focus predominantly on vision-based tactile sensors, leaving distributed electronic skins largely unaddressed. These sensors, however, have a distinctive property: their sensing elements are sparse and irregularly arranged over the surface they cover, which makes direct reuse of visual SSL methods suboptimal. We present Tactile-JEPA, an efficient self-supervised pre-training method that uses the spatial arrangement of tactile sensors to learn topology-aware representations. Specifically, it is trained to predict the embeddings of masked sensing elements from the unmasked remainder, using the sensor connectivity graph to guide spatial masking. Our analysis shows that effective tactile representations require capturing both local contact details and the global state of the tactile surface, which we achieve through dual-scale masking. Across three diverse datasets spanning magnetic and piezoresistive sensors, different robot embodiments, and single- and paired-sensor configurations, Tactile-JEPA reduces force estimation error by 6.3% and in-hand orientation error by 20.8% over the prior state-of-the-art, with consistent gains in other downstream applications, including policy learning. Overall, our results demonstrate that the benefit of tactile sensing depends critically on the quality of encoder pre-training, a problem which Tactile-JEPA addresses directly. Code is available at https://github.com/E-Kovtun/tactile.
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All authors Elizaveta Kovtun, Matvey Konovalov, Andrey Sakhovskiy, Semen Budennyy

Computer Vision

A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network for Real-Time Recognition of Hand-Drawn Geometric Shapes

Recognizing hand-drawn geometric shapes is a foundational sub-problem of sketch recognition, with applications in education, human-computer interaction, and diagram digitization. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a desktop application that recognizes four basic hand-drawn geometric shapes, circle, square, rectangle, and triangle using a compact Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). A dataset of 2,000 labeled 28x28-pixel shape images was collected independently and released publicly. The classifier consists of three convolutional blocks (16, 32, and 64 filters) with max-pooling, an in-model data-augmentation stage (random horizontal flip, rotation, and zoom), a dropout-regularized dense layer of 128 units, and a 4-way linear output layer, totaling 97{,}956 trainable parameters. The network is trained with the Adam optimizer on a sparse categorical cross-entropy objective computed directly on logits. On an 80/20 train-validation split, the model achieves 94.80% training accuracy and 96.01% validation accuracy with a validation loss of 0.1437. A Tkinter-based graphical interface allows a user to draw a shape with the mouse and receive an immediate class prediction with a confidence score. We situate this system within the broader sketch and shape-recognition literature, compare its accuracy against related hand-drawn shape classification studies, and discuss the limitations inherent to a small, single-contributor dataset. The complete source code, trained model, and per-class datasets are released publicly to support reproducibility.
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Materials Science

Revealing tilt-driven structural heterogeneity in hybrid improper ferroelectrics by spatially-resolved crystallography

Domain walls in ferroic oxides can host emergent functionalities that differ fundamentally from those of the surrounding bulk, making their microscopic structure central to understanding and controlling macroscopic behaviour. We use scanning three-dimensional X-ray diffraction to map the spatial evolution of coupled octahedral distortion modes across ferroelastic domain walls in the hybrid improper ferroelectric Ca$_{2.15}$Sr$_{0.85}$Ti$_{2}$O$_{7}$. By combining tomographic reconstruction with symmetry-adapted analysis of the octahedral rotation and tilt and associated strain modes, we map their spatial evolution across individual walls in the bulk crystal. We find that the walls are intrinsically extended, with widths far exceeding those expected for conventional Ising-like ferroic interfaces. The wall structure is characterised by a continuous rotation of the tilt order parameter through a tetragonal intermediate. These results provide new microscopic insight into the structural mechanisms governing ferroelastic wall formation, ferroelectric switching, and emergent functionality at domain walls.
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Machine Learning

Credit Access is Associated with Improved Food Security in the Horn of Africa

The intensification of climate change poses a growing threat to food security, especially in vulnerable communities. This study employs an observational machine-learning framework to estimate the causal association between access to credit and acute food insecurity in Somalia and across the Horn of Africa, drawing on a harmonized dataset spanning key environmental, socioeconomic, and conflict-related factors from 2015 to 2022. Results indicate that greater credit access is associated with a 2% reduction in acute food insecurity at the population level over the study period. Given that, on average, 16% of the population is in crisis, this effect represents a meaningful shift within the at-risk group. We interpret these estimates under explicit identification assumptions and complement them with robustness and refutation tests. The results provide context-specific evidence on how financial access correlates with food security outcomes in data-scarce, crisis-affected settings, and offer a transparent framework for integrating heterogeneous data sources when randomized evaluations are infeasible.
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All authors Jordi Cerdà-Bautista, Vasileios Sitokonstantinou, José Manuel Veiga López-Peña, Duccio Piovani, José María Tárraga, Gustau Camps-Valls

Quantum Physics

Versatile Quantum Machine Learning with an Ultra-low Power Photonic Quantum Reservoir Computer

Integrated photonic microprocessors provide high-bandwidth, massively parallel linear computation, but realizing nonlinear feature maps and temporal memory remain key challenges for machine learning. Conventional approaches rely on active tuning and additional nonlinear elements, increasing architectural complexity and power overhead. Here we demonstrate an integrated photonic quantum reservoir computer that achieves nonlinear mapping, fading memory, and task versatility without active tuning of the reservoir core. The same chip supports accurate static classification, dynamic prediction, and stable autonomous forecasting, establishing broad utility across both classification and temporal inference tasks. Competitive performance is retained in the zero-bias state, where all on-chip phase shifters are unpowered, eliminating active control and reducing computational power consumption to zero. This passive operation highlights a scalable route to multifunctional machine-learning hardware, where large-scale photonic quantum processors can be repurposed as reservoirs without reconfiguring their internal optical networks. By combining quantum-state encoding, multimode interferometric mixing, and photon-statistical readout, this architecture provides a physically grounded paradigm for low-power, large-scale quantum reservoir computing.
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All authors Wei Wang, Zan Tang, Menglong Fang, Daiqin Su, Mile Gu, Jayne Thompson, Lip Ket Chin, Hong Cai, Leong-Chuan Kwek, Ai-Qun Liu

Machine Learning

Information-Time Proximal Policy Optimization

RLVR has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, existing methods typically parameterize temporal progression in the Markov Decision Process by token-by-token generation, despite the highly non-uniform information flow along autoregressive trajectories. In this paper, we propose InfoPPO, which reparameterizes temporal progression using information density rather than raw token count. This reparameterization induces a common state-dependent structure for both temporal credit propagation and policy updates. InfoPPO restores the effectiveness of non-trivial discounting in long-horizon reasoning, retaining effective-horizon contraction while avoiding excessive attenuation of terminal supervision over long token sequences. Moreover, the information-time policy-improvement analysis naturally leads to a state-dependent update constraint, which we implement through adaptive clipping. By adapting the clipping threshold at each token position to the information density of its corresponding state, this mechanism enables more targeted policy updates while preserving proximal control. Theoretically, we extend performance-difference and policy-improvement analyses to the information-time MDP, deriving a policy-improvement lower bound when policy changes are regulated by information density. We further connect the general information-time analysis to practical LLM policy optimization by relating state-wise information density to local policy movement, while also providing theoretical grounding for the adaptive update mechanism. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate consistent gains over competitive baselines across five challenging competition-style mathematical reasoning benchmarks. InfoPPO also maintains stable accuracy and response length across non-trivial discount settings under which token-time PPO deteriorates.
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All authors Yongcheng Zeng, Xinyu Cui, Yan Song, Guoqing Liu, Hongsheng Xin, Kaike Zhang, Cheng Deng, Kun Zhan, Jian Ying, Jian Zhao, Haifeng Zhang, Jun Wang

Computer Vision

Topographic Training Concentrates Causal Circuits Without Improving Neuron Monosemanticity

Mechanistic interpretability of vision transformers seeks to decompose model computation into human-readable units, but learned representations entangle many concepts in each neuron. Feature superposition is widely treated as the central obstacle to this decomposition, yet most mitigations (sparse autoencoders, dictionary learning) are post-hoc and leave the underlying network unchanged. We ask whether a spatial-locality training loss (TopoLoss) can act as a lightweight, training-time prior that improves interpretability of standard mech-interp tools. Training ViT on ImageNet-100 across multiple TopoLoss weights $\alpha$, we measure causal sufficiency of topographic clusters via activation patching and feature geometry via sparse autoencoders fit to the same residual stream. At $\alpha=1.0$, topographic clusters are 2.79$\times$ more causally sufficient than random unit sets of the same size, with the effect increasing monotonically in $\alpha$. SAE L0 sparsity decreases by 11% and dead-feature fraction rises 19-fold, yet standard neuron-level monosemanticity scores are unchanged, indicating that topographic pressure acts at circuit level, concentrating causal mass into spatially local structures without disentangling individual neurons. This dissociation suggests current neuron-level monosemanticity metrics are insensitive to a class of real interpretability gains, and positions cheap architectural priors as a viable training-time complement to post-hoc tooling.
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High Energy Physics (Experiment)

The detector system of the SHiP/NA67 experiment at CERN

The SHiP/NA67 experiment aims to search for feebly interacting GeV-scale new particles and to perform all-flavour neutrino-physics measurements at the HI-ECN3 beam facility at the CERN SPS. The collaboration is currently optimising the experiment's initial configuration for the commissioning and first physics runs of 2032-2033. The detector subsystems comprise a few large-area instruments: for new-particle searches, highly sophisticated veto detectors, high timing-resolution detectors, a lightweight straw tracker system, and high-spatial-precision calorimeters; and, for neutrino reconstruction, small transverse-size, high-granularity calorimeters.
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Information Theory

On the Information-Theoretic Limits of Latent-Space Watermarking Through Pretrained Generators

We study latent-space watermarking through a pretrained generator using a prescribed latent-to-output stochastic mapping, called the renderer. A watermark encoder selects the latent input using a message and secret key. For every message and semantic context, the released output must have exactly the desired conditional output distribution. For finite alphabets, we derive rate–key inner and outer bounds and characterize the coding and coordination requirements for realizing watermark communication through the prescribed latent interface. When the target output distribution of the generator uniquely determines the corresponding latent input distribution through the renderer, a strengthened converse yields the capacity region; the same region governs explicit preservation of the pretrained latent distribution. We extend the analysis to general jointly Gaussian models and identify a sufficient statistic of the latent that captures both the watermark-bearing information available at the generated output and the latent coordination required to preserve its target distribution. For the vector Gaussian model, we further characterize the optimal allocation of the secret-key resource across the resulting modes. Finally, we turn to an emerging robustness threat that is particularly natural in generative watermarking: an adversary can regenerate the released sample to obtain a fresh realization of the same underlying content while attenuating or destroying the embedded watermark. We incorporate this robustness axis into our framework and characterize the one-pass compound capacity of the scalar Gaussian model when the semantic context is known to the encoder but hidden from the detector, while the regeneration attack may depend on that context. Extending the analysis to multiple rounds of repeated canonical regeneration, we characterize the resulting watermark-capacity decay.
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Robotics

Multi-Agent Transportation of Free-Flyers in Microgravity Via Pushing Interaction Under Human-in-the-Loop Control

We propose a safety-critical framework for the cooperative transportation of passive targets in microgravity, where a team of chaser robots acts through unilateral pushing contacts to track a human-provided desired twist while ensuring safe target motion. The pushing-only nature of the interaction introduces sparse, configuration-dependent actuation constraints requiring chasers to physically relocate on the target body when the desired pushing allocation changes. To address these challenges, we formulate a delay-aware feedback control architecture leveraging Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) and Control Barrier Function (CBF) constraints within a mixed-integer thrust allocation program to enforce stability and safety of the target, respectively. The proposed framework enables reference tracking while guaranteeing obstacle avoidance with a circular obstacle despite intermittent control authority, providing a foundation for human-supervised cooperative transportation of free-flyers in space environments. The proposed framework is validated through Gazebo simulations.
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All authors Gregorio Marchesini, Nicola De Carli, Sihyun Cho, Youngkyoung Kong, Elias Krantz, Mani Hemanth Dhullipalla, Dimos V. Dimarogonas, H. Jin Kim

Fluid Dynamics

Edge Contact Lubrication

In this paper we discuss the dynamics of a lubricating film separating two flat surfaces. It may be possible for the gap between the surfaces to reduce to zero at one point on the boundary in a finite time. Typically, the maximum pressure diverges as the gap between the surfaces approaches zero. We discuss the form of the pressure field in the vicinity of its maximum. We also introduce a numerical method for accurate determination of the pressure across the lubrication surface, enabling us to determine the hydrodynamic forces. We determine the phase diagram describing the evolution of the gap, as a function of the initial configuration and of the line of action of the external forces. When contact does occur, we consider whether the subsequent motion involves sliding of the point of contact. We argue that, when sliding does occur, the motion does not depend upon the microscopic properties of the surface roughness.
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Statistics Theory

Nonparametric Estimation of the Diffusion-Interaction Function in Particle Systems

We study the problem of nonparametric estimation of the interaction function in particle systems whose interaction enters through the diffusion coefficient. The particle system is observed discretely over a fixed time interval, and the interaction function is assumed to belong to a suitable nonparametric function class. We propose an estimation procedure based on empirical risk minimization over finite-dimensional sieve spaces, introducing a computable contrast function that exploits the local volatility of the observed trajectories. We derive a general non-asymptotic error bound under the intrinsic norm associated with the statistical problem and, focusing the analysis on multiresolution wavelet approximation spaces, we obtain explicit polynomial convergence rates in two distinct regimes, depending on whether the particle or discretization error dominates. Finally, we establish convergence rates for the classical $L^2$-norm.
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Combinatorics

How to Construct High Barrycades

Given two positive integers height $h$ and order $n$, the barrycade construction problem asks for a set of $h$ permutations of the integers from $1$ to $n$ such that all the proper partial sums given by these permutations are pairwise distinct. The name barrycade was coined by Richard K. Guy and refers to Barry Cipra, who introduced this kind of arrangement problem. A simple calculation shows that a solution can only exist for $n \ge 2h-2$ and it is conjectured that there always exists a solution for every height $h \ge 2$ and order $n \ge 2h-2$. In this work, for every height $h \ge 1$, we present a construction of a barrycade of height $h$ and order $n = 2h+3$. We also present a randomized heuristic that allows us to find a barrycade of height $h$ and conjectured optimal order $n=2h-2$, for every height $2 \leq h \leq 50$. Thus, we confirm the conjectured optimal order for all heights up to $50$. We also consider a related corral construction problem, where the permutations define a cyclic arrangement. In this setting, for every height $h \ge 1$, we present a construction of a corral of height $h$ and order $n=2h$. A heuristic approach, similar to the one used for barrycades, allows us to find a corral of height $h$ and conjectured optimal order $n=2h-1$, for every height $1 \leq h \leq 50$. We confirm Tomoki Nakamigawa's conjecture on well-dispersed partitions of cyclic groups for the number of parts up to $20$.
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All authors Jakub Binięda, Michał Dębski, Grzegorz Gutowski, Mateusz Milewski

Computation and Language

URA-NER: A Unified Retrieval-Augmented Framework with Retrieval Alignment and Uncertainty Reduction for Low-Resource NER

In-context learning (ICL) based on large language models (LLMs) has shown promising potential in alleviating performance bottlenecks caused by the limited availability of annotated data in Named Entity Recognition (NER). However, existing methods still face issues of retrieval misalignment and generation uncertainty, making their performance heavily dependent on the LLM's capabilities. As the parameter scale of LLMs decreases, their performance in few-shot settings deteriorates significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel unified retrieval-augmented framework, URA-NER, including three key components: Progressive Granularity Retrieval (PGR), Model-aware Representation Enhancement (MaRE), and Reason-aware Knowledge Verification. PGR is a two-stage retrieval mechanism that achieves stage alignment. It first retrieves demonstrations for span detection based on the query's global semantics, and then for type classification based on the specific entity context, providing fine-grained local information. Moreover, MaRE employs entity pre-recognition to guide the construction of representations, ensuring the query and demonstrations are aligned within the LLM's semantic space and attention pattern. In addition, to mitigate generation uncertainty, we propose RaKV, a closed-loop "generation-retrieval-verification" process. It explicates the LLM's reasoning paths, leverages them for the retrieval of external knowledge, and reorganizes the knowledge into verification evidence aligned with the original reasoning paths. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple low-resource NER datasets. Results demonstrate that URA-NER significantly enhances the performance of LLMs under low-resource settings, with particularly pronounced gains for smaller LLMs, achieving new state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
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Computational Physics

VNS Tokamak for Medical Isotope Production

The Volumetric Neutron Source (VNS) tokamak is a proposed fusion reactor for testing components under fusion neutron irradiation, and has potential use for radioisotope production. The VNS geometry is modeled in the Serpent 2.2.2 and OpenMC 0.15.2 neutronics codes. Coupled neutron-photon simulations compared fluxes, spectra, and selected reaction rates in the blanket and vacuum vessel. Good agreement was found overall, with the largest difference found in (n, 2n) reactions. On an HPC cluster, Serpent 2 was found to have shorter computation time in coupled simulations, while OpenMC was faster in neutron only simulations. Radioisotope production yields were simulated in Serpent 2.2.2 for capsule and Cobalt plate irradiation facilities. Results indicate potential for large volume production of 99Mo, 131I, 225Ac, 177Lu, 192Ir, 64Cu, 67Cu, 161Tb, and 153Sm while 203Pb indicates lower potential. 100Mo and LEU target heating was calculated, suggesting the LEU target mass or the cooling may need adjustment. Optimized 60Co production yielded 1.2 GBq/mg and 100,000 TBq after a 3-year irradiation period. Sensitivity to plant outage for 99Mo, 131I, 177Lu, and 60Co was simulated, suggesting irradiation can be restarted for the same isotope loading and demonstrated long-lived 60Co to be robust to long plant dwell-time.
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All authors Christopher Ehrich, Pavel Pereslavtsev, Christian Bachmann, Christian Reiter

Machine Learning

Prescriptive SVD-Inspired Attention via Spectral Energy Retention

Self-attention is central to modern Transformer architectures, but its dense dot-product formulation makes it difficult to identify which internal directions are structurally important and which can be modified without disrupting the model. SVD-Inspired Attention (SVDA) addresses part of this problem by introducing a learned diagonal spectrum into the query-key score interaction, making latent attention directions explicitly inspectable through indicators such as spectral entropy, effective rank, sparsity, alignment, selectivity, and perturbation response. This paper examines the transition from diagnostic interpretation to operational intervention. A diagnosis–intervention–verification framework is proposed, and one intervention is evaluated: spectral energy retention in the attention-score pathway. Across FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Food-101, the $\rho=0.90$ prescription removes 24.5–53.7% of score directions, reduces parameters by 2.6–4.3%, and reduces estimated MACs by 2.8–5.4%. The paired mean accuracy change of the dimension-reduced model ranges from $-0.03$ to $+0.05$ percentage points over three seeds. These results support SVDA as an intrinsically interpretable attention mechanism whose learned spectrum exposes an operational coordinate system for deterministic and verifiable modification of attention-score formation.
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Human-Computer Interaction

DeceptionAnalyser: A Web-Based AI Tool for Performing Structured Deception Analysis with Argumentation Schemes and LLMs

Deception plays a central role in Intelligence operations, yet it remains difficult to analyse systematically without expert knowledge of reasoning patterns and cognitive manipulation. In computational argumentation, for instance, no scheme-level ground-truth corpora currently exist to support statistical validation. In this paper, we address this by introducing a set of ten argument schemes designed to model distinct forms of deception, each accompanied by structured premises and critical questions. In doing so, we introduce the first dedicated library of argumentation schemes specifically designed for deception analysis, providing a structured foundation for systematically modelling and analysing deception in narrative text. We then present DeceptionAnalyser, a browser-based tool that implements these schemes through a two-stage methodology combining LLM-based premise extraction with critical-question-driven evaluation. Our aim is to provide a conceptual and methodological foundation for analysing deceptive reasoning in narrative text. This is precisely what we address in this paper by demonstrating how structured argumentation theory and AI-assisted analysis can support transparent, explainable assessments of potential deception. Because the schemes are designed to flag claims for scrutiny rather than to output a deception verdict, we do not benchmark classification accuracy; instead, we assess the reliability of the methodology by measuring the consistency of the tool's premise and conclusion assessments across ten contemporary large language models and repeated runs. We find that scheme detection is highly stable for clear-cut deception and degrades gracefully, in interpretable ways, on more ambiguous intelligence-style narratives.
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All authors Stefan Sarkadi, Xabier Garmendia, Jack Mumford, Trevor Bench-Capon

Fluid Dynamics

A closed-form solution for streaming and Lagrangian transport in a deforming circular cavity

Streaming from a deforming cavity wall serves micromixing, pumping and particle handling. We solve it in closed form in a two-dimensional circular cavity, for any azimuthal wall mode $m$, as $\mathrm{Wo}^2 \to 0$. A biharmonic inversion against the Reynolds stress, corrected by the second-order slip a moving wall imposes, gives the Lagrangian mean a tracer follows for a deforming no-slip wall, $\psi_L = -[m(5m+4)a_m^2/(128(m+2)(2m+1))]\,r^{2m}(r^2-1)^2\sin 2m\theta$, with a companion form for a shear-free interface. For a single mode the factor $(5m+4)/(m+2)$ relating it to the auxiliary solution $\psi_2$ is the same for every member of the co-phased prescribed-velocity family; at $m=2$ the physical Eulerian mean peaks an order of magnitude above $\psi_2$, with opposite sign. The no-slip cell centers lie at $r^2 = m/(m+2)$, and at large $m$ the peak streamfunction falls as $m^{-2}$, the peak speed as $m^{-1}$. At fixed radial wall-velocity amplitude the ranking over $m$ follows the wall kinematics: an externally driven wall peaks at $m=1$, a wall with zero first-order surface strain at $m=3$. Mode superpositions invert without degenerating, each harmonic carrying its own correction. At finite $\mathrm{Wo}$ the first-order field stays closed form in Bessel functions and the mean flow reduces to quadrature; the construction approaches the $m=2$ Rayleigh limit on a separate tangentially driven boundary problem. An independent finite-element solver, with the closed form withheld, reproduces $\psi_2$ with quadratic mesh convergence.
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All authors Zijian Liu, Julian Olszewski, Yang Lin, Yuan Gao, Mengren Wu, Jie Xu

2609.24368 · 21 Sep · 24 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. v2: the (5m+4)/(m+2) relation is stated for a single mode; the Wo^-1 decay law applies to the reference-boundary field, and the Lagrangian mean decays as Wo^-2; adds a moving-domain Navier-Stokes comparison, an appendix and references

Computer Vision

TReViS: Temporal Repetition Structure Aware Video Synthesis for Self-supervised Repetitive Action Counting

Fully supervised repetitive action counting (RAC) has achieved strong performance, but requires dense temporal annotations that are costly and difficult to scale. We propose TReViS, a self-supervised video synthesis framework that enables training RAC models without any repetition labels. TReViS estimates the underlying temporal repetition structure of an unlabeled video via a Temporal Self-Similarity Matrix, infers its cycle statistics, and synthesizes new training sequences that preserve realistic repetition patterns while introducing controlled temporal variability. These synthesized videos are paired with pseudo-labels and used to train existing RAC architectures from scratch. Across multiple datasets and backbones, TReViS consistently outperforms prior self-supervised methods and achieves performance competitive with several supervised baselines, while remaining fully label-free, demonstrating the effectiveness of structure-aware video synthesis for label-free RAC. The source code is available at https://github.com/yfqi/TReViS.
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All authors Fanqi Yu, Shengming Ma, Stefano Fiorini, Vito Paolo Pastore, Xuan Qi, Vittorio Murino, Cigdem Beyan

High Energy Physics (Theory)

T-duality of string charge density/bit threads correspondence in type II supergravity

In this paper, we study Abelian T-duality of the string charge density/bit threads correspondence in ten-dimensional Type II supergravity. T-duality along the common compact circle maps the Type IIB F1-NS5-P background to a Type IIA P-NS5-F1 background with the winding and momentum charges exchanged. The radial F1 source remains an F1 source, and its projected charge density gives a bit-thread flow whose maximal flux reproduces the black hole entropy. The same duality maps D1-D5-P to D0-D4-F1. In this case, a radial D1 source becomes a D2 source wrapped on the dual circle. Contracting the resulting spatial bivector with the normalized closed one-form on that circle gives a conserved effective radial flow whose maximal flux again reproduces the entropy. Although the local metrics, dilatons, source currents, and flow norms change, the dilaton-weighted transverse area density and the integrated maximal flux are invariant. These results provide a nontrivial T-duality test of the correspondence and extend it from string currents to wrapped-brane currents that reduce to string-like flows.
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Networking

Joint Energy Efficiency and Fairness Optimization for D2D Communications in Aerial-Ground Integrated Heterogeneous Networks

This study investigates an Aerial-Ground Integrated Heterogeneous network (AGIHN) architecture that combines terrestrial macro base stations and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serving as aerial base stations to enhance uplink access for macrocell users. To address the complex uplink resource allocation challenge for multiple device-to-device (D2D) communication pairs, we propose a low-complexity Multi-Channel Rate-Fair (MCRF) algorithm. Distinct from traditional exclusive allocation methods, MCRF supports shared reuse, enabling multiple D2D pairs to simultaneously multiplex on the same resource block, thereby significantly improving spectral efficiency. To manage the severe intra-tier interference arising from this non-orthogonal sharing, a heuristic Interference Avoidance (IA) strategy is integrated to ensure the transmission quality of D2D users. The proposed framework jointly optimizes system throughput, user fairness, and energy efficiency without requiring computationally intensive offline training. Simulation results demonstrate distinct performance advantages depending on the reuse mode: Compared to traditional single-channel exclusive reuse schemes, MCRF achieves massive gains, increasing D2D energy efficiency and throughput by approximately 397% and 542%, respectively. Furthermore, relative to multi-channel benchmarks (e.g., MCRR), the proposed algorithm optimizes the efficiency-fairness trade-off, enhancing the fairness index by 7.43% while maintaining a robust fairness score exceeding 0.6 in interference-prone environments.
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High Energy Physics (Theory)

Spin-curvature effects in slowly rotating black hole spacetime

We investigate the spin-curvature interaction for a massive spin-1/2 quantum particle in a slowly rotating black hole spacetime. In contrast to the flat Minkowski space, the curved spacetime introduces non-trivial spin connections into the Dirac equation due to the direct curvature-spin interaction. The force arising from this non-trivial spin-curvature coupling makes the particle deviate from its geodesics. We first calculate the tetrads in the co-moving frame of the particle in the slowly rotating black hole background. We then compute the components of the relativistic quantum force, arising from the spin-curvature interaction, using these co-moving tetrads up to linear order in the rotation parameter ($a$) of the black hole. The procedure of computing the force is based on the WKB approximation and the Gordon decomposition method for the Dirac probability four current. Our results show that the rotation parameter modifies the magnitude of the force by introducing a term that decays more rapidly with radial distance than the force magnitude in a static spherically symmetric Schwarzschild black hole spacetime.
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Number Theory

$D$-elliptic modular curves $X_0(N)$

We present a method for determining whether there exists a degree $D$ rational map from $X_0(N)$ to some elliptic curve $E/\mathbb{Q}$. Moreover, we explain how to obtain a quadratic form that represents all possible degrees of such maps using the degree pairing method. This method previously required odd analytic rank and some additional technical conditions to be satisfied. In this paper, we extended the method to even rank curves as well and remove all technical conditions. We also show how to prove or disprove the existence of degree $D$ maps to elliptic curves by a lifting criterion on the lattices $H_1(-,\mathbb{Z})$ As an application of this method, we determine all $D$-elliptic curves $X_0(N)$ for all $D\leq 100$. Interestingly, in some cases we found degree $D$ rational maps that we could not explain by degeneracy maps, quotient maps, and modular parameterisation.
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All authors Maarten Derickx, Daeyeol Jeon, Yongjae Kwon, Petar Orlić