Papers

Adoption and diffusion of neologisms in online communities have received renewed attention in recent years. As internet slang terms such as APT, referring to a K-pop song, and phrases such as Canon Event meaning an embarrassing but pivotal event, go viral online, it becomes increasingly important to understand the mechanisms that contribute to their success. Prior studies have often explained slang diffusion either from the perspective of social interaction or from the linguistic properties of the slang itself, but rarely from both perspectives together. One major obstacle has been the high cost of annotating slang usage in large-scale online communication. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, make it possible to use them as scalable annotators for such tasks. In this study, we first curate a human-annotated benchmark to evaluate LLM performance in detecting slang usage in real Reddit communication. We then leverage LLM-based annotations to model slang adoption and diffusion. Our results show that slang diffusers with higher bridging capital are associated with increased subsequent adoption, whereas diffusers with higher bonding capital are associated with reduced adoption. We also find that wider contextual usage of a slang term is associated with a longer time before new users officially adopt it. Together, these findings suggest that both social-network structure and linguistic context shape the diffusion of neologisms in online communities.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for EdgeAI perception systems, where accurate object localization and reliable identification enable safe decision-making. Singleagent MOT suffers from occlusions, sensor noise, and partial scene understanding in complex real-world scenarios. While multi-agent systems improve robustness by exploiting shared information, they introduce redundant measurements that lead to false data associations, and still struggle to capture nonlinear object dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose CDKFTrack, a Cluster-aware Data-Driven Kalman Filtering framework for Cooperative 3D MOT. The proposed method first fuses multivehicle 3D LiDAR detections through a Graph Laplacian-based formulation. Then, a cluster-aware redundancy reduction scheme groups spatially related detections and selects representative observations to reduce duplicate inputs to the tracker. The resulting detections are processed by a data-driven Kalman filter that learns object motion dynamics from data, reducing dependence on predefined linear motion assumptions. Furthermore, a wavelet-based temporal refinement module leverages the multiresolution decomposition property of wavelets to attenuate shortterm positional fluctuations and improve trajectory continuity. To the best of our knowledge, CDKF-Track is the first framework to jointly address detection-level fusion redundancy and learnable motion modeling in cooperative 3D MOT. Experimental results on the real-world V2V4Real dataset indicate that CDKF-Track achieves up to 27.99% improvements in tracking accuracy over state-of-the-art multi-agent MOT methods.

We investigate the weak and strong field gravitational lensing of light by a primary hair black hole (BH) solution obtained within the framework of the gravitational decoupling (GD) approach. In this method, the BH solution is constructed by introducing geometric deformations to a known seed spacetime, which, in the present case, is the Schwarzschild geometry. The deformation functions are determined by imposing the dominant energy condition, leading to the emergence of two characteristic parameters, the primary hair $Q$ and the coupling constant $\alpha$, both of which deform the Schwarzschild spacetime. To explore the lensing properties of this BH, we employ the Gibbons-Werner approach in the weak field regime and Bozza's formalism in the strong field regime. In the weak field limit, we derive the deflection angle up to second-order corrections and find that the coupling parameter $\alpha$ contributes more significantly to the leading-order deflection than the primary hair parameter $Q$. The primary hair is also found to exhibit an effectively repulsive gravitational behavior. In the strong field regime, we compute the deflection angle of photons propagating near the photon sphere, where the deflection diverges logarithmically, allowing photons to complete multiple loops around the BH and form relativistic images. Using the supermassive BH Sgr A* as the astrophysical lens, we further investigate the strong lensing observables, namely the asymptotic angular position $\vartheta_{\infty}$, the angular separation $s$, and the relative magnitude $r_{\mathrm{mag}}$. We also constrain the primary hair parameter $Q$ for different values of the coupling constant $\alpha$ using the shadow observations of Sgr A* reported by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration.

We present and tackle two problems associated with deploying Foundation Models (FMs) on Embodied Agents performing navigation: 1) Training bias in FMs leading to poor personalization in unseen environments, and 2) Limited FM context length hindering success, especially on long horizon tasks. Our solution for the former involves priming the FM with human-habit data mined from the scene and our solution for the latter involves active memory management via a novel `memory head' augmentation. We first present a taxonomy of existing literature on FM-based Embodied Navigation, and highlight these limitations. We then present our approaches, Transit-Aware Planning (TAP) and MemCtrl to address the limitations. With TAP, we present real-world results in a lab environment with a Turtlebot for personalized target finding that shows an average improvement of 18% over a non-TAP baseline. On MemCtrl, we report a 6% average improvement across various embodied tasks, with 20% on long instruction subsets, all while using nearly half the context used in the baseline model. Motivated by these result, we present our stance the deployability of FM-based embodied agents in real-world environments, and highlight open research directions.

We recast the Lange-Stuhler theorem as the universal property of a $2$-cartesian square of classifying stacks. This formulation shows that every Frobenius-periodic vector bundle of rank $r$ on an arbitrary fibered category in characteristic $p>0$ is trivialized by a finite étale torsor, without geometric hypotheses or restrictions on the ground field beyond its characteristic. The construction extends from $\mathrm{GL}_n$ to group schemes over finite fields that are connected affine or of finite type.

We present a systematic study of nuclear ground-state properties obtained with the Skyrme quark-meson coupling (SQMC) energy density functional and compare them with results from the SLy4d Skyrme parameterisation. The SQMC functional is constructed using the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model, which incorporates the internal quark structure of the nucleon and results in a significant reduction in the number of free parameters. We investigate binding energies, two-nucleon separation energies, charge radii, and quadrupole deformations across a broad range of nuclei. Particular attention is devoted to the isovector dependence of the spin-orbit interaction derived within the QMC model, and its impact on the binding energies of neutron-rich nuclei relevant to the r-process. We find that the SQMC functional provides a reasonable description of nuclear ground-state properties in comparison with SLy4d.

Reconstructing the stress field of a planar viscoelastic flow from optical measurements loses its direct evidence wherever optical coverage is interrupted, and no improvement in optical precision restores an observation that was never made. We characterize what a second, velocity channel adds, and what neither channel can supply. Two calibrated optical components determine the local deviatoric stress pointwise, while velocity constrains spatial stress variation through momentum balance, so the two channels are complementary rather than redundant. The isotropic part of the stress is unobservable to both: the divergence of an isotropic field is a pure gradient, which the Leray projection annihilates, so every representable isotropic mode lies in the joint null space. That accounts for the null space exactly when the optical field is complete, and bounds it from below otherwise, since finite incomplete sampling and aperture zeros can remove further directions. We verify the count directly on three discretizations. In paired synthetic tests with finite measurement apertures, spatially correlated noise and optical stripe dropout, adding velocity reduces the mean whole-domain deviatoric error from 50.40% to 27.82% at 3% reference noise, and the improvement survives shared gaps, inverse-grid refinement at fixed physical sampling, and a constitutively generated stress field. The improvement does not rest on how the regularization parameter is chosen: it holds under both the expected-norm discrepancy rule and generalized cross-validation, and we report each selection with its position in the search interval, which is where the two rules differ.

The mass and redshift distributions of merging binary black holes (BBHs) bear imprints of their astrophysical formation channels. Whether the BH mass distribution evolves with redshift, however, remains an open question. In this paper, we employ copula functions, which describe the dependence between variables independently of their marginal distributions, to probe the dependence structure between the primary mass and the redshift of BBH mergers. We construct five population models by coupling the marginal distributions of primary mass and redshift with the Gaussian copula, the Clayton copula, or one of its three rotations, and we constrain their hyperparameters using 235 BBH events from GWTC-5.0. For comparison, we also adopt a baseline model in which the primary mass and redshift are assumed independent. Among the copula-based models, only the model with the $180^\circ$ rotated Clayton copula, which couples higher primary masses preferentially with high redshifts, exhibits evidence for a nonzero correlation, with its copula parameter deviating from the independence limit at more than $1\sigma$ significance. Importantly, the constraints on the Hubble constant ($H_0$) derived from these models are mutually consistent within the $68\%$ confidence level; the baseline model yields $H_0=74.3^{+13.7}_{-19.6}~\mathrm{km\ s^{-1}\ Mpc^{-1}}$, indicating that allowing for a mass–redshift dependence does not significantly bias the $H_0$ inference with the current dataset. Bayesian model comparison favors the baseline model over all copula-based alternatives, with log-Bayes factors corresponding to weak to moderate evidence against the latter on the Jeffreys scale. Our results thus imply that the current GWTC-5.0 sample remains consistent with no redshift evolution of the primary mass distribution over the redshift range probed.

This paper is devoted to the global dynamics of a nonlocal Lagrangian-averaged Navier-Stokes-$\alpha$ (LANS-$\alpha$)-type system (also known as the viscous Euler-Poincaré system) in one, two, and three spatial dimensions. In the unforced periodic setting with zero mean, we establish global well-posedness for the initial-value problem and prove that the corresponding solution semigroup is dissipative and possesses a compact global attractor consisting of the singleton $\{0\}$. Furthermore, we obtain the following global-in-time algebraic asymptotic stability estimate: \[ \|u(t,\cdot)\|_{H^3}\lesssim t^{-1/2},\qquad \forall\, t>0, \] which is derived from higher-order energy inequalities combined with a uniform Gronwall-type argument. Our results provide a complete description of the long-time behavior of the unforced periodic dynamics for this nonlocal LANS-$\alpha$-type system.

We develop a Schrödingerization algorithm for quantum linear systems problems in two higher dimensions. The earlier LC-Schrödingerization approach represents the solution as a time integral of a homogeneous convection response and implements this integral by a linear combination of unitaries (LCU) over evolution times. We instead use Duhamel's principle to incorporate the integral into an inhomogeneous convection equation with zero initial data. Fourier projection in the convection variable and Schrödingerization in a second auxiliary variable then realize the solution without the separate LCU step. A joint choice of the kernel and recovery procedure gives an evolution time independent of the target accuracy, a uniformly bounded $L^2$ kernel normalization, and accurate recovery on a fixed interval. We establish the periodization and discretization bounds and analyze the interval recovery probability. With block preconditioning, we retain a single logarithmic precision factor and obtain linear condition-number dependence without variable-time amplitude amplification. Under exact oracle access and given a valid constant-factor solution-norm estimate, the algorithm uses $\mathcal O(\kappa_A\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries to each original input oracle, with constant success probability and $\ell^2$ state error at most $\varepsilon$. The matrix-query bound matches the standard worst-case scaling when the supplied norm bounds are tight. UnitaryLab simulations on positive-definite and indefinite systems demonstrate the solution accuracy and probability gain from interval recovery.

Many scientific datasets, such as molecular conformational ensembles or single-cell tissue measurements, are naturally modeled as meta-distributions: distributions over probability measures on non-Euclidean domains. Existing generative methods largely assume Euclidean geometry and fail to capture this structure. We introduce Riemannian Wasserstein Entropic Flow Matching (RWEFM), a generative framework on the Wasserstein space $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathcal{M})$ of a Riemannian manifold $(\mathcal{M},g)$. RWEFM is trained by regressing a neural vector field onto Riemannian optimal transport velocities, using McCann displacement interpolations as conditional paths. We confirm theoretically that this construction leads to a valid flow matching approach on $\mathcal{P}_2(\mathcal{M})$ and introduce the Riemannian Entropic Map, a GPU-efficient approximation of the optimal transport map on manifolds. Our experiments show that by respecting the intrinsic geometry of the data, RWEFM can generate whole single-cell samples in hyperspherical latent spaces and protein conformational ensembles on the torus. As RWEFM requires only a geodesic distance and a projection operator, it is not restricted to manifolds with closed-form geometry, which we demonstrate by generating distributions on a general triangulated mesh.

Deterministic dynamics modeling of tendon-driven continuum robots remains challenging owing to uncertainties in material behavior, tendon transmission, friction, and contact. Measured joint configurations and nominal tendon commands do not fully characterize these internal mechanical factors, leaving uncertainty in the subsequent motion. We therefore develop a history-conditioned, physics-informed flow-matching framework for probabilistic dynamics prediction, using motion and actuation histories to predict the distribution of the next complete joint configuration. By recursively sampling next-step configurations under prescribed commands, the model predicts distributions of future whole-body motions. In simulation, scenario-specific models achieve five-second trajectory Energy Scores (lower is better) of 12.05 mm under internal friction variation and 9.29 mm under unobserved actuation disturbances. Relative to the conditional variational autoencoder and diffusion baselines, Flow attains lower Energy Scores and coverage closer to the nominal level in both scenarios. Ablations support history and structural conditioning in both scenarios. On the physical robot, predictions under two tendon-command profiles excluded from training capture the principal motion sequences, with five-second Energy Scores of 11.91 and 11.42 mm, lower than the compared baselines. The predicted-to-measured spread ratios are 1.65 and 1.22 (closer to 1 is better). These results support history-conditioned probabilistic dynamics prediction under incomplete mechanical observations.

We increasingly use machine learning to label scientific datasets. The models we develop and deploy are improving all the time, but they are not and will likely never be perfect. Mistakes matter, as errors can propagate into our scientific understanding, particularly when systematically biased. Very reasonably, scientists thus review substantial proportions of ML-generated labels to verify or correct mistakes in pursuit of ensuring their scientific findings are not biased by ML. In this work, we focus on helping scientists optimally allocate this reviewing effort relative to their scientific goals. We focus on a specific class of scientists (ecologists) and a specific, widespread, and impactful modeling target (occupancy modeling, which estimates where species are likely to occur, conditioned on environmental factors). We introduce Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling (ACORN), a method that incorporates ML predictions into occupancy models and strategically selects samples for expert review that are maximally informative for downstream ecological analysis. Across camera-trap and bioacoustic datasets, our method recovers ecological conclusions close to those obtained from fully human-labeled data, while requiring substantially fewer expert reviews than non-targeted review policies. Our results suggest that ML-assisted scientific workflows should optimize expert effort for downstream inference, rather than for classifier accuracy alone, especially when human review budget is limited. Our code is available at https://github.com/timmh/acorn

Let $n$ be a positive integer. A translation-invariant total order (TITO) with period $n$ is a total order of the integers that is invariant under translations by multiples of $n$. These structures arise naturally in the study of Coxeter groups. In particular, real $n$-TITOs are in bijection with biclosed sets of positive roots of the affine symmetric group $\widetilde S_n$. Barkley and Defant recently introduced pattern avoidance for TITOs and used it to define the affine Tamari lattice. The enumeration of TITOs avoiding a single pattern of length $3$ is due to Crites and Barkley–Defant. We extend this work to TITOs avoiding two patterns. Our main results include a complete enumeration of TITOs that avoid a pair of patterns in $S_3\times S_3$, as well as of TITOs that avoid a pair $(p, q)$ with $p \in S_3 \setminus \{123, 321\}$ and $q \in S_4$. Furthermore, we provide an explicit construction of the inverse of the bijection between $312$-avoiding TITOs and noncrossing arc diagrams, thereby extending the combinatorial framework introduced by Barkley.

As large language models (LLMs) scale rapidly, dense full-parameter adaptation becomes increasingly expensive, motivating sparse and modular architectures such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. This shift raises a key question for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT): at what granularity should parameters be selected and updated? Existing PEFT methods such as LoRA operate on predefined weight matrices, while expert-level sparse tuning methods update entire selected experts. However, we observe that activated experts are internally sparse, with only a small fraction of intermediate channels strongly responding to downstream tasks, indicating that expert-level adaptation is still too coarse. We propose NSFT (Neural Sub-expert Fine-Tuning), a fine-grained PEFT framework that refines MoE adaptation from experts to sub-experts. NSFT decomposes each expert along the intermediate dimension into structured channel groups and selects task-relevant sub-experts by combining routing importance with intra-expert activation saliency. To optimize sparse partial updates, NSFT further introduces learning-rate scaling and dynamic gradient scaling to compensate for the reduced effective update magnitude. Experiments on OLMoE and Ling-mini-2.0 across challenging domain-specific tasks and general benchmarks show that NSFT consistently outperforms representative PEFT and expert-level sparse tuning baselines, while using substantially fewer trainable parameters and preserving competitive general capability. These results suggest that sub-expert-level adaptation is a more precise and efficient PEFT paradigm for MoE LLMs.

Robots operating safely in cluttered everyday environments often need to infer scene geometry from partial observations. Methods that detect objects in 2D and reconstruct them independently struggle in such scenes: a missed object is never reconstructed, a merged detection can fuse two objects, and separately reconstructed meshes may overlap or fail to touch their supporting surfaces. We introduce CODA (Complete Once, Decompose Afterward), a generative model that instead reconstructs the complete scene geometry from a single unsegmented RGB-D image, then separates the surface into the surrounding environment and movable objects. Still, generated scene geometry can drift from the observed partial point cloud. To reduce this drift, CODA uses two explicit 3D grounding mechanisms to keep reconstructed geometry consistent with observed surfaces while completing unseen regions. Experiments on HomebrewedDB and our custom cluttered-scene dataset show more accurate reconstructions and a higher fraction of objects remaining in place under simulated gravity than both object-first and scene-first baselines.

Large-scale manipulation demonstrations are essential for learning robust visuomotor policies, yet real-world data collection is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation offers a promising alternative, but physical and visual discrepancies can limit the transferability of synthetic data, particularly for manipulation with soft grippers. We present PhyVisGen, a physically and visually high-fidelity framework for scalable robotic manipulation data generation. On the physical side, PhyVisGen introduces an arm-gripper coupling method based on the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC), enabling high-fidelity soft contact throughout complete manipulation trajectories. On the visual side, it combines real-scene reconstruction with real-time path tracing to generate visually realistic observations while preserving captured scene appearance. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the physical and visual fidelity of PhyVisGen. Policies trained exclusively on synthetic manipulation demonstrations achieve 65-95% success across five real-robot tasks, without real-robot demonstration data or policy fine-tuning.

Recent game world models support realistic visual simulation and interactive gameplay based on player inputs. However, they typically learn environment dynamics from pixel-level supervision, jointly modeling perception, memory, state transitions, and rendering within a single end-to-end framework. While this design enables open-ended, action-controllable generation, it still falls short of delivering a complete gameplay experience. Games are governed by explicit mechanics, such as health deduction, skill activation, combat rules, and termination conditions. These mechanics depend on precise and consistent state transitions that generative models alone cannot reliably enforce. In contrast, game engines can guarantee such mechanics through hard-coded rules, but provide limited flexibility for player-driven creation. To bridge these paradigms, we introduce GameDirector, the first agentic framework that decouples rule-based gameplay logic from visual rendering. Given player-defined configurations, the framework acts as an intelligent director that interprets visual observations, updates game states, tactically controls NPCs, and enforces gameplay rules. It then translates these decisions into text prompts that guide the video world model to render the resulting gameplay. This separation allows players to configure characters, states, and rules much like a game developer while preserving coherent game mechanics. Experiments on three games, using data collected by our automated gameplay agent, show that GameDirector achieves accurate state tracking, reliable rule following, and improves boss action quality by more than 39.9% over various end-to-end game world model settings. Overall, by externalizing player-controllable game logic, GameDirector establishes a middle ground between hard-coded simulation and generative modeling, enabling more flexible and closed-loop gameplay experiences.

Surgical videos are a primary resource for teaching trainees anatomy, tool usage, and procedural skills. Yet learning from them at scale requires systems that understand surgical scenes. Existing approaches fall short: vision-language models lack fine-grained domain reasoning, task-specific models do not generalize, and prior scene graphs omit clinically meaningful detail. We present SurgGraph, a training-free pipeline that generates quantitative scene graphs from surgical videos. Operating on segmentation masks and depth maps, SurgGraph encodes each clinically meaningful relation (attachment, occlusion, separation, tool actions) as a <subject, verb, object, value> tuple whose numeric value quantifies the relation's extent over time. Technical evaluations show more precise scene understanding than state-of-the-art surgical VLM baselines. We then build SurgGraphQA, a proof-of-concept learning application that retrieves meaningful and boundary-case exemplars and generates visual explanations and feedback. A study with 17 medical students and 2 resident surgeons shows significant learning gains, demonstrating its educational value.

Accurately isolating disease-related features from confounding covariates (e.g., age, gender, site) and individual variations remains a fundamental challenge in medical image classification. Traditional regression-based approaches may ignore non-linear relations between image features and true covariates. To overcome this issue, we present a generalized Medical Imaging Disentanglement Learning (MedIDL) framework. MedIDL maps image features into three mutually orthogonal latent spaces through specialized disentanglement heads: a disease classification head guided by a supervised loss, a covariate-alignment head constrained by cross-subject similarity matching, and a Gaussian head absorbing individual variations. We evaluated our framework across 7 datasets encompassing diverse imaging modalities. MedIDL outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised classification methods in accuracy across all datasets. Association analyses demonstrate that MedIDL successfully isolates target-specific latent representations. Gradient-based interpretability mappings localize pathognomonic patterns aligning with established clinical literature.

Robots have significant potential to automate construction processes. However, their industry adoption remains limited, partly because of the programming effort required to adapt robots to diverse tasks. This paper presents a skill sequence planning method that enables a heterogeneous team of multi-functional robots to collaboratively perform construction assembly work using reusable, preprogrammed skills such as grasping, drilling, and fastening. A central controller transforms the digital representation of the building into a construction relationship graph that represents construction entities, their states, and their parent-child relationships. Based on this representation, the system selects the next construction target, generates a symbolic sequence of skills for capable members of the robot team, and produces collision-free geometric motion plans for skill execution. The symbolic planning problem is dynamically regenerated as the construction state changes. An interactive digital twin presents the planned skill sequence and robot states to human co-workers for review and approval before execution. The method is evaluated through a construction assembly case study. By reducing the need to program robots separately for each task variation, the proposed approach supports more flexible deployment of collaborative robot teams in construction.

We study the semiclassical dynamics of solitary waves for the three-dimensional cubic–quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation with an external potential. For initial data given by a modulated free ground state $P_\omega$, we prove that the wave-packet center follows the associated classical Hamiltonian flow. For $\omega\in\mathcal I$, we obtain qualitative persistence near the soliton orbit. Under the additional positive-slope condition $\omega\in\mathcal I_+$, we establish an $O(\eps)$ approximation in the scaled $H^1$ norm on every fixed time interval. We also derive $O(\eps^2)$ concentration estimates for the mass, momentum, and center of mass.

Predicting early outcomes based on trajectory can decrease the expenses associated with agent evaluation by terminating a run once the outcome becomes sufficiently predictable, assuming that the predictor's confidence is properly calibrated. Calibration is at risk when a predictor is applied to an agent on which it was never trained, but it is not known whether such transfer failures are broad across agent systems or concentrated in specific target agent/head combinations. Using public SWE-bench Verified trajectories and a frozen dual-head early-outcome prediction pipeline, we ran a leave-one-agent-out calibration audit, a shared-predictor leave-two-agents-out control, oracle prior correction, and a robustness battery over training cohorts, task resampling, task halves, jackknife, and thresholds. Fixed-scaffold TerminalBench analysis served as a pre-registered boundary test. Broad same-predictor pairwise heterogeneity was not supported; the median pairwise corrected-gap differences were 0.0180 (SUCCESS head, 45 pairs) and 0.0385 (FAILURE head, 35 pairs), and the pre-registered heterogeneity criterion was not met on either head. Two specific combinations, gpt-5-mini/SUCCESS and claude-opus-4.6/FAILURE, showed persistent calibration-transfer errors (median corrected gaps 0.1377 and 0.1107) without a sign reversal under any frozen control. TerminalBench did not establish cross-benchmark replication: the success target produced zero decisions (INDETERMINATE), and the failure target did not satisfy the pre-registered persistence criterion. Therefore, a strong target-specific calibration-transfer error can exist within one frozen environment, but the evidence does not establish that the error is intrinsic to the model or general across benchmarks.

Satellite-based free-space optics (FSO) quantum key distribution (QKD) systems have recently attracted significant research interest due to their potential to enable globally secured applications. However, the inherent uncertainty of FSO channels, caused by weather conditions and satellite mobility, induces severe fluctuations in quantum bit-error rate (QBER) between legitimate users. This makes designing an efficient key reconciliation, an essential step in the QKD post-processing, particularly challenging. In this work, we propose a key reconciliation scheme that combines protograph rate-compatible (RC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with a syndrome-based error estimation method. The proposed error estimation method reduces the number of communication rounds without requiring additional information disclosure. Furthermore, to our best knowledge, an analytical framework is first developed to evaluate end-to-end secret-key throughput (SKT), accounting for the impact of imperfect error estimation and dynamic FSO channel conditions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms conventional blind reconciliation under diverse FSO channel conditions and provide practical guidelines for system parameter selection. Finally, we validate the proposed framework through a case study that incorporates data from a Starlink low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite and moving ground vehicles.

Exhaustively evaluating every candidate LLM configuration on every benchmark item to identify a high-performing one is costly. We formulate configuration selection as a cost-aware Bayesian bandit problem and propose GittinsEval, which draws on the Bayesian-optimal Gittins policy to determine which configuration to evaluate next and when to stop. We extend the policy with an anytime recommendation rule over both fully and partially evaluated configurations, using an LCB-style score to account for posterior uncertainty. GittinsEval is computationally efficient, requiring only lightweight online updates after offline precomputation. Across GSM8K, PIQA, AlpacaEval, and MMLU response matrices, GittinsEval is consistently competitive, with particularly strong gains over configuration-level Bayesian optimization on large-example benchmarks and over cost-unaware bandit baselines on large-candidate tasks. Crucially, GittinsEval often attains near-zero simple regret using only 1% to 2% of the exhaustive-evaluation cost; it also offers an adaptive stopping rule that typically triggers at 1% to 10%.

We introduce the chordal isometric circle of a Möbius map, and use this to give a factorization of any Möbius map as the composition of a chordal isometry and either a reflection, or a rotary reflection, across a circle. We then use this to find the chordal, and spherical, Lipschitz constants of a Möbius map, and compare this with related results in the literature.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning when scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, but small- and mid-scale models remain brittle reasoners even with knowledge distillation (KD). We present Ladders-of-Thought (LoT), a framework that improves reasoning by combining progressive question rewrites with a self-evolving curriculum. LoT automatically generates semantically faithful but easier variants of reasoning problems, organizes them into difficulty buckets using step-based measures, and employs a self-evolving bandit scheduler to allocate training adaptively. Evaluated on two reasoning domains, math and multi-hop reasoning, across 1-8B models from different families, LoT consistently improves over KD. It delivers large gains on arithmetic tasks (e.g., +32 percentage points on AddSub, +25pp on SVAMP), +2-8pp improvements on in-domain test splits, and strong though dataset-dependent benefits on multi-hop reasoning (e.g., +16pp on QASC, +25pp on StrategyQA). LoT also converges faster than staged curricula, highlighting the value of adaptive progression. These results show that progressive rewrites coupled with adaptive curricula provide a simple yet effective recipe for strengthening reasoning in smaller LLMs.

Closed-loop evaluation of surgical robots requires tissue that deforms, can be grasped and lifted, and reproduces the anatomy in which the robot will operate. We present a simulator in which this tissue is reconstructed from a fixed-view RGB-D recording of the surgical field, composited to remove the instruments, closed into watertight volumes and tetrahedralised; the pipeline was applied unchanged to three specimens of two species (thirteen organs, 146,061 tetrahedra, no inverted elements). For one specimen, the organs are placed in a bimanual cell in which two Franka FR3 arms operate motorised instruments through 6 mm trocars. The core contribution is the numerical and contact design that keeps this cell stable: implicit integration, simulation meshes separate from collision meshes, numerical guards, and a grasp constraint captured at the live tissue pose. In 45 repeated grasp-lifts, a friction grasp held the tissue in 0 of 15 trials and each constraint grasp in 13 of 15; on displaced tissue, a rest-pose constraint produced one-step snaps of up to 17.8 mm, which live-pose capture eliminates. Against the recording, front-surface depth error is 1.33 to 1.41 mm, organ silhouette IoU is 0.80, and in five grasp-lifts reproduced from video the landmark displacement RMSE is 11.8 mm against 14.2 mm for a static prediction. Biofidelity is not claimed; the environment is intended for closed-loop feasibility, safety, contact and policy screening.

This thesis studies the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence in two directions: quantum methods for machine learning and machine learning methods for quantum systems. For quantum machine learning, Neural Quantum Embedding learns data representations that increase the trace distance between embedded class ensembles, lowering an embedding-dependent bound on empirical risk and improving classification on noisy quantum hardware. A training objective based on the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product extends this approach to deterministic quantum computation with one qubit (DQC1) and is demonstrated on an NMR quantum processor. A margin-based generalization analysis then connects quantum neural network performance to quantum state discrimination. In the studied benchmarks, margin distributions predict generalization more reliably than parameter-count metrics. For quantum systems, a Mamba-based neural decoder for surface codes matches a reproduced Transformer baseline in memory experiments while reducing inference-cost scaling from quartic to quadratic in code distance. Under an explicit decoder-induced-noise model, it achieves lower logical error rates and a higher effective threshold. For neural quantum states, stochastic reconfiguration is interpreted as tangent-space ridge regression, with its diagonal shift controlling the bias-variance trade-off under finite Monte Carlo sampling. Multi-shift stochastic reconfiguration reduces checkpoint-local validation residuals and update variance relative to fixed-shift SR, at additional computational cost. Together, these contributions show how learned representations, statistical control, and hardware constraints shape the exchange between quantum computing and machine learning.

We study Yang's higher numerical invariants for the quasi-homogeneous submodules \[ M_{k,\ell}=[z^k-w^\ell]\subset H^2(\mathbb D^2), \qquad k,\ell\in\mathbb N,\quad k\neq\ell. \] The Hilbert–Schmidt property and the low-order invariants $\Sigma_0$ and $\Sigma_1$ for this family follow from earlier results on $M_{\theta,\varphi}$-type submodules. Our aim is to determine the complete higher-order sequence. Using the weighted homogeneous decomposition associated with $z^k-w^\ell$, we construct explicit orthonormal bases for the two defect spaces and determine the exact support of the shifted defect inner products. For $j\geq1$, set \[ A_j=\left\lceil\frac{j}{\ell}\right\rceil, \qquad B_j=\left\lceil\frac{j}{k}\right\rceil. \] We obtain \[ \Sigma_0(M_{k,\ell})=\frac{\pi^2}{6}, \qquad \Sigma_j(M_{k,\ell})=F(A_j,B_j), \] where $F$ is an explicitly evaluated symmetric function on $\mathbb N^2$. The sequence is nonincreasing, tends to zero, and satisfies $\Sigma_j>\Sigma_{j+1} \Longleftrightarrow k\mid j\ \text{or}\ \ell\mid j$. Hence its strict descent set is $k\mathbb N\cup\ell\mathbb N$. This descent set determines the additive semigroup $\langle k,\ell\rangle$, while the complete numerical invariant sequence determines the unordered pair $\{k,\ell\}$. The order of the two exponents is not recoverable because of coordinate-swap symmetry.