TTM (Talking to Me) task is a pivotal component in understanding human social interactions, aiming to determine who is engaged in conversation with the camera-wearer. Traditional models often face challenges in real-world scenarios due to missing visual data, neglecting the role of head orientation, and background noise. This study addresses these limitations by introducing EgoAdapt, an adaptive framework designed for robust egocentric "Talking to Me" speaker detection under missing modalities. Specifically, EgoAdapt incorporates three key modules: (1) a Visual Speaker Target Recognition (VSTR) module that captures head orientation as a non-verbal cue and lip movement as a verbal cue, allowing a comprehensive interpretation of both verbal and non-verbal signals to address TTM, setting it apart from tasks focused solely on detecting speaking status; (2) a Parallel Shared-weight Audio (PSA) encoder for enhanced audio feature extraction in noisy environments; and (3) a Visual Modality Missing Awareness (VMMA) module that estimates the presence or absence of each modality at each frame to adjust the system response dynamically.Comprehensive evaluations on the TTM benchmark of the Ego4D dataset demonstrate that EgoAdapt achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 67.39% and an Accuracy (Acc) of 62.01%, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 4.96% in Accuracy and 1.56% in mAP.

Replica exchange (REX) is one of the most widely used enhanced sampling methodologies, yet its efficiency is limited by the requirement for a large number of intermediate temperature replicas. Here we present Generative Replica Exchange (GREX), which integrates deep generative models into the REX framework to eliminate this temperature ladder. Drawing inspiration from reservoir replica exchange (res-REX), GREX utilizes trained normalizing flows to generate high-temperature configurations on demand and map them directly to the target distribution using the potential energy as a constraint, without requiring target-temperature training data. This approach reduces production simulations to a single replica at the target temperature while maintaining thermodynamic rigor through Metropolis exchange acceptance. We validate GREX on three benchmark systems of increasing complexity, highlighting its superior efficiency and practical applicability for molecular simulations.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) introduces a structurally distinct attack surface that existing threat frameworks, designed for traditional software systems or generic LLM deployments, do not adequately cover. This paper presents MCP-38, a protocol-specific threat taxonomy consisting of 38 threat categories (MCP-01 through MCP-38). The taxonomy was derived through a systematic four-phase methodology: protocol decomposition, multi-framework cross-mapping, real-world incident synthesis, and remediation-surface categorization. Each category is mapped to STRIDE, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025, LLM01--LLM10), and the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications (2026, ASI01--ASI10). MCP-38 addresses critical threats arising from MCP's semantic attack surface (tool description poisoning, indirect prompt injection, parasitic tool chaining, and dynamic trust violations), none of which are adequately captured by prior work. MCP-38 provides the definitional and empirical foundation for automated threat intelligence platforms.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer high energy efficiency and event-driven computation, ideal for low-power edge AI. Their hardware implementation on FPGAs, however, faces challenges due to heavy computation, large memory use, and limited flexibility. This paper proposes a compact System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture for temporal-coding SNNs, integrating a RISC-V controller with an event-driven SNN core. It replaces multipliers with bitwise operations using binarized weights, includes a spike-time sorter for active spikes, and skips noninformative events to reduce computation. The architecture runs fully on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, achieving up to 16x memory reduction for weights and lowering computational overhead and latency, with 97.0% accuracy on MNIST and 88.3% on FashionMNIST. This self-contained design provides an efficient, scalable platform for real-time neuromorphic inference at the edge.

Multi-agent LLM systems delegate tasks across trust boundaries, but current protocols do not govern delegation under unverifiable quality claims. We show that when delegates can inflate self-reported quality scores, quality-based routing produces a provenance paradox: it systematically selects the worst delegates, performing worse than random. We extend the LLM Delegate Protocol (LDP) with delegation contracts that bound authority through explicit objectives, budgets, and failure policies; a claimed-vs-attested identity model that distinguishes self-reported from verified quality; and typed failure semantics enabling automated recovery. In controlled experiments with 10 simulated delegates and validated with real Claude models, routing by self-claimed quality scores performs worse than random selection (simulated: 0.55 vs. 0.68; real models: 8.90 vs. 9.30), while attested routing achieves near-optimal performance (d = 9.51, p < 0.001). Sensitivity analysis across 36 configurations confirms the paradox emerges reliably when dishonest delegates are present. All extensions are backward-compatible with sub-microsecond validation overhead.

Accurate segmentation of brain images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans plays a pivotal role in brain image analysis and the diagnosis of neurological disorders. Deep learning algorithms, particularly U-Net and U-Net++, are widely used for image segmentation. However, it finds difficult to deal with uncertainty in images. To address this challenge, this work integrates intuitionistic fuzzy logic into U-Net and U-Net++, propose a novel framework, named as IFS U-Net and IFS U-Net++. These models accept input data in an intuitionistic fuzzy representation to manage uncertainty arising from vague ness and imprecise data. This approach effectively handles tissue ambiguity caused by the partial volume effect and boundary uncertainties. To evaluate the effectiveness of IFS U-Net and IFS U-Net++, experiments are conducted on two publicly available MRI brain datasets: the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR) and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS). Segmentation performance is quantitatively assessed using Accuracy, Dice Coefficient, and Intersection over Union (IoU). The results demonstrate that the proposed architectures consistently improve segmentation performance by effectively addressing uncertainty

Surrogate gradients are a standard tool for training spiking neural networks (SNNs), but conventional hard forward or surrogate backward training couples a nonsmooth forward model with a biased gradient estimator. We study sharpness aware Surrogate Training (SAST), which applies sharpness aware Minimization (SAM) to a surrogate forward SNN trained by backpropagation. In this formulation, the optimization target is an ordinary smooth empirical risk, so the training gradient is exact for the auxiliary model being optimized. Under explicit boundedness and contraction assumptions, we derive compact state stability and input Lipschitz bounds, establish smoothness of the surrogate objective, provide a first order SAM approximation bound, and prove a nonconvex convergence guarantee for stochastic SAST with an independent second minibatch. We also isolate a local mechanism proposition, stated separately from the unconditional guarantees, that links per sample parameter gradient control to smaller input gradient norms under local Jacobian conditioning. Empirically, we evaluate clean accuracy, hard spike transfer, corruption robustness, and training overhead on N-MNIST and DVS Gesture. The clearest practical effect is transfer gap reduction: on N-MNIST, hard spike accuracy rises from 65.7% to 94.7% (best at $ρ=0.30$) while surrogate forward accuracy remains high; on DVS Gesture, hard spike accuracy improves from 31.8% to 63.3% (best at $ρ=0.40$). We additionally specify the compute matched, calibration, and theory alignment controls required for a final practical assessment.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems extend large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge sources but introduce new attack surfaces through the retrieval pipeline. In particular, adversaries can poison retrieval corpora so that malicious documents are preferentially retrieved at inference time, enabling targeted manipulation of model outputs. We study gradient-guided corpus poisoning attacks against modern RAG pipelines and evaluate retrieval-layer defenses that require no modification to the underlying LLM. We implement dual-document poisoning attacks consisting of a sleeper document and a trigger document optimized using Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG). In a large-scale evaluation on the Security Stack Exchange corpus (67,941 documents) with 50 attack attempts, gradient-guided poisoning achieves a 38.0 percent co-retrieval rate under pure vector retrieval. We show that a simple architectural modification, hybrid retrieval combining BM25 and vector similarity, substantially mitigates this attack. Across all 50 attacks, hybrid retrieval reduces gradient-guided attack success from 38 percent to 0 percent without modifying the model or retraining the retriever. When attackers jointly optimize payloads for both sparse and dense retrieval signals, hybrid retrieval can be partially circumvented, achieving 20-44 percent success, but still significantly raises attack difficulty relative to vector-only retrieval. Evaluation across five LLM families (GPT-5.3, GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Llama 4, and GPT-4o-mini) shows attack success ranging from 46.7 percent to 93.3 percent. Cross-corpus evaluation on the FEVER Wikipedia dataset (25 attacks) yields 0 percent attack success across all retrieval configurations.

While explainable AI (XAI) is often heralded as a means to enhance transparency and trustworthiness in closed-loop neurotechnology for psychiatric and neurological conditions, its real-world prevalence remains low. Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that the type of explanations provided by current XAI methods often fails to align with clinicians' end-user needs. In this viewpoint, we argue that clinically meaningful explainability (CME) is essential for AI-enabled closed-loop medical neurotechnology and must be addressed from an ethical, technical, and clinical perspective. Instead of exhaustive technical detail, clinicians prioritize clinically relevant, actionable explanations, such as clear representations of input-output relationships and feature importance. Full technical transparency, although theoretically desirable, often proves irrelevant or even overwhelming in practice, as it may lead to informational overload. Therefore, we advocate for CME in the neurotechnology domain: prioritizing actionable clarity over technical completeness and designing interface visualizations that intuitively map AI outputs and key features into clinically meaningful formats. To this end, we introduce a reference architecture called NeuroXplain, which translates CME into actionable technical design recommendations for any future neurostimulation device. Our aim is to inform stakeholders working in neurotechnology and regulatory framework development to ensure that explainability fulfills the right needs for the right stakeholders and ultimately leads to better patient treatment and care.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) indoor localization provides centimeter-level accuracy and low latency, but its measurement reliability degrades severely under Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions, leading to meter-scale ranging errors and inconsistent uncertainty characteristics. Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) complements UWB by providing infrastructure-free motion estimation; however, its error accumulates nonlinearly over time due to bias and noise propagation. Fusion methods based on Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) and Particle Filters (PF) can improve average localization accuracy through probabilistic state estimation. However, these approaches typically rely on manually tuned measurement covariances. Such fixed or heuristically tuned parameters are hard to sustain across varying indoor layouts, NLOS ratios, and motion patterns, leading to limited robustness and poor generalization of measurement uncertainty modeling in heterogeneous environments. To address this limitation, this work proposes an adaptive measurement covariance scaling framework in which reliability cues are learned from historical UWB/PDR trajectories. A large teacher model is employed offline to generate temporally consistent next-position predictions from structured UWB/PDR sequences, and this behavior is distilled into a lightweight student model suitable for real-time deployment. The student model continuously regulates EKF measurement covariances based on prediction residuals, enabling environment-aware fusion without manual re-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed KD-EKF framework significantly reduces localization error, suppresses error spikes during Line-of-Sight (LOS)/NLOS transitions, and mitigates long-term drift compared to fixed-parameter EKF, thereby improving measurement robustness across diverse indoor environments.

Digital twins, virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming system design across industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) systems has been limited by the non-differentiable nature of conventional RF simulators. The visibility of propagation paths causes severe discontinuities, and differentiable rendering techniques from computer graphics cannot easily transfer due to point-source antennas and dominant specular reflections. In this paper, we present RFDT, a physically based differentiable RF simulation framework that enables gradient-based interaction between virtual and physical worlds. RFDT resolves discontinuities with a physically grounded edge-diffraction transition function, and mitigates non-convexity from Fourier-domain processing through a signal domain transform surrogate. Our implementation demonstrates RFDT's ability to accurately reconstruct digital twins from real RF measurements. Moreover, RFDT can augment diverse downstream applications, such as test-time adaptation of machine learning-based RF sensing and physically constrained optimization of communication systems.

In the artificial intelligence (AI) age, firms increasingly invest in AI technology innovation to secure competitive advantages. However, the relationship between firms' AI technology innovation and consumer complaints remains insufficiently explored. Drawing on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), this paper investigates how firms' AI technology innovation influences consumer complaints. Employing a multimethod approach, Study 1 analyzes panel data from S&P 500 firms (N = 2,758 firm-year observations), Study 2 examines user-generated Reddit data (N = 2,033,814 submissions and comments), and Study 3 involves two controlled experiments (N = 410 and N = 500). The results reveal that firms' AI technology innovation significantly increases consumers' threat-related emotions, heightening their complaints. Furthermore, compared to AI process innovation, AI product innovation leads to higher consumer complaints. This paper advances the understanding of consumers' psychological responses to firms' AI innovation and provides practical implications for managing consumer complaints effectively.

Current keyword spotting systems primarily use phoneme-level matching to distinguish confusable words but ignore user-specific pronunciation traits like prosody (intonation, stress, rhythm). This paper presents ProKWS, a novel framework integrating fine-grained phoneme learning with personalized prosody modeling. We design a dual-stream encoder where one stream derives robust phonemic representations through contrastive learning, while the other extracts speaker-specific prosodic patterns. A collaborative fusion module dynamically combines phonemic and prosodic information, enhancing adaptability across acoustic environments. Experiments show ProKWS delivers highly competitive performance, comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness for personalized keywords with tone and intent variations.

As advancements in technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Verification (SV), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) lead to increased usage of intelligent voice assistants, the demand for privacy and personalization has escalated. In this paper, we introduce a multi-task learning framework for personalized, customizable open-vocabulary Keyword Spotting (PCOV-KWS). This framework employs a lightweight network to simultaneously perform Keyword Spotting (KWS) and SV to address personalized KWS requirements. We have integrated a training criterion distinct from softmax-based loss, transforming multi-class classification into multiple binary classifications, which eliminates inter-category competition, while an optimization strategy for multi-task loss weighting is employed during training. We evaluated our PCOV-KWS system in multiple datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms the baselines in evaluation results, while also requiring fewer parameters and lower computational resources.

To explore the feasibility of avoiding the confident error (or hallucination) of generation models (GMs), we formalise the system of GMs as a class of stochastic dynamical systems through the lens of control theory. Numerous factors can be attributed to the hallucination of the learning process of GMs, utilising knowledge of control theory allows us to analyse their system functions and system responses. Due to the high complexity of GMs when using various optimization methods, we cannot figure out their solution of Laplace transform, but from a macroscopic perspective, simulating the source response provides a virtual way to address the hallucination of GMs. We also find that the training progress is consistent with the corresponding system response, which offers us a useful way to develop a better optimization component. Finally, the hallucination problem of GMs is fundamentally optimized by using Laplace transform analysis.

Solid-state storage architectures based on NAND or emerging memory devices (SSD), are fundamentally architected and optimized for both reliability and performance. Achieving these simultaneous goals requires co-design of memory components with firmware-architected Error Management (EM) algorithms for density- and performance-scaled memory technologies. We describe a Machine Learning (ML) for systems methodology and modeling for co-designing the EM subsystem together with the natural variance inherent to scaled silicon process of memory components underlying SSD technology. The modeling analyzes NAND memory components and EM algorithms interacting with comprehensive suite of synthetic (stress-focused and JEDEC) and emulation (YCSB and similar) workloads across Flash Translation abstraction layers, by leveraging a statistically interpretable and intuitively explainable ML algorithm. The generalizable co-design framework evaluates several thousand datacenter SSDs spanning multiple generations of memory and storage technology. Consequently, the modeling framework enables continuous, holistic, data-driven design towards generational architectural advancements. We additionally demonstrate that the framework enables Representation Learning of the EM-workload domain for enhancement of the architectural design-space across broad spectrum of workloads.

We study the Fréchet $k-$means of a metric measure space when both the measure and the distance are unknown and have to be estimated. We prove a general result that states that the $k-$means are continuous with respect to the measured Gromov-Hausdorff topology. In this situation, we also prove a stability result for the Voronoi clusters they determine. We do not assume uniqueness of the set of $k-$means, but when it is unique, the results are stronger. This framework provides a unified approach to proving consistency for a wide range of metric learning procedures. As concrete applications, we obtain new consistency results for several important estimators that were previously unestablished, even when $k=1$. These include $k-$means based on: (i) Isomap and Fermat geodesic distances on manifolds, (ii) difussion distances, (iii) Wasserstein distances computed with respect to learned ground metrics. Finally, we consider applications beyond the statistical inference paradigm like (iv) first passage percolation and (v) discrete approximations of length spaces.

This work pursues automated planning and scheduling of distributed data pipelines, or workflows. We develop a general workflow and resource graph representation that includes both data processing and sharing components with corresponding network interfaces for scheduling. Leveraging these graphs, we introduce WORKSWORLD, a new domain for numeric domain-independent planners designed for permanently scheduled workflows, like ingest pipelines. Our framework permits users to define data sources, available workflow components, and desired data destinations and formats without explicitly declaring the entire workflow graph as a goal. The planner solves a joint planning and scheduling problem, producing a plan that both builds the workflow graph and schedules its components on the resource graph. We empirically show that a state-of-the-art numeric planner running on commodity hardware with one hour of CPU time and 30GB of memory can solve linear-chain workflows of up to 14 components across eight sites.

AI code agents excel at isolated tasks yet struggle with multi-file software engineering requiring architectural understanding. We introduce Theory of Code Space (ToCS), a benchmark that evaluates whether agents can construct, maintain, and update coherent architectural beliefs during codebase exploration. Agents explore procedurally generated codebases under partial observability -- opening files under a budget -- and periodically externalize their belief state as structured JSON, producing a time-series of architectural understanding. Three findings emerge from experiments with four baselines and six frontier LLMs. First, the Active-Passive Gap is model-dependent: one model builds better maps through active exploration than from seeing all files at once, while another shows the opposite -- revealing that active exploration is itself a non-trivial capability absent from some models. Second, retaining structured belief maps in context acts as self-scaffolding for some models but not others, showing that the mechanism is model-dependent. Third, belief state maintenance varies dramatically: a smaller model maintains perfectly stable beliefs across probes while its larger sibling suffers catastrophic belief collapse -- forgetting previously-discovered components between probes. We release ToCS as open-source software. Code: https://github.com/che-shr-cat/tocs

Efficient question-answering (QA) over extensive scientific literature is essential for evidence-based engineering decision-making. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly applied to question-answering over long academic papers, where accurate evidence allocation under a fixed token budget is critical. However, existing approaches flatten papers into unstructured chunks, destroying the native hierarchical structure and forcing retrieval to operate in a disordered space. This produces fragmented contexts, misallocates tokens to non-evidential regions, and increases the reasoning burden for downstream language models.To address these issues, we propose SF-RAG, an RAG framework that treats the native hierarchical structure of academic papers as a low-entropy retrieval prior.SF-RAG first inherits the native hierarchy to construct a structure-fidelity index, which prevents entropy increase at the source.It then designs a path-guided retrieval mechanism that aligns query semantics to relevant sections and selects high relevance root-to-leaf paths under a fixed token budget, yielding compact, coherent, and low-entropy retrieval contexts.In contrast to existing RAG approaches, SF-RAG avoids entropy increase caused by destructive preprocessing and provides a native low-entropy structural basis for subsequent retrieval. We further introduce entropy-based structural diagnostics to quantify retrieval fragmentation and evidence allocation accuracy.Evaluations across three QA benchmarks show that SF-RAG significantly reduces retrieval fragmentation and improves evidence allocation. These structural benefits drive superior answer quality, establishing a scalable foundation for intelligent engineering document systems and future applications in technical specifications.

Expand-and-sparsify representations are a class of theoretical models that capture sparse representation phenomena observed in the sensory systems of many animals. At a high level, these representations map an input $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$ to a much higher dimension $m \gg d$ via random linear projections before zeroing out all but the $k \ll m$ largest entries. The result is a $k$-sparse vector in $\{0,1\}^m$. We study the suitability of this representation for two fundamental statistical problems: density estimation and mode estimation. For density estimation, we show that a simple linear function of the expand-and-sparsify representation produces an estimator with minimax-optimal $\ell_{\infty}$ convergence rates. In mode estimation, we provide simple algorithms on top of our density estimator that recover single or multiple modes at optimal rates up to logarithmic factors under mild conditions.

We study federated learning (FL) over wireless fading channels where multiple devices simultaneously send their model updates. We propose an efficient age-aware edge-blind over-the-air FL approach that does not require channel state information (CSI) at the devices. Instead, the parameter server (PS) uses multiple antennas and applies maximum-ratio combining (MRC) based on its estimated sum of the channel gains to detect the parameter updates. A key challenge is that the number of orthogonal subcarriers is limited; thus, transmitting many parameters requires multiple Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols, which increases latency. To address this, the PS selects only a small subset of model coordinates each round using AgeTop-k, which first picks the largest-magnitude entries and then chooses the k coordinates with the longest waiting times since they were last selected. This ensures that all selected parameters fit into a single OFDM symbol, reducing latency. We provide a convergence bound that highlights the advantages of using a higher number of antenna array elements and demonstrates a key trade-off: increasing k decreases compression error at the cost of increasing the effect of channel noise. Experimental results show that (i) more PS antennas greatly improve accuracy and convergence speed; (ii) AgeTop-k outperforms random selection under relatively good channel conditions; and (iii) the optimum k depends on the channel, with smaller k being better in noisy settings.

Modern cybersecurity platforms must process and display high-frequency telemetry such as network logs, endpoint events, alerts, and policy changes in real time. Traditional rendering techniques based on static pagination or fixed polling intervals fail under volume conditions exceeding hundreds of thousands of events per second, leading to UI freezes, dropped frames, or stale data. This paper presents an AI-assisted adaptive rendering framework that dynamically regulates visual update frequency, prioritizes semantically relevant events, and selectively aggregates lower-priority data using behavior-driven heuristics and lightweight on-device machine learning models. Experimental validation demonstrates a 45-60 percent reduction in rendering overhead while maintaining analyst perception of real-time responsiveness.

Large language model (LLM) safety evaluation is moving from content moderation to action security as modern systems gain persistent state, tool access, and autonomous control loops. Existing jailbreak frameworks still leave a gap between adaptive multi-turn attacks and agentic runtimes: attack algorithms are usually packaged as monolithic scripts, while agent harnesses rarely expose explicit abstractions for rollback, tool simulation, or strategy switching. We present AJAR, a red-teaming framework that exposes multi-turn jailbreak algorithms as callable MCP services and lets an Auditor Agent orchestrate them inside a tool-aware runtime built on Petri. AJAR integrates three representative attacks, namely Crescendo, ActorAttack, and X-Teaming, under a shared service interface for planning, prompt generation, optimization, evaluation, and context control. On 200 HarmBench validation behaviors, AJAR improves X-Teaming from 65.0% to 76.0% attack success rate (ASR), reaches 80% cumulative success one turn earlier than the native implementation, and reproduces Crescendo more effectively than PyRIT (91.0% vs. 87.5% ASR). Behavior-level analysis shows that these gains are concentrated in hard categories and frequently depend on rollback-enabled transcript repair. We further show that tool access reshapes rather than uniformly enlarges the attack surface: ActorAttack rises from 51.0% to 56.0% ASR with tools, whereas Crescendo drops from 91.0% to 78.0% and X-Teaming from 76.0% to 55.5%, with the sharpest declines appearing in categories that rely on long semantic buildup. These results position AJAR as a practical foundation for evaluating multi-turn jailbreaks under realistic agent constraints. Code and data are available at https://github.com/douyipu/ajar.

Accelerated failure time (AFT) models provide a direct and interpretable time-scale description of covariate effects in lifetime data analysis, but classical formulations rely on linear predictors and are therefore limited in their ability to represent nonlinear relationships. Moreover, in heterogeneous clinical settings with complex covariate structures and varying censoring mechanisms, standard survival models such as the Cox proportional hazards model or AFT formulations may be inadequate due to restrictive structural assumptions. We propose a structured nonparametric extension of the AFT framework in which the regression function governing log-survival time is an unknown smooth function represented through Kolmogorov--Arnold representations. We formalize the nonlinear AFT estimand under independent right-censoring and show that the proposed function class strictly contains the classical linear AFT model as a special case. Estimation is carried out through a unified framework that accommodates several censoring-adjusted losses such as Buckley--James, inverse probability of censoring weight and transformation methods. Structural regularization and pruning promote parsimony, and symbolic approximation yields analytic representations of learned component functions. Simulation studies show that the method recovers linear structure when appropriate and captures nonlinear effects when present. Applications to multiple clinical datasets demonstrate competitive predictive performance and transparent covariate-effect estimation.

Large-scale networked multi-agent systems increasingly underpin critical infrastructure, yet their collective behavior can drift toward undesirable emergent norms such as collusion, resource hoarding, and implicit unfairness. We present the Adaptive Accountability Framework (AAF), an end-to-end runtime layer that (i) records cryptographically verifiable interaction provenance, (ii) detects distributional change points in streaming traces, (iii) attributes responsibility via a causal influence graph, and (iv) applies cost-bounded interventions-reward shaping and targeted policy patching-to steer the system back toward compliant behavior. We establish a bounded-compromise guarantee: if the expected cost of intervention exceeds an adversary's expected payoff, the long-run fraction of compromised interactions converges to a value strictly below one. We evaluate AAF in a large-scale factorial simulation suite (87,480 runs across two tasks; up to 100 agents plus a 500-agent scaling sweep; full and partial observability; Byzantine rates up to 10%; 10 seeds per regime). Across 324 regimes, AAF lowers the executed compromise ratio relative to a Proximal Policy Optimization baseline in 96% of regimes (median relative reduction 11.9%) while preserving social welfare (median change 0.4%). Under adversarial injections, AAF detects norm violations with a median delay of 71 steps (interquartile range 39-177) and achieves a mean top-ranked attribution accuracy of 0.97 at 10% Byzantine rate.

Coarse-to-fine path decision-making requires predicting a valid taxonomy path in which earlier decisions constrain later ones. However, existing benchmarks score each level independently, obscuring cross-level validity and consistency. To better align evaluation with this setting, we introduce a Joint Path Decision (JPD) protocol that requires predicting the full path in one call, together with Depth-Weighted Prefix Accuracy (DWPA), a metric family that measures path reliability with tunable emphasis on deeper levels. Under JPD, strong vision-language models (VLMs) frequently produce invalid parent-child pairs and brittle full-path predictions, suggesting that their failures stem not only from incomplete taxonomic knowledge but also from unstable cross-level decision coordination. To address this problem, we propose DuoTeach, a dual-role self-teaching distillation framework that requires no ground-truth labels and reuses the same pretrained VLM in two roles. Its Decision-Conditioned Rollout (DCR) generates more coherent teacher traces by conditioning each level on prior decisions, and distills this coordinated behavior into the student without additional test-time rollouts. Across multiple taxonomy-structured benchmarks and VLM base models, DuoTeach improves in-domain DWPA (alpha = 0.95) by up to 30.24 points and boosts zero-shot performance on unseen taxonomies from 17.17% to 43.66%. Further analyses attribute these gains to improved within-call multi-level decision coordination.

Membership Inference Attack (MIA) aims to determine whether a specific data sample was included in the training dataset of a target model. Traditional MIA approaches rely on shadow models to mimic target model behavior, but their effectiveness diminishes for Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommendation systems due to the scale and complexity of training data. This paper introduces a novel knowledge distillation-based MIA paradigm tailored for LLM-based recommendation systems. Our method constructs a reference model via distillation, applying distinct strategies for member and non-member data to enhance discriminative capabilities. The paradigm extracts fused features (e.g., confidence, entropy, loss, and hidden layer vectors) from the reference model to train an attack model, overcoming limitations of individual features. Extensive experiments on extended datasets (Last.FM, MovieLens, Book-Crossing, Delicious) and diverse LLMs (T5, GPT-2, LLaMA3) demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms shadow model-based MIAs and individual-feature baselines. The results show its practicality for privacy attacks in LLM-driven recommender systems.

This study develops an AI-based pose estimation pipeline for quantifying movement kinematics in resistance training. Using videos from Wolf et al. (2025), comprising 303 recordings of 26 participants performing eight upper-body exercises under full (fROM) and lengthened partial (pROM) conditions, we extract joint-angle trajectories using five distinct deep-learning pose estimation models and a unified signal-processing framework. From these trajectories, we derive repetition-level metrics including range of motion (ROM) and repetition duration. We use these outputs as dependent variables in a crossed random-effects model that accounts for participant-, exercise-, and model-level variability to assess systematic differences between ROM conditions. Results indicate that pROM reduces range of motion without significantly affecting repetition duration. Variance decomposition shows that pROM increases both between-participant and between-exercise variability, suggesting reduced consistency in execution. To enable cross-exercise comparison, we model ROM on a logarithmic scale and define %ROM as the proportion of fROM achieved under pROM. While the estimated mean is approximately 56\%, significant heterogeneity across exercises indicates that lengthened partials are not characterized by a fixed proportion of full ROM. The results demonstrate that AI-based motion analysis can provide reliable kinematic insights to inform evidence-based training recommendations.

Cellular wireless systems are facing a proliferation of frequency bands over a wide spectrum, particularly with the expansion into FR3. These bands must be supported in user equipment (UE) handsets with multiple antennas in a constrained form factor. Rapid variations in channel quality across the bands from motion and hand blockage, limited field-of-view of antennas, and hardware and power-constrained measurement sparsity pose significant challenges to reliable multi-band channel tracking. This paper formulates the problem of predicting achievable rates across multiple antenna arrays and bands with sparse historical measurements. We propose a transformer-based neural architecture that takes asynchronous rate histories as input and outputs per-array rate predictions. Evaluated on ray-traced simulations in a dense urban micro-cellular setting with FR1 and FR3 arrays, our method demonstrates superior performance over baseline predictors, enabling more informed band selection under realistic mobility and hardware constraints.