As agents operate over long horizons, their memory stores grow continuously, making retrieval critical to accessing relevant information. Many agent queries require reasoning-intensive retrieval, where the connection between query and relevant documents is implicit and requires inference to bridge. LLM-augmented pipelines address this through query expansion and candidate re-ranking, but introduce significant inference costs. We study computation allocation in reasoning-intensive retrieval pipelines using the BRIGHT benchmark and Gemini 2.5 model family. We vary model capacity, inference-time thinking, and re-ranking depth across query expansion and re-ranking stages. We find that re-ranking benefits substantially from stronger models (+7.5 NDCG@10) and deeper candidate pools (+21% from $k$=10 to 100), while query expansion shows diminishing returns beyond lightweight models (+1.1 NDCG@10 from weak to strong). Inference-time thinking provides minimal improvement at either stage. These results suggest that compute should be concentrated on re-ranking rather than distributed uniformly across pipeline stages.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have evolved from passive predictive tools into active entities capable of autonomous decision-making and environmental interaction, driven by the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this evolution has introduced critical security vulnerabilities that existing frameworks fail to address. The Hierarchical Autonomy Evolution (HAE) framework organizes agent security into three tiers: Cognitive Autonomy (L1) targets internal reasoning integrity; Execution Autonomy (L2) covers tool-mediated environmental interaction; Collective Autonomy (L3) addresses systemic risks in multi-agent ecosystems. We present a taxonomy of threats spanning cognitive manipulation, physical environment disruption, and multi-agent systemic failures, and evaluate existing defenses while identifying key research gaps. The findings aim to guide the development of multilayered, autonomy-aware defense architectures for trustworthy AI agent systems.

Multi-agent coordination dilemmas expose a fundamental tension between individual optimization and collective welfare, yet characterizing such coordination requires metrics sensitive to temporal structure and collective dynamics. As a diagnostic testbed, we study a BoE-derived multi-agent variant of the Battle of the Exes, formalizing it as a Markov game in which turn-taking emerges as a periodic coordination regime. Conventional outcome-based metrics (e.g., efficiency and min/max fairness) are temporally blind (they cannot distinguish structured alternation from monopolistic or random access patterns) and fairness ratios lose discriminative power as n grows, obscuring inequities. To address this limitation, we introduce Perfect Alternation (PA) as a reference coordination regime and propose six novel Alternation (ALT) metrics designed as temporally sensitive observables of coordination quality. Using Q-learning agents as a minimal adaptive diagnostic baseline, and comparing against random-policy null processes, we uncover a clear measurement failure: despite exhibiting deceptively high traditional metrics (e.g., reward fairness often exceeding 0.9), learned policies perform up to 81% below random baselines under ALT-variant evaluation, a deficit already present in the two-agent case and intensifying as n grows. These results demonstrate, in this setting, that high aggregate payoffs can coexist with poor temporal coordination, and that conventional metrics may severely mischaracterize emergent dynamics. Our findings underscore the necessity of temporally aware observables for analyzing coordination in multi-agent games and highlight random-policy baselines as essential null processes for interpreting coordination outcomes relative to chance-level behavior.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as the backbone of recommender systems. However, user-item interactions in real-world scenarios are non-stationary, making preference drift over time inevitable. Existing model update strategies mainly rely on global fine-tuning or pointwise editing, but they face two fundamental challenges: (i) imbalanced update granularity, where global updates perturb behaviors unrelated to the target while pointwise edits fail to capture broader preference shifts; (ii) unstable incremental updates, where repeated edits interfere with prior adaptations, leading to catastrophic forgetting and inconsistent recommendations. To address these issues, we propose Region-Aware Incremental Editing (RAIE), a plug-in framework that freezes the backbone model and performs region-level updates. RAIE first constructs semantically coherent preference regions via spherical k-means in the representation space. It then assigns incoming sequences to regions via confidence-aware gating and performs three localized edit operations - Update, Expand, and Add - to dynamically revise the affected region. Each region is equipped with a dedicated Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module, which is trained only on the region's updated data. During inference, RAIE routes each user sequence to its corresponding region and activates the region-specific adapter for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets under a time-sliced protocol that segments data into Set-up (S), Finetune (F), and Test (T) show that RAIE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while effectively mitigating forgetting. These results demonstrate that region-aware editing offers an accurate and scalable mechanism for continual adaptation in dynamic recommendation scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/fengaogao/RAIE.

We study shallow and deep neural networks whose inputs range over a general topological space. The model is built from a prescribed family of continuous feature maps and reduces to multilayer feedforward networks in the Euclidean case. We focus on the universal approximation property and establish general conditions under which such networks are dense in spaces of continuous vector-valued functions on arbitrary topological spaces and, in particular, locally convex spaces. Universality results obtained in the arbitrary-width case extend classical approximation theorems to non-Euclidean spaces. We also consider the deep narrow setting, in which the width of each hidden layer is uniformly bounded while the depth is allowed to grow. We identify conditions under which such networks retain the universal approximation property. As a concrete example, we employ Ostrand's extension of the Kolmogorov superposition theorem to derive an explicit universality result for products of compact metric spaces, with width bounds expressed in terms of topological dimension.

We propose a template-driven triangulation framework that embeds raster- or segmentation-derived boundaries into a regular triangular grid for stable PDE discretization on image-derived domains. Unlike constrained Delaunay triangulation (CDT), which may trigger global connectivity updates, our method retriangulates only triangles intersected by the boundary, preserves the base mesh, and supports synchronization-free parallel execution. To ensure determinism and scalability, we classify all local boundary-intersection configurations up to discrete equivalence and triangle symmetries, yielding a finite symbolic lookup table that maps each case to a conflict-free retriangulation template. We prove that the resulting mesh is closed, has bounded angles, and is compatible with cotangent-based discretizations and standard finite element methods. Experiments on elliptic and parabolic PDEs, signal interpolation, and structural metrics show fewer sliver elements, more regular triangles, and improved geometric fidelity near complex boundaries. The framework is well suited for real-time geometric analysis and physically based simulation over image-derived domains.

Sonification -- the mapping of data to non-speech audio -- offers an underexplored channel for representing complex dynamical systems. We treat El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a canonical example of low-dimensional climate chaos, as a test case for culturally-situated sonification evaluated through complex systems diagnostics. Using parameter-mapping sonification of the Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly index (1870--2024), we encode ENSO variability into two traditional Javanese gamelan pentatonic systems (pelog and slendro) across four composition strategies, then analyze the resulting audio as trajectories in a two-dimensional acoustic phase space. Recurrence-based diagnostics, convex hull geometry, and coupling analysis reveal that the sonification pipeline preserves key dynamical signatures: alternating modes produce the highest trajectory recurrence rates, echoing ENSO's quasi-periodicity; layered polyphonic modes explore the broadest phase space regions; and the two scale families induce qualitatively distinct coupling regimes between spectral brightness and energy -- predominantly anti-phase in pelog but near-independent in slendro. Phase space trajectory analysis provides a rigorous geometric framework for comparing sonification designs within a complex systems context. Perceptual validation remains necessary; we contribute the dynamical systems methodology for evaluating such mappings.

The rapid proliferation of rumors on social networks poses a significant threat to information integrity. While rumor dissemination forms complex structural patterns, existing detection methods often fail to capture the intricate interplay between textual coherence and propagation dynamics. Current approaches typically represent nodes through isolated textual embeddings, neglecting the semantic flow across the entire propagation path. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) as a structural augmentation layer for graph-based rumor detection. Moving beyond conventional methods, our framework employs LLMs to evaluate information subchains and strategically introduce a virtual node into the graph. This structural modification converts latent semantic patterns into explicit topological features, effectively capturing the textual coherence that has historically been inaccessible to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). To ensure reliability, we develop a structured prompt framework that mitigates inherent biases in LLMs while maintaining robust graph learning performance. Furthermore, our proposed framework is model-agnostic, meaning it is not constrained to any specific graph learning algorithm or LLMs. Its plug-and-play nature allows for seamless integration with further fine-tuned LLMs and graph techniques in the future, potentially enhancing predictive performance without the need to modify original algorithms.

We present FastLSQ, a framework for PDE solving and inverse problems built on trigonometric random Fourier features with exact analytical derivatives. Trigonometric features admit closed-form derivatives of any order in $\mathcal{O}(1)$, enabling graph-free operator assembly without autodiff. Linear PDEs: one least-squares call; nonlinear: Newton--Raphson reusing analytical assembly. On 17 PDEs (1--6D), FastLSQ achieves $10^{-7}$ in 0.07s (linear) and $10^{-8}$--$10^{-9}$ in $<$9s (nonlinear), orders of magnitude faster and more accurate than iterative PINNs. Analytical higher-order derivatives yield a differentiable digital twin; we demonstrate inverse problems (heat-source, coil recovery) and PDE discovery. Code: github.com/sulcantonin/FastLSQ and \texttt{pip install fastlsq}.

Recent advances in LLMs have sparked growing interest in applying them to hardware design automation, particularly for accurate RTL code generation. Prior efforts follow two largely independent paths: (i) training domain-adapted RTL models to internalize hardware semantics, (ii) developing agentic systems that leverage frontier generic LLMs guided by simulation feedback. However, these two paths exhibit complementary strengths and weaknesses. In this work, we present ACE-RTL that unifies both directions through Agentic Context Evolution (ACE). ACE-RTL integrates an RTL-specialized LLM, trained on a large-scale dataset of 1.7 million RTL samples, with a frontier reasoning LLM through three synergistic components: the generator, reflector, and coordinator. These components iteratively refine RTL code toward functional correctness. We further analyze a parallel scaling strategy that reduces wall-clock iterations to first success by exploring diverse debugging trajectories concurrently. On the CVDP benchmark, ACE-RTL achieves up to a 41.02% pass rate improvement over 14 competitive baselines.

The increasing availability of relational data has contributed to a growing reliance on network-based representations of complex systems. Over time, these models have evolved to capture more nuanced properties, such as the heterogeneity of relationships, leading to the concept of multilayer networks. However, the analysis and evaluation of methods for these structures is often hindered by the limited availability of large-scale empirical data. As a result, graph generators are commonly used as a workaround, albeit at the cost of introducing systematic biases. In this paper, we address the inverse-generator problem by inferring the configuration parameters of a multilayer network generator, \mABCD, from a real-world system. Our goal is to identify parameter settings that enable the generator to produce synthetic networks that act as digital twins of the original structure. We propose a method for estimating matching configurations and for quantifying the associated error. Our results demonstrate that this task is non-trivial, as strong interdependencies between configuration parameters weaken independent estimation and instead favour a joint-prediction approach.

Ransomware core capability, unauthorized encryption, demands controls that identify and block malicious cryptographic activity without disrupting legitimate use. We present a probabilistic, risk-based access control architecture that couples machine learning inference with mandatory access control to regulate encryption on Linux in real time. The system builds a specialized dataset from the native ftrace framework using the function_graph tracer, yielding high-resolution kernel-function execution traces augmented with resource and I/O counters. These traces support both a supervised classifier and interpretable rules that drive an SELinux policy via lightweight booleans, enabling context-sensitive permit/deny decisions at the moment encryption begins. Compared to approaches centered on sandboxing, hypervisor introspection, or coarse system-call telemetry, the function-level tracing we adopt provides finer behavioral granularity than syscall-only telemetry while avoiding the virtualization/VMI overhead of sandbox-based approaches. Our current user-space prototype has a non-trivial footprint under burst I/O; we quantify it and recognize that a production kernel-space solution should aim to address this. We detail dataset construction, model training and rule extraction, and the run-time integration that gates file writes for suspect encryption while preserving benign cryptographic workflows. During evaluation, the two-layer composition retains model-level detection quality while delivering rule-like responsiveness; we also quantify operational footprint and outline engineering steps to reduce CPU and memory overhead for enterprise deployment. The result is a practical path from behavioral tracing and learning to enforceable, explainable, and risk-proportionate encryption control on production Linux systems.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing large language models by encouraging step-by-step intermediate reasoning, and recent advances have extended this paradigm to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In the medical domain, where diagnostic decisions depend on nuanced visual cues and sequential reasoning, CoT aligns naturally with clinical thinking processes. However, current benchmarks for medical image understanding generally focus on the final answer while ignoring the reasoning path. Such opaque reasoning processes lack reliable bases for judgment, making it difficult to assist doctors in diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce a new M3CoTBench benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency of CoT reasoning in medical image understanding. M3CoTBench features 1) a diverse, multi-level difficulty dataset covering 24 examination types, 2) 13 varying-difficulty tasks, 3) a suite of CoT-specific evaluation metrics (correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency) tailored to clinical reasoning, and 4) a performance analysis of multiple MLLMs. M3CoTBench systematically evaluates CoT reasoning across diverse medical imaging tasks, revealing current limitations of MLLMs in generating reliable and clinically interpretable reasoning, and aims to foster the development of transparent, trustworthy, and diagnostically accurate AI systems for healthcare. Project page at https://juntaojianggavin.github.io/projects/M3CoTBench/.

Digital-humanities work on semantic shift often alternates between handcrafted close readings and opaque embedding machinery. We present a reproducible expert-system style pipeline that quantifies lexical drift and its instability in the Old Bailey Corpus (1674-1913), coupling interpretable trajectories with legally meaningful axes. We bin proceedings by decade with dynamic merging for low-resource slices, train skip-gram embeddings, align spaces through orthogonal Procrustes to a 1900s anchor, and measure both geometric displacement and neighborhood turnover. We add split-half baselines and seed-sensitivity checks to separate within-bin instability from temporal change. Three visual analytics outputs (drift magnitudes, semantic trajectories, and movement along a mercy-versus-retribution axis) expose how justice, crime, poverty, and insanity evolve with penal reforms, transportation debates, and Victorian moral politics. The pipeline is implemented as auditable scripts so results can be reproduced in other historical corpora.

Voronoi diagrams naturally produce convex, watertight, and topologically consistent cells, making them an appealing representation for 3D shape reconstruction. However, standard differentiable Voronoi approaches typically optimize generator positions in stable configurations, which can lead to locally uneven surface geometry. We present VoroLight, a differentiable framework that promotes controlled Voronoi degeneracy for smooth surface reconstruction. Instead of optimizing generator positions alone, VoroLight associates each Voronoi surface vertex with a trainable sphere and introduces a sphere--intersection loss that encourages higher-order equidistance among face-incident generators. This formulation improves surface regularity while preserving intrinsic Voronoi properties such as watertightness and convexity. Because losses are defined directly on surface vertices, VoroLight supports multimodal shape supervision from implicit fields, point clouds, meshes, and multi--view images. By introducing additional interior generators optimized under a centroidal Voronoi tessellation objective, the framework naturally extends to volumetric Voronoi meshes with consistent surface--interior topology. Across diverse input modalities, VoroLight achieves competitive reconstruction fidelity while producing smoother and more geometrically regular Voronoi surfaces. Project page: https://jiayinlu19960224.github.io/vorolight/

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to predict speakers' emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual cues. Existing approaches either struggle to capture complex cross-modal interactions or experience gradient conflicts and unstable training when using deeper architectures. To address these issues, we propose Cross-Space Synergy (CSS), which couples a representation component with an optimization component. Synergistic Polynomial Fusion (SPF) serves the representation role, leveraging low-rank tensor factorization to efficiently capture high-order cross-modal interactions. Pareto Gradient Modulator (PGM) serves the optimization role, steering updates along Pareto-optimal directions across competing objectives to alleviate gradient conflicts and improve stability. Experiments show that CSS outperforms existing representative methods on IEMOCAP and MELD in both accuracy and training stability, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex multimodal scenarios.

In multicellular organisms, cells coordinate their activities through cell-cell communication (CCC), which is crucial for development, tissue homeostasis, and disease progression. Recent advances in single-cell and spatial omics technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to systematically infer and analyze CCC from these omics data, either by integrating prior knowledge of ligand-receptor interactions (LRIs) or through de novo approaches. A variety of computational methods have been developed, focusing on methodological innovations, accurate modeling of complex signaling mechanisms, and investigation of broader biological questions. These advances have greatly enhanced our ability to analyze CCC and generate biological hypotheses. Here, we introduce the biological mechanisms and modeling strategies of CCC, and provide a focused overview of more than 140 computational methods for inferring CCC from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic data, emphasizing the diversity in methodological frameworks and biological questions. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, and summarize available methods in an interactive online resource (https://cellchat.whu.edu.cn) to facilitate more efficient method comparison and selection.

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) is a technology that measures gene expression profiles within tissue sections while retaining spatial context. It reveals localized gene expression patterns and tissue heterogeneity, both of which are essential for understanding disease etiology. However, its high cost has driven efforts to predict spatial gene expression from whole slide images. Despite recent advancements, current methods still face significant limitations, such as under-exploitation of high-level biological context, over-reliance on exemplar retrievals, and inadequate alignment of heterogeneous modalities. To address these challenges, we propose DKAN, a novel Dual-path Knowledge-Augmented contrastive alignment Network that predicts spatially resolved gene expression by integrating histopathological images and gene expression profiles through a biologically informed approach. Specifically, we introduce an effective gene semantic representation module that leverages the external gene database to provide additional biological insights, thereby enhancing gene expression prediction. Further, we adopt a unified, one-stage contrastive learning paradigm, seamlessly combining contrastive learning and supervised learning to eliminate reliance on exemplars, complemented with an adaptive weighting mechanism. Additionally, we propose a dual-path contrastive alignment module that employs gene semantic features as dynamic cross-modal coordinators to enable effective heterogeneous feature integration. Through extensive experiments across three public ST datasets, DKAN demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art models, establishing a new benchmark for spatial gene expression prediction and offering a powerful tool for advancing biological and clinical research.

The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) has become the de facto routing standard for resource-constrained IoT systems, but its lightweight design exposes critical vulnerabilities to a wide range of routing-layer attacks such as hello flood, decreased rank, and version number manipulation. Traditional countermeasures, including protocol-level modifications and machine learning classifiers, can achieve high accuracy against known threats, yet they fail when confronted with novel or zero-day attacks unless fully retrained, an approach that is impractical for dynamic IoT environments. In this paper, we investigate incremental learning as a practical and adaptive strategy for intrusion detection in RPL-based networks. We systematically evaluate five model families, including ensemble models and deep learning models. Our analysis highlights that incremental learning not only restores detection performance on new attack classes but also mitigates catastrophic forgetting of previously learned threats, all while reducing training time compared to full retraining. By combining five diverse models with attack-specific analysis, forgetting behavior, and time efficiency, this study provides systematic evidence that incremental learning offers a scalable pathway to maintain resilient intrusion detection in evolving RPL-based IoT networks.

The rapid development of large language models (LLM) has greatly enhanced everyday applications. While many FPGA-based accelerators, with flexibility for fine-grained data control, exhibit superior speed and energy efficiency compared to GPUs, recent GPU-specific optimizations have diminished this advantage. When limited to arithmetic-based computation, FPGAs often underperform GPUs due to their comparatively fewer computational resources. To address this challenge, we exploit a key advantage of FPGAs over GPUs: abundant distributed on-chip memory embedded among computational units. We believe that shifting LLM inference from arithmetic-based to memory-based computations through table lookups can improve the efficiency on FPGAs to compete with GPUs. However, existing methods are inefficient or unable to scale and deploy language models due to algorithm and architecture design limitations. This paper introduces \textbf{LUT-LLM}, the first FPGA accelerator that deploy 1B+ language model with memory-based computation, leveraging vector quantization. We construct a performance model, evaluate multiple quantization schemes, and identify activation-weight vector co-quantization as the most effective approach. To support this scheme, LUT-LLM features (1) bandwidth-aware parallel centroid search to reduce decoding latency, (2) efficient 2D table lookups, and (3) a spatial-temporal hybrid design to reduce data caching for a higher throughput table lookup. We develop a training recipe that converts existing models to support table lookups with high accuracy and prototype LUT-LLM for Qwen 3 1.7B model on the AMD V80 FPGA, reducing arithmetic operations by $4\times$ and achieving a $1.10\sim3.29\times$ faster generation speed and a $3.05\sim 6.60\times$ higher energy efficiency than GPUs.

Upcoming measurements of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, which results from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons scattering off moving electrons, offer a powerful probe of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). The kSZ signal contains key information about the timing, duration, and spatial structure of the EoR. A precise measurement of the CMB optical depth $τ$, a key parameter that characterizes the universe's integrated electron density, would significantly constrain models of early structure formation. However, the weak kSZ signal is difficult to extract from CMB observations due to significant contamination from astrophysical foregrounds. We present a machine learning approach to extract $τ$ from simulated kSZ maps. We train advanced machine learning models, including swin transformers, on high-resolution seminumeric simulations of the kSZ signal. To robustly quantify prediction uncertainties of $τ$, we employ the Laplace Approximation (LA). This approach provides an efficient and principled Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution over the model's weights, allowing for reliable error estimation. We investigate and compare two distinct application modes: a post-hoc LA applied to a pre-trained model, and an online LA where model weights and hyperparameters are optimized jointly by maximizing the marginal likelihood. This approach provides a framework for robustly constraining $τ$ and its associated uncertainty, which can enhance the analysis of upcoming CMB surveys like the Simons Observatory and CMB-S4.

Bond markets respond differently to macroeconomic news compared to equity markets, yet most sentiment models are trained primarily on general financial or equity news data. However, bond prices often move in the opposite direction to economic optimism, making general or equity-based sentiment tools potentially misleading. We introduce BondBERT, a transformer-based language model fine-tuned on bond-specific news. BondBERT can act as the perception and reasoning component of a financial decision-support agent, providing sentiment signals that integrate with forecasting models. We propose a generalisable framework for adapting transformers to low-volatility, domain-inverse sentiment tasks by compiling and cleaning 30,000 UK bond market articles (2018-2025). BondBERT's sentiment predictions are compared against FinBERT, FinGPT, and Instruct-FinGPT using event-based correlation, up/down accuracy analyses, and LSTM forecasting across ten UK sovereign bonds. We find that BondBERT consistently produces positive correlations with bond returns, and achieves higher alignment and forecasting accuracy than the three baseline models. These results demonstrate that domain-specific sentiment adaptation better captures fixed income dynamics, bridging a gap between NLP advances and bond market analytics.

Neutron irradiation produces, within a few picoseconds, displacement cascades that are sequences of atomic collisions generating point and extended defects which subsequently affects the long-term evolution of materials. The diversity of these defects, characterized morphologically and statistically, defines what is called the "primary damage". In this work, we present a fully unsupervised machine learning (ML) workflow that detects and classifies these defects directly from molecular dynamics data. Local environments are encoded by the Smooth Overlap of Atomic Positions (SOAP) vector, anomalous atoms are isolated with autoencoder neural networks (AE), embedded with Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) and clustered using Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN). Applied to 80 keV displacement cascades in Ni, Fe$_7$0Ni$_{10}$Cr$_{20}$, and Zr, the AE successfully identify the small fraction of outlier atoms that participate in defect formation. HDBSCAN then partitions the UMAP latent space of AE-flagged SOAP descriptors into well defined groups representing vacancy- and interstitial-dominated regions and, within each, separates small from large aggregates, assigning 99.7 % of outliers to compact physical motifs. A signed cluster-identification score confirms this separation, and cluster size scales with net defect counts (R2 > 0.89). Statistical cross analyses between the ML outlier map and several conventional detectors (centrosymmetry, dislocation extraction, etc.) reveal strong overlap and complementary coverage, all achieved without template or threshold tuning. This ML workflow thus provides an efficient tool for the quantitative mapping of structural anomalies in materials, particularly those arising from irradiation damage in displacement cascades.

Conventional passivity-based torque controllers for manipulators are typically unconstrained, which can lead to safety violations under external perturbations. In this paper, we employ viability theory to pre-compute safe sets in the state-space of joint positions and velocities. These viable sets, constructed via data-driven and analytical methods for self-collision avoidance, external object collision avoidance and joint-position and joint-velocity limits, provide constraints on joint accelerations and thus joint torques via the robot dynamics. A quadratic programming-based control framework enforces these constraints on a passive controller tracking a dynamical system, ensuring the robot states remain within the safe set in an infinite time horizon. We validate the proposed approach through simulations and hardware experiments on a 7-DoF Franka Emika manipulator. In comparison to a baseline constrained passive controller, our method operates at higher control-loop rates and yields smoother trajectories.

Recently, sophisticated deep learning-based approaches have been developed for generating efficient initial guesses to accelerate the convergence of density functional theory (DFT) calculations. While the actual initial guesses are often density matrices (DM), quantities that can convert into density matrices also qualify as alternative forms of initial guesses. Hence, existing works mostly rely on the prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix for obtaining high-quality initial guesses. However, the Hamiltonian matrix is both numerically difficult to predict and intrinsically non-transferable, hindering the application of such models in real scenarios. In light of this, we propose a method that constructs DFT initial guesses by predicting the electron density in a compact auxiliary basis representation using E(3)-equivariant neural networks. Trained exclusively on small molecules with up to 20 atoms, our model achieves an average 33.3% reduction in SCF iterations for molecules three times larger (up to 60 atoms). This result is particularly significant given that baseline Hamiltonian-based methods fail to generalize, often increasing the iteration count by over 80% or failing to converge entirely on these larger systems. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this acceleration is robustly scalable: the model successfully accelerates calculations for systems with up to 900 atoms (polymers and polypeptides) without retraining. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first and robust candidate for a universally transferable DFT acceleration method. We also released the SCFbench dataset and its accompanying code to facilitate future research in this promising direction.

Video diffusion models have rich world priors, but their use in spatial tasks is limited by poor control, spatial-temporal inconsistent results, and entangled scene-camera dynamics. Current approaches, such as per-task fine-tuning or post-process warping, often introduce visual artifacts, fail to generalize, or incur high computational costs. We introduce WorldForge, a novel, training-free framework that operates purely at inference time to resolve these issues. Our method comprises three synergistic components. First, an intra-step refinement loop injects fine-grained motion guidance during the denoising process, iteratively correcting the output to ensure strict adherence to the target camera path. Second, an optical flow-based analysis identifies and isolates motion-related channels within the latent space. This allows our framework to selectively apply guidance, thereby decoupling motion from appearance and preserving visual fidelity. Third, a dual-path guidance strategy adaptively corrects for drift by comparing the guided generation against an unguided, reference denoising path, effectively neutralizing artifacts caused by misaligned structural inputs. Together, these components inject precise, trajectory-aligned control without model retraining, achieving accurate motion guidance and photorealistic synthesis. As a plug-and-play, model-agnostic solution, WorldForge demonstrates highly versatile generalizability. Beyond robust zero-shot 3D/4D generation, it readily empowers over a dozen diverse downstream applications, seamlessly enabling tasks like video editing, stabilization, and virtual try-on. Extensive experiments confirm state-of-the-art performance in trajectory adherence and perceptual quality, outperforming both training-dependent and inference-only baselines.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) require highly efficient matrix multiplication engines for complex computations. This paper presents a systolic array architecture incorporating novel exact and approximate processing elements (PEs), designed using energy-efficient positive partial product and negative partial product cells, termed as PPC and NPPC, respectively. The proposed 8-bit exact and approximate PE designs are employed in a 8x8 systolic array, which achieves a energy savings of 22% and 32%, respectively, compared to the existing design. To demonstrate their effectiveness, the proposed PEs are integrated into a systolic array (SA) for Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) computation, achieving high output quality with a PSNR of 38.21,dB. Furthermore, in an edge detection application using convolution, the approximate PE achieves a PSNR of 30.45,dB. These results highlight the potential of the proposed design to deliver significant energy efficiency while maintaining competitive output quality, making it well-suited for error-resilient image and vision processing applications.

This paper introduces a new family of cognitive modal logics designed to formalize conjectural reasoning: modal systems in which cognitive contexts extend known facts with hypothetical assumptions in order to explore their consequences. Unlike traditional doxastic and epistemic systems, conjectural logics rely on a principle, called Axiom \textbf{C} ($φ\rightarrow \Boxφ$), through which established facts are preserved across conjectural layers. While Axiom \textbf{C} has often been treated with suspicion because of its association with modal collapse, we show that collapse does not arise from \textbf{C} alone, but requires either the presence of Axiom \textbf{T} or a concretely bivalent base logic. Accordingly, we avoid \textbf{T} and adopt a non-bivalent semantic framework, such as supervaluation-style semantics, Weak Kleene logic, or Description Logic, in which undefined propositions may coexist with modal assertions. This prevents modal collapse and preserves a distinction between factual and conjectural statements. Within this framework we define the modal systems $\mathbf{KC}$ and $\mathbf{KDC}$, show that Axiom \textbf{C} directly implies \textbf{4} and \textbf{5}, and prove that these systems are non-trivial, sound, and complete. An inclusion theorem links reality, doxastic states, epistemic states, and conjectural states via set-theoretic inclusion among valuations, providing a unified account of how these layers relate. Finally, we introduce a dynamic operator, $\mathsf{settle}(p)$, which formalizes the transition by which a conjectural extension becomes designated reality, thereby motivating a corresponding Conjectural Dynamic Logic.

Insider threat detection (ITD) poses a persistent and high-impact challenge in cybersecurity due to the subtle, long-term, and context-dependent nature of malicious insider behaviors. Traditional models often struggle to capture semantic intent and complex behavior dynamics, while existing LLM-based solutions face limitations in prompt adaptability and modality coverage. To bridge this gap, we propose DMFI, a dual-modality framework that integrates semantic inference with behavior-aware fine-tuning. DMFI converts raw logs into two structured views: (1) a semantic view that processes content-rich artifacts (e.g., emails, https) using instruction-formatted prompts; and (2) a behavioral abstraction, constructed via a 4W-guided (When-Where-What-Which) transformation to encode contextual action sequences. Two LoRA-enhanced LLMs are fine-tuned independently, and their outputs are fused via a lightweight MLP-based decision module. We further introduce DMFI-B, a discriminative adaptation strategy that separates normal and abnormal behavior representations, improving robustness under severe class imbalance. Experiments on CERT r4.2 and r5.2 datasets demonstrate that DMFI outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy. Our approach combines the semantic reasoning power of LLMs with structured behavior modeling, offering a scalable and effective solution for real-world insider threat detection.

In decentralized federated learning (FL), multiple clients collaboratively learn a shared machine learning (ML) model by leveraging their privately held datasets distributed across the network, through interactive exchange of the intermediate model updates. To ensure data security, cryptographic techniques are commonly employed to protect model updates during aggregation. Despite growing interest in secure aggregation, existing works predominantly focus on protocol design and computational guarantees, with limited understanding of the fundamental information-theoretic limits of such systems. Moreover, optimal bounds on communication and key usage remain unknown in decentralized settings, where no central aggregator is available. Motivated by these gaps, we study the problem of decentralized secure aggregation (DSA) from an information-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we consider a network of $K$ fully-connected users, each holding a private input -- an abstraction of local training data -- who aim to securely compute the sum of all inputs. The security constraint requires that no user learns anything beyond the input sum, even when colluding with up to $T$ other users. We characterize the optimal rate region, which specifies the minimum achievable communication and secret key rates for DSA. In particular, we show that to securely compute one symbol of the desired input sum, each user must (i) transmit at least one symbol to others, (ii) hold at least one symbol of secret key, and (iii) all users must collectively hold no fewer than $K - 1$ independent key symbols. Our results establish the fundamental performance limits of DSA, providing insights for the design of provably secure and communication-efficient protocols in decentralized learning.