The manifold hypothesis suggests that high-dimensional data often lie on or near a low-dimensional manifold. Estimating the dimension of this manifold is essential for leveraging its structure, yet existing work on dimension estimation is fragmented and lacks systematic evaluation. This article provides a comprehensive survey for both researchers and practitioners. We review often-overlooked theoretical foundations and present eight representative estimators. Through controlled experiments, we analyze how individual factors, such as noise, curvature, and sample size, affect performance. We also compare the estimators on diverse synthetic and real-world datasets, introducing a principled approach to dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning. Our results offer practical guidance for estimator selection and yield insights that will inform future estimator design.

Personalized instruction aims to provide learners with support that adapts to their individual knowledge and progress toward learning objectives. Discovering and tracing Knowledge Components (KCs) is an important step in building accurate models of student learning. However, KC discovery in computer science education is challenging due to the open-ended nature of programming, wide variability in student solutions, and intertwined use of programming structures in code. We address these challenges with a pattern-based KC discovery method that uses a data-driven approach to define KCs as recurring structural patterns in student code that reveal persistent patterns of struggle and mastery in students' solutions. We then evaluate the discovered KCs using expert evaluation and statistical student modeling to demonstrate their effectiveness in capturing student learning and struggles. We propose a framework for modeling students' learning by deriving pattern-based KCs from student code through a three-stage process. First, an attention-based code representation model identifies Abstract Syntax Tree subtrees most relevant to code correctness. Second, a Variational Autoencoder abstracts these subtrees into a smooth latent space, capturing structural similarity across student submissions. Third, the resulting representations are clustered into pattern-based KCs. To assess the effectiveness of pattern-based KCs for modeling students' learning, we adapt the Deep Knowledge Tracing model to incorporate these KCs, demonstrating significant improvements in predictive performance over baseline KT methods. Additionally, the learning curve analysis showed alignment between the derived KCs and learning theory.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), particularly those enhanced through reinforced post-training, have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, as exemplified by models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, these capabilities are predominantly benchmarked on domains like mathematical problem solving and code generation, leaving open the question of whether such reasoning skills generalize to complex real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce LocationReasoner, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' reasoning abilities in the context of real-world site selection, where models must identify feasible locations by reasoning over diverse and complicated spatial, environmental, and logistic constraints. The benchmark covers carefully crafted queries of varying difficulty levels and is supported by a sandbox environment with in-house tools for constraint-based location search. Automated verification further guarantees the scalability of the benchmark, enabling the addition of arbitrary number of queries. Extensive evaluations on real-world site selection data from Boston, New York, and Tampa reveal that state-of-the-art reasoning models offer limited improvement over their non-reasoning predecessors in real-world contexts, with even the latest OpenAI o4 model failing on 30% of site selection tasks. Moreover, agentic strategies such as ReAct and Reflexion often suffer from over-reasoning, leading to worse outcomes than direct prompting. With key limitations of LLMs in holistic and non-linear reasoning highlighted, we release LocationReasoner to foster the development of LLMs and agents capable of robust, grounded reasoning in real-world decision-making tasks. Codes and data for our benchmark are available at https://github.com/miho-koda/LocationReasoner.

In Computer Science (CS) education, understanding factors contributing to students' programming difficulties is crucial for effective learning support. By identifying specific issues students face, educators can provide targeted assistance to help them overcome obstacles and improve learning outcomes. While identifying sources of struggle, such as misconceptions, in real-time can be challenging in current educational practices, analyzing logical errors in students' code can offer valuable insights. This paper presents a scalable framework for automatically detecting logical errors in students' programming solutions. Our framework is based on an explainable Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) embedding model, the Subtree-based Attention Neural Network (SANN), that identifies the structural components of programs containing logical errors. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate its effectiveness, and the results suggest that our framework can accurately capture students' logical errors and, more importantly, provide us with deeper insights into their learning processes, offering a valuable tool for enhancing programming education.

Current image generation models produce visually compelling but scientifically implausible images, exposing a fundamental gap between visual fidelity and physical realism. In this work, we introduce ScienceT2I, an expert-annotated dataset comprising a training set of over 20k adversarial image pairs and 9k prompts across 16 scientific domains and an isolated test set of 454 challenging prompts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 18 recent image generation models and find that none scores above 50 out of 100 under implicit scientific prompts, while explicit prompts that directly describe the intended outcome yield scores roughly 35 points higher, confirming that current models can render correct scenes when told what to depict but cannot reason from scientific cues to the correct visual outcome. To address this, we develop SciScore, a reward model fine-tuned from CLIP-H that captures fine-grained scientific phenomena without relying on language-guided inference, surpassing GPT-4o and experienced human evaluators by roughly 5 points. We further propose a two-stage alignment framework combining supervised fine-tuning with masked online fine-tuning to inject scientific knowledge into generative models. Applying this framework to FLUX.1[dev] yields a relative improvement exceeding 50% on SciScore, demonstrating that scientific reasoning in image generation can be substantially improved through targeted data and alignment.

In this paper, we introduce a new problem, Online-MMSI, where the model must perform multimodal social interaction understanding (MMSI) using only historical information. Given a recorded video and a multi-party dialogue, the AI assistant is required to immediately identify the speaker's referent, which is critical for real-world human-AI interaction. Without access to future conversational context, both humans and models experience substantial performance degradation when moving from offline to online settings. To tackle the challenges, we propose Online-MMSI-VLM, a novel framework based on multimodal large language models. The core innovations of our approach lie in two components: (1) multi-party conversation forecasting, which predicts upcoming speaker turns and utterances in a coarse-to-fine manner; and (2) socially-aware visual prompting, which highlights salient social cues in each video frame using bounding boxes and body keypoints. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three tasks across two datasets, significantly outperforming the baseline and demonstrating the effectiveness of Online-MMSI-VLM. Project page: https://sampson-lee.github.io/online-mmsi-project-page.

Large language models (LLMs), initially developed for generative AI, are now evolving into agentic AI systems, which make decisions in complex, real-world contexts. Unfortunately, while their generative capabilities are well-documented, their decision-making processes remain poorly understood. This is particularly evident when testing targeted decision-making: for instance, how models handle exceptions, a critical and challenging aspect of decision-making made relevant by the inherent incompleteness of contracts. Here we demonstrate that LLMs, even ones that excel at reasoning, deviate significantly from human judgments because they adhere strictly to policies, even when such adherence is impractical, suboptimal, or even counterproductive. We then evaluate three approaches to tuning AI agents to handle exceptions: ethical framework prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and supervised fine-tuning. We find that while ethical framework prompting fails and chain-of-thought prompting provides only slight improvements, supervised fine-tuning - specifically with human explanations - yields markedly better results. Surprisingly, in our experiments, supervised fine-tuning even enabled models to generalize human-like decision-making to novel scenarios, demonstrating transfer learning of human-aligned decision-making across contexts. Furthermore, fine-tuning with explanations, not just labels, was critical for alignment, suggesting that aligning LLMs with human judgment requires explicit training on how decisions are made, not just which decisions are made. These findings highlight the need to address LLMs' shortcomings in handling exceptions in order to guide the development of agentic AI toward models that can effectively align with human judgment and simultaneously adapt to novel contexts.

Representational similarity in neural networks is inherently scale-dependent, yet widely used metrics such as Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) and Procrustes analysis provide only global scalar estimates. These scalars often fail to distinguish micro-scale geometric jitter (local noise) from macro-scale semantic reorganization, compressing multi-scale structural relationships into a single uninformative value. We introduce the Topological Alignment Spectrum (TAS), a multi-scale diagnostic tool that sweeps normalized mean Jaccard similarity over varying neighborhood sizes. By normalizing the metric over an analytically-derived expected range (from expected overlap under randomness to perfect alignment), TAS yields a dimension-invariant metric over a spectrum of scales, where one indicates perfect structural alignment, zero reflects chance-level agreement, and negative values signal active anti-alignment at specific scales. Experiments on synthetic point clouds demonstrate that TAS allows the recognition of distinct types of alignment perturbation: local jitter harms fine-grained neighborhoods but preserves cluster-level structure, while cluster-center shuffling preserves local similarity but disrupts global alignment -- phenomena that remain invisible or conflated under global, single-scalar metrics. Applying TAS to the MultiBERTs collection reveals that fine-tuning induces comprehensive topological reorganization across scales, challenging the view of task adaptation as merely conservative or localized. While models from different random seeds remain locally divergent, semantic clusters emerge as the dominant scale of alignment. TAS thus offers a granular, topology-aware alternative for diagnosing convergence and representational stability in deep networks.

Nonlinear dimensional reduction with the manifold assumption, often called manifold learning, has proven its usefulness in a wide range of high-dimensional data analysis. The significant impact of t-SNE and UMAP has catalyzed intense research interest, seeking further innovations toward visualizing not only the local but also the global structure information of the data. Moreover, there have been consistent efforts toward generalizable dimensional reduction that handles unseen data. In this paper, we first propose GLoMAP, a novel manifold learning method for dimensional reduction and high-dimensional data visualization. GLoMAP preserves locally and globally meaningful distance estimates and displays a progression from global to local formation during the course of optimization. Furthermore, we extend GLoMAP to its inductive version, iGLoMAP, which utilizes a deep neural network to map data to its lower-dimensional representation. This allows iGLoMAP to provide lower-dimensional embeddings for unseen points without needing to re-train the algorithm. iGLoMAP is also well-suited for mini-batch learning, enabling large-scale, accelerated gradient calculations. We have successfully applied both GLoMAP and iGLoMAP to the simulated and real-data settings, with competitive experiments against the state-of-the-art methods.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging for machine learning research on graph-structured data. GNNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but they face scalability challenges when it comes to real-world applications that have numerous data and strict latency requirements. Many studies have been conducted on how to accelerate GNNs in an effort to address these challenges. These acceleration techniques touch on various aspects of the GNN pipeline, from smart training and inference algorithms to efficient systems and customized hardware. As the amount of research on GNN acceleration has grown rapidly, there lacks a systematic treatment to provide a unified view and address the complexity of relevant works. In this survey, we provide a taxonomy of GNN acceleration, review the existing approaches, and suggest future research directions. Our taxonomic treatment of GNN acceleration connects the existing works and sets the stage for further development in this area.

This study investigates the ability of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and interpret misleading visualizations, and recognize these observations along with their underlying causes and potential intentionality. Our analysis leverages concepts from visualization rhetoric and a newly developed taxonomy of authorial intents as explanatory lenses. We formulated three research questions and addressed them experimentally using a dataset of 2,336 COVID-19-related tweets, half of which contain misleading visualizations, and supplemented it with real-world examples of perceptual, cognitive, and conceptual errors drawn from VisLies, the IEEE VIS community event dedicated to showcasing deceptive and misleading visualizations. To ensure broad coverage of the current LLM landscape, we evaluated 16 state-of-the-art models. Among them, 15 are open-weight models, spanning a wide range of model sizes, architectural families, and reasoning capabilities. The selection comprises small models, namely Nemotron-Nano-V2-VL (12B parameters), Mistral-Small-3.2 (24B), DeepSeek-VL2 (27B), Gemma3 (27B), and GTA1 (32B); medium-sized models, namely Qianfan-VL (70B), Molmo (72B), GLM-4.5V (108B), LLaVA-NeXT (110B), and Pixtral-Large (124B); and large models, namely Qwen3-VL (235B), InternVL3.5 (241B), Step3 (321B), Llama-4-Maverick (400B), and Kimi-K2.5 (1000B). In addition, we employed OpenAI GPT-5.4, a frontier proprietary model. To establish a human perspective on these tasks, we also conducted a user study with visualization experts to assess how people perceive rhetorical techniques and the authorial intentions behind the same misleading visualizations. This allows comparison between model and expert behavior, revealing similarities and differences that provide insights into where LLMs align with human judgment and where they diverge.

Uncertainty quantification is essential when deploying learning-based control methods in safety-critical systems. This is commonly realized by constructing uncertainty tubes that enclose the unknown function of interest, e.g., the reward and constraint functions or the underlying dynamics model, with high probability. However, existing approaches for uncertainty quantification typically rely on restrictive assumptions on the unknown function, such as known bounds on functional norms or Lipschitz constants, and struggle with discontinuities. In this paper, we model the unknown function as a random function from which independent and identically distributed realizations can be generated, and construct uncertainty tubes via the scenario approach that hold with high probability and rely solely on the sampled realizations. We integrate these uncertainty tubes into a safe Bayesian optimization algorithm, which we then use to safely tune control parameters on a real Furuta pendulum.

Chest X-ray (CXR) segmentation is an important step in computer-aided diagnosis, yet deploying large foundation models in clinical settings remains challenging due to computational constraints. We propose AdaLoRA-QAT, a two-stage fine-tuning framework that combines adaptive low-rank encoder adaptation with full quantization-aware training. Adaptive rank allocation improves parameter efficiency, while selective mixed-precision INT8 quantization preserves structural fidelity crucial for clinical reliability. Evaluated across large-scale CXR datasets, AdaLoRA-QAT achieves 95.6% Dice, matching full-precision SAM decoder fine-tuning while reducing trainable parameters by 16.6\times and yielding 2.24\times model compression. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test confirms that quantization does not significantly degrade segmentation accuracy. These results demonstrate that AdaLoRA-QAT effectively balances accuracy, efficiency, and structural trust-worthiness, enabling compact and deployable foundation models for medical image segmentation. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://prantik-pdeb.github.io/adaloraqat.github.io/

Inverse design of optical multilayer stacks seeks to infer layer materials, thicknesses, and ordering from a desired target spectrum. It is a long-standing challenge due to the large design space and non-unique solutions. We introduce \texttt{OptoLlama}, a masked diffusion language model for inverse thin-film design from optical spectra. Representing multilayer stacks as sequences of material-thickness tokens, \texttt{OptoLlama} conditions generation on reflectance, absorptance, and transmittance spectra and learns a probabilistic mapping from optical response to structure. Evaluated on a representative test set of 3,000 targets, \texttt{OptoLlama} reduces the mean absolute spectral error by 2.9-fold relative to a nearest-neighbor template baseline and by 3.45-fold relative to the state-of-the-art data-driven baseline, called \texttt{OptoGPT}. Case studies on designed and expert-defined targets show that the model reproduces characteristic spectral features and recovers physically meaningful stack motifs, including distributed Bragg reflectors. These results establish diffusion-based sequence modeling as a powerful framework for inverse photonic design.

"Vibe coding," in which developers delegate code generation to AI assistants and accept the output with little manual review, has gained rapid adoption in production settings. On March 31, 2026, Anthropic's Claude Code CLI shipped a 59.8 MB source map file in its npm package, exposing roughly 512,000 lines of proprietary TypeScript. The tool had itself been largely vibe-coded, and the leak traced to a misconfigured packaging rule rather than a logic bug. Existing static-analysis and secret-scanning tools did not cover this failure mode, pointing to a gap between the vulnerabilities AI tends to introduce and the vulnerabilities current tooling is built to find. We present VibeGuard, a pre-publish security gate that targets five such blind spots: artifact hygiene, packaging-configuration drift, source-map exposure, hardcoded secrets, and supply-chain risk. In controlled experiments on eight synthetic projects (seven vulnerable, one clean control), VibeGuard achieved 100% recall, 89.47% precision (F1 = 94.44%), and correct pass/fail gate decisions on all eight projects across three policy levels. We discuss how these results inform a defense-in-depth workflow for teams that rely on AI code generation.

Next-generation (NextG) cellular networks are designed to support emerging applications with diverse data rate and latency requirements, such as immersive multimedia services and large-scale Internet of Things deployments. A key enabling mechanism is radio access network (RAN) slicing, which dynamically partitions radio resources into virtual resource blocks to efficiently serve heterogeneous traffic classes, including enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). In this paper, we study the impact of adversarial attacks on AI-driven RAN slicing decisions, where a budget-constrained adversary selectively jams slice transmissions to bias deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based resource allocation, and quantify the resulting service level agreement (SLA) violations and post-attack recovery behavior. Our results indicate that budget-constrained adversarial jamming can induce severe and slice-dependent steady-state SLA violations. Moreover, the DRL agent's reward converges toward the clean baseline only after a non-negligible recovery period.

Popularity bias is a pervasive problem in recommender systems, where recommendations disproportionately favor popular items. This not only results in "rich-get-richer" dynamics and a homogenization of visible content, but can also lead to misalignment of recommendations with individual users' preferences for popular or niche content. This work studies popularity bias through the lens of user-recommender alignment. To this end, we introduce Popularity Quantile Calibration, a measurement framework that quantifies misalignment between a user's historical popularity preference and the popularity of their recommendations. Building on this notion of popularity alignment, we propose SPREE, an inference-time mitigation method for sequential recommenders based on activation steering. SPREE identifies a popularity direction in representation space and adaptively steers model activations based on an estimate of each user's personal popularity bias, allowing both the direction and magnitude of steering to vary across users. Unlike global debiasing approaches, SPREE explicitly targets alignment rather than uniformly reducing popularity. Experiments across multiple datasets show that SPREE consistently improves user-level popularity alignment while preserving recommendation quality.

Multi-LLM revision pipelines, in which a second model reviews and improves a draft produced by a first, are widely assumed to derive their gains from genuine error correction. We question this assumption with a controlled decomposition experiment that uses four matched conditions to separate second-pass gains into three additive components: re-solving, scaffold, and content. We evaluate this design across two model pairs on three benchmarks spanning knowledge-intensive MCQ and competitive programming. Our results show that the gains of multi-LLM revision are not monolithic, but depend on task structure, draft quality, and the type of draft information. On MCQ tasks, where the answer space is constrained and drafts provide little structural guidance, most gains are consistent with stronger-model re-solving, and directly routing queries to the stronger model can be more effective than revising a weak draft. On code generation tasks, however, two-stage prompting remains useful because even semantically null drafts can provide substantial structural scaffolding, while weak draft content can be harmful. Finally, role-reversed experiments show that strong drafts clearly benefit weak reviewers. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that the utility of multi-LLM revision is dynamically bottlenecked by task structure and draft quality, necessitating more targeted pipeline designs rather than blanket revision strategies.

While large language model-based multi-agent systems have shown strong potential for complex reasoning, how to effectively organize multiple agents remains an open question. In this paper, we introduce OrgAgent, a company-style hierarchical multi-agent framework that separates collaboration into governance, execution, and compliance layers. OrgAgent decomposes multi-agent reasoning into three layers: a governance layer for planning and resource allocation, an execution layer for task solving and review, and a compliance layer for final answer control. By evaluating the framework across reasoning tasks, LLMs, execution modes, and execution policies, we find that multi-agent systems organized in a company-style hierarchy generally outperform other organizational structures. Besides, hierarchical coordination also reduces token consumption relative to flat collaboration in most settings. For example, for GPT-OSS-120B, the hierarchical setting improves performance over flat multi-agent system by 102.73% while reducing token usage by 74.52% on SQuAD 2.0. Further analysis shows that hierarchy helps most when tasks benefit from stable skill assignment, controlled information flow, and layered verification. Overall, our findings highlight organizational structure as an important factor in multi-agent reasoning, shaping not only effectiveness and cost, but also coordination behavior.

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) serve as a fundamental auditing tool for evaluating training data leakage in machine learning models. However, existing methodologies predominantly rely on static, handcrafted heuristics that lack adaptability, often leading to suboptimal performance when transferred across different large models. In this work, we propose AutoMIA, an agentic framework that reformulates membership inference as an automated process of self-exploration and strategy evolution. Given high-level scenario specifications, AutoMIA self-explores the attack space by generating executable logits-level strategies and progressively refining them through closed-loop evaluation feedback. By decoupling abstract strategy reasoning from low-level execution, our framework enables a systematic, model-agnostic traversal of the attack search space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoMIA consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while eliminating the need for manual feature engineering.

We develop Structured-Knowledge-Informed Neural Networks (SKINNs), a unified estimation framework that embeds theoretical, simulated, previously learned, or cross-domain insights as differentiable constraints within flexible neural function approximation. SKINNs jointly estimate neural network parameters and economically meaningful structural parameters in a single optimization problem, enforcing theoretical consistency not only on observed data but over a broader input domain through collocation, and therefore nesting approaches such as functional GMM, Bayesian updating, transfer learning, PINNs, and surrogate modeling. SKINNs define a class of M-estimators that are consistent and asymptotically normal with root-N convergence, sandwich covariance, and recovery of pseudo-true parameters under misspecification. We establish identification of structural parameters under joint flexibility, derive generalization and target-risk bounds under distributional shift in a convex proxy, and provide a restricted-optimal characterization of the weighting parameter that governs the bias-variance tradeoff. In an illustrative financial application to option pricing, SKINNs improve out-of-sample valuation and hedging performance, particularly at longer horizons and during high-volatility regimes, while recovering economically interpretable structural parameters with improved stability relative to conventional calibration. More broadly, SKINNs provide a general econometric framework for combining model-based reasoning with high-dimensional, data-driven estimation.

The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing role offers a unique and timely opportunity to investigate AI-driven contributions and their effects on code quality, team dynamics, and software maintainability. In this work, we construct a novel dataset of approximately $110,000$ open-source pull requests, including associated commits, comments, reviews, issues, and file changes, collectively representing millions of lines of source code. We compare five popular coding agents, including OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Jules, and Devin, examining how their usage differs in various development aspects such as merge frequency, edited file types, and developer interaction signals, including comments and reviews. Furthermore, we emphasize that code authoring and review are only a small part of the larger software engineering process, as the resulting code must also be maintained and updated over time. Hence, we offer several longitudinal estimates of survival and churn rates for agent-generated versus human-authored code. Ultimately, our findings indicate an increasing agent activity in open-source projects, although their contributions are associated with more churn over time compared to human-authored code.

Matrix mechanisms are often used to provide unbiased differentially private query answers when publishing statistics or creating synthetic data. Recent work has developed matrix mechanisms, such as ResidualPlanner and Weighted Fourier Factorizations, that scale to high dimensional datasets while providing optimality guarantees for workloads such as marginals and circular product queries. They operate by adding noise to a linearly independent set of queries that can compactly represent the desired workloads. In this paper, we present QuerySmasher, an alternative scalable approach based on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Given a workload that can be answered from various data marginals, QuerySmasher splits each query into sub-queries and re-assembles the pieces into mutually orthogonal sub-workloads. These sub-workloads represent small, low-dimensional problems that can be independently and optimally answered by existing low-dimensional matrix mechanisms. QuerySmasher then stitches these solutions together to answer queries in the original workload. We show that QuerySmasher subsumes prior work, like ResidualPlanner (RP), ResidualPlanner+ (RP+), and Weighted Fourier Factorizations (WFF). We prove that it can dominate those approaches, under sum squared error, for all workloads. We also experimentally demonstrate the scalability and accuracy of QuerySmasher.

Overlap, also known as positivity, is a key condition for causal treatment effect estimation. Many popular estimators suffer from high variance and become brittle when features differ strongly across treatment groups. This is especially challenging in high dimensions: the curse of dimensionality can make overlap implausible. To address this, we propose a class of feature representations called deconfounding scores, which preserve both identification and the target of estimation; the classical propensity and prognostic scores are two special cases. We characterize the problem of finding a representation with better overlap as minimizing an overlap divergence under a deconfounding score constraint. We then derive closed-form expressions for a class of deconfounding scores under a broad family of generalized linear models with Gaussian features and show that prognostic scores are overlap-optimal within this class. We conduct extensive experiments to assess this behavior empirically.

Non-stationarity arises from concurrent policy updates and leads to persistent environmental fluctuations. Existing approaches like Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) and sequential update schemes mitigate this issue. However, since the perception of the policies of other agents remains dependent on sampling environmental interaction data, the agent essentially operates in a passive perception state. This inevitably triggers equilibrium oscillations and significantly slows the convergence speed of the system. To address this issue, we propose Gradient Realignment via Active Shared Perception (GRASP), a novel framework that defines generalized Bellman equilibrium as a stable objective for policy evolution. The core mechanism of GRASP involves utilizing the independent gradients of agents to derive a defined consensus gradient, enabling agents to actively perceive policy updates and optimize team collaboration. Theoretically, we leverage the Kakutani Fixed-Point Theorem to prove that the consensus direction $u^*$ guarantees the existence and attainability of this equilibrium. Extensive experiments on StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and Google Research Football (GRF) demonstrate the scalability and promising performance of the framework.

Large-scale web applications are widely deployed with complex third-party components, inheriting security risks arising from component vulnerabilities. Security assessment is therefore required to determine whether such known vulnerabilities remain practically exploitable in real applications. Penetration testing is a widely adopted approach that validates exploitability by launching concrete attacks against known vulnerabilities in real-world black-box systems. However, existing approaches often fail to automatically generate reliable exploits, limiting their effectiveness in practical security assessment. This limitation mainly stems from two issues: (1) precisely triggering vulnerabilities with correct technical details, and (2) adapting exploits to diverse real-world deployment settings. In this paper, we propose AutoEG, a fully automated multi-agent framework for exploit generation targeting black-box web applications. AutoEG has two phases: First, AutoEG extracts precise vulnerability trigger logic from unstructured vulnerability information and encapsulates it into reusable trigger functions. Second, AutoEG uses trigger functions for concrete attack objectives and iteratively refines exploits through feedback-driven interaction with the target application. We evaluate AutoEG on 104 real-world vulnerabilities with 29 attack objectives, resulting in 660 exploitation tasks and 55,440 exploit attempts. AutoEG achieves an average success rate of 82.41%, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, whose best performance reaches only 32.88%.

Gaussian processes (GPs) offer appealing properties but are costly to train at scale. Sparse variational GP (SVGP) approximations reduce cost yet still rely on Cholesky decompositions of kernel matrices, ill-suited to low-precision, massively parallel hardware. While one can construct valid variational bounds that rely only on matrix multiplications (matmuls) via an auxiliary matrix parameter, optimising them with off-the-shelf first-order methods is challenging. We make the inverse-free approach practical by proposing a better-conditioned bound and deriving a matmul-only natural-gradient update for the auxiliary parameter, markedly improving stability and convergence. We further provide simple heuristics, such as step-size schedules and stopping criteria, that make the overall optimisation routine fit seamlessly into existing workflows. Across regression and classification benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method 1) serves as a drop-in replacement in SVGP-based models (e.g., deep GPs), 2) recovers similar performance to traditional methods, and 3) can be faster than baselines when well tuned.

Autonomous agents increasingly interact with the web, yet most websites remain designed for human browsers -- a fundamental mismatch that the emerging ``Agentic Web'' must resolve. Agents must repeatedly browse pages, inspect DOMs, and reverse-engineer callable routes -- a process that is slow, brittle, and redundantly repeated across agents. We observe that every modern website already exposes internal APIs (sometimes called \emph{shadow APIs}) behind its user interface -- first-party endpoints that power the site's own functionality. We present Unbrowse, a shared route graph that transforms browser-based route discovery into a collectively maintained index of these callable first-party interfaces. The system passively learns routes from real browsing traffic and serves cached routes via direct API calls. In a single-host live-web benchmark of equivalent information-retrieval tasks across 94 domains, fully warmed cached execution averaged 950\,ms versus 3{,}404\,ms for Playwright browser automation (3.6$\times$ mean speedup, 5.4$\times$ median), with well-cached routes completing in under 100\,ms. A three-path execution model -- local cache, shared graph, or browser fallback -- ensures the system is voluntary and self-correcting. A three-tier micropayment model via the x402 protocol charges per-query search fees for graph lookups (Tier~3), a one-time install fee for discovery documentation (Tier~1), and optional per-execution fees for site owners who opt in (Tier~2). All tiers are grounded in a necessary condition for rational adoption: an agent uses the shared graph only when the total fee is lower than the expected cost of browser rediscovery.

Mechanistic simulations typically assume fixed ontologies: variables, causal relationships, and resolution policies are static. This assumption fails when the true causal structure is contested or unidentifiable-as in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) spread, where contact, environmental, and selection ontologies compete. We introduce Procela, a Python framework where variables act as epistemic authorities that maintain complete hypothesis memory, mechanisms encode competing ontologies as causal units, and governance observes epistemic signals and mutates system topology at runtime. This is the first framework where simulations test their own assumptions. We instantiate Procela for AMR in a hospital network with three competing families. Governance detects coverage decay, policy fragility, and runs structural probes. Results show 20.4% error reduction and 69% cumulative regret improvement over baseline. All experiments are reproducible with full auditability. Procela establishes a new paradigm: simulations that model not only the world but their own modeling process, enabling adaptation under structural uncertainty.

Modern data warehouses extend SQL with semantic operators that invoke large language models on each qualifying row, but the per-row inference cost is prohibitive at scale. Model cascades reduce this cost by routing most rows through a fast proxy model and delegating uncertain cases to an expensive oracle. Existing frameworks, however, require global dataset access and optimize a single quality metric, limiting their applicability in distributed systems where data is partitioned across independent workers. We present two adaptive cascade algorithms designed for streaming, per-partition execution in which each worker processes its partition independently without inter-worker communication. SUPG-IT extends the SUPG statistical framework to streaming execution with iterative threshold refinement and joint precision-recall guarantees. GAMCAL replaces user-specified quality targets with a learned calibration model: a Generalized Additive Model maps proxy scores to calibrated probabilities with uncertainty quantification, enabling direct optimization of a cost-quality tradeoff through a single parameter. Experiments on six datasets in a production semantic SQL engine show that both algorithms achieve F1 > 0.95 on every dataset. GAMCAL achieves higher F1 per oracle call at cost-sensitive operating points, while SUPG-IT reaches a higher quality ceiling with formal guarantees on precision and recall.