The problem of predicting unobserved entries in a binary matrix, known as 1-bit matrix completion, has found diverse applications in fields such as recommendation systems. In this study, we develop an empirical Bayes method for 1-bit matrix completion motivated by the Efron--Morris estimator, a matrix generalization of the James--Stein estimator that shrinks singular values toward zero. The proposed method exploits the underlying low-rank structure of binary matrices, drawing parallels with multidimensional item response theory. Simulation studies and real-data applications demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a superior balance of predictive accuracy, calibration reliability (uncertainty quantification), and computational efficiency compared to existing methods.

We present swarm-attack, an open-source adversarial testing framework in which multiple lightweight LLM agents coordinate through shared memory, parallel exploration, and evolutionary optimization. Together, our results demonstrate that both safety bypass of frontier models and software vulnerability discovery, i.e., the capability class that motivated restricted release of Anthropic's Mythos Preview, are achievable at effectively zero cost using commodity hardware and openly available models. We report two experiments. In the first, five instances of a 1.2 billion parameter model conducted 225 jailbreak attacks each against GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4. Against GPT-4o, the swarm achieved an Effective Harm Rate of 45.8%, producing 49 critical-severity breaches; against Claude Sonnet-4, the Effective Harm Rate was 0% despite a 40% technical success rate. In the second experiment, the same models performed combined source code analysis and binary fuzzing against a vulnerable C application with 9 planted CWEs. With a hand-crafted exploit seed corpus, regex pattern detection, and AddressSanitizer-based crash classification, the pipeline recovers 9 of 9 vulnerabilities (100% recall) in approximately four minutes on a consumer MacBook. With those scaffold components disabled, the same model recovers 0 of 9 by crash verification and 2 of 9 by citation. The capability class that motivated restricted release of Anthropic's Mythos Preview is therefore reproducible at effectively zero cost; the important enabler is the system scaffold itself, which compensates for the limited reasoning capacity of small individual models.

Machine learning-based simulators offer the potential to model the dynamics of complex systems more efficiently than classical approaches, while retaining differentiability, a key property for materials design. Graph neural network (GNN)-based simulators have shown strong performance across a range of physical domains, including molecular dynamics. However, their reliance on temporal context for accurate prediction limits their use in inverse design settings, where simulations must be initialized from a single static configuration. Moreover, inverse design requires robust out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, as candidate structures typically lie outside the training domain. Here, we address both challenges by introducing two complementary strategies that enable stable and accurate structure-only initialization of GNN-based simulations. To directly target OOD generalization, we propose an inference-time physics-based optimization framework that constrains model predictions to remain physically consistent during rollout. In addition, we introduce a differentiable, GNN-based barostat that enables accurate tracking of system dimensions and pressure, critical for capturing macroscopic responses and supporting OOD generalization. We evaluate these approaches in the context of uniaxial compression of disordered elastic networks spanning a broad range of geometries, Poisson ratios, and microscopic behaviors. We find that, together, these methods substantially improve rollout stability and enable reliable OOD generalization, including regimes with distinct, more complex dynamics than those in the training data. These results show that, when properly initialized and constrained, GNN-based simulators can serve as efficient and generalizable tools for materials discovery and structural optimization, advancing their use in materials, molecular, and dynamical system design.

We study full-reference image quality assessment from a machine-centric perspective, where images are evaluated by how well they preserve information for downstream models. We formulate machine-oriented quality as a latent machine utility and approximate it through pairwise predictive-consistency comparisons. To this end, we construct PCMP, a dataset of PSNR-matched distortion pairs labeled by consistency votes from multiple pretrained models. We further propose ML-CLIPSim, a differentiable quality metric built on a frozen CLIP visual encoder, which aggregates intermediate patch-token similarities and global image embeddings. Experiments on machine-preference benchmarks, human-IQA datasets, and learned image compression show that ML-CLIPSim better aligns with machine-oriented preferences than conventional fidelity and perceptual metrics, while remaining competitive for human quality prediction. Used as a compression distortion term, it improves rate--task trade-offs across multiple downstream tasks.

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the flow converges weakly toward the target, but no quantitative rate is known for the last iterate. In this paper, we establish quantitative local convergence in strong norms for this dynamics, when the interaction kernel is of Riesz type on the $d$-dimensional torus. Specifically, assuming that the initial density and the target are smooth and close in $L^2$-norm, we obtain explicit polynomial convergence rates in $L^2$-norm that depend on the dimension and on the regularity parameters of the kernel, the initialization and the target. We further show that these rates are sharp in certain regimes, and support the theory with numerical experiments. In the edge case of kernels with a Coulomb singularity, we recover the global exponential convergence result established in prior work. Our analysis is inspired by recent results on Wasserstein gradient flows of kernel mean discrepancies.

We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function. This model extends linear and generalized linear bandits to a nonparametric setting, and is particularly relevant when the reward function is not known in advance. While optimal regret guarantees are known for monotone reward functions, the general non-monotone case remains poorly understood, with the best known bound being $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{3/4})$ (under standard boundedness and Lipschitz assumptions on the reward function [Kang et al., 2025]). We close this gap by establishing the optimal regret for general single-index bandits. We propose a simple two-phase algorithm, namely, Zoomed Single Index Bandit with Upper Confidence Bound ($\texttt{ZoomSIB-UCB}$), that first estimates the projection direction via a normalized Stein estimator, and then reduces the problem to a one-dimensional bandit using discretization and finally use UCB. This approach achieves a regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{2/3})$, and improves significantly upon prior work without any additional assumptions. We also prove a matching minimax lower bound of $\tildeΩ(T^{2/3})$, showing that the upper bound is essentially tight. Our upper and lower bounds together provide a sharp characterization of the regret in single-index bandits. Moreover, the empirical results further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Low-cost air quality sensors are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives as public awareness of air pollution continues to grow, and people take measures to monitor and improve the air they breathe indoors. Besides the standard operation of these sensors, fluctuations in environmental parameters can be leveraged to understand human behavior and activities in indoor spaces. Unlike traditional audio-visual, Radio Frequency, and inertial sensors, air quality sensors are easily scalable to a household, are privacy-preserving, and more economical. Such distributed sensor networks must jointly make decisions to monitor indoor occupants for downstream smart home and healthcare applications. However, due to low processing power, memory, and energy, they often struggle to maintain distributed data consensus and identify activity-affected sensor groups for accurate on-device inference. In this paper, we propose PoHAR framework that implements: (i) a conflict-free replicated data primitive for data sharing, (ii) a hierarchical clustering for ESP32 to detect activity-affected sensor groups with a self-supervised distance metric, and (iii) a leader-based group inference with off-the-shelf ML classifiers, enabling the sensor network to collaboratively detect hyperlocal indoor activities. Our extensive experiments demonstrated on-device activity detection, achieving 97.41% accuracy for indoor activity and 99.68% for cooking activity, using off-the-shelf ML models with latency below 34 microseconds.

This paper relaxes the restrictive symmetry conditions adopted in [4], [5] and extends their universal feature selection framework to accommodate noisy observations as well as attribute structures that may exhibit directional preferences. We introduce the notion of weak spherical symmetry, quantified by second-moment distances, which allows controlled deviations from rotational invariance. Under this relaxed condition, we develop a universal feature selection framework based on the singular value decomposition of the canonical dependence matrix computed from noisy data. Our main result shows that the selected features achieve asymptotically optimal error exponents up to a residual term that depends on the symmetry deviation $δ$ and the noise levels $η_1, η_2$. When $δ, η_1, η_2$ are relatively small, our result recovers that of [5], thereby demonstrating that exact spherical symmetry is unnecessary. Overall, our findings highlight the robustness of the selection framework against second-moment deviations and observation noise, thereby broadening its applicability across diverse inference tasks and providing a theoretically grounded tool for universal feature selection in practical scenarios.

Metric-induced discrete flow matching (MI-DFM) exploits token-latent geometry for discrete generation, but its practical use is limited by two issues: heuristic schedulers requiring hyperparameter search, and finite-step path-tracking error from its first-order continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) solver. We address both issues. First, we derive a kinetic-optimal scheduler for prescribed scalar-parameterized probability paths, and instantiate it for MI-DFM as a training-free numerical schedule that traverses the path at constant Fisher-Rao speed. Second, we introduce a finite-step moment correction that adjusts the jump probability while preserving the CTMC jump destination distribution. We validate the resulting method, GibbsTTS, on codec-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). Under controlled comparisons with a unified architecture and large-scale dataset, GibbsTTS achieves the best objective naturalness and is preferred in subjective evaluations over masked discrete generative baselines. Additionally, in comparison with the evaluated state-of-the-art TTS systems, GibbsTTS shows strong speaker similarity, achieving the highest similarity on three of four test sets and ranking second on the fourth. Project page: https://ydqmkkx.github.io/GibbsTTSProject

We present FrameTwin, a curve-anchored Gaussian alignment framework that uses sparse-view images to close the control loop for adaptive wireframe 3D printing. Our key idea is to capture the deformation of thin wireframe structures from sparse-view images using Gaussian kernels anchored to parametric curves, yielding a compact and geometry-aware encoding that explicitly captures strut topology. Driven by a differentiable rendering pipeline, FrameTwin estimates a neural deformation field that aligns the partially printed target model with the deformed structure observed during fabrication, where the optimized curve-Gaussian representation serves as a digital twin of the evolving wireframe. Unlike general Gaussian-splatting approaches, our formulation constrains kernel placement along parametric curves, substantially reducing the ambiguity inherent in sparse-view observations of thin structures. The resultant deformation-field alignment enforces global consistency across all struts. By using the estimated deformation field to blend the distorted printed geometry with the remaining unprinted geometry, FrameTwin enables adaptive updates to future printing trajectories. We demonstrate that FrameTwin can robustly capture and compensate for deformation in wireframe models fabricated using a robotized 3D printing system.

Running deep neural networks on microcontroller units (MCUs) is severely constrained by limited memory resources. While TinyML techniques reduce model size and computation, they often fail in practice due to excessive peak Random Access Memory (RAM) usage during inference, dominated by intermediate activations. As a result, many models remain infeasible on standalone MCUs. In this work, we present a fine-grained split inference system for networked MCUs that enables collaborative inference of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models across multiple devices. Our key insight is that breaking the memory bottleneck requires splitting inference at sub-layer granularity rather than at layer boundaries. We reinterpret pre-trained models to enable kernel-wise and neuron-wise partitioning, and distribute both model parameters and intermediate activations across multiple MCUs. A lightweight, resource-aware coordinator orchestrates the inference across MCU devices with heterogeneous resources. We implement the proposed system on a real testbed and evaluate it on up to 8 MCUs using MobileNetV2, a representative CNN model. Our experimental results show that CNN models infeasible on a single MCU can be executed across networked MCUs, reducing the per-MCU peak RAM usage while maintaining the practical end-to-end inference latency. All the source code of this work can be found here: https://github.com/shashsuresh/split-inference-on-MCUs.

We consider a mutual information (MI) regularized version of optimal density control of a discrete-time linear system. MI optimal control has been proposed as an extension of maximum entropy optimal control to trade off between control performance and benefits provided by stochastic inputs. MI regularization induces stochasticity in the policy, which poses challenges for applications of MI optimal control in safety-critical scenarios. To remedy this situation, we impose Gaussian density constraints at specified times to directly control state uncertainty. For this MI optimal density control problem, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm and derive the closed form of each step in the algorithm. In addition, we reveal that the alternating optimization of the MI optimal density control problem coincides with that of the so-called generalized Schrödinger bridge problem associated with the discrete-time linear system.

Autonomous drone fleets have immense potential in medical supply delivery during disaster incident response. However, coordinating multiple drones in such settings introduces compounding challenges: dynamic environmental hazards such as wind, obstacles, and intermittent network connectivity, constrained energy budgets, and the need to serve patient locations fairly under deadlines and triage-based priority while optimizing schedule utilization. In this paper, we present CEDA, a novel CTDE Deep Q-Network algorithm for cooperative multi-drone medical delivery, designed to jointly optimize triage-priority-aware routing, multi-agent coordination, and energy-efficient navigation under dynamic uncertainty. CEDA introduces a Priority-Preserving Fair Scheduling strategy, in which a structured reward function encodes both triage weights and complementary fairness mechanisms ensuring no patient class is starved of service. We evaluate CEDA in a simulated grid environment featuring dynamic hazard zones, stochastic action failures, and dynamically spawning patients across three triage priority levels, as well as in a PX4 SITL validation using two X500 quadrotors controlled via MAVSDK in offboard position mode. Simulation results demonstrate that CEDA achieves a delivery completion rate above 85%, reduces obstacle collisions by over 90% across training, and delivers an average of 6 patients per episode with a triage efficiency of 0.82. CEDA preserves clinical priority ordering, Critical patients are served first, while achieving near-zero mortality across lower-triage classes, confirming that priority-weighted routing does not condemn Stable or Urgent patients to neglect. PX4 SITL validation further demonstrates that the learned policy remains executable and triage-coherent under practical communication constraints and realistic multi-drone coordination in disaster response settings.

Query-separated computation forces a representation to play an operational role: data are encoded before a query is known, and a later decoder can answer only through the intermediate interface. In this regime the representation functions as a message rather than merely as a feature map. We formalize this observation by embedding information causality (IC) into representation learning, obtaining a framework called neural information causality (Neural-IC). The revised formulation separates two logically distinct statements. First, every query-separated architecture induces a random-access communication experiment and obeys the embedding inequality $I_{\mathrm{N\text{-}RAC}}\le I(\vec a:H,B)$. Second, any independently certified physical capacity bound on the interface, such as a hard $m$-bit alphabet, a finite-precision register, or a power-constrained noisy channel, implies $I_{\mathrm{N\text{-}RAC}}\le C_H$. This separation avoids treating capacity as a post hoc definition and makes Neural-IC an operational diagnostic for query leakage, precision leakage, and episode-specific memory. We also provide an exact one-bit classical RAC benchmark, showing explicitly that the relevant quantum enhancement is not total information beyond the bottleneck, but fair query-conditioned access. For CHSH-type correlation layers, nested Neural-RAC protocols multiply correlation biases across depth; requiring stability of a one-bit bottleneck for arbitrary depth selects the Tsirelson threshold. We extend the analysis to asymmetric seed biases, to multi-capacity finite-depth phase diagrams, and to correlated data via a conditional information score. Controlled simulations, including straight-through binary bottlenecks and deliberately leaky ablations, verify that apparent violations are accounted for by broken query separation or undercounted capacity.

Interactive assessments generate sequential process data that are not well handled by conventional item response models. Existing MDP-based measurement approaches, such as the Markov decision process measurement model (MDP-MM, LaMar, 2018), link action choices to state-action values, but their reliance on person-specific tabular value functions makes them difficult to scale beyond small, fully enumerated tasks. We propose the Reinforcement Learning Measurement Model (RLMM), a measurement framework that decouples person-level choice sensitivity from task-level value representation through a shared parametric action-value function, making estimation more computationally efficient for larger process-data settings. The model combines a Boltzmann choice rule with normalized advantages, a soft Bellman consistency penalty, and a block-coordinate MAP procedure for joint estimation, while also yielding step-level influence diagnostics for identifying behaviorally critical decisions. In peg-solitaire simulations, the RLMM achieved higher estimation accuracy and substantially lower runtime than the original MDP-MM, with advantages increasing as task complexity grew. In AQUALAB gameplay logs, the estimated person parameter was positively associated with cumulative reward, task completion, and behavioral efficiency. These results show that the RLMM extends decision-process-based psychometric models to larger and more behaviorally realistic environments while preserving an interpretable latent trait tied to decision making steps.

Reconstructing 3D fluid velocity fields from sparse 2D video observations is a highly ill-posed inverse problem, demanding both transport consistency with observed motion and physical validity under fluid laws. Existing methods typically impose these constraints through soft penalties, often leading to compromised accuracy and convergence issues. We introduce a reconstruction framework that structurally enforces both constraints. Specifically, we parameterize the reconstructed velocity using a continuous Divergence-Free Kernel representation, driving the advection of a Lagrangian 3D Gaussian Splatting representation. This formulation intrinsically guarantees both flow incompressibility and long-range transport coherence by construction. To enable the efficient optimization of such a constrained system, we introduce a novel Sliding Window scheme that propagates gradients over meaningful temporal horizons while maintaining tractable training costs. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both transport consistency and physical accuracy, enabling applications such as high-quality re-simulation and flow analysis.

Volumetric video (VV) streaming enables real-time, immersive access to remote 3D environments, powering telepresence, ecological monitoring, and robotic teleoperation. These applications turn VV streaming into a real-time interface to remote physical environments, imposing new system-level demands for photorealistic scene representation, low-latency interaction, and robust performance under heterogeneous networks. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely used for real-time photorealistic rendering, offering superior visual quality and rendering performance, but it faces challenges due to bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, as the foundation of adaptive VV streaming, existing Levels of Detail (LoD) methods based on density are not well-suited to Gaussian representations, leading to visible gaps and severe quality degradation. Recent studies have also explored attribute compression techniques to reduce bandwidth consumption. Our preliminary studies reveal that aggressive attribute compression primarily causes color distortion, which can be effectively corrected in the rendered image using a reference image. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Color-Adaptive scheme for adaptive VV streaming that uses vector quantization (VQ) to establish LoDs and correct color distortions with low-resolution reference images. We further present CAGS, an adaptive VV streaming system compatible with diverse Gaussian representations, which integrates the Color-Adaptive scheme by rendering reference images on the streaming server and performing color restoration on the client. Extensive experiments on our prototype system demonstrate that CAGS outperforms the existing adaptive streaming systems in PSNR by 5$\sim$20 dB under fluctuating bandwidth, operates significantly faster than existing scalable Gaussian compression methods, and generalizes across different Gaussian representations.

Automated grading of diabetic retinopathy (DR) faces several critical challenges: subtle inter-grade visual distinctions in fine-grained lesion patterns, distributional discrepancies induced by heterogeneous imaging devices and acquisition conditions, and the inherent inability of purely visual approaches to exploit clinical semantic knowledge. In this paper, we propose CLIP-Guided Semantic Diffusion (CGSD), a DR grading framework that synergistically integrates vision-language pretraining with diffusion probabilistic modeling. We adopt a domain-specific vision-language model tailored for DR grading as the semantic guidance module and adapt it to the target domain via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), effectively bridging the distributional gap between the pretrained model and the target dataset with only a minimal number of trainable parameters. Building on this foundation, we construct a cross-modal semantic conditioning vector by computing the dot product between image features and the text description features of each DR grade, yielding a joint representation that simultaneously encodes visual content and clinical-grade semantics. This vector serves as the conditioning signal for the diffusion denoising network, replacing the structurally complex dual-branch visual prior employed in existing diffusion-based classification methods. Experiments on the APTOS 2019 dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 87.5% and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.731, outperforming a variety of representative methods. Ablation studies further validate the independent contribution of each constituent module.

Confidence sequences based on test martingales provide time-uniform uncertainty quantification for the mean of bounded IID observations without parametric distributional assumptions. Their practical efficiency, however, depends strongly on the choice of martingale updates, and many existing constructions do not exploit prior information about plausible data-generating distributions or mean values. We propose a Bayes-assisted framework that uses a Bayesian working predictive model to adaptively construct confidence sequences. For each candidate mean and time point, the predictive distribution selects, among valid one-step martingale factors, the update maximising predictive expected log-growth; validity is therefore preserved even when the prior or working model is misspecified. We prove that if the predictive distribution is Wasserstein-consistent, the resulting procedure is asymptotically log-optimal, matching the per-sample log-growth of an oracle procedure with access to the true distribution. We instantiate the framework using robust predictives based on Dirichlet-process mixtures and Bayesian exponentially tilted empirical likelihood. Experiments on synthetic data, sequential best-arm identification for LLM evaluation, and prediction-powered inference show that informative priors can substantially reduce confidence-sequence width and sampling effort while retaining anytime-valid coverage.

Gaussian process (GP) marginal likelihood scores and kernel conditional independence tests are theoretically appealing for nonlinear causal discovery but computationally prohibitive at scale. We present three complementary RFF-based methods forming a practical toolkit for score-based, constraint-based, and hybrid causal discovery. The Fourier Feature Marginal Likelihood (FFML) score approximates the exact GP marginal likelihood by replacing the $n x n$ kernel Gram matrix with a finite-dimensional feature representation, reducing cost to $O(nm^2 + m^3)$ while retaining the probabilistic interpretation and automatic complexity penalty of the exact score. FFML extends to mixed (continuous and discrete) parent sets via a product-kernel construction, with a Kronecker path for small discrete parent sets and a Hadamard-product path otherwise. The Tetrad Random Fourier Feature (TRFF) score is a complementary BIC-style alternative using penalized Student-t regression with random Fourier features. TRFF offers robustness to heavy-tailed noise and faster runtime than FFML. Empirically, TRFF and FFML exhibit a complementary precision-recall profile: TRFF achieves higher precision while FFML achieves better recall and lower SHD overall. The Fourier Feature Conditional Independence (FFCI) test is a fast nonparametric CI test for mixed data, using ridge residualization in feature space and a Frobenius-norm cross-covariance statistic approximated as a weighted sum of chi-squared variables. Empirically, BOSS+FFML achieves the lowest SHD on nonlinear data, while BOSS+TRFF offers the highest precision. When run through PC-Max, FFCI and RCIT exhibit complementary precision-recall profiles: RCIT is more precise while FFCI achieves better recall and substantially lower SHD, at approximately twice the runtime.

Evolutionary computation has long promised to deliver both high-performance optimization tools as well as rigorous scientific simulations of Darwinian evolution. However, modern algorithms frequently abandon evolutionary fidelity for physics-inspired heuristics or superficial biological metaphors. This paper derives a suite of advanced gradient-based optimization algorithms directly from evolutionary first principles. We introduce Darwinian Lineage Simulations (DLS) to prove that, in an asexual context, Fisher's and Wright's historically opposed views of evolution are actually formally equivalent; One can partition Fisher's deterministically-evolving total population into Wright's randomly-drifting sub-populations. We prove that proper bookkeeping requires introducing a specific kind of structured noise (the DLS noise relation). Crucially, any bookkeeping choices which satisfy this relation will yield a faithful simulation of evolution. Using this vast representational freedom, we prove that a broad family of battle-tested optimization algorithms are already perfectly compatible with evolutionary dynamics. These include: Stochastic Gradient Descent as well as many regularizations/approximations of Newton's method and Natural Gradient Descent. By simply adding DLS noise (i.e., evolutionarily faithful genetic drift), these algorithms become scientifically valid in silico simulations of Darwinian evolution. Finally, we demonstrate that even the state-of-the-art Adam optimizer can be brought into evolutionary compliance through a minor mathematical surgery.

A central challenge in dynamic network analysis is to represent temporal evolution in a way that is both geometrically meaningful and statistically identifiable. One approach embeds a sequence of network snapshots as trajectories in a Euclidean space and relates these trajectories to node embeddings. In multilayer and unfolded spectral constructions, however, node embeddings and their underlying latent positions are identifiable only up to general linear transformations. Although this ambiguity preserves edge probabilities, it can distort geometry and invalidate distance based temporal comparisons at both the trajectory and node-levels. We develop Multiscale Euclidean Network Trajectories (MENT), a framework for multiscale temporal trajectories based on second-moment geometry. By imposing an isotropic normalization on the anchor latent positions, we reduce the relevant ambiguity to orthogonal transformations and prevent distortion of the second-moment geometry. In this canonical representation, we define a trace variation distance and mode-wise variation distances along orthogonal directions, and use multidimensional scaling to obtain low-dimensional trajectories of time points at both global and mode-wise levels. The resulting trajectories support interpretation and inference. They admit mode-wise decompositions, support attribution of global and mode-wise temporal changes to nodes, and enable change point detection through 1D trajectories. We prove consistency of the proposed unfolded spectral embedding and of the induced temporal trajectories. Experiments on two synthetic and two real dynamic networks illustrate stable and interpretable recovery of temporal structure and show strong performance against existing change point detection baselines.

A key challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies in designing learning signals that effectively promote coordination among agents. Designing such signals requires estimating how one agent's current action affects its teammates over future interaction steps. To address this, we introduce Multi-step Advantage-Gated Interventional Causal MARL (MAGIC), a framework that estimates multi-step action effects between agents and selectively converts them into intrinsic rewards. MAGIC uses counterfactual action interventions to compare teammate futures under factual and counterfactual branches, and introduces a gate based on advantage to direct exploration toward beneficial behaviors aligned with the task goal. Experiments on Multi-Agent Particle Environments (MPE) and StarCraft micromanagement benchmarks (SMAC and SMACv2) show that MAGIC consistently outperforms leading prior methods, with average relative final performance improvements of 26.9% and 10.1%, respectively.

High-capacity associative memories based on Kernel Logistic Regression (KLR) exhibit strong storage capabilities, but the dynamical and geometric mechanisms underlying their stability remain poorly understood. This paper investigates the global geometry of attractor basins and the mechanisms governing the storage limit in KLR-trained Hopfield networks. We combine empirical evaluations using random sequences and real-world image embeddings (CIFAR-10) with morphing experiments and statistical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) analysis. Our experiments show that the network achieves a storage capacity for random sequences up to $P/N \approx 16$, while maintaining stable retrieval for structured data at effective loads near $P/N \approx 20$. Morphing analysis indicates that attractors on the "Ridge of Optimization" are separated by sharp, phase-transition-like boundaries, characterized by steep effective potential barriers and critical slowing down. Furthermore, by comparing an SNR analysis with a geometric reference point inspired by Cover's theorem, we show that the practical storage limit is governed primarily not by a lack of geometric separability in the feature space, but by the loss of dynamical stability against crosstalk noise. These findings suggest that KLR networks function as highly localized exemplar-based memories that operate near the onset of dynamical collapse, providing a useful perspective on the design of robust, large-scale retrieval systems.

Static program slicing is a fundamental software engineering technique for isolating code relevant to specific variables. While recent learning-based approaches using language models (LMs) show promise in automating slice prediction, they suffer from inaccurate dependency modeling and unconstrained generation, where LMs fail to capture precise data flow relations and produce slices containing hallucinated tokens and statements. To address these challenges, we propose Sliceformer, a novel approach that reformulates static program slicing as a sequence-to-sequence task using small language models such as CodeT5+. Sliceformer introduces two key innovations that directly target the identified limitations. First, to improve dependency modeling, we design dataflow-aware pretraining objectives that leverage data flow graphs (DFG) to teach models data dependencies through dataflow-preserving statement permutation and dataflow-aware span corruption. Second, to eliminate hallucination, we develop a constrained decoding mechanism that enforces both lexical and syntactic constraints. We evaluate Sliceformer on Java and Python program slicing benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines with up to 22% gain in ExactMatch.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is highly susceptible to artifact contamination, such as electrooculographic (EOG) and electromyographic (EMG) interference, which severely degrades signal quality and hinders reliable interpretation in applications including neurological diagnosis, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), etc. Effective EEG denoising remains challenging because different artifact sources exhibit diverse and temporally varying distributions, together with distinct spectral characteristics across frequency bands. To address these issues, we propose BandRouteNet, an adaptive frequency-aware neural network for EEG denoising that jointly exploits band-specific processing and full-band contextual modeling. The proposed model performs band-wise denoising to explicitly capture frequency-dependent artifact patterns. Within this framework, we introduce a routing mechanism that adaptively determines where and to what extent denoising should be applied across temporal locations within each frequency band. In parallel, a full-band conditioner directly processes the original noisy EEG to extract global temporal context, producing both conditional parameters for modulating the band-wise pathway and a coarse-grained signal-level refinement to supplement the final reconstruction. Extensive experiments on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark dataset demonstrate that BandRouteNet outperforms other methods under EOG, EMG, and mixed-artifact conditions in terms of Relative Root Mean Square Error (RRMSE) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio Improvement (SNR$_{\text{imp}}$) under unified experimental settings, while remaining highly parameter-efficient with only 0.2M trainable parameters. These results highlight its strong potential for high-performance EEG artifact removal in resource-constrained applications.

Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference. We show that fully generative tabular synthesizers, including GAN- and LLM-based models, can preserve predictive utility while distorting average treatment effect (ATE) estimates. The failure is structural: ATE preservation requires both a realistic covariate law and an accurate treatment-effect contrast, whereas prediction loss penalizes treatment-effect error only through an overlap-weighted term. We formalize this mismatch through sensitivity and loss-decomposition results, and identify an analogous decomposition in block-level next-token prediction under log loss. Motivated by the tabular causal analysis, we propose a hybrid synthetic-data framework that generates covariates while modeling treatment and outcome mechanisms separately, allowing causal-purpose treatment assignment such as randomized synthetic assignment. We evaluate this framework in three settings: ATE preservation under fully generative versus hybrid synthesis, targeted augmentation for practical positivity problems, and synthetic simulation engines for comparing OR, IPW, AIPW, and TMLE before real-data analysis. Across synthetic and ACTG experiments, hybrid synthesis improves causal fidelity relative to fully generative baselines; LLM-based hybrid synthesis is often more faithful than CTGAN for ATE preservation and finite-sample estimator benchmarking.

We present enclawed, a hard-fork hardening framework built on the OpenClaw AI assistant gateway. enclawed targets deployments that need attestable peer trust, deny-by-default external connectivity, signed-module loading, and a tamper-evident audit trail -- typically regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, defense, government). The framework ships in two flavors: an open flavor preserving OpenClaw compatibility while emitting audit, classification, and data-loss-prevention (DLP) signals, and an enclaved flavor activating strict allowlists, FIPS cryptographic-module assertion, mandatory manifest signature verification, and high-assurance peer attestation for the Model Context Protocol. The classification ladder is data-driven: deployers pick from five built-in presets or supply their own JSON. We ship a 356-case test suite (261 unit + 95 adversarial pen-tests) covering tamper detection, signature forgery, egress bypass, audit-log truncation, trust-root mutation, DLP evasion, prompt injection, code injection, and biconditional admission for net-capable extensions; real-time human-in-the-loop control; a memory-bounded transaction buffer with rollback; strict-mode TypeScript typecheck; and a CI workflow. The biconditional extension-admission gate extends the skill trust schema to non-skill extensions. The four-level verification lattice is now closed at the top: four skill-formal-* primitives plus a CLI produce a signed proof-carrying bundle the runtime re-checks at load, raising a skill from tested to formal via static effect-containment, refinement-typed dispatch, and bounded model checking. enclawed is a hardening framework, not an accredited certification; hardware, validated crypto, facilities, and assessor sign-off remain the deployer's responsibility.

Retrieving real-time information is a fundamental capability for search-integrated agents in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly static and therefore fail to capture the temporal dynamics of information and the continuously evolving nature of real-world knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose RT-QA, a dynamic evaluation framework that leverages executable code workflows to retrieve up-to-date answers at evaluation time. Specifically, we construct an agent-driven pipeline that autonomously generates code for web crawling and DOM-based answer extraction to produce real-time ground truth. To ensure robust evaluation over time, the pipeline further incorporates a self-repair mechanism to adapt to changes in web page structures. RT-QA spans 12 domains (e.g., Finance, Sports) with 320 Chinese questions categorized into three difficulty levels. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art models (e.g., GPT-5.2, GLM-4.7) reveal significant limitations in real-time adaptability: even the best models achieve only 46% accuracy. Our analysis highlights two primary failure modes: (1) Lazy Retrieval, where agents rely on search snippets instead of deeply scanning specific websites for information (20% of failures); and (2) Temporal Confusion, a cognitive error where agents retrieve a historical date (e.g., an event in 2024) and fail to re-anchor to the current time (2026) for subsequent reasoning. These findings suggest that future agents require not just better retrieval strategies, but robust temporal state management.

The performance of large language model (LLM) agents depends critically on the execution harness, the system layer that orchestrates tool use, context management, and state persistence. Yet this same architectural centrality makes the harness a high-value attack surface: a single compromise at the harness level can cascade through the entire execution pipeline. We observe that existing security approaches suffer from structural mismatch, leaving them blind to harness-internal state and unable to coordinate across the different phases of agent operation. In this paper, we introduce \safeharness{}, a security architecture in which four proposed defense layers are woven directly into the agent lifecycle to address above significant limitations: adversarial context filtering at input processing, tiered causal verification at decision making, privilege-separated tool control at action execution, and safe rollback with adaptive degradation at state update. The proposed cross-layer mechanisms tie these layers together, escalating verification rigor, triggering rollbacks, and tightening tool privileges whenever sustained anomalies are detected. We evaluate \safeharness{} on benchmark datasets across diverse harness configurations, comparing against four security baselines under five attack scenarios spanning six threat categories. Compared to the unprotected baseline, \safeharness{} achieves an average reduction of approximately 38\% in UBR and 42\% in ASR, substantially lowering both the unsafe behavior rate and the attack success rate while preserving core task utility.