Flexible continuous-time survival modeling is critical for capturing complex time-varying hazard dynamics in high-dimensional data; however, training such models remains challenging due to the intractable integral required for likelihood estimation. We introduce QSurv, a scalable deep learning framework that enables nonparametric continuous-time modeling without relying on time discretization or restrictive distributional assumptions. We propose a training objective based on Gauss-Legendre numerical quadrature, which approximates the cumulative hazard with high-order accuracy while facilitating efficient end-to-end training via standard backpropagation. Furthermore, to effectively capture non-stationary hazard dynamics in complex architectures, we introduce time-conditioned low-rank adaptation, a mechanism that conditions general neural backbones on time by dynamically modulating weights via low-rank updates. We provide theoretical analysis establishing approximation error bounds for cumulative-hazard evaluation. Comprehensive experiments across synthetic benchmarks, large-scale real-world tabular datasets, and high-dimensional medical imaging tasks demonstrate that QSurv achieves competitive predictive performance with advantages in instantaneous hazard function estimation, enabling more interpretable characterization of time-varying risk patterns.

LLM agents routinely serve as first (and sometimes only) readers of academic papers, skimming for sub-claims, extracting reproducibility steps, and generalizing scope. Standard prose papers produce recurring failures in this role: sub-claims that cannot be cited at sub-paper granularity, scope overextension beyond what the paper tests, and figure commands buried in codebases rather than the paper itself. We propose `paper.json`, a companion JSON file that travels with the PDF and addresses each failure with a lightweight convention: stable claim IDs (C1), an explicit does-not-claim list (C2), exact per-figure shell commands (C3), and stable definition IDs (C5). A fifth convention (C4) holds that minimum viable compliance, hand-written JSON alongside the PDF, is achievable in under an hour for a finished paper without touching the human-readable output. C1, C2, C3, and C5 are open invitations: an agent that reads a compliant paper and acts on it produces evidence for or against them. This paper is itself compliant: `uv run validator.py paper.json --against paper.typ` passes. Repo: https://github.com/arquicanedo/paper-json

Second-order methods offer an attractive path toward more sample-efficient LLM training, but their practical use is often blocked by the systems cost of maintaining and updating large matrix-based optimizer states. We introduce \textbf{Asteria}, a runtime system designed to remove this bottleneck by separating second-order optimization logic from the critical GPU training path. Rather than keeping all preconditioner state on the accelerator, Asteria dynamically distributes optimizer state across GPU memory, CPU memory, and optional NVMe storage according to architectural constraints and runtime pressure. It further uses training hooks to prepare shadow states in advance, allowing expensive inverse-root computations to proceed asynchronously on the host while GPU computation continues. For distributed training, Asteria employs a bounded-staleness protocol that limits synchronization frequency while preserving optimizer effectiveness through topology-aware coordination. We evaluate Asteria on both memory-constrained and distributed training settings. On a DGX Spark platform with a single GB10 GPU and 128GB unified memory, Asteria supports second-order training for a 1B-parameter language model. On multi-node GH200 systems, it lowers visible optimizer overhead, reduces recurring latency spikes, accelerates convergence in wall-clock time, and maintains the optimization advantages of SOAP and KL-Shampoo in a 7B-parameter language model. Our results suggest that second-order LLM training can be made practical not by simplifying the optimizer alone, but by rethinking how optimizer state, background computation, and distributed synchronization are managed at the runtime level.

We develop a skew-adaptive extension of split conformal prediction for regression. The method starts from an asymmetric interval family centered at a point prediction and uses the gauge approach to deduce the conformity score induced by this family. The inverse hyperbolic sine transform of signed scaled residuals provides the training target for an additional predictive model, whose role is to learn how predictive uncertainty should tilt across the feature space. The resulting procedure preserves the finite-sample marginal validity of split conformal prediction under exchangeability, while producing intervals that adapt to both local scale and local skewness. We also develop a calibration-sample-based estimator for comparing the expected relative future width of the skew-adaptive and classical scaled-score intervals. Experiments on a variety of datasets indicate gains in prediction interval efficiency over the scaled-score construction and conformalized quantile regression, and show that the proposed estimator closely matches the corresponding average width ratio observed on the test sample.

We propose a scalable neuromorphic architecture based on spiking dynamics emerging from the autonomous time-continuous evolution of clockless (asynchronous) digital circuits. Implemented on commercially available field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), our system implements networks of interacting Boolean spiking neurons with configurable excitatory and inhibitory synaptic weights. A complete processing pipeline enables efficient handling of spike-encoded data for solving machine-learning tasks. We demonstrate competitive performance for an audio classification task with spike-based encoding and high-speed processing. Power consumption is significantly lower than traditional digital implementations; this makes our approach an efficient alternative that bridges the gap to dedicated analog neuromorphic systems without the need for specialized hardware design. More generally, our approach establishes clockless digital hardware as a viable platform for neuromorphic computing. It paves the way for reconfigurable chips to be turned into energy-efficient quasi-analog neuromorphic processors.

Wideband channel estimation (CE) in high-mobility scenarios remains challenging because channel responses vary rapidly, while practical systems can allocate only sparse pilots to accommodate dense users. Fortunately, many high-mobility environments, such as high-speed railways, exhibit scheduled trajectories, predictable velocities, and a limited number of dominant propagation paths. These properties induce a delay--beam power spectrum that is more stable than the instantaneous complex channel frequency response (CFR), less sensitive to the random phase coherence, and rich in geometric information. To exploit such environmental properties, we propose GeoGS-CE, a two-stage channel estimation framework for sparse-pilot high-mobility scenarios. In the offline stage, GeoGS-CE jointly models: 1) a scene-level 3D Gaussian representation that captures the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) geometric scattering support, and 2) a leakage-aware differentiable wireless rendering process that maps the NLoS Gaussians, together with an explicit virtual line-of-sight (LoS) component, to the measured delay--beam power spectrum, while accounting for practical OFDM delay and array leakage effects. In the online stage, the delay--beam power spectrum is predicted for each user location and used as a strong covariance prior, enabling accurate full-band and full-array CFR reconstruction and tracking through a linear MMSE estimator. Simulations based on channels generated from a segment of the Guangshen high-speed railway show that the proposed geometric prior substantially improves CFR reconstruction over pilot-only and non-geometric baselines.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for multimodal intelligence, but their growing deployment also expands the attack surface of prompt injection. Despite this growing concern, existing attacks still suffer from a critical limitation: the injected prompt for one modality only steers the model's interpretation of that singular input. Alternatively, these attacks remain multimodal but fail to achieve cross-modal prompt perturbation. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel cross-modal prompt injection attack CrossMPI, which can steer the model's interpretation of both textual and visual inputs via image-only prompt injection. Our design is underpinned by the following key breakthroughs. First, we turn the focus of the injected prompt perturbation optimization from the visual embedding space (typically with only $10^5$ parameters) to the model hidden state space (for multimodal information integration and with $10^7$ parameters). Then, two strategies are adopted to mitigate the optimization challenges posed by the larger parameter space. To constrain the optimized model parameter space, we introduce a layer selection strategy that identifies the layers most critical to multimodal integration. Interestingly, deviating from the past experience, our analysis reveals that the optimal layers for LVLM prompt perturbation reside in the middle of the model rather than the last. To constrain the image perturbation space, we propose a new distance-decremental perturbation budget assignment strategy that allocates budgets decrementally as the pixel distance to semantic-critical regions increases. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs and datasets show that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches.

Relational databases store much of the world's structured information, and they are essential for driving complex predictive applications. However, deep learning progress on relational data remains limited, as conventional approaches flatten databases into single tables via manual feature engineering, discarding relational context. Relational deep learning (RDL) addresses this by modeling databases as relational entity graphs (REGs) for graph neural networks (GNNs), but remains task- and database-specific. To combine the strengths of both paradigms, we propose a hybrid architecture combining a fine-tuned BART encoder to capture intra-row semantics with a GraphSAGE-based GNN over REGs to inject relational context. Experiments on RelBench show that the GNN substantially enriches BART's row embeddings, achieving a ROC-AUC of 67.40 on the driver-dnf task from the rel-f1 dataset. This performance is competitive with supervised baselines such as LightGBM (68.86) and narrows the gap to RDL (72.62) to within 5.22 points, though a substantial gap remains to state-of-the-art foundation models such as KumoRFM (82.63). These results suggest that lightweight hybrid LM-GNN architectures offer a promising and resource-efficient path towards foundation models for relational databases.

Neural network surrogate models have emerged as a promising approach to model solution fields for a wide variety of boundary value problems encountered in physical modeling. Stochastic problems represent an area of particularly high interest because of the potential to significantly reduce the repeated evaluation of expensive forward models via traditional numerical solvers when conducting parametric analysis. However, many studies found in the literature primarily focus on the ability of neural network surrogate models to represent deterministic samples or mean field solutions and largely overlook surrogate model performance at the tails of the distribution. The present study examines in detail the ability of neural network surrogate models to capture the full distribution of solution fields over the entire probability space, while emphasis is placed at the tails of the distribution. Serving as a canonical problem is the heat conduction equation with a highly stochastic source term, inducing extremely large variation in the thermal solution field. Comparisons are made between a classic feed-forward fully connected network and a Deep Operator Network architecture, using both data-driven and physics-informed loss functions. Results show that the worst-case prediction errors are an order of magnitude larger than the mean field error, highlighting the importance of the outlier samples. The large errors associated with extreme samples result from the networks having to extrapolate beyond the bounds of the training data. A method for identifying these samples is presented along with a discussion of potential approaches to account of their errors. Among the models considered, the fully connected neural network trained using a weak form residual loss performs best in handling these extrapolated inputs, achieving the highest prediction accuracy for the numerically produced datasets.

Semantic code search has been widely adopted in both academia and industry. These approaches embed natural-language queries and code snippets into a shared embedding space and retrieve results based on vector similarity. Despit strong performance on benchmark datasets, they often suffer from poor explainability and generalization. Retrieved code may appear semantically similar yet miss critical functional requirements of the query, while providing no explanation of why the result was retrieved. Moreover, such failures become more severe under distribution shift, where models struggle to generalize to unseen benchmarks. In this work, we propose XSearch, an intrinsically explainable code search framework. Our key insight is that by relying on global embedding similarity, existing retrievers inherently take an inductive view. They learn statistical patterns rather than truly understanding the query's functional requirements. We address this problem by reformulating code search as a deductive concept alignment problem. XSearch (i) identifies functional concepts in the query and (ii) explicitly aligns them with corresponding code statements. This explain-then-predict design produces inherent concept-level explanations and mitigates shortcut learning that harms out-of-distribution generalization. We train an encoder with explicit concept-alignment objectives and perform retrieval through explicit matching between query concepts and code statements. Experiments show that, trained on CodeSearchNet using GraphCodeBERT (125M parameters), XSearch improves performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks from 0.02 to 0.33 (15x) over eight state-of-the-art retrievers, and consistently outperforms both encoder- and decoder-based baselines with up to 7B parameters. A user study demonstrates that concept-alignment explanations enable users to evaluate retrieved results faster and more accurately.

Machine learning systems increasingly make life-changing decisions about individuals, such as loan approvals, hiring, and cheating detection, raising a pressing question: how can individuals respond to negative decisions made by these opaque systems? While explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has largely focused on algorithmic recourse -- helping individuals change their features to obtain a desired outcome -- the parallel problem of algorithmic contestability -- helping individuals review and correct erroneous algorithmic decisions -- has received far less attention, despite its central ethical and legal importance. We trace this neglect to the absence of clear formal definitions and a systematic operationalization of contestability as an algorithmic problem. To address it, we propose an operational definition of contestability as a natural complement to recourse: contestability starts from the presumption that a decision may be incorrect and focuses on identifying evidence to challenge and potentially overturn it, whereas recourse assumes the decision is valid and instead provides pathways for changing it. We show that standard XAI explanations, such as counterfactuals, LIME, or Anchors, even when combined with human intuitions about decision continuity or monotonicity, reveal only errors in the neighborhood of the individual, but provide insufficient grounds for overturning the decision at hand. Going thus beyond traditional XAI, we identify three types of evidence warranting reversal according to the decision maker's own ethical standards: predictive multiplicity, incorrect feature values, and neglected overruling evidence. We argue that these render decisions normatively indefensible and thus successfully contestable. Finally, we analyze how existing EU legislation connects to our framework and argue that individuals already hold some legal rights to these forms of evidence.

AI agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously in the world, yet there is still no reliable way to trace a harmful agent back to the account that deployed it. This creates the same accountability gap across both ends of the intent spectrum: benign operators may deploy misconfigured or overbroad agents that cause harm unintentionally, while malicious operators may deliberately weaponize agents for scams, harassment, or cyber attacks. In many cases, these agents are powered by vendor-hosted models, a dependency that holds even for sophisticated adversaries such as state actors conducting cyber operations. In either case, affected parties can observe the behavior but cannot notify the responsible operator, stop the session, or identify the account for investigation. We formalize this gap as the problem of agent attribution: linking an observed agent interaction to the responsible account at the hosting vendor. To our knowledge, this is the first work to define the problem and present a practical solution. Our protocol is canary-based: an authorized party injects a canary into the agent's interaction stream, and the vendor searches a narrow window of session logs to recover the originating session and account. Simple canaries suffice in non-adversarial settings. For adversarial operators who filter or paraphrase incoming content, we develop robust canary constructions that cannot be suppressed without degrading the agent's own task performance, yielding a formal asymmetry in the defender's favor. We evaluate a variety of scenarios including real-world agents and show that our attribution method is reliable, robust, and scalable for vendor-side deployment.

We consider the problem of testing properties of graphs underlying high-dimensional graphical models. We adopt the model of covariance queries introduced by Lugosi, Truszkowski, Velona, and Zwiernik (2021). We study the case when the underlying graph is a tree. The main results of the paper show that, while reconstructing the entire tree may be costly, certain global structural properties can be tested efficiently. In particular, we design randomized tests for global structural properties that use a sub-quadratic number of queries. We develop testing procedures for several fundamental properties, including the number of leaves, the maximum degree, the typical distance, and the diameter of the tree. For each property, we obtain explicit query complexity bounds that depend on the target threshold and tolerance parameters.

Teleoperation promises to extend the operational envelope of automated vehicles, yet it critically depends on network latency and video quality. We report a fixed-base driving-simulator study (N=25) with a 2x2 manipulation of added latency (100/300 ms) and bitrate (500/2000 kbit/s), plus a best-case baseline (0 ms added, 9000 kbit/s). We measured effective glass-to-glass (G2G) latency per condition (baseline approx. 413 ms; effective totals approx. 500-700 ms) and verified stable framerate and encoder settings. Multimodal measures covered performance (speed, steering reversals, crashes), oculomotor behavior (blink rate, fixation duration), physiology (RR interval, heart rate, skin conductance), and subjective workload. Latency and bitrate each increased operator load and modestly affected performance. Physiological measures (heart rate, RR interval) exhibited sub-additive interactions, whereas performance and oculomotor interactions were small or non-significant. Equivalence tests showed that 300 ms with 2000 kbit/s was velocity-equivalent to best-case (SESOI +/- 2 km/h), while 300 ms with 500 kbit/s was not. We argue that latency and video quality should be treated as largely independent design levers, and that physiology-aware adaptation can anticipate overload before safety is compromised.

Finding an odor source in a turbulent flow requires effectively leveraging the history of olfactory observations into a robust navigation strategy. In this work, we use tabular Q-learning to train an olfactory search agent with a minimal memory of past observations: only a running clock since the last whiff. This agent learns an interpretable strategy to recover the plume which combines well-known behaviors observed in insects: surging, casting, and a return downwind. While achieving good performance on data from direct numerical simulations of turbulence, the agent is limited by an inability to adapt its strategy to the local intermittency level; we show that providing more flexibility improves robustness.

We developed a tool for detecting domain shifts, namely subtle differences in the probability distributions of datasets. We identify these shifts using an algorithm designed to detect localised density anomalies in high-dimensional feature spaces. If an anomaly is present, we then identify the feature subspace in which the anomaly is most pronounced. This allows us to trace the domain shift to a small set of features, making the shift interpretable. Moreover, we provide a protocol for compensating domain shifts by extracting, from two unlabelled datasets, subsets of samples with no detectable residual distributional difference. We validate the framework on controlled 20-dimensional benchmarks with known ground truth, recovering both broad and localized shifts together with their supporting feature subspaces. We then apply it to healthy electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings represented by 782 features. In age- and sex-matched cohort comparisons differing in measurement-device composition, the method detects device-induced shifts, extracts representative subsets enriched in the imbalanced device components, and identifies ECG features associated with the acquisition contrast. These results suggest that density-shift detection and subspace attribution provide a practical framework for uncovering hidden cohort biases before downstream modelling.

AI emotional companions face a safety-rapport paradox: restrictive safeguards can damage supportive alliance, while permissive systems risk user harm. We present SLIP (Staged Layers of Intervention Protocol), a four-stage graduated methodology deriving interventions (none, soft, hard) from structured qualitative indicators -- affect intensity (a) and narrative dynamism (m) -- alongside ETHICS (Emergent Taxonomy for Human-AI Interaction Context Signals), a "signals not labels" taxonomy. An evaluation combining a small-scale production deployment (N=68 entries, 10 users, 10 weeks) with a synthetic persona battery (N=91, 5 behavioral-risk profiles) achieved 0% false positives for the flow persona and showed expected escalation patterns in crisis-oriented personas. However, initial results showed that 8 consecutive days of high-energy elevation produced zero interventions (0/8), exposing a boundary where the "do not pathologize" principle conflicts with safety. A subsequent three-model stress test demonstrated that increased model capability improves detection from 0/8 to 6/8 while preserving 0/10 flow false positives in the largest model. Read as preliminary, these findings position graduated intervention as a design direction for navigating -- not resolving -- the safety-rapport tension in affective computing.

Modeling long-term user interests with massive historical user behaviors enhances click-through rate (CTR) prediction performance in advertising and recommendation systems. Typically, a two-stage framework is widely adopted, where a general search unit (GSU) first retrieves top-$k$ relevant behaviors towards the target item, and an exact search unit (ESU) generates interest features via tailored attention. However, current target-centered GSU would ignore other latent user interests, leading to incomplete and biased interest features. Additionally, the matching-based retrieval process in GSUs depends on the pairwise similarity score between target item and each historical behavior, which not only becomes time-consuming for online services as user behaviors continue to grow, but also overlooks the interaction information among user behaviors. To combat these problems, we propose a \textbf{Gen}erative \textbf{L}ong-term user \textbf{I}nterest model named GenLI for CTR prediction. GenLI consists of an interest generation module (IGM), a behavior retrieval module (BRM), and an interest fusion module (IFM). The IGM generates multiple interest distributions to indicate different aspects of real-time user interests, which is target-independent and incorporates interaction information among behaviors, ensuring complete and diverse interest features. The BRM selects related behaviors via a simple lookup operation, reducing the time complexity for weighting each behavior to $O(1)$. Finally, the IFM uses delicate gating mechanisms to generate interest features. Based on the generation process, GenLI improves the diversity of user interests and avoids complex matching-based behavioral retrieval, achieving a better balance between accuracy and efficiency for CTR prediction.

Clinical application of high-resolution diffusion MRI is hindered by hardware limitations and prohibitive scan times, motivating computational super-resolution. This study investigates the efficacy of a feature-based loss function in preserving diffusion signal consistency in deep learning super-resolution. Using 7T data from the human connectome project to generate pairs of low- and high-resolution diffusion weighted images (DWI), we trained UNets for 2D super-resolution. Ablation and isolation studies evaluated different VGG16-layers for feature-based losses against an image-based L1 baseline. Deeper layers and combinations thereof resulted in grid-like artifacts in super-resolution DWIs, which persisted in diffusion parameters like quantitative and fractional anisotropy. No such artifacts were present when using the shallowest layer. Downstream analysis for this layer showed great consistency with the ground truth, even for 9-fold super-resolution. Image SNR and used VGG16-layer depths modulated artifact appearance and severity, mandating careful selection of contributing layers for application in and beyond diffusion MRI.

Security in cloud computing has become a major concern due to several factors such as layered cloud architectures, dynamic environments, and exposure to unseen or zero-day attacks. Moreover, intrusion detection systems (IDS) typically operate at specific layers and rely heavily on machine learning models, which often perform well in experimental settings but fail to sustain performance in real cloud deployments. In this work, we implement a confidence-aware multilevel intrusion detection system using reinforcement learning tailored for cloud environments. The system secures three distinct layers: network, host, and hypervisor. Machine learning models at each layer detect known attack patterns, while prediction confidence distinguishes reliable decisions from uncertain outcomes. Within the multi-gate flow, low-confidence events pass through a learned-threshold confidence gate (Gate-1), followed by a Chroma memory-matching gate (Gate-2), with unresolved events escalated to a large language model (LLM) for semantic analysis and explanation. Final attack promotion at Gate-3 uses calibrated LLM confidence or weighted-fusion fallback, while uncertain events are retained in a review bucket to avoid forced classification. Generated explanations and confirmed knowledge are stored in ChromaDB to support future analysis and retraining. The approach is first evaluated using static thresholds, establishing a baseline for comparison. Results show that the proposed system learns adaptive thresholds and reduces LLM escalation by 58.78%, lowering cost while maintaining strong performance (88.68% accuracy, 85.29% precision, 84.72% recall, 85.00% F1). The network and hypervisor layers achieve 98.02% and 97.08% accuracy, demonstrating a balanced and efficient detection system.

The modeling and simulation of infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems are central problems in mathematical physics and engineering, however they pose significant computational and structural challenges for standard data-driven architectures. In this work, we introduce the Symplectic Neural Operator, a neural operator architecture designed to preserve the symplectic structure intrinsic to Hamiltonian PDEs. We provide a theoretical characterization of their symplecticity and establish a rigorous long-term stability result based on the combination of symplectic structure preservation and learning accuracy. Numerical experiments on canonical Hamiltonian PDEs corroborate this theoretical result and show that SNOs exhibit improved energy behavior compared with non-structure-preserving neural operators.

We study the query complexity of obtaining a relative Fisher information guarantee for sampling from a log-smooth non-log-concave distribution; this is a sampling analog of finding an approximate stationary point in optimization. Our algorithm is based on the proximal sampler, which is an implicit discretization of the Langevin diffusion, and requires an implementation of the backward step known as the restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO). We show that by leveraging the recent results for log-concave sampling with high-accuracy guarantees in Rényi divergence, we can obtain an approximate RGO implementation that -- when used with the proximal sampler -- yields a complexity guarantee in relative Fisher information that inherits the same dimension dependence as log-concave sampling, and improves upon prior work for non-log-concave sampling. We also show a converse reduction that any improvement in the dimension dependence in relative Fisher information for non-log-concave sampling will yield an improved dimension dependence for high-accuracy log-concave sampling.

Conversational interfaces powered by large language models (LLMs) are widely used for ideation and analysis, yet their linear structure limits exploration of alternatives and management of long-running interactions. We present CanvasConvo, a conversational interface concept that transforms linear chat into a branching conversation tree embedded in a spatial canvas. CanvasConvo enables users to explore what-if scenarios by branching directly from conversational content, supporting parallel development of alternative directions. These branches are visualized on a canvas while remaining integrated with a familiar chat interface, allowing users to switch between linear and non-linear interaction. Features such as timeline-based navigation, automatic tagging and summarization, and context-aware controls (e.g., goals, reusable prompts) support structured interaction and continuity. We evaluated CanvasConvo in a 5-7 day field study with 24 participants. Our findings highlight how non-linear conversational structures support exploratory workflows and different interactions in LLM-based work.

This work extends a framework for predicting the performance of High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads using Machine Learning (ML). A common limitation in performance modeling is the restricted number of hardware counters that can be collected simultaneously. To address this, we propose a heuristic-based methodology to merge execution traces from multiple runs, each instrumented with a different set of hardware counters. Our approach matches computation bursts across executions by analyzing MPI structure, timing, and communication patterns. This process enables the construction of a unified dataset that includes a wider set of hardware features without relying on multiplexing. The output is a new synthetic trace with all merged counters, which can be used both for HPC performance prediction and for conventional performance analysis. The methodology has been validated on MareNostrum5 machine with a range of kernels and real applications. Results show that the merged counters maintain acceptable accuracy depending on the application, and can be directly used to train ML models on a richer feature space without prior counter selection.

Stipple patterns, point sets whose local density tracks a target image, are traditionally produced by per-density iterative optimizers, which are slow, non-differentiable, and must be re-run from scratch for each new target. Learned alternatives have so far addressed only unconditional point generation; capacity-constrained, image-conditioned stippling has remained out of reach. We present the first diffusion-based sampler that simultaneously satisfies a learned local point-distribution prior and a continuous, image-defined capacity constraint at inference. The method is a ControlNet branch built on top of an optimal-transport-grid point-set diffusion baseline, conditioned on the target density map and a high-resolution image. Two design choices make the combination tractable: training and inference are restricted to the late-stage denoising regime, initialized from a density-weighted rejection sample, and the standard zero-convolution injection is replaced with a sigmoid-gated 1x1 projection that preserves the base model's blue-noise structure under hard density signals. A single trained checkpoint accepts arbitrary target densities at inference, generalizes to point budgets that were not seen during training, and produces stipples in time nearly independent of the output point count. On the Icons-50 benchmark, our learned sampler reaches parity with per-density-optimized baselines on every reported metric while remaining differentiable end-to-end.

Code agents increasingly help developers work with unfamiliar repositories, but every such task depends on a costly prerequisite: bootstrapping the repository into a usable development state. This process requires substantial trial-and-error exploration, yet the resulting knowledge--resolved dependencies, repair strategies--stays trapped in a single conversation, unavailable to future agents. We therefore formulate repository bootstrapping as a reusable startup knowledge problem and introduce BootstrapAgent, a multi-agent framework that distills the heuristics discovered during bootstrap exploration into a persistent, verifiable, agent-consumable .bootstrap contract. Through evidence extraction, structured planning, deterministic Docker-based verification, and trace-driven repair, BootstrapAgent generates a contract covering environment setup, diagnostic checks, minimal verification, and accumulated repair knowledge. We further propose warm repair with clean replay to accelerate iterative debugging without sacrificing cold-start reproducibility, and a delta repair with sanity check to prevent reward hacking. Experiments on three benchmarks show that BootstrapAgent achieves a 92.9% success rate, outperforming the baseline by over 10% while reducing downstream agent token usage by 25.9% and build time by 22.3%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Vossera/BootstrapAgent.

Recent advances in foundation models have enabled conversational agents that aim for sustained companionship rather than mere task completion. Yet most still remain unable to support natural, long-term companion-like interactions, resulting in experiences that feel episodic and inauthentic. We argue that current agents overlooked cross-temporal modeling of agents' social behaviors and internal emotions: generated behaviors rarely influence an agent's emotional state, and emotional states seldom shape subsequent behaviors. We present Cross-Temporal Emotion Modeling (CTEM), a framework that links long-term behavioral history to moment-to-moment emotional expression. CTEM establishes a closed loop where past experiences update an evolving emotional state; this state conditions immediate interactions; and user feedback continually revises both memory and emotional state, enabling reflection and anticipation. We instantiate CTEM as Auri, a companion agent on an instant-messaging platform, and report a 21-day in-the-wild study showing that CTEM shows improvements in perceived naturalness, coherence, and emotional harmony.

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) under one-shot planning is a core component of warehouse automation, yet classical formulations typically assume four-connected 2D grids with unit-time moves in four directions. To fill reality gaps while still being trackable with discrete combinatorial search, this work proposes a more practical counterpart tailored to differential-drive AGVs. We term this multi-agent warehouse pathfinding (MAWPF), featured with four constraints: (i) agent actions are restricted to straight motion and in-place rotation; (ii) rotations require multi-step costs; (iii) acceleration and deceleration are considered, and; (iv) follower collisions are prohibited to prevent rear-end crashes. To solve MAWPF efficiently, we adapt representative suboptimal MAPF algorithms-PP, LNS2, PIBT, and LaCAM-and conduct comprehensive benchmarking. Our experiments reveal that PP and LNS2 struggle to solve instances with many agents, while PIBT-based approaches achieve preferable scalability with increased solution cost. We believe that these constitute an important step toward adapting classical gridworld MAPF to operational warehouse setups.

Proactive autoscaling for containerized workloads depends on knowing the provisioning delay, i.e., the time between a scaling decision and the moment new capacity is ready to serve traffic. In practice, this cold-start duration can vary substantially across environments and even across consecutive scale-out events. We present ADAPT (Adaptive Duration Approximation for Predictive Timing), an online EWMA estimator that tracks coldstart duration at runtime. ADAPT feeds a dynamic planning horizon, FH-OPT, into a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) that optimizes replica counts over a rolling window. Together, these components form a closed-loop proactive autoscaling design that adapts its lookahead based on measured provisioning delay. Evaluated across three policies (MPC+LSTM, MPC+Prophet, HPA) and six workload archetypes with five random seeds, MPC+LSTM achieves below 5% SLA violation on all workloads, compared with 7-19% for reactive HPA and up to 28.7% for MPC+Prophet on bimodal traffic.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice accuracy depends heavily on the logging policy used to collect data for computing the estimate. We study how to design logging policies that minimize OPE error for given target policies. We characterize a fundamental reward-coverage tradeoff: concentrating probability mass on high-reward actions reduces variance but risks missing signal on actions the target policy may take. We propose a unifying framework for logging policy design and derive optimal policies in canonical informational regimes where the target policy and reward distribution are (i) known, (ii) unknown, and (iii) partially known through priors or noisy estimates at logging time. Our results provide actionable guidance for firms choosing among multiple candidate recommendation systems. We demonstrate the importance of treatment selection when gathering data for OPE, and describe theoretically optimal approaches when this is a firm's primary objective. We also distill practical design principles for selecting logging policies when operational constraints prevent implementing the theoretical optimum.