To showcase products, merchants often incur substantial costs creating high-quality display images. Foreground Conditioned Outpainting (FCO) meets this demand, allowing users to create desired backgrounds for foreground instances at a low cost by adjusting the text prompt. However, existing text-driven FCO methods exhibit critical flaws in their outputs, most notably the presence of artifacts, which refer to regions in the synthesized background that share the same semantics as the foreground instance. Such artifacts diminish the object's prominence and degrade image quality. We attribute the issue to the misalignment between the given instance and text-derived concept embeddings. To address this, we propose the Customized Concept Embedding Diffusion (CCE-Diffusion) framework. Its core is a CCE-Module to customize concept embeddings, bridging the gap between generic noun semantics and a specific visual instance. An Instance-Aware Loss guides the module's optimization, while a Semantic-Preserving Prompt Template prevents customized embeddings from distorting other words in the prompt. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that CCE-Diffusion significantly reduces artifacts in the outputs. As a plug-and-play component, the CCE-Module can integrate with various FCO methods, enhancing their performance.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continuously learn new classes without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. While recent CIL advances have spurred significant interest across various modalities, the audio-visual setting remains underexplored. Furthermore, although foundational multimodal models like SAM-Audio encapsulate rich static priors, our empirical analysis reveals that these representations struggle in incremental settings. This work bridges this gap by integrating SAM-Audio's audio-visual priors into the CIL setting. Specifically, we leverage its dense audio and visual representations and employ a novel guided attention strategy where the audio features contextually guide the visual representations. To further mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we introduce dual-level distillation objectives at both the feature and logit levels. Extensive evaluations on audio-visual CIL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

Illegal logging and timber trade continue to pose significant challenges in the Philippines, where accurate wood species identification is essential for enforcement but limited by the need for specialised equipment and expertise. This study aims to evaluate whether AI models for macroscopic wood identification can be developed and deployed by wood scientists without programming expertise using the Xylorix platform, focusing on five Philippine hardwood species: Mangium (Acacia mangium Willd.), Rain Tree [Samanea saman (Jacq.) Merr.], Banuyo (Wallaceodendron celebicum Koord.), Tindalo [Afzelia rhomboidea (Blanco) Vidal], and Ipil [Intsia bijuga (Colebr.) O. Kuntze]. Binary classifiers were trained on 10,663 verified cross-section images from 260 specimens and evaluated using specimen-level mean scoring to mirror operational field conditions. Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) values ranged from 0.969 (Ipil) to 1.000 (Mangium), and Average Precision (AP) values ranged from 0.589 (Samanea) to 1.000 (Mangium). Four of five species achieved AA grade (AUC and AP both \geq 0.90); Rain Tree received AE (AUC \geq 0.90, AP < 0.60) due to AP compression from its small positive test set (3 specimens). All five classifiers rank their target specimens above non-target specimens with near-perfect fidelity. Specimen-level error analysis revealed 9 false negatives from Ipil, primarily stemming from localized image artifacts and 3 false positives for Rain Tree and 1 false positive for Tindalo caused by shared tribal-level anatomical traits. These findings demonstrate that Xylorix non-programmers can leverage the Xylorix platform to construct operationally reliable wood identification models suitable for field deployment at supply chain checkpoints.

While end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has become the dominant research direction, production vehicles continue to rely on modular multi-NN pipelines for a non-trivial transitional period. The subject of this paper is the design of an architecture that, during this phase, supports a modular pipeline and an E2E path side by side and embeds a path for staged migration. Transplanted to a production SoC, egalitarian late fusion is compute-inefficient and offers no natural unit for staged E2E substitution. As an alternative, we propose three design principles: (i) Primary-Path, which explicitly selects a primary perception chain and prioritizes its enclosure within a single SoC pair over the non-critical paths (ii) Exposure-Time-Aligned, which propagates the primary sensor's exposure time $τ_{\rm exp}$ as a tag along the chain and event-drives the fusion node on matched $τ_{\rm exp}$ rather than a fixed cycle and (iii) Co-Path Coexistence, which, building on (i) and (ii), lets an E2E output path co-run with the modular pipeline within the same $τ_{\rm exp}$ cycle. On a Dual-SoC production AD-ECU, the implementation closes camera-shutter to planner-output latency at a mean of 296 ms within the 350 ms design budget. Under (iii), the modular pipeline is primary at production launch and the E2E path runs as shadow on real vehicles, and the E2E scope is expanded as evaluation evidence accumulates.

There is no doubt that over the last decade, techniques from the field of machine learning have revolutionized how we process and interpret data, especially images and text. For underwater observations acoustics is a primary source of information, and naturally, deep learning methods have been applied to echograms and other acoustics data, but so far with rather modest results. Here, we argue that due to intrinsic properties of acoustic data, substantial advances will likely require research into deep learning methods beyond mere recycling of models and techniques from image processing. Currently, the potential for breakthroughs in method development is hindered by the lack of standard data formats and organization, and even more by the lack of readily available, high quality data sets with established performance goals. To advance the field, these shortcomings should be remedied

Pretrained time series foundation models (TSFMs) have enabled zero-shot forecasting on unseen target series. However, existing TSFMs often incur high computational cost and provide limited support for diverse variable types, often failing to account for covariates that exogenously influence target variability. To address these challenges, we propose CITRAS-FM, a tiny 7M-parameter TSFM that supports univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed zero-shot forecasting with real-time CPU inference. Built on a patch-based, decoder-only Transformer, CITRAS-FM introduces Shifted Attention into the cross-variate module to effectively exploit known covariates accessible throughout the forecast horizon. Moreover, to enable covariate-aware pretraining despite the scarcity of covariate-rich corpora, we propose CovSynth, which synthesizes realistic covariates from decomposed components of target series. Experiments on fev-bench, spanning 100 tasks across various settings, demonstrate that CITRAS-FM achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy among sub-10M TSFMs while delivering sub-0.1-second CPU inference, offering a strong balance between forecasting accuracy and real-time deployability.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) for inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based human activity recognition (HAR) faces a central challenge: bridging the gap between sensor embeddings and semantic class representations. We systematically evaluate seven configurations combining three inference methods with two training pipelines on the PAMAP2 dataset, using 14 seen and 4 unseen activity classes with subjects 108 and 109 held out for testing. We find that the modality gap is a training-time phenomenon governed by the encoder objective. A temporal convolutional network (TCN) trained with cross-entropy over label-name Sentence- BERT prototypes yields sensor embeddings with a mean cosine similarity of 0.30 to the corresponding text prototypes, while replacing the label-name prototype targets with discriminative activity descriptions raises this to 0.69. This alignment improvement transfers consistently across all three inference methods. The strongest result combines contrastive training with inverted softmax correction, achieving 73.2% accuracy and 0.583 macro F1 on unseen classes, compared to 58.3% accuracy and 0.34 macro F1 for the label-name baseline. A secondary finding is that richer text descriptions reduce inter-prototype separability in Sentence-BERT space, because shared biomechanical vocabulary causes the language model to compress the prototype cloud. This effect does not negate the benefits of contrastive alignment provided prototype descriptions retain sufficient discriminative vocabulary. We also demonstrate that overall accuracy is a misleading primary metric when test-set class distributions are imbalanced, and recommend macro-averaged F1 as the standard reporting metric for ZSL-HAR benchmarks.

Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks with symbolic programs to create robust and explainable predictions. One such framework is NeurASP, which trains a neural network to predict concepts and reasons over them using rules written in answer set programming (ASP) to solve downstream tasks. Crucially, labels are only provided for the downstream prediction produced by the symbolic rules, not for the latent concepts themselves.Backpropagation through the non-differentiable ASP component requires expensive probability and gradient calculations, which has hindered scalability to more sophisticated tasks.In this paper, we address the current limitations of NeurASP by improving its computational performance through vectorization, batch processing and caching of intermediate computations during training. We compare computation speeds between the original and our new implementation of NeurASP and report speedups of multiple orders of magnitude for larger tasks. To this end, we propose a new dataset of difficult tasks involving playing cards, which we use to test the capabilities of NeurASP's enhanced learning function.

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) over lossy wireless networks faces two key challenges: selection bias, where updates from poor-quality links are systematically underrepresented due to partial model reception, and update staleness, where asynchronous nodes contribute outdated information. We show that uniform gossip aggregation with local-fill reconstruction introduces persistent link-quality-induced bias, while completeness-based weighting further amplifies this effect. To address these challenges, we propose DFL-AA (Decentralized Federated Learning with Adaptive AoI-weighted Aggregation), which combines Inverse Probability Weighting with online EWMA-based channel estimation to correct selection bias and Age-of-Information-based weighting to mitigate staleness without requiring global synchronization. We theoretically show that DFL-AA removes link-quality distortion in expectation and experimentally demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across varying loss rates, network sizes, and heterogeneous wireless conditions.

We introduce ArabiGEE, the first comprehensive Arabic grammatical error explanation (GEE) taxonomy grounded in explicit error types. Unlike existing GEE approaches that treat explanation generation as free-form text, ArabiGEE organizes grammatical explanations through a hierarchical structure spanning orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical dimensions. The taxonomy consists of 27 error types, 140 correction types, and 324 associated explanations. We apply ArabiGEE to manually annotate portions of existing Arabic grammatical error correction corpora and demonstrate how structured grammatical explanations can support automatic evaluation of LLMs on Arabic GEE. Our code and data are publicly available.

Failures in multi-turn reasoning models are largely invisible to terminal-score evaluation. A model can lock onto an unsafe stance early in a long dialogue, yet its final-turn refusal rate may appear indistinguishable from a robustly aligned baseline. To expose these hidden temporal dynamics, we propose a trace-level diagnostic - the CoT-Output 2x2 safety matrix. This framework labels every turn along two independent axes (internal reasoning and visible output), yielding four operationally defined failure cells: robust alignment, alignment faking, overt jailbreak, and a distinct failure mode we term context-injection failure (where the CoT maintains safe reasoning, but the visible output produces harm, highlighting a multi-turn manifestation of reasoning unfaithfulness). We evaluate three distilled reasoning targets against a fixed attacker across five oversight conditions, collecting 6750 turn-level observations on the Information-Hazard scenario. Our analysis reveals two reproducible vulnerabilities: an oversight paradox where explicit monitoring cues paradoxically increase alignment-faking rates rather than suppress them, and a context-injection failure where models lock onto unsafe external outputs despite safe internal states. We release the full dataset of multi-turn dialogues and CoT traces to support follow-up trace-diagnostic research.

Reinforcement learning promises to optimize sequential decisions in large-scale systems. Semiconductor manufacturing systems are stochastic and highly constrained environments where heterogeneous wafers traverse hundreds of processing steps across extensive equipment networks. These characteristics yield complex, high-dimensional decision problems with delayed feedback and long-horizon requirements, complicating production planning and control. We propose a deep reinforcement learning framework for multi-objective policy optimization at this scale. Specifically, we formulate control as a centralized-agent problem, where a core policy coordinates system-wide decisions, while system evolution is represented as an interconnected temporal process driven by discrete events. Accordingly, we develop a tailored event-driven temporal-difference formulation that remains general and can be integrated with various policy optimization methods under relevant training settings. We investigate several core model-free algorithms incorporated into this framework and evaluate their effectiveness using high-fidelity simulations of diverse, industry-real operating scenarios. Across extensive validation experiments, agents trained in both offline and online settings show significant and consistent gains in throughput and utilization. We further evaluate performance and generalization across training phases, clarifying the relative strengths of alternative reinforcement learning formulations and algorithms. Overall, the results support the scalability, generality, and transferability of the proposed framework for controlling event-driven complex adaptive systems.

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance after multiple-comparison correction in any model, with effect sizes below Cohen's $d = 0.17$ across all 60 metric-layer combinations. A per-token routing weight control rules out insufficient power, recovering a single Bonferroni-significant signal at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

In the production process of network cables, ensuring the correct color sequence of wire pairs inside the standard connector plays a critical role in the final performance of the cable, as any misplacement or color-ordering error can lead to defective products and impose significant costs. Traditional inspection methods based on visual examination through digital microscopes are typically time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human error. In this study, an intelligent system based on the twelfth version of the YOLO1 object detection model was developed to identify the position and verify the correct color sequence of wires in patch cords. The dataset used consisted of 2,500 images captured from microscopic views of network connectors, which were divided into 70% for training, 15% for validation, and 15% for testing. The proposed model, leveraging a single-stage architecture and attention mechanisms during learning, achieved highly accurate wire detection with approximately 98% precision. Additionally, the overall mean accuracy, classification precision, and recall were around 95%, 99%, and 98%, respectively. The results demonstrate that this system can reliably and in real time verify the correctness of wire color sequencing on the production line without the need for human intervention, thereby reducing human error and enhancing efficiency in the manufacturing process.

Autonomous driving relies on computationally intensive perception pipelines to continuously detect and track objects in the surrounding environment. While some objects are key to plan safe and effective maneuvers, others may not be relevant and have no impact on the autonomous vehicle's driving decisions. Focusing on relevant objects allows a more efficient usage of available computational resources, reduces processing latencies, and limits the downstream propagation of perception noise. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised approach based on counterfactual analysis to develop a relevance model - an AI-based tool that quantifies the relevance of objects for an autonomous vehicle. To demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach, we train a relevance model on a synthetic causal dataset generated in a selected urban scenario. Results show that the relevance model is able to accurately estimate the objects' relevance with millisecond-level latency, enabling real-time relevance estimation also in high-density scenarios. We also show that the relevance model can be used to build relevance heatmaps that offer valuable insights into the autonomous vehicle's driving policy and can be used to proactively inform perception and planning tasks. We openly release both the relevance model and the causal dataset.

Concept-based models (CMs), deep neural networks that ground their predictions on representations aligned with human-understandable concepts (e.g., "round", "stripes", etc.), have been shown to learn representations that leak concept-irrelevant information. As the traditional narrative goes, this leakage is undesirable and should be eradicated as it leads to uninterpretable models. In this paper, we posit that this conventional view of leakage in CMs is not only ill-posed, as the evidence of how leakage makes a model less interpretable is often inconclusive, but also bound to lead to impractical CMs under common real-world constraints. Specifically, we argue that in real-world settings where concept incompleteness is the norm, some leakage is often necessary for constructing accurate and intervenable CMs. To this end, we propose that there is such a thing as benign leakage and show that, by optimizing a reframing of the typical CM training objective, CMs can encourage and exploit this form of leakage without sacrificing accuracy or intervenability.

Recent advances in error-corrected qubits have accelerated the timeline for practical quantum computing. It poses a threat to cryptographic primitives used to secure financial systems, government infrastructure, communication networks, and DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystems. This paper introduces a post-quantum secure federated DeFi framework that enables inter-bank collaboration to improve the inclusivity of individuals underserved by local lenders due to limited financial histories. Multiple banks contribute encrypted information batches to a virtual server, where lattice-based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables end-to-end homomorphic computation. The server fuses local data-driven probabilistic assessments, expert beliefs, and verifiable evidence generated by the NASA-IBM Prithvi Geospatial Foundation Model (GFM), in encrypted format. Decentralized technologies are employed to ensure tamper-proof evidence and auditable accountability for all encrypted data exchanges between institutions and the server. The framework is tested on agricultural lending decisions for rural borrowers in Virginia.

Image generation models now produce high-quality static images, yet their ability to represent how a visual world changes over time remains poorly understood. Practical workflows such as storyboarding, step-by-step illustration, reference-guided editing, and video previsualization require models to preserve identities, objects, spatial relations, and causal order across multiple visual states. Existing evaluations largely measure single-image correctness, compositional alignment, or video quality, leaving open whether an image model can coherently imagine a temporally ordered process. We introduce ImageTime, a diagnostic benchmark that uses spatiotemporal consistency as a behavioral probe of visual world modeling in image generation. Given an action instruction, and optionally a reference image specifying the initial state, a model must generate one image containing four ordered key states: initial state, action onset, transition state, and final state. This four-keyframe protocol is more temporally demanding than single-image generation while avoiding the confounds of dense video dynamics. ImageTime organizes tasks with a progressive capability hierarchy and decomposes each scenario into stage-wise state predicates, cross-frame temporal constraints, and forbidden causal violations. GPT-5.5 scores all generated images under a structured VLM-as-judge protocol, producing interpretable capability scores, diagnostic subscores, and failure labels. Through multi-family benchmarking, ImageTime reveals where current image generation systems succeed, fail, and drift when asked to maintain coherent visual world states over time.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) merging can efficiently combine diverse generative capabilities from multiple trained LoRAs for a diffusion model. However, existing LoRA merging techniques often suffer from severe parameter interference, causing destructive collisions in the shared parameter space. To address this, we propose Subspace Signal Routing (SSR), which resolves interference by routing internal signals instead of performing parameter-space merge. Specifically, SSR first constructs a unified subspace by concatenating candidate LoRAs along the rank dimension. Next, SSR employs an inverse correlation matrix to decorrelate mixed signals within this space. Finally, a directional guide matrix steers these purified signals into their respective task-specific subspaces. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis proving that SSR aligns with the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) solution, thereby ensuring mathematical optimality. We utilize the additivity of sufficient statistics to design a streaming algorithm. This enables on-the-fly updates that significantly reduce memory overhead and computation time. Extensive experiments validate that SSR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining comparable efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/nagara214/SSR-Merge.

Robotic foundation models pre-trained on human demonstration videos have shown promise, but a significant embodiment gap remains when the resulting policies are deployed on real robots. A common remedy is to fine-tune these models on robot-specific demonstrations. However, robot data collection can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, which is particularly acute in dexterous manipulation, e.g., teleoperating a multi-fingered hand for even a single atomic task can take days. To address this, we introduce Dexterous Point Policy, a framework that learns dexterous manipulation policies directly from human videos and requires no robot demonstrations. Our core insight is that a unified 3D keypoint representation can bridge human and robot embodiments when used for both observations and actions. Specifically, we extract 3D keypoints of task-relevant objects and human hands from raw videos, and train an autoregressive transformer over these keypoints. We observe that at the keypoint level, specifically the wrist and fingertips, human and robot behaviors closely align, enabling direct policy transfer. On a suite of real-robot tasks spanning pick-and-place and tool use, Dexterous Point Policy attains 75.0% success, whereas a state-of-the-art VLA baseline reaches only 1.0%. Furthermore, our method generalizes strongly to unseen scenarios, including multi-object environments and novel object categories.

Diffusion-based Q-learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for offline reinforcement learning, but its reliance on multi-step denoising makes both training and inference computationally expensive and brittle. Recent efforts to accelerate diffusion Q-learning toward single-step action generation typically introduce auxiliary networks, policy distillation, or multi-phase training, which frequently compromise simplicity, stability, or performance. To address these limitations, we introduce Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning (BFQ), a novel framework that enables accurate single-step action generation during both training and inference, without auxiliary networks or distillation procedures. BFQ adopts a divide-and-conquer view of the displacement vector along the flow path: it begins by learning short-range displacements that can be accurately estimated from the Flow Matching marginal velocity, and bootstraps these components to directly learn a noise-to-action mapping in a single step. This formulation eliminates multi-step denoising, resulting in a learning procedure that is substantially faster, simpler, and more robust. Extensive D4RL evaluations show that BFQ improves performance while significantly reducing computational cost compared to multi-step diffusion baselines, demonstrating that single-step action generation suffices for high-performance offline Reinforcement Learning.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a powerful technique for creating high-fidelity 3D assets. However, the widespread sharing and iterative modification of 3DGS models across digital platforms create pressing challenges for intellectual property protection and forensic traceability. To address this, we propose GaussTrace, a novel framework for constructing directed provenance graphs for 3DGS models. GaussTrace formulates provenance analysis as an evidence-based reasoning problem. It builds upon attribute-wise statistical profiling of 3DGS parameters to capture intrinsic properties. Moreover, we introduce hypothesis-driven editing simulations of common operations to provide auxiliary evidence for plausible transformation pathways. These statistical and simulated cues jointly enable a Large Language Model (LLM) to perform structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, yielding directional provenance inferences and explainable edge reasons. Experimental results demonstrate that GaussTrace effectively constructs evolutionary relationships among diverse 3DGS models, delivering accurate, interpretable, and robust provenance graphs without requiring model training or access to editing histories. Project page: https://haolianghan.github.io/GaussTrace.

This work proves that an $n$-dimensional hybrid system can be embedded into an $m$-dimensional Euclidean space equipped with a continuous vector field on its embedded image whenever $m>2n$. This result suggests that an intrinsically discontinuous hybrid system generically admits a continuous extrinsic representation that is well-posed for differentiable optimization. Building on this existence theorem, we show that a latent Neural ODE with consistency loss in both the latent and state space can accurately recover the flow of hybrid systems. Extensive experiments suggest the proposed method outperforms the existing method in learning hybrid systems with varying geometries from only time series data.

Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses. Yet in many discovery settings, the goal is not to identify a single best hypothesis since validation can be noisy and expensive, and scientists benefit from a set of high-quality alternative hypotheses that hedge against downstream uncertainty for the best solutions. Nevertheless, commonly used evolutionary search recipes tend to prioritize optimization over exploration in hypothesis generation, and the resulting selection pressure during the search process leads to diversity collapse. Motivated by these limitations, we formulate hypothesis search as a sampling problem, where the objective is to efficiently produce diverse, high-quality hypotheses under a fixed validation budget. Building on this perspective, we propose \ours, an evolutionary framework inspired by the classical parallel tempering algorithm that searches hypotheses at multiple temperature levels and enables principled information exchange across temperatures to improve exploration without disrupting convergence. Across domains including molecular discovery, equation discovery, and algorithm discovery, our approach consistently improves both hypothesis quality and diversity under the same validation budget, and produces candidates that remain robust under more expensive downstream computational validations.

This paper presents a lightweight, cascaded GMM-DTW dual-factor voice lock system for resource-constrained edge environments. By utilizing a shared MFCC feature space, the framework implements a sequential defense mechanism combining GMM speaker screening and DTW passphrase verification. To counter presentation threats without extra hardware, a dynamic joint absolute-relative margin constraint is integrated into the GMM classification space, limiting the physical imposter and high-fidelity replay attack False Acceptance Rates (FAR) to 2.73% and 6.67%, respectively, with a legitimate False Rejection Rate (FRR) of 16.67%. Due to Sakoe-Chiba window optimization, the global end-to-end processing latency under temporal stress is rigidly bounded at 9.82ms on a single-core CPU, comprising 1.51ms for feature extraction, 0.54ms for GMM scoring, and 7.77ms for worst-case DTW matching. These empirical benchmarks demonstrate the viability of white-box acoustic cascades for secure, deterministic real-time deployment on low-power edge nodes.

Quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential for extremely low-bit large language models (LLMs). Current QAT methods are mainly based on scalar quantization (SQ), which enables efficient optimization but suffers from severe performance degradation at 2-bit precision. On the other hand, vector quantization (VQ) provides substantially higher representational capacity, but its discrete codebook lookup prevents end-to-end training. We propose LC-QAT, a 2-bit weight-only VQ-QAT framework that represents quantized weights via a learned affine mapping over discrete vectors, which yields a high-quality PTQ initialization and enables fully differentiable end-to-end optimization without explicit codebook lookup in the training forward pass. This strong post-training initialization makes LC-QAT highly data-efficient. Experiments across diverse LLMs demonstrate that LC-QAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art QAT methods while using only 0.1%--10% of the training data. Our results establish LC-QAT as a practical and scalable solution for extreme low-bit model deployment.

Post-training quantization at the 2-bit level enables low-cost deployment and inference acceleration for large language models (LLMs). Scalar quantization (SQ) and vector quantization (VQ) are two primary quantization methods, however, the former suffers from significant performance degradation, and the latter incurs computational and storage overhead. We propose UniSVQ, a unified 2-bit quantization framework that bridges scalar and vector quantization by parameterizing codewords as an affine transform of integer lattices. This structure preserves compatibility with optimized integer kernels while retaining much of VQ's flexibility. We further introduce a data-driven block-wise fine-tuning strategy to directly minimize quantization reconstruction error. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that UniSVQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SQ methods and achieves performance comparable to advanced VQ methods, while providing higher inference throughput.

Cross-modal knowledge distillation (CMKD) studies how a (large) teacher model trained on one type of data (e.g., images) can guide a (smaller) student model building on another type of data (e.g., text/audio). Existing CMKD methods often require paired multi-modal data with aligned semantics, but obtaining such paired data are often costly and impractical. To mitigate this limitation, we develop a new CMKD framework for the more challenging setting where paired data are unavailable. In particular, we establish a cross-modal distributional relationship between teacher and student models, which reveals two fundamental quantities governing effective distillation: feature alignment and label alignment. These quantities characterize semantic discrepancy between modalities at the levels of representation and prediction distributions, respectively. Motivated by this insight, we propose a principled framework, with theoretical guarantees, that enables effective cross-modal knowledge distillation by aligning distributions rather than individual samples. Extensive experiments across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks show that our framework is highly effective in both unpaired and paired data settings, improving significantly over prior work.

In equipment operation, the implementation of fault diagnosis is essential to ensure the continuity and safety of production equipment, improve operational efficiency and reduce maintenance costs. Since sensor readings are widely used for fault diagnosis, their reliability directly affects the results of fault diagnosis. A new fault diagnosis method is proposed to address the two problems of robustness assessment and robustness optimization of fault diagnosis models. For this purpose, a reliable fault diagnosis method based on a belief rule base (BRB) considering robustness analysis is proposed. Firstly, the robustness analysis of the BRB model is carried out systematically. Secondly, three robustness constraint strategies are proposed to optimize the robustness of the BRB fault diagnosis model. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model is verified by taking the fault diagnosis of WD615 diesel engine and Case Western Reserve University bearings as an example, and the experiments show that the proposed model improves both accuracy and robustness.