Motivation: Biomedical question answering often requires evidence beyond topically retrieved literature, including gene alias resolution, database identifier normalization, and atlas-derived biological measurements. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically follow a fixed workflow and lack an explicit mechanism for deciding when retrieved text is sufficient, when curated biomedical knowledge is required, or when executable evidence assembly over structured measurements should be invoked. This motivates a substrate-aware large language model (LLM) harness that selectively assembles sufficient evidence across literature, knowledge bases, and biological atlases. Results: We introduce BioHarness, an LLM harness for staged biomedical evidence assembly across literature retrieval, curated biomedical knowledge resources, and atlas-derived structured measurements. BioHarness first attempts to answer from reranked literature evidence and escalates through grounded cascade control to REPL-style evidence assembly only when the current evidence is uncertain, weakly grounded, or substrate-mismatched. Across 19,302 biomedical QA items spanning seven answer formats, BioHarness improves the pooled score from 65.9 to 71.0 over the strongest non-oracle baseline. Ablations, case studies, and backbone-scaling analyses show that these gains arise from repairing evidence-substrate mismatches through reranking, entity grounding, and structured measurement access, rather than from indiscriminately invoking more reasoning steps, retrieving additional literature, or relying on a particular answer-model scale.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Beacon protocol lets researchers ask whether a genomic variant has been observed in a participating cohort and receive aggregate variant-level counts. As Beacon networks grow, two privacy risks remain: host institutions can see plaintext queries, and repeated rare-variant queries can support membership-inference attacks. We present bioETH-Beacon, a smart-contract prototype that runs the Beacon "aggregate count" query over encrypted data on a fully homomorphic Ethereum Virtual Machine (fhEVM). Hospitals upload encrypted marker-count entries, authorized researchers submit encrypted marker queries, and the contract returns an encrypted answer that is released, via an off-chain key-management service, only to the requester named in the contract's on-chain ACL. The design is organized as a 3x4 tier-by-query-family grid spanning genotype, sex, age, and phenotype queries, with tiers that trade stronger confidentiality for lower query cost. For genotype paths, the prototype can add bounded on-chain noise to mitigate probing attacks. Experiments on synthetic panels derived from a Polygenic Score (PGS) catalog show the expected scaling behavior and demonstrate that pre-aggregation can substantially reduce query gas when public marker presence is an acceptable trade-off. Overall, bioETH-Beacon provides a research prototype for confidential Beacon-style genomic querying without a trusted compute evaluator.

Why does massive AI investment fail to generate commensurate productivity gains? We argue the paradox is theoretically generated: prevailing production function frameworks encounter a structural boundary by treating AI as a separable factor of production without modeling the cognitive mediation through which AI generates productive value. This directs investment toward deployment when productivity requires prior development of what we term convergence capacity (C). We propose the Intellectually Converged Human (ICH) framework, a fifth-stage framework for production function theory: H-hat = H[1 + phi(A,C)], where effective productive capacity equals human capital (H) scaled by an augmentation factor [1 + phi], with phi jointly determined by AI utilization intensity (A) and convergence capacity (C), a four-dimensional cognitive construct encompassing embodied understanding, metacognition, temporal integration, and integrative thinking. The production function Y = F(K, H-hat) provides a human-centered mechanism for Solow's TFP residual: A_Solow = [1 + phi(A,C)]^(1-alpha). The framework predicts three augmentation regimes with distinct policy implications. Descriptive cross-national analysis of 20 OECD economies shows the AIxC interaction is associated with 86% of TFP variance versus 31% for AI alone, a pattern-consistent finding in the small-n theoretical tradition. South Korea exemplifies national-scale under-augmentation: high H, substantial A, low C produce phi = 0. We distinguish convergence capacity from adjacent constructs, absorptive capacity, dynamic capability, and human capital, and demonstrate that C constitutes the specific cognitive mediator that prior frameworks have left implicit. We derive C-first policy prescriptions and offer three empirically testable propositions with a falsifiable 10-year forecast.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively fine-tune language models for domain-specific tasks without sharing raw data. Since full model fine-tuning is often prohibitively expensive for FL clients, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the de facto approach in practice, freezing the base model and training only a small set of adapters. In this paper, we show that a malicious parameter server can stealthily corrupt a PEFT adapter into a privacy backdoor that implicitly memorizes the client's training samples as isolated per-sample parameter updates stored in separate neurons, without degrading model utility. Concretely, our attack, NeuroImprint, assigns a dedicated memorization neuron to each training sample and constrains that each neuron is updated at most once along the local fine-tuning trajectory. This design mitigates both cross-sample collisions and cross-step mixing introduced by large local batches and stateful optimizers (e.g., Adam/AdamW) in language-model fine-tuning. After fine-tuning, the resulting isolated per-sample updates can be analytically inverted in closed form to recover text embeddings, which are then deterministically mapped back to token sequences. To understand the generality of our method, we implemented NeuroImprint on multiple language models (BERT, GPT-2, Qwen2, and Llama3.2) and evaluated it across four fine-tuning datasets spanning diverse domains. The results demonstrate that our attack can reconstruct 59% to 79% of all finetuning samples with high semantic fidelity.

Scientific papers are frequently dense and characterized by features such as small fonts and line spacing, double columns of text, and tightly arranged figures. While these features make papers more compact, they can hinder readability, make them less accessible, and can strain the reader. arXiv is a premier open-access repository for scientific papers across different fields and is used extensively by researchers, including those in the physics and astrophysics communities. Easy Reads is an automated, end-to-end, open-source Python program that helps address the stated challenge by making papers from arXiv more reader-friendly and accessible. Easy Reads can automatically fetch a paper from arXiv via its URL and work with the source TeX file to allow custom formatting of the paper features, primarily the font size, and the number of columns used. The main goal of Easy Reads is to facilitate ease of reading of scientific papers.

When a cache miss fetches from cloud object storage, the bill is per GET request and per byte of egress, not latency. Classic caching minimizes the miss rate, the wrong objective: a rarely but expensively fetched object can cost thousands of times more dollars than a frequently but cheaply fetched one. Generalized-caching theory bounds the miss-cost objective, but no reported benchmark measures how far deployed heuristics sit from the dollar-optimal offline policy on real cloud prices. We supply that reference. For uniform-size page caches with heterogeneous miss costs the offline dollar-optimum is exact in polynomial time via an integral interval linear program -- validated against brute force; variable sizes are NP-hard, so we extend the flow-based offline bound from the hit-ratio objective to dollars (cost-FOO), tight to about four percent. Against this reference we find: (i) a heterogeneity-regret law -- LRU's dollar-regret rises with miss-cost dispersion (Spearman 0.87) while cost-aware GreedyDual cuts it to roughly a tenth; (ii) a contention frontier -- GreedyDual's residual regret collapses to near zero exactly when the budget fits the expensive working set, and is the open slice otherwise; and (iii) a closed-form crossover s* = GET_fee/egress_rate (about 4 KB on S3, 330 B on GCS) that predicts which deployments need dollar-aware caching at all. On a real Twitter trace the price vector alone moves the workload across s*, shifting the regime as predicted. The artifact is a reproducible billing-faithful benchmark; heuristics and bounds it builds on are prior work, credited.

In the information age, one of the leading problems is how to ensure individual's privacy. Depending on the context in which privacy is considered, various data privacy models have emerged. However, the domain of formal verification of these models is still not sufficiently explored even when it comes to the most basic models. An attempt to verify privacy requirements is the Compliance Assertion Language (COMPASS). In COMPASS, one can specify an anonymity condition that a table needs to satisfy, and an action that will modify the table if the condition is not satisfied. It is designed to operate on preprocessed tables in a form one record - one group of people. In this paper, we modify the COMPASS language in order to operate on microdata tables in their usual form of one record - one person. The modified language is called A-COMPASS. Along with checking of previously applied anonymity conditions, A-COMPASS enables the execution of anonymization actions as a new feature. We further provide the syntax and the semantics for the A-COMPASS language. We also prove the most important properties of the introduced semantics like determinism and compositionality. Finally, we provide a mechanism to verify anonymity properties, such as k-anonymity and l-diversity.

To address the challenges of interoperability in computational science, we present the latest updates to the software package MaRDI Open Interfaces. This software package aims to decrease the time and coding/testing efforts spent by computational scientists on tasks such as writing bindings to numerical solvers and adapting experiment codes to the varying interfaces of solvers for the same problem type (e.g., for benchmarking, which solver is better). By streamlining these tasks, this software package helps researchers focus on the actual essence of their computational projects. Here, we demonstrate a recently developed interface for nonlinear optimization and illustrate how it can be applied for computational experiments with optimization problems. As an example of such problem, we consider training of physics-informed neural networks to predict the solutions of viscous Burgers' equation.

Smallholder maize farmers in Uganda continue to face limited market access, weak bargaining power, low price transparency, and heavy reliance on intermediaries. These challenges are compounded by poor produce coordination, delayed payments, and weak visibility into cooperative transactions. This paper presents Farmer Connect, a cooperative-based digital platform designed to support produce management, marketplace coordination, and transparent earnings tracking among farmer groups. The system supports four user roles: administrators, supervisors, farmers, and customers. Its core functions include farmer group management, contribution recording and verification, marketplace listing, order processing, First In First Out based produce allocation, earnings visibility, mobile money payment support, and notification services. The platform was implemented using a mobile-first architecture with cloud-based backend services and an administrative web dashboard. Functional implementation showed that the system was able to support the major workflows required for group-based maize marketing and cooperative coordination, with approximately 85% of identified user requirements implemented. The study shows that cooperative-centered digital platforms can provide a practical framework for improving transparency, coordination, and buyer access for smallholder farmers.

We study prefix-dependent congruences for random deterministic transition systems with state outputs. In this setting, the admissible continuations used to compare two states may depend on the observed prefix, and two states are identified only if no common admissible continuation distinguishes their future outputs. The framework includes probabilistic deterministic finite automata as a motivating special case. We analyze the random transition model in which all transition values are independent and uniform. Each state is also assigned an independent label that specifies both its output and its set of admissible symbols. If two independent labels agree with probability strictly less than one, and every label has at least three admissible symbols, then the induced congruence is trivial with high probability. The proof combines a pruning process on pairs, a collision-free exploration controlling its early evolution, and a first-moment argument showing that the remaining pairs cannot organize into nontrivial equivalence classes.

As boards engage with the adoption of Artificial Intelligence including agentic AI to drive operational efficiencies, this presents new opportunities for profit maximisation. AI adoption is increasingly identified with employee role displacement and in companies, and the interests of employees as stakeholders require exploration. A novel question posed is whether in an age of AI ascendancy AI may warrant being given stakeholder status as its role in the company approximates or eclipses that of human employees. The article probes four distinct models of corporate purpose within the duty on directors to act in the best interests of the company, the shareholder primacy model, the Enlightened Shareholder value model, the stakeholder friendly model, and the stakeholder value model, highlighting the available scope for directors to accommodate the interests of employees around AI adoption in decision-making by boards around AI. It is concluded that given the degree to which directors are insulated from legal scrutiny in relation to their best interests duty, adopting a wider law in context approach to promote employee welfare would serve the interests of employees, directors and companies alike. This would see directors engaging meaningfully with employees and providing opportunities for reskilling to adapt to the age of AI.

The paper proposes a dynamic approach to image encryption, combining the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and classical cryptography to improve the security and flexibility of image encryption. The main concept is to create adaptive Substitution boxes (S-boxes) based on characteristics that are learned by a trained CNN. The CNN-based S-boxes can be relied on for more non-linearity, uniqueness, and input image dependence than the conventional fixed S-boxes because they are susceptible to the linear and differential attacks. This dynamic behaviour enhances the confusion property and makes it more resistant to statistical and structural attacks. The encryption algorithm consists of CNN-based feature extraction and the creation of a personalised S-box to replace the pixels. Entropy, histogram analysis, correlation, NPCR, and UACI enable security assessment of generated S-boxes based on the CNN, indicating that the scheme is more resilient and flexible than traditional ones.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient computing due to their sparse spatio-temporal activity. However, effectively translating such irregular sparsity into practical performance and energy gains remains challenging, as full-event computing architectures are still underexplored. This paper proposes ExSpike, a general full-event neuromorphic architecture that fully exploits irregular sparsity in SNNs. To realize pure event-driven execution, we first propose a set of dataflow optimizations to ensure that the inputs to each SNN layer remain spike-based, thereby enabling full-event execution throughout the network. We then design a hardware-efficient full-event architecture, named ExSpike, which supports the optimized pure event-driven dataflow and an additional Attention Core for spike-driven self-attention. To further improve computing efficiency, we introduce adjacent-position event compression to reduce redundant accumulations across spatially adjacent spike sequences. ExSpike is implemented on an AMD Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and evaluated on both classification and segmentation workloads. Experimental results show that ExSpike achieves high normalized energy efficiency across diverse SNN models while maintaining competitive accuracy, delivering up to 479.15 GOPS, 281.85 GOPS/W, and 0.80 GOPS/W/PE. In particular, ExSpike achieves up to 10$\times$ higher PE-normalized energy efficiency than the SOTA FPGA-based SNN accelerator (FireFly-T). The code for ExSpike is available at \url{https://github.com/xiaoyuehai/ExSpike}.

MaRDI Open Interfaces is a software package that aims to improve interoperability in scientific computing, particularly, for nonlinear optimization. To this end, this package holds two main characteristics. First, it provides unified interfaces for typical numerical problems to help switching between solvers for the same problem type. Second, it automates data marshalling between programming languages. Hence, computational scientists can conduct experiments faster by using the package, with fewer code-modification and testing efforts. In this work we describe the general structure of the software package and show examples with the interface for nonlinear optimization.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly being used to automate multi-step engineering work flows by interacting with software tools, interpreting intermediate results, and autonomously planning subsequent actions. Power system dynamic studies represent a particularly promising yet largely unexplored application domain for these agents. Unlike static computational tasks, dynamic studies often require more time on model parameter calibration, engineering judgment, and decision making under constrained action spaces. This paper introduces PowerAgentBench-Dyn, a benchmark designed to evaluate Agentic AI systems on power system dynamic-analysis tasks. The benchmark targets problems that cannot be reduced to a single optimization or coding task, but instead require a type of reasoning, tool usage, and iterative experimentation routinely performed by experienced power system engineers. The proposed framework includes two initial benchmark tasks. The first, the Dynamic Model Quality Review Benchmark, evaluates agents' ability to validate and diagnose dynamic models based on model-quality compliance criteria specified by system operators. The second, the Dynamic Security Risk Screening Benchmark, assesses agents' capability to leverage semantic memory and a limited simulation budget to identify, rank, and analyze the most critical short-circuit contingencies from an unseen fault dataset, as well as propose and evaluate possible mitigation measures. For each task, we define the simulation environment, observation and action spaces, and evaluation metrics. The benchmark is reproducible in a metric-based sense: released cases and simulator settings define a deterministic evaluator, while stochastic agent behavior is assessed over repeated runs using success rates and other metrics. The benchmark supports the development of future Agentic AI for power system operation and planning.

Ambiguity-bounded versions of $\mathrm{NP}$, denoted $\mathrm{UP}_{\leq f(n)}$, bound by $f(n)$ the number of accepting paths the nondeterministic polynomial-time Turing machine can have on inputs of length $n$. Such classes range from Valiant's completely unambiguous ($f(n)=1$) class $\mathrm{UP}$ to $\mathrm{NP}$ itself, where there is no bound or, equivalently, there is the toothless exponential bound ($f(n) = 2^{n^{O(1)}}$). This paper seeks to understand which of these classes stand and fall together as to whether they equal deterministic polynomial time. Informally put, what ranges of ambiguities have linked fates? That is, for which pairs of nondecreasing functions, $(f_1 ,f_2)$, satisfying $(\forall n)[f_1(n) \leq f_2(n)]$, does it hold that $\mathrm{P} = \mathrm{UP}_{\leq f_1(n)} \implies \mathrm{P} = \mathrm{UP}_{\leq f_2(n)}$. More particularly, for which pairs does that hold robustly, i.e., it holds in the real world and every relativized world? And for which pairs does that implication fail to hold robustly, i.e., there is an oracle $A$ such that $\mathrm{P}^A = \mathrm{UP}_{\leq f_1(n)}^A \subsetneq \mathrm{UP}_{\leq f_2(n)}^A$? The only previously known positive result is Watanabe's 1988 result that $ \mathrm{P} = \mathrm{UP}_{\leq 1} \implies (\forall k \geq 1)[\mathrm{P} = \mathrm{UP}_{\leq k}]$, which even holds robustly. His result, though lovely, applies only to constant-bounded ambiguities. As our positive result, we present a new class of cases (Theorem 3.8) that apply (and even robustly apply) at greater ambiguity levels. To give our class of cases, we leverage two approaches: a novel path-poisoning approach that works even on superconstant ambiguities (Theorem 3.5) and a new application of the power of padding (Theorems 3.3/3.4). As negative results, we show that for essentially all other cases, no linkage holds robustly.

The contemporary American labor force is highly dispersed, necessitating the use of digital communication tools to bridge spatial and temporal gaps in union organizing. This study provides an in-depth analysis of how workers within various labor unions utilize digital, text-based communication platforms -- including Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack -- for labor organizing. Through 17 qualitative interviews, we examine the challenges and opportunities presented by digital organizing, identifying both technical and social obstacles. Our findings reveal that although digital tools are integral to contemporary labor successes, they also introduce new complexities, such as navigating technical security, managing information overload, and building trust and consensus. Based on these insights, we draw connections to broader understandings of digital organizing and the role of digital tools in unions.

Large-scale LLM training requires always-on, fine-grained observability for effective performance diagnosis at scale. Coarse resource monitors alone cannot localize root causes, and fine-grained profilers incur prohibitive (5%-30%) overheads and massive trace volumes, making always-on deployment impractical in large production clusters. We propose ARGUS, a low-overhead, fine-grained, always-on tracing and real-time analysis system for training workloads in 10,000+ GPU-scale production clusters. ARGUS decomposes observation along the training call hierarchy into CPU call stacks, framework semantics, and GPU kernel execution, with always-on collection under a combined overhead of less than 2%. It builds a unified data pipeline and compresses raw kernel events by approximately 3,700x from 10 MB to 2.7 KB per rank per step. Its progressive diagnosis framework automatically isolates anomalous windows, straggler ranks, and degraded kernels through iteration-time, phase-level, and kernel-level analysis. Deployed for over six months on a 10,000+ GPU production cluster, ARGUS has supported continuous fail-slow detection and performance optimization. Our case studies further demonstrate its effectiveness across representative anomalies, including compute stragglers, link degradation, pipeline-bubble amplification, FlashAttention JIT stalls, and compute stragglers masked by communication symptoms.

The performance of high-tech systems is often dictated by a few performance objectives shared among the many closed-loop controlled subsystems operating in the machine, such as synchronization, coordination, and alignment, which necessitates control methods that explicitly address them to achieve optimal performance. The aim of this paper is to introduce a framework that improves system performance through system-level controllers designed to be implemented as add-ons to the existing subsystem control structure. The developed method parametrizes all stabilizing system-level add-on controllers using the Youla framework, enabling a convex formulation of the sparse $\mathcal{H}_2$ synthesis problem. The result is a sparse add-on controller that achieves the optimal trade-off between combined performance and interconnection complexity, as demonstrated through numerical simulations.

The standard convex-algebra interchange axiom, common to probability-monad formalisations since Stone, is provably too weak to support full Bayesian conditioning. We make this precise in Cubical Agda: finite distributions as a higher inductive type, conditional independence as a cubical path between kernels, recursive Bayesian conditioning as a total function on a full-support fragment. Lifting conditioning to the full HIT exposes a structural mismatch -- the two halves of the rearranged 4-leaf mix carry distinct Bayesian weights related by Bayes' formula, not the single shared inner weight the standard axiom provides. We exhibit the minimal generalisation that resolves this and prove the standard form is the degenerate case where the two inner weights coincide. Around this observation we verify the algebraic context constructively, with zero postulates above an abstract ordered-field interface: bind commutativity, the four semi-graphoid axioms, intersection (reduced to contraction via structural $Σ$-witnesses, without positivity), Pearl's do-calculus Rules~1, 2, and~3 in kernel form, finite-type Bayesian conditioning, and Pearl's d-separation theorem (soundness) on arbitrary $n$-vertex finite directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) in both interventional and Bayesian forms. The probability monad is also verified as a Markov category; the abstract interface discharges at $Q$.

Twin-width is a graph parameter that has become central to explaining the fixed-parameter tractability of first-order model checking across many graph classes. Despite its algorithmic importance, computing twin-width remains poorly understood: even recognizing graphs of twin-width at most four is NP-hard, and no fixed-parameter approximations parameterized by twin-width itself are known. A recent approach towards breaking this barrier focuses on first developing fixed-parameter algorithms for computing or approximating twin-width under parameterizations distinct from twin-width. Our first result establishes that approximating twin-width is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by treedepth, thereby breaking the long-standing barrier that all previous tractable parameterizations were based on deletion distance. The proof proceeds via oriented twin-width, yielding the first constructive evidence that this variant may be easier to handle algorithmically. As our second main result, we show that computing twin-width exactly is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to vertex integrity. This constitutes the first non-trivial parameterized algorithm for computing optimal contraction sequences.

Database configuration tuning is critical for workload performance, but practical tuning on real deployments remains difficult. Existing automatic tuners mostly formulate tuning as iterative search over DBMS knob values. This formulation leads to high execution cost, prematurely narrows the configuration space, and leaves practical requirements insufficiently addressed: diagnosing runtime bottlenecks from system feedback, exploring OS-level reconfiguration opportunities, executing changes robustly, and learning from previous trials and tasks. We propose AgenticDB, an agentic framework for database workload reconfiguration. AgenticDB implements a context-grounded harness that interacts with the target database environment by proposing DBMS- and OS-level changes, applying them under safety constraints, observing workload performance and runtime states, and using execution feedback to guide subsequent decisions. This runtime interaction enables AgenticDB to diagnose bottlenecks, explore a broader DBMS- and OS-level reconfiguration space, avoid unsafe or unsupported actions, and accumulate experience within and across reconfiguration tasks. As a result, AgenticDB turns database tuning into a self-refining reconfiguration process in which runtime feedback iteratively improves later decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on MySQL and PostgreSQL using YCSB, Sysbench, and TPC-H workloads. The results show that AgenticDB achieves the best final performance on all evaluated workloads, improving over the strongest baseline by 118.1% on average and reducing aggregate time-to-best by 22.6%. The results also demonstrate that its OS-level action space, robust execution lifecycle, and memory-enhanced planning contribute to more effective and practical database reconfiguration.

We study a data-driven control problem in the presence of arbitrary data poisoning attacks. We assume that a subset of offline output data is stored in unprotected locations and may be poisoned by an adversary. We first establish fundamental limitations for data-driven control arising from such poisoned data: poisoning attacks are not detected/identified from the dataset alone; unprotected data are non-informative for controller design with worst-case guarantees; and hard constraints on unprotected outputs are not certifiable. Motivated by these limitations and the data-enabled predictive control (DeePC) technique, we propose Secure DeePC, a data-driven control algorithm that is resilient against poisoning attacks. It first runs output-truncated DeePC using only the protected dataset until the online input becomes persistently exciting. It then uses online measurements to reconstruct the partial offline dataset, and finally returns to full-output DeePC. Secure DeePC achieves MPC-equivalent performance in finite time almost surely under certain conditions. Simulation results illustrate the efficacy of the proposed framework against poisoning attacks.

Model quantization is widely adopted to reduce memory usage and inference cost when deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices. However, recent studies have revealed a new security threat known as Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors (QCBs), where a model behaves normally in full precision but activates malicious behavior only after quantization. Existing defenses typically modify quantization procedures or correct activation statistics, often introducing additional computational overhead or relying on specific quantization settings. Here, we present QVec, a parameter-space perspective for defending against QCBs. We observe that the weight difference between a full-precision model and its quantized counterpart encodes a structured behavioral shift, which can be interpreted as a malicious task vector rather than random quantization noise. Based on this insight, QVec counteracts this malicious direction through controlled parameter correction prior to deployment. QVec requires no retraining, no trigger samples, and only a single quantization pass to estimate the parameter shift, together with a lightweight hyperparameter search. Extensive experiments across image classification benchmarks and multiple Large Language Model (LLM) attack scenarios demonstrate that QVec consistently suppresses backdoor activation while preserving clean performance.

Mix networks are a highly effective way to achieve anonymity, defending against a wide range of traffic-analysis attacks. However, mix networks are usually designed for infrastructure networks and cannot be directly applied in the context of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The few existing solutions for MANETs require advance knowledge of the topology or a trusted central party. In this paper, we present TrustMix, a mix protocol for MANETs that operates without any central trusted party. In TrustMix, parties join groups and then messages are forwarded via multiple groups to provide anonymity. With TrustMix, users only need to find a party nearby that they consider trusted. They then forward the message to this party's group, and the party shuffles messages before forwarding to other groups, meaning that the original message and the forwarded message cannot be linked. Furthermore, even if the chosen party is adversarial, they can only break the anonymity if all parties in their group are adversarial as all of them contribute to the shuffling. In addition to anonymity, TrustMix also enforces rate limits on the number of messages through the use of linkable ring signatures, which allows detecting that parties send more messages that allowed without revealing identities. We prove the security of our protocol in the random oracle model. We evaluate its anonymity using an existing mix-network simulator and show that TrustMix significantly improves message anonymity. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept Android implementation and show that TrustMix achieves acceptable throughput with 5 mobile devices.

We present Phoenix, a multi-agent LLM system that resolves GitHub issues from triage through pull-request creation, combining seven layered safety controls with a baseline-aware test evaluation strategy. Phoenix decomposes the work across six specialized agents. Planner, reproducer, coder, tester, failure analyst and Pull Request (PR) agent, all coordinated by a label-based GitHub webhook state machine. Every change is checked against a baseline test run before a pull request is opened. On a 24-instance slice of SWE-bench Lite. run on the production webhook path, Phoenix oracle-resolves 75% of instances with no pass-to-pass regressions on successful runs; this curated slice is not directly comparable to full-split leaderboard results, and we discuss the limits of the comparison. A complementary pilot on 42 real issues across 14 repositories yields 100% correctness preservation (CP; mean 122s on the hard tier). Manual inspection shows that about half of the resulting pull requests are well-targeted fixes. The other half place code at incorrect paths, a planner localization limitation we are addressing with retrieval. We also report the deployment failure modes (WAF filtering, token expiry, permission boundaries, flaky CI) that motivated each safety mechanism.

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are emerging as a key organizational model for local and global sharing of renewable generation, storage, and flexible loads. Engineering Digital Twins of RECs is made difficult by the heterogeneity of devices, contracts, and runtime data involved. In this paper, we take a first step toward a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workflow for REC's Digital Twins. Starting from an industrially-validated REC domain model, we re-express a representative house subset in SysML using the open-source Modelio tool, yielding two Block Definition Diagrams - a device taxonomy and a community organizational view. We then discuss four semantic gaps that plain SysML leaves open and sketch how the SAREF4ENER ontology could be imported as a reference package to close them. Combining SysML with SAREF-based semantics for smart-energy Digital Twins remains largely unexplored, and we position this paper as a first step along that line.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) constitute a core technology for delivering crucial positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services in the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) domain, where they are indispensable for generating Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) that uphold network reliability and vehicular safety. Yet, GNSS signals are acutely exposed to spoofing, an advanced attack in which an adversary transmits crafted signals that replicate legitimate satellite characteristics, misleading the receiver into computing a false position. This work presents a methodology for conducting physical spoofing with inexpensive Software Defined Radio (SDR), describing a coordinate generation pipeline that employs Haversine-based distance calculations, temporal discretization to emulate constant velocity, and linear interpolation to produce high-fidelity GPS baseband signals. The proposed attack is experimentally validated on real Commsignia OnBoard Unit (OBU) and RoadSide Unit (RSU) devices using a HackRF One across three scenarios that emulate synthetic trajectories at steady speeds of 90 km/h, 145 km/h, and 200 km/h. The most significant contribution of this paper is the demonstration that V2X communications are not secured, as they are susceptible to GNSS spoofing attacks, which cause service degradation without being detected.

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, trust management plays a vital role in securing systems, especially when dealing with resource-constrained devices. Traditional trust models often overlook the impact of fluctuating network quality, leading to slower trust convergence and inaccurate assessments. In this paper, we propose a dynamic trust management solution, known as the Trust Convergence Acceleration (TCA) approach, which integrates Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate trust convergence under poor network conditions. Our model predicts the number of time units needed for trust convergence based on key network metrics and dynamically adapts transition probabilities in the trust model to enhance convergence speed. Using a simulation framework that incorporates realistic Wi-Fi channel conditions based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the TCA-based approach, achieving up to a 28.6% reduction in trust convergence time under challenging conditions. Furthermore, the proposed solution exhibits resilience in scenarios involving malicious nodes, improving trust evaluation accuracy. This work provides a scalable and adaptive trust framework for IIoT systems in dynamic industrial environments, ensuring robust performance under varying network conditions.

We consider the Minimum Linear Ordering Problem: given a ground set $N$ of cardinality $n$ and a non-negative set function $f\colon 2^N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, the goal is to find an ordering $π$ of $N$ that minimizes the sum of the values of $f$ over all prefixes of $π$. This problem has been studied for various classes of set functions, and the case of a submodular $f$ is of special interest, as it captures classic problems including Minimum Linear Arrangement and Minimum Containing Interval Graph. In this work, we resolve the approximability of the Minimum Linear Ordering Problem for a general submodular $f$ by establishing matching upper and lower bounds and present: $(1)$ a polynomial-time algorithm achieving an $O(\sqrt{n/\ln n})$-approximation; and $(2)$ a matching information-theoretic hardness result, showing that no algorithm evaluating $f$ a polynomial number of times can achieve an $o(\sqrt{n/\ln n})$-approximation. Previously, the best known hardness of approximation was $2$, and an $O(\sqrt{n/\ln n})$-approximation was known only for the special case where $f$ is both submodular and symmetric.