The rapid evolution of Quantum Development Kits (QDKs) introduces a specific form of technical debt that compromises code maintainability and hinders software reuse. In the specialized domain of Quantum Software Engineering (QSE), this challenge is intensified by the scarcity of high-quality training data and the high volatility of emerging frameworks, which often lead general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce unreliable or hallucinated results. This paper proposes a hybrid approach integrating LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to automate the migration of Qiskit code across versions. The proposed methodology enhances the precision and reliability of migration suggestions by leveraging an automatically generated taxonomy of migration scenarios as the structured, version-specific knowledge source to guide the models. The approach is implemented through an automated, extensible workflow evaluating LLMs (Google Gemini Flash-2.5 and OpenAI Gpt-oss-20b) under different retrieval schemes (unconstrained and restrictive). Results demonstrate that the taxonomy-based RAG architecture, particularly under the restrictive scheme, significantly reduces hallucinations and improves descriptive quality, with Google Gemini Flash-2.5 showing superior performance in detecting complex refactoring scenarios. These findings confirm the potential of this data-centric methodology to foster technological independence and provide robust, intelligent assistants that mitigate API obsolescence, ensuring the long-term availability of quantum algorithms within a rapidly shifting ecosystem and flattening the learning curve within Quantum Software Engineering (QSE).

This paper investigates the techno-economic viability of shared electric vehicle (EV) fleets for demand charge reduction under practical logistical and operational constraints. Unlike idealized models that overlook transit overheads, we propose a high-fidelity fleet management framework that explicitly accounts for the spatio-temporal coupling of energy consumption, labor costs for EV drivers, and battery degradation. We formulate the dispatch problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that jointly minimizes demand charges and total cost of ownership. To address the computational complexity arising from path-dependent constraints, we develop a marginal-value-based heuristic algorithm that achieves near-optimal performance with high computational efficiency. Using real-world data from San Francisco, our analysis reveals that a modest number of EVs can achieve significant demand charge savings, sufficient to recover the ownership and operational expenses. Our results also show how tariff structures, fleet size, and cost components influence overall profitability.

This paper revisits the classical concept on N-version programming in the setting of contemporary AI coding agents. Revisiting the seminal Knight-Leveson experiment, we study whether diversity across agent systems, models, and implementation languages creates diverse failure modes. Using the Knight-Leveson's, Launch Interceptor Program Specification, we evaluate 48 agent-generated implementations on a shared oracle and a campaign of 1,000,000 randomized test inputs. The results show substantial common-mode failure, along the findings of Knight-Leveson. Further analysis that many of those co-occuring failures can be traced to where is specification is particularly hard or ambiguous. We also demonstrate that diversity from coding agents provides practical benefit: across majority voting three-version units, the mean failure count drops from 387.44 for single versions to 130.99 for triples, and 11,844 N-version units exhibit zero observed failures. Our original results is the strongest evidence to date that N-Version Programming with coding agents is a useful engineering strategy.

Memory models are formal specifications of concurrent-program executions, accounting for weak behaviors introduced by compiler and architectural optimizations. The increase of their number and complexity has spawned efforts for uniform verification across whole classes of models, by axiomatizing the models in an adequate metatheory that admits a uniform treatment. In this work, we formally study Monadic Second-Order logic (MSO) as a metatheory for weak memory, by proving results on the treewidth and MSO-expressibility of various popular weak-memory models, as this combination allows us to uniformly tackle several verification problems. In summary, our results are as follows. First, we prove that executions under Sequential Consistency ($\mathsf{SC}$) have bounded treewidth, while already those under Total Store Order ($\mathsf{TSO}$) do not. Second, we prove that a broad range of models, including Release/Acquire and the full RC20, are MSO-axiomatizable, while others, such as Strong Release/Acquire and $\mathsf{TSO}$, are not, unless the Orthogonal Vectors problem $\unicode{x2013}$ which requires quadratic time under SETH $\unicode{x2013}$ can be solved in linear time. Finally, we introduce the notion of reads-from robustness, as an extension to recent work on coarse robustness criteria. We show that our treewidth bounds (both upper and lower) have far-reaching algorithmic implications for any of our MSO-axiomatizable models $\mathsf{MM}$: there is an algorithm that, for every program $\mathsf{P}$, either verifies $\mathsf{P}$ under $\mathsf{MM}$ or reports that $\mathsf{P}$ is not reads-from robust against $\mathsf{MM}$. Overall, our results establish a rich and versatile theoretical framework for weak-memory verification and robustness.

In this paper, we report our experiences and takeaways from workshops using puzzles to learn CTL. Background: Software testing is important yet difficult to teach. We introduced a BoK of puzzle-based learning activities to teach CTL, based on a model of critical tester's cognition, leading to the pedagogical framework P4TEST. We conducted thirteen workshops with students, testers, teachers, and primary school pupils to assess puzzle-based teaching of critical testing literacy. Experience: Across eleven workshops, we used a semi-structured approach, varying puzzles, materials, and timing. In two additional workshops, we introduced workbooks and think-aloud sessions to gather more data on the learning experience. Observations: Participants consistently perceived themselves as experimenting while solving puzzles. Students tended to converge on solutions, while professionals continued exploring. Emotions were visible in behaviour but hard to surface through written reflection alone. Think-aloud sessions revealed immediate reasoning; written reflections elicited more meta-cognitive reflection. The theme Sensemaking / reflection-in-action captured how participants framed problems, navigated dead ends, and shifted strategies. Reflections: Puzzles are not the intervention: the entire sequence of solving, debriefing, and reflecting is. Designing that sequence more deliberately is the work ahead. We also developed an open-source web application with built-in analytics to customise workshops.

This paper presents a novel neural nonlinear control framework for a multi-drone slung payload system with variable-length cables and a rigid-body payload. The equations of motion are formulated into a decoupled structure, where the payload and cable length dynamics are governed by independent control channels, facilitating modularized controller design on reduced-order subsystems. A neural control contraction metric (CCM) controller and a neural feedback controller are jointly trained to enforce contraction conditions for the payload subsystem. Separately, a cable length control law is derived that exploits the variable-length degree of freedom for obstacle avoidance. Numerical simulations demonstrate trajectory tracking of a rigid-body payload and gate traversal capabilities of the overall system under the proposed control framework.

BARReL is a Lean 4 library bridging Atelier B, an industrial tool for the B method, and the Lean proof assistant by enabling users to conduct their formal B developments -- up to machine refinement and implementation -- interactively inside Lean, while retaining standard B syntax. B partial operators are carefully encoded by generating explicit well-definedness conditions, leveraging Lean's dependent types to enforce a well-definedness discipline by construction. That is, proof obligations and proof steps cannot silently rely on ill-typed or ill-defined instantiations. BARReL also features basic automation to try to discharge such well-definedness conditions automatically. The implementation is written entirely using Lean meta-programming and is designed to be modular: extending the supported B fragment typically requires only adding new syntax and encoding clauses. We illustrate the approach on a small but representative case study, and argue that BARReL can act as a stepping stone towards a strongly reliable Atelier B toolchain grounded in the Lean proof assistant.

This study presents an integrated framework for processing, modelling, and generating statistically representative three-dimensional fiber microstructures from experimental X-ray-$μ$CT observations. First, an analytical slice-segment ellipse-intersection method is introduced to extract per-slice and per-fiber in-plane and out-of-plane misalignment profiles along the fiber depth. These descriptors are then used to construct a stochastic model that captures slice-wise misalignment distributions and their depth-wise evolution through, copula-based in-plane dependence, latent autoregressive continuity, and rare extreme-misalignment motifs. The model hyperparameters are calibrated using Bayesian optimization, achieving close agreement with the original statistical descriptors, with deviations generally below 10\%. The optimized statistical model is coupled with a physical generation strategy that begins with variable-radius fiber seeding layer and proceeds through an iterative slice-by-slice 3D growth scheme, where the statistical layer guides fiber evolution and Delaunay-based neighbourhood construction with ellipse-based contact resolution ensures non-overlapping, radius-augmented synthetic microstructures. The framework successfully generates about 2400 synthetic fibers while preserving strong statistical fidelity to the original X-ray-$μ$CT data. The proposed pipeline provides a promising and scalable route for generating statistically equivalent, geometrically admissible, and simulation-ready fiber composite microstructures for virtual testing and analysis.

In 2025 and 2026, two events settled questions that had until then been speculative. In the first, a large language model executed the great majority of a state-aligned cyber-espionage campaign on its own, with human operators intervening at only a few decision points. In the second, the most capable cyber-relevant model was placed under a controlled-access program limited to a vetted set of United States technology firms, allied governments, and European standards bodies; that perimeter included no African government, operator, or university. Together the two events establish the argument of this paper: frontier language models have become a decisive instrument of cyber operations, and that instrument is built, owned, and rationed within a small circle from which Africa is absent. The paper documents Africa's exclusion on every count. The continent does not build frontier models, cannot yet operate them, and cannot, for now, obtain the most capable ones. The operational deficit is set out along three axes, skilled people, compute and electrical power, and investment, each measured against current figures; meanwhile AI-enabled fraud is already mounting against African mobile-money systems, the part of the digital economy the continent leads. Two constraints follow: the gating of frontier models by their developers, which no African decision can open, and a chosen dependence on infrastructure vendors now caught in geopolitical restriction. Because comparable but ungated models are forecast to spread within six to twelve months, the paper argues for a response that operates inside that window through threat-intelligence sharing, governance adoption, and partnership, undertaken by Africans on their own terms.

Tree-like structures appear in many areas of science, and their shapes can help understand the underlying processes they drive or that give rise to them. By thinking of these structures as geometric graphs in $\mathbb{R}^3$, we gain access to tools from computational geometry and topology to study them. In this paper, we adopt the theory of quadratic forms to measure the directional spread of geometric graphs, and we introduce the hexplot model -- equipped with a metric derived from the Fisher metric on the standard triangle -- to visualize, measure, and collect statistics.

Public opinion research has long faced a trade-off between depth and scale: standardized surveys enable large-scale measurement but restrict respondents to researcher-defined categories, obscuring the diversity of unexpected considerations that underlie public sentiment. More conversational interviews provide richer insights through open-ended probing, but their reliance on trained human interviewers has kept them difficult to scale. This study introduces AI Conversational Interviewing as a method for collecting open-ended public opinion data at scale, pursuing three objectives: to demonstrate the analytical value of conversational text data for questions beyond the reach of closed-ended items; to assess the method's practical viability through participants' own evaluations; and to inform implementation by experimentally comparing voice-based, chat-based, and free-choice interview modes. We conducted a study combining an AI-led interview with a standardized survey on migration policy among 571 respondents recruited via Prolific and Payback Panel. The findings establish AI Conversational Interviewing as a viable and valuable addition to the social-science toolkit. The conversational transcripts surface considerations and reasoning that a comprehensive standardized battery does not capture such as markedly different mental models of migration among subgroups with similar attitudes levels. Among respondents who completed the interview, evaluations of the AI interview were at or above those of the standardized survey across modes, although completion itself varied by condition. By releasing open data and open-source pipeline materials, the study contributes to a growing literature on harnessing artificial intelligence to expand the methods of public opinion measurement.

Conversational and tool-using LLM agents operate over a context window that fills from several directions simultaneously. As a session proceeds, the agent accumulates user and assistant turns, entries drawn from a persistent memory store, and often largest of all, the verbatim outputs of tool calls such as file reads, search results, and API responses. Once the cumulative context exceeds the model's token budget, the framework must decide what to keep. The prevailing mechanism is recency truncation, sometimes paired with periodic summarization. This is topic-blind: a fact established early in a session is discarded simply because it is old, even when the current user query is about exactly that fact; conversely, verbose but irrelevant recent material is retained. Agents that must recall information across many turns, the defining case for memory, are precisely where recency truncation fails. Existing alternatives sit outside the agent's assembly step. Retrieval augmented generation fetches external documents into the prompt but does not arbitrate the agent's \emph{already-present} pooled context. Context-compression methods reduce token count by rewriting or pruning text, but operate query-blind and lossily. Neither treats memory entries, conversation turns, and tool outputs as a single candidate pool to be selected from by relevance at the moment the prompt is assembled.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in general-purpose code generation, but their effectiveness in specialized software domains remains underexplored. Solidity smart contracts represent a high-stakes domain where generated code must satisfy strict language-level, security, and software-engineering constraints. Existing benchmarks and metrics remain insufficient for repository-level Solidity generation, where models must synthesize complete contracts from natural language requirements. To address this gap, we introduce SolidityBench, a benchmark of 5,470 repository-level Solidity smart contracts paired with natural language descriptions. We also propose SolidityScore, a Solidity-aware semantic metric that emphasizes domain-critical constructs such as security modifiers, contract declarations, and Solidity-specific keywords. Using this benchmark, we evaluate representative code LLMs, including Qwen2.5-Coder, DeepSeek-Coder, and CodeLlama, across zero-shot prompting, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation, and supervised fine-tuning. The results show that general-purpose models exhibit systematic structural deficiencies in repository-level Solidity generation. Among non-parametric methods, retrieval-augmented generation performs best, while in-context learning degrades beyond two examples due to context saturation. Supervised fine-tuning achieves the largest improvement by internalizing Solidity-specific constraints into model parameters. Overall, our study provides a comprehensive benchmark for repository-level Solidity code generation and shows that high-quality domain data combined with supervised fine-tuning is the most effective strategy for improving the reliability of LLM-generated smart contracts.

Embodied AI (EAI) mobile applications are evolving from auxiliary user interfaces into active control-path components, directly linking mobile-side cryptographic security to cyber-physical trust. Despite this shift, existing security research predominantly focuses on embodied AI devices and cloud infrastructures, leaving the mobile control layer largely unexplored as a critical attack surface. To bridge this gap, we present the first large-scale measurement study of cryptographic misuse within the EAI mobile ecosystem. We construct EAIAppZoo, a benchmark of 507 real-world applications across six EAI domains, and employ an automated semantic-aware analysis pipeline to measure the prevalence and characteristics of five major cryptographic failure modes. Our measurement yields 12,975 misuse findings (with an evaluated precision of 80.74\%), revealing that these cryptographic failures are driven by EAI-specific engineering constraints rather than random developer errors. We uncover structural security trade-offs: latency-sensitive control paths systematically weaken transport protection, while the heavy reliance on offline device provisioning and legacy IoT SDKs exacerbates the local hardcoding of authentication credentials. Through real-world case studies, we demonstrate how these mobile-side cryptographic flaws bypass nominal network protections, enabling adversaries to intercept command channels and hijack the physical control of EAI entities. Ultimately, our findings highlight that mobile applications have become a fragile, yet overlooked, cryptographic trust boundary in cyber-physical systems.

When network links were slow, cloud and distributed database systems could rely on generic kernel abstractions and treat network communication as a black box. With today's fast cloud networks, this approach breaks down: database performance becomes limited by the CPU overhead of the kernel TCP stack. Replacing TCP with user-space UDP can reduce this overhead, but it requires reimplementing essential guarantees, such as reliability and ordering. To solve this conundrum, database systems should no longer treat networking as a black box but co-design it with database operations. We propose the bi-channel paradigm for database systems, which separates communication into two channels: A high-performance data path for latency- and bandwidth-sensitive operations, and a reliable control path for coordination and recovery. We implement the paradigm by combining user-space UDP and kernel-based TCP, though other stack combinations are possible. This design exploits modern NIC capabilities while preserving TCP's reliability. We demonstrate the paradigm's efficiency and simplicity in two representative settings: a distributed shuffle saturating 200 Gbit/s with three CPU cores, and a replicated key-value store processing millions of messages per second.

Recently, in the social choice literature, much attention has been given to the question of avoiding underrepresentation in approval-based multi-winner voting. In this paper, we explore the largely overlooked complementary question of avoiding overrepresentation. This has not been explored systematically, despite being a desirable property with concrete applications. Intuitively, overrepresentation happens when a group determines a disproportionately large part of the committee, thereby exceeding the group's quota. We formulate a strong and appealing axiom for avoiding overrepresentation, called justifiable upper quota (JUQ). We introduce a generalization of Thiele rules, composite Thiele rules, and characterize the unique rule in this class satisfying our axiom. This rule, Adams-AV, which naturally extends Adams' apportionment method, has not been studied before. Additionally, we introduce a polynomial-time rule that satisfies JUQ. Furthermore, we introduce justified near quota, an axiom that balances avoiding under- and overrepresentation. It characterizes the unique Thiele rule extending the Sainte-Laguë apportionment method. Finally, we analyze the compatibility of our axioms with established proportionality notions such as EJR+.

Multimodal document retrieval--selecting the most relevant multimodal document from a large corpus to answer a natural language query--plays an essential role in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. State-of-the-art methods represent each document and query with multiple token-level embeddings and use late interaction to achieve high effectiveness. However, such multi-vector representations incur substantial memory overhead during retrieval, leading to poor scalability and hindering real-world deployment. In this paper, we present Stellar, a scalable multimodal document retrieval framework that stores token-level document embeddings on disk and loads only a small set of candidate embeddings into memory for late interaction. Stellar comprises two key components: (i) Lexical Representation-based Filtering (LRF), which fine-tunes a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a sparse encoder to produce high-quality lexical representations, enabling efficient and effective document filtering to significantly reduce the candidate set; (ii) Efficient Disk-backed Late Interaction (DLI), which designs an on-disk token embedding storage layout guided by a balanced clustering algorithm, and dynamically loads only the necessary token embeddings into memory using a simple yet effective cost model. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmarks and a newly presented large-scale dataset demonstrate that Stellar reduces memory overhead and query latency by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to existing methods without compromising retrieval effectiveness.

Machine learning is often touted to improve the efficiency of ICT, but that small gain is overwhelmed by the enormous carbon, water, and land footprints of data centers and ML-ready devices. We survey the electricity consumption of ML applications in training and inference, focusing on electricity-intensive image generation. Our team of a computer engineer, a media scholar, and an artist explore solutions including inexact computing; tiny language models; low-precision hardware architectures; hardware with limited capacity; and anticipating and mitigating energy demands at the design phase. We will sketch our work in progress of an ethical and aesthetically sophisticated tiny image generator using non-scraped data. Looking to the economic context, we will propose a true-cost accounting for the environmental impact of machine learning and suggest that the criterion of efficiency is driven by the shareholder-capitalist framing of ICT.

Skeletonization of tubular structures from 3D imaging is essential for tasks such as morphometric analysis, transport or flow simulation, and procedural planning in domains including vascular networks, plant root systems, and neural connectomes. However, automatic skeleton extraction often introduces topological artifacts, such as erroneous connections between nearby branches and fragmented centerlines caused by noise or missing data. Correcting these artifacts manually can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when precise interaction is required. We present a semi-automatic correction method that reconstructs a plausible centerline connection from minimal user input. Given a user-selected source and target point, our method traces a path by combining (i) component-wise minimum spanning trees for stable local propagation and (ii) a filtered 3D Delaunay edge graph for bridging gaps and handling ambiguous junctions. Candidate steps are ranked using a score that accounts for direction continuity, spatial proximity, component consistency, and target-directed progress. The output is an ordered polyline (or edge sequence) that can be used as a suggested correction and integrated into downstream skeleton post-processing workflows. We implement the system in C++ with an interactive viewer based on Libigl and demonstrate representative qualitative results on brain vessel datasets, including correction of typical "crossing" and "dotted" artifacts. While our current validation is qualitative, the method is lightweight and serves as a practical building block toward more comprehensive interactive correction pipelines in biomedical imaging and related domains.

Formal verification is a challenging but important task for ensuring the security of cryptographic protocols. While modern protocol verification tools significantly reduce verification effort, modelling remains challenging to practitioners without a background in formal verification. In addition, transferring verification results to a concrete protocol implementation requires expert knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel language-first method for verification of trace properties using a domain-specific language for protocol implementations. We target the Tamarin prover for verification, and we prove that verified universal trace properties translate back to the implementation. We additionally integrate symbolic execution in order to analyse the memory safety of protocol implementations. We use our tool to implement and generate accurate models for a signed Diffie-Hellman protocol, and for the WireGuard VPN protocol. Our WireGuard implementation is interoperable with existing implementations when using our interpreter, and achieves acceptable performance. We formally prove our implementations secure using a combination of symbolic execution and verification of the generated Tamarin models.

Music theory obeys a rich set of mathematical rules and symmetries. These symmetries follow mathematical structure which can be verified and expressioned in the precise language of a proof assistant. In this paper, we present Prismriver, a formalization of music theory in Lean 4. By formalizing music theory in Lean 4, we open the door to verifiable algorithmic composition and accompaniment generation. We also enable the analysis of monadic analysis of structures in music.

The defensive performance of football players is commonly measured through a limited number of actions like tackles and interceptions while their continuous impact through positional behaviour has hardly been studied before. We formulate this problem as an attribution over multi-agent spatiotemporal trajectories without player-level ground truth labels, where event-level changes of expected threat are distributed among individuals. We propose a framework that performs this attribution using player involvement scores calculated from defensive pressure areas (DPAs). By computing role-conditioned baselines within automatically detected team structures, we can determine each defender's expected responsibility for threat created through arbitrary passes. The validity and robustness of this approach are evaluated on a uniquely extensive cross-gender and cross-competition data set, including positional and event data from 64 matches of the men's World Cup, 116 matches of the women's German Bundesliga and 336 matches of the men's German 3. Liga. In the absence of a ground truth, we propose an evaluation protocol that combines multiple relatively weak proxies into robust summary scores. We find a validity score that is improved by around 1 standard deviation compared to the best action-based metric and demonstrate that many popular measures show limited validity. The "blame" for conceding high-value actions shows especially strong correlations with external ratings and market values, making it the first published metric in football to reliably measure positioning errors. All code underlying this work is publicly available to support reproducibility and further research.

MLLM-based mobile GUI agents have made substantial progress in UI understanding and action execution, but adapting them to real target apps remains costly because mobile apps are numerous, frequently updated, and hard to cover with human-written tasks, demonstrations, or reward labels. Existing annotation-free GUI learning reduces manual supervision, yet lacks a unified substrate connecting target-app exploration, curriculum mining, rollout execution, and feedback, while policy optimization often relies on isolated rollouts and coarse rewards that are hard to convert into reliable improvement signals. We present MobileForge, an annotation-free adaptation system for mobile GUI agents. MobileForge consists of MobileGym, which grounds task generation and rollout evaluation in real mobile app interaction, and Hierarchical Feedback-Guided Policy Optimization (HiFPO), which turns trajectory outcomes, step-level process feedback, and corrective hints into hint-contextualized step-level GRPO updates. Using only automatically generated annotation-free adaptation data, MobileForge adapts Qwen3-VL-8B to 67.2% Pass@3 on AndroidWorld, close to the closed-data GUI-specialized GUI-Owl-1.5-8B base model at 69.0%. The MobileForge-adapted ForgeOwl-8B further reaches 77.6% Pass@3 on AndroidWorld and 41.0% success on the out-of-domain MobileWorld GUI-only split, establishing the strongest open-data mobile GUI agent in our evaluation. Code, data, and trained models will be released at https://mobile-forge.github.io/.

MLLM-based mobile GUI agents have made substantial progress on short-horizon tasks, yet remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks that require retaining intermediate facts across many steps and app transitions. We attribute this limitation to ReAct-style prompting, which passively accumulates per-step records, leading to prompt explosion and dilution of critical cross-app facts. To address this, we introduce MemGUI-Agent, an end-to-end long-horizon mobile GUI agent with proactive context management. MemGUI-Agent is built on Context-as-Action (ConAct), which casts context management as first-class actions emitted by the same policy that selects UI actions. Instead of passively appending history, ConAct maintains three structured context fields: folded action history, folded UI state, and recent step record, preserving critical UI facts while keeping context compact. To make proactive context management learnable across model scales, we construct MemGUI-3K, a 2,956-trajectory dataset with full ConAct annotations for supervised training and offline analysis. Training an 8B model on MemGUI-3K produces MemGUI-8B-SFT, an 8B MemGUI-Agent that achieves the best open-data 8B performance on MemGUI-Bench and generalizes to the out-of-distribution MobileWorld benchmark. Code, data, and trained models will be released at https://memgui-agent.github.io/.

Non-volatile SRAM (nvSRAM) designs have been investigated to address the high leakage power of CMOS-based SRAM and the large write latency of emerging non-volatile memory (eNVM) technologies. However, prior nvSRAM designs that combine SRAM with eNVM devices typically require backup and restore (B\&R) operations and incur significant cell-area overhead. Here, we propose a differential memory bit-cell consisting of a pair of cross-coupled ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) and a pair of access transistors, resulting in a four-transistor (4T) structure, which is smaller than conventional 6T SRAM and many prior nvSRAM designs. The proposed bit-cell can be configured to operate in either volatile or non-volatile mode by adjusting the write conditions. In the non-volatile mode, the proposed nvSRAM achieves a store power of 0.13~$μ$W with a 2~ns store time, and no explicit B\&R operation is required. The proposed bit-cell can also be viewed as a cross-coupled gain cell, enabling further applications.

In this paper, we implement and evaluate Whisper dot-product kernel offloading on IMAX, a programmable Coarse-Grained Linear Arrays (CGLAs) architecture. Whisper-tiny.en profiling on an ARM Cortex-A72 shows that dot-product operations account for 90.6% of FP16 execution time and 87.1% of Q8_0 execution time. To address this kernel bottleneck, we combine kernel mapping, local-memory sizing, and burst scheduling. The implementation uses inline FP16-to-FP32 conversion, 2-way SIMD FMA on a 64-bit datapath, column-wise multithreading, and mixed execution in which aligned vector segments run on IMAX and residual segments run concurrently on the host CPU. We evaluate the design with an FPGA prototype and a 28nm ASIC projection at 840MHz. For Whisper-tiny.en, 32KB local memory and burst length 16 jointly minimize PDP and EDP. Under a TDP-based cross-platform comparison, the projected IMAX records a PDP of 11.58J for Whisper-tiny.en Q8_0, 2.35x lower than Jetson AGX Orin (27.16J) and 10.48x lower than RTX 4090 (121.38J). The same design extends to Whisper-base.en and Whisper-small.en, where the PDP gap narrows as 32KB local-memory coverage drops from 93.8% for tiny to about 66.5% for base and small. These results position IMAX as a programmable architecture for lower-PDP local ASR in the tiny-model regime.

Human collective participation is rarely steady in time: it is bursty, with short episodes of intense activity separated by long quiet intervals. In crisis response and community mobilization, predicting when people act matters as much as predicting whether they act. Such settings are increasingly modeled with LLM-based social simulators, yet these simulators are validated on whether each action is individually plausible, not on whether actions are timed as in reality. Their temporal realism, the degree to which simulated activity reproduces the bursty, heavy-tailed timing of real human systems, thus remains untested. We examine this gap using a multi-year, city-scale log of offline volunteering in Shenzhen that spans the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirically, we establish that bursty timing is common at individual and tracked-group levels, that it is largely endogenous and self-exciting, and that it is amplified by the pandemic rather than produced by daily activity cycles. A standard LLM-only simulator reproduces almost none of this timing: its synchronous schedule has no self-excitation channel, so agents act on a near-regular clock. Guided by these findings, we build a simulator in which a data-calibrated self-excitation channel and a crisis-period regime decide when each agent acts and query the LLM only at those moments, leaving it to decide which task to join and whether to commit. The LLM-only baseline yields no bursty agents (median burstiness $B=-0.14$); a single data-calibrated gate is then sufficient to lift per-agent timing above the burst threshold (median $B\approx0.37$) without degrading LLM content decisions. These results indicate that temporal realism in LLM-based crisis-response simulation is best achieved by decoupling when agents act, governed by an explicit self-excitation and crisis-activation mechanism, from what they do, governed by the LLM.

Filtered ANN search, which combines vector similarity with attribute predicates, is a core primitive in modern vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation. We benchmark all major categorical filtered ANN methods across multiple datasets under three predicates and find that no single method dominates. Moreover, even within a single dataset and predicate type, the best method for a query can vary. Therefore, we propose a query-aware routing framework. A lightweight ML model predicts each candidate method's recall on the query, and the router consults an offline benchmark table that maps every method and parameter setting to its measured recall and QPS, then selects the method with the best recall--QPS trade-off. Our ablation study narrows 22 candidate features to a minimal set of three and we adopt regression rather than classification as the prediction target to sharpen accuracy. Our model is trained on six real-world datasets and applied to five unseen validation datasets. The final result shows that our router achieves state-of-the-art recall and QPS balance across all five validation datasets compared to existing filtered ANN baselines, while incurring negligible latency overhead.

Open-weight AI models (OWMs), or models released with publicly-available weights, are distributing rapidly and approaching the performance levels of leading closed-weight AI models (CWMs). While OWMs offer substantial scientific and economic benefits, their release introduces distinct risk factors for which existing evaluation practices, largely designed for CWM deployment, fail to account. In this paper, we argue that these risk factors demand distinct proportional evaluation (PE) approaches: evaluating without system-level safeguards (PE1), assessing robustness to modifications that undo model-level safeguards (PE2), testing selective capability amplification (PE3), and proxying worst-case misuse (PE4). We systematically review current evaluation practices of OWMs released in 2025 through April 2026, finding that only one of the 37 families of models reviewed fulfills PE1-4 and most do not fulfill any. This paper targets policymakers, funders, and researchers involved in AI evaluation. As OWMs grow increasingly capable, their evaluation warrants close attention from developers, funders, and governance bodies alike.

Gas metering on EVM-compatible blockchains assumes that execution conditions are stable: that the resource mix is constant enough to justify collapsing execution costs into a single scalar with fixed relative prices, and that state drift between submission and execution does not materially alter a transaction's outcome. We measure the extent to which this assumption fails. We present a trace-level measurement study of EVM workloads on Ethereum (L1) and Base (L2) throughout 2025, sampling 3,000 blocks per day per chain. We decompose each transaction into opcode-level execution gas, intrinsic gas, refunds, and persistent state deltas. To measure state sensitivity, we re-execute transactions from September 2025 on older states and record how gas usage and storage access patterns change. We find the resource mix to be far from stable: on Base, storage reads and compute account for 29.2% and 24.3% of execution gas, while Ethereum devotes 34.9% to storage writes. Ethereum's gas limit doubling during 2025 shifted its own profile toward compute-heavier, Base-like patterns. Base also exhibits a higher fraction of cold storage reads (49.7% versus 39.6% on Ethereum). Persistent state growth, a permanent cost priced as a transient one, reaches 456 GB on Base versus 38 GB on Ethereum. Execution outcomes are equally unstable: gas estimates vary across nearby historical states for 46.0% of transactions on Base, compared to 13.9% on Ethereum, with especially high sensitivity for MEV and DeFi activity. Storage access patterns also diverge across states, limiting the effectiveness of access lists and complicating parallel execution. Our work provides an empirical foundation for multi-dimensional gas metering and explicit pricing of state growth. They show that state-sensitive execution behavior complicates workload estimation, directly affecting transaction predictability and user experience.