While Late Interaction models exhibit strong retrieval performance, many of their underlying dynamics remain understudied, potentially hiding performance bottlenecks. In this work, we focus on two topics in Late Interaction retrieval: a length bias that arises when using multi-vector scoring, and the similarity distribution beyond the best scores pooled by the MaxSim operator. We analyze these behaviors for state-of-the-art models on the NanoBEIR benchmark. Results show that while the theoretical length bias of causal Late Interaction models holds in practice, bi-directional models can also suffer from it in extreme cases. We also note that no significant similarity trend lies beyond the top-1 document token, validating that the MaxSim operator efficiently exploits the token-level similarity scores.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how AI agents discover and invoke external tools, with over 10,000 active servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads as of early 2026. Yet MCP does not yet standardize how agents safely operate those tools at production scale. Three protocol-level primitives remain missing: identity propagation, adaptive tool budgeting, and structured error semantics. This paper identifies these gaps through field lessons from an enterprise deployment of an AI agent platform integrated with a major cloud provider's MCP servers (client name redacted). We propose three mechanisms to fill them: (1) the Context-Aware Broker Protocol (CABP), which extends JSON-RPC with identity-scoped request routing via a six-stage broker pipeline; (2) Adaptive Timeout Budget Allocation (ATBA), which frames sequential tool invocation as a budget allocation problem over heterogeneous latency distributions; and (3) the Structured Error Recovery Framework (SERF), which provides machine-readable failure semantics that enable deterministic agent self-correction. We organize production failure modes into five design dimensions (server contracts, user context, timeouts, errors, and observability), document concrete failure vignettes, and present a production readiness checklist. All three algorithms are formalized as testable hypotheses with reproducible experimental methodology. Field observations demonstrate that while MCP provides a solid protocol foundation, reliable agent tool integration requires infrastructure-level mechanisms that the specification does not yet address.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to simulation optimization, stochastic programming, and online M-estimation, where sampling effort is a decision variable. We study the mini-batch gradient noise as a sampling-design object. Under exchangeable fresh-sampling mini-batches, the conditional covariance given the de Finetti directing measure mu is b^{-1} G_mu(theta), and under identifiability the projected population object is b^{-1} G*(theta) -- projected Fisher information for correctly specified likelihoods, the sandwich partner of the Hessian otherwise. This identification fixes the noise matrix entering the diffusion analysis of constant-step SGD: the raw iterate path has a deterministic fluid limit, and the sqrt(b/eta)-scaled fluctuations satisfy a functional CLT with noise covariance G*; near a nondegenerate optimum the limit is Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, and its Lyapunov covariance scaled by eta/b matches the linearized discrete recursion at leading order. Under a curvature-noise compatibility condition mu_F > 0, we prove 1/N mean-square upper bounds and an i.i.d. parametric Fisher van Trees lower bound of the same rate order, with oracle-complexity guarantees depending on an effective dimension d_eff and condition number kappa_F. Numerical experiments verify the identification and confirm the Lyapunov predictions in direct SGD.

Skull stripping magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the human brain is an important process in many image processing techniques, such as automatic segmentation of brain structures. Numerous methods have been developed to perform this task, however, they often fail in the presence of neuropathology and can be inconsistent in defining the boundary of the brain mask. Here, we propose a novel approach to skull strip T1-weighted images in a robust and efficient manner, aiming to consistently segment the outer surface of the brain, including the sulcal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), while excluding the full extent of the subarachnoid space and meninges. We train a modified version of the U-net on silver-standard ground truth data using a novel loss function based on the signed-distance transform (SDT). We validate our model both qualitatively and quantitatively using held-out data from the training dataset, as well as an independent external dataset. The brain masks used for evaluation partially or fully include the subarachnoid space, which may introduce bias into the comparison; nonetheless, our model demonstrates strong performance on the held-out test data, achieving a consistent mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.964$\pm$0.006 and an average symmetric surface distance (ASSD) of 1.4mm$\pm$0.2mm. Performance on the external dataset is comparable, with a DSC of 0.958$\pm$0.006 and an ASSD of 1.7$\pm$0.2mm. Our method achieves performance comparable to or better than existing state-of-the-art methods for brain extraction, particularly in its highly consistent preservation of the brain's outer surface. The method is publicly available on GitHub.

Generative AI can adversely impact news publishers by lowering consumer demand. It can also reduce demand for newsroom employees, and increase the creation of news "slop." However, it can also form a source of traffic referrals and an information-discovery channel that increases demand. We use high-frequency granular data to analyze the strategic response of news publishers to the introduction of Generative AI. Many publishers strategically blocked LLM access to their websites using the robots.txt file standard. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that large publishers who block GenAI bots experience reduced website traffic compared to not blocking. In addition, we find that large publishers shift toward richer content that is harder for LLMs to replicate, without increasing text volume. Finally, we find that the share of new editorial and content-production job postings rises over time. Together, these findings illustrate the levers that publishers choose to use to strategically respond to competitive Generative AI threats, and their consequences.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capability to understand and develop code. However, their capability to rigorously reason about and prove code correctness remains in question. This paper offers a comprehensive study of LLMs' capability to develop correctness proofs for system software written in Rust. We curate a new system-verification benchmark suite, VeruSAGE-Bench, which consists of 849 proof tasks extracted from eight open-source Verus-verified Rust systems. Furthermore, we design different agent systems to match the strengths and weaknesses of different LLMs (o4-mini, GPT-5, Sonnet 4, and Sonnet 4.5). Our study shows that different tools and agent settings are needed to stimulate the system-verification capability of different types of LLMs. The best LLM-agent combination in our study completes over 80% of system-verification tasks in VeruSAGE-Bench. It also completes over 90% of a set of system proof tasks not part of VeruSAGE-Bench because they had not yet been finished by human experts. This result shows the great potential for LLM-assisted development of verified system software.

Predicting potential and counterfactual outcomes from observational data is central to individualized decision-making, particularly in clinical settings where treatment choices must be tailored to each patient rather than guided solely by population averages. We propose PO-Flow, a continuous normalizing flow (CNF) framework for causal inference that jointly models potential outcome distributions and factual-conditioned counterfactual outcomes. Trained via flow matching, PO-Flow provides a unified approach to individualized potential outcome prediction, conditional average treatment effect estimation, and counterfactual prediction. By encoding an observed factual outcome and decoding under an alternative treatment, PO-Flow provides an encode-decode mechanism for factual-conditioned counterfactual prediction. In addition, PO-Flow supports likelihood-based evaluation of potential outcomes, enabling uncertainty-aware assessment of predictions. A supporting recovery guarantee is established under certain assumptions, and empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate strong performance across a range of causal inference tasks within the potential outcomes framework.

This paper explores the risk that a large language model (LLM) trained for code generation on data mined from software repositories will generate content that discloses sensitive information included in its training data. We decompose this risk, known in the literature as ``unintended memorization,'' into two components: unintentional disclosure (where an LLM presents secrets to users without the user seeking them out) and malicious disclosure (where an LLM presents secrets to an attacker equipped with partial knowledge of the training data). We observe that while existing work mostly anticipates malicious disclosure, unintentional disclosure is also a concern. We describe methods to assess unintentional and malicious disclosure risks side-by-side across different releases of training datasets and models. We demonstrate these methods through an independent assessment of the Open Language Model (OLMo) family of models and its Dolma training datasets. Our results show, first, that changes in data source and processing are associated with substantial changes in unintended memorization risk; second, that the same set of operational changes may increase one risk while mitigating another; and, third, that the risk of disclosing sensitive information varies not only by prompt strategies or test datasets but also by the types of sensitive information. These contributions rely on data mining to enable greater privacy and security testing required for the LLM training data supply chain.

Audio and music generation based on flexible multimodal control signals is a widely applicable topic, with the following key challenges: 1) a unified multimodal modeling framework, and 2) large-scale, high-quality training data. As such, we propose AudioX, a unified framework for anything-to-audio generation that integrates varied multimodal conditions (i.e., text, video, and audio signals) in this work. The core design in this framework is a Multimodal Adaptive Fusion module, which enables the effective fusion of diverse multimodal inputs, enhancing cross-modal alignment and improving overall generation quality. To train this unified model, we construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset, IF-caps, comprising over 7 million samples curated through a structured data annotation pipeline. This dataset provides comprehensive supervision for multimodal-conditioned audio generation. We benchmark AudioX against state-of-the-art methods across a wide range of tasks, finding that our model achieves superior performance, especially in text-to-audio and text-to-music generation. These results demonstrate our method is capable of audio generation under multimodal control signals, showing powerful instruction-following potential. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX/.

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used to optimize deep Cox neural network (Cox-NN) by updating model parameters using mini-batches of data. We show that SGD aims to optimize the average of mini-batch partial-likelihood, which is different from the standard partial-likelihood. This distinction requires developing new statistical properties for the global optimizer, namely, the mini-batch maximum partial-likelihood estimator (mb-MPLE). We establish that mb-MPLE for Cox-NN is consistent and achieves the optimal minimax convergence rate up to a polylogarithmic factor. For Cox regression with linear covariate effects, we further show that mb-MPLE is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent and asymptotically normal with asymptotic variance approaching the information lower bound as batch size increases, which is confirmed by simulation studies. Additionally, we offer practical guidance on using SGD, supported by theoretical analysis and numerical evidence. For Cox-NN, we demonstrate that the ratio of the learning rate to the batch size is critical in SGD dynamics, offering insight into hyperparameter tuning. For Cox regression, we characterize the iterative convergence of SGD, ensuring that the global optimizer, mb-MPLE, can be approximated with sufficiently many iterations. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of mb-MPLE in a large-scale real-world application where the standard MPLE is intractable.

Solving time-dependent Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is one of the most critical problems in computational science. While Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a promising framework for approximating PDE solutions, their accuracy and training speed are limited by two core barriers: gradient-descent-based iterative optimization over complex loss landscapes and non-causal treatment of time as an extra spatial dimension. We present Frozen-PINN, a novel PINN based on the principle of space-time separation that leverages random features instead of training with gradient descent, and incorporates temporal causality by construction. On eight PDE benchmarks, including challenges such as extreme advection speeds, shocks, and high dimensionality, Frozen-PINNs achieve superior training efficiency and accuracy over state-of-the-art PINNs, often by several orders of magnitude. Our work addresses longstanding training and accuracy bottlenecks of PINNs, delivering quickly trainable, highly accurate, and inherently causal PDE solvers, a combination that prior methods could not realize. Our approach challenges the reliance of PINNs on stochastic gradient-descent-based methods and specialized hardware, leading to a paradigm shift in PINN training and providing a challenging benchmark for the community.

To date, various paradigms of soft-Computing have been used to solve many modern problems. Among them, a self organizing combination of fuzzy systems and neural networks can make a powerful decision making system. Here, a Dynamic Growing Fuzzy Neural Controller (DGFNC) is combined with an adaptive strategy and applied to a 3PSP parallel robot position control problem. Specifically, the dynamic growing mechanism is considered in more detail. In contrast to other self-organizing methods, DGFNC adds new rules more conservatively; hence the pruning mechanism is omitted. Instead, the adaptive strategy 'adapts' the control system to parameter variation. Furthermore, a sliding mode-based nonlinear controller ensures system stability. The resulting general control strategy aims to achieve faster response with less computation while maintaining overall stability. Finally, the 3PSP is chosen due to its complex dynamics and the utility of such approaches in modern industrial systems. Several simulations support the merits of the proposed DGFNC strategy as applied to the 3PSP robot.

We investigate stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits, where the entire joint distribution of outcomes impacts the complexity of the problem instance (unlike in the standard bandits). Typical distributions considered depend on specific parameter values, whose prior knowledge is required in theory but quite difficult to estimate in practice; an example is the commonly assumed sub-Gaussian family. We alleviate this issue by instead considering a new general family of sub-exponential distributions, which contains bounded and Gaussian ones. We prove a new lower bound on the expected regret on this family, that is parameterized by the unknown covariance matrix of outcomes, a tighter quantity than the sub-Gaussian matrix. We then construct an algorithm that uses covariance estimates, and provide a tight asymptotic analysis of the regret. Finally, we apply and extend our results to the family of sparse outcomes, which has applications in many recommender systems.

Recommender systems have historically developed along two largely independent paradigms: feature interaction models for modeling correlations among multi-field categorical features, and sequential models for capturing user behavior dynamics from historical interaction sequences. Although recent trends attempt to bridge these paradigms within shared backbones, we empirically reveal that naive unifying these two branches may lead to a failure mode of Sequential Collapse Propagation (SCP). That is, the interaction with those dimensionally ill non-sequence fields leads to the dimensional collapse of the sequence features. To overcome this challenge, we propose TokenFormer, a unified recommendation architecture with the following innovations. First, we introduce a Bottom-Full-Top-Sliding (BFTS) attention scheme, which applies full self-attention in the lower layers and shrinking-window sliding attention in the upper layers. Second, we introduce a Non-Linear Interaction Representation (NLIR) that applies one-sided non-linear multiplicative transformations to the hidden states. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and Tencent's advertising platform demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, while detailed analysis confirm that TokenFormer significantly improves dimensional robustness and representation discriminability under unified modeling.

This work identifies a necessary condition for any variational quantum approach to reach the exact ground state. Briefly, the norms of the projections of the input and the ground state onto each group module must match, implying that module weights of the solution state have to be known in advance in order to reach the exact ground state. An exemplary case is provided by matchgate circuits applied to problems whose solutions are classical bit strings, since all computational basis states share the same module-wise weights. Combined with the known classical simulability of quantum circuits for which observables lie in a small linear subspace, this implies that certain problems admit a classical surrogate for exact solution with each step taking $O(n^5)$ time. The Maximum Cut problem serves as an illustrative example.

We present a hybrid retrieval system for COVID-19 scientific literature, evaluated on the TREC-COVID benchmark (171,332 papers, 50 expert queries). The system implements six retrieval configurations spanning sparse (SPLADE), dense (BGE), rank-level fusion (RRF), and a projection-based vector fusion (B5) approach. RRF fusion achieves the best relevance (nDCG@10 = 0.828), outperforming dense-only by 6.1% and sparse-only by 14.9%. Our projection fusion variant reaches nDCG@10 = 0.678 on expert queries while being 33% faster (847 ms vs. 1271 ms) and producing 2.2x higher ILD@10 than RRF. Evaluation across 400 queries -- including expert, machine-generated, and three paraphrase styles -- shows that B5 delivers the largest relative gain on keyword-heavy reformulations (+8.8%), although RRF remains best in absolute nDCG@10. On expert queries, MMR reranking increases intra-list diversity by 23.8-24.5% at a 20.4-25.4% nDCG@10 cost. Both fusion pipelines evaluated for latency remain below the sub-2 s target across all query sets. The system is deployed as a Streamlit web application backed by Pinecone serverless indices.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic AI systems for scientific discovery, but most approaches remain limited to textbased reasoning without automated experimental verification. We propose MIND, an LLM-driven framework for automated hypothesis validation in materials research. MIND organizes the scientific discovery process into hypothesis refinement, experimentation, and debate-based validation within a multi-agent pipeline. For experimental verification, the system integrates Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials, particularly SevenNet-Omni, enabling scalable in-silico experiments. We also provide a web-based user interface for automated hypothesis testing. The modular design allows additional experimental modules to be integrated, making the framework adaptable to broader scientific workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/IMMS-Ewha/MIND, and a demonstration video at: https://youtu.be/lqiFe1OQzN4.

Glitches frequently contaminate data in gravitational-wave detectors, complicating the observation and analysis of astrophysical signals. This work introduces VIGILant, an automatic pipeline for classification and visualization of glitches in the Virgo detector. Using a curated dataset of Virgo O3b glitches, two machine learning approaches are evaluated: tree-based models (Decision Tree, Random Forest and XGBoost) using structured Omicron parameters, and Convolutional Neural Networks (ResNet) trained on spectrogram images. While tree-based models offer higher interpretability and fast training, the ResNet34 model achieved superior performance, reaching a F1 score of 0.9772 and accuracy of 0.9833 in the testing set, with inference times of tens of milliseconds per glitch. The pipeline has been deployed for daily operation at the Virgo site since observing run O4c, providing the Virgo collaboration with an interactive dashboard to monitor glitch populations and detector behavior. This allows to identify low-confidence predictions, highlighting glitches requiring further attention.

Deep learning-based surface electromyography (sEMG) gesture recognition is frequently bottlenecked by data scarcity and limited subject diversity. While synthetic data generation via Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models has emerged as a promising augmentation strategy, these approaches often face challenges regarding training stability or inference efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose EMGFlow, a conditional sEMG generation framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the application of Flow Matching (FM) and continuous-time generative modeling in the sEMG domain. To validate EMGFlow across three benchmark sEMG datasets, we employ a unified evaluation protocol integrating feature-based fidelity, distributional geometry, and downstream utility. Extensive evaluations show that EMGFlow outperforms conventional augmentation and GAN baselines, and provides stronger standalone utility than the diffusion baselines considered here under the train-on-synthetic test-on-real (TSTR) protocol. Furthermore, by optimizing generation dynamics through advanced numerical solvers and targeted time sampling, EMGFlow achieves improved quality-efficiency trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that Flow Matching is a promising and efficient paradigm for addressing data bottlenecks in myoelectric control systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Open-EXG/EMGFlow.

The node2vec random walk is a non-Markovian random walk on the vertex set of a graph, widely used for network embedding and exploration. This random walk model is defined in terms of three parameters which control the probability of, respectively, backtracking moves, moves within triangles, and moves to the remaining neighboring nodes. From a mathematical standpoint, the node2vec random walk is a nontrivial generalization of the non-backtracking random walk and thus belongs to the class of second-order Markov chains. Despite its widespread use in applications, little is known about its long-run behavior. The goal of this paper is to begin exploring its fundamental properties on arbitrary graphs. To this aim, we show how lifting the node2vec random walk to the state spaces of directed edges and directed wedges yields two distinct Markovian representations which are key for its asymptotic analysis. Using these representations, we find mild sufficient conditions on the underlying finite or infinite graph to guarantee ergodicity, reversibility, recurrence and characterization of the invariant measure. As we discuss, the behavior of the node2vec random walk is drastically different compared to the non-backtracking random walk. While the latter simplifies on arbitrary graphs when using its natural edge Markovian representation thanks to bistochasticity, the former simplifies on regular graphs when using its natural wedge Markovian representation. Remarkably, this representation reveals that a graph is regular if and only if a certain weighted Eulerianity condition holds.

Assessing teachers' geometric content knowledge is essential for geometry instructional quality and student learning, but difficult to scale. The Van Hiele model characterizes geometric reasoning through five hierarchical levels. Traditional Van Hiele assessment relies on manual expert analysis of open-ended responses. This process is time-consuming, costly, and prevents large-scale evaluation. This study develops an automated approach for diagnosing teachers' Van Hiele reasoning levels using large language models grounded in educational theory. Our central hypothesis is that integrating explicit skills information significantly improves Van Hiele classification. In collaboration with mathematics education researchers, we built a structured skills dictionary decomposing the Van Hiele levels into 33 fine-grained reasoning skills. Through a custom web platform, 31 pre-service teachers solved geometry problems, yielding 226 responses. Expert researchers then annotated each response with its Van Hiele level and demonstrated skills from the dictionary. Using this annotated dataset, we implemented two classification approaches: (1) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and (2) multi-task learning (MTL). Each approach compared a skills-aware variant incorporating the skills dictionary against a baseline without skills information. Results showed that for both methods, skills-aware variants significantly outperformed baselines across multiple evaluation metrics. This work provides the first automated approach for Van Hiele level classification from open-ended responses. It offers a scalable, theory-grounded method for assessing teachers' geometric reasoning that can enable large-scale evaluation and support adaptive, personalized teacher learning systems.

Binary stellar evolution simulations are computationally expensive. Stellar population synthesis relies on these detailed evolution models at a fundamental level. Producing thousands of such models requires hundreds of CPU hours, but stellar track interpolation provides one approach to significantly reduce this computational cost. Although single-star track interpolation is straightforward, stellar interactions in binary systems introduce significant complexity to binary evolution, making traditional single-track interpolation methods inapplicable. Binary tracks present fundamentally different challenges compared to single stars, which possess relatively straightforward evolutionary phases identifiable through distinct physical properties. Binary systems are complicated by mutual interactions that can dramatically alter evolutionary trajectories and introduce discontinuities difficult to capture through standard interpolation. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for track alignment and iterative track averaging based on Dynamic Time Warping to address misalignments between neighboring tracks. Our method computes a single shared warping path across all physical parameters simultaneously, placing them on a consistent temporal grid that preserves the causal relationships between parameters. We demonstrate that this joint-alignment strategy maintains key physical relationships such as the Stefan-Boltzmann law in the interpolated tracks. Our comprehensive evaluation across multiple binary configurations demonstrates that proper temporal alignment is crucial for track interpolation methods. The proposed method consistently outperforms existing approaches and enables the efficient generation of more accurate binary population samples for astrophysical studies.

Binary droplet collisions are ubiquitous in dense sprays. Traditional deterministic models cannot adequately represent transitional and stochastic behaviors of binary droplet collision. To bridge this gap, we developed a probabilistic model by using a machine learning approach, the Light Gradient-Boosting Machine (LightGBM). The model was trained on a comprehensive dataset of 33,540 experimental cases covering eight collision regimes across broad ranges of Weber number, Ohnesorge number, impact parameter, size ratio, and ambient pressure. The resulting machine learning classifier captures highly nonlinear regime boundaries with 99.2% accuracy and retains sensitivity in transitional regions. To facilitate its implementation in spray simulation, the model was translated into a probabilistic form, a multinomial logistic regression, which preserves 93.2% accuracy and maps continuous inter-regime transitions. A biased-dice sampling mechanism then converts these probabilities into definite yet stochastic outcomes. This work presents the first probabilistic, high-dimensional droplet collision model derived from experimental data, offering a physically consistent, comprehensive, and user-friendly solution for spray simulation.

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks have penetrated healthcare applications where real-time requirements and edge computing capabilities are essential. Gait analysis that detects abnormal steps to prevent patients from falling is a prominent problem for such applications. Given the extremely stringent design requirements in performance, power dissipation, and area, an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) enables an efficient real-time exploitation of LSTMs for gait analysis, achieving high accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first cross-layer co-optimized LSTM accelerator for real-time gait analysis, targeting an ASIC design. We conduct a comprehensive design space exploration from software down to layout design. We carry out a bit-width optimization at the software level with hardware-aware quantization to reduce the hardware complexity, explore various designs at the register-transfer level, and generate alternative layouts to find efficient realizations of the LSTM accelerator in terms of hardware complexity and accuracy. The physical synthesis results show that, using the 65 nm technology, the die size of the accelerator's layout optimized for the highest accuracy is 0.325 mm^2, while the alternative design optimized for hardware complexity with a slightly lower accuracy occupies 15.4% smaller area. Moreover, the designed accelerators achieve accurate gait abnormality detection 4.05x faster than the given application requirement.

In this paper, we introduce GatherMOS, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLM) as meta-evaluators to aggregate diverse signals into quality predictions. GatherMOS integrates lightweight acoustic descriptors with pseudo-labels from DNSMOS and VQScore, enabling the LLM to reason over heterogeneous inputs and infer perceptual mean opinion scores (MOS). We further explore both zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning setups, showing that zero-shot GatherMOS maintains stable performance across diverse conditions, while few-shot guidance yields large gains when support samples match the test conditions. Experiments on the VoiceBank-DEMAND dataset demonstrate that GatherMOS consistently outperforms DNSMOS, VQScore, naive score averaging, and even learning-based models such as CNN-BLSTM and MOS-SSL when trained under limited labeled-data conditions. These results highlight the potential of LLM-based aggregation as a practical strategy for non-intrusive speech quality evaluation.

The robust low-rank tensor completion problem addresses the challenge of recovering corrupted high-dimensional tensor data with missing entries, outliers, and sparse noise commonly found in real-world applications. Existing methodologies have encountered fundamental limitations due to their reliance on uniform regularization schemes, particularly the tensor nuclear norm and $\ell_1$ norm regularization approaches, which indiscriminately apply equal shrinkage to all singular values and sparse components, thereby compromising the preservation of critical tensor structures. The proposed tensor weighted correlated total variation (TWCTV) regularizer addresses these shortcomings through an $M$-product framework that combines a weighted Schatten-$p$ norm on gradient tensors for low-rankness with smoothness enforcement and weighted sparse components for noise suppression. The proposed weighting scheme adaptively reduces the thresholding level to preserve both dominant singular values and sparse components, thus improving the reconstruction of critical structural elements and nuanced details in the recovered signal. Through a systematic algorithmic approach, we introduce an enhanced alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) that offers both computational efficiency and theoretical substantiation, with convergence properties comprehensively analyzed within the $M$-product framework.Comprehensive numerical evaluations across image completion, denoising, and background subtraction tasks validate the superior performance of this approach relative to established benchmark methods.

Clustering and dimensionality reduction have been crucial topics in machine learning and computer vision. Clustering high-dimensional data has been challenging for a long time due to the curse of dimensionality. For that reason, a more promising direction is the joint learning of dimension reduction and clustering. In this work, we propose a Manifold Learning Framework that learns dimensionality reduction and clustering simultaneously. The proposed framework is able to jointly learn the parameters of a dimension reduction technique (e.g. linear projection or a neural network) and cluster the data based on the resulting features (e.g. under a Gaussian Mixture Model framework). The framework searches for the dimension reduction parameters and the optimal clusters by traversing a manifold,using Gradient Manifold Optimization. The obtained The proposed framework is exemplified with a Gaussian Mixture Model as one simple but efficient example, in a process that is somehow similar to unsupervised Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). We apply the proposed method to the unsupervised training of simulated data as well as a benchmark image dataset (i.e. MNIST). The experimental results indicate that our algorithm has better performance than popular clustering algorithms from the literature.

Semantic segmentation of histopathology images under class imbalance is typically addressed through frequency-based loss reweighting, which implicitly assumes that rare classes are difficult. However, true difficulty also arises from morphological variability, boundary ambiguity, and contextual similarity-factors that frequency cannot capture. We propose Dynamic Focal Attention (DFA), a simple and efficient mechanism that learns class-specific difficulty directly within the cross-attention of query-based mask decoders. DFA introduces a learnable per-class bias to attention logits, enabling representation-level reweighting prior to prediction rather than gradient-level reweighting after prediction. Initialised from a log-frequency prior to prevent gradient starvation, the bias is optimised end-to-end, allowing the model to adaptively capture difficulty signals through training, effectively unifying frequency-based and difficulty-aware approaches under a common attention-bias framework. On three histopathology benchmarks (BDSA, BCSS, CRAG), DFA consistently improves Dice and IoU, matching or exceeding a difficulty-aware baseline without a separate estimator or additional training stage. These results demonstrate that encoding class difficulty at the representation level provides a principled alternative to conventional loss reweighting for imbalanced segmentation.

We propose a novel end-to-end privacy-preserving framework, instantiated by three efficient protocols for different deployment scenarios, covering both input and output privacy, for the vertically split scenario in federated learning (FL), where features are split across clients and labels are not shared by all parties. We do so by distributing the role of the aggregator in FL into multiple servers and having them run secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols to perform model and feature aggregation and apply differential privacy (DP) to the final released model. While a naive solution would have the clients delegating the entirety of training to run in MPC between the servers, our optimized solution, which supports purely global and also global-local models updates with privacy-preserving, drastically reduces the amount of computation and communication performed using multiparty computation. The experimental results also show the effectiveness of our protocols.

Effective IT change management is important for businesses that depend on software and services, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as finance, where operational reliability, auditability, and explainability are essential. A significant portion of IT incidents are caused by changes, making it important to identify high-risk changes before deployment. This study presents a predictive incident risk scoring approach at a large international bank. The approach supports engineers during the assessment and planning phases of change deployments by predicting the potential of inducing incidents. To satisfy regulatory constraints, we built the model with auditability and explainability in mind, applying SHAP values to provide feature-level insights and ensure decisions are traceable and transparent. Using a one-year real-world dataset, we compare the existing rule-based process with three machine learning models: HGBC, LightGBM, and XGBoost. LightGBM achieved the best performance, particularly when enriched with aggregated team metrics that capture organisational context. Our results show that data-driven, interpretable models can outperform rule-based approaches while meeting compliance needs, enabling proactive risk mitigation and more reliable IT operations.