Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $λ^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation.

Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose \textbf{G}raph-based \textbf{T}arget \textbf{B}ack-\textbf{P}ropagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target--output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $π_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $π_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $π_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5--0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare settings, yet their tendency to hallucinate poses risks when clinical decisions are involved. This study examine whether LLMs recommend recently banned or withdrawn pharmaceuticals when answering clinical questions and tests an agent-based method for reducing such errors. We developed a five-agent "Trust but Verify" system using a single LLM backbone. To measure regulatory knowledge obsolescence, we created an adversarial dataset of 103 clinical MCQs where historically correct answers now refer to banned substances. This scale ensures statistical significance across various therapeutic classes. We evaluated three open-access model families (GPT-OSS, Llama-3, Falcon-3) under vanilla and agentic conditions. Performance was measured via pointwise score, label accuracy, Hallucination Error Rate (HER), and Component Fidelity (CF) score. We also observed clinical safety regression in proprietary models. In default configurations, all models showed high hallucination rates, consistently selecting banned drugs that matched training data patterns. Our proposed agentic architecture reduced HER by approximately 53% across models. Pointwise scores shifted from -0.25 (unsafe recommendation) toward 0.0 (appropriate refusal). The safety audit intercepted dangerous outputs even when models' parametric knowledge favored the banned substance. The proposed multi-agent framework offers a model-agnostic method for enforcing regulatory compliance that prioritizes patient safety over fluent text generation. Our work demonstrates a practical approach for deploying autonomous AI systems in safety-critical healthcare settings. It shows how real-time regulatory data can be integrated into LLM pipelines to support clinical decision-making.

Healthcare is essential, expert, and episodic by design - built around the roughly one hour per year a person spends with a clinician. The 8,759 hours outside clinical settings, where eating, sleeping, movement, medication, and stress actually shape long-term health, have no comparable infrastructure. The bottleneck for personalized health is not raw data or reasoning capability; it is the absence of that infrastructure layer. This paper introduces the Personal Care Utility (PCU): a layered, event-driven architecture proposed as the missing utility for everyday health, in the way that payments, networks, and power are utilities for their domains. PCU organizes continuous personal signals into semantically meaningful life events through a Personicle, estimates dynamic health state against personal baselines, reasons about cause and context, and routes guidance through an orchestrator that separates clinical decision logic, behavioral strategy selection, and natural-language expression. This separation lets large language models support reasoning and communication while keeping safety-critical clinical decisions grounded in validated evidence. We instantiate PCU for Type 2 Diabetes - turning CGM, meal, activity, medication, sleep, stress, and clinical data into glycemic events, individualized state estimates, causal explanations, and knowledge-grounded interventions. A day-in-the-life scenario shows the same infrastructure producing real-time nudges, weekly summaries, medication check-ins, silence, or deterministic safety alerts depending on context and risk. We close with how PCU generalizes to other chronic conditions and the governance questions any always-on personal health utility must address. The result is a blueprint that treats personalization not as a final messaging layer, but as an architectural property of everyday health guidance.

Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines.

Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

Safe coordination problems surface in multi-agent reinforcement learning when global safety cannot be enforced by any agent unilaterally: the admissibility of one agent's action may depend on the dynamics of other agents. Decentralised shields can enforce safety at runtime, but purely factorised permissions often exclude optimal team behaviour that is safe only through coordination. We study deterministic safety guarantees for agents trained and deployed under decentralised execution, recovering team-optimal safe behaviour without centralised runtime control. Agents have a shared global specification $ϕ$ in the safety fragment of Linear Temporal Logic ($\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ ), and select among tuples of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations whose conjunction implies the global specification $ϕ$. Each agent may rely on the other agents' local obligations as assumptions because the whole contract tuple is certified simultaneously and allows projection into local action masks. At learning time, a non-stationary multi-armed bandit chooses among a library of local $\mathsf{LTL}_{\mathsf{safe}}$ obligations to select the tuple that optimises team reward, all without forgoing end-to-end safety. We evaluate the approach across 6 environments and 15 algorithmic variants.

Reconstruction-based anomaly detection is attractive for industrial inspection, but scaling it from category-specific training to a one-for-all setting is challenging. A single model must reconstruct diverse normal appearances without copying abnormal details, which exposes two coupled failure modes: identical shortcut, where anomalies pass through the reconstruction path, and mis-reconstruction, where normal categories are confused with one another. We propose \textbf{BoRAD}, a label-free training framework that treats this as a representation-capacity allocation problem. BoRAD uses a shared learnable prototype bank to impose two complementary regularizers: spatial prototype alignment contracts local within-prototype variation to suppress anomaly copying, while prototype-relative global alignment preserves between-prototype structure and improves sensitivity to abnormal angular deviations. The prototype bank and prediction heads are used only during training; inference remains a standard teacher-student feature discrepancy pass, with no class labels, negative pairs, memory retrieval, or prototype lookup. BoRAD achieves competitive one-for-all anomaly detection performance, including 86.2\% mAD on MVTec AD, 80.7\% mAD on VisA and 73.1\% mAD on Real-IAD. Diagnostic analyses further show reduced anomaly leakage, improved normal-category separability, and stronger anomaly-normal score separation.

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias.

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

The Differential Time-Varying Effect Model (DTVEM) of Jacobson et al. (2019) is a popular tool for finding the best time lag in intensive longitudinal data, but it assumes everyone shares the same lag structure. The original authors named fixing this as future work, and it clashes with the premise of modern clinical research, which is that people differ. We present DTVEM-RE, an extension that lets each person have their own lag coefficients, with two versions of the confirmatory step: a discrete-time hierarchical Bayesian VAR in Stan, which pools across people and gives calibrated uncertainty, and a continuous-time per-person Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model in ctsem, which handles unevenly spaced beeps directly. We report four results. A simulation shows the Bayesian version recovers the between-person spread tau_a with bias below 0.01 and coverage of 90 to 93 percent. On the Fisher et al. (2017) EMA dataset (N=40), person-specific lag-1 effects vary by an order of magnitude across three mood items, the Bayesian and GAMM estimates agree closely (r=0.87 to 0.92), and DTVEM-RE gives the best one-step-ahead prediction among four discrete-time methods. A multi-lag version shows all nine tau_k values have credible intervals excluding zero, and the lag where people differ most changes across items, something lag-1-only methods like mlVAR cannot detect. Finally, the two versions agree almost exactly on person-specific lag-1 estimates (r >= 0.995), differing only as shrinkage predicts. DTVEM-RE is, to our knowledge, the first person-specific implementation of DTVEM-style lag detection, and it contains standard DTVEM as a special case.

We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI.

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

Robotic apple harvesting offers a promising solution to labor shortages in commercial orchards, but low throughput and poor performance in orchard environments hinder its commercial adoption. This paper presents a modular dual-arm apple harvesting robot that uses a vertically stacked arms to enable simultaneous operation in the upper and lower zones of a single tree, simplifying platform positioning from multi-tree lateral repositioning to single-tree stops. Compared to our prior horizontal dual-arm system, the platform integrates 5 advances: (1)a foundation-model-based perception pipeline combining Grounding-DINO and EfficientViT-SAM for robust fruit localization in unstructured outdoor environments; (2)7th-order jerk-bounded trajectory generation paired with a Control Barrier Function safety filter to achieve fast yet safe arm motions; (3)a linear sweep harvesting strategy with a 10cm approach buffer and rotational detachment that improves picking reliability; (4)a temporal-logic-based dual-arm coordination policy with vision-arm async scheduling that maximizes usage of a shared vacuum source; and (5)field validation in 2 commercial orchards covering different apple varieties and tree architectures during the 2025 harvest season. Across the 1738 arm cycles collected in these field trials, the system achieved an 80.0% per-attempt success rate and a mean per-arm cycle time of 7.53s. Fruit damage assessments confirmed that 91.2% of robotically harvested fruit retained the highest USDA grade (Extra Fancy), with bruise rates between 2.4% and 4.9%. With further improvements in the picking cycle time and handling of heavy foliage occlusions, this new modular robot design holds promise for commercial harvesting of apples.

Explainable and trustworthy speech emotion recognition (SER) remains a challenging task to date, largely due to the scarcity of SER data with reliable speech emotion descriptor (SED) labels, such as prosodic features and speaker traits. This paper presents a confidence score and reinforcement learning (RL) based on-the-fly SED rectification approach for post-training SER systems on automatically annotated SED labels. Experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD suggest that explainable SER systems incorporating the proposed confidence score and RL-based SED rectification approach consistently outperform baselines without data selection or SED rectification. The best performing system, which integrates both components, surpasses the baseline without data selection and SED rectification, achieving SER gains of 2.9% and 3.3% absolute (3.7% and 5.4% relative) on IEMOCAP and MELD benchmarks, respectively.

Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies enable strong generalization in robotic manipulation, but remain sensitive to spurious visual correlations and noisy action generation, leading to brittle behavior under perturbations. We introduce Selected Diffusion Noise (SDN), a simple, training-free test-time method that improves both robustness and success rate by leveraging the diffusion noise space as a controllable degree of freedom. SDN dynamically samples noise vectors that are maximally separated from a reference set to mitigate reliance on spurious cues, while selecting candidates that yield more coherent action trajectories. This dual objective encourages stable behavior even under object-masked observations and reduces action jitter without modifying model parameters. We evaluate SDN on two simulation benchmarks (Google Robot, Widow-X) and two real-world robotic datasets across multiple VLA policies, including pi_0, Groot-N1.5, and Groot-N1.6. SDN consistently improves success rates by +8% in simulation and +10% in real-world settings, while producing smoother and more stable actions. Our results highlight that diffusion noise selection can serve as an effective and general mechanism for enhancing VLA policies at test time.

Humans rely on directional fingertip forces to probe and regulate contact during manipulation, yet most wearable haptic gloves render only vibration or single-axis force, leaving force direction ambiguous. Without directional cues, users must infer contact force from vision alone, often leading to over-pressing, inconsistent control, and reduced precision in robotic teleoperation. We present the N2D Haptic Glove, a multi-finger wearable device that renders planar flexion-extension fingertip forces using capstan-drive transmissions for high-transparency force feedback. Through benchtop validations and a user study involving haptic teleoperation of a robotic arm and hand, we demonstrate that compared to visual-only and single-axis haptic baselines, planar fingertip feedback significantly reduces contact force error during precise manipulation, improves trial-to-trial consistency, and enhances overall user experience in axial probing tasks. These findings establish the N2D Haptic Glove and directional finger-based haptics devices as a promising modality for contact-rich teleoperation, immersive virtual reality simulations, and robot learning from demonstrations. N2D Haptic Glove's hardware and software system will be fully open-sourced at \href{https://ucsdarclab.github.io/n2d-glove/}{this https URL}.

We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

Existing studies reveal that current backdoor defenses exhibit limited robustness and often fail against specific types of attacks. More concerningly, prevailing safety tuning strategies tend to provide only superficial safety protection, as they fall short of completely eliminating the backdoor effects. In this work, we present a novel formulation of backdoor learning and unlearning as a sequential, three-stage process from a continual learning perspective. Within this framework, we formally define complete backdoor unlearning and further derive the necessary conditions for achieving it based on the mechanism of catastrophic forgetting. Guided by these insights, we propose Blind Inversion-Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (BI-BAU), which formulates the generation of adversarial examples satisfying the unlearning conditions as a blind inversion problem. We solve this by integrating the bi-level optimization process of adversarial training into an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm framework to optimize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective. Furthermore, BI-BAU is extended to untargeted adversarial scenarios with unknown target classes, as well as to multi-modal contrastive learning tasks, enhancing its applicability to real-world deployment scenarios where pre-trained models may be compromised. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits general applicability across a wide spectrum of backdoor attacks and can effectively and thoroughly eliminate the backdoor effects from a backdoor model.

Accurate pediatric brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to limited annotated data, heterogeneous imaging phenotypes, diffuse tumor boundaries, and class imbalance across tumor subregions. Here, we present a two-stage deep learning framework for improving multi-modal pediatric brain MRI segmentation and clinical interpretation. First, we evaluate 3D Res U-Net and Swin-UNETR baselines on BraTS-PEDs MRI scans, using four co-registered modalities to predict tumor core, whole tumor, and enhancing tumor regions. Second, we introduce diffusion-based refinement models conditioned on coarse Swin-UNETR predictions, including a 3D DDPM refiner and MedSegDiff. Conditioning substantially improves diffusion stability and performance, particularly for enhancing tumor boundary segmentation. Conditioned MedSegDiff achieves the strongest boundary agreement with the lowest HD95. Finally, predicted tumor volumes and representative segmentation overlays are integrated with a multimodal language model to generate structured radiology-style reports. Together, our results suggest that coarse-to-refined diffusion segmentation can improve pediatric tumor boundary delineation and support end-to-end interpretable AI-assisted neuro-oncology workflows.

We propose ShearFuse-UNet, a lightweight and computationally efficient deep learning model for next-day wildfire spread prediction from multi-modal satellite data. The model integrates three complementary transform-domain branches inside each encoder block of a U-Net backbone: a 2D Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) branch, a 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) branch, and a cone-adapted digital Shearlet residual branch. The WHT and DCT branches establish orthogonal latent spaces with learnable spectral scaling and fixed soft-thresholding, while the Shearlet branch provides anisotropic, multi-directional feature decomposition that explicitly encodes the elongated edge structures characteristic of fire fronts. A learned SpectralFusion gate adaptively combines the WHT and DCT responses, and the Shearlet reconstruction is added as a residual. This three-branch design bears a loose structural analogy to transformer self-attention: the WHT and DCT branches provide complementary spectral representations that are adaptively fused, while the Shearlet branch contributes directional content through a residual pathway. Unlike self-attention, the proposed design relies on fixed mathematical transforms rather than learned projection operators, reducing parameter count and computational cost. Evaluated on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, ShearFuse-UNet achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a ResNet18-based U-Net (14M parameters, F1 = 0.589) and demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Results on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset further validate these findings across a different benchmark.

This paper proposes, an improved version of the 3 in sewer pipe inspection robot equipped with an emergency evacuation mechanism. The low traction force and poor stepover capability, which were challenges of the first version, have been improved by simply connecting the propulsion units. The coupled propulsion units feature a differential mechanism capable of posture changes via a single wire, enabling adaptation to pipe diameter variations. To traverse obstacles like pipe joints, a control method was devised that detects obstacle contact through current load on the drive wheel motors and slackens the wire. This method was verified through simulated pipe experiments. Load comparisons were made using current waveforms applied to the drive wheels. Our proposed control method significantly improved the step-over capability of the new articulated robots.

Existing studies on gender bias in LLMs have largely focused on stereotypes, occupational associations, or explicit harmful outputs. In this work, we ask whether LLMs apply consistent response standards to the same negative behavior under matched male-actor and female-actor conditions. We introduce GAMA-Bench, a gender-mirrored benchmark of 1,298 scenarios covering intimate relationship and public social conflicts. It constructs gender-neutral misconduct templates through controlled grids and cross-model review, then compiles them into paired first-person prompts with matched actor-gender and role-reference variations. We further design a structured response-framing protocol to measure how models allocate punishment, empathy, escalation, instruction, and blame. Experiments on 10 representative LLMs reveal a consistent male-disadvantaging asymmetry: male actors receive more punitive, escalatory, and blame-centered framing, whereas female actors receive more therapeutic and empathy-oriented framing for the same misconduct. Further analyses show that this pattern persists across model families, scenario tracks, model scale, and explicit thinking-style reasoning. The official code is available at https://github.com/xufeiqiong/GAMA-Bench.

We study semidefinite relaxations for collision-free motion planning. We focus on a point robot moving from start to goal through spherical obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^n$, subject to path continuity constraints and squared derivative costs; a setting that is conceptually simple yet captures the hardness of collision-free motion planning. We formulate this problem exactly as a nonconvex problem over polynomial curves, and present a natural semidefinite relaxation. We contribute two key theoretical insights; to our knowledge this is the first theoretical analysis of semidefinite relaxations for collision-free motion planning. First, we show that solving the convex relaxation is equivalent to solving, to global optimality, a related motion planning problem in a potentially higher-dimensional space. This geometric interpretation yields necessary and sufficient conditions for tightness, and a clear intuition for when the relaxation is loose. Second, we show that the relaxation admits a symmetry reduction that makes it significantly smaller than one might expect, with positive semidefinite cone sizes that scale linearly with the polynomial degree and are independent of the ambient dimension. The resulting relaxation is 10 to 100 times faster than direct nonlinear programming transcriptions solved with SNOPT and IPOPT, exhibits significantly lower variance in solve times, and reliably finds a locally optimal path for the original problem. We demonstrate its effectiveness as a convex steering function in an RRT planner for minimum-snap quadrotor planning with $C^4$ continuous trajectories.