In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.

Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

We present a proof-of-concept palm-mounted thermal feedback prototype addressing thermal rendering challenges specific to augmented reality (AR), where users must interact with both real and virtual objects in their physical workspace. In contrast to thermal feedback systems developed for virtual reality, AR thermal feedback must preserve manual dexterity, maintain access to real-world thermal cues, and provide coherent virtual temperature sensations without obstructing natural object interaction. We propose three AR-specific design considerations, which our prototype implements: indirect feedback to preserve fingertip dexterity, active thermal passthrough to sense and render the temperature of contacted physical surfaces, and spatially and temporally varying thermal rendering across the palm. Human-subject experiments evaluated perceptual sensitivity, indirect feedback, active thermal passthrough, spatial pattern recognition, and moving thermal rendering during AR interaction. Results showed that although indirect feedback reduced perceived realism during visual contact at the fingertips, it did not reduce immersion or comfort; active thermal passthrough supported temperature discrimination between real and rendered surfaces; and spatiotemporal rendering significantly improved immersion and realism compared with static thermal stimulation. These findings suggest that our design considerations are viable design strategies for AR thermal haptics, while also clarifying tradeoffs for applications that require precise realism versus broader immersive thermal experience.

Crashworthiness is a key performance measure in the design of safety-critical vehicle panel components such as B-pillars. Finite element (FE) simulations are widely used to evaluate crash responses but remain computationally expensive for large-scale, nonlinear impact scenarios, particularly when integrated into iterative design and optimisation processes. Although machine learning-based surrogate models have been developed for rapid crashworthiness analysis, they exhibit limitations in detailed representation of complex 3-dimensional components. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for processing data with complex structures. However, existing GNN models often lack sufficient accuracy and computational efficiency to meet industrial demands. This paper proposes Recurrent Graph U-Net (ReGUNet), a graph-based surrogate model for crashworthiness analysis of vehicle panel components. By representing FE meshes in graph form, the model naturally accommodates complex irregular structural geometries. Its hierarchical architecture improves computational efficiency and accuracy, while the introduction of recurrence enhances stability of temporal predictions over multiple time steps. A side-impact case study of hot-stamped steel B-pillars with varying geometries is used to generate training dataset. The trained model demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the dynamic deformation behaviour and crashworthiness indicators of previously unseen component designs. ReGUNet achieves over a 52% reduction in the average deformation prediction error relative to baseline methods, together with markedly improved computational efficiency. ReGUNet provides rapid and reliable crashworthiness assessments, which in turn accelerates the design cycle of vehicle panel components.

Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime -- unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso -- remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is one of the gold standards for vascular disease diagnosis. With the help of a contrast agent, time-resolved 2D DSA images deliver comprehensive blood flow information and can be utilized to reconstruct 3D vessel structures for medical assessment. Current commercial DSA systems typically require hundreds of scanning views to perform reconstruction, resulting in substantial radiation exposure. In this study, we propose a neural rendering-based optimization framework tailored for high-quality sparse-view DSA reconstruction to reduce radiation dosage. Our approach, termed vessel probability guided attenuation learning, represents DSA imaging as a complementary weighted combination of static and dynamic attenuation fields, with the weights derived from the time-independent vessel probability field. Functioning as a foreground mask, vessel probability provides proper gradients for both static and dynamic fields adaptive to different scene types. This mechanism enables self-supervised decomposition between static backgrounds and dynamic contrast agent flow, and significantly improves reconstruction quality. Our model is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between synthesized projections and real captured DSA images. We further employ two training strategies to improve reconstruction quality: (1) coarse-to-fine progressive training for better geometry and (2) temporal perturbed rendering loss for temporal consistency. Experimental results have demonstrated high-quality 3D vessel reconstruction and 2D DSA image synthesis.

Unstructured text provides decision-makers with a rich data source in many domains, ranging from product reviews in retail to nursing notes in healthcare. To leverage this information, words are typically translated into word embeddings -- vectors that encode the semantic relationships between words -- through unsupervised learning algorithms such as matrix factorization. However, learning word embeddings from new domains with limited training data can be challenging, because the meaning/usage may be different in the new domain, e.g., the word ``positive'' typically has positive sentiment, but often has negative sentiment in medical notes since it may imply that a patient tested positive for a disease. In practice, we expect that only a small number of domain-specific words may have new meanings. We propose an intuitive two-stage estimator that exploits this structure via a group-sparse penalty to efficiently transfer learn domain-specific word embeddings by combining large-scale text corpora (such as Wikipedia) with limited domain-specific text data. We bound the generalization error of our transfer learning estimator, proving that it can achieve high accuracy with substantially less domain-specific data when only a small number of embeddings are altered between domains. Furthermore, we prove that all local minima identified by our nonconvex objective function are statistically indistinguishable from the global minimum under standard regularization conditions, implying that our estimator can be computed efficiently. Our results provide the first bounds on group-sparse matrix factorization, which may be of independent interest. We empirically evaluate our approach compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning heuristics from natural language processing.

While proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)-based surrogates are widely explored for hydrodynamic applications, the use of Koopman autoencoders for real-world coastal-ocean modelling remains relatively limited. This paper introduces a flexible Koopman autoencoder formulation that incorporates meteorological forcings and boundary conditions, and systematically compares its performance against POD-based surrogates. The Koopman autoencoder employs a learned linear temporal operator in latent space, enabling eigenvalue regularization to promote temporal stability. This strategy is evaluated alongside temporal unrolling techniques for achieving stable and accurate long-term predictions. The models are assessed on three test cases spanning distinct dynamical regimes, with prediction horizons up to one year at 30-minute temporal resolution. Across all cases, the reduced order surrogates with temporal unrolling achieve high accuracy with relative root-mean-squared-errors of 0.0068-0.14 and $R^2$-values of 0.61-0.995, where prediction errors are largest for current velocities, and smallest for water surface elevations. In two of the three cases, the Koopman Autoencoder have higher accuracy than the POD-based surrogates. Comparing to in-situ observations, the surrogate yields -0.64% to 12% increase in water surface elevation prediction error when compared to prediction errors of the physics-based model. These error levels, corresponding to a few centimeters, are acceptable for many practical applications, while inference speed-ups of 300-1400x enables workflows such as ensemble forecasting and long climate simulations for coastal-ocean modelling.

Reliable flow measurements are essential in many industries, but current instruments often fail to accurately estimate multiphase flows, which are frequently encountered in real-world operations. Combining machine learning (ML) algorithms with accurate single-phase flowmeters has therefore received extensive research attention in recent years. The Coriolis mass flowmeter is a widely used single-phase meter that provides direct mass flow measurements, which ML models can be trained to correct, thereby reducing measurement errors in multiphase conditions. This paper demonstrates that preserving temporal information significantly improves model performance in such scenarios. We compare a multilayer perceptron, a windowed multilayer perceptron, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) on three-phase air-water-oil flow data from 342 experiments. Whereas prior work typically compresses each experiment into a single averaged sample, we instead compute short-time averages from within each experiment and train models that preserve temporal information at several downsampling intervals. The CNN performed best at 0.25 Hz with approximately 95 % of relative errors below 13 %, a normalized root mean squared error of 0.03, and a mean absolute percentage error of approximately 4.3 %, clearly outperforming the best single-averaged model and demonstrating that short-time averaging within individual experiments is preferable. Results are consistent across multiple data splits and random seeds, demonstrating robustness.

Machine learning is central to modern science, industry, and policy, yet its predictive power often comes at the cost of transparency: we rarely know which input features truly drive a model's predictions. Without such understanding, researchers cannot draw reliable conclusions, practitioners cannot ensure fairness or accountability, and policymakers cannot trust or govern model-based decisions. Existing tools for assessing feature influence are limited; most lack statistical guarantees, and many require costly retraining or surrogate modeling, making them impractical for large modern models. We introduce AICO, a broadly applicable framework that turns model interpretability into an efficient statistical exercise. AICO tests whether each feature genuinely improves predictive performance by masking its information and measuring the resulting change. The method provides exact, finite-sample feature p-values and confidence intervals for feature importance through a simple, non-asymptotic hypothesis testing procedure. It requires no retraining, surrogate modeling, or distributional assumptions, making it feasible for large-scale algorithms. In both controlled experiments and real applications, from credit scoring to mortgage-behavior prediction, AICO reliably identifies the variables that drive model behavior, providing a scalable and statistically principled path toward transparent and trustworthy machine learning.

Predicting links in sparse, continuously evolving networks is a central challenge in network science. Conventional heuristic methods and deep learning models, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically designed for static graphs and thus struggle to capture temporal dependencies. Snapshot-based techniques partially address this issue but often encounter data sparsity and class imbalance, particularly in networks with transient interactions such as telecommunication call detail records (CDRs). Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) model dynamic graphs by updating node embeddings over time; however, their predictive accuracy under sparse conditions remains limited. In this study, we improve the TGN framework by extracting enclosing subgraphs around candidate links, enabling the model to jointly learn structural and temporal information. Experiments on a sparse CDR dataset show that our approach increases average precision by 2.6% over standard TGNs, demonstrating the advantages of integrating local topology for robust link prediction in dynamic networks.

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is the most familiar endocrine illness in women of reproductive age. Many Bangladeshi women suffer from PCOS disease in their older age. The aim of our research is to identify effective vision-based medical image analysis techniques and evaluate hybrid models for the accurate detection of PCOS. We introduced two novel hybrid models combining convolutional and transformer-based approaches. The training and testing data were organized into two categories: "infected" (PCOS-positive) and "noninfected" (healthy ovaries). In the initial stage, our first hybrid model, 'DenConST' (integrating DenseNet121, Swin Transformer, and ConvNeXt), achieved 85.69% accuracy. The final optimized model, 'DenConREST' (incorporating Swin Transformer, ConvNeXt, DenseNet121, ResNet18, and EfficientNetV2), demonstrated superior performance with 98.23% accuracy. Among all evaluated models, DenConREST showed the best performance. This research highlights an efficient solution for PCOS detection from ultrasound images, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy while reducing detection errors.

Interactive acoustic auralization allows users to explore virtual acoustic environments in real-time, enabling the acoustic recreation of concert hall or Historical Worship Spaces (HWS) that are either no longer accessible, acoustically altered, or impractical to visit. Interactive acoustic synthesis requires real-time convolution of input signals with a set of synthesis filters that model the space-time acoustic response of the space. The acoustics in concert halls and HWS are both characterized by a long reverberation time, resulting in synthesis filters containing many filter taps. As a result, the convolution process can be computationally demanding, introducing significant latency that limits the real-time interactivity of the auralization system. In this paper, the implementation of a real-time multichannel loudspeaker-based auralization system is presented. This system is capable of synthesizing the acoustics of highly reverberant spaces in real-time using GPU-acceleration. A comparison between traditional CPU-based convolution and GPU-accelerated convolution is presented, showing that the latter can achieve real-time performance with significantly lower latency. Additionally, the system integrates acoustic synthesis with acoustic feedback cancellation on the GPU, creating a unified loudspeaker-based auralization framework that minimizes processing latency.

Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments wherein robotic agents learn to perform actions associated with imperative sentences (e.g., push red cube) via curiosity-driven self-exploration. Our approach amortizes active inference using Q-learning, enabling intrinsically motivated developmental learning. The simulations reveal key findings corresponding to observations in developmental psychology. i) Generalization improves drastically as the scale of compositional elements increases. ii) Curiosity-driven exploration enables faster learning. iii) Rote pairing of sentences and actions precedes compositional generalization. iv) Exception-handling induces U-shaped developmental performance, a pattern like representational redescription in child language learning. These results suggest that curiosity-driven active inference accounts for how intrinsically motivated sensorimotor-linguistic learning supports scalable compositional generalization and exception handling in humans and artificial agents.

Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

Prior work has shown that in-context demonstrations can jailbreak language models, but it remains unclear how models interpret different types of compliance demonstrations. We study this by mixing benign compliance demonstrations (non-harmful request, helpful response) with harmful compliance demonstrations (harmful request, helpful response) and testing three hypotheses about how demonstration composition drives harmful compliance. Across four models, we find that benign and harmful demonstrations are not interchangeable: benign demonstrations can either reduce or increase harmful compliance depending on the model. We further show that preference optimization is the critical training stage that prevents benign demonstrations from increasing harmful compliance, that demonstration ordering exhibits strong recency bias, and that models differ in how refusal interacts with in-context learning: some adopt demonstrated formatting even when refusing, while others override all in-context signals upon refusal. Taken together, this work moves beyond showing that demonstration-based jailbreaking works to characterizing how it works: what models extract from compliance demonstrations depends on demonstration content, ordering, and training methodology.

Sensor measurements are frequently corrupted by outliers and non-Gaussian noise. These imperfections in the sensor data can cause classical state estimators to generate biased and unreliable state and uncertainty estimates. Robust estimators reject or downweight outliers but do not perform measurement covariance estimation, whereas joint state and covariance estimators assume Gaussian residuals and fixed loss shape parameters. Integrating these two capabilities into a single framework is an opportunity to simultaneously estimate both state and covariance in the presence of outliers. This paper proposes a unified Block-Coordinate Descent framework that combines a norm-aware adaptive robust loss, an Iteratively Reweighted Least-Squares state update, and a Minimum Weighted Covariance Determinant covariance estimator, yielding a self-tuning joint state and covariance estimator. The framework is evaluated in a Monte-Carlo simulation and on real-world ultra-wideband localization experiments in cluttered non-line-of-sight environments. Results show that the proposed estimator consistently recovers the true inlier measurement covariance and matches or exceeds the state estimation accuracy of all baselines, without requiring any manual parameter tuning.

Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

MultiModal Federated Graph Learning (MM-FGL) offers a natural collaborative training paradigm, but its practical deployment is challenged by two granularities of modality imbalance. Client-level imbalance occurs when certain clients lack entire modalities, while node-level imbalance occurs when individual nodes exhibit missing visual or textual attributes. While several relevant studies exist, our investigation reveals that they predominantly target graph-agnostic or centralized scenarios, rendering them difficult to adapt directly. To address these challenges, we formalize modality-imbalanced MM-FGL as an implicit graph-aware latent semantic representation synthesis problem. This paradigm recovers missing modal semantics directly within the representation space, thereby maximizing alignment with the original data's semantic distribution and mitigating the high variance induced by missing modalities. To this end, we propose FedMGS (Federated Modality-aware Graph Synthesis), which integrates three core components. The availability-aware graph encoder prevents missing modalities from contaminating local structural propagation. The prototype-guided latent semantic synthesizer establishes cross-client semantic anchors for unavailable modalities. The reliability-calibrated semantic fusion mechanism regulates the impact of recovered latent representations prior to predictive readout. Extensive experiments on four tasks show that FedMGS consistently outperforms competitive baselines with gains up to 17.41% with best efficiency-performance tradeoff.

We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) allows for the efficient building of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems (IFDS). On the other hand, DTL methods still heavily rely on large amounts of labelled data. Obtaining such an amount of data can be challenging when dealing with machines or structures faults. This document proposes a novel approach to the design of vibration-based IFDS using DTL in condition of strong data scarcity. A periodic multi-excitation level procedure leveraging intrinsic non-linearities of real-world systems is used to produce images that can be conveniently analysed by pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to diagnose faults. A new data visualization method and its augmentation technique are proposed in this paper to tackle the typical lack of data encountered during the design of IFDS. Experimental validation on a railway pantograph structure provides effective support for the proposed method.

Pose-flow video anomaly detectors are attractive for one-class surveillance because they provide likelihood-based rankings for tracked skeleton windows. However, a single likelihood score may hide multimodal normal behavior and be sensitive to pose-observation noise. We study a frozen-detector setting in which the pose-flow backbone, cached skeleton tracks, and evaluation pipeline are fixed. Reliability-Aware Prototype Calibration (RPC) is a post-hoc score calibration method for this setting. It adds a standardized nearest-prototype deviation in the frozen latent space to the standardized flow score, and uses keypoint confidence only to gate this added geometric evidence. Thus, RPC preserves the original density signal while correcting the ranking with empirical normal-mode structure under pose reliability. Across two frozen pose-flow backbones and four datasets, RPC improves frame-level AUROC in all eight backbone-dataset pairs, with gains ranging from 0.34 to 4.49 percentage points and averaging 2.03 points. Ablation and reliability analyses show that prototype deviation is the main corrective signal, while reliability gating is most useful when pose observations are less trustworthy. These results suggest that lightweight post-hoc calibration can strengthen cached pose-flow systems when retraining or reproducing the full pose pipeline is impractical.

Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

Machine learning models are predominantly evaluated through predictive performance metrics such as ranking quality, prediction error, or classification accuracy. While these metrics effectively quantify how closely predictions match the ground truth, they do not assess whether model outputs respect predefined logical or domain-specific constraints. In high-stakes applications, including healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems, logical consistency can be as critical as predictive accuracy, yet no standard metric captures this dimension. We introduce the Rule Violation Score (RVS), a complementary evaluation metric that quantifies the extent to which a predictive model respects a given set of logical rules, independently of predictive accuracy. RVS treats hard rules (strict constraints) and soft rules (statistical regularities) differently, can be evaluated on any dataset and on any predictive model expressed over a relational vocabulary, and can be computed using SQL queries that are automatically generated for Horn rules. Beyond evaluating models, RVS can also evaluate the logical consistency of training datasets and help identify poorly defined rules. We evaluate RVS on three benchmarks covering knowledge graph link prediction and relational regression, including rule-based, embedding-based, and neuro-symbolic predictive models. Our results demonstrate that two models achieving comparable predictive accuracy can exhibit substantially different levels of logical compliance, revealing differences in model behavior that standard metrics fail to capture.

Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the \emph{effective dimension} $d_{\rm eff}$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_{\rm eff}$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_{\rm eff}$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an \emph{exact} decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_{\rm eff}(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_{\rm eff}$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_{\rm eff}$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Modern Hebrew is needed for applications like text-to-speech (TTS), but is challenging due to the language's abjad writing system, which leaves vowels largely unwritten, creating substantial ambiguity. Standard approaches first predict vowel diacritics (nikud) to produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, but this is limited: vocalization data is scarce and laborious to produce, it does not specify features such as lexical stress, and it reflects formal grammatical rules rather than everyday spoken pronunciation. Direct sequence-to-sequence IPA prediction, meanwhile, struggles on limited data and fails to exploit the character-level alignment characteristic of abjads. Our method, ReNikud, overcomes these limitations with two key insights: (1) Weak audio supervision via a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labeling pipeline on thousands of hours of unlabeled Hebrew audio, yielding phonemic transcriptions that reflect natural spoken norms without manual annotation. (2) A pseudo-vocalization architecture that predicts IPA phonemes at each character position, enforcing character-level alignment as an inductive bias. Results on existing Hebrew G2P benchmarks and the new targeted MILIM benchmark for spoken Hebrew show that ReNikud surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and trained models to support further work on Hebrew TTS and speech technologies.

Understanding urban spatial morphology is critical for climate modeling, risk assessment, and sustainable urban design, and Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping provides the basic framework for this. However, many cities still use coarse ~100-m resolution LCZ records, which are unsuitable for fine-scale urban research. In this study, precomputed embeddings from TESSERA (Feng et al., 2025) and AlphaEarth (Brown et al., 2025) are compared to traditional Sentinel-1/2 (S1S2) composites in five Swiss cities to see if they can upscale coarse LCZ maps to 10-m resolution using an attention-based U-Net. Three experiments assess multi-city transferability, the impact of higher-resolution reference data, and temporal robustness to year-to-year phenology changes. We find that all datasets achieve strong performance with test data Intersection-over-Union (IoU) ranging from 0.59-0.69 and 0.77-0.82 in the first two experiments. TESSERA consistently outperforms both S1S2 and AlphaEarth across both settings As expected, we find that the transfer of embedding-based models from one year to another remains an open challenge. Overall, however, our results demonstrate the promising potential of embeddings derived from EO foundation models to reduce time consuming preprocessing, respectively, manual feature engineering tasks and to guide a universal deep learning-based LCZ mapping workflow. When combined with a simple location-aware attention U-Net architecture, the embeddings enhance regional transferability and scalability, supporting the development of comprehensive and reproducible fine-scale LCZ maps for global urban climate applications Improving reference data quality remains the strongest lever for further accuracy gains.

This data report introduces PolSeT (Polish Semantic Timbre), a dataset designed to facilitate research in psychoacoustics and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) in Polish and cross-cultural contexts. The dataset contains data from two sequential experiments. Experiment 1 (N=60) was a free-verbalization task aimed at creating a lexicon of Polish semantic descriptors. Using 11 stimuli, a total of 1901 descriptors (701 unique) were gathered. Experiment 2 (N=105) utilized this lexicon to conduct a semantic differential study, where participants rated 18 instrument sounds on 8 bipolar scales, with repeated trials for reliability analysis. The released dataset includes raw listener responses, comprehensive demographics (experience, gender, age), audio stimuli, and extracted acoustic features with Python extraction code. This dataset addresses a gap in open timbre research data, providing both the qualitative linguistic groundwork and the quantitative ratings necessary for psychoacoustic research and the training of multilingual semantic embedding models.