The paper introduces FedIoC, a federated learning framework that embeds structured threat indicators into gradient updates using a supervised contrastive loss. By aligning gradients from clients that share indicators for the same attack campaign, the server can cluster updates via cosine similarity to recover global campaign patterns without transmitting sensitive indicators. Experiments on two public threat‑detection benchmarks show that the server successfully identifies cross‑organizational campaign cohorts from fragmented local data.
By Manuel R\"oder, Bibin Babu, Frank-Michael Schleif
The paper introduces Expert Modulation, a novel approach for multi‑modal time series prediction that conditions both expert routing and computation on textual signals, thereby providing direct cross‑modal control over expert behavior. Unlike previous methods that rely on token‑level fusion, this mechanism avoids mixing temporal patches with language tokens in a shared embedding space, which can be problematic when high‑quality time‑text pairs are scarce or when time series characteristics vary widely. Experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that Expert Modulation yields strong improvements over existing multi‑modal forecasting techniques.
By Lige Zhang, Ali Maatouk, Jialin Chen, Karthik Charan Konduri, Leandros Tassiulas, Rex Ying
The paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) approach that uses time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding to limit each neuron to at most one spike per time window, enabling energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). A reference-based strategy is introduced to encode the four core LLM components—embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations, and dropout—allowing the construction of a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture trained end-to-end. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 show performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while achieving a 1.5‑billion‑parameter spiking LLM and providing an estimate of spike-related energy consumption.
By Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud
The paper introduces Agentic Context Cracking, a technique that adaptively and speculatively structures unstructured data during the reasoning process of large language model agents. By creating a sub-agent that extracts useful structure from documents as they are opened, the method reduces the need to repeatedly read large files, cutting token usage by 53% on the FanOutQA benchmark while maintaining accuracy. Over time, more queries are answered using the accumulated structured data, approaching the efficiency of a database lookup.
By Milad Rezaei Hajidehi, Qitong Wang, Stratos Idreos
The paper introduces Dual-Embedding Watermarking (DEW), a semantic watermarking technique for large language models that combines contextual and token-level embeddings. DEW applies algebraic vector-space operations to generate a watermark signal that remains robust to paraphrasing and translation, while obfuscating the signal with pseudo-random matrices seeded by a secret key. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art robustness, especially against translation, with minimal computational overhead and preserved text quality at lower watermark strengths.
By Jonas Sch\"afer, Cezary Pilaszewicz, Gerhard Wunder
The article surveys Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning (DHGRL), a field that tackles the challenges of modeling evolving, multi‑type networks. It introduces a unified definition covering both discrete‑time and continuous‑time DHGs, and proposes an algorithm‑centric taxonomy that groups methods into embedding‑based, GNN‑based, and Transformer‑based approaches, highlighting their biases toward temporal granularity. The survey also reviews key applications, datasets, benchmarks, and outlines future research directions.
By Huan Liu, Pengfei Jiao, Jie Yin, Hongjiang Chen, Zhidong Zhao
The paper reports on building a research-software catalog using a coding agent, starting from a three‑day hackathon prototype and moving to public deployment. It details the engineering work needed—adversarial review, data‑quality checks, browser validation, and publication safeguards—to ensure reliable operation, noting that silent failures were more problematic than crashes. The authors then examine applying these lessons to a larger, human‑curated portal (MateriApps) that combines curated metadata, external documentation, vector search, and local language‑model generation, finding that explicit validation, monitoring, and repeated review remain essential for AI‑assisted software portals.
By Kazuyoshi Yoshimi, Satoshi Terasaki, Gotai Yamada
The paper evaluates four metrics—CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO—used to measure cross‑lingual representation sharing in multilingual language models. Across 21 models ranging from 125 M to 14 B parameters, the metrics disagree, and the authors attribute this to anisotropy, where representations cluster in a narrow embedding cone. Only ILO shows a strong, robust correlation with cross‑lingual transfer performance (Spearman’s ρ = 0.90) after controlling for model size, family, and task variation, leading the authors to recommend ILO as the primary metric alongside anisotropy diagnostics.
By Oskar Holmstr\"om, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann
The paper introduces SEAL, a plug‑and‑play module that enhances single‑image sticker personalization in diffusion models by adding a semantic‑guided spatial attention loss, a split‑merge token strategy, and structure‑aware layer restriction. SEAL integrates without altering the U‑Net backbone and addresses overfitting issues such as visual entanglement and structural rigidity. Alongside SEAL, the authors release StickerBench, a large sticker dataset with six attribute tags to enable systematic evaluation of identity preservation and contextual controllability.
By Changhyun Roh, Yonghyun Jeong, Jonghyun Lee, Chanho Eom, Jihyong Oh
Qlippy is a retrieval‑augmented generative AI assistant designed to support reproducible quantum software development. It is embedded in the development environment and grounds its responses in a curated corpus of quantum‑software‑engineering knowledge, explaining reproducibility and provenance concepts in context. The assistant augments Qiskit programs with MLflow‑based experiment tracking that follows the QProv schema, thereby reducing reliance on large language models and enabling low‑cost, privacy‑preserving local deployment.
By Mahee Gamage, Vlad Stirbu
The paper introduces a multimodal emotion recognition framework that combines audio and visual feature extraction with an attention-based fusion strategy. Audio features include Wav2Vec2 embeddings, MFCCs, and statistical acoustic descriptors, fused via a BiLSTM, while video features are extracted using a ResNet50-BiLSTM architecture. A multi-head attention mechanism fuses these modalities, and experiments on MELD and IEMOCAP show significant accuracy and robustness gains, especially in unbalanced data settings.
By Xu Lin, Ke Wang, Hui Kang, Xinying Wang
LexFlip is a diagnostic tool that creates minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French clauses to test whether legal meaning is preserved when lexical overlap remains high. The dataset contains 373 edits that reverse legal force while keeping 93% of tokens unchanged, and a harness evaluates various metrics, regressors, and judges on these edits. The study finds that most embedding and BERTScore metrics barely differentiate these edits, while bidirectional NLI performs better, and a simple length feature outperforms semantic metrics on the FrJudge human benchmark.
By Gaurab Baral
LentEx is a new framework for latent entity extraction that uses synthetic data generation and instruction fine‑tuning to train smaller, efficient large language models. By creating diverse, contextually rich synthetic examples through a template‑based approach, LentEx overcomes the lack of labeled datasets and achieves strong performance, surpassing state‑of‑the‑art models on the MTEB Clustering Benchmark. The method also generalizes well to unseen domains, making it useful for tasks such as retrieval‑augmented generation, customer persona analysis, and knowledge graph enrichment.
By Umesh Bodhwani, Yuan Ling, Cibi Chakravarthy Senthilkumar, Shujing Dong, Yarong Feng, Hongfei Li, Ayush Goyal
BeaconKV is a training‑free key‑value cache compression technique for Large Reasoning Models that uses beacon queries—compact representatives of query clusters—to predict which KV pairs will be revisited during long‑horizon reasoning. By focusing on Thought Revisiting Tokens that re‑attend distant context, BeaconKV reduces memory usage up to 5.8× and improves throughput by over 4.3× while largely preserving cache accuracy across multiple open‑source LRMs and reasoning benchmarks.
By Janghyeon Kim, Minsoo Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Jungwook Choi
The paper reports a comprehensive tuning of both a novel sparse self‑organizing map algorithm (SparseBin) and its baseline cuSPARSE implementation. By optimizing four key levers—tile size, tile‑membership clustering, neuron‑axis chunking, and vectorised loads—the authors achieved a 5.6‑10.1× speed‑up per epoch for map sizes ranging from 32×32 to 512×512, and increased the performance margin over the CUDA baseline from ~80× to ~385×. The tuned kernel saturated the L2 bandwidth at 77% of peak, indicating that further performance gains are unlikely without new hardware or fundamentally different approaches.
By Andrew James Amos
Embedded Graph Flows (EGF) is a generative model for categorical graphs that learns continuous embeddings for node and unordered-edge categories and uses a permutation‑equivariant graph transformer to transport Gaussian noise toward these embeddings. A terminal readout then maps the embeddings back to discrete graph categories. EGF achieves competitive performance on molecular benchmarks, outperforming other methods on QM9 and maintaining low maximum mean discrepancy on ZINC250k.
By Ethan Ma, Zihan Wang, Chris Siu Yeung Chow, Xinguo Feng, Qingqing Li, Rui Jiang, Naipeng Dong, Guangdong Bai
The paper investigates the energy landscape of the t‑SNE algorithm, highlighting its non‑convexity and the resulting difficulty in understanding its behavior. It demonstrates that for a broad class of t‑SNE‑related energies and symmetric data densities, there exist infinite families of distinct critical points that preserve discrete symmetries in both feature and embedding spaces. These critical configurations explain empirical observations such as topology breaking and spurious clustering, and the authors support their claims with numerical and analytical examples.
By Nakul Haridas, Ryan Murray
The paper introduces a Nested Inductive Bias framework that uses a two‑stage diffeomorphic composition to pull back non‑Euclidean target geometries onto symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifolds. This approach allows the construction of curvature‑aligned Riemannian classifiers that respect both matrix constraints and the intrinsic relational geometry of data. Empirical results on kinematic, signal processing, and synthetic benchmarks show that class separability degrades when metric curvature does not match the data distribution, and the authors also propose the Rational Conformal Metric (RCM) for robust vectorized architectures.
By Tushar Das
CAGE: Coherence-Aware Graph Encoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation introduces a reranking framework that evaluates and enhances the coherence of retrieved passages across four dimensions—Intra-Domain Relevance, Noise Resistance, Informational Bonding, and Factual Consistency. The method transforms passages into directed heterogeneous entity graphs, reweights factual anchors, encodes structural patterns with a Relational Graph Convolutional Network, and fuses inter-chunk coherence with query relevance to produce a final ranking. Evaluations on four multi‑hop benchmarks show that CAGE matches or surpasses strong baselines, improving Recall@5 on bridge‑dominated datasets and consistently boosting downstream Exact Match scores, indicating that structurally coherent context leads to more precise answers even when retrieval recall is similar or lower.
By Tong Qi, Jingyu Wu, Youbing Yin, Spencer Hong, Daben Liu, Erin Babinsky
The paper investigates how visuomotor imitation policies fail when visually similar distractors are introduced, framing the issue as conditional visual grounding where the target changes with manipulation phase and task state. Using Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), the authors systematically vary color and shape similarity of distractors, pinpointing failures to picking and placement stages. They then test distractor augmentation, phase‑dependent attention regularization, and appearance‑based visual prompting, which together significantly improve robustness in simulation and on a physical UR3e robot, and demonstrate similar improvements on a pretrained vision‑language‑action policy for instrument handling.
By Vivek Chavan, Pengtao Xie, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann, Kevin Haninger, J\"org Kr\"uger