With the anticipated arrival of Q-day, quantum computers threaten current cryptographic schemes for encryption and digital signatures. In response, major content delivery networks and cloud service providers are already adopting Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). The current state-of-the-art focuses on benchmarking the operational performance of implementing PQC, but the real-world adoption status remains under-researched. This work utilizes large-scale SSH fingerprint data from a proprietary scanning tool to analyze PQC adoption across 1.52 million hosts and 27,012 entities. Our study shows that the PQC transition in the SSH protocol is underway but highly polarized: 45.2% of SSH hosts on port 22 support PQC, while 54.8% remain classical-only. At the entity level, 39.9% have enabled PQC on at least one host, whereas 60.1% have no PQC support. By correlating PQC adoption with industry, geography, and organizational size (digital and financial), this study provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of PQC adoption status in SSH infrastructure.
Attention is a major scalability bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), with its computational cost and key-value (KV) memory traffic becoming increasingly prohibitive as context length grows. Sparse attention addresses this bottleneck by restricting each query to a subset of the context, but its effectiveness hinges on identifying relevant regions both cheaply and reliably. Existing training-free methods primarily rely on runtime relevance estimates, with selection dimensionality and granularity typically governed by fixed heuristics rather than the intrinsic interaction structure of pretrained attention heads. We take a different perspective: the query-key operator of each pretrained head defines a characteristic response structure that determines the resolution needed for sparse selection, both across feature directions and across context tokens. Building on this insight, we propose Head-Adaptive Sparse Attention (HASA), a training-free sparse attention framework that jointly adapts selection resolution along these two dimensions. Along the feature dimension, the singular spectrum of each head's query-key operator determines an effective rank, yielding a compact, head-specific response space. Along the sequence dimension, neighboring regions are progressively merged according to the directional coherence of their token responses in this same space, while heterogeneous regions remain separate. Exact attention is then computed using the original full-dimensional KV states of the selected regions. HASA captures 88.1% of dense-attention mass and, compared with UNIQUE, a strong recent sparse-attention baseline, improves accuracy by up to 3.47 and 2.57 points on RULER and LongBench-Pro, respectively, and accelerates self-attention by up to 1.32x, while achieving up to 14.07x speedup over dense attention.
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have become a promising paradigm for end-to-end robot control, but their effectiveness still depends heavily on large volumes of demonstration data. In manipulation tasks, this dependence is compounded by structured spatiotemporal uncertainty in the action space: multiple nearby actions or trajectories may successfully solve the same task, while semantically equivalent demonstrations often unfold at different speeds. Standard pointwise supervision treats each demonstrated action as an exact target, imposing an unnecessary learning burden under such uncertainty. We present SURE, a data-efficient VLA training framework that explicitly models both spatial and temporal uncertainty. SURE augments a VLA backbone with a lightweight transposed-convolutional probabilistic action decoder that captures spatial uncertainty through local correlations among neighboring action bins. It further introduces Soft-DTW alignment supervision to accommodate local timing variations between predicted and demonstrated action chunks. Together, these two components reduce sensitivity to demonstrator-specific poses and execution timing, enabling more data-efficient action learning. We evaluate SURE on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world manipulation tasks. Even with only 10% of the demonstration data or 20% of the training steps, SURE achieves manipulation success rates that match or surpass baseline VLAs.
Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) connects information across documents through entity relationships to support relational reasoning. However, black-box access to GraphRAG systems can enable adversaries to reconstruct knowledge graphs and recover both structural connectivity between entities and the semantics of their relationships. Existing defenses lack formal privacy guarantees and provide limited protection against such reconstruction attacks. We propose RelGuard, the first differentially private framework for GraphRAG, which provides formal privacy guarantees by mitigating connectivity leakage and protecting relations and their semantic meaning through relation removal. We formalize relation differential privacy (relation-DP), which bounds the distinguishability of mechanism outputs according to the semantic distance between alternative relations while accounting for relation removal. Building on this definition, we develop a four-step defense mechanism that sanitizes source documents before GraphRAG indexing by perturbing relation predicates or removing their associated connectivity using the exponential mechanism. Experiments across three GraphRAG systems and two targeted reconstruction attacks demonstrate that RelGuard provides stronger protection against reconstruction attacks than four existing defense mechanisms while better preserving downstream utility.
A common test of personalization replaces a user's history with someone else's and measures the drop in accuracy. But this swap also changes the topics in the history, so the drop may reflect topic mismatch. We examine this problem with a frozen language model on LaMP-2 news categorization, using histories from similar users and synthetic histories assembled from other users' articles. The user's own history improves accuracy by 2.3 percentage points over a model trained without history. Removing history only at evaluation makes this gain appear larger, at 4.8 points. Category labels alone reproduce 86% of the accuracy gap between the user's own history and a random user's history. With synthetic histories matched on labels and text similarity, the gap falls to 0.9 points. Across two user splits and three training seeds, the advantage over a similar user's history is 3.2 points for users seen during training and 0.65 points for unseen users, where the evidence for an advantage remains inconclusive. A small movie-tagging experiment with one training seed also finds no advantage over other users' histories. These findings show why personalization should be evaluated on unseen users, with histories of similar content and a model trained without history as comparisons. We also find that adding gated cross-attention improves on a prefix-only model under our training setup; whether this holds more broadly remains open.
Post-training language models for reasoning typically rely on gold answers, task-specific verifiers, or learned reward models, limiting scalability when such signals are scarce. Multi-agent debate offers a self-supervised alternative, but converting debate into reliable training supervision remains challenging: majority voting weights agreeing responses equally, lacks a principled tie-breaking rule, and is ill-defined for open-ended tasks without a canonical answer; likelihood-based scoring can conflate fluency with correctness; and homogeneous committees may reinforce correlated errors. We introduce Alignment by Confident Debate (AbCD), which converts debate traces into preference data without gold answer labels. A sampling-diverse committee debates each problem, after which final answers are clustered by task-level semantic equivalence. We use verifiable tasks (mathematical reasoning, multiple-choice quantitative QA, and executable code-generation) as a controlled test bed: their answer keys or executable checkers let us evaluate the quality of debate-derived supervision against ground truth, even though the oracle itself never uses gold labels. Post-training on the resulting preferences outperforms inference-only ensembling and debate, as well as SFT on the same traces, across five model families spanning 1B to 8B parameters and four datasets, improving consensus accuracy, with a maximum gain of $21.5_{pp}$. Ablations show that the approach transfers to a larger model and to code generation, while also revealing limitations of heterogeneous committees and agreement-based weighting. Overall, the results suggest that debate traces can yield useful preference supervision when answer equivalence is combined with confidence-weighted disagreement.
Protein conformational ensemble generation aims to efficiently characterize the structural variations accessible to a protein beyond a single static structure. Recent flow-based methods efficiently generate conformational ensembles, but they model coordinated structural variation implicitly, which can limit ensemble fidelity and hinder direct control. To address this limitation, we propose CoMoFlow, a controllable framework for generating protein backbone conformational ensembles by explicitly modeling collective variation. CoMoFlow constructs protein-specific collective modes from the equilibrium structure, learns the distribution of their coefficients across the molecular dynamics (MD) ensemble, and uses sampled collective variations to guide SE(3) flow matching through feature conditioning and prior recentering. Experiments on ATLAS and de novo proteins show that CoMoFlow improves reconstruction of MD conformational distributions and coordinated structural variation relative to strong flow-based baselines, while enabling direct control over targeted conformational changes.
Traditional information theory provides powerful tools for analyzing statistical properties of information but offers limited insight into meaning and semantic transformation. It has never been possible to quantify the meaning of an arbitrary piece of information. Large language models represent information as vectors embedded within high-dimensional semantic spaces, enabling meaning to be analyzed geometrically. This paper defines semantic state as the vector representation of information within a model's semantic space and defines cognitive work as the transformation between semantic states, movement through semantic space. To quantify this transformation, we introduce the Contextual Information Differential (CID), a covariance-aware metric based on Mahalanobis distance measuring semantic displacement relative to the structure of the embedding manifold. By treating meaning as a geometric property of semantic space, CID provides a practical method for measuring semantic change, cognitive transformation, and information processing. This framework establishes a foundation for analyzing cognitive processing, learning, reasoning, knowledge generation, synthetic expertise, and human/AI collaboration through implementation-independent measurement of semantic state change in both human and artificial systems.
Bolt preload is a decisive functional quantity in bolted joints because it determines whether external loads are transmitted primarily through frictional clamping or directly through the bolt. Existing preload measurement techniques, including strain-gauge bolts, force washers, ultrasonic methods, and bolt-length measurements, are effective in certain applications but require additional hardware, coupling, calibration, or joint modifications. This limits their scalability for large numbers of standard fasteners and motivates a non-contact optical approach. This paper proposes PreForceVision, a physics-guided optical framework for estimating bolt preload from preload-induced surface deformation of the bolt-head front face. The method treats preload estimation as an inverse deformation-to-force problem, where deformation of the optically accessible bolt-head surface is extracted from reference-loaded image pairs and related to the internal preload state. Preliminary results for an M16 strength class 8.8 bolt show an approximately \SI{12}{\micro\meter} simulated head-face depression at \SI{90}{\kilo\newton}, strain-gauge measurements of comparable magnitude, and an optical 3D measured central depression of approximately \SIrange{10}{20}{\micro\meter}. The contribution is a physics-guided optical methodology combining controlled image-pair acquisition, DIC- or optical-flow-based deformation extraction, multimodal validation, and uncertainty-aware regression for rough preload estimation under controlled conditions.
Quantitative equity selection and portfolio construction in emerging and cross-border markets frequently suffer from computational bottlenecks, remote API fragility, survivorship bias, and rigid execution constraints such as discrete board lots and investor-mandated drawdown limits. In this paper, we present StockASkill, a local-first, full-data-driven AgentSkill engineered as a specialized Quant Co-Processor for autonomous AI agents and quantitative researchers. Tailored for agile portfolios (10^5 ~ 10^7 RMB) where discrete lot execution and capital protection are mandatory, StockASkill embeds a columnar DuckDB OLAP engine over 42.44 million historical price records and 186,432 financial disclosures spanning 26 years across China A-shares, Hong Kong, US equities, and ETFs. By eliminating ad-hoc network dependencies during analysis, StockASkill reduces cross-sectional screening latency across 5,400+ equities from over 25 seconds to sub-0.5 seconds (a 95%+ reduction). We formalize an end-to-end mathematical pipeline integrating a 7+1 factor alpha model, an SLSQP convex optimizer under smooth CVaR drawdown surrogates with exact path projection, dynamic 100-share board lot integer quantization, and an autonomous thesis lifecycle finite-state machine. Furthermore, we provide a zero-disk, strongly-typed JSON streaming interface designed for high-throughput LLM tool-calling. Open-sourced at https://github.com/axjing/stockaskill, comprehensive empirical benchmarks from 2018 to 2024 demonstrate that the architecture achieves annualized Sharpe ratios exceeding 1.48 and Calmar ratios up to 2.17, while reducing max drawdown by up to 85% relative to benchmark indices.
Transformer inference repeatedly invokes dense matrix multiplication and attention, including its data-dependent softmax normalization. We present Atik, an open-source RoCC accelerator for RocketChip that executes matrix multiplication and dense attention through one shared fixed-point MAC mesh. Atik accepts and returns BF16 tensors, uses a streaming online-softmax schedule that never materializes the full score matrix, and is invoked through a small descriptor-based ABI. We evaluate three meshes cycle-by-cycle on FireSim and report standalone Sky130 physical-design area. Across 137 logged FireSim test records, all tests pass their benchmark tolerance with zero reported output mismatches. Relative to the same scalar Rocket BF16 reference, the 8x8 configuration reaches 31.5x peak matmul speedup and 225.8x peak attention speedup. Hybrid projections for the single-layer workload-derived C models, using directly measured accelerator-kernel cycles, give aggregate speedups of 44.2x, 77.1x, and 32.3x for ViT, TinyBERT, and GPT-2 prefill, respectively; these are not full-model hardware replays.
Returned products in circular engineering often have heterogeneous degradation histories, making remaining function difficult to assess. For bolted joints, corrosion alters surface morphology, contact, friction, preload retention, and mechanical response. This paper presents a physics-informed multimodal framework for linking microscopic and camera-based degradation observations to functional indicators of corroded bolted joints. The workflow defines the corrosion failure mode, generates synchronized inspection and functional-response records, preprocesses image, roughness, exposure, and joint descriptors, aligns microscopy and camera observations through similarity learning, and constructs a calibrated corrosion-severity field. Partial differential equation (PDE) discovery is applied to this field to identify candidate effective mesoscale laws rather than complete electrochemical mechanisms. The corrosion-evolution model is coupled to a separate functional model, with friction coefficient as the primary target and preload loss included when clamp-force data are available. The contribution is a reproducible pathway for physically constrained assessment of degraded bolted-joint behavior.
Large language models have expanded beyond text to vision, audio, and other modalities, but understanding raw electromagnetic (EM) signals remains challenging. Wideband recordings can contain millions of samples, whereas existing waveform-based EM models are primarily evaluated on short in-phase and quadrature (IQ) segments, leaving long-recording understanding and detailed description insufficiently explored. We introduce LEMMO, a large EM model for instruction-driven recognition and description of long raw IQ recordings. LEMMO combines a linear-attention EM encoder with anti-aliased temporal resampling to process up to eight million complex samples. Its EM-text interaction module conditions learnable queries on instructions before retrieving signal evidence. Compact queries support recognition, while structured queries with auxiliary factual supervision organize scene-level properties, signal attributes, and cross-signal relationships for detailed description. We also construct and release a unified 1.38-TB corpus of real-world and synthetic EM signals, including LEMMO-ShortQA and LEMMO-LongDesc. Compared with MERLIN-LoRA, LEMMO improves mean EM-Bench perception accuracy by 15.77 %, mean strategy-generation ROUGE-L F1 by 4.38 points, and mean LEMMO-ShortQA accuracy by 14.31 %. It also improves categorical and numerical fact F1 on both LEMMO-LongDesc tasks while preserving its language backbone's MMLU performance. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/N1rv4n4/LEMMO and https://huggingface.co/datasets/DaftJun/RFLAS, respectively.
Language-model agents use experience through external retrieval and parameter learning. Consolidating stored experience into model weights requires deciding both which experience to train on and when its external records can leave retrieval. Admission based solely on student mastery can exclude useful teacher demonstrations, while removal immediately after training can discard guidance that the model still needs. We introduce ENGRAM, a framework that separates training admission from memory release. A demonstration-aware gate admits skills based on student mastery or sufficient successful teacher demonstrations. The student learns from selected action traces with context from an Engram Trace Graph (ETG). A verification gate then compares the updated model without episodic retrieval against the base model with retrieval on reserved probes. Release requires valid training participation and scores meeting both relative and absolute criteria; records for skills that fail verification remain retrievable. Experiments across interactive and reasoning benchmarks show consistent gains over frozen-weight ETG controls, with ablations supporting demonstration-aware admission and selective adapter activation. A controlled held-out comparison shows that verified release substantially reduces the retrievable footprint while remaining close to retain-all performance and outperforming immediate and budget-matched random release. ENGRAM also improves task performance while reducing input-token usage and model calls. Skill-level verification further reduces retrievable experience through selective archival, retaining external guidance for skills that do not meet the release criteria. Code is available in anonymous.4open.science/r/engram-anonymous.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to annotate social-science texts, but high accuracy does not establish that they apply researcher-supplied category definitions: predictions may instead reflect prior associations with category labels or labeled demonstrations. We introduce a counterfactual audit that reassigns definitions among output labels, distinguishing adherence to supplied definitions from preservation of a dataset's original mapping. Across three political-text datasets, models rarely follow reassigned definitions, and standard fine-tuning strengthens the original mapping without reliably increasing definition adherence. We then study retrieval-augmented annotation. Retrieving the nearest training examples generally outperforms retrieving examples separately within each category despite using fewer demonstrations. On the two tasks with substantial gains, direct \(k\)-nearest-neighbor classification recovers 74--93\% of the improvement, indicating that neighborhood labels provide much of the predictive signal. Relabeling fixed demonstrations redirects predictions, whereas aligning demonstrations with reassigned definitions substantially increases adherence to the new mapping. Thus, accuracy-improving interventions need not increase codebook adherence; definitions, category labels, demonstrations, retrieval, and training data should be aligned and validated jointly.
Data-use auditing in Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to determine whether the given data has been used for training, thereby supporting data ownership safeguards. A dominant solution is data watermarking, which embeds traceable signals into training data and detects them in model outputs. Recent studies have proposed many watermarking-based auditing methods in LLMs. However, systematic investigation from an adversarial perspective remains limited: non-compliant LLM providers would use unauthorized copyrighted datasets for training their own models to enhance model capabilities, while attempting to evade detection by auditors, thereby avoiding legal liability. To fill this research gap, we propose a novel evasion framework, termed Logit Laundering, where the non-compliant LLM provider manipulates model outputs at inference time to undermine detectable watermark signals. Specifically, we design a logit reshaping module to suppress watermark-induced statistical signals by integrating a statistical bias estimator as a plug-and-play component. This design keeps the model parameters unchanged and performs manipulation only in the logit space, thereby enabling auditing evasion while minimizing the impact on model's learned knowledge. To further balance evasion effectiveness and model utility, we introduce a confidence-aware scaling module to adaptively calibrate the suppression strength based on next-token prediction confidence. Extensive evaluations show that Logit Laundering can successfully evade existing various state-of-the-art auditing methods, significantly attenuating detectable signals, while preserving model utility on downstream tasks. Our work highlights the need for exploring more robust auditing methods to guard against evasion behaviors.
In the healthcare sector, claim denials impose significant financial and administrative burdens, emphasizing the need for automated and trustworthy decision-support systems. This paper proposes a modular Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework for healthcare claim denial analysis, integrating specialized agents for denial risk prediction, risk factor identification, diagnosis-procedure-medication code relationship analysis, and counterfactual analysis. The framework integrates predictive analytics, graph-based learning, a Hybrid Contextual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline grounded in healthcare policy documents, and a dedicated HIPAA Compliance Agent to support privacy protection. Evaluated on a synthetic healthcare claims dataset, the framework achieved 98% traceability of reported numerical findings, validated 214 of 216 policy citations, and removed all 280 identified sensitive identifiers without modifying the underlying analysis. These findings pave the way for further research into Agentic AI as a framework for explainable, policy-aware, and privacy-preserving healthcare claim denial management.
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) represent two approaches for knowledge representation and reasoning over heterogeneous data. Recent research has explored their integration through Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) systems, which use KGs to provide structured context to LLMs. However, existing GraphRAG approaches treat KGs as homogeneous graphs and rely on textual similarity between the input prompt and the context, rather than using it as a source of deterministic knowledge. This work proposes an agent-based GraphRAG system that introduces a symbolic layer to integrate deterministic reasoning alongside text similarities. This approach is based on the definition of typed centralities for KGs, where centrality measures are computed separately for each specific KG's class. This information is used to construct a symbolic representation that is provided to the LLM as a deterministic source. The proposed system was mathematically validated and evaluated on a real-world POLE (Person, Object, Location, Event) dataset, comparing reasoning and information retrieval with and without the symbolic layer. The results indicate that the our approach leads to responses that are more consistent with the context, improving the generated outputs.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse sequences organize radiofrequency excitation, gradient encoding, and signal acquisition, determining magnetization evolution and image formation. Sequence research requires translating imaging objectives into executable protocols meeting physical and acquisition constraints, refined via physical simulation, signal reconstruction, and scientific evaluation. Sequence construction, physical verification, parameter search, and assessment involve many tools and manual decisions, limiting automation from objective to verifiable sequence. We develop SmartBloch-Agent, an integrated framework for automated MRI sequence design and optimization. Given objectives and scientific constraints in natural language, an AI agent interprets goals, plans tasks, orchestrates tools, and makes feedback-informed decisions, drawing on a construction module and optimizers for structural design and parameter search. Our GPU-accelerated SmartBloch engine supplies physical computation for both stages, so the framework configures, per sequence and objective, event validation, Full-Bloch magnetization evolution, signal acquisition, image reconstruction, and scientific evaluation, and closes the loop without external MRI simulators. Results return to the agent to guide sequence revision, parameter optimization, and candidate selection, and the design files carry simulation, reconstruction, and evaluation evidence, forming an output package for a real-scanner workflow. Experiments show the framework automatically designs and optimizes MRI sequences for varied objectives and constraints, refines candidates with physical feedback, and improves several parameter-estimation metrics and downstream quantitative reconstruction. SmartBloch-Agent unifies objectives, design, physical execution, and evaluation into a continuous workflow for end-to-end automation of MRI sequence research.
We show that the Transformer's recurrent successors --- such as selective state-space models (SSMs), Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), and Retentive Network (RetNet) --- can be characterized as infinite-impulse-response (IIR) systems. The zero--pole geometries of these IIR systems characterize the temporal modes they can represent. However, to trade parallelism, the algebraic structures of the parameterizations of these recurrent systems often give rise to poles constrained to the real axis, thereby inducing an architectural bias in their recurrent dynamics. To unify these recurrent architectures and eliminate their pole geometry bias, inspired by the lattice--ladder realization of general IIR systems, we present \textsc{Mira} (\textbf{M}odal \textbf{I}IR \textbf{R}ecurrent \textbf{A}rchitecture), a unified family of linear-time recurrent architectures for building large language models (LLMs) with a highly parallel algebraic structure. Each \textsc{Mira} block realizes a higher-order IIR system that represents temporal modes from token streams through a lattice--ladder structure, followed by a feed-forward network (FFN). This realization enables the model to represent the temporal modes associated with both real and complex-conjugate poles. We pretrain \textsc{Mira-S}, a 12-layer small-scale LLM with 0.14B parameters composed entirely of \textsc{Mira} blocks. Throughout the pretraining, \textsc{Mira-S} achieves lower perplexity than strong recurrent baselines, exhibits stronger context-window generalization beyond the training length, and attains higher throughput with a dedicated CUDA kernel.