arXiv:2607.17421v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The strong chromatic index $\chi'_s(G)$ is the smallest number of colours needed to colour the edges of a graph $G$ so that any two edges at distance at most $2$ receive different colours. Using the \emph{local flag algebra} framework introduced in a companion paper, we prove $\chi'_s(G) \leq 1.73\,\Delta(G)^2$ for every graph $G$ of maximum degree $\Delta(G)$, $\chi'_s(G) \leq 1.6255\,\Delta(G)^2$ for every bipartite $G$, and $\chi'_s(G) \leq 1.6633\,\Delta_A(G)\,\Delta_B(G)$ for every bipartite $G$ of side maximum degrees $\Delta_A(G), \Delta_B(G)$ with rational $\Delta_B(G)/\Delta_A(G) \in (0, 1]$, provided $\Delta(G)$, $\Delta_A(G)$, $\Delta_B(G)$ are sufficiently large. These three bounds make progress towards three established conjectures: those of Erd\H{o}s-Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il (1985) for general graphs, Faudree-Gy\'arf\'as-Schelp-Tuza (1989) for bipartite graphs, and Brualdi-Quinn Massey (1993) in the asymmetric bipartite setting.
Additionally, for the random bipartite graph $G \sim G(n_A, n_B, p)$ at constant $p \in (0,1)$ and bounded aspect ratio $\max(n_A, n_B) = O(\min(n_A, n_B))$, we prove the Brualdi-Quinn Massey bound $\chi'_s(G) \leq \Delta_A(G)\,\Delta_B(G)$ asymptotically almost surely.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.17037v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: High-resolution atmospheric data are required to resolve mesoscale and localized meteorological structures, however such datasets remain limited in many regions of the world. Existing high-resolution weather products are typically produced through dynamical downscaling, which is computationally expensive and difficult to scale across locations, variables, and forecast scenarios. These limitations motivate machine-learning-based downscaling systems that can generate multiple weather variables stochastically while producing new high-resolution fields directly. In this paper we present Apeliotes, a framework for high-resolution weather forecasting. Built on the global re-analysis atmospheric data, a pre-trained global weather foundation model, and a regionally trained generative diffusion model, Apeliotes not only provides accurate kilometer-scale weather variables, but also multi-level atmospheric fields which are not directly available in the existing global atmospheric data. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that Apeliotes achieves highly competitive performance. The model predicts vertical wind profile with less than 3\% error between truth and predicted fields, achieving correlations of 0.91 for 10-m wind speed and 0.99 for 2-m temperature, with NRMSE values of 0.42 and 0.17, respectively.
arXiv:2607.17524v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task. Our key intuition is that by training the model to distinguish good and bad tokens in a response, we naturally guide the model towards generating good tokens, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with directly training the model to generate off-policy tokens. Experiments on document summarization tasks show that TOPL achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization across 11 datasets against a diverse set of sequence-level and token-level baselines. We further demonstrate that TOPL transfers effectively to machine translation, suggesting that its benefits generalize across different faithful generation tasks. Through ablation studies, we confirm that our token-level learning signal is critical to good performance; sequence-level analogues do not confer similar benefits. Finally, we show that TOPL induces interpretable model updates: the LoRA adapters learned through TOPL function as linear classification heads and steering vectors.
arXiv:2607.17085v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UASs) can remotely sense targets across large-scale areas but may be vulnerable to threats in contested environments. Current approaches consider efficiency through UAS path planning, but missions prioritizing robustness (i.e., the capacity to withstand disruptions) and resilience (i.e., the ability to recover from disruptions) are rarely considered despite their ability to increase mission success. This paper presents robust and resilient strategies for route planning for a fleet of UASs in a heterogeneous threat landscape. By integrating components of robustness and resilience in route planning through allowing the UASs to overlap in the waypoint locations and dynamic mission adaptation, the probability of mission success of complete area coverage can be increased. The results show that a robustness-focused strategy shows significant improvement in probability of mission success over an efficiency-based strategy, and that a resilience-based strategy outperforms both the efficiency- and robustness- based strategies. The specified methodologies provide promising future directions of research to explicitly incorporate robustness and resilience into UAS mission planning.
arXiv:2607.17091v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Processing-In-Memory (PIM) has emerged as a promising technology for accelerating machine learning (ML) workloads. Specifically, non-volatile memory-based PIM architectures have enabled effective ML acceleration due to their ability to perform energy-efficient matrix-vector multiplication operations. However, these devices suffer from non-idealities such as thermal noise. This noise alters the stored values in the memory cells which correspond to actual model weights, compromising the inference accuracy. In this work, we introduce ThRIve, a noise-aware training methodology that leverages low-rank adaptation to enable thermally robust inference on heterogeneous PIM architectures. ThRIve selectively stores these low-rank noise-aware parameters on a hardware that is less susceptible to thermal noise, enabling robustness against temperature-induced noise variations. ThRIve mitigates the effects of thermal-noise and prevent the drop in inference accuracy across the entire operating temperature range. Experimental results demonstrate that ThRIve-enabled architectures maintain consistent inference accuracy, with the mean accuracy staying within 2% of the ideal (i.e., noise-free) accuracy, and the variation in accuracy across the entire operating temperature range remaining within 2% of the mean. The proposed methodology achieves accuracy and robustness comparable to thermally-resilient Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM)-based PIM systems, while delivering up to 5.4x reduction in energy-delay product (EDP) during CNN model inferencing.
arXiv:2607.17715v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-context inference is central to modern large language model (LLM) applications such as retrieval-augmented generation and multi-document reasoning. To mitigate the growing inference cost, recent work has explored key-value (KV) cache reuse to reduce redundant prefill computation. However, existing reuse methods primarily focus on computation savings and overlook a critical bottleneck in long-context LLM serving: the cost of storing and accessing large KV caches. While KV compression appears to be a natural complement, naively combining compression with non-prefix KV reuse often leads to severe accuracy degradation. In this work, we propose C$^2$KV, a unified framework for non-prefix KV reuse that jointly optimizes KV extraction and inference-time concatenation. C$^2$KV learns a composable and compressed KV cache manifold that is explicitly designed to be position-agnostic. Our approach introduces a lightweight sidecar Extractor with learnable compression tokens and a structured attention flow, enabling modular KV representations that can be flexibly reused and concatenated without modifying the frozen base model. We further employ a compression-concatenation co-training strategy to align extraction-time representations with their downstream reuse behavior. Extensive experiments across multiple long-context benchmarks and model families demonstrate that C$^2$KV significantly reduces KV cache storage and transfer costs, achieving up to 17$\times$ inference speedup under long contexts, while preserving generation quality.
arXiv:2607.18029v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Researchers need to answer ad-hoc questions about the contents of domain-specific archives but often lack the expertise to write structured queries on the metadata. We show that when domain vocabulary and semantics are captured in a well-designed Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology, Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate accurate structured queries zero-shot, without fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, or multi-agent orchestration. We present the Natural Language Knowledge Graph Query (NLKGQ) system, a framework and development process that enables natural language access to metadata in such archives. The framework includes a web interface that helps researchers pose natural language questions, which a domain-agnostic harness translates to SPARQL via an LLM and executes against a knowledge graph. The development process begins with capturing domain vocabulary and semantics in a formal OWL ontology. Domain-specific code then extracts metadata from archive sources and imports it into a knowledge graph defined by the ontology. Both are designed for reuse across domains. We demonstrate the system on metadata derived from a large-scale neuroimaging research archive, evaluating multiple LLMs and ontology representations. The best configurations achieve 100% accuracy on a competence and regression question set developed with domain experts. An ablation study across eight ontology representations reveals that readable entity names and semantic annotations are the dominant factors in accuracy, more significant than model choice or prompt engineering. We also compare SPARQL to an auto-generated SQL database as query backends, showing that OWL's structural features provide a substantial advantage over SQL DDL for LLM-driven query generation. Our demonstration domain also requires local LLMs on modest institutional hardware to address privacy concerns for human subject data.
arXiv:2607.16530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As generative AI is increasingly applied to automate multi-step and high-stake workflows, human judgment and involvement remain essential for ensuring the quality of AI-generated outputs. In practice, while it is desirable for human experts to provide oversight on AI regularly, often by reviewing intermediate outputs, giving feedback, making corrections, and steering subsequent steps, such oversight is constrained by the time and resources that humans can afford. This creates a tension between the need for human oversight and AI's efficiency in delivering more output with less intervention. An important but underexplored question, then, is how to optimally engage humans in human-AI coworking. This work was originally motivated by our empirical observation that in long AI workflows, human oversight often improves user satisfaction while reducing unnecessary rework and token consumption. From there, we formulate the problem of where to place oversight stages in human-AI coworking. Under reasonable assumptions, we then develop the nonuniformity principle, which states that the optimal schedule places oversight stages with non-decreasing gaps along the workflow. We empirically validate this principle in two common AI agent workflows: writing literature reviews and constructing websites.
arXiv:2607.16791v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The region near the interface between cortical bone and the medullary cavity (the endosteal surface) is of particular interest for the early detection of osteoporosis. This region is typically the first to exhibit signs of unbalanced remodeling (enlarged pores and increased surface roughness). In this study, we analyze ultrasound reflection at the endosteal surface to introduce a novel potential biomarker of cortical bone health based on specularity. Our hypothesis is that increased pore size and surface roughness enhance ultrasound scattering, thereby reducing specular reflection. We reconstruct maps of specularity by combining a signal processing technique initially designed to enhance specular reflectors in soft tissues with a beamforming technique that accounts for refraction at bone soft tissue interfaces. Specularity values (between 0 and 1) quantify the similarity between received signals and signals from an ideal specular reflector. Using numerical simulations and ex vivo measurements with a 2.5 MHz phased array we highlight a strong relationship between specularity and bone microstructure, as assessed by high-resolution micro-computed tomography. Among 12 regions of interest (ROI) in the femoral bone of three donors, 8 ROIs without large pores showed high specularity (>0.5) in over 50% of pixels, in contrast to 4 ROIs with signs of extensive remodeling. Both pore volume fraction and pore size were strongly associated with specularity. In simple linear regression analyses, each parameter individually explained 84% of the variability in specularity. These findings suggest that specularity reflects bone microstructure and may potentially serve as a sensitive marker for identifying cortical bone degradation near the endosteal surface.
arXiv:2607.16366v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Robotic navigation in unstructured environments requires robust situational awareness to safely traverse hazards such as steep slopes and rocky terrain. To address this challenge, perception systems increasingly rely on multimodal sensor fusion. Specifically, integrating thermal imagery with standard optical and depth sensors enhances terrain differentiation, directly improving the reliability of mapping algorithms. This paper presents PRISM, a multimodal perception system for terrain mapping in unstructured settings. PRISM leverages a custom sensor suite to capture aligned RGB, depth, and thermal (RGB-D-T) imagery. At its core is OmniUnet, a novel vision transformer-based network specifically designed for multimodal semantic terrain segmentation. We validated the proposed system using two newly annotated datasets (BASEPROD and LAENTIEC) and demonstrate its real-world applicability through physical field experiments. Deployed on a resource-constrained embedded computer, PRISM efficiently generates traversability maps that directly enable autonomous navigation via a rover's Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) subsystem.
arXiv:2607.18039v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Production customer-service bots must improve answer quality across iterative releases, yet large language models must not bypass evidence boundaries, policy rules, or human-handoff safeguards. We present an \textbf{Evidence-Grounded Customer-Service Agent Workflow} deployed in a real-world customer-service setting. BM25 recall, issue-title-vector recall, issue-description-vector recall, weighted RRF fusion, and cross-encoder reranking construct grounded FAQ evidence for controlled LLM decisions. Policy-guided orchestration then combines this RAG evidence with scenario-specific rule evidence, conversation memory, and clarification state inside a fixed LangGraph DAG~\cite{langgraph2024}. The paper contributes three reusable deployment patterns: \textbf{hybrid RAG evidence construction}, where multi-channel retrieval and reranking produce auditable FAQ candidates; \textbf{evidence-grounded issue/action decision}, where an Evidence-Grounded Decision Module selects an issue/action from typed FAQ evidence and scenario-specific rule evidence; and \textbf{trace-driven RAG and reranker improvement}, where traces diagnose whether failures come from recall, ranking, final candidate selection, clarification, rule-derived evidence, or action policy, and where reranker fine-tuning is evaluated not only for in-domain gain but also for forgetting risk.
arXiv:2607.17289v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In Online Sorting, we are given an array $A$ of $n$ initially empty cells. At each time step $t\in[n]$, an element $x_t\in[0,1]$ arrives and must be placed irrevocably into an empty cell, without knowledge of future arrivals. The objective is to minimize the sum of absolute differences between elements assigned to adjacent cells. The problem has been studied under both adversarial and stochastic input models. For adversarial sequences, Aamand, Abrahamsen, Beretta, and Kleist (SODA'23) gave a tight $O\sqrt n)$-competitive algorithm, fully resolving the worst-case setting. For stochastic sequences, in which the elements are drawn i.i.d.\ from $U[0,1]$, Hu (SODA'26) gave an $\log n\cdot 2^{O(\log^* n)}$-competitive algorithm in expectation and proved an $\Omega(\log n)$ lower bound, while Kalavas, Platanos, and Tolias (STACS'26) gave an $O(\log^2 n)$-competitive algorithm with high probability. Very recently, Hermansen (ESA'26) closed the remaining gap by designing an $O(\log n)$-competitive algorithm in expectation.
In this work, we study Random-Order Online Sorting, a model interpolating between the adversarial and stochastic settings, that was posed as a challenging open question by Hermansen (ESA'26). Here, the input is a multiset chosen adversarially, but its elements arrive in uniformly random order. We take a different point of view by solving the problem in rank space, and prove an $O(\log^2 n)$-competitive algorithm with high probability, matching the state-of-the-art high probability guarantee for the stochastic setting in this more general model. We also study a multidimensional generalization, which we call Random-Order Online TSP, and obtain an $O(\log^3 n)$-competitive algorithm with high probability.
arXiv:2607.17574v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement-learning navigation policies for legged robots select actions reactively from current observations and short-term memory, with limited capacity to anticipate how moving obstacles will evolve in the near future. In dynamic environments, this reactivity causes the robot to respond too late because collision risk depends on short-horizon scene structure rather than on current obstacle positions alone. Lightweight predictive supervision applied to the policy's recurrent state during training can encode anticipatory obstacle dynamics without modifying the inference-time controller. We augment a reactive LSTM-SRU navigation backbone with an auxiliary JEPA-style predictor and SIGReg regularization: during training, the predictor supervises the deterministic hidden state to anticipate its own next state; at inference, it is fully discarded, incurring zero additional computational cost. On simulated and real-world navigation benchmarks with dynamic obstacles, our method substantially improves navigation success while reducing collision rates through the predictive training signal alone, without additional inference-time parameters. Real-robot deployment on a Unitree Go2 demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer: the controller navigates cluttered indoor and dynamic outdoor environments without fine-tuning, with evasive behavior consistent with the collision reduction observed in simulation.
arXiv:2607.17575v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose ARBITER, a novel LLM guardrail framework that introduces two key ideas: (i) dual-hypothesis reasoning, a reasoning method for LLM guardrails that explicitly considers both safe and unsafe interpretations of a prompt before making a safety decision, and (ii) multi-component supervised fine-tuning (MC-SFT), a structured training loss for reasoning-based guardrails that decomposes LLM outputs into logical components and weights them according to their importance. Existing reasoning-based guardrails often rely on expensive procedures, such as generating reasoning traces using larger or closed-source teacher models and applying full-parameter fine-tuning. In contrast, ARBITER uses a cost-effective self-generation strategy for reasoning traces and LoRA-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning while still achieving better performance than these expensive approaches. Additionally, ARBITER provides faithful evidence-phrase explanations for unsafe decisions, enabling a more transparent and interpretable guardrail method. Experiments on three safety moderation benchmarks show that ARBITER outperforms existing reasoning-based and non-reasoning guardrail baselines, with clear gains in out-of-domain evaluations.
arXiv:2607.17297v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides detailed aerodynamic data for vehicle design, but its cost limits design iteration. Neural-operator surrogates reduce this cost, yet their deterministic predictions do not indicate when a geometry or surface region is reliable. This study develops a conformal-prediction framework for reliability-aware automotive aerodynamic surrogate modeling on the DrivAerML dataset. GeoTransolver is the main backbone, while Transolver assesses transfer across neural-operator architectures. For drag coefficient prediction, conformalized quantile regression constructs calibrated case-level intervals. For surface pressure and wall shear stress (WSS), point prediction is combined with residual-scale estimation and residual-normalized conformal calibration to obtain spatially adaptive intervals. Global absolute, point-adaptive normalized, and case-wise normalized calibration are compared under split and cross-validation-assisted out-of-fold protocols. All experiments target 90% nominal coverage. Conformal calibration corrects the under-coverage of raw drag-coefficient quantile intervals, while out-of-fold score aggregation reduces the Monte Carlo coverage standard deviation from 10.41 to 3.10 percentage points. For surface fields, point-adaptive normalized calibration yields the narrowest near-nominal intervals, reducing mean width by 22.68% for pressure and 25.35%--27.09% for WSS under the out-of-fold protocol. Case-wise normalized calibration is more conservative but improves vehicle-level reliability. Smoothness regularization reduces the residual-scale local-variation score by 74.29% and lowers interval widths without material coverage loss. The framework converts deterministic neural-operator outputs into calibrated reliability indicators for prioritizing uncertain vehicle geometries and surface regions in follow-up CFD verification.
arXiv:2607.16972v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continuous Chain-of-Thought methods replace verbose reasoning traces with a short sequence of dense latent representations. Earlier continuous CoT methods indirectly supervise the latent representations such that its final state match that of verbose reasoning traces, requiring autoregressive, slow generation during training. We introduce C-MTP, a simpler, faster direct supervision approach that models each latent as an average of the embeddings in the CoT traces to be compressed. Our approach outperforms a prior direct supervision method that approximates the distribution of compressed tokens, and performs competitively to slower indirect supervision approaches in existing evaluation setup with simplified CoT traces (less than 100 tokens). Lastly, we extend the evaluation of Continuous CoT methods to complex tasks with longer reasoning traces ($\ge$ few hundreds reasoning tokens). We find both direct and indirect supervision training methods perform poorly (roughly 65\% performance drop) in this setting, revealing the limitations of current continuous CoT methods. The code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/Varun221/cmtp_research
arXiv:2607.17092v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The core objective of short video recommendation is to model users' unobservable true satisfaction with recommended videos. As the dominant industrial framework, end-to-end multi-objective ensemble ranking models are typically trained with multi-dimensional dense user behavioral signals, such as clicks and watch time. However, these behavioral signals are partial, fragmented, and often mutually conflicting user satisfaction proxies, introducing uncertainty and label bias into satisfaction modeling. Conventional deterministic models overlook this uncertainty, which exacerbates satisfaction label bias and results in suboptimal model convergence. Meanwhile, existing uncertainty-aware methods mostly employ uncertainty for post-hoc ranking adjustments rather than leveraging it as a remedy to mitigate the inherent bias within the core optimization pipeline. This paper proposes UAME, an Uncertainty-Aware end-to-end Multi-objective Ensemble ranking framework for short video recommendation. UAME represents the model's prediction as a Gaussian scoring variable, where the mean denotes the predicted satisfaction score and the variance quantifies predictive uncertainty associated with this score. We further design a probabilistic pairwise ranking loss, and construct an uncertainty-aware sample-level weighting scheme to mitigate the bias. We further provide theoretical analysis suggesting that the weighting scheme helps mitigate satisfaction label bias. Extensive offline and online experiments on a large-scale industrial short video platform demonstrate that UAME consistently improves two state-of-the-art paradigms, EMER and EASQ, and better aligns with questionnaire-based user satisfaction. UAME has been deployed in our production short-video recommendation system and continues to deliver stable, statistically significant gains.
arXiv:2607.16263v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Antibody expression ranking is a critical task in antibody design, yet its modelling is severely hindered by the scarcity of labeled experimental data. To address this, we propose a unified preference-based learning framework that integrates scarce quantitative expression data with large-scale weak positive supervision from immunization data. We adapt Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to protein language models by introducing a union-masked log-likelihood approximation and IMGT-based alignment, enabling efficient training on variable-length sequences. Evaluating on a diverse internal dataset of 1254 labeled sequences and 4 million unlabeled camelid-derived antibodies, we show that our method consistently outperforms baselines on most metrics. Our results demonstrate that preference learning can effectively learn from weak supervision, providing a scalable solution for antibody expressibility optimization in data-constrained settings. Project page: https://kisoji-biotechnology-inc.github.io/Preference-Expression-Ranking/.
arXiv:2607.17577v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Harmonic Balance (HB) method is widely used to compute and analyze the periodic responses of nonlinear systems. However, its application to high-dimensional complex systems is limited by the burden of handling the partial derivatives of the nonlinearities. This work presents pyHB, an open-source, automatic-differentiation-enhanced semi-analytical framework that integrates the complete HB workflow for general user-defined nonlinear systems. The proposed formulation exploits localized nonlinearities and applies PyTorch-based automatic differentiation (AD) only to the reduced nonlinear force, thereby avoiding the need for user-supplied derivatives of the nonlinear force and maintaining controllable GPU memory usage. Weighted arc-length continuation, sparse matrix assembly, a blocked solution strategy for the augmented continuation equations, and Floquet-based stability analysis are incorporated within a modular architecture that separates model definition from reusable numerical procedures. Hence, pyHB can provide a complete landscape of the nonlinear system's periodic response based solely on the user-defined dynamical equations. Four examples, including a quasi-zero-stiffness isolator, a nonlinear piezoelectric energy harvester, a 284 degrees of freedom (DOFs) aeroengine model, and a 2000 DOFs Bernoulli beam, demonstrate the ability of pyHB to trace stable and unstable solution branches and capture subharmonic resonance, combination resonance, and mixed-order electromechanical responses. Notably, in the Bernoulli beam example with 202000 HB unknowns, the AD-enhanced solver requires approximately 0.44s per continuation point, achieving several-hundred-fold speedup compared to the Newmark-$\beta$ method and remaining 637.8MB of additional RAM and 243.5MB of GPU memory. The proposed pyHB provides a general, one-stop benchmark platform for HB-based nonlinear dynamics analysis.
arXiv:2607.17093v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generative CAD modeling has broad design and application potential. Despite significant advances in Boundary Representation (B-Rep) generation, the dominant representation in CAD, existing methods largely depend on uniformly sampled point- or grid-based geometry representations, sacrificing native surface types and parameters and thereby limiting geometric fidelity and downstream usability. We present ParaCAD, an autoregressive framework for point-cloud-conditioned B-Rep generation that directly operates on native parametric surfaces. ParaCAD introduces a surface-centric tokenization that explicitly encodes each face by its exact surface type and continuous parameters, preserving the intrinsic semantics of CAD geometry. Our model first generates parametric surfaces with constrained UV domains, and then constructs a valid B-Rep by globally intersecting these surfaces to recover edges and vertices. ParaCAD places point-cloud-conditioned generation at the core of B-Rep synthesis, making it practical for user-guided reconstruction and seamless integration into existing 3D generation pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ParaCAD produces accurate B-Reps with faithful point-cloud alignment, outperforming point-based baselines in geometric precision, robustness, watertightness and downstream usability.
arXiv:2607.17095v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Accurate short-term wind power forecasting is essential for grid stability and operational planning, yet remains challenging due to the complex interactions between atmospheric conditions and turbine dynamics. However, existing methods fail to effectively incorporate weather forecasting with wind turbine data (i.e., SCADA), leading to suboptimal solutions. To address this, we introduce a multimodal framework that integrates historical point-based SCADA data with grid-based Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecasts, which is challenging due to heterogeneous input and the complex physical wind-turbine interactions. Our approach first explicitly decomposes inputs into scalar and vector features to better capture both site-specific and geometric dependencies and then incorporates a geometric encoder to extract rotation-invariant features from wind vectors. We further leverages a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) architecture, which performs global convolutions in the frequency domain to efficiently model long-range spatiotemporal relationships. Extensive experiments on three real-world wind farms, with weather forecasting data, demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of its physically-informed design. The core implementation of our method is publicly available at: https://github.com/shawn-sypiao/GWPF.
arXiv:2607.16367v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On flat superhydrophobic surfaces, droplet rebound is well described by a single inertio-capillary time scale, yielding a contact-time that is independent of impact energy. This single-mode response reflects the radial symmetry of flat-plate impacts. We demonstrate that an anisotropic geometric constraint, imposing a fixed spreading length along one axis, breaks this degeneracy and splits the rebound into a reciprocal pair of inertio-capillary modes. The fixed length also couples the contact-time to the Weber-dependent maximum spread, introducing an impact-energy dependence absent on the flat plate. We realize this constraint with grooved substrates, simulated using a non-ideal, entropic, multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method and validated against the experiments of Chantelot et al. Extending their blob model from a single transverse scale to the reciprocal pair, we organize both modes through a geometric blob number and relate their time scales to the Weber number and groove width. We show that on non-wetting grooves the reciprocal modes are recovered directly, and explore the effects of finite wall affinity, using competition between the two modes to explain an observed two-branch structure in the contact-time response on mildly wetting, superhydrophobic grooves. Predictions tied to global energy balance reproduce cleanly across all conditions, while those tied to the details of the droplet's spread morphology are approximate but directionally correct. These results show that anisotropic confinement turns contact-time reduction from a question of accelerating a single rebound mode into one of selecting between conjugate inertio-capillary modes.
arXiv:2607.18040v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Existing image manipulation localization (IML) methods rely heavily on 2D forensic cues, such as low-level artifacts, noise traces, and semantic inconsistencies in the manipulated image. While effective in many cases, these cues become much less discriminative when manipulated regions are well blended with their surrounding context in appearance. In such cases, a manipulated region may remain locally appearance-consistent, but still violate the geometric structure of the surrounding scene. This limitation motivates us to go beyond purely 2D evidence and introduce geometric reasoning into IML. To this end, we leverage monocular reconstruction to obtain auxiliary geometric cues, including depth and surface normals. However, a key challenge lies in the fact that reconstructed geometry on manipulated images is inherently noisy and cannot be used naively. Rather than treating depth and normals as direct evidence, we estimate their reliability and exploit them selectively for localization. Based on this principle, we design a geometry-aware framework (GFrame) that fuses reliable geometric cues with RGB features and propagates them across scales to improve fine-grained localization. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves excellent performance under limited budget constraints. These results indicate that reliable 3D geometry provides complementary forensic evidence beyond traditional 2D cues for IML. Related code will be released.
arXiv:2607.17042v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Humanoid robots have become increasingly popular in applications such as social interaction, education, and service roles, which drives the need for more natural and efficient human-robot interactions. However, currently available humanoid heads often face limitations, including high costs, mechanical complexity, and limited adaptability across diverse environments. To address these challenges, we present an articulated humanoid robot head designed for a receptionist role, integrating a mechanical structure with 21 degrees of freedom (DoF), including mechanisms for the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, and neck, and covered with realistic silicone skin to achieve a human-like appearance and expression. The system integrates a model-based architecture that combines SCRFD, ArcFace, and ByTetrack for face recognition and Llama and Whisper for natural language processing, with hardware support enabling real-time operations and human re-identification. The conversational ability and re-identification capabilities of the humanoid robot head were quantitatively measured, while its emotional expressiveness and human likeness were evaluated through a user study, achieving an average human likeness score of 4.13 out of 5.
arXiv:2607.17316v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The softmax policy $\pi(a \mid s) \propto \exp(\beta Q(s,a))$ is the default model of stochastic choice in reinforcement learning (RL). Various justifications based on robustness, exploration, and optimization have been offered in the RL literature, but none uniquely derives the softmax form from first principles. This leaves a basic tension unresolved: the entropy bonus in the soft Bellman equation violates the Independence axiom that underwrites the Markov decision process (MDP) reward structure. We dissolve this tension by distinguishing two kinds of randomness: chance and choice. By restricting von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) Independence to environmental lotteries over base prospects, we show that imposing independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and monotonicity on the policy and value functions at choice nodes uniquely determines the Boltzmann policy, the entropy-regularized representation, and the soft Bellman equation. The choice between the soft and hard Bellman equations thus reduces to a design decision: whether the agent values its own ability to choose. We develop RL-specific consequences, including return monotonicity and convergence under generalized discounting, and synthesize the independent lines from economics and information theory that arrive at the same structure, offering a normative assessment of when IIA is appropriate for agent design.