Multi-Horizon Consistency as Geometry: When Latent Dynamics Contract, and When They Do Not

Multi-horizon latent consistency is a common training knob in video predictors and world models, but practitioners rarely know what it does to transition geometry. We treat lambda, the weight on multi-step latent agreement, as a diagnostic control and measure an empirical expansion proxy L20,q95 together with horizon-20 prediction error E20. On Moving-MNIST (n=6 seeds at the critical pair), raising lambda from 0 to 0.8 cuts L20 from 4.96 +/- 2.01 to 1.01 +/- 0.06 (paired t p=0.005, Wilcoxon p=0.031) and halves E20 (0.365 to 0.177, paired t p=1.1e-13). Four of six seeds cross L<1 at lambda=0.8. The same loss does not produce population L<1 on action-conditioned Pendulum-v1 or CartPole-v1, nor on KTH Actions video, even when E20 improves. An associational mediation analysis on MMNIST gives r-hat=0.94 (95% CI [0.88, 1.00], n=27, B=2000); lambda was not randomized. Defensive checks (architectural baselines, exogenous stress, WorldTest, MPC, scaling) mostly support a narrow claim: soft consistency can push passive video toward a near-contractive band, and that band is domain-limited. A stochastic-forcing law L20 ~ 1.23 + 1.82 eta at lambda=0.8 (bootstrap slope CI [1.73, 1.92], R^2=0.96) unifies control domains on the same curve via calibrated eta_eff. Complete joint slices at lambda in {0.4, 1.2} (30/30 cells, 5 eta x 3 seeds) show comparable linear L20(eta) slopes (~1.69 and ~2.00); we do not fit a continuous (lambda, eta) surface. We do not report DreamerV3 or TD-MPC2 returns.

A Reliable Indoor Navigation System for Humans Using AR-based Technique

Reliable navigation systems are not available indoors, such as in campuses and small areas. Users must depend on confusing, time-consuming static signage or floor maps. In this paper, an AR-based technique has been applied to campus and small-site navigation, where Vuforia Area Target is used for environment modeling. AI navigation's NavMesh component is used for navigation purposes, and the A* algorithm is used within this component for shortest path calculation. Compared to Dijkstra's algorithm, it can reach a solution about two to three times faster for smaller search spaces. In many cases, Dijkstra's algorithm has difficulty performing well in high-complexity environments where memory usage grows and processing times increase. Compared to older approaches such as GPS, real-time processing and AR overlays can be combined to provide intuitive directions for users while dynamically updating the path in response to environmental changes. Experimental results indicate significantly improved navigation accuracy, better user experience, and greater efficiency compared to traditional methods. These results show that AR technology integrated with existing pathfinding algorithms is feasible and scalable, making it a user-friendly solution for indoor navigation. Although highly effective in limited and defined indoor spaces, further optimization of NavMesh is required for large or highly dynamic environments.

Mobile-Ready Automated Triage of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Digital Fundus Images

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of vision impairment worldwide. However, manual diagnosis is often time-consuming and prone to errors, leading to delays in screening. This paper presents a lightweight automated deep learning framework for efficient assessment of DR severity from digital fundus images. We use a MobileNetV3 architecture with a Consistent Rank Logits (CORAL) head to model the ordered progression of disease while maintaining computational efficiency for resource-constrained environments. The model is trained and validated on a combined dataset of APTOS 2019 and IDRiD images using a preprocessing pipeline including circular cropping and illumination normalization. Extensive experiments including 3-fold cross-validation and ablation studies demonstrate strong performance. The model achieves a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.9019 and an accuracy of 80.03 percent. Additionally, we address real-world deployment challenges through model calibration to reduce overconfidence and optimization for mobile devices. The proposed system provides a scalable and practical tool for early-stage diabetic retinopathy screening.

A Locality Radius Framework for Understanding Relational Inductive Bias in Database Learning

Foreign key discovery and related schema-level prediction tasks are often modeled using graph neural networks (GNNs), implicitly assuming that relational inductive bias improves performance. However, it remains unclear when multi-hop structural reasoning is actually necessary. In this work, we introduce locality radius, a formal measure of the minimum structural neighborhood required to determine a prediction in relational schemas. We hypothesize that model performance depends critically on alignment between task locality radius and architectural aggregation depth. We conduct a controlled empirical study across foreign key prediction, join cost estimation, blast radius regression, cascade impact classification, and additional graph-derived schema tasks. Our evaluation includes multi-seed experiments, capacity-matched comparisons, statistical significance testing, scaling analysis, and synthetic radius-controlled benchmarks. Results reveal a consistent bias-radius alignment effect.

FRaN-X: FRaming and Narratives-eXplorer

We present FRaN-X, a Framing and Narratives Explorer that automatically detects entity mentions and classifies their narrative roles directly from raw text. FRaN-X comprises a two-stage system that combines sequence labeling with fine-grained role classification to reveal how entities are portrayed as protagonists, antagonists, or innocents, using a unique taxonomy of 22 fine-grained roles nested under these three main categories. The system supports five languages (Bulgarian, English, Hindi, Russian, and Portuguese) and two domains (the Russia-Ukraine Conflict and Climate Change). It provides an interactive web interface for media analysts to explore and compare framing across different sources, tackling the challenge of automatically detecting and labeling how entities are framed. Our system allows end users to focus on a single article as well as analyze up to four articles simultaneously. We provide aggregate level analysis including an intuitive graph visualization that highlights the narrative a group of articles are pushing. Our system includes a search feature for users to look up entities of interest, along with a timeline view that allows analysts to track an entity's role transitions across different contexts within the article. The FRaN-X system and the trained models are licensed under an MIT License. FRaN-X is publicly accessible at https://fran-x.streamlit.app/ and a video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/VZVi-1B6yYk.