Lifecycle-Aware Federated Continual Learning in Mobile Autonomous Systems

Federated continual learning (FCL) allows distributed autonomous fleets to adapt collaboratively to evolving terrain types across extended mission lifecycles. However, current approaches face several key challenges: 1) they use uniform protection strategies that do not account for the varying sensitivities to forgetting on different network layers; 2) they focus primarily on preventing forgetting during training, without addressing the long-term effects of cumulative drift; and 3) they often depend on idealized simulations that fail to capture the real-world heterogeneity present in distributed fleets. In this paper, we propose a lifecycle-aware dual-timescale FCL framework that incorporates training-time (pre-forgetting) prevention and (post-forgetting) recovery. Under this framework, we design a layer-selective rehearsal strategy that mitigates immediate forgetting during local training, and a rapid knowledge recovery strategy that restores degraded models after long-term cumulative drift. We present a theoretical analysis that characterizes heterogeneous forgetting dynamics and establishes the inevitability of long-term degradation. Our experimental results show that this framework achieves up to 8.3\% mIoU improvement over the strongest federated baseline and up to 31.7\% over conventional fine-tuning. We also deploy the FCL framework on a real-world rover testbed to assess system-level robustness under realistic constraints; the testing results further confirm the effectiveness of our FCL design.

From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning

Generative engines (GEs) are reshaping information access by replacing ranked links with citation-grounded answers, yet current Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) methods optimize each instance in isolation, unable to accumulate or transfer effective strategies across tasks and engines. We reframe GEO as a strategy learning problem and propose MAGEO, a multi-agent framework in which coordinated planning, editing, and fidelity-aware evaluation serve as the execution layer, while validated editing patterns are progressively distilled into reusable, engine-specific optimization skills. To enable controlled assessment, we introduce a Twin Branch Evaluation Protocol for causal attribution of content edits and DSV-CF, a dual-axis metric that unifies semantic visibility with attribution accuracy. We further release MSME-GEO-Bench, a multi-scenario, multi-engine benchmark grounded in real-world queries. Experiments on three mainstream engines show that MAGEO substantially outperforms heuristic baselines in both visibility and citation fidelity, with ablations confirming that engine-specific preference modeling and strategy reuse are central to these gains, suggesting a scalable learning-driven paradigm for trustworthy GEO. Code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MAGEO

Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Precision Agriculture

Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is a fundamental capability for agricultural robots; however, existing solutions often overlook energy constraints, resulting in incomplete operations in large-scale or resource-limited environments. This paper proposes an energy-aware CPP framework grounded in Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reinforcement learning, designed for grid-based environments with obstacles and charging stations. To enable robust and adaptive decision-making under energy limitations, the framework integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for spatial feature extraction and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for temporal dynamics. A dedicated reward function is designed to jointly optimize coverage efficiency, energy consumption, and return-to-base constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves over 90% coverage while ensuring energy safety, outperforming traditional heuristic algorithms such as Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) baselines by 13.4-19.5% in coverage and reducing constraint violations by 59.9-88.3%. These findings validate the proposed SAC-based framework as an effective and scalable solution for energy-constrained CPP in agricultural robotics.

AnyAD: Unified Any-Modality Anomaly Detection in Incomplete Multi-Sequence MRI

Reliable anomaly detection in brain MRI remains challenging due to the scarcity of annotated abnormal cases and the frequent absence of key imaging modalities in real clinical workflows. Existing single-class or multi-class anomaly detection (AD) models typically rely on fixed modality configurations, require repetitive training, or fail to generalize to unseen modality combinations, limiting their clinical scalability. In this work, we present a unified Any-Modality AD framework that performs robust anomaly detection and localization under arbitrary MRI modality availability. The framework integrates a dual-pathway DINOv2 encoder with a feature distribution alignment mechanism that statistically aligns incomplete-modality features with full-modality representations, enabling stable inference even with severe modality dropout. To further enhance semantic consistency, we introduce an Intrinsic Normal Prototypes (INPs) extractor and an INP-guided decoder that reconstruct only normal anatomical patterns while naturally amplifying abnormal deviations. Through randomized modality masking and indirect feature completion during training, the model learns to adapt to all modality configurations without re-training. Extensive experiments on BraTS2018, MU-Glioma-Post, and Pretreat-MetsToBrain-Masks demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses state-of-the-art industrial and medical AD baselines across 7 modality combinations, achieving superior generalization. This study establishes a scalable paradigm for multimodal medical AD under real-world, imperfect modality conditions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wuchangw/AnyAD.

Towards Theoretical Understanding of Transformer Test-Time Computing: Investigation on In-Context Linear Regression

Using more test-time computation during language model inference, such as generating more intermediate thoughts or sampling multiple candidate answers, has proven effective in significantly improving model performance. This paper takes an initial step toward bridging the gap between practical language model inference and theoretical transformer analysis by incorporating randomness and sampling. We focus on in-context linear regression with continuous/binary coefficients, where our framework simulates language model decoding through noise injection and binary coefficient sampling. Through this framework, we provide detailed analyses of widely adopted inference techniques. Supported by empirical results, our theoretical framework and analysis demonstrate the potential for offering new insights into understanding inference behaviors in real-world language models.

Enhancing Vehicular Platooning with Wireless Federated Learning: A Resource-Aware Control Framework

This paper aims to enhance the performance of Vehicular Platooning (VP) systems integrated with Wireless Federated Learning (WFL). In highly dynamic environments, vehicular platoons experience frequent communication changes and resource constraints, which significantly affect information exchange and learning model synchronization. To address these challenges, we first formulate WFL in VP as a joint optimization problem that simultaneously considers Age of Information (AoI) and Federated Learning Model Drift (FLMD) to ensure timely and accurate control. Through theoretical analysis, we examine the impact of FLMD on convergence performance and develop a two-stage Resource-Aware Control framework (RACE). The first stage employs a Lagrangian dual decomposition method for resource configuration, while the second stage implements a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach for vehicle selection. The approach integrates Multi-Head Self-Attention and Long Short-Term Memory networks to capture spatiotemporal correlations in communication states. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to baseline methods, the proposed framework improves AoI optimization by up to 45%, accelerates learning convergence, and adapts more effectively to dynamic VP environments on the AI4MARS dataset.

Benign Oscillation of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Large Learning Rates

In this work, we theoretically investigate the generalization properties of neural networks (NN) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with large learning rates. Under such a training regime, our finding is that, the oscillation of the NN weights caused by the large learning rate SGD training turns out to be beneficial to the generalization of the NN, which potentially improves over the same NN trained by SGD with small learning rates that converges more smoothly. In view of this finding, we call such a phenomenon "benign oscillation". Our theory towards demystifying such a phenomenon builds upon the feature learning perspective of deep learning. Specifically, we consider a feature-noise data generation model that consists of (i) weak features which have a small $\ell_2$-norm and appear in each data point; (ii) strong features which have a larger $\ell_2$-norm but only appear in a certain fraction of all data points; and (iii) noise. We prove that NNs trained by oscillating SGD with a large learning rate can effectively learn the weak features in the presence of those strong features. In contrast, NNs trained by SGD with a small learning rate can only learn the strong features but makes little progress in learning the weak features. Consequently, when it comes to the new testing data which consist of only weak features, the NN trained by oscillating SGD with a large learning rate could still make correct predictions consistently, while the NN trained by small learning rate SGD fails. Our theory sheds light on how large learning rate training benefits the generalization of NNs. Experimental results demonstrate our finding on "benign oscillation".