Analog Quantum Image Representation with Qubit-Frugal Encoding

In this work, we introduce a fundamentally new paradigm for quantum image representation tailored for neutral-atom quantum devices. The proposed method constructs a qubit-efficient image representation by first applying a cartographic generalization algorithm to a classical edge-extracted input image, yielding a highly optimized sparse-dot based geometric description. While ensuring the structural integrity of the image, this sparse representation is then embedded into the atomic configuration of Aquila (QuEra Computing Inc.), modeled through the Bloqade simulation software stack. By encoding visual information through physical atom placement rather than digital basis-state coding, the approach avoids the costly state-preparation overhead inherent to digital quantum image processing circuits. Additionally, pruning sparse dot images, akin to map feature reduction, compresses representations without fidelity loss, thereby substantially reducing qubit requirements when implemented on an analog neutral-atom quantum device. The resulting quantum-native images have been successfully evaluated through matching tasks against an image database, thus illustrating the feasibility of this approach for image matching applications. Since sparse-dot image representations enable seamless generation of synthetic datasets, this work constitutes an initial step towards fully quantum-native machine-learning pipelines for visual data and highlights the potential of scalable analog quantum computing to enable resource-efficient alternatives to energy-intensive classical AI-based image processing frameworks.

Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Phase Information on Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery

Predictive maintenance of rotating machinery increasingly relies on vibration signals, yet most learning-based approaches either discard phase during spectral feature extraction or use raw time-waveforms without explicitly leveraging phase information. This paper introduces two phase-aware preprocessing strategies to address random phase variations in multi-axis vibration data: (1) three-axis independent phase adjustment that aligns each axis individually to zero phase (2) single-axis reference phase adjustment that preserves inter-axis relationships by applying uniform time shifts. Using a newly constructed rotor dataset acquired with a synchronized three-axis sensor, we evaluate six deep learning architectures under a two-stage learning framework. Results demonstrate architecture-independent improvements: the three-axis independent method achieves consistent gains (+2.7\% for Transformer), while the single-axis reference approach delivers superior performance with up to 96.2\% accuracy (+5.4\%) by preserving spatial phase relationships. These findings establish both phase alignment strategies as practical and scalable enhancements for predictive maintenance systems.

ArcGen: Generalizing Neural Backdoor Detection Across Diverse Architectures

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to the security and reliability of deep learning models. To mitigate such attacks, one promising approach is to learn to extract features from the target model and use these features for backdoor detection. However, we discover that existing learning-based neural backdoor detection methods do not generalize well to new architectures not seen during the learning phase. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of this issue and propose a novel black-box neural backdoor detection method called ArcGen. Our method aims to obtain architecture-invariant model features, i.e., aligned features, for effective backdoor detection. Specifically, in contrast to existing methods directly using model outputs as model features, we introduce an additional alignment layer in the feature extraction function to further process these features. This reduces the direct influence of architecture information on the features. Then, we design two alignment losses to train the feature extraction function. These losses explicitly require that features from models with similar backdoor behaviors but different architectures are aligned at both the distribution and sample levels. With these techniques, our method demonstrates up to 42.5% improvements in detection performance (e.g., AUC) on unseen model architectures. This is based on a large-scale evaluation involving 16,896 models trained on diverse datasets, subjected to various backdoor attacks, and utilizing different model architectures. Our code is available at https://github.com/SeRAlab/ArcGen.

Three-Dimensional Radio Localization: A Channel Charting-Based Approach

Channel charting creates a low-dimensional representation of the radio environment in a self-supervised manner using manifold learning. Preserving relative spatial distances in the latent space, channel charting is well suited to support user localization. While prior work on channel charting has mainly focused on two-dimensional scenarios, real-world environments are inherently three-dimensional. In this work, we investigate two distinct three-dimensional indoor localization scenarios using simulated, but realistic ray tracing-based datasets: a factory hall with a three-dimensional spatial distribution of datapoints, and a multistory building where each floor exhibits a two-dimensional datapoint distribution. For the first scenario, we apply the concept of augmented channel charting, which combines classical localization and channel charting, to a three-dimensional setting. For the second scenario, we introduce multistory channel charting, a two-stage approach consisting of floor classification via clustering followed by the training of a dedicated expert neural network for channel charting on each individual floor, thereby enhancing the channel charting performance. In addition, we propose a novel feature engineering method designed to extract sparse features from the beamspace channel state information that are suitable for localization.

Stakeholder Suite: A Unified AI Framework for Mapping Actors, Topics and Arguments in Public Debates

Public debates surrounding infrastructure and energy projects involve complex networks of stakeholders, arguments, and evolving narratives. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for anticipating controversies and informing engagement strategies, yet existing tools in media intelligence largely rely on descriptive analytics with limited transparency. This paper presents Stakeholder Suite, a framework deployed in operational contexts for mapping actors, topics, and arguments within public debates. The system combines actor detection, topic modeling, argument extraction and stance classification in a unified pipeline. Tested on multiple energy infrastructure projects as a case study, the approach delivers fine-grained, source-grounded insights while remaining adaptable to diverse domains. The framework achieves strong retrieval precision and stance accuracy, producing arguments judged relevant in 75% of pilot use cases. Beyond quantitative metrics, the tool has proven effective for operational use: helping project teams visualize networks of influence, identify emerging controversies, and support evidence-based decision-making.

Neurosymbolic Information Extraction from Transactional Documents

This paper presents a neurosymbolic framework for information extraction from documents, evaluated on transactional documents. We introduce a schema-based approach that integrates symbolic validation methods to enable more effective zero-shot output and knowledge distillation. The methodology uses language models to generate candidate extractions, which are then filtered through syntactic-, task-, and domain-level validation to ensure adherence to domain-specific arithmetic constraints. Our contributions include a comprehensive schema for transactional documents, relabeled datasets, and an approach for generating high-quality labels for knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in $F_1$-scores and accuracy, highlighting the effectiveness of neurosymbolic validation in transactional document processing.

Automated Information Flow Selection for Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation

Multi-scenario multi-task recommendation (MSMTR) systems must address recommendation demands across diverse scenarios while simultaneously optimizing multiple objectives, such as click-through rate and conversion rate. Existing MSMTR models typically consist of four information units: scenario-shared, scenario-specific, task-shared, and task-specific networks. These units interact to generate four types of relationship information flows, directed from scenario-shared or scenario-specific networks to task-shared or task-specific networks. However, these models face two main limitations: 1) They often rely on complex architectures, such as mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks, which increase the complexity of information fusion, model size, and training cost. 2) They extract all available information flows without filtering out irrelevant or even harmful content, introducing potential noise. Regarding these challenges, we propose a lightweight Automated Information Flow Selection (AutoIFS) framework for MSMTR. To tackle the first issue, AutoIFS incorporates low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to decouple the four information units, enabling more flexible and efficient information fusion with minimal parameter overhead. To address the second issue, AutoIFS introduces an information flow selection network that automatically filters out invalid scenario-task information flows based on model performance feedback. It employs a simple yet effective pruning function to eliminate useless information flows, thereby enhancing the impact of key relationships and improving model performance. Finally, we evaluate AutoIFS and confirm its effectiveness through extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets and an online A/B test.

SHARP-QoS: Sparsely-gated Hierarchical Adaptive Routing for joint Prediction of QoS

Dependable service-oriented computing relies on multiple Quality of Service (QoS) parameters that are essential to assess service optimality. However, real-world QoS data are extremely sparse, noisy, and shaped by hierarchical dependencies arising from QoS interactions, and geographical and network-level factors, making accurate QoS prediction challenging. Existing methods often predict each QoS parameter separately, requiring multiple similar models, which increases computational cost and leads to poor generalization. Although recent joint QoS prediction studies have explored shared architectures, they suffer from negative transfer due to loss-scaling caused by inconsistent numerical ranges across QoS parameters and further struggle with inadequate representation learning, resulting in degraded accuracy. This paper presents an unified strategy for joint QoS prediction, called SHARP-QoS, that addresses these issues using three components. First, we introduce a dual mechanism to extract the hierarchical features from both QoS and contextual structures via hyperbolic convolution formulated in the Poincaré ball. Second, we propose an adaptive feature-sharing mechanism that allows feature exchange across informative QoS and contextual signals. A gated feature fusion module is employed to support dynamic feature selection among structural and shared representations. Third, we design an EMA-based loss balancing strategy that allows stable joint optimization, thereby mitigating the negative transfer. Evaluations on three datasets with two, three, and four QoS parameters demonstrate that SHARP-QoS outperforms both single- and multi-task baselines. Extensive study shows that our model effectively addresses major challenges, including sparsity, robustness to outliers, and cold-start, while maintaining moderate computational overhead, underscoring its capability for reliable joint QoS prediction.

Digital Modeling of Spatial Pathway Activity from Histology Reveals Tumor Microenvironment Heterogeneity

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables simultaneous mapping of tissue morphology and spatially resolved gene expression, offering unique opportunities to study tumor microenvironment heterogeneity. Here, we introduce a computational framework that predicts spatial pathway activity directly from hematoxylin-and-eosin-stained histology images at microscale resolution 55 and 100 um. Using image features derived from a computational pathology foundation model, we found that TGFb signaling was the most accurately predicted pathway across three independent breast and lung cancer ST datasets. In 87-88% of reliably predicted cases, the resulting spatial TGFb activity maps reflected the expected contrast between tumor and adjacent non-tumor regions, consistent with the known role of TGFb in regulating interactions within the tumor microenvironment. Notably, linear and nonlinear predictive models performed similarly, suggesting that image features may relate to pathway activity in a predominantly linear fashion or that nonlinear structure is small relative to measurement noise. These findings demonstrate that features extracted from routine histopathology may recover spatially coherent and biologically interpretable pathway patterns, offering a scalable strategy for integrating image-based inference with ST information in tumor microenvironment studies.

Behavior and Representation in Large Language Models for Combinatorial Optimization: From Feature Extraction to Algorithm Selection

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new perspectives for automation in optimization. While several studies have explored how LLMs can generate or solve optimization models, far less is understood about what these models actually learn regarding problem structure or algorithmic behavior. This study investigates how LLMs internally represent combinatorial optimization problems and whether such representations can support downstream decision tasks. We adopt a twofold methodology combining direct querying, which assesses LLM capacity to explicitly extract instance features, with probing analyses that examine whether such information is implicitly encoded within their hidden layers. The probing framework is further extended to a per-instance algorithm selection task, evaluating whether LLM-derived representations can predict the best-performing solver. Experiments span four benchmark problems and three instance representations. Results show that LLMs exhibit moderate ability to recover feature information from problem instances, either through direct querying or probing. Notably, the predictive power of LLM hidden-layer representations proves comparable to that achieved through traditional feature extraction, suggesting that LLMs capture meaningful structural information relevant to optimization performance.