Daily Papers

Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities. In multilingual settings, unlearning must additionally propagate within its intended linguistic scope. However, existing evaluations mainly measure cross-lingual transfer and cannot distinguish insufficient from excessive propagation. We introduce CLLPU (Cross-Lingual and Language-Bound Protocol for LLM Unlearning), a multilingual benchmark that formulates this problem through two settings: common-goal forgetting, where target knowledge should be suppressed across all languages, and language-conditioned forgetting, where suppression should remain confined to a designated language. CLLPU combines goal-guided topic pairing, schema-aware relation matching, and dual-anchor multilingual translation to construct 800 matched knowledge-unit pairs and 72,000 QA instances across ten languages. Experiments with six representative methods on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct reveal opposite failure modes: forgetting remains incomplete when universal suppression is required, yet spreads beyond the intended boundary when language-conditioned confinement is required. We further find that general multilingual utility can conceal damage to neighbor knowledge. These findings establish propagation control as a central challenge for multilingual LLM unlearning. We publicly release CLLPU together with its construction pipeline.

We propose a new method to ensure neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) satisfy output specifications by using invariance set propagation. Our approach uses a class of control barrier functions to transform output specifications into constraints on the parameters and inputs of the learning system. This setup allows us to achieve output specification guarantees simply by changing the constrained parameters/inputs both during training and inference. Moreover, we demonstrate that our invariance set propagation through data-controlled neural ODEs not only maintains generalization performance but also creates an additional degree of robustness by enabling causal manipulation of the system's parameters/inputs. We test our method on a series of representation learning tasks, including modeling physical dynamics and convexity portraits, as well as safe collision avoidance for autonomous vehicles.

In visual storytelling, human performances are central to creative intent and narrative meaning. However, preserving human identity and performance while enabling flexible visual edits remains challenging for generative video models. We formalize this challenge as identity-preserving video restylization, which propagates scene, lighting, and style changes specified by an edited keyframe across a source video, while preserving facial likeness and performance, including expressions, eye gaze, and lip synchronization. A key obstacle is the absence of paired training data, as identity-preserving restylized video pairs are rare in real-world settings. To address this, we propose a decoupling of source-grounded identity preservation and edit-driven video synthesis. Our key insight is that facial appearance and expression should remain invariant, with illumination being the primary permissible variation. We therefore cast identity preservation as a video relighting problem, while modeling visual edit propagation as controlled video synthesis guided by the edited keyframe. Building on this formulation, we introduce ID-V2V, a video-to-video generative framework integrating complementary control signals: relit facial regions and facial normal maps tightly constrain facial likeness and performance, while edited keyframes and depth sequences enable flexible and temporally coherent generation. This design enables constructing training pairs from a single video, eliminating the need for scarce paired data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-V2V significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving facial likeness and fine-grained facial performance, supports both single- and multi-subject scenarios, and delivers high visual quality, highlighting its potential as a human-centric tool for real-world content production. The code is available at: https://github.com/Eyeline-Labs/ID-V2V.

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) can benefit from nearby out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, but estimation errors at these actions may be amplified by bootstrapping. Existing regularization and local-generalization methods control either the admissible OOD region or the influence of generalized targets, often through separate mechanisms. We propose Convex Hull Neighborhood Smooth Dual Generalization (CSDG), which expresses the Bellman backup as an in-sample value target plus a CHN-local correction. This formulation makes the generalized contribution explicit and separates it from the in-sample reference path. The correction is obtained by smoothing in-sample-oriented and OOD-oriented candidates sampled at different perturbation radii. A mixture coefficient lambda scales its contribution to each backup, while the recursive discount remains gamma. Under boundedness and fixed perturbation kernels, we derive an exact one-step correction identity, a time-varying iterate bound, and a fixed-point bound that depends only on the branch discrepancy at the fixed point. We further characterize the implicit policies induced by the idealized operators and give a conditional non-degradation criterion. The practical algorithm approximates these quantities using asymmetric bounded noise and expectile regression, without exact support classification or an additional pessimistic OOD penalty. Experiments on Gym-MuJoCo and AntMaze show strong aggregate performance and stable value estimation. Code is available at: https://github.com/YOUNG-fnxm/CSDG

Quantum networks are complex systems formed by the interaction among quantum processors through quantum channels. Analogous to classical computer networks, quantum networks allow for the distribution of quantum computation among quantum computers. In this work, we describe a quantum walk protocol to perform distributed quantum computing in a quantum network. The protocol uses a quantum walk as a quantum control signal to perform distributed quantum operations. We consider a generalization of the discrete-time coined quantum walk model that accounts for the interaction between a quantum walker system in the network graph with quantum registers inside the network nodes. The protocol logically captures distributed quantum computing, abstracting hardware implementation and the transmission of quantum information through channels. Control signal transmission is mapped to the propagation of the walker system across the network, while interactions between the control layer and the quantum registers are embedded into the application of coin operators. We demonstrate how to use the quantum walker system to perform a distributed CNOT operation, which shows the universality of the protocol for distributed quantum computing. Furthermore, we apply the protocol to the task of entanglement distribution in a quantum network.

In LLM/VLM agents, prompt privacy risk propagates beyond a single model call because raw user content can flow into retrieval queries, memory writes, tool calls, and logs. Existing de-identification pipelines address document boundaries but not this cross-stage propagation. We propose BodhiPromptShield, a policy-aware framework that detects sensitive spans, routes them via typed placeholders, semantic abstraction, or secure symbolic mapping, and delays restoration to authorized boundaries. Relative to enterprise redaction, this adds explicit propagation-aware mediation and restoration timing as a security variable. Under controlled evaluation on the Controlled Prompt-Privacy Benchmark (CPPB), stage-wise propagation suppresses from 10.7\% to 7.1\% across retrieval, memory, and tool stages; PER reaches 9.3\% with 0.94 AC and 0.92 TSR, outperforming generic de-identification. These are controlled systems results on CPPB rather than formal privacy guarantees or public-benchmark transfer claims. The project repository is available at https://github.com/mabo1215/BodhiPromptShield.git.

Radiomap blind prediction aims to infer radiomaps from observable representations of the propagation environment and base station configuration without field measurements. In practice, the observable representations are inherently incomplete. Thus, the target radiomap is not fully determined by the inputs when generalizing to unseen configurations or environments. Under incomplete observation, we establish a population-level theory of deterministic radiomap blind prediction that identifies the conditional mean as its optimal target and separates prediction error into reducible predictor approximation and irreducible uncertainty caused by missing physical information. The framework further characterizes the train-test risk gap and the uncertainty reduction enabled by observation enrichment. Building on it, we reveal the dual role of propagation priors: they provide physically grounded guidance, yet their implementable forms may bias the attainable predictor. This motivates RadioDecomp, which treats a prior-guided predictor as a correctable base and learns its remaining predictable discrepancy through residual refinement. To evaluate RadioDecomp across distinct propagation-prior designs, we instantiate it with a feature-guided monolithic base and a LoS-Shadow structured base, yielding RadioFR and RadioLSR, respectively. Across random, cross-configuration, and cross-environment settings, experiments confirm the benefit of propagation-related representations and show that both instantiations improve upon their respective bases. Further controlled studies on base capacity, training-support coverage, and observation coarsening corroborate the proposed analysis.

This paper presents Qffusion, a dual-frame-guided framework for portrait video editing. Specifically, we consider a design principle of ``animation for editing'', and train Qffusion as a general animation framework from two still reference images while we can use it for portrait video editing easily by applying modified start and end frames as references during inference. Leveraging the powerful generative power of Stable Diffusion, we propose a Quadrant-grid Arrangement (QGA) scheme for latent re-arrangement, which arranges the latent codes of two reference images and that of four facial conditions into a four-grid fashion, separately. Then, we fuse features of these two modalities and use self-attention for both appearance and temporal learning, where representations at different times are jointly modeled under QGA. Our Qffusion can achieve stable video editing without additional networks or complex training stages, where only the input format of Stable Diffusion is modified. Further, we propose a Quadrant-grid Propagation (QGP) inference strategy, which enjoys a unique advantage on stable arbitrary-length video generation by processing reference and condition frames recursively. Through extensive experiments, Qffusion consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on portrait video editing.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as part of compound AI systems that coordinate multiple modules (e.g., retrievers, tools, verifiers) over long-horizon workflows. Recent approaches that propagate textual feedback globally (e.g., TextGrad) make it feasible to optimize such pipelines, but we find that performance degrades as system depth grows. In particular, long-horizon agentic workflows exhibit two depth-scaling failure modes: 1) exploding textual gradient, where textual feedback grows exponentially with depth, leading to prohibitively long message and amplifies evaluation biases; and 2) vanishing textual gradient, where limited long-context ability causes models overemphasize partial feedback and compression of lengthy feedback causes downstream messages to lose specificity gradually as they propagate many hops upstream. To mitigate these issues, we introduce Textual Equilibrium Propagation (TEP), a local learning principle inspired by Equilibrium Propagation in energy-based models. TEP includes two phases: 1) a free phase where a local LLM critics iteratively refine prompts until reaching equilibrium (no further improvements are suggested); and 2) a nudged phase which applies proximal prompt edits with bounded modification intensity, using task-level objectives that propagate via forward signaling rather than backward feedback chains. This design supports local prompt optimization followed by controlled adaptation toward global goals without the computational burden and signal degradation of global textual backpropagation. Across long-horizon QA benchmarks and multi-agent tool-use dataset, TEP consistently improves accuracy and efficiency over global propagation methods such as TextGrad. The gains grows with depth, while preserving the practicality of black-box LLM components in deep compound AI system.

Layer-wise PTQ is a promising technique for compressing large language models (LLMs), due to its simplicity and effectiveness without requiring retraining. However, recent progress in this area is saturating, underscoring the need to revisit its core limitations and explore further improvements. We address this challenge by identifying a key limitation of existing layer-wise PTQ methods: the growth of quantization errors across layers significantly degrades performance, particularly in low-bit regimes. To address this fundamental issue, we propose Quantization Error Propagation (QEP), a general, lightweight, and scalable framework that enhances layer-wise PTQ by explicitly propagating quantization errors and compensating for accumulated errors. QEP also offers a tunable propagation mechanism that prevents overfitting and controls computational overhead, enabling the framework to adapt to various architectures and resource budgets. Extensive experiments on several LLMs demonstrate that QEP-enhanced layer-wise PTQ achieves substantially higher accuracy than existing methods. Notably, the gains are most pronounced in the extremely low-bit quantization regime.

First-Frame Propagation (FFP) offers a promising paradigm for controllable video editing, but existing methods are hampered by a reliance on cumbersome run-time guidance. We identify the root cause of this limitation as the inadequacy of current training datasets, which are often too short, low-resolution, and lack the task diversity required to teach robust temporal priors. To address this foundational data gap, we first introduce FFP-300K, a new large-scale dataset comprising 300K high-fidelity video pairs at 720p resolution and 81 frames in length, constructed via a principled two-track pipeline for diverse local and global edits. Building on this dataset, we propose a novel framework designed for true guidance-free FFP that resolves the critical tension between maintaining first-frame appearance and preserving source video motion. Architecturally, we introduce Adaptive Spatio-Temporal RoPE (AST-RoPE), which dynamically remaps positional encodings to disentangle appearance and motion references. At the objective level, we employ a self-distillation strategy where an identity propagation task acts as a powerful regularizer, ensuring long-term temporal stability and preventing semantic drift. Comprehensive experiments on the EditVerseBench benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforming existing academic and commercial models by receiving about 0.2 PickScore and 0.3 VLM score improvement against these competitors.

Radio maps describe how wireless signals propagate across space and are essential for wireless communication, sensing, and network planning. However, constructing accurate radio maps traditionally requires either dense measurements or computationally expensive physical simulations, which limits scalability and real-time deployment. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence offer a promising alternative, but existing approaches lack fine-grained control and physical consistency when applied to real-world wireless environments. Here we present ControlRadio, a controllable generative framework that produces radio maps from natural-language descriptions and environmental layouts, including building structures and transmitter locations. Joint semantic and spatial conditioning enables interpretable, propagation-plausible generation, while a controlled latent prior and layout-aware conditioning improve stability and structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlRadio achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalization across diverse urban scenarios, while reducing computation time by more than four orders of magnitude compared with conventional simulation-based methods. Such results suggest a new paradigm for scalable and controllable wireless environment modeling, with broad implications for next-generation communication systems and data-driven radio sensing.

Video colour editing is a crucial task for content creation, yet existing solutions either require painstaking frame-by-frame manipulation or produce unrealistic results with temporal artefacts. We present a practical, training-free framework that makes precise video colour editing accessible through an intuitive interface while maintaining professional-quality output. Our key insight is that by decoupling spatial and temporal aspects of colour editing, we can better align with users' natural workflow -- allowing them to focus on precise colour selection in key frames before automatically propagating changes across time. We achieve this through a novel technical framework that combines: (i) a simple point-and-click interface merging grid-based colour selection with automatic instance segmentation for precise spatial control, (ii) bidirectional colour propagation that leverages inherent video motion patterns, and (iii) motion-aware blending that ensures smooth transitions even with complex object movements. Through extensive evaluation on diverse scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods while eliminating the need for training or specialized hardware, making professional-quality video colour editing accessible to everyone.

Multi-server MCP agents create an information-flow control problem: faithful tool composition can turn individually benign read/write permissions into cross-boundary credential propagation -- a structural side effect of workflow topology, not necessarily malicious model behavior. We present MCPHunt, to our knowledge the first controlled benchmark that isolates non-adversarial, verbatim credential propagation across multi-server MCP trust boundaries, with three methodological contributions: (1) canary-based taint tracking that reduces propagation detection to objective string matching; (2) an environment-controlled coverage design with risky, benign, and hard-negative conditions that validates pipeline soundness and controls for credential-format confounds; (3) CRS stratification that disentangles task-mandated propagation (faithful execution of verbatim-transfer instructions) from policy-violating propagation (credentials included despite the option to redact). Across 3,615 main-benchmark traces from 5 models spanning 147 tasks and 9 mechanism families, policy-violating propagation rates reach 11.5--41.3% across all models. This propagation is pathway-specific (25x cross-mechanism range) and concentrated in browser-mediated data flows; hard-negative controls provide evidence that production-format credentials are not necessary -- prompt-directed cross-boundary data flow is sufficient. A prompt-mitigation study across 3 models reduces policy-violating propagation by up to 97% while preserving 80.5% utility, but effectiveness varies with instruction-following capability -- suggesting that prompt-level defenses alone may not suffice. Code, traces, and labeling pipeline are released under MIT and CC BY 4.0.

Knowledge editing techniques for large language models (LLMs) can inject knowledge that is later reproducible verbatim, but they fall short on propagating that knowledge: models cannot answer questions that require reasoning with the injected knowledge. We present a hypernetwork-based approach for knowledge propagation, named PropMEND, where we meta-learn how to modify gradients of a language modeling loss to encourage injected information to propagate. Our approach extends the meta-objective of MEND [29] so that gradient updates on knowledge are transformed to enable answering multi-hop questions involving that knowledge. We show improved performance on the RippleEdit dataset, showing almost 2x accuracy on challenging multi-hop questions whose answers are not explicitly stated in the injected fact. We further introduce a new dataset, Controlled RippleEdit, to evaluate the generalization of our hypernetwork, testing knowledge propagation along relations and entities unseen during hypernetwork training. PropMEND still outperforms existing approaches in unseen entity-relation pairs, yet the performance gap decreases substantially, suggesting future work in propagating knowledge to a wide range of relations.

How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely functionally motivated models assume distinct neuronal compartments to represent local error signals that determine the sign of synaptic plasticity. However, this explicit error modulation is inconsistent with phenomenological plasticity models in which the sign depends primarily on postsynaptic activity. Here we show how a plausible microcircuit model and Hebbian learning rule derived within an adaptive control theory framework can resolve this discrepancy. Assuming errors are encoded in top-down dis-inhibitory synaptic afferents, we show that error-modulated learning emerges naturally at the circuit level when recurrent inhibition explicitly influences Hebbian plasticity. The same learning rule accounts for experimentally observed plasticity in the absence of inhibition and performs comparably to back-propagation of error (BP) on several non-linearly separable benchmarks. Our findings bridge the gap between functional and experimentally observed plasticity rules and make concrete predictions on inhibitory modulation of excitatory plasticity.

Video Super-Resolution (VSR) aims to restore high-quality video frames from low-resolution (LR) estimates, yet most existing VSR approaches behave like black boxes at inference time: users cannot reliably correct unexpected artifacts, but instead can only accept whatever the model produces. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive VSR framework dubbed SparkVSR that makes sparse keyframes a simple and expressive control signal. Specifically, users can first super-resolve or optionally a small set of keyframes using any off-the-shelf image super-resolution (ISR) model, then SparkVSR propagates the keyframe priors to the entire video sequence while remaining grounded by the original LR video motion. Concretely, we introduce a keyframe-conditioned latent-pixel two-stage training pipeline that fuses LR video latents with sparsely encoded HR keyframe latents to learn robust cross-space propagation and refine perceptual details. At inference time, SparkVSR supports flexible keyframe selection (manual specification, codec I-frame extraction, or random sampling) and a reference-free guidance mechanism that continuously balances keyframe adherence and blind restoration, ensuring robust performance even when reference keyframes are absent or imperfect. Experiments on multiple VSR benchmarks demonstrate improved temporal consistency and strong restoration quality, surpassing baselines by up to 24.6%, 21.8%, and 5.6% on CLIP-IQA, DOVER, and MUSIQ, respectively, enabling controllable, keyframe-driven video super-resolution. Moreover, we demonstrate that SparkVSR is a generic interactive, keyframe-conditioned video processing framework as it can be applied out of the box to unseen tasks such as old-film restoration and video style transfer. Our project page is available at: https://sparkvsr.github.io/

While recent generative models produce high-fidelity videos, they struggle with the complex narrative control required for coherent multi-shot audio-visual generation. Existing methods suffer from temporal misalignment, limited controllability, and incomplete scripting. In this paper, we propose MAVIN, the first framework for multi-shot audio-visual generation with customized narrative control. To resolve temporal misalignment, we propose boundary-aware attention, which leverages hierarchical captions and boundary-aware token routing to render audio-visual elements within their respective temporal boundaries. To improve the controllability for multi-subject scenarios, we propose ID-aware propagation, utilizing identity embeddings and an identity-aware mask to bind specific identities to consistent visual appearances and vocal timbres. To provide comprehensive audio-visual narratives, we present a multi-agent scripting pipeline to transform free-form user inputs into hierarchical captions. Furthermore, we construct MAVINSet, a multi-shot audio-visual dataset for robust training and evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVIN achieves state-of-the-art performance, opening up a new avenue for integrating generative models into professional filmmaking workflows.

We establish nonlinear stability of three-dimensional Couette flow for the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations on mathbb Ttimesmathbb R^2. Divergence-free perturbations satisfying |u_{rm in}|_{H^2}+|u^perp_{0,rm in}|_{dot B^{-2}_{2,infty}}leq c_*ν generate unique global H^2 solutions that remain close to Couette flow, where u^perp_{0,rm in} denotes the streamwise average of the transverse velocity. This result retains the O(ν) stability threshold despite the absence of a spanwise spectral gap. The nonzero streamwise modes exhibit enhanced dissipation, their wall-normal component satisfies a viscosity-uniform time-integrated inviscid-damping estimate, and the transverse zero mode decays in L^2 at rate (1+νt)^{-1}. The endpoint space dot B^{-2}_{2,infty} controls the transverse low frequencies, accommodates divergence-form nonlinear forcing, and is critical for linear lift-up from the wall-normal zero mode. The proof combines propagation of this endpoint norm, Fourier splitting, and a two-level roll-to-streak representation with an adaptation of the nonzero-mode framework of Wei--Zhang (CPAM, 2021).

Complex vector modes, entangled in spin and orbital angular momentum, are opening burgeoning opportunities for a wide variety of applications. Importantly, the flexible manipulation the various properties of such beams will pave the way to novel applications. As such, in this manuscript, we demonstrate a longitudinal spin-orbit separation of complex vector modes propagating in free space. To achieve this we employed the recently demonstrated circular Airy Gaussian vortex vector (CAGVV) modes, which feature a self-focusing property. More precisely, by properly manipulating the intrinsic parameters of CAGVV modes, the strong coupling between the two constituting orthogonal components of CAGVV mode undergo a spin-orbit separation along the propagation direction namely, while one polarisation component, focuses at a specific plane, the other focuses at a different plane. Such spin-orbit separation, which we demonstrated by numerical simulations and corroborated experimentally, can be adjusted on-demand by simply changing the initial parameters of CAGVV modes. Our findings will be of great relevance, for example in optical tweezers, to manipulate micro- or nano-particles at two different parallel planes.

Sampling-based algorithms, which eliminate ''unimportant'' computations during forward and/or back propagation (BP), offer potential solutions to accelerate neural network training. However, since sampling introduces approximations to training, such algorithms may not consistently maintain accuracy across various tasks. In this work, we introduce a variance-controlled adaptive sampling (VCAS) method designed to accelerate BP. VCAS computes an unbiased stochastic gradient with fine-grained layerwise importance sampling in data dimension for activation gradient calculation and leverage score sampling in token dimension for weight gradient calculation. To preserve accuracy, we control the additional variance by learning the sample ratio jointly with model parameters during training. We assessed VCAS on multiple fine-tuning and pre-training tasks in both vision and natural language domains. On all the tasks, VCAS can preserve the original training loss trajectory and validation accuracy with an up to 73.87% FLOPs reduction of BP and 49.58% FLOPs reduction of the whole training process. The implementation is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/VCAS .

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative modeling, with their sampling procedures routinely modified to control generation and improve efficiency. These modifications introduce perturbations along the sampling trajectory, raising a central question: how do such perturbations affect generated output? To address this question, we develop a theoretical framework to investigate perturbation propagation, combining dynamical analysis of the sampling process with an information-theoretic characterization of output responses. Within this framework, we quantify perturbation strength using the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between perturbed and reference trajectory distributions, termed as path cost, which is shown to bound, but do not determine, changes in the output distribution. Building on this analysis, we derive a response identity that connects the propagation and accumulation of local perturbations with the information captured by a selected feature mean, explaining why changes in the output distribution can remain undetected by its first-order response. We test our theoretical analysis through controlled interventions at equal path cost in pretrained diffusion models, revealing distinct patterns of output sensitivity across sampling stages and spatial frequencies. To assess whether our framework can diagnose perturbations arising from practical approximations, we apply it to cache-based acceleration and show that our propagation analysis reliably identifies sampling intervals where caching causes larger image errors.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text but struggle to enforce external constraints because they generate tokens sequentially without explicit control mechanisms. GenCP addresses this limitation by combining LLM predictions with Constraint Programming (CP) reasoning, formulating text generation as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). In this paper, we improve GenCP by integrating Masked Language Models (MLMs) for domain generation, which allows bidirectional constraint propagation that leverages both past and future tokens. This integration bridges the gap between token-level prediction and structured constraint enforcement, leading to more reliable and constraint-aware text generation. Our evaluation on COLLIE benchmarks demonstrates that incorporating domain preview via MLM calls significantly improves GenCP's performance. Although this approach incurs additional MLM calls and, in some cases, increased backtracking, the overall effect is a more efficient use of LLM inferences and an enhanced ability to generate feasible and meaningful solutions, particularly in tasks with strict content constraints.

High-resolution (HR) medical videos are vital for accurate diagnosis, yet are hard to acquire due to hardware limitations and physiological constraints. Clinically, the collected low-resolution (LR) medical videos present unique challenges for video super-resolution (VSR) models, including camera shake, noise, and abrupt frame transitions, which result in significant optical flow errors and alignment difficulties. Additionally, tissues and organs exhibit continuous and nuanced structures, but current VSR models are prone to introducing artifacts and distorted features that can mislead doctors. To this end, we propose MedVSR, a tailored framework for medical VSR. It first employs Cross State-Space Propagation (CSSP) to address the imprecise alignment by projecting distant frames as control matrices within state-space models, enabling the selective propagation of consistent and informative features to neighboring frames for effective alignment. Moreover, we design an Inner State-Space Reconstruction (ISSR) module that enhances tissue structures and reduces artifacts with joint long-range spatial feature learning and large-kernel short-range information aggregation. Experiments across four datasets in diverse medical scenarios, including endoscopy and cataract surgeries, show that MedVSR significantly outperforms existing VSR models in reconstruction performance and efficiency. Code released at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/MedVSR.

In staggered treatment-adoption designs, later-treated units are valid controls for an earlier-treated cohort only until their own treatment begins, so the admissible donor set contracts with event time. Fixing the donor pool at the longest horizon discards temporarily eligible donors, whereas re-estimating synthetic-control weights independently at each horizon can make the counterfactual unstable as donor composition changes. We propose Risk-Set Transported Synthetic Control with Difference-in-Differences Adjustment (RT-SC-DiD). For each cohort and event-time horizon, the estimator fits weights on the currently untreated donors while shrinking them toward a transported reference that reallocates the weight of exiting donors to similar surviving donors. A DiD baseline correction removes persistent level differences. We characterize distortion from horizon-by-horizon reoptimization, derive the loading change induced by naive deletion and renormalization, and give a conditional recursive bound for error propagation under an explicitly assumed regularity condition on the transport map. We also introduce donor-support diagnostics and a donor-only placebo procedure for selecting the transport penalty. In an 80-replication pilot comparison and a separate 40-replication-per-value sensitivity analysis, intermediate transport regularization reduces average RMSE relative to independent horizon-specific estimation and strong anchoring. This evidence supports the method's bias-variance motivation but is not a proved guarantee. RT-SC-DiD is intended for settings where later-treated units provide useful short-horizon information and donor support contracts materially over time. Existing staggered synthetic-control and synthetic difference-in-differences methods do not, to our knowledge, explicitly regularize within-cohort weight sequences toward transported references as risk sets contract.

Image diffusion models have been utilized in various tasks, such as text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis. Recent research has introduced tuning methods that make subtle adjustments to the original models, yielding promising results in specific adaptations of foundational generative diffusion models. Rather than modifying the main backbone of the diffusion model, we delve into the role of skip connection in U-Net and reveal that hierarchical features aggregating long-distance information across encoder and decoder make a significant impact on the content and quality of image generation. Based on the observation, we propose an efficient generative tuning framework, dubbed SCEdit, which integrates and edits Skip Connection using a lightweight tuning module named SC-Tuner. Furthermore, the proposed framework allows for straightforward extension to controllable image synthesis by injecting different conditions with Controllable SC-Tuner, simplifying and unifying the network design for multi-condition inputs. Our SCEdit substantially reduces training parameters, memory usage, and computational expense due to its lightweight tuners, with backward propagation only passing to the decoder blocks. Extensive experiments conducted on text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of efficiency and performance. Project page: https://scedit.github.io/

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of downstream natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, their considerable sizes and memory demands hinder practical deployment, underscoring the importance of developing efficient compression strategies. Singular value decomposition (SVD) decomposes a matrix into orthogonal components, enabling efficient low-rank approximation. This is particularly suitable for LLM compression, where weight matrices often exhibit significant redundancy. However, current SVD-based methods neglect the residual matrix from truncation, resulting in significant truncation loss. Additionally, compressing all layers of the model results in severe error propagation. To overcome these limitations, we propose ERC-SVD, a new post-training SVD-based LLM compression method from an error-controlled perspective. Specifically, we leverage the residual matrix generated during the truncation process to reduce truncation loss. Moreover, under a fixed overall compression ratio, we selectively compress the last few layers of the model, which mitigates error propagation and improves compressed model performance. Comprehensive evaluations on diverse LLM families and multiple benchmark datasets indicate that ERC-SVD consistently achieves superior performance over existing counterpart methods, demonstrating its practical effectiveness.

Sensory systems across all modalities and species exhibit adaptation to continuously changing input statistics. Individual neurons have been shown to modulate their response gains so as to maximize information transmission in different stimulus contexts. Experimental measurements have revealed additional, nuanced sensory adaptation effects including changes in response maxima and minima, tuning curve repulsion from the adapter stimulus, and stimulus-driven response decorrelation. Existing explanations of these phenomena rely on changes in inter-neuronal synaptic efficacy, which, while more flexible, are unlikely to operate as rapidly or reversibly as single neuron gain modulations. Using published V1 population adaptation data, we show that propagation of single neuron gain changes in a recurrent network is sufficient to capture the entire set of observed adaptation effects. We propose a novel adaptive efficient coding objective with which single neuron gains are modulated, maximizing the fidelity of the stimulus representation while minimizing overall activity in the network. From this objective, we analytically derive a set of gains that optimize the trade-off between preserving information about the stimulus and conserving metabolic resources. Our model generalizes well-established concepts of single neuron adaptive gain control to recurrent populations, and parsimoniously explains experimental adaptation data.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators. In addition to speed, such simulators need to model the physics of the robots and their interaction with the environment to a level acceptable for transferring policies learned in simulation to reality. We present QuadSwarm, a fast, reliable simulator for research in single and multi-robot RL for quadrotors that addresses both issues. QuadSwarm, with fast forward-dynamics propagation decoupled from rendering, is designed to be highly parallelizable such that throughput scales linearly with additional compute. It provides multiple components tailored toward multi-robot RL, including diverse training scenarios, and provides domain randomization to facilitate the development and sim2real transfer of multi-quadrotor control policies. Initial experiments suggest that QuadSwarm achieves over 48,500 simulation samples per second (SPS) on a single quadrotor and over 62,000 SPS on eight quadrotors on a 16-core CPU. The code can be found in https://github.com/Zhehui-Huang/quad-swarm-rl.

Learning from active human involvement enables the human subject to actively intervene and demonstrate to the AI agent during training. The interaction and corrective feedback from human brings safety and AI alignment to the learning process. In this work, we propose a new reward-free active human involvement method called Proxy Value Propagation for policy optimization. Our key insight is that a proxy value function can be designed to express human intents, wherein state-action pairs in the human demonstration are labeled with high values, while those agents' actions that are intervened receive low values. Through the TD-learning framework, labeled values of demonstrated state-action pairs are further propagated to other unlabeled data generated from agents' exploration. The proxy value function thus induces a policy that faithfully emulates human behaviors. Human-in-the-loop experiments show the generality and efficiency of our method. With minimal modification to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, our method can learn to solve continuous and discrete control tasks with various human control devices, including the challenging task of driving in Grand Theft Auto V. Demo video and code are available at: https://metadriverse.github.io/pvp

Variable-order Markov models generate sequences over a finite alphabet by conditioning each symbol on the longest available suffix of the generated history. Regular constraints, by contrast, describe finite-horizon control requirements by an automaton: fixed positions, forced endings, metrical patterns, and forbidden copied fragments are all special cases. Existing exact methods already handle regular constraints with belief propagation for first-order Markov chains. The contribution here is the variable-order extension: identifying the state space on which the existing BP-regular machinery must be run when the generator is a variable-order/backoff model. A first-order constraint layer can enforce useful support conditions, but it computes future mass after merging histories that a variable-order generator deliberately keeps distinct. We formalize this mismatch and give the sparse construction obtained by replacing the first-order Markov state with the observed context state, then taking the standard product with the regular constraint automaton. For a fixed trained context graph and automaton, inference is linear in the sequence horizon; in general it is polynomial in the number of reachable product edges. This gives the correct variable-order distribution conditioned on regular constraints without expanding to all K-tuples. The same finite-source interface supports reversible data augmentation by inverse count lookup, matching materialized transposition augmentation without storing transformed corpora. We also separate exact BP inference from generation-time backoff policies, such as singleton avoidance, whose stochastic semantics must be made explicit if exactness is claimed.

Automated evaluation of tool-using large language model (LLM) agents is widely assumed to be reliable, but this assumption has rarely been validated against human annotation. We introduce AgentProp-Bench, a 2,000-task benchmark with 2,300 traces across four domains, nine production LLMs, and a 100-label human-validated subset. We quantify judge reliability, characterize error propagation, and evaluate a runtime mitigation. Substring-based judging agrees with human annotation at kappa=0.049 (chance-level); a three-LLM ensemble reaches kappa=0.432 (moderate) with a conservative bias. Under validated evaluation, a parameter-level injection propagates to a wrong final answer with human-calibrated probability approximately 0.62 (range 0.46-0.73 across models). Rejection (catching bad parameters) and recovery (correcting after acceptance) are independent model capabilities (Spearman rho=0.126, p=0.747). A tuned runtime interceptor reduces hallucination on GPT-4o-mini by 23.0 percentage points under a concurrent n=600 control, but shows no significant effect on Gemini-2.0-Flash, whose aggressive parameter rejection eliminates the target failure mode. All code, data, traces, and human labels are released at https://github.com/bhaskargurram-ai/agenthallu-bench.

LLM agents excel when environments are mostly static and the needed information fits in a model's context window, but they often fail in open-ended investigations where explanations must be constructed by iteratively mining evidence from massive, heterogeneous operational data. These investigations exhibit hidden dependency structure: entities interact, signals co-vary, and the importance of a fact may only become clear after other evidence is discovered. Because the context window is bounded, agents must summarize intermediate findings before their significance is known, increasing the risk of discarding key evidence. ReAct-style agents are especially brittle in this regime. Their retrieve-summarize-reason loop makes conclusions sensitive to exploration order and introduces run-to-run non-determinism, producing a reliability gap where Pass-at-k may be high but Majority-at-k remains low. Simply sampling more rollouts or generating longer reasoning traces does not reliably stabilize results, since hypotheses cannot be autonomously checked as new evidence arrives and there is no explicit mechanism for belief bookkeeping and revision. In addition, ReAct entangles semantic reasoning with controller duties such as tool orchestration and state tracking, so execution errors and plan drift degrade reasoning while consuming scarce context. We address these issues by formulating investigation as abductive reasoning over a dependency graph and proposing EoG (Explanations over Graphs), a disaggregated framework in which an LLM performs bounded local evidence mining and labeling (cause vs symptom) while a deterministic controller manages traversal, state, and belief propagation to compute a minimal explanatory frontier. On a representative ITBench diagnostics task, EoG improves both accuracy and run-to-run consistency over ReAct baselines, including a 7x average gain in Majority-at-k entity F1.

Organizations across finance, healthcare, transportation, content moderation, and critical infrastructure are rapidly deploying highly automated AI systems, yet they lack principled methods to quantify how increasing automation amplifies harm when failures occur. We propose a parsimonious Bayesian risk decomposition expressing expected loss as the product of three terms: the probability of system failure, the conditional probability that a failure propagates into harm given the automation level, and the expected severity of harm. This framework isolates a critical quantity -- the conditional probability that failures propagate into harm -- which captures execution and oversight risk rather than model accuracy alone. We develop complete theoretical foundations: formal proofs of the decomposition, a harm propagation equivalence theorem linking the harm propagation probability to observable execution controls, risk elasticity measures, efficient frontier analysis for automation policy, and optimal resource allocation principles with second-order conditions. We motivate the framework with an illustrative case study of the 2012 Knight Capital incident ($440M loss) as one instantiation of a broadly applicable failure pattern, and characterize the research design required to empirically validate the framework at scale across deployment domains. This work provides the theoretical foundations for a new class of deployment-focused risk governance tools for agentic and automated AI systems.

Propagation-based video editing enables precise user control by propagating a single edited frame into following frames while maintaining the original context such as motion and structures. However, training such models requires large-scale, paired (source and edited) video datasets, which are costly and complex to acquire. Hence, we propose the PropFly, a training pipeline for Propagation-based video editing, relying on on-the-Fly supervision from pre-trained video diffusion models (VDMs) instead of requiring off-the-shelf or precomputed paired video editing datasets. Specifically, our PropFly leverages one-step clean latent estimations from intermediate noised latents with varying Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) scales to synthesize diverse pairs of 'source' (low-CFG) and 'edited' (high-CFG) latents on-the-fly. The source latent serves as structural information of the video, while the edited latent provides the target transformation for learning propagation. Our pipeline enables an additional adapter attached to the pre-trained VDM to learn to propagate edits via Guidance-Modulated Flow Matching (GMFM) loss, which guides the model to replicate the target transformation. Our on-the-fly supervision ensures the model to learn temporally consistent and dynamic transformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PropFly significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various video editing tasks, producing high-quality editing results.

We introduce a hierarchical filtering procedure for generative models of sequences on trees, enabling control over the range of positional correlations in the data. Leveraging this controlled setting, we provide evidence that vanilla encoder-only transformer architectures can implement the optimal Belief Propagation algorithm on both root classification and masked language modeling tasks. Correlations at larger distances corresponding to increasing layers of the hierarchy are sequentially included as the network is trained. We analyze how the transformer layers succeed by focusing on attention maps from models trained with varying degrees of filtering. These attention maps show clear evidence for iterative hierarchical reconstruction of correlations, and we can relate these observations to a plausible implementation of the exact inference algorithm for the network sizes considered.

As LLMs generate increasingly long outputs, effective uncertainty estimation must identify errors at fine-grained levels rather than discard entire responses. While such methods exist, evaluating uncertainty at any resolution (token to an entire generation) is challenging and highly sensitive to label imperfections, making zero-noise benchmarks essential; yet, long-form generation benchmarks tend to rely on fallible labels rather than deterministic ground truth. We introduce Single-answer Atomic Long-form Target (SALT), a benchmark of six procedurally generated tasks with single deterministic long textual ground truths, enabling unit-level evaluation of correctness, calibration, and ranking without external judges. Equipped with SALT, our analysis of 50+ LLMs reveals key insights: We identify which confidence functions dominate each uncertainty aspect and show that confidence ranking largely breaks at atomic resolution, even when clearer separability emerges at coarser line-level units. SALT further enables controlled atom-level interventions throughout generation, revealing two separable drivers of future errors: propagation from corrupted prefixes, dominated by global context correctness, and bounded degradation from increasing answer-context length. Finally, we demonstrate that reasoning, via Chain-of-Thought prompting or internalized through training, introduces a trade-off, improving accuracy while degrading confidence ranking. These findings directly impact risk-critical applications requiring reliable error identification and mitigation.

The goal of Online Domain Adaptation for semantic segmentation is to handle unforeseeable domain changes that occur during deployment, like sudden weather events. However, the high computational costs associated with brute-force adaptation make this paradigm unfeasible for real-world applications. In this paper we propose HAMLET, a Hardware-Aware Modular Least Expensive Training framework for real-time domain adaptation. Our approach includes a hardware-aware back-propagation orchestration agent (HAMT) and a dedicated domain-shift detector that enables active control over when and how the model is adapted (LT). Thanks to these advancements, our approach is capable of performing semantic segmentation while simultaneously adapting at more than 29FPS on a single consumer-grade GPU. Our framework's encouraging accuracy and speed trade-off is demonstrated on OnDA and SHIFT benchmarks through experimental results.

We present Vivid-VR, a DiT-based generative video restoration method built upon an advanced T2V foundation model, where ControlNet is leveraged to control the generation process, ensuring content consistency. However, conventional fine-tuning of such controllable pipelines frequently suffers from distribution drift due to limitations in imperfect multimodal alignment, resulting in compromised texture realism and temporal coherence. To tackle this challenge, we propose a concept distillation training strategy that utilizes the pretrained T2V model to synthesize training samples with embedded textual concepts, thereby distilling its conceptual understanding to preserve texture and temporal quality. To enhance generation controllability, we redesign the control architecture with two key components: 1) a control feature projector that filters degradation artifacts from input video latents to minimize their propagation through the generation pipeline, and 2) a new ControlNet connector employing a dual-branch design. This connector synergistically combines MLP-based feature mapping with cross-attention mechanism for dynamic control feature retrieval, enabling both content preservation and adaptive control signal modulation. Extensive experiments show that Vivid-VR performs favorably against existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as AIGC videos, achieving impressive texture realism, visual vividness, and temporal consistency. The codes and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/Vivid-VR.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still struggle with vision hallucination, where generated responses are inconsistent with the visual input. Existing methods either rely on large-scale annotated data for fine-tuning, which incurs massive computational overhead, or employ static post-hoc strategies that overlook the dynamic nature of hallucination emergence. To address these, we introduce a new self-rewarding framework, enabling dynamic hallucination mitigation at inference time without external supervision. On the empirical side, we reveal that visual hallucination exhibits phase-wise dynamic patterns, peaking at the onset of each semantic phase. Drawing on these insights, we propose PSRD (Phase-wise \textbf{Self-Reward Decoding) for online hallucination correction guided by phase-wise self-reward signals. To reduce the cost of repeated self-evaluation during decoding, we distill the hallucination guidance signal from LVLMs into a lightweight reward model. The reward model subsequently provides on-the-fly guidance for targeted intervention during the decoding process, enabling precise hallucination suppression. The proposed PSRD significantly reduces the hallucination rate of LLaVA-1.5-7B by 50.0% and consistently outperforms existing post-hoc methods across five hallucination evaluation benchmarks for four LVLMs. Further analysis confirms that PSRD effectively mitigates hallucination propagation and achieves a highly controllable trade-off between strong performance and inference efficiency.

Multi-agent LLM systems improve reasoning by combining outputs from multiple agents, but interaction-heavy methods can introduce error propagation and high communication overhead. When agents exchange raw responses or reasoning traces, incorrect intermediate reasoning may be adopted and amplified, leading to confident but wrong consensus; multi-round communication also increases token consumption, latency, and inference cost. In this paper, we propose a controlled-communication coordination framework named DarkForest. DarkForest first keeps agents independent, so each agent produces an answer without seeing the others' outputs. It then parses the raw responses into structured candidate records, groups semantically equivalent candidates into clusters, and estimates a calibrated belief distribution over these clusters using agent reliability, confidence, parse quality, support-pattern reliability, and independence corrections. A coordinator receives only policy-permitted evidence from this belief state with controlled communication. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that DarkForest achieves leading overall quality, improves the strongest baseline by up to 30.7\% on benchmark metrics, and reduces token consumption by up to 6.5times compared with communication-heavy baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted across diverse software engineering domains, such as code generation, program repair, and vulnerability detection. These applications require understanding beyond surface-level code patterns: value propagation, control flow, and interdependence between program elements. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate end-to-end outcomes, such as whether code is correctly repaired or generated, leaving the models ability for program semantic reasoning underexplored. This work presents CoRe, a high-quality, human-verified benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on fundamental static analysis tasks. CoRe includes 12,553 task instances spanning data dependency, control dependency, and information flow across programs written in C/C++, Java, and Python. To ensure semantic diversity and reasoning complexity, we propose a semantics-aware diverse sampling strategy that selects targets and task instances based on structural coverage and dependency depth. We evaluate 10 mainstream LLMs and show that, while they perform well at identifying dependencies, models still struggle with tasks that require deeper semantic understanding and multi-step reasoning. We further conduct qualitative analyses to uncover key challenges, such as complex control structures and backward dependency patterns, offering insights into improving LLMs code reasoning capabilities.

We propose a fully spectral, neuro\-symbolic reasoning architecture that leverages Graph Signal Processing (GSP) as the primary computational backbone for integrating symbolic logic and neural inference. Unlike conventional reasoning models that treat spectral graph methods as peripheral components, our approach formulates the entire reasoning pipeline in the graph spectral domain. Logical entities and relationships are encoded as graph signals, processed via learnable spectral filters that control multi-scale information propagation, and mapped into symbolic predicates for rule-based inference. We present a complete mathematical framework for spectral reasoning, including graph Fourier transforms, band-selective attention, and spectral rule grounding. Experiments on benchmark reasoning datasets (ProofWriter, EntailmentBank, bAbI, CLUTRR, and ARC-Challenge) demonstrate improvements in logical consistency, interpretability, and computational efficiency over state\-of\-the\-art neuro\-symbolic models. Our results suggest that GSP provides a mathematically grounded and computationally efficient substrate for robust and interpretable reasoning systems.

Financial time-series forecasting is a high-stakes problem where regime shifts and shocks make point-accurate yet overconfident models dangerous. We propose Uncertainty-Gated Generative Modeling (UGGM), which treats uncertainty as an internal control signal that gates (i) representation via gated reparameterization, (ii) propagation via similarity and confidence routing, and (iii) generation via uncertainty-controlled predictive distributions, together with uncertainty-driven regularization and calibration to curb miscalibration. Instantiated on Weak Innovation AutoEncoder (WIAE-GPF), our UG-WIAE-GPF significantly improves risk-sensitive forecasting, delivering a 63.5\% MSE reduction on NYISO (0.3508 rightarrow 0.1281), with improved robustness under shock intervals (mSE: 0.2739 rightarrow 0.1748).

In the digital era, the rapid propagation of fake news and rumors via social networks brings notable societal challenges and impacts public opinion regulation. Traditional fake news modeling typically forecasts the general popularity trends of different groups or numerically represents opinions shift. However, these methods often oversimplify real-world complexities and overlook the rich semantic information of news text. The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides the possibility of modeling subtle dynamics of opinion. Consequently, in this work, we introduce a Fake news Propagation Simulation framework (FPS) based on LLM, which studies the trends and control of fake news propagation in detail. Specifically, each agent in the simulation represents an individual with a distinct personality. They are equipped with both short-term and long-term memory, as well as a reflective mechanism to mimic human-like thinking. Every day, they engage in random opinion exchanges, reflect on their thinking, and update their opinions. Our simulation results uncover patterns in fake news propagation related to topic relevance, and individual traits, aligning with real-world observations. Additionally, we evaluate various intervention strategies and demonstrate that early and appropriately frequent interventions strike a balance between governance cost and effectiveness, offering valuable insights for practical applications. Our study underscores the significant utility and potential of LLMs in combating fake news.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) mitigates this sparsity by querying a privileged teacher at student-visited prefixes and providing dense token-level distributional supervision. Although this dense supervision alleviates signal sparsity, we find that standard OPSD still underexploits the temporal structure of the rollout. It assigns every local divergence the same coefficient, regardless of its position or the divergence sequence in which it occurs. In on-policy autoregressive generation, the same divergence magnitude can follow different discrepancy histories, reflecting different evolutions of the mismatch between the teacher and student. Since the local scalar alone cannot distinguish these temporal contexts, standard OPSD cannot adapt its token-level weights to the realized discrepancy sequence. To address this limitation, we propose Divergence-Adaptive Supervision Horizons (DASH). DASH maps the gap between each local distillation signal and the sequence-level mean to an adaptive propagation gate and then uses these gates to control backward multi-step aggregation. By doing so, DASH adjusts token-level supervision weights according to how local divergences evolve during generation. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks across three model scales show that DASH improves over our matched vanilla OPSD reruns on every benchmark at all three scales. DASH reuses the teacher and student distributions that OPSD already computes, so the gains require no additional teacher or student forward pass. Code: https://github.com/DBtxy/DASH-OPSD

In geometrically frustrated assemblies local inter-subunit misfits propagate to intra-assembly strain gradients, giving rise to anomalous self-limiting assembly thermodynamics. Here, we use theory and coarse-grained simulation to study a recently developed class of ``curvamer'' particles, flexible shell-like particles that exhibit self-limiting assembly due to the build up of curvature deformation in cohesive stacks. To address a generic, yet poorly understood aspect of frustrated assembly, we introduce a model of curvamer assembly that incorporates both {\it intra-particle} shape deformation as well as compliance of {\it inter-particle} cohesive gaps, an effect we can attribute to a {\it finite range of attraction} between particles. We show that the ratio of intra-particle (bending elasticity) to inter-particle stiffness not only controls the regimes of self-limitation but also the nature of frustration propagation through curvamer stacks. We find a transition from uniformly-bound, curvature-focusing stacks at small size to gap-opened, uniformly curved stacks at large size is controlled by a dimensionless measure of inter- versus intra-curvamer stiffness. The finite range of inter-particle attraction determines range of cohesion in stacks are self-limiting, a prediction which is in strong agreement with numerical studies of our coarse-grained colloidal model. These predictions provide critical guidance for experimental realizations of frustrated particle systems designed to exhibit self-limitation at especially large multi-particle scales.

The integration of machine learning tools into telecom networks, has led to two prevailing paradigms, namely, language-based systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), and physics-based systems, such as Digital Twins (DTs). While LLM-based approaches enable flexible interaction and automation, they lack explicit representations of network dynamics. DTs, in contrast, offer a high-fidelity network simulation, but remain scenario-specific and are not designed for learning or decision-making under uncertainty. This gap becomes critical for 6G systems, where decisions must take into account the evolving network states, uncertainty, and the cascading effects of control actions across multiple layers. In this article, we introduce the {Telecom World Model}~(TWM) concept, an architecture for learned, action-conditioned, uncertainty-aware modeling of telecom system dynamics. We decompose the problem into two interacting worlds, a controllable system world consisting of operator-configurable settings and an external world that captures propagation, mobility, traffic, and failures. We propose a three-layer architecture, comprising a field world model for spatial environment prediction, a control/dynamics world model for action-conditioned Key Performance Indicator (KPI) trajectory prediction, and a telecom foundation model layer for intent translation and orchestration. We showcase a comparative analysis between existing paradigms, which demonstrates that TWM jointly provides telecom state grounding, fast action-conditioned roll-outs, calibrated uncertainty, multi-timescale dynamics, model-based planning, and LLM-integrated guardrails. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept on network slicing to validate the proposed architecture, showing that the full three-layer pipeline outperforms single-world baselines and accurately predicts KPI trajectories.

Analysis of pre-trained code models also has revealed that they can effectively learn program syntax. However, these works are limited in analyzing code syntax and their distance-based approaches are not accurate due to the curse of high dimensionality. Furthermore, the study of the learnt program semantics of these models is rarely discussed. To further understand the code features learnt by these models, in this paper, we target two well-known representative code pre-trained models (i.e., CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT) and devise a set of probing tasks for the syntax and semantics analysis. Specifically, on one hand, we design two probing tasks (i.e., syntax pair node prediction and token tagging prediction) to manipulate AST for the understanding of learnt program syntax. On the other hand, we design two tasks (i.e., semantic relationship prediction and semantic propagation prediction(inGraph) ) on the constructed control flow graph (CFG), data dependency graph (DDG) and control dependency graph (CDG) for the learnt program semantic analysis. In addition, to understand which kind of program semantics these pre-trained models can comprehend well, we conduct the statistical analysis for attention weights learnt by different heads and layers. Through extensive analysis in terms of program syntax and semantics, we have the following findings: 1) Both CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT can learn the program syntax well. 2) Both CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT can learn program semantics to different extents. GraphCodeBERT is superior to CodeBERT in learning program control flow and data dependency information but has a similar capability to CodeBERT in learning control dependency information. 3) Both CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT can capture program semantics in the final layer of representation, but different attention heads and layers exhibit different roles in learning program semantics.

The rapid expansion of long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) has reignited debate on whether Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) remains necessary. However, empirical evidence reveals persistent limitations of long-context inference, including the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon, high computational cost, and poor scalability for multi-document reasoning. Conversely, traditional RAG systems, while efficient, are constrained by flat chunk-level retrieval that introduces semantic noise and fails to support structured cross-document synthesis. We present FABLE, a Forest-based Adaptive Bi-path LLM-Enhanced retrieval framework that integrates LLMs into both knowledge organization and retrieval. FABLE constructs LLM-enhanced hierarchical forest indexes with multi-granularity semantic structures, then employs a bi-path strategy combining LLM-guided hierarchical traversal with structure-aware propagation for fine-grained evidence acquisition, with explicit budget control for adaptive efficiency trade-offs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FABLE consistently outperforms SOTA RAG methods and achieves comparable accuracy to full-context LLM inference with up to 94\% token reduction, showing that long-context LLMs amplify rather than fully replace the need for structured retrieval.

The Lipschitz property of a deep neural network provides a direct measure of its sensitivity to input perturbations and, when explicitly controlled, offers a principled way to limit the propagation of errors and improve robustness. Over the past decade, Lipschitz-bounded layers have been incorporated into increasingly expressive and high-performing deep models, narrowing the gap between empirical robustness and formal, by-design guarantees of stability. This article introduces the fundamental concepts underlying Lipschitz-bounded neural networks, explaining the principles behind Lipschitz-constrained layers, the mechanisms used to enforce their bounds, and how they yield robustness certificates at the cost of a single forward pass. The tutorial concludes by discussing emerging and open directions, highlighting Lipschitz control as a general framework for offering guaranteed, by-design stability.

Interactive video generation and editing are becoming increasingly important for creative design. In this report, we introduce EditStream: a unified framework for interactive video generation and editing. EditStream unifies multiple video creation and manipulation tasks within a single DiT-based model through flexible task-specific conditioning, and further transforms it into a fast, few-step autoregressive model for efficient streaming. It supports Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, Video-to-Video, Editing Propagation, Reference-guided Video Editing, and Camera Pose Change, enabling flexible control over video generation, transformation, and editing within one system. To make the unified model practical for interactive use, we develop a two-stage distillation approach that combines Velocity Moment Matching (VMM) with autoregressive unrolling. VMM matches conditional velocity moments at student-reached intermediate states to preserve generation quality and motion, while unrolling exposes the student to its own autoregressive predictions to improve temporal stability. Together, they alleviate common challenges in few-step autoregressive video generation, including over-saturation, degraded motion, temporal instability, and complex training. EditStream provides a practical and scalable solution that bridges high-quality diffusion-based video models with interactive creative workflows.

As 5G technology becomes increasingly established, the anticipation for 6G is growing, which promises to deliver faster and more reliable wireless connections via cutting-edge radio technologies. However, efficient management method of the large-scale antenna arrays deployed by those radio technologies is crucial. Traditional management methods are mainly reactive, usually based on feedback from users to adapt to the dynamic wireless channel. However, a more promising approach lies in the prediction of spatial channel state information (spatial-CSI), which is an all-inclusive channel characterization and consists of all the feasible line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths between the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx), with the three-dimension (3D) trajectory, attenuation, phase shift, delay, and polarization of each path. Advances in hardware and neural networks make it possible to predict such spatial-CSI using precise environmental information, and further look into the possibility of holographic communication, which implies complete control over every aspect of the radio waves emitted. Based on the integration of holographic communication and digital twin, we proposed a new framework, digital radio twin, which takes advantages from both the digital world and deterministic control over radio waves, supporting a wide range of high-level applications. As a preliminary attempt towards this visionary direction, in this paper, we explore the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to pinpoint the valid paths in a given environment, demonstrating promising results, and highlighting the potential of this approach in driving forward the evolution of 6G wireless communication technologies.

Ray tracing has become a standard for accurate radio propagation modeling, but suffers from exponential computational complexity, as the number of candidate paths scales with the number of objects raised to the power of the interaction order. This bottleneck limits its use in large-scale or real-time applications, forcing traditional tools to rely on heuristics to reduce the number of path candidates at the cost of potentially reduced accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted framework that replaces exhaustive path searching with intelligent sampling via Generative Flow Networks. Applying such generative models to this domain presents significant challenges, particularly sparse rewards due to the rarity of valid paths, which can lead to convergence failures and trivial solutions when evaluating high-order interactions in complex environments. To ensure robust learning and efficient exploration, our framework incorporates three key architectural components. First, we implement an experience replay buffer to capture and retain rare valid paths. Second, we adopt a uniform exploratory policy to improve generalization and prevent the model from overfitting to simple geometries. Third, we apply a physics-based action masking strategy that filters out physically impossible paths before the model even considers them. As demonstrated in our experimental validation, the proposed model achieves substantial speedups over exhaustive search -- up to 10times faster on GPU and 1000times faster on CPU -- while maintaining high coverage accuracy and successfully uncovering complex propagation paths. The complete source code, tests, and tutorial are available at https://github.com/jeertmans/sampling-paths.

Modeling radio propagation is essential for wireless network design and performance optimization. Traditional methods rely on physics models of radio propagation, which can be inaccurate or inflexible. In this work, we propose using graph neural networks to learn radio propagation behaviors directly from real-world network data. Our approach converts the radio propagation environment into a graph representation, with nodes corresponding to locations and edges representing spatial and ray-tracing relationships between locations. The graph is generated by converting images of the environment into a graph structure, with specific relationships between nodes. The model is trained on this graph representation, using sensor measurements as target data. We demonstrate that the graph neural network, which learns to predict radio propagation directly from data, achieves competitive performance compared to traditional heuristic models. This data-driven approach outperforms classic numerical solvers in terms of both speed and accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply graph neural networks to real-world radio propagation data to generate coverage maps, enabling generative models of signal propagation with point measurements only.

Multi-agent systems play a central role in area coverage tasks across search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture. Achieving non-uniform coverage, where spatial priorities vary across the domain, requires coordinating agents while respecting dynamic and communication constraints. Density-driven approaches can distribute agents according to a prescribed reference density, but existing methods do not ensure connectivity. This limitation often leads to communication loss, reduced coordination, and degraded coverage performance. This letter introduces a connectivity-preserving extension of the Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework. The coverage objective, defined using the Wasserstein distance between the agent distribution and the reference density, admits a convex quadratic program formulation. Communication constraints are incorporated through a smooth connectivity penalty, which maintains strict convexity, supports distributed implementation, and preserves inter-agent communication without imposing rigid formations. Simulation studies show that the proposed method consistently maintains connectivity, improves convergence speed, and enhances non-uniform coverage quality compared with density-driven schemes that do not incorporate explicit connectivity considerations.

In this paper we propose a highly efficient and very accurate deep learning method for estimating the propagation pathloss from a point x (transmitter location) to any point y on a planar domain. For applications such as user-cell site association and device-to-device link scheduling, an accurate knowledge of the pathloss function for all pairs of transmitter-receiver locations is very important. Commonly used statistical models approximate the pathloss as a decaying function of the distance between transmitter and receiver. However, in realistic propagation environments characterized by the presence of buildings, street canyons, and objects at different heights, such radial-symmetric functions yield very misleading results. In this paper we show that properly designed and trained deep neural networks are able to learn how to estimate the pathloss function, given an urban environment, in a very accurate and computationally efficient manner. Our proposed method, termed RadioUNet, learns from a physical simulation dataset, and generates pathloss estimations that are very close to the simulations, but are much faster to compute for real-time applications. Moreover, we propose methods for transferring what was learned from simulations to real-life. Numerical results show that our method significantly outperforms previously proposed methods.

Identifying control strategies for biological networks is paramount for practical applications that involve reprogramming a cell's fate, such as disease therapeutics and stem cell reprogramming. Here we develop a novel network control framework that integrates the structural and functional information available for intracellular networks to predict control targets. Formulated in a logical dynamic scheme, our approach drives any initial state to the target state with 100% effectiveness and needs to be applied only transiently for the network to reach and stay in the desired state. We illustrate our method's potential to find intervention targets for cancer treatment and cell differentiation by applying it to a leukemia signaling network and to the network controlling the differentiation of helper T cells. We find that the predicted control targets are effective in a broad dynamic framework. Moreover, several of the predicted interventions are supported by experiments.

We give an overview of recent developments in the modeling of radiowave propagation, based on machine learning algorithms. We identify the input and output specification and the architecture of the model as the main challenges associated with machine learning-driven propagation models. Relevant papers are discussed and categorized based on their approach to each of these challenges. Emphasis is given on presenting the prospects and open problems in this promising and rapidly evolving area.

The field of image synthesis has made tremendous strides forward in the last years. Besides defining the desired output image with text-prompts, an intuitive approach is to additionally use spatial guidance in form of an image, such as a depth map. For this, a recent and highly popular approach is to use a controlling network, such as ControlNet, in combination with a pre-trained image generation model, such as Stable Diffusion. When evaluating the design of existing controlling networks, we observe that they all suffer from the same problem of a delay in information flowing between the generation and controlling process. This, in turn, means that the controlling network must have generative capabilities. In this work we propose a new controlling architecture, called ControlNet-XS, which does not suffer from this problem, and hence can focus on the given task of learning to control. In contrast to ControlNet, our model needs only a fraction of parameters, and hence is about twice as fast during inference and training time. Furthermore, the generated images are of higher quality and the control is of higher fidelity. All code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.

Statistical channel models are instrumental to design and evaluate wireless communication systems. In the millimeter wave bands, such models become acutely challenging; they must capture the delay, directions, and path gains, for each link and with high resolution. This paper presents a general modeling methodology based on training generative neural networks from data. The proposed generative model consists of a two-stage structure that first predicts the state of each link (line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight, or outage), and subsequently feeds this state into a conditional variational autoencoder that generates the path losses, delays, and angles of arrival and departure for all its propagation paths. Importantly, minimal prior assumptions are made, enabling the model to capture complex relationships within the data. The methodology is demonstrated for 28GHz air-to-ground channels in an urban environment, with training datasets produced by means of ray tracing.

In millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular communications, multi-hop relay disconnection by line-of-sight (LOS) blockage is a critical problem, especially in the early diffusion phase of mmWave-available vehicles, where not all the vehicles have mmWave communication devices. This paper proposes a distributed position control method for autonomous vehicles to make long relays connecting to road side units (RSUs) by avoiding blockages to communicate with each other via LOS paths. Even though vehicles with the proposed method do not use the whole information of the environments and cooperate with each other, they can decide their action (e.g., lane change and overtaking) to form long relays using only information of its surroundings (e.g., surrounding vehicle positions). The decision-making problem is formulated as a Markov decision process so that autonomous vehicles can learn a practical movement strategy of making long relays by a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. This paper designs a learning algorithm based on a sophisticated deep reinforcement learning algorithm, asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C), which enables vehicles to learn a complex movement strategy quickly by its deepneural-network architecture and multi-agent-learning mechanism. Once the strategy is well trained, vehicles can distributedly move to positions where the long relay to the RSU is established. Simulations results confirm that the proposed method can increase the relay length and coverage even if the traffic conditions and penetration ratio of mmWave communication devices in learning and operation phases are different.

A control technique is developed via Reinforcement Learning that allows arbitrary controlling of the position of an acoustic cavitation bubble in a dual-frequency standing acoustic wave field. The agent must choose the optimal pressure amplitude values to manipulate the bubble position in the range of x/lambda_0in[0.05, 0.25]. To train the agent an actor-critic off-policy algorithm (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient) was used that supports continuous action space, which allows setting the pressure amplitude values continuously within 0 and 1, bar. A shaped reward function is formulated that minimizes the distance between the bubble and the target position and implicitly encourages the agent to perform the position control within the shortest amount of time. In some cases, the optimal control can be 7 times faster than the solution expected from the linear theory.

We model and study the processes of excitation, absorption, and transfer in various networks. The model consists of a harmonic oscillator representing a single-mode radiation field, a qubit acting as an antenna, a network through which the excitation propagates, and a qubit at the end serving as a sink. We investigate how off-resonant excitations can be optimally absorbed and transmitted through the network. Three strategies are considered: optimising network energies, adjusting the couplings between the radiation field, the antenna, and the network, or introducing and optimising driving fields at the start and end of the network. These strategies are tested on three different types of network with increasing complexity: nearest-neighbour and star configurations, and one associated with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. The results show that, among the various strategies, the introduction of driving fields is the most effective, leading to a significant increase in the probability of reaching the sink in a given time. This result remains stable across networks of varying dimensionalities and types, and the driving process requires only a few parameters to be effective.

Radio maps and channel knowledge maps provide reusable propagation knowledge, but a stored map can become locally outdated after persistent changes to doors, partitions, furniture, large equipment, or infrastructure. Motivated by digital-twin state synchronization, we develop an electromagnetic twin that recurrently converts sparse channel measurements into a persistent wireless state, exposes that state to communication queries, and uses its uncertainty to request subsequent measurements. The twin tracks persistent or semi-persistent propagation changes rather than transient human motion or fast fading. Each update is a constrained inverse problem that combines the previous map, a scene graph, and an imperfect physics prior. Measurement consistency with a confidence-calibrated radius and physical gain bounds enforce feasibility, while scene-aware spatial regularization and selective temporal memory preserve propagation boundaries and unchanged regions. Successive convex approximation (SCA), majorization--minimization alternating direction method of multipliers (MM-ADMM), and a low-complexity primal--dual hybrid gradient (LC-PDHG) mode realize the framework at different computational scales, and a local perturbation analysis gives an explicit multi-update tracking recursion. The updated state supports access-point association and codebook beam selection, while change-weighted A-optimal design closes the measurement--update--query loop. Over 500 realizations, the recurrent update remains stable through eight persistent scene events and raises best-beam accuracy from 76.64% to 90.83% as measured-location density grows from 2% to 16%.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems have a huge potential both in terms of data rate and energy efficiency, although channel estimation becomes challenging for a large number of antennas. Using a physical model allows to ease the problem by injecting a priori information based on the physics of propagation. However, such a model rests on simplifying assumptions and requires to know precisely the configuration of the system, which is unrealistic in practice.In this paper we present mpNet, an unfolded neural network specifically designed for massive MIMO channel estimation. It is trained online in an unsupervised way. Moreover, mpNet is computationally efficient and automatically adapts its depth to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The method we propose adds flexibility to physical channel models by allowing a base station (BS) to automatically correct its channel estimation algorithm based on incoming data, without the need for a separate offline training phase.It is applied to realistic millimeter wave channels and shows great performance, achieving a channel estimation error almost as low as one would get with a perfectly calibrated system. It also allows incident detection and automatic correction, making the BS resilient and able to automatically adapt to changes in its environment.

Outdoor-to-indoor (OtI) signal propagation further challenges the already tight link budgets at millimeter-wave (mmWave). To gain insight into OtI mmWave scenarios at 28 GHz, we conducted an extensive measurement campaign consisting of over 2,200 link measurements. In total, 43 OtI scenarios were measured in West Harlem, New York City, covering seven highly diverse buildings. The measured OtI path gain can vary by up to 40 dB for a given link distance, and the empirical path gain model for all data shows an average of 30 dB excess loss over free space at distances beyond 50 m, with an RMS fitting error of 11.7 dB. The type of glass is found to be the single dominant feature for OtI loss, with 20 dB observed difference between empirical path gain models for scenarios with low-loss and high-loss glass. The presence of scaffolding, tree foliage, or elevated subway tracks, as well as difference in floor height are each found to have an impact between 5-10 dB. We show that for urban buildings with high-loss glass, OtI coverage can support 500 Mbps for 90% of indoor user equipment (UEs) with a base station (BS) antenna placed up to 49 m away. For buildings with low-loss glass, such as our case study covering multiple classrooms of a public school, data rates over 2.5/1.2 Gbps are possible from a BS 68/175 m away from the school building, when a line-of-sight path is available. We expect these results to be useful for the deployment of mmWave networks in dense urban environments as well as the development of relevant scheduling and beam management algorithms.

The quickly increasing data traffic and the user demand for a full coverage of mobile services anywhere and anytime are leading mobile networking into a future of small cell networks. However, due to the high-density and randomness of small cell networks, there are several technical challenges. In this paper, we investigate two critical issues: best signal quality and mobility management. Under the assumptions that base stations are uniformly distributed in a ring shaped region and that shadowings are lognormal, independent and identically distributed, we prove that when the number of sites in the ring tends to infinity, then (i) the maximum signal strength received at the center of the ring tends in distribution to a Gumbel distribution when properly renormalized, and (ii) it is asymptotically independent of the interference. Using these properties, we derive the distribution of the best signal quality. Furthermore, an optimized random cell scanning scheme is proposed, based on the evaluation of the optimal number of sites to be scanned for maximizing the user data throughput.

5G and beyond networks promise advancements in bandwidth, latency, and connectivity. The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) framework enhances flexibility through network slicing and closed-loop RAN control. Central to this evolution is integrating machine learning (ML) for dynamic network control. This paper presents a framework to optimize O-RAN operation. First, we build and share a robust O-RAN dataset from real-world traffic captured across diverse locations and mobility scenarios, replicated within a full-stack srsRAN-based O-RAN system using the Colosseum RF emulator. This dataset supports ML training and deployment. We then introduce a traffic classification approach leveraging various ML models, demonstrating rapid training, testing, and refinement to improve accuracy. With up to 99% offline accuracy and 92% online accuracy for specific slices, our framework adapts efficiently to different models and network conditions. Finally, we present a physical resource block (PRB) assignment optimization strategy using reinforcement learning to refine resource allocation. Our learned policy achieves a mean performance score (0.631), surpassing a manually configured expert policy (0.609) and a random baseline (0.588), demonstrating improved PRB utilization. More importantly, our approach exhibits lower variability, with the Coefficient of Variation (CV) reduced by up to an order of magnitude in three out of four cases, ensuring more consistent performance. Our contributions, including open-source tools and datasets, accelerate O-RAN and ML-driven network control research.

We consider funnel control for linear infinite-dimensional systems that are impedance passive, meaning that they satisfy an energy balance in which the stored energy equals the squared norm of the state and the supplied power is the inner product of input and output. For the analysis we employ the system node approach, which offers a unified framework for infinite-dimensional systems with boundary and distributed control and observation. The resulting closed-loop dynamics are governed by a nonlinear evolution equation; we establish its solvability and hence the applicability of funnel control to this class. The applicability is illustrated by an Euler-Bernoulli beam, which is studied in two distinct scenarios: once with boundary control and once with distributed control.

Efficient downlink radio resource management in 5G requires jointly optimizing user scheduling and transmit-power allocation under time-varying wireless conditions. This is challenging in OFDMA systems because PRB assignment is combinatorial, power allocation is continuous, and performance depends on channel evolution, link adaptation, and long-term fairness. We propose a hierarchical cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with staged curriculum training for joint downlink PRB and power allocation in a physically grounded 5G environment. System-level simulation is implemented in Sionna, while Sionna RT supports wireless scene construction and mobility-aware ray-traced channel generation. The control task is decomposed into two sequential stages: a PRB agent learns user-level resource shares, which are converted to exact PRB assignments by a deterministic channel-aware quota resolver, and a power agent distributes the base-station power budget across users and their assigned PRB-symbol resources. The framework operates in a cross-layer loop with adaptive modulation and coding, HARQ feedback, outer-loop link adaptation, and a fairness-aware reward based on smoothed throughput and Jain's fairness index. Training stability is improved through a three-phase curriculum for PRB allocation, power control, and joint fine-tuning. Under matched channel realizations, we compare against a PF scheduler with equal-power transmission and two ablations isolating the learned PRB and power-control components. Results show that both learned components improve throughput distribution relative to PF, while the full PRB and power controller achieves the largest cell-throughput gain with only a modest reduction in Jain's fairness index.

Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is very heterogeneous, and strategies based on controlling network properties, such as the degree and spectral radius, have been shown to be effective. Implementation of such strategies requires detailed information on the contact structure, which might be sensitive in many applications. Our focus here is on choosing effective vaccination strategies when the edges are sensitive and differential privacy guarantees are needed. Our main contributions are (varepsilon,delta)-differentially private algorithms for designing vaccination strategies by reducing the maximum degree and spectral radius. Our key technique is a private algorithm for the multi-set multi-cover problem, which we use for controlling network properties. We evaluate privacy-utility tradeoffs of our algorithms on multiple synthetic and real-world networks, and show their effectiveness.

Network planning seeks to determine base station parameters that maximize coverage and capacity in cellular networks. However, achieving optimal planning remains challenging due to the diversity of deployment scenarios and the significant simulation-to-reality discrepancy. In this paper, we propose AutoPlan, a new automatic network planning framework by leveraging digital radio twin (DRT) techniques. We derive the DRT by finetuning the parameters of building materials to reduce the sim-to-real discrepancy based on crowdsource real-world user data. Leveraging the DRT, we design a Bayesian optimization based algorithm to optimize the deployment parameters of base stations efficiently. Using the field measurement from Husker-Net, we extensively evaluate AutoPlan under various deployment scenarios, in terms of both coverage and capacity. The evaluation results show that AutoPlan flexibly adapts to different scenarios and achieves performance comparable to exhaustive search, while requiring less than 2\% of its computation time.

Although Maxwell discovered the physical laws of electromagnetic waves 160 years ago, how to precisely model the propagation of an RF signal in an electrically large and complex environment remains a long-standing problem. The difficulty is in the complex interactions between the RF signal and the obstacles (e.g., reflection, diffraction, etc.). Inspired by the great success of using a neural network to describe the optical field in computer vision, we propose a neural radio-frequency radiance field, NeRF^2, which represents a continuous volumetric scene function that makes sense of an RF signal's propagation. Particularly, after training with a few signal measurements, NeRF^2 can tell how/what signal is received at any position when it knows the position of a transmitter. As a physical-layer neural network, NeRF^2 can take advantage of the learned statistic model plus the physical model of ray tracing to generate a synthetic dataset that meets the training demands of application-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Thus, we can boost the performance of ANNs by the proposed turbo-learning, which mixes the true and synthetic datasets to intensify the training. Our experiment results show that turbo-learning can enhance performance with an approximate 50% increase. We also demonstrate the power of NeRF^2 in the field of indoor localization and 5G MIMO.

Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) offers an open, programmable architecture for next-generation wireless networks, enabling advanced control through AI-based applications on the near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (near-RT RIC). However, fully integrated, real-time demonstrations of closed-loop optimization in O-RAN remain scarce. In this paper, we present a complete framework that combines the O-RAN Software Community RIC (OSC RIC) with srsRAN for near-real-time network slicing using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our system orchestrates resources across diverse slice types (eMBB, URLLC, mMTC) for up to 12 UEs. We incorporate GNU Radio blocks for channel modeling, including Free-Space Path Loss (FSPL), single-tap multipath, AWGN, and Doppler effects, to emulate an urban mobility scenario. Experimental results show that our RL-based xApps dynamically adapt resource allocation and maintain QoS under varying traffic demands, highlighting both the feasibility and challenges of end-to-end AI-driven optimization in a lightweight O-RAN testbed. Our findings establish a baseline for real-time RL-based slicing in a disaggregated 5G framework and underscore the need for further enhancements to support fully simulated PHY digital twins without reliance on commercial software.

Despite significant progress in text-to-image diffusion models, achieving precise spatial control over generated outputs remains challenging. ControlNet addresses this by introducing an auxiliary conditioning module, while ControlNet++ further refines alignment through a cycle consistency loss applied only to the final denoising steps. However, this approach neglects intermediate generation stages, limiting its effectiveness. We propose InnerControl, a training strategy that enforces spatial consistency across all diffusion steps. Our method trains lightweight convolutional probes to reconstruct input control signals (e.g., edges, depth) from intermediate UNet features at every denoising step. These probes efficiently extract signals even from highly noisy latents, enabling pseudo ground truth controls for training. By minimizing the discrepancy between predicted and target conditions throughout the entire diffusion process, our alignment loss improves both control fidelity and generation quality. Combined with established techniques like ControlNet++, InnerControl achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse conditioning methods (e.g., edges, depth).

ControlNet offers a powerful way to guide diffusion-based generative models, yet most implementations rely on ad-hoc heuristics to choose which network blocks to control-an approach that varies unpredictably with different tasks. To address this gap, we propose FlexControl, a novel framework that copies all diffusion blocks during training and employs a trainable gating mechanism to dynamically select which blocks to activate at each denoising step. With introducing a computation-aware loss, we can encourage control blocks only to activate when it benefit the generation quality. By eliminating manual block selection, FlexControl enhances adaptability across diverse tasks and streamlines the design pipeline, with computation-aware training loss in an end-to-end training manner. Through comprehensive experiments on both UNet (e.g., SD1.5) and DiT (e.g., SD3.0), we show that our method outperforms existing ControlNet variants in certain key aspects of interest. As evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, FlexControl preserves or enhances image fidelity while also reducing computational overhead by selectively activating the most relevant blocks. These results underscore the potential of a flexible, data-driven approach for controlled diffusion and open new avenues for efficient generative model design.

This paper explores the use of generative models to synthesize high-quality, site-specific multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel data, addressing the high cost of the extensive measurement campaigns required to acquire real-world data for AI-native wireless networks. Two location-conditioned generative paradigms are compared: a conditional denoising diffusion implicit model (cDDIM), and a conditional flow matching model (cFMM). Both these models generate MIMO channel matrices conditioned on user coordinates, to preserve the spatial structure of the deployment site. The approaches are evaluated across three dimensions: statistical fidelity (including beam consistency and effective rank), generation efficiency, and utility in downstream tasks such as channel-state information compression and beam alignment. Results across diverse propagation scenarios (28 GHz and 3.5 GHz, both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight) demonstrate that both models accurately capture site-specific characteristics, even when trained on scarce ground-truth data. Notably, cFMM achieves a quality comparable to cDDIM with roughly an order of magnitude less inference time. Augmenting scarce site-specific datasets with these synthetic channels yields hefty performance gains in downstream physical layer tasks compared to using scarce data alone or stochastic channels.

Current controllable diffusion models typically rely on fixed architectures that modify intermediate activations to inject guidance conditioned on a new modality. This approach uses a static conditioning strategy for a dynamic, multi-stage denoising process, limiting the model's ability to adapt its response as the generation evolves from coarse structure to fine detail. We introduce TC-LoRA (Temporally Modulated Conditional LoRA), a new paradigm that enables dynamic, context-aware control by conditioning the model's weights directly. Our framework uses a hypernetwork to generate LoRA adapters on-the-fly, tailoring weight modifications for the frozen backbone at each diffusion step based on time and the user's condition. This mechanism enables the model to learn and execute an explicit, adaptive strategy for applying conditional guidance throughout the entire generation process. Through experiments on various data domains, we demonstrate that this dynamic, parametric control significantly enhances generative fidelity and adherence to spatial conditions compared to static, activation-based methods. TC-LoRA establishes an alternative approach in which the model's conditioning strategy is modified through a deeper functional adaptation of its weights, allowing control to align with the dynamic demands of the task and generative stage.

The potential of applying diffusion models (DMs) for multiple antenna communications is discussed. A unified framework of applying DM for multiple antenna tasks is first proposed. Then, the tasks are innovatively divided into two categories, i.e., decision-making tasks and generation tasks, depending on whether an optimization of system parameters is involved. For each category, it is conceived 1) how the framework can be used for each task and 2) why the DM is superior to traditional artificial intelligence (TAI) and conventional optimization tasks. It is highlighted that the DMs are well-suited for scenarios with strong interference and noise, excelling in modeling complex data distribution and exploring better actions. A case study of learning beamforming with a DM is then provided, to demonstrate the superiority of the DMs with simulation results. Finally, the applications of DM for emerging multiple antenna technologies and promising research directions are discussed.

Generative models transform random noise into images; their inversion aims to transform images back to structured noise for recovery and editing. This paper addresses two key tasks: (i) inversion and (ii) editing of a real image using stochastic equivalents of rectified flow models (such as Flux). Although Diffusion Models (DMs) have recently dominated the field of generative modeling for images, their inversion presents faithfulness and editability challenges due to nonlinearities in drift and diffusion. Existing state-of-the-art DM inversion approaches rely on training of additional parameters or test-time optimization of latent variables; both are expensive in practice. Rectified Flows (RFs) offer a promising alternative to diffusion models, yet their inversion has been underexplored. We propose RF inversion using dynamic optimal control derived via a linear quadratic regulator. We prove that the resulting vector field is equivalent to a rectified stochastic differential equation. Additionally, we extend our framework to design a stochastic sampler for Flux. Our inversion method allows for state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot inversion and editing, outperforming prior works in stroke-to-image synthesis and semantic image editing, with large-scale human evaluations confirming user preference.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a highly deployable real-time method for novel view synthesis. In practice, it requires a universal, consistent control mechanism that adjusts the trade-off between rendering quality and model compression without scene-specific tuning, enabling automated deployment across different device performances and communication bandwidths. In this work, we present ControlGS, a control-oriented optimization framework that maps the trade-off between Gaussian count and rendering quality to a continuous, scene-agnostic, and highly responsive control axis. Extensive experiments across a wide range of scene scales and types (from small objects to large outdoor scenes) demonstrate that, by adjusting a globally unified control hyperparameter, ControlGS can flexibly generate models biased toward either structural compactness or high fidelity, regardless of the specific scene scale or complexity, while achieving markedly higher rendering quality with the same or fewer Gaussians compared to potential competing methods. Project page: https://zhang-fengdi.github.io/ControlGS/

Handover measurement is responsible for finding a handover target and directly decides the performance of mobility management. It is governed by a complex combination of parameters dealing with multi-cell scenarios and system dynamics. A network design has to offer an appropriate handover measurement procedure in such a multi-constraint problem. The present paper proposes a unified framework for the network analysis and optimization. The exposition focuses on the stochastic modeling and addresses its key probabilistic events namely (i) suitable handover target found, (ii) service failure, (iii) handover measurement triggering, and (iv) handover measurement withdrawal. We derive their closed-form expressions and provide a generalized setup for the analysis of handover measurement failure and target cell quality by the best signal quality and minimum duration outage level crossing properties. Finally, we show its application and effectiveness in today's 3GPP-LTE cellular networks.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems, particularly those leveraging multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) with hybrid beamforming, face challenges in optimizing user throughput and minimizing latency due to the high complexity of dynamic beam selection and management. This paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for enhancing user throughput in multi-panel mmWave radio access networks in a practical network setup. Our DRL-based formulation utilizes an adaptive beam management strategy that models the interaction between the communication agent and its environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), optimizing beam selection based on real-time observations. The proposed framework exploits spatial domain (SD) characteristics by incorporating the cross-correlation between the beams in different antenna panels, the measured reference signal received power (RSRP), and the beam usage statistics to dynamically adjust beamforming decisions. As a result, the spectral efficiency is improved and end-to-end latency is reduced. The numerical results demonstrate an increase in throughput of up to 16% and a reduction in latency by factors 3-7x compared to baseline (legacy beam management).

An important concept in the fifth generation of mobile networks is multitenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, installing small cells is an effective resource to provide greater performance and capacity to both indoor and outdoor places. This paper proposes a new framework for automated cell planning in multitenant small cell networks. In particular, taking advantage of the available network data, a set of detailed planning specifications over time and space domains are generated in order to meet the contracted capacity by each tenant. Then, the network infrastructure and configuration are updated according to an algorithm that considers different actions such as adding/removing channels and adding or relocating small cells. The simulation results show the effectiveness of various methods to derive the planning specifications depending on the correlation between the tenant's and network's traffic demands.

The use of mmWave frequencies is one of the key strategies to achieve the fascinating 1000x increase in the capacity of future 5G wireless systems. While for traditional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies several well-developed statistical channel models are available for system simulation, similar tools are not available for mmWave frequencies, thus preventing a fair comparison of independently developed transmission and reception schemes. In this paper we provide a simple albeit accurate statistical procedure for the generation of a clustered MIMO channel model operating at mmWaves, for both the cases of slowly and rapidly time-varying channels. Matlab scripts for channel generation are also provided, along with an example of their use.

Automating city-scale wireless deployment remains challenging under complex urban propagation and network-wide interference. We introduce CityDeploy-Bench, a benchmark that reframes multi-transmitter deployment as physics-grounded spatial set planning under a unified ray-tracing verifier. The benchmark separates utility representation from planning dynamics, enabling controlled comparison between direct scalar rewards, relational models, and higher-order interaction structures across diverse planners. Our experiments reveal a clear transition in planning behavior as physical coupling grows. Deployment quality becomes increasingly dependent on whether the learned utility captures collective transmitter interactions, whereas stronger search alone cannot compensate for missing relational structure. This establishes multi-transmitter deployment as a coordination problem over physically interacting sets rather than a collection of independent spatial decisions. We release CityDeploy-Data and the benchmark framework as a reproducible testbed for research linking decision learning with physically grounded wireless network design.

Rate control algorithms are at the heart of video conferencing platforms, determining target bitrates that match dynamic network characteristics for high quality. Recent data-driven strategies have shown promise for this challenging task, but the performance degradation they introduce during training has been a nonstarter for many production services, precluding adoption. This paper aims to bolster the practicality of data-driven rate control by presenting an alternative avenue for experiential learning: leveraging purely existing telemetry logs produced by the incumbent algorithm in production. We observe that these logs contain effective decisions, although often at the wrong times or in the wrong order. To realize this approach despite the inherent uncertainty that log-based learning brings (i.e., lack of feedback for new decisions), our system, Mowgli, combines a variety of robust learning techniques (i.e., conservatively reasoning about alternate behavior to minimize risk and using a richer model formulation to account for environmental noise). Across diverse networks (emulated and real-world), Mowgli outperforms the widely deployed GCC algorithm, increasing average video bitrates by 15-39% while reducing freeze rates by 60-100%.

We tackle the challenge of large-scale network intervention for guiding excitatory point processes, such as infectious disease spread or traffic congestion control. Our model-based reinforcement learning utilizes neural ODEs to capture how the networked excitatory point processes will evolve subject to the time-varying changes in network topology. Our approach incorporates Gradient-Descent based Model Predictive Control (GD-MPC), offering policy flexibility to accommodate prior knowledge and constraints. To address the intricacies of planning and overcome the high dimensionality inherent to such decision-making problems, we design an Amortize Network Interventions (ANI) framework, allowing for the pooling of optimal policies from history and other contexts, while ensuring a permutation equivalent property. This property enables efficient knowledge transfer and sharing across diverse contexts. Our approach has broad applications, from curbing infectious disease spread to reducing carbon emissions through traffic light optimization, and thus has the potential to address critical societal and environmental challenges.

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

Over the last years, several works have explored the application of deep learning algorithms to determine the large-scale signal fading (also referred to as ``path loss'') between transmitter and receiver pairs in urban communication networks. The central idea is to replace costly measurement campaigns, inaccurate statistical models or computationally expensive ray-tracing simulations by machine learning models which, once trained, produce accurate predictions almost instantly. Although the topic has attracted attention from many researchers, there are few open benchmark datasets and codebases that would allow everyone to test and compare the developed methods and algorithms. We take a step towards filling this gap by releasing a publicly available dataset of simulated path loss radio maps together with realistic city maps from real-world locations and aerial images from open datasources. Initial experiments regarding model architectures, input feature design and estimation of radio maps from aerial images are presented and the code is made available.

In the last few years, the Internet throughput, usage and reliability have increased almost exponentially. The introduction of broadband wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and cellular networks together with increased computational power have opened the door for a new breed of applications to be created, namely real-time multimedia applications. Delivering real-time multimedia traffic over a complex network like the Internet is a particularly challenging task since these applications have strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements on bandwidth, delay, and delay jitter. Traditional Internet protocol (IP)-based best effort service is not able to meet these stringent requirements. The time-varying nature of wireless channels and resource constrained wireless devices make the problem even more difficult. To improve perceived media quality by end users over wireless Internet, QoS supports can be addressed in different layers, including application layer, transport layer and link layer. Cross layer design is a well-known approach to achieve this adaptation. In cross-layer design, the challenges from the physical wireless medium and the QoS-demands from the applications are taken into account so that the rate, power, and coding at the physical (PHY) layer can adapted to meet the requirements of the applications given the current channel and network conditions. A number of propositions for cross-layer designs exist in the literature. In this chapter, an extensive review has been made on these cross-layer architectures that combine the application-layer, transport layer and the link layer controls. Particularly, the issues like channel estimation techniques, adaptive controls at the application and link layers for energy efficiency, priority based scheduling, transmission rate control at the transport layer, and adaptive automatic repeat request (ARQ) are discussed in detail.

6G networks will introduce unprecedented complexity, which calls for a paradigm shift in network optimization and management. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions, especially those enabled by the recently developed foundation models, have been recognized as promising candidates. Foundation models are large-scale AI models with general-purpose feature extraction capabilities, and once trained on massive amounts of data, they can be adapted to solve a wide range of downstream tasks, either in a zero-shot manner or with few-shot fine-tuning. This article provides a comprehensive overview of how foundation models are reshaping physical-layer processing and wireless resource management across three progressive paradigms. First, we examine the adaptation of off-the-shelf pre-trained foundation models to various wireless tasks. Second, we explore wireless-native foundation models, built from scratch on wireless data to bridge cross-domain modality gaps and capture universal wireless-domain physical characteristics. Third, we highlight agentic foundation models, which elevate static data processing into autonomous, reasoning-driven network orchestration. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of applying foundation models to emerging 6G frontiers, including integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architectures, semantic communications, and system-level network autonomy. Finally, we identify critical open challenges and opportunities, charting a promising path toward fully intelligent and adaptive wireless networks.

We develop a model-free policy gradient method for discrete-time mean-field control (MFC). In MFC, the policy affects the objective both through the controlled dynamics and through the population distribution. Standard REINFORCE estimators capture the first effect but not the second. We introduce Transport REINFORCE, a transport map-based approach that perturbs a suitable transformation of the population distribution to estimate this missing mean-field contribution. The method applies to both finite and continuous state spaces. In finite state spaces, we perturb the population distribution directly on the probability simplex through a convex combination of the current population weights and random weights. In continuous state spaces, we project the population distribution onto the manifold of Gaussian mixtures, and then randomize it via a transport map that ensures the perturbed law remains within this manifold. We prove consistency of the perturbed objective and gradient as the perturbation vanishes, and derive bias and mean-square error bounds for the resulting sample-based gradient estimator. Numerical experiments on several MFC benchmarks show that Transport REINFORCE improves over standard REINFORCE.

This paper presents a groundbreaking self-improving interference management framework tailored for wireless communications, integrating deep learning with uncertainty quantification to enhance overall system performance. Our approach addresses the computational challenges inherent in traditional optimization-based algorithms by harnessing deep learning models to predict optimal interference management solutions. A significant breakthrough of our framework is its acknowledgment of the limitations inherent in data-driven models, particularly in scenarios not adequately represented by the training dataset. To overcome these challenges, we propose a method for uncertainty quantification, accompanied by a qualifying criterion, to assess the trustworthiness of model predictions. This framework strategically alternates between model-generated solutions and traditional algorithms, guided by a criterion that assesses the prediction credibility based on quantified uncertainties. Experimental results validate the framework's efficacy, demonstrating its superiority over traditional deep learning models, notably in scenarios underrepresented in the training dataset. This work marks a pioneering endeavor in harnessing self-improving deep learning for interference management, through the lens of uncertainty quantification.

This paper addresses the fundamental problem of non-uniform area coverage in multi-agent systems, where different regions require varying levels of attention due to mission-dependent priorities. Existing uniform coverage strategies are insufficient for realistic applications, and many non-uniform approaches either lack optimality guarantees or fail to incorporate crucial real-world constraints such as agent dynamics, limited operation time, the number of agents, and decentralized execution. To resolve these limitations, we propose a novel framework called Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC). The central idea of D2OC is the integration of optimal transport theory with multi-agent coverage control, enabling each agent to continuously adjust its trajectory to match a mission-specific reference density map. The proposed formulation establishes optimality by solving a constrained optimization problem that explicitly incorporates physical and operational constraints. The resulting control input is analytically derived from the Lagrangian of the objective function, yielding closed-form optimal solutions for linear systems and a generalizable structure for nonlinear systems. Furthermore, a decentralized data-sharing mechanism is developed to coordinate agents without reliance on global information. Comprehensive simulation studies demonstrate that D2OC achieves significantly improved non-uniform area coverage performance compared to existing methods, while maintaining scalability and decentralized implementability.

This paper presents a fully automated, data-driven framework for the large-scale deployment of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in cellular networks. Leveraging physically consistent ray tracing and empirical data from a commercial deployment in the UK, the proposed method jointly optimizes RIS placement, orientation, configuration, and base station beamforming in dense urban environments across frequency bands (corresponding to 4G, 5G, and a hypothetical 6G system). Candidate RIS locations are identified via reflection- and scattering-based heuristics using calibrated electromagnetic models within the Sionna Ray Tracing (RT) engine. Outage users are clustered to reduce deployment complexity, and the tradeoff between coverage gains and infrastructure cost is systematically evaluated. It is shown that achieving meaningful coverage improvement in urban areas requires a dense deployment of large-aperture RIS units, raising questions about cost-effectiveness. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, the complete simulation framework and RIS deployment algorithms are provided as open-source software.

Traffic congestion in dense urban centers presents an economical and environmental burden. In recent years, the availability of vehicle-to-anything communication allows for the transmission of detailed vehicle states to the infrastructure that can be used for intelligent traffic light control. The other way around, the infrastructure can provide vehicles with advice on driving behavior, such as appropriate velocities, which can improve the efficacy of the traffic system. Several research works applied deep reinforcement learning to either traffic light control or vehicle speed advice. In this work, we propose a first attempt to jointly learn the control of both. We show this to improve the efficacy of traffic systems. In our experiments, the joint control approach reduces average vehicle trip delays, w.r.t. controlling only traffic lights, in eight out of eleven benchmark scenarios. Analyzing the qualitative behavior of the vehicle speed advice policy, we observe that this is achieved by smoothing out the velocity profile of vehicles nearby a traffic light. Learning joint control of traffic signaling and speed advice in the real world could help to reduce congestion and mitigate the economical and environmental repercussions of today's traffic systems.

Radio-frequency coverage maps (RF maps) are extensively utilized in wireless networks for capacity planning, placement of access points and base stations, localization, and coverage estimation. Conducting site surveys to obtain RF maps is labor-intensive and sometimes not feasible. In this paper, we propose radio-frequency adversarial deep-learning inference for automated network coverage estimation (RADIANCE), a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach for synthesizing RF maps in indoor scenarios. RADIANCE utilizes a semantic map, a high-level representation of the indoor environment to encode spatial relationships and attributes of objects within the environment and guide the RF map generation process. We introduce a new gradient-based loss function that computes the magnitude and direction of change in received signal strength (RSS) values from a point within the environment. RADIANCE incorporates this loss function along with the antenna pattern to capture signal propagation within a given indoor configuration and generate new patterns under new configuration, antenna (beam) pattern, and center frequency. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare RADIANCE with ray-tracing simulations of RF maps. Our results show that RADIANCE achieves a mean average error (MAE) of 0.09, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.29, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 10.78, and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) of 0.80.

Industrial disruption replanning demands multi-agent coordination under strict latency and communication budgets, where disruptions propagate through tightly coupled physical dependencies and rapidly invalidate baseline schedules and commitments. Existing coordination schemes often treat communication as either effectively free (broadcast-style escalation) or fixed in advance (hand-tuned neighborhoods), both of which are brittle once the disruption footprint extends beyond a local region. We present \CASCADE, a budgeted replanning mechanism that makes communication scope explicit and auditable rather than fixed or implicit. Each agent maintains an explicit knowledge base, solves role-conditioned local decision problems to revise commitments, and coordinates through lightweight contract primitives whose footprint expands only when local validation indicates that the current scope is insufficient. This design separates a unified agent substrate (Knowledge Base / Decision Manager / Communication Manager) from a scoped interaction layer that controls who is contacted, how far coordination propagates, and when escalation is triggered under explicit budgets. We evaluate \CASCADE on disrupted manufacturing and supply-chain settings using unified diagnostics intended to test a mechanism-design claim -- whether explicit scope control yields useful quality-latency-communication trade-offs and improved robustness under uncertainty -- rather than to provide a complete algorithmic ranking.

Pinching-antenna systems attach dielectric pinches to a waveguide, creating line-of-sight radiation points within a few meters of any user. The pinches on one waveguide, however, radiate the same signal, unlike a conventional array, where each element transmits a dedicated signal. Separating the signals of multiple users therefore becomes challenging and requires a new perspective on multiple access. Most existing studies rest on an idealized model, and no survey examines the access schemes under realistic impairments. This article surveys multiple access in pinching-antenna systems and organizes fifty-six works into a unified taxonomy by spatial degrees of freedom. The users of one waveguide can be separated only in time, frequency, power, or guided mode, while multiple waveguides add the space domain. The article then identifies the impairments critical to this separation, which perturb the effective channel, leak interference across orthogonal resources, or couple the pinches on the uplink, and summarizes them in an impairment-versus-method map. A unified evaluation of time-, frequency-, power-, and space-domain access under identical channel and impairment models reveals that the degradation is method specific. The analytical and numerical results give insight into multiple access in these systems and provide a basis for its impairment-aware design, a necessary step toward their adoption in practical networks.

Diffusion models for continuous data gained widespread adoption owing to their high quality generation and control mechanisms. However, controllable diffusion on discrete data faces challenges given that continuous guidance methods do not directly apply to discrete diffusion. Here, we provide a straightforward derivation of classifier-free and classifier-based guidance for discrete diffusion, as well as a new class of diffusion models that leverage uniform noise and that are more guidable because they can continuously edit their outputs. We improve the quality of these models with a novel continuous-time variational lower bound that yields state-of-the-art performance, especially in settings involving guidance or fast generation. Empirically, we demonstrate that our guidance mechanisms combined with uniform noise diffusion improve controllable generation relative to autoregressive and diffusion baselines on several discrete data domains, including genomic sequences, small molecule design, and discretized image generation.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has emerged as a central approach for enhancing semantic alignment in flow-based diffusion models. In this paper, we explore a unified framework called CFG-Ctrl, which reinterprets CFG as a control applied to the first-order continuous-time generative flow, using the conditional-unconditional discrepancy as an error signal to adjust the velocity field. From this perspective, we summarize vanilla CFG as a proportional controller (P-control) with fixed gain, and typical follow-up variants develop extended control-law designs derived from it. However, existing methods mainly rely on linear control, inherently leading to instability, overshooting, and degraded semantic fidelity especially on large guidance scales. To address this, we introduce Sliding Mode Control CFG (SMC-CFG), which enforces the generative flow toward a rapidly convergent sliding manifold. Specifically, we define an exponential sliding mode surface over the semantic prediction error and introduce a switching control term to establish nonlinear feedback-guided correction. Moreover, we provide a Lyapunov stability analysis to theoretically support finite-time convergence. Experiments across text-to-image generation models including Stable Diffusion 3.5, Flux, and Qwen-Image demonstrate that SMC-CFG outperforms standard CFG in semantic alignment and enhances robustness across a wide range of guidance scales. Project Page: https://hanyang-21.github.io/CFG-Ctrl

Text-conditional diffusion models are able to generate high-fidelity images with diverse contents. However, linguistic representations frequently exhibit ambiguous descriptions of the envisioned objective imagery, requiring the incorporation of additional control signals to bolster the efficacy of text-guided diffusion models. In this work, we propose Cocktail, a pipeline to mix various modalities into one embedding, amalgamated with a generalized ControlNet (gControlNet), a controllable normalisation (ControlNorm), and a spatial guidance sampling method, to actualize multi-modal and spatially-refined control for text-conditional diffusion models. Specifically, we introduce a hyper-network gControlNet, dedicated to the alignment and infusion of the control signals from disparate modalities into the pre-trained diffusion model. gControlNet is capable of accepting flexible modality signals, encompassing the simultaneous reception of any combination of modality signals, or the supplementary fusion of multiple modality signals. The control signals are then fused and injected into the backbone model according to our proposed ControlNorm. Furthermore, our advanced spatial guidance sampling methodology proficiently incorporates the control signal into the designated region, thereby circumventing the manifestation of undesired objects within the generated image. We demonstrate the results of our method in controlling various modalities, proving high-quality synthesis and fidelity to multiple external signals.

To enhance the handover performance in fifth generation (5G) cellular systems, conditional handover (CHO) has been evolved as a promising solution. Unlike A3 based handover where handover execution is certain after receiving handover command from the serving access network, in CHO, handover execution is conditional on the RSRP measurements from both current and target access networks, as well as on mobility parameters such as preparation and execution offsets. Analytic evaluation of conditional handover performance is unprecedented in literature. In this work, handover performance of CHO has been carried out in terms of handover latency, handover packet loss and handover failure probability. A Markov model accounting the effect of different mobility parameters (e.g., execution offset, preparation offset, time-to-preparation and time-to-execution), UE velocity and channel fading characteristics; has been proposed to characterize handover failure. Results obtained from the analytic model has been validated against extensive simulation results. Our study reveal that optimal configuration of O_{exec}, O_{prep}, T_{exec} and T_{prep} is actually conditional on underlying UE velocity and fading characteristics. This study will be helpful for the mobile operators to choose appropriate thresholds of the mobility parameters under different channel condition and UE velocities.

The growing scale of modern farms has increased the need for efficient and adaptive multi-agent coverage strategies for pest, weed, and disease management. Traditional methods such as manual inspection and blanket pesticide spraying often lead to excessive chemical use, resource waste, and environmental impact. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising platform for precision agriculture through targeted spraying and improved operational efficiency, existing UAV-based approaches remain limited by battery life, payload capacity, and scalability, especially in large fields where single-UAV or uniformly distributed spraying is insufficient. Although multi-UAV coordination has been explored, many current frameworks still assume uniform spraying and do not account for infestation severity, UAV dynamics, non-uniform resource allocation, or energy-efficient coordination. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework that integrates Optimal Transport (OT) theory with multi-UAV coverage control for large-scale agricultural spraying. The method supports non-uniform, priority-aware resource allocation based on infestation intensity, reducing unnecessary chemical application. UAVs are modeled as a linear time-varying (LTV) system to capture variations in mass and inertia during spraying missions. The D2OC control law, derived using Lagrangian mechanics, enables efficient coordination, balanced workload distribution, and improved mission duration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms uniform spraying and Spectral Multiscale Coverage (SMC) in coverage efficiency, chemical reduction, and operational sustainability, providing a scalable solution for smart agriculture.

We study the problem of symbolic music generation (e.g., generating piano rolls), with a technical focus on non-differentiable rule guidance. Musical rules are often expressed in symbolic form on note characteristics, such as note density or chord progression, many of which are non-differentiable which pose a challenge when using them for guided diffusion. We propose Stochastic Control Guidance (SCG), a novel guidance method that only requires forward evaluation of rule functions that can work with pre-trained diffusion models in a plug-and-play way, thus achieving training-free guidance for non-differentiable rules for the first time. Additionally, we introduce a latent diffusion architecture for symbolic music generation with high time resolution, which can be composed with SCG in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared to standard strong baselines in symbolic music generation, this framework demonstrates marked advancements in music quality and rule-based controllability, outperforming current state-of-the-art generators in a variety of settings. For detailed demonstrations, code and model checkpoints, please visit our project website: https://scg-rule-guided-music.github.io/.

Non-cooperative game theory provides a robust framework for analyzing distributed resource allocation in multi-user wireless networks, with Iterative Water-Filling (IWF) emerging as a canonical solution for power control problems. Although classical fixed-point theorems guarantee the existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) under mild concavity and compactness conditions, the convergence of practical iterative algorithms to that equilibrium remains a challenging endeavor. This challenge intensifies under varying update schedules, interference regimes, and imperfections such as channel estimation errors or feedback delay. In this paper, we present an in-depth examination of IWF in multi-user systems under three different update schemes: (1) synchronous sequential updates, (2) synchronous simultaneous updates, and (3) totally asynchronous updates. We first formulate the water-filling operator in a multi-carrier environment, then recast the iterative process as a fixed-point problem. Using contraction mapping principles, we demonstrate sufficient conditions under which IWF converges to a unique NE and highlight how spectral radius constraints, diagonal dominance, and careful step-size selection are pivotal for guaranteeing convergence. We further discuss robustness to measurement noise, partial updates, and network scaling to emphasize the practical viability of these schemes. This comprehensive analysis unifies diverse threads in the literature while offering novel insights into asynchronous implementations. Our findings enable network designers to ascertain system parameters that foster both stable convergence and efficient spectrum usage.

Radio surveys provide exponentially increasing amounts of observational data, which requires the development of novel data reduction and analysis methods. To this end, realistic simulations of observational data provide controlled environments for testing and developing new methods. Diffusion models excel at synthesizing realistic image data, but are limited by size constraints and high computational demands. We implemented a latent diffusion model (LDM) to synthesize realistic radio survey map cutouts. Further, we developed a technique for sampling radio survey maps of arbitrary size with the LDM. This is done by sampling in multiple sequential steps, whereby consistency is provided through context vectors and image inpainting. We trained our model on observations from the LOFAR telescope obtained from the third data release of the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey. We implemented a LDM composed of a vector-quantized variational autoencoder and a diffusion model operating on the resulting latent representations. We added information on source locations, brightness and sizes by extracting parameters from the public source catalog and encoding them into a vector format passed as context to the LDM. We trained the model for image inpainting to facilitate continuous sequential sampling. We were able to generate realistic cutouts of 512 pixel side length, corresponding to ~5.7 arcmin, with precise control over source locations and brightness. Control over source extension was achieved at lower precision. Sampling of arbitrary-sized maps was made possible, showing realistic results with seamless combination of individual samples and limited only by occasional sampling artifacts.

As mobile networks proliferate, we are experiencing a strong diversification of services, which requires greater flexibility from the existing network. Network slicing is proposed as a promising solution for resource utilization in 5G and future networks to address this dire need. In network slicing, dynamic resource orchestration and network slice management are crucial for maximizing resource utilization. Unfortunately, this process is too complex for traditional approaches to be effective due to a lack of accurate models and dynamic hidden structures. We formulate the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) without knowing models and hidden structures. Additionally, we propose to solve the problem using CLARA, a Constrained reinforcement LeArning based Resource Allocation algorithm. In particular, we analyze cumulative and instantaneous constraints using adaptive interior-point policy optimization and projection layer, respectively. Evaluations show that CLARA clearly outperforms baselines in resource allocation with service demand guarantees.

Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the inherent flexibility to be dynamically adjusted during execution by, for example, setting target speeds or actuator limits. We present a framework to overcome this shortcoming of neural controllers by conditioning them on an auxiliary input. This advance is enabled by including a feature-wise linear modulation layer (FiLM). We use model-free reinforcement-learning to train quadrotor control policies for the task of navigating through a sequence of waypoints in minimum time. By conditioning the policy on the maximum available thrust or the viewing direction relative to the next waypoint, a user can regulate the aggressiveness of the quadrotor's flight during deployment. We demonstrate in simulation and in real-world experiments that a single control policy can achieve close to time-optimal flight performance across the entire performance envelope of the robot, reaching up to 60 km/h and 4.5g in acceleration. The ability to guide a learned controller during task execution has implications beyond agile quadrotor flight, as conditioning the control policy on human intent helps safely bringing learning based systems out of the well-defined laboratory environment into the wild.

We present LooseControl to allow generalized depth conditioning for diffusion-based image generation. ControlNet, the SOTA for depth-conditioned image generation, produces remarkable results but relies on having access to detailed depth maps for guidance. Creating such exact depth maps, in many scenarios, is challenging. This paper introduces a generalized version of depth conditioning that enables many new content-creation workflows. Specifically, we allow (C1) scene boundary control for loosely specifying scenes with only boundary conditions, and (C2) 3D box control for specifying layout locations of the target objects rather than the exact shape and appearance of the objects. Using LooseControl, along with text guidance, users can create complex environments (e.g., rooms, street views, etc.) by specifying only scene boundaries and locations of primary objects. Further, we provide two editing mechanisms to refine the results: (E1) 3D box editing enables the user to refine images by changing, adding, or removing boxes while freezing the style of the image. This yields minimal changes apart from changes induced by the edited boxes. (E2) Attribute editing proposes possible editing directions to change one particular aspect of the scene, such as the overall object density or a particular object. Extensive tests and comparisons with baselines demonstrate the generality of our method. We believe that LooseControl can become an important design tool for easily creating complex environments and be extended to other forms of guidance channels. Code and more information are available at https://shariqfarooq123.github.io/loose-control/ .

Text-to-music generation models are now capable of generating high-quality music audio in broad styles. However, text control is primarily suitable for the manipulation of global musical attributes like genre, mood, and tempo, and is less suitable for precise control over time-varying attributes such as the positions of beats in time or the changing dynamics of the music. We propose Music ControlNet, a diffusion-based music generation model that offers multiple precise, time-varying controls over generated audio. To imbue text-to-music models with time-varying control, we propose an approach analogous to pixel-wise control of the image-domain ControlNet method. Specifically, we extract controls from training audio yielding paired data, and fine-tune a diffusion-based conditional generative model over audio spectrograms given melody, dynamics, and rhythm controls. While the image-domain Uni-ControlNet method already allows generation with any subset of controls, we devise a new strategy to allow creators to input controls that are only partially specified in time. We evaluate both on controls extracted from audio and controls we expect creators to provide, demonstrating that we can generate realistic music that corresponds to control inputs in both settings. While few comparable music generation models exist, we benchmark against MusicGen, a recent model that accepts text and melody input, and show that our model generates music that is 49% more faithful to input melodies despite having 35x fewer parameters, training on 11x less data, and enabling two additional forms of time-varying control. Sound examples can be found at https://MusicControlNet.github.io/web/.

AI control is a family of techniques to prevent an AI with malicious goals from subverting its operator's intent. AI Control usually studies a single agent in one trajectory, but real deployments run many agents over shared infrastructure, and the most severe risks (model-weight exfiltration, training-run poisoning) plausibly need several agents acting in concert. We initiate the empirical study of multi-agent AI control, formalising distributed attacks in which several agents jointly aim for a malicious goal. We develop FakeLab: a synthetic AI-lab codebase (9 services, 86 benign tasks, 4 attack objectives). We evaluate single agent monitoring against distributed attacks, varying the number of agents, their coordination, model capabilities and precise monitoring configuration. Our central finding is the fragmentation effect: as more agents coordinate to attack, per-agent monitoring becomes less likely to catch any of the attackers. Secondly, this is not driven by the ratio of benign to malicious code -- we argue this is likely dependent on model capability. Third, an explicit planner amplifies the fragmentation effect, raises the rate of completing the attack up to sevenfold, and mildly sharpens executors' poor monitor-theory-of-mind. Finally: a weak "trusted" monitor misses most attacks, while a stronger one cuts undetected success by more than an order of magnitude but remains imperfect. We are happy to share FakeLab, our control setting, with safety researchers on request.

The open radio access network (O-RAN), with its disaggregated and open architecture, is poised to meet the demands of the next generation of wireless communication. However, to unlock the full potentials of O-RAN, real-time network modeling and optimization are essential. A promising solution for such requirement is the use of network digital twin (NDT). NDT provides a comprehensive view of a network, covering both physical and logical components, including infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms. NDT, as a real-time virtual representation of O-RAN facilitates a variety of operations, such as emulations, test, optimization, monitoring, and analysis of a new configuration in a risk-free environment, without requiring them to be implemented in real network. Such capability enables the vendors and network operators for a faster adoption of new solutions with frequent updates, while ensuring the resiliency of the existing services via planning ahead under various "what-if" scenarios. In this paper, we first describe what exactly NDT means in the context of O-RAN, as well as its key enablers. We then describe the NDT application within the O-RAN in both prior and post-deployment. Finally, we provide two practical uses cases, namely network energy efficiency and traffic steering, where the NDT can be leveraged effectively.

The upper 6 GHz (U6G) band with XL-MIMO is a key enabler for sixth-generation wireless systems, yet intelligent radiomap prediction for such systems remains challenging. Existing datasets support only small-scale arrays (up to 8x8) with predominantly isotropic antennas, far from the 1024-element directional arrays envisioned for 6G. Moreover, current methods encode array configurations as scalar parameters, forcing neural networks to extrapolate array-specific radiation patterns, which fails when predicting radiomaps for configurations absent from training data. To jointly address data scarcity and generalization limitations, this paper advances XL-MIMO radiomap prediction from three aspects. To overcome data limitations, we construct the first XL-MIMO radiomap dataset containing 78400 radiomaps across 800 urban scenes, five frequency bands (1.8-6.7 GHz), and nine array configurations up to 32x32 uniform planar arrays with directional elements. To enable systematic evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark framework covering practical scenarios from coverage estimation without field measurements to generalization across unseen configurations and environments. To enable generalization to arbitrary beam configurations without retraining, we propose the beam map, a physics-informed spatial feature that analytically computes array-specific coverage patterns. By decoupling deterministic array radiation from data learned multipath propagation, beam maps shift generalization from neural network extrapolation to physics-based computation. Integrating beam maps into existing architectures reduces mean absolute error by up to 60.0% when generalizing to unseen configurations and up to 50.5% when transferring to unseen environments. The complete dataset and code are publicly available at https://lxj321.github.io/MulticonfigRadiomapDataset/.

Controlling the evolution of complex physical systems is a fundamental task across science and engineering. Classical techniques suffer from limited applicability or huge computational costs. On the other hand, recent deep learning and reinforcement learning-based approaches often struggle to optimize long-term control sequences under the constraints of system dynamics. In this work, we introduce Diffusion Physical systems Control (DiffPhyCon), a new class of method to address the physical systems control problem. DiffPhyCon excels by simultaneously minimizing both the learned generative energy function and the predefined control objectives across the entire trajectory and control sequence. Thus, it can explore globally and plan near-optimal control sequences. Moreover, we enhance DiffPhyCon with prior reweighting, enabling the discovery of control sequences that significantly deviate from the training distribution. We test our method on three tasks: 1D Burgers' equation, 2D jellyfish movement control, and 2D high-dimensional smoke control, where our generated jellyfish dataset is released as a benchmark for complex physical system control research. Our method outperforms widely applied classical approaches and state-of-the-art deep learning and reinforcement learning methods. Notably, DiffPhyCon unveils an intriguing fast-close-slow-open pattern observed in the jellyfish, aligning with established findings in the field of fluid dynamics. The project website, jellyfish dataset, and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/diffphycon.

SiFo, a wireless foundation model-based framework, is proposed for low-overhead site-specific channel state information (CSI) feedback. In 3GPP NR, Type-II feedback provides an expressive codebook-based CSI representation, but it requires substantial reference-signal overhead, UE-side search, and feedback. Learning-based site-specific feedback can reduce these online costs while retaining high-quality subspace representation by exploiting deployment-dependent propagation structure. However, existing site-specific designs typically train a dedicated neural network for each new site, which limits scalability when the number of deployments is large. SiFo addresses this scalability issue by pretraining a CSI feedback model across source sites and adapting it to a target site through lightweight calibration. A small set of target-site users reports low-dimensional reference signal received power (RSRP) fingerprints, and their full-CSI-based subspace labels are stored as calibration memory. During online operation, a served user is matched to calibrated users through the same SSB probing and RSRP reporting procedure, so nearby calibration samples provide site-specific subspace guidance without updating model parameters. SiFo therefore transfers common propagation knowledge while retaining local adaptation. Numerical results across ten city scenarios demonstrate that SiFo (i) achieves higher CSI-capture efficiency than separately trained site-specific learning baselines under the same target-site labeled budget, (ii) approaches the high-overhead 3GPP NR Type-II feedback reference using only RSRP measurements collected during online SSB probing, and (iii) converts the high CSI-capture efficiency and low overhead into effective spectral efficiency improvement under limited target-site data.

We introduce controlgym, a library of thirty-six safety-critical industrial control settings, and ten infinite-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE)-based control problems. Integrated within the OpenAI Gym/Gymnasium (Gym) framework, controlgym allows direct applications of standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like stable-baselines3. Our control environments complement those in Gym with continuous, unbounded action and observation spaces, motivated by real-world control applications. Moreover, the PDE control environments uniquely allow the users to extend the state dimensionality of the system to infinity while preserving the intrinsic dynamics. This feature is crucial for evaluating the scalability of RL algorithms for control. This project serves the learning for dynamics & control (L4DC) community, aiming to explore key questions: the convergence of RL algorithms in learning control policies; the stability and robustness issues of learning-based controllers; and the scalability of RL algorithms to high- and potentially infinite-dimensional systems. We open-source the controlgym project at https://github.com/xiangyuan-zhang/controlgym.

Radio maps (RMs) serve as a critical foundation for enabling environment-aware wireless communication, as they provide the spatial distribution of wireless channel characteristics. Despite recent progress in RM construction using data-driven approaches, most existing methods focus solely on pathloss prediction in a fixed 2D plane, neglecting key parameters such as direction of arrival (DoA), time of arrival (ToA), and vertical spatial variations. Such a limitation is primarily due to the reliance on static learning paradigms, which hinder generalization beyond the training data distribution. To address these challenges, we propose UrbanRadio3D, a large-scale, high-resolution 3D RM dataset constructed via ray tracing in realistic urban environments. UrbanRadio3D is over 37times3 larger than previous datasets across a 3D space with 3 metrics as pathloss, DoA, and ToA, forming a novel 3Dtimes33D dataset with 7times3 more height layers than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) dataset. To benchmark 3D RM construction, a UNet with 3D convolutional operators is proposed. Moreover, we further introduce RadioDiff-3D, a diffusion-model-based generative framework utilizing the 3D convolutional architecture. RadioDiff-3D supports both radiation-aware scenarios with known transmitter locations and radiation-unaware settings based on sparse spatial observations. Extensive evaluations on UrbanRadio3D validate that RadioDiff-3D achieves superior performance in constructing rich, high-dimensional radio maps under diverse environmental dynamics. This work provides a foundational dataset and benchmark for future research in 3D environment-aware communication. The dataset is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/UrbanRadio3D.