Computer Science (arXiv)

We present Eureka, a task-conditioned Meta-Agent architecture that compiles long-horizon tasks into dynamic obligation graphs with explicit acceptance semantics. During execution, Eureka forms Macro-Agents with specialized state, memory, operators, tools, verifiers, and local topology via receding-horizon planning, architecture promotion, and minimal-sufficient compilation. When bottlenecks recur, cost-benefit-gated evolution updates the local architecture under constraints. Theoretically, we establish results on regret, planning invalidation, amortization, subtree interfaces, serializability, and verification. Experimentally, Eureka completes 170/170 recursive tasks and generates 3,948 certificates with no false acceptances. Active context compresses median input from 9,490 to 4,005 tokens; incremental processing avoids 65.38% recomputation across 12,000 tasks; 16,000 concurrent executions serialize consistently. The same Meta-Agent instantiates a Theory-Discovery Agent and a Math/Conjecture Agent. The former yields structural results in quantum-process and spacetime theory. The latter identifies bottlenecks in Riemann Hypothesis research and advances a positivity certificate for Suzuki's localized Weil quadratic form to 0 < a <= 69/200 = 0.345, reaching ~99.55% of (log 2)/2. These results suggest that scientific-agent capability depends not only on the base model but on whether an architecture can be formed to match the task's cognitive structure.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), leveraging sparse accumulate operations in the place of power-hungry multiply-and-accumulate operations. ANN-SNN conversion is a widely adopted approach to realize deep SNNs with accuracy comparable to that of ANNs. The Quantization-Clip-Floor-Shift (QCFS) activation minimizes conversion error, yet requires a large number of inference timesteps to match the source ANN accuracy on real-world vision datasets. PASCAL addresses this by proposing the Precise ANN-SNN Conversion Integrate-and-Fire (PASC-IF) neuron, which guarantees mathematical equivalence between the converted SNN and the source ANN, thereby achieving ANN-equivalent accuracy at significantly reduced timesteps. Despite this algorithmic advancement, the hardware implications of deploying the PASC-IF neuron remain unexplored. In this work, we present APEX, a dual-sparsity SNN inference accelerator that integrates the PASC-IF neuron into the LoAS hardware framework. The three-stage PASC-IF datapath is realized as a fully combinational circuit with no additional latency cost. APEX exploits dual sparsity in both input spikes and weights through a fully temporal-parallel dataflow, enabling efficient sparse computation and reduced memory traffic. Across all evaluated models, the PASC-IF neuron on average achieves up to 3% higher accuracy than the standard IF neuron, with a power overhead of only 1.3%-5.4%, an area overhead of 2.1%-2.7%, and 40% energy reduction for best accuracy configurations.

We introduce Bernstein-Vazirani Networks (BVNs), a non-variational quantum machine learning framework that leverages quantum interference for supervised learning, demonstrated on vision and representation learning tasks. In their standard form, BVNs follow the principle of quantum Fourier sampling: labelled data are placed in superposition and interfered in the Fourier basis to extract globally informative features. We then define generalised BVNs that enable interference in problem-adapted bases, yielding more expressive models under the same measurement budget as in the standard setting. BVNs achieve universal function approximation through (over)complete interference bases, while training of BVNs is gradient-free. Experiments on synthetic and real-world classification tasks, as well as implicit image representation, show strong generalisation capabilities and competitive performance with classical and quantum baselines.

Following on recent reports on specific platforms or companies, this paper provides an assessment of the global impact of the production and use of video games. It draws together publicly available data on game development, hardware, games sold, download sizes, time spent playing games on different platforms, and subscriptions to multiplayer and cloud game services. It provides an update to figures published 2020 and 2022. Crucially, our account of emissions related to video games considers a wide range of categories, yet contains enough detail to be critiqued and improved in the future.

Spatial representation learning for autonomous driving aims to map raw visual signals into structured 3D scene representations, where object-centric bounding boxes and rendering-oriented 3D primitives (\eg, 3D Gaussians) serve as two distinct yet highly complementary levels for scene understanding. Existing methods typically treat dynamic reconstruction and instance-level perception as separate tasks, despite their shared goal of estimating the underlying 3D world state. As a result, dynamic reconstruction is under-constrained while 3D detection lacks geometric grounding. To address this gap, we propose USR-Drive, a unified conditional generative framework that, given only posed multi-view driving videos, jointly recovers dense dynamic geometry and instance-level object layouts within a shared scene representation. Specifically, USR-Drive represents dense Gaussian primitives and sparse 3D bounding boxes as two aligned latent token streams and jointly denoises them with a unified multi-modal diffusion Transformer. Unlike prior paradigms that use boxes as external conditions or predict them with detached modules, USR-Drive treats them as mutually constrained state variables with a Unified Positional Encoding (UPE) that aligns heterogeneous tokens within a shared metric spatiotemporal coordinate. Via such unified representation and generative framework, the two modalities reinforce each other: geometry supplies dense metric evidence for box prediction, while boxes provide instance-level structural priors that help preserve spatial consistency and reduce ambiguity in sequential 3D geometric representation. Our approach successfully delivers state-of-the-art results for both dynamic reconstruction and 3D detection on the nuScenes and VKitti datasets.

Visual Counterfactual Explanations (VCEs) aim to explain image classifiers by generating minimally edited and realistic versions of an input image that change the classifier's prediction. Existing VCE methods are inherently classifier-dependent and therefore susceptible to classifier biases and failure modes, such as sensitivity to shortcut features and calibration errors. In this paper, we propose a classifier-free approach for visual counterfactual generation based on Contrastive Analysis (CA). Given two datasets corresponding to different classes (e.g., healthy and patients), we disentangle the generative factors that are common across the two datasets from those that are salient to each dataset, and generate counterfactual images by swapping only the salient factors. By operating directly on data distributions rather than decision boundaries, our method provides model-agnostic VCEs that are less sensitive to classifier biases. Our approach leverages the high-quality synthesis and well-structured latent space of StyleGAN2. We use the feature space F, instead than the usual W-space, to improve detail preservation. Unlike conventional CA approaches, which typically assume salient factors in only one dataset, we introduce an adapted framework and loss functions for VCE that allow multiple salient factors in each dataset. We evaluate our method on three medical imaging datasets and demonstrate superior counterfactual generation quality compared to existing approaches.

Accurate and responsible medical question answering (QA) is important in healthcare, where complex cases require factual knowledge and nuanced reasoning. Existing medical QA systems, typically based on single-agent architectures and static retrieval, often lack adaptability, persistent memory, and structured decision-making. This work introduces an adaptive memory and reflection (AMR) agentic system, a multi-agent framework in which specialized agents use dedicated memory and reflection-based feedback to retrieve relevant prior cases and improve subsequent reasoning. Complexity assessment routes questions through solo, collaborative, or escalated workflows, while consensus and ethical overseer modules support reasoning consolidation and output review. Evaluation on MedQA and MedMCQA demonstrates strong performance compared with several baselines. Ablation studies show that combining agent-specific memory, reflection, and external retrieval yields the strongest performance. These findings highlight the potential of structured memory and feedback for developing more trustworthy medical agents. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/mm-air/AMR-Agent.

Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged between standard large-scale preprocessing practices and the goals of careful information stewardship. Many existing pipelines optimize for web text: as a result, they tend to aggressively filter, deduplicate, restrict by language, and sometimes discard meaningful metadata. Meanwhile, researchers seeking to use IB-HL duplicate effort while performing similar processing and analysis. We describe an approach that we call Enriched Text. Instead of producing a single 'complete' stream of tokens, we normalize the text while preserving metadata through annotations. We separate endmatter, detect per-paragraph language, identify clusters of duplicate paragraphs, and compute per-paragraph bits-per-byte scores. We provide this information through HTML-like annotations layered on top of the text. By parsing these annotations, users can tailor the output to their own needs instead of accepting a global editorial decision on content. The pipeline applies to all $\approx$250 languages in the collection. This report describes this project's goals, implementation, and design rationale. The release includes IB-HL-ET (an enriched-text version of IB-HL containing 217B o200k_base tokens across 983,003 volumes, organized into 1.39B annotated subtopic paragraphs) and the pipeline that produced it. These serve to make the collection easier for machines to parse and for humans to study.

Accurately extracting nuanced, contextualized data from research articles is laborious and time intensive. Here, we investigate the performance of frontier, browser-based large language models (LLMs) to extract highly contextualized information. We demonstrate four escalating workflows, 1) given an expert curated prompt and research articles, most frontier LLMs perform well at data extraction, however can struggle with interpreting scientific context and nuance, 2) given simple instructions, LLMs can author their own prompts which were almost as eNective as expert-written prompts, 3) autonomous discovery of research literature was diNicult, agents either missed or hallucinated references, and 4) LLMs can create new datasets from published guidelines that closely match human-expert judges, but still require a human-in-the-loop. Together, these findings define an auditable division of labour in which experts specify the evidence standard, models cross-check repeated extractions and researchers resolve disputed cases, providing a practical route to scaling scientific data curation without relinquishing expert oversight.

Global Covariance Pooling (GCP) improves deep networks by capturing second-order feature statistics, and is especially effective for fine-grained recognition. Because covariance matrices live on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold, a normalization step is required before the Euclidean classifier. The faithful choice is the matrix logarithm (MLN-COV), which maps the SPD manifold to its tangent space; in practice it was abandoned in favour of the matrix square root because its eigendecomposition-based gradient is numerically unstable. We show that this instability is an artifact of computing the logarithm spectrally, not of the logarithm itself. Approximating the logarithm with finite polynomials in the covariance matrix removes the eigendecomposition from both passes: every operation becomes a General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM), the gradient stays bounded on the spectral support of the pre-normalized covariance, and the unstable 1/(lambda_i-lambda_j) term never appears. The key ingredient is a mean-eigenvalue pre-normalization that centres the spectrum near 1, away from the singularity of log, with a scalar post-compensation that returns the singular part of log(A) in closed form. Our recommended normalizer is a degree-8 Chebyshev expansion evaluated by a three-term matrix recurrence, with a matching reverse recurrence for the backward pass; Legendre, Laguerre, Taylor and Pade expansions are studied as controls that isolate the roles of the basis and of the target function. On three fine-grained benchmarks and ImageNet-1k the decomposition-free logarithm is both faster and more accurate than the spectral logarithm and than the square-root approximations it replaces, and at matched basis and degree the log target beats the square-root target, confirming that the gain comes from the faithful Riemannian map rather than from a better polynomial family.

Autonomous vehicles depend on fast and reliable perception systems to detect surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, traffic signs, and other road objects in real time. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and analysis of one-stage object detectors for autonomous driving rather than an implementation of a new detection system. The survey reviews the evolution of major one-stage detectors, including YOLOv1, SSD, RetinaNet, EfficientDet, anchor-free detectors such as FCOS and CenterNet, and recent real-time models such as YOLOv10. It compares these architectures through their design choices, feature-fusion strategies, loss functions, deployment trade-offs, and reported benchmark performance. The paper also summarizes commonly used autonomous-driving datasets, evaluation metrics, open challenges, and future research directions. Overall, this survey highlights how one-stage detectors balance speed, accuracy, efficiency, and robustness, while also emphasizing the remaining gap between benchmark results and dependable real-world autonomous-driving performance.

Continual learning has largely been model-centric, treating model parameters as the state that changes with sequential experience. Modern agents can also adapt through a harness of prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules. Because these contents jointly shape later execution, a harness update can disrupt previously reliable behavior even when the model is frozen. This raises a new question: how can an agent continually improve its state outside the model while retaining behavior acquired earlier? We formulate Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a new continual learning paradigm in which the harness evolves around a frozen foundation model, and define the resulting loss of earlier behavior as harness-level forgetting. We instantiate HCL with four execution-facing components: the Task Interface, Experience Memory, Capability Map, and Adaptive Router. We further introduce guarded harness evolution to separate update generation from state commitment. A Continual Optimizer proposes candidate harnesses from post-execution feedback, and a Continual Evaluator commits the resulting candidate harness only after checking current improvement, historical retention, and validity. Experiments on textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open-world interaction demonstrate capability accumulation and failure recovery, with relative gains exceeding 10% over corresponding baselines in multiple settings. Component ablations assess the contribution of each harness component, while controlled retention sweeps reveal measurable harness-level forgetting and show that the stability--plasticity trade-off can be explicitly adjusted.

Mechanisms for dynamically converting cyber threat intelligence (CTI) into actionable detection capabilities are necessary due to the rapid evolution of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Sigma rules are an essential part of contemporary threat detection workflows because they offer a platform-independent framework for expressing detection logic that can be converted into particular queries across SIEM systems. Conventional techniques for manually crafting Sigma rules are prone to mistakes, and necessitate extensive knowledge, which restricts their scalability. Although there are open-source and industry-maintained Sigma rule repositories, they often fail to keep pace with emerging threats and require frequent customization to fit diverse operational environments. This emphasizes the necessity of dynamic rule generation that is adapted to evolving attack techniques as well as particular use cases. In this work, we design AUTOSIGMA, an automated solution for transforming unstructured CTI reports into relevant Sigma rules. Rather than relying solely on language models, AUTOSIGMA leverages a structured knowledge base to enrich partial inputs, matches the enriched content against a repository of existing Sigma rules, and then employs an LLM-as-a-Judge mechanism to iteratively validate the rules. By combining knowledge-driven enrichment, template-based rule grounding, and a multi-stage solution, AUTOSIGMA enables accurate, context-aware, and relevant rule generation. Evaluations across multiple real-world APT reports and multiple security blogs demonstrate that AUTOSIGMA outperforms alternative solutions and LLM models in rule validity, rule relevancy, MITRE ATT&CK technique coverage, and robustness to input quality. AUTOSIGMA's Demo: https://youtu.be/iSr6IurQ6BM

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly paired with verifiers (step checkers, self-consistency filters, tool-based fact checkers, formal proof assistants) that claim to detect the model's errors. Yet the verification literature uses the word "level" to mean at least five different things: verification granularity, concept abstraction, risk tier, system-stack layer, and the epistemic source of the ground truth. We propose Verification Autonomy Levels (VAL), a meta-standard that classifies any verification scheme along a single axis: where does the verification spec come from, and what does the verdict guarantee? VAL ranges from L0 (LLM self-declaration; no deterministic anchor) through L2 (objective ground truth; correctness only) to L3/L4 (decidable systems with single-property or domain-level completeness), with L5 impossible in the unrestricted case. Central to VAL is the completeness blind spot: substitution- and sampling-based verifiers can confirm that proposed candidates hold, but cannot prove that no candidate was missed. We further identify a dichotomy the literature has not stated: completeness is reachable only for formally specifiable properties, whereas empirical open-world verification (fact-checking, diagnosis) caps at anchored correctness (L2). We document this gap empirically across four domains (symbolic mathematics, behavior monitoring, medical diagnosis, and code generation, the last a reverse validation with predictions stated before evidence) and in the strongest formal-verification baseline in our survey, whose authors note the verifier focuses on the correctness of each step. We show the levels of granularity, concept hierarchy, risk, and system stack are orthogonal to VAL, resolving a systematic conflation across 17 surveyed papers. Code and full assessment are released as supplementary material.

Hate speech is a real and timely threat that affects a large portion of online users, especially youth and minority groups. While building reliable and robust automatic hate speech detection (HSD) systems is paramount, we argue that this must also be balanced with the individual right to privacy. Exploring the intersection of HSD and privacy, we demonstrate that HSD systems might unintentionally achieve performance at the cost of encoding authorship, posing a threat to privacy. Building on these findings, we establish the notion of a privacy-HSD trade-off, which demands a careful balance. We benchmark a series of text privatization methods, as well as our newly proposed domain-specific AgnoSpeech technique, showing that balancing privacy and HSD is difficult but feasible. The findings make a strong case for more research on the trade-offs between privacy and HSD, both of which have tangible implications for the safeguarding of online participation.

Site-specific weed management in paddy farming offers substantial reductions in herbicide use over conventional broadcast spraying, but field deployment has been limited by three persistent challenges: robust crop-row navigation under canopy where GNSS degrades, real-time visual discrimination between rice and morphologically diverse weeds, and the asymmetric cost of misclassifying rice as weed, which is irreversible. This paper presents AgriNav, an integrated autonomous tractor system built around four ROS-coupled modules: a custom PyTorch reimplementation of WeedDet for rice detection, a parallel lightweight 1.68M-parameter CNN-FPN variant with asymmetric class weighting, an inverted-logic discrimination module that protects the rice class through a hardcoded confidence-gate veto, and a 6-state constant-velocity-turn-rate Extended Kalman Filter fusing GNSS, IMU, and wheel odometry with three-level outage bridging. Our primary system-level contribution is a four-mechanism LiDAR-camera fusion bridge that uses the navigation LiDAR for region-of-interest constraint, world-coordinate projection, ground-plane filtering, and bidirectional confidence fusion at zero additional hardware cost. Simulation experiments demonstrate continuous position tracking through a 20-second GNSS outage, crop row detection confidence above 0.9 throughout operation, and rice-detection confidences from 0.32 to 0.95 across paddy, aerial, and post-flood imagery. The LiDAR ROI constraint reduces detection inference region by an estimated 30 to 50 percent.

We ask whether internal representation statistics can provide useful example-level difficulty signals for adaptive inference in multilingual African NLP, and find that they cannot in this setting. Studying natural language inference across 15 African languages with frozen off-the-shelf checkpoints, we report four results. First, AfriXNLI's English configuration shares 1,047 of its 1,050 examples verbatim with XNLI evaluation data, and one widely used NLI checkpoint scores 1.000 on that test split, consistent with XNLI test exposure. Because AfriXNLI is derived from XNLI, its English, French and Swahili configurations cannot serve as clean evaluations for XNLI-trained models. Second, parameter count does not reliably order capability across African languages: our larger checkpoint is better in seven languages and worse in eight, with no significant aggregate difference. Third, across three multilingual representation spaces, angular dispersion is consistently more language-determined than effective rank, so pooled correlations can inflate one and mask the other. Fourth, the association that survives language control depends on the target: effective rank predicts probability gain from escalation but not whether escalation changes the prediction, while cheap-model confidence shows the opposite pattern; the two targets correlate at only 0.655. Under the tested models, signals, and compute budgets, no evaluated signal makes adaptive routing preferable to always-expensive inference, although an oracle exceeds it by 11 accuracy points at 60% of the compute. Our central methodological finding is that a representation statistic can be statistically significant for one notion of computational benefit while being irrelevant to another, and therefore be a poor decision variable.

Debates have recently emerged as a useful methodology for agentic AI to improve performance as well as to aid explainability and user engagement. For example, LLM-empowered agents may debate internally (with themselves) and/or externally (with other agents). In many settings where debates are used, debates' outcomes and resulting outputs are determined post-hoc by external judges, often LLMs. In this paper we develop and test a novel theory of debate judgement applicable to all settings where agents engage in debates by providing pros and cons for their opinions therein. Specifically, we identify a number of formal properties that debate judgement may be required to satisfy in general, as concerns reproducibility, robustness, groundedness and explainability. Then, we explore their satisfaction formally and/or experimentally, for claim verification settings, for two specific alternative debate judgement methods: variants of the LLMs as a judge idea and formal semantics drawn from computational argumentation. We show that the two methods give similar accuracy performances but the former may lack formal guarantees that the latter brings. Overall, our study indicates argumentation semantics as an ideal candidate for principled judges in debate-driven AI.

Open AI scholarship has focused on model releases and cloud ecosystems, leaving the local inference infrastructure that makes open-weight models runnable on user-owned devices largely unexamined. We address this gap through a mixed-methods analysis of llama.cpp, combining 7,681 merged pull requests from March 2023 through March 2026 with repository discussions, corporate statements, and contributor blogs. We show that local inference broadens participation at execution while relocating capture into the infrastructure that makes execution possible. Through hardware backends, model integration labor, and Hugging Face's February 2026 absorption of the project, we document how control shifts to hardware vendors, model distributors, and core maintainers while model owners and individual contributors bear the cost of making models runnable. These dynamics suggest that preserving openness outside the cloud requires attention to the infrastructure that makes models runnable, not just to the models themselves. This calls for policy mechanisms---analysis of format dependencies and vendor influence, model compatibility requirements, and sustained public funding for inference tooling---that extend beyond model release conditions to the infrastructure layer.

Automating graphic design synthesis from user-provided elements requires both a coherent overall composition and the exact preservation of each asset. Existing methods predict a layout as explicit bounding-box coordinates with a language model and then paste the assets into it, which separates spatial planning from visual synthesis and tends to produce rigid, mis-scaled compositions. We instead ask whether the layout can emerge implicitly inside a pretrained image-editing diffusion transformer. We present Mise-en-Scène, a two-stage framework. In the first stage, a diffusion transformer adapted with a small, knockout-selected LoRA drafts a complete design in which the arrangement of the elements emerges jointly with the rendered canvas. In the second stage, a deterministic match-and-place step moves the original high-resolution assets to the drafted positions, which guarantees exact asset fidelity and yields an editable, layered design that a designer can keep refining rather than a flat image. Notably, a minimal adaptation of the pretrained transformer already suffices, without the specialized conditioning machinery commonly introduced for multi-element generation. On the large-scale PrismLayersPlus benchmark, the designs produced by Mise-en-Scène are the closest to the ground truth in perceived quality among all compared methods, by a wide margin over both an LLM layout planner and a specialized layout transformer, while our match-and-place stage bridges the remaining fidelity gap to the ground-truth composites.

Visual grounding in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery aims to localize a target object in complex bird's-eye-view scenes according to a natural language description. However, the abundance of small, densely distributed, and visually similar objects creates high visual redundancy, while repetitive local configurations give rise to strong topological ambiguity. Existing approaches mainly focus on visual--language feature alignment or dense contextual interaction, yet they struggle to distinguish subtle inter-instance differences and effectively exploit spatial topological structures, leading to inaccurate grounding in highly crowded scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{GrabVG}$, a novel visual grounding framework inspired by human visual search. GrabVG explicitly decomposes grounding into two sequential stages: $\textit{preattentive hypothesis search}$ and $\textit{graph-attentive feature binding}$. Specifically, we first generate a compact set of reliable object hypotheses through distillation-guided proposal induction and text-aware hypothesis filtering, substantially reducing background distractions and semantic mismatches. These hypotheses are then organized into a sparse graph, where language-guided intra-instance visual cues and inter-instance topological relationships are jointly bound and propagated via graph attention, enabling efficient spatial reasoning and accurate target localization. Extensive experiments on AerialVG and AerialSense show that GrabVG achieves a favorable accuracy--speed trade-off, reaching 67.31$\%$ and 80.34$\%$ Acc@0.5 and outperforming the corresponding baselines by 10.55 and 8.76 percentage points, respectively.

Language model-based systems which allow asking questions of documents have become popular tools for sensemaking. Despite their implied capability, these systems still suffer from issues of factuality and provenance, while encouraging confirmatory, rather than exploratory, research. We present TractorBeam, a browser extension-based mixed-initiative system that uses collaborative annotation as an interface metaphor for sensemaking, re-framing language model (LM) outputs as suggested highlights in a process that we call \textit{collaborative machine annotation}. This metaphor allows us to present LM results in-context on PDF documents, directly addressing concerns of provenance and factuality, while allowing users to iteratively construct mental schemas and queries for language models directly in the context of a document. In a preliminary user study, all of our participants felt that TractorBeam enabled them evaluate and iteratively improve the model's reflection of their intended highlighting, and several found suggestions that made them reconsider their original schema. TractorBeam suggests that systems that facilitate exploratory research on individual documents may lead to verifiable sensemaking for users and complement tools that work across broader corpora.

Electronic travel aids are pivotal for the independent mobility of the visually impaired. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer rich environmental understanding, they often suffer from excessive false positives in dynamic scenarios, leading to cognitive overload. To address this, we present ForeSightGuide, an anticipatory assistive guidance framework that couples semantic scene understanding with predictive hazard assessment. Unlike reactive systems, ForeSightGuide leverages the reasoning capabilities of VLMs to anticipate obstacle motion, effectively filtering out non-threatening objects to provide concise, actionable guidance. To validate our approach, we introduce a novel dataset captured in complex, dynamic real-world traffic scenes, designed to benchmark predictive capabilities. Extensive experiments on both public benchmarks and our proposed dataset demonstrate that ForeSightGuide achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it significantly mitigates information overload by reducing redundant alerts to 0.299 per guidance output while maintaining a low missed-hazard rate of 0.112, proving its efficacy for safe walking assistance.

There has been a significant recent interest in designing distributed algorithms in the SLEEPING model that minimize the {energy (a.k.a awake) complexity, which measures the number of rounds a node is awake during the algorithm. A node spends non-trivial resources (messages, energy, etc.) only when it is awake and not while sleeping. Energy complexity has been studied for various fundamental problems with respect to minimizing the maximum (worst-case) or the average number of rounds a node is awake. It has been shown that the energy complexities of several fundamental problems such as leader election (LE), broadcast, Minimum Spanning Tree (MST), Maximal Independent Set (MIS) is exponentially smaller compared to their respective best-possible round complexities in the standard CONGEST model (where nodes can only send messages of small size). This raises a fundamental question of whether such significant energy gains are possible for many other fundamental problems. Our main contribution is a general and powerful technique for showing energy lower bounds using information theory. It gives almost a "plug-in" way to show energy lower bounds for various problems in the standard CONGEST model. Our information-theoretic technique allows us to leverage known lower bounds on communication complexity to obtain new, almost optimal (up to logarithmic factors) polynomial (in $n$) lower bounds on energy complexity --- for both worst-case and average-case --- for fundamental graph problems such as triangle enumeration, All-Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP), diameter computation, minimum weight cycle, Maximum Independent Set (MaxIS), Minimum Dominating Set (MinDS), Minimum Vertex Cover (MinVC). The energy lower bounds of these problems match their respective round lower bounds, implying that one cannot obtain any significant gains in energy complexity.

The increasing deployment of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in critical infrastructure sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation has shown new challenges for Digital Forensics (DF). Traditional DF methodologies are not well equipped to handle the complexity, scale, and heterogeneity of IIoT environments. This paper introduces a comprehensive Twelve-Step Process (TSP) tailored specifically for IIoT incidents, addressing the need for effective investigation and Potential Digital Evidence (PDE) handling in such dynamic environments in DF. We begin by exploring the importance of IIoT and its role in industrial ecosystems, followed by an examination of existing DF challenges. Each step of the process, from forensic readiness to investigation closure, is designed to ensure robust PDE collection, analysis, and legal compliance to increase chances of admissibility from a DF scenario