Computer Science (arXiv)

LLM-powered GUI agents that autonomously operate smartphones are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to early real-world deployment. However, because these agents routinely process untrusted environmental content, they are highly vulnerable to environmental injection attacks, which include indirect prompt injections and adversarial instructions. Such attacks can manipulate the behavior of agents without user awareness through diverse channels encountered in everyday mobile use. Despite these risks, existing benchmarks often fail to capture everyday user scenarios, lacking a systematic evaluation of GUI agents under environmental injection attacks on mobile devices. To address this gap, we introduce MobileWorldSafety, a benchmark of 142 risk tasks built on real Android applications. For each task, we define a programmatically verifiable risk indicator over the final system state and evaluate outcomes with a two-stage pipeline: rule-based verification handles unambiguous cases, while an LLM judge adjudicates ambiguous ones. This distinguishes safety failures from capability failures and enables objective and reproducible assessment. Evaluations on six agents, including both general agents and specialized GUI agents, demonstrate that all agents remain highly vulnerable, with attack success rates ranging from 40.4% to 66.9%. These findings indicate that current agents often fail to maintain safety alignment when adversarial content is presented as ordinary mobile context. MobileWorldSafety provides a foundation for quantifying these vulnerabilities and advancing research on robust mobile GUI agents.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability characterized by challenges in social interaction and communication. As the causes of ASD remain unclear, identifying relevant features and hidden correlations is crucial for early diagnosis. This systematic review evaluates 55 studies from 2017 to 2023 on the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to ASD. The primary objective is to examine recent ML applications in ASD research, identifying trends, techniques, and datasets that enhance diagnosis and treatment. Supervised learning methods dominate, as they align well with ASD diagnostic needs; however, the role of deep learning is expanding with greater data availability. Emerging techniques based on hybrid methods, where unsupervised, deep learning, and fuzzy logic could be included, will be interesting to observe in the future. The review highlights key challenges and opportunities, particularly the need for models that can integrate complex data -such as genetic and clinical information- to improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes. Additionally, incorporating innovative data sources, like wearable devices and biometric sensors, could enable continuous and non-intrusive monitoring, providing a more holistic understanding of ASD. Findings emphasize that addressing current challenges requires interdisciplinary collaboration and expanded datasets tailored to ASD. Future ML models will benefit from broader multimodal data integration, enabling researchers to more comprehensively address the complexities of ASD.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance but carry massive computational overhead that restricts edge deployment. Although structural pruning has emerged as a key strategy to reduce these costs, existing methods often suffer from severe accuracy degradation or require expensive retraining. Recently, Variance-Based Pruning (VBP) introduced a promising paradigm by selecting neurons based on activation variance; however, it remains limited by statistical noise in finite-sample activation covariance and reliance on bias-only updates that cannot fully account for structural reconstruction error. To address these limitations, we introduce Denoised Variance-Based Pruning with Optimal Brain Bias Compensation (DVBP + OB$^2$C). We leverage random matrix theory to filter noise from the activation covariance spectrum for robust neuron selection and mathematically prove that integrating mean-shift compensation into the Optimal Brain Compression objective reduces the layer-wise Hessian exactly to the activation covariance matrix. This enables an optimal, closed-form update of the remaining weights using the same statistics gathered for selection. Extensive experiments on DeiT, Swin, and ConvNeXt architectures demonstrate that DVBP + OB$^2$C achieves state-of-the-art training-free performance; at 50% MLP pruning, it retains over 90% of the original Top-1 accuracy on Small and Base variants, outperforming VBP by up to 29.46% (ConvNeXt-T) and 7.33% (Swin-S). The code is available at: https://github.com/geontackee/DVBP_OB2C.

Modern hospitals increasingly rely on integrated Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) infrastructures to support critical healthcare services. However, this convergence expands the cybersecurity attack surface and makes safe validation of defensive mechanisms difficult on live systems. Existing testbeds often focus on isolated IT or OT environments and do not capture realistic cross-domain healthcare interactions. This work presents a hospital IT and OT cybersecurity testbed coupled with a digital twin for monitoring, experimentation, and validation of countermeasures. The testbed emulates a central server, Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, SCADA-based infrastructure, and segmented IT, OT, and DMZ networks. It supports controlled cyberattack execution, software-patch evaluation, and training of RL-based defense agents. The testbed is further extended to a digital twin that models the real-time state of the environment using log and network statistics and enables bidirectional interaction through command execution and container lifecycle orchestration. Modbus/TCP and FHIR/HL7 support realistic communication across healthcare and industrial components. Experimental evaluation shows low computation overhead, with average normalized CPU utilization below 0.4 % per container and most lightweight services operating below 0.01%. OpenPLC Modbus TCP operations achieve a median round-trip latency of 0.901 ms. The testbed also captures a multi-stage SSH-based attack propagating from the DMZ to the IT and PLC networks. The framework provides a foundation for extending the emulated environment toward a hardware-enabled hospital digital twin.

This monograph develops elimination geometry (EG), a typed, native-loss, audit-oriented framework for studying when locally optimal objects can be realized by a shared deployment rule. Elimination and compression may erase distinctions required by prediction, inference, control, or representation. EG asks which distinctions are lost, whether the induced defect is visible to the declared task, and whether changing information, architecture, action space, or deployment domain can repair it. EG separates local solvability, global realizability, and finite-sample certifiability. It derives native defects from the original objective and distinguishes architecture obstruction from model approximation, generalization, and implementation error. The monograph synthesizes tools from geometry, optimization, information theory, statistics, and machine learning into interfaces for integrability, representation admissibility, resource constraints, observational overlap, and common deployment. Formal results address regular, coordination, singular, compositional, and resource-limited mechanisms with explicit antecedents and claim boundaries. Applications include sparse model selection, distribution-free prediction, observational treatment policies, routed expert and retrieval systems, and learned score fields. Obstruction-Aware Learning and Inference links structural diagnosis to finite-data authorization, mechanism-matched intervention, and independent validation. Reproducible synthetic and real-data studies illustrate how certificates can guide architecture repair while recording failed gates and unresolved cases. The framework requires the deployment contract, native endpoint, competing explanations, information and compute budgets, and validation rule to be fixed before a persistent performance floor is attributed to architecture.

Agents increasingly interpret a person's natural-language preferences by querying an LLM for numerical preference judgments, e.g., by asking how much the person would be willing to pay for an item. A growing body of work estimates a utility function from these judgments and then chooses actions based on their estimated utility. This pipeline assumes the judgments are approximately self-consistent: that a single utility function can reproduce them. But are they? To study this question, we measure the self-consistency of cardinal LLM preference judgments. For example, the difference in stated willingness-to-pay between two items should match the stated payment that makes a person indifferent to exchanging them. We develop statistical tests and interpretable measures of how far observed responses depart from the best-fitting self-consistent utility function. Experiments with flight, apartment, and hotel examples across six LLMs reveal large persistent inconsistencies. This suggests that LLM-derived preference judgments cannot be faithfully summarized by a single utility function.

Modern embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex and typically integrate numerous heterogeneous devices, such as controllers, sensors, actuators, and supporting subsystems. As a result, their development and integration involve a wide variety of serial communication protocols, ranging from standardized solutions to partially standardized and fully project-defined formats. Efficient development of such systems increasingly depends on automation toolchains, which in turn require a clear, unified, and machine-processable formal basis. This paper proposes a unified, protocol-agnostic message model for explicit and deterministic description of serial messages. The model is based on formal definition of data types, atomic message elements (containers), and complete message structure. In addition to the model itself, the paper introduces methods for practical work with it, including configurable message types for expressing structural constraints and supporting deterministic automation, as well as configurable user representations for engineering-oriented reading and editing. The proposed model and methods are demonstrated through implementation in an industrial tool environment. The results show that the approach can support machine-readable interface control document development, automated generation of transport-layer software, and practical engineering work with both standardized and weakly formalized serial protocols. Taken together, the proposed model, methods, and tool implementation provide a practical foundation for automation toolchains in heterogeneous serial communication development.

We present rl-triton, an open-source library of high-performance GPU kernels for reinforcement learning credit assignment, implemented in Triton. The core contribution is a unified associative scan framework that recasts seven distinct RL estimation algorithms - Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE), V-Trace, Retrace($λ$), TD($λ$) returns, discounted returns, eligibility traces, and episodic prefix sums - as instances of a single first-order linear recurrence solved in $O(\log T)$ parallel steps. All algorithms share the same associative scan operator, with algorithm-specific fused Triton kernels constructing their recurrence coefficients on-chip. We verify the associative operator algebraically and define the treatment of terminated and truncated episodes explicitly. Benchmarks show a 1.6-5.70$\times$ full-call speedup over a vectorized torch-compile baseline in the massively parallel simulation regime (thousands of environments, short rollouts). The reported range covers all seven algorithms on both GPUs, both with and without per-step truncation handling. For most algorithms, speedups increase at longer sequence lengths, as the baseline requires more scan stages as $\log T$ grows, each adding an intermediate HBM round-trip. The library is available at https://github.com/simonsays1980/rl-triton.

What a reasoning model writes is only a partial record of the process that produces it. We introduce a two-level internal readout for mixture-of-experts reasoning. We first distill vocabulary-scale J-space into J64, a 64-axis semantic frame learned from the model's own reasoning states. J64 reveals readable process state that the emitted trace does not show: it separates inference effort from problem-induced strain. It also adds 0.096 to 0.135 held-out AUC over a baseline that reads the same rollout as token occupancy and aggregates it in exactly the same way. We then reconstruct J64 from native expert-routing statistics. The result is R64, a low-overhead proxy: its median per-axis correlation with J64 is 0.69 to 0.86 across three models and two families, and on gpt-oss-20b it preserves 95 to 100% of J64's predictive gain. The readout supports test-time decisions at two temporal resolutions. Over completed candidate sets, J64 and R64 improve single-branch selection, and R64-weighted voting improves plain majority voting in seven of eight settings. During generation, rolling readout windows drive a cumulative stop-and-resample policy whose operating point is fixed on training questions alone. J64 improves accuracy by 1.1 to 5.9 points over a sibling-permuted control, and the routing-only R64 proxy retains 0.9 to 3.2 of those points. Finally, router edits aimed at the mechanism J64 names induce the predicted reasoning behaviors and shift a diagnosed stall from numerical guessing toward exact symbolic execution. Together, J64 makes latent process state readable, while routing makes it deployable and actionable.

For each $d\in\N_{\geq 2}$ we construct a Delone set $Y$ in $\R^{d}$ for which every Lipschitz bijection from $Y$ to $\Z^{d}$ has a very irregular inverse. For example, the inverse fails to be Lipschitz, even at just a single point. Further, we clarify the relationship between several notions of regularity for bijections between Delone sets, studied in the literature.

Vision-LSTM (ViL) enables efficient global modeling, but its cost still scales with the number of spatial tokens, so existing segmenters confine ViL to a coarse bottleneck and lose fine anatomical detail. Rasterizing 2D features into a 1D sequence further breaks adjacency across the orthogonal scan axis. We propose MaLViL, a Multi-axis Low-rank Vision-LSTM network that extends ViL across decoder resolutions. Bidirectional low-rank ViL (Bi-LRViL) reasons on a compact orthonormal subspace and preserves detail through an orthogonal residual; scale-aware SaLViL restores cross-axis neighbors before serialization; and a Cross-Directional Mixer (CDM) fuses orthogonal horizontal and vertical traversal paths. Statistics-Guided Skip Modulation (SGSM) further retains boundary cues in encoder skips. On skin-lesion, ultrasound, and multi-organ CT benchmarks, MaLViL achieves competitive or state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy, while reducing ViL operator memory by up to $83\times$ at fine decoder resolutions. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmindflow/malvil.

The $\operatorname{do}$-operator is described graphically by deleting arrows into its targets and functionally by replacing their mechanisms with constants. To call these operations equivalent is not yet a mathematical statement: one returns a graph and remembers only the targets, whereas the other returns mechanisms and also remembers the imposed values. We make a dependency-level comparison precise for deterministic acyclic structural causal models with finitely many endogenous variables. If $\operatorname{Graph}(F)$ extracts the dependencies of a mechanism family $F$, our main theorem is $\operatorname{Graph}(F^ι)=\operatorname{Surg}(\operatorname{Graph}(F),T_ι)$. Thus replacing target mechanisms removes exactly the dependencies removed by graph surgery. For a model $M=(G,F)$ whose graph may contain unused arrows, we characterize when the same equality holds with $G$ in place of $\operatorname{Graph}(F)$; it holds for every intervention exactly when $G$ records the dependencies of $F$ exactly. We then define the intervened model, characterize its run, show how sequential interventions combine, and prove that an outcome depends only on interventions at its actual dependency ancestors. All principal results are machine-checked in an accompanying Lean 4 development.

Integrating open-vocabulary perception into object-level 3D scene graphs is a double-edged sword. While vision-language detectors recover long-tail categories and small, fine-grained objects overlooked by closed-set models, they also tend to fragment large surfaces and merge small objects into larger neighboring objects, compromising instance-level consistency and undermining mapping fidelity. Moreover, existing methods struggle to retrieve previously unmapped targets or determine whether a queried object is absent, hindering robust embodied open-world navigation and exploration. We present OVIP-SG, a unified framework for instance-preserving semantic mapping, functional scene partitioning, and language-guided small, fine-grained object retrieval. OVIP-SG uses a vision-language model (VLM) to enumerate scene-specific categories for robust open-world detection. Symmetric 3D Intersection over Union (IoU) association and area-weighted feature fusion preserve small independent instances, while VLM-inferred object functions partition scenes into compact functional search regions. A four-stage cascaded retrieval pipeline further incorporates voxel voting and determines target absence from exploration coverage. Under a unified evaluation protocol on Replica, OVIP-SG outperforms ConceptGraphs by 6.31 points in class-mean accuracy (mAcc) and 5.15 points in frequency-weighted mIoU (F-mIoU) while achieving a class-agnostic native-instance Panoptic Quality (PQ) of 0.398. It reduces the search area to 21.8% of the indoor floor space and reaches 0.773 balanced accuracy for object-presence classification. Real-world robotic experiments further demonstrate its practical effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/Agibot-Spatial-AI/OVIP-SG.

Large language models (LLMs) can both expand underspecified queries and encode text as dense representations, suggesting a unified model for query expansion and retrieval. Existing systems usually rely on prompted expansions, independently trained modules, or staged optimization, leaving generated expansions only indirectly aligned with the retrieval loss that judges them. We train a single decoder-only LLM end to end, where the same model generates the expansion and encodes both the expanded query and candidate documents. This unified setting creates a moving-target problem: retrieval supervision should improve query-side expansion, but the same update also shifts the document embeddings that serve as retrieval targets. We introduce Document Embedding Preservation Tuning (DEPT), which keeps tuned document embeddings close to cached initial embeddings while allowing retrieval gradients to pass through straight-through decoding into the generator. DEPT converts joint query--document movement into query-side adaptation against approximately stable, whitened document embeddings that support index reuse and online hard-negative mining. Experiments with Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and LLaMA-3.2-3B-Instruct on five datasets in BEIR benchmark show that DEPT improves average retrieval quality over training-free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, while ablations isolate the effects of preservation, whitening, end-to-end expansion training, and online negatives. Code is available at https://github.com/ILSparkle/DEPT.

Goldreich-Levin reductions are ubiquitous in cryptography: they convert an algorithm capable of guessing $\langle r, m \rangle$ (mod $2$) for a hidden string $m$ and a random challenge $r$, to one that is capable of extracting the entirety of $m$. Here, we describe a "simultaneous" Goldreich-Levin reduction for two entangled parties who are capable of guessing $\langle r, m \rangle$ given uniformly random identical challenges $r$. This allows to upgrade any unclonable encryption scheme satisfying "search" security to one satisfying the gold standard of unclonable "indistinguishability". As a corollary, we show that the simplest candidate unclonable encryption scheme from BB84 states satisfies unclonable indistinguishability. This result was discovered by GPT-5.6 Ultra after a few interactions. Our prompts included recent results on unclonable encryption by Ananth and Sahai, and Ragavan.

Developing robots capable of understanding and manipulating objects requires compact, interpretable, and generalizable representations. This work proposes a reinforcement learning-based framework for robotic grasp refinement, integrating keypoint-based object representations with a Deep Q-Network (DQN). Using 2D overhead images captured in a simulated environment, a geometric-based algorithm generates initial grasp candidates, which are iteratively refined by the proposed framework, transforming failed grasps into successful ones. Experiments conducted on 300 objects from the Dex-Net dataset using a UR5 manipulator demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving a 100% success rate on objects previously deemed ungraspable by geometrical methods. The framework's sim-to-real transferability is further validated through physical experiments on a Delta parallel robot, where a refined grasp successfully manipulates an object that was previously ungraspable. The findings underscore the effectiveness of reinforcement learning in addressing challenges in robotic grasping, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 FIFA World Cup and already operates crowd management at Hajj scale. Drone-based counting must hold accuracy on footage unlike anything in its training corpus, without labels, and must warn of dangerous inflow before a crush forms. We deliver a validated answer built on 525 controlled runs, a full-resolution corpus study, five falsification ablations, and a five-condition safety-interlock evaluation. Label-free adaptation recovers 31-49% of shift-induced error across four corruptions and five severities, with the strongest method gaining 41.8 MAE over the frozen source (95% CI [34.1, 49.6], p=7.5x10^-10, d=2.52). We establish a severity law separating methods with a constant absolute margin from the one whose margin grows, and a stability budget identifying which configuration is safe to fly. On a full-resolution corpus carrying a genuine +48 MAE aerial gap (source retrained to 14.6 validation MAE, a 34% improvement), adaptation repairs the dense-scene undercounting that would otherwise under-report a forming crush, and the flux-based risk module fires on real congestion episodes in 2 of 6 full-length clips. We localise the recoverable error: in a regime built to favor a physics-informed conservation prior (300-frame clips at 200ms spacing, five times wider than standard), the adaptation signal is normalisation-driven, not flow-driven; the continuity residual is invariant to the proportional counting errors domain shift produces, confirmed by four on/off ablations correlated at r=0.999 and a 40% input corruption moving accuracy by only 0.05 MAE. A label-free shift gate shows shift magnitude and accuracy damage are rank-independent (Spearman rho=0.20; rho=-0.60 among genuine shifts), quantifying the 58% of headroom a magnitude gate forgoes. We establish unconditional adaptation with tail monitoring as policy, closing with a six-point protocol.

Delegating cognitive operations to generative artificial intelligence redistributes execution and raises a governance problem: where human direction of the task remains. We distinguish two routes. Specified delegation places that direction before execution, through instructions, constraints, or criteria that delimit the task. Iterative coproduction places it during production, through interventions that correct or redirect provisional outputs. To examine both routes, we use aggregate monthly cells from the Anthropic Economic Index for April and May 2026. The AEI distinguishes two modes of use: 1P API, which corresponds to direct traffic through Anthropic's API, and Claude.ai, which combines activity from Chat and Cowork. On this basis, we test whether a stronger work-related orientation of human-AI interaction is associated with more specified delegation within each mode and whether the increase in the iterative profile is greater in Claude.ai than in 1P API. The main analysis uses level-0 O*NET tasks and estimates how both profiles change when an eligible record reallocates ten percentage points from personal use to work-related use. The iterative comparison is restricted to 1,411 node-month pairs observed and eligible in both modes. Specified delegation increases by 2.76 points in 1P API (95% CI: [2.30, 3.22]) and by 1.45 in Claude.ai (95% CI: [0.93, 1.97]). On the common support, iterative coproduction changes by-0.30 points in 1P API and by 0.15 in Claude.ai, yielding a between-mode difference of 0.45 points (95% CI: [0.15, 0.75]). These findings show that work-related orien tation is associated with stronger traces of prior human direction and that the observable iterative response varies across modes of use. The article shifts attention from how much the AI executes to when human direction leaves observable traces.

Retinal diseases are a leading cause of irreversible vision impairment, making early and accurate diagnosis essential for effective treatment. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) serves as a critical imaging modality for this purpose, yet its automated analysis is hindered by inherent speckle noise, varying lesion scales, and subtle inter-class similarities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, RetiWave-Mamba, which integrates spatial-frequency domain learning with state-of-the-art state space models. The framework utilizes Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to decompose OCT images into low- and high-frequency streams, enabling decoupled processing of structural context and fine-grained details. For the low-frequency branch, we design a Multi-scale Contextual Localization Module (MCLM), which synergizes multi-scale dilation with spatial attention to expand the global receptive field and precisely localize lesion regions. For the high-frequency branch, we introduce an Attention-Guided High-Resolution Network (AG-HRNet) equipped with an intelligent gating mechanism to suppress noise propagation during multi-scale interactions. Furthermore, a Frequency-Adaptive Mamba Projector (FAMP) is incorporated to capture long-range dependencies within disjoint high-frequency textural features. Extensive experiments on the OCT-C8 dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves a state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification accuracy of 98.25%, surpassing existing methods. These results highlight the efficacy of RetiWave-Mamba in robustly identifying retinal pathologies under noisy conditions, offering a promising tool for clinical diagnosis.

Machine learning models for electroencephalography (EEG) analysis show great promise across a wide range of applications, but their deployment in high-risk domains is hindered by their vulnerability to distribution shifts. Encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) data can lead to catastrophic, overconfident predictive failures. While OOD detection methods can mitigate these risks, they remain heavily under-explored for EEG. Moreover, evaluations in the broader literature typically evaluate OOD detection performance in isolation, ignoring their practical impact on downstream applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a benchmark for EEG OOD detection, evaluate a broad range of methods, and furthermore evaluate their value in two clinical downstream prediction task. Our results disentangle OOD detection and model uncertainty estimation capabilities, which are frequently conflated in the literature, provide actionable insights about the current state of the art for EEG OOD detection and model uncertainty estimation, and demonstrate how complementary methods for both aspects can be combined to form a robust safety net for the deployment of EEG-based machine learning models in real-world applications.

Learning analytics models can identify students at risk of poor performance, but they do not directly indicate which interventions are feasible, actionable, and compatible with educational constraints. This paper introduces SC2R, a semantics-constrained counterfactual recourse framework for educational decision support. SC2R combines a calibrated predictive model, integer-programming-based recourse generation over discrete action variables, a lightweight RDF vocabulary for intervention-plan representation, and SHACL validation for enforcing timing, budget, immutability, and availability constraints. The framework is evaluated offline on the OULAD dataset using snapshots constructed relative to each assessment at two decision horizons. Results show that the predictive component provides strong performance, that compact intervention plans can be generated at scale, and that semantic validation reveals infeasible plans that lighter optimization-only settings would otherwise accept. Rather than claiming causal improvement in student outcomes, this work shows that counterfactual recourse becomes more operationally meaningful in education when recommendations are not only model-valid, but also semantically feasible and machine-checkable.

We present MoNe, a lightweight modular neural memory that attaches to any frozen pretrained Transformer to enable long-context inference without retraining. MoNe reads context in fixed-size segments via test-time learning of fast-weight neural memory networks with layer-localized gradient updates; at inference, the memory generates keys and values from the query tokens alone, with no context tokens re-read. This two-phase design decouples inference cost from context length, achieving $O(N)$ preprocessing and $O(1)$ query cost with peak GPU memory that does not grow with $N$. At 128K tokens, MoNe reduces both compute and peak GPU memory by approximately 80% compared to ICL with only 6.4% parameter overhead. MoNe generalizes to context lengths far beyond the backbone's native window, achieving strong performance on needle-in-a-haystack and word extraction benchmarks from RULER, where ICL degrades sharply.

We consider the dynamic principal-agent problem under asymmetric information, wherein a principal sequentially designs contracts to incentivize an agent with unknown preferences and hidden actions. A fundamental bottleneck in the existing literature is the assumption of deterministic agent utility, which renders the principal's expected utility discontinuous and forces computationally intractable discretizations of the contract space. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a stochastic counterpart into the agent's utility model, capturing the inherent physical and behavioral variations in realistic subsystems. We formally prove that this stochastic formulation restores the continuity of the principal's expected utility. Leveraging this continuous geometric structure, we formulate the interaction as a structured multi-armed bandit problem subject to heteroscedastic noise. We propose a \texttt{Heteroscedastic GP-UCB} algorithm that utilizes a Neural Network (Arcsin) kernel, chosen to capture the non-stationary, sigmoidal geometry of the utility landscape. For an $m$-dimensional compact contract space, we establish a high-probability cumulative regret bound of $O\left(\sqrt{T}(\log T)^{m+1}\right)$. Finally, we demonstrate the practical efficacy of our theoretical framework by formulating the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) incentive design problem, proving its equivalence to a dynamic principal-agent problem, and showing superior economic performance for grid aggregators.

Slate recommendation treats a slate rather than an individual item as the recommendation unit, requiring joint optimization of item interactions and slate utility. Existing approaches typically separate candidate generation from ranking and restrict optimization to retrieved candidates. Generative recommendation with Semantic IDs (SIDs) offers a path to end-to-end recommendation, but existing SID construction often lacks recommendation-aware semantics and effective local collaborative signals, while next-token prediction is misaligned with slate-level objectives. We propose OGR, an end-to-end framework that directly generates ordered slates-"Once Generated, Ranked." OGR first introduces TUSID, which adaptively fuses item-specific semantic and local collaborative information into hierarchical SIDs. It then uses list-wise preference planning and pipelined position-wise SID decoding to model global preferences and inter-item dependencies while generating ordered slates. We further propose SPA, a reward-guided conservative policy optimization method that aligns generated slates with user preferences beyond likelihood imitation. Offline experiments show that OGR outperforms representative baselines, with 48.2% and 27.2% relative NDCG@5 gains on industrial and public datasets, respectively. Online A/B testing on Kuaishou further yields a 1.120% improvement in Effective Views.

We make progress towards the impossibility of imperfectly complete quantum-computation, classical-communication (QCCC) key agreement by constructing the first unconditional attacks on quantum key agreement in the following restricted settings. In the two-message setting, we assume that Alice makes only classical queries to the oracle in the first round and that her message to Bob is classical, but otherwise both parties may perform arbitrary quantum computation, make quantum queries, and send a quantum state in the second round. Our attack and analysis are based on the heavy-query learning techniques from Austrin et al. (CRYPTO 2022) and the reprogramming techniques of Katz and Sela (arXiv 2401.14319). In the round-independent setting, we show that the attack of Barak and Mahmoody (CRYPTO 2009; J. Cryptology 2017) can be extended to multiple rounds when Alice and Bob share classical communication and make only classical queries in all but the final round. In both settings, the attacker is computationally unbounded and makes $poly(λ)$ queries to recover the key whenever each honest query bound is at most $poly(λ)$ and the valid agreement probability is inverse-polynomial. As a consequence, we rule out imperfectly correct quantum public-key encryption for classical messages whose length is bounded by a polynomial in $λ$ in the QROM when key generation has classical oracle access, even if encryption, decryption, and the ciphertext are quantum. In particular, the one-bit case applies to the imperfectly correct PKE obtained from two-round OSP by Bartusek and Khurana (CRYPTO 2025) whenever the classical OSP sender makes only classical random-oracle queries.