Modern Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) im- plementations now connect edge gateways, cloud dashboards and business applications. This improves visibility and remote monitoring. However it simultaneously exposes industrial traffic to various cyber threats including scanning, web attacks and Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi), phishing- driven credential theft, and command-and-control (C2) activity. Although rule-based tools remain useful for detecting known signatures, their efficacy decreases with minimally altered attacks or when alerts require manual investigation. This paper presents AIRO (Autonomous Intelligence-Driven Cybersecurity Risk Re- duction System), an efficient framework for IIoT monitoring and response. AIRO combines Apache Kafka streaming, attack- specific feature extraction, machine learning (ML) inference, confidence-based decision logic and risk reduction measures such as Internet Protocol (IP) blocking, account suspension and traffic limiting. We developed four specialized datasets for C2 beaconing, reconnaissance, SQLi, and phishing to evaluate AIRO. These datasets include noisy and overlapping characteristic distribu- tions to minimize label leakage. The best-performing models, primarily Gradient Boosting and LightGBM, achieve F1-scores up to 0.9229 while ensuring low-latency from event input to mitigation

Large language models (LLMs) differ in capabilities and costs, motivating routing methods that adaptively choose a model for each query. These methods rely on performance prediction: given a query, estimate whether a model will answer it correctly. Most routing methods train separate predictors of candidate models' performance to guide model selection. Our work shows that performance prediction only beats a simple baseline when the candidate model is suboptimal on the task or the performance predictor adds significant capacity relative to the candidate model. Specifically, we take a model's self-confidence, the probability it assigns to its chosen answer, as a baseline and study how much a performance predictor can improve on it. First, we show that any performance predictor that outperforms a model's self-confidence can be used to improve the model's loss: the predictor's advantage transfers exactly in log loss through recalibration. Second, accounting for the predictor's additional parameters, we bound its advantage by the model's suboptimality plus the gain from those parameters. Third, we extend our theoretical results to two-model cascades, which route queries to a more capable model when the first model is predicted to fail. Experiments with 16 language models on four benchmarks show that predictors gain a larger advantage over self-confidence on more suboptimal models. This advantage shrinks as models improve through finetuning. Cascading exhibits the same two patterns: predictor-based routing offers larger gains over confidence-based routing for more suboptimal models, and these gains diminish after finetuning.

This paper studies the problem of safe tool execution for large language model (LLM) agents under prompt injection. Using Petri nets, we formalize the execution harness between the LLM and its tools as a supervisory control problem, in which marks represent capabilities, approvals and budgets. Since a transition fires only if the marks it needs are present, an injected request whose preconditions are unmet or already spent is refused regardless of its wording. Treating tool outcomes as uncontrollable, we enforce safety by the conventional maximally permissive supervisor, and this safety transfers to the running system under four assumptions. Moreover, to capture an agent that may propose again after a refusal, we introduce the notion of a replanning closed loop, in which each retry costs an inference call. We show that, in this loop, the conventional supervisor can be arbitrarily more intrusive than a stricter safe one. Furthermore, for a given proposer model, the maximally permissive least-intrusive supervisor is characterized as a value-threshold refinement of the conventional one. Under precise conditions, this refinement orders two concurrent actions by at most one monitor place. On an autonomous release agent, we find by synthesis that safe deployment requires a step that the supervisor can refuse after a rollout starts.

In the post-API landscape, social-media profiling has become inexpensive and automated: Large Language Models (LLMs) can extract structured information from unstructured content and deduce attributes users never disclosed. A person's true exposure is not what they post but what can be inferred from it. As these practices become routine, exposure to social engineering attacks becomes an operational certainty, demanding a shared framework for assessment and mitigation. We make this exposure measurable by quantifying how accurately a target can be profiled, and how far that profile enables social engineering attacks. Because no existing model fully spans this continuum, we unify Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) and Cyber Human Intelligence (Cyber-HUMINT), two individual-focused disciplines that evolved separately, into a single doctrine-grounded taxonomy of 38 capabilities across the Cyber Threat Intelligence lifecycle, where user profiling bridges passive collection and active engagement. Domain experts validated the taxonomy (Fleiss' $\kappa$ = 0.92). We operationalize its core path (extraction, inference, and susceptibility assessment) as an LLM-augmented multi-agent pipeline, evaluated on real participants' public data. Susceptibility is assessed indirectly: the pipeline predicts how each target would rank personalized engagement options, matching their actual choices significantly above chance. This ranking capacity captures the personalization on which tailored attacks depend. The underlying profiles are accurate: extraction reaches F1 = 97.3%, and inferred attributes score 4.73/5, both far above rule-based and NER-based baselines at negligible cost. The framework augments security analysts' tradecraft rather than replacing it and enables defenders to gauge their own exposure before an adversary does.

Cancer care is a longitudinal, time-sensitive process requiring coordination among diverse healthcare professionals (HCPs), whose collaboration evolves throughout treatment. Prior studies link care team structure to patient outcomes, but the temporal dynamics of collaboration and their relationship to evolving patient risk remain poorly understood. We introduce a visual analytics framework for modeling and interpreting time-varying care team interactions in oncology. We construct dynamic collaboration networks from electronic health record (EHR)-mediated communication data and use a temporal graph neural network (TGNN) to estimate patient outcome risk over time. We then investigate how changes in care team composition and specialist participation relate to shifts in estimated risk across treatment stages. Our multi-view interactive system combines TGNN-based risk modeling with coordinated visualizations of care team networks, feature-level explanations from a surrogate logistic regression model, and exploratory what-if analysis. Without making causal claims, the system helps analysts examine how risk estimates co-evolve with collaboration patterns and identify care team characteristics associated with these changes. We demonstrate its utility through expert-guided analysis scenarios involving 505 patients with breast, colorectal, and lung cancers, evaluating its ability to reveal clinically meaningful collaboration patterns. This work improves the interpretability of temporal graph-based models in longitudinal, team-based healthcare, with potential applicability to other evolving collaborative settings.

Individual preferences often become visible only after deployment, when a user accepts one decision or revokes it in favor of another. Jev-style typed interfaces make this feedback explicit by identifying the selected action and, under revocation, the decision it replaces. We study how these consequences persist across requests as Decision-Level Continual Learning from Typed Feedback (Jev-DLC). Jev-DLC treats each correction as both evidence about a recurring action identity and a directed relation between the preferred and rejected choices. It preserves these signals in complementary bounded channels above a frozen scorer and combines their scores to shape the next decision. The method retains no raw interaction history, adds no scorer call, and performs no runtime language-model backward pass. We also introduce TCPA-Bench, a chronological suite that credits a correction only through its effect on later decisions. On TCPA-Repeat, Jev-DLC reaches 44.83% user-macro accuracy overall, 2.43 points above Recent-4 history replay. After at least two earlier feedback events, it reaches 56.07%, a 7.54-point margin over the strongest reported comparison at this depth. These results show how explicit typed corrections can become compact causal state for continual personalization.

Metaphor is a crucial aspect of human cognition. As such, we would like to understand how it is represented in large language models (LLMs) and how it might be controlled. We use mechanistic interpretability techniques to identify causal subspaces in a range of LLMs covering different architectures and sizes. We show that we are able to steer output on classification tasks across different parts of speech. We are also able to steer output on generation tasks, indicating that these techniques can be used to control the metaphoricity of LLM output.

Projected quantum kernels (PQKs) have emerged as a notable approach to circumvent the hardness of machine learning tasks arising from the exponential dimensionality of the quantum Hilbert space. However, recent PQK studies often rely heavily on extensive classical hyperparameter tuning of the radial basis function (RBF) kernel parameter and the support vector machine regularization parameter. The extensive tuning can mask the true representational power of the underlying PQKs induced by quantum feature maps, which has not been explored in detail. Thus, this work aims to expose the structural capabilities of PQKs by isolating and evaluating their native inductive bias through comparisons between untuned and tuned PQKs against the RBF baseline. Furthermore, we propose novel quantum feature maps that leverage two-qubit entanglement to capture multivariate correlations in IoT data. The results show that extensive tuning can lead to competitive performance architectures, while our proposed entanglement topologies exhibit a significantly stronger native inductive bias. This reveals that superior quantum architectural design can yield structurally better PQKs with improvements arising from quantum-mechanical properties rather than from classical hyperparameter tuning.

Accurate estimation of diffuse horizontal irradiance (DHI) is critical for optimising photovoltaic system performance and energy forecasting yet remains challenging in regions lacking comprehensive ground-based instrumentation. Recent advancements using Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained on extensive sky image datasets have shown promise in replacing costly irradiance measurement equipment, but the scarcity of long-term, high-quality sky imagery significantly restricts practical implementation. Addressing this critical gap, this study proposes a novel dual-framework approach designed for data-scarce scenarios. First, calculated atmospheric parameters, including extraterrestrial irradiance and cyclic time encodings, are integrated to represent sky conditions without utilising any instrumentation. Next, a sequential pipeline initially predicts synthetic global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and uses it as a feature, to refine DHI estimation. Finally, a dual-parallel architecture simultaneously processes raw and overlay-enhanced fisheye sky images. Overlays are generated through unsupervised, physics-informed cloud segmentation to highlight dynamic sky features. Empirical validation is performed using data from the Chilbolton Observatory, chosen for its temperate climate and frequent cloud variability. To simulate data-scarce conditions, models are trained on a single month (e.g., January) and evaluated across a temporally disjoint, full-year test set. Under this setup, the sequential and dual-parallel frameworks achieve RMSE values within 2-3 W/m^2 and 1-6 W/m^2, respectively, of a state-of-the-art ViT trained on the complete dataset. By combining physics-informed modelling with unsupervised segmentation, the proposed method provides a scalable and cost-effective solution for DHI estimation, advancing solar resource assessment in data-constrained environments.

Continual learning requires a model to keep acquiring new skills and knowledge without compromising its existing capabilities. Parametric methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity. Non-parametric methods, such as prompts, skills, and harnesses, leverage in-context learning but are limited by context length and lossy plain-text compression. To effectively combine their complementary strengths, we propose HERD (Harness-Evolving Recursive Distillation), a hybrid continual learning framework that learns efficiently in the harness and internalizes experience into cumulative capabilities via distillation. On the harness side, HERD continually refines its skills to capture reusable patterns, while retaining high-residual examples that the skills fail to capture in a bounded memory. On the parameter side, HERD performs drift-constrained distillation with dual anchors, substantially reducing forgetting over long recursive runs. On the 25-stage task stream of TRACE+17, under fixed memory and compute budgets, HERD matches the strongest parametric baseline in new-task acquisition while exhibiting the least forgetting and the strongest retention of general capabilities.

Finite element model updating is among the most general approaches to discover constitutive models from structural experiments: since the displacement field is computed rather than measured, it accommodates arbitrary geometries, boundary conditions, and sparse or noisy data. However, every loss evaluation requires a nonlinear finite element solve per load step, and training neural materials requires many such evaluations. Intrusive model order reduction lowers this cost while retaining boundary conditions and variational structure. How can a reduced model remain accurate while the network weights change at every training step? We combine proper orthogonal decomposition and energy-conserving sampling and weighting with adjoint sensitivities of the reduced model, and adapt both the trial space and the sampled elements along the optimization path. The constitutive law is a polyconvex neural network: a logarithmic normalization term, together with a zero-anchored input convex architecture and a growth term, renders the energy polyconvex, coercive, and non-negative by construction, independent of the trained weights. We demonstrate the approach on two experimental datasets and one synthetic three-dimensional example. For a two-phase specimen, training time decreases from nine hours to 41 minutes compared with a full-order identification, without loss of accuracy. In the three-dimensional example, six modes replace 48 672 degrees of freedom, 116 of 15 625 elements suffice to evaluate the internal forces, and training takes 13 minutes. In all cases, the identified material reproduces the measured reaction force and predicts the displacement field from the force alone. Hyperreduction makes the discovery of neural materials from structural data affordable while retaining the advantages of finite element model updating.

While arousal can be reliably predicted from musical audio, emotional valence remains difficult to model due to its subjective and context-dependent nature. In this work, we investigate the potential of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models to advance continuous valence and arousal prediction. Rather than predicting emotion scores directly, our framework leverages contextual demonstrations from an auxiliary dataset to refine the initial predictions produced by a small, task-specific base model. We systematically evaluate a text-based ICL variant using lyrics and generated audio captions, alongside a multimodal variant that incorporates raw audio signals. Using the entire MER60 dataset strictly as a held-out test set, our experiments demonstrate substantial performance gains, particularly for valence. Text-based ICL improves the valence $R^2$ from 0.110 to 0.427 with 80 demonstration shots, while the multimodal variant achieves 0.346 with only 10 shots. These findings suggest that training-free ICL offers an effective inference-time strategy for current language models to predict continuous music emotion.

As the use of AI, and consequently its harms, becomes more prevalent, the global discourse around AI has become increasingly risk-aware. With new risks emerging more frequently than ever, a key challenge is how to represent, document, and catalogue AI risks in an effective, interoperable, and queryable manner. Additionally, the European Union (EU) AI Act's requirements for "high-risk" AI systems to manage and document the risks creates the need for open and interoperable tools, methods, and standards that facilitate AI risk management in an ever-changing environment. In this paper, we present ontologies and taxonomies developed to assist with risk management and documentation, in line with the requirements of the EU the AI Act. We developed the AI Risk Ontology (AIRO) to specify AI use cases and their associated risks, complemented by the Vocabulary of AI Risks (VAIR), which populates AIRO with taxonomies of concepts. Key international standards on AI and risk, namely ISO/IEC 23894 on AI risk management and ISO/IEC 22989 on AI terminology informed the development of the ontologies. To promote reuse and enable multi-regulatory compliance, AIRO and VAIR have been integrated in the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) through a consensus-building process, expanding DPV's scope from data to AI.

Long-context models often use answer-bearing evidence less effectively when it appears away from a prompt boundary. We compare this position bias across Transformer, state-space, and hybrid Mamba architectures by moving one gold document through a fixed set of nine distractors. The evaluated Transformers show a beginning advantage that the evaluated state-space models lack, while both families favor evidence near the end. A matched pure-versus-hybrid Mamba comparison points in the same direction but remains statistically uncertain. The family difference appears among models that can answer the task. Transformer primacy reappears on synthetic retrieval, where state-space ceiling prevents a family comparison. A corpus swap within one state-space architecture changes overall accuracy without a detectable change in curve shape. Prompt changes can create or nearly remove a beginning advantage. Position remains decodable across architectures even when response curves differ, and attention concentration near initial tokens covaries with beginning sensitivity in the tested Transformer family. These exploratory results show that effective context use depends on the evaluated architecture family, capability, task, and prompt, without isolating the sequence mixer as the sole cause.

Content warning: this paper quotes slurs and hateful statements from published test suites; the racial slur among them is masked. Automated systems decide at scale which messages are harmful, and they decide unevenly. Classifiers label African American English as offensive up to twice as often as other English, the accounts of prominent drag queens can score as more toxic than those of white nationalists, and safety behaviour that holds in English collapses in low-resource languages. We argue that over-flagging and under-protection share one cause: deciding harm from vocabulary and surface form rather than from what a message does. We organise the evidence into seven failure modes and argue, as testable hypotheses, that harmful behaviours (a request for secrecy, a demand for payment, an attempt to isolate someone) travel across languages better than the words that express them. We propose an evaluation protocol that makes the gap between the best- and worst-served language communities a headline result, and show that the naive gap is inflated under equal service and that its usual bootstrap interval is unreliable. Applied to five open systems in eleven languages, from a keyword lexicon to two current multilingual guard models, the protocol finds that none reaches native-speaker accuracy at separating harmful function from harmless form (51 of 55 system-language pairs fall short); that greater capability raises discrimination in nine languages while leaving Arabic and romanised Hindi near chance, so the gap between the best- and worst-served languages grows with capability; that one system both over-flags and under-protects the same language most; and that a language a system reads worst can look the most fairly treated when only false positives are reported.

Policy enforcement for LLM agents has shifted from single-turn content moderation to compound, application-specific policies evaluated over multi-turn transcripts and tool-call trajectories. Fine-tuned guardrail models are efficient but degrade on compound policies, and while LLM-as-a-judge approaches achieve higher accuracy, they incur high inference cost and tend to produce unstable predictions. Neurosymbolic methods offer a natural alternative, decomposing the policy into narrow neural decisions composed under explicit logic. However, existing symbolic layers lack the required expressiveness and are optimized against fixed data rather than the policy itself. To address this, we introduce SCOPE, which compiles a policy into an executable program of neural predicates executed by small models, deterministic extractors, and code that composes their outputs. The program is optimized jointly with its training data, using adversarial generation of counterexamples that target where the program deviates from the policy. We evaluate SCOPE on a benchmark of real-world policy tasks against prompt optimization, task decomposition, and workflow generation methods, achieving the highest average accuracy across tasks and models. Programs optimized with the weakest executor transfer to other models without further optimization. This allows them to be deployed in production on inexpensive models, where they reach accuracy comparable to frontier reasoning models. Unlike these monolithic models, SCOPE produces substantially more stable predictions, and each verdict is interpretable through the predicate outputs that produced it. Additionally, we validate the key components of our method through an ablation study. SCOPE thus enables reliable, interpretable, and efficient policy enforcement at production scale.

Capability benchmarks measure what large language models can do, but not whether their recommendations remain appropriate as decision conditions change. This paper proposes a trajectory-based measurement framework and prospective validation protocol for artificial wisdom, defined behaviorally as context-sensitive regulation of judgment. Versioned reference specifications determine admissible responses and transition materiality before evaluation. Seven stage-level criteria assess judgment under current conditions, while two transition components assess material-update adequacy and commitment-preserving stability. Stability requires prior adequacy; switching within registered commitment classes is permitted, and persistent error earns no stability credit. A nine-component profile is primary, with a secondary bottleneck score and separate critical-failure reporting. Three simplified simulations examine precision, bottleneck estimation, and sensitivity to model-family count. A single-criterion simulation met its precision criteria at 24 scenarios per domain. Near a bottleneck tie, the estimated minimum had a downward bias of 0.55 points at that size. A simplified incremental-prediction simulation detected a Brier improvement of 0.027 with probabilities of .508 and .742 using eight and twelve families, respectively; it does not establish power for the operational protocol. An exploratory predecessor-rubric study comprising 71 evaluation records illustrates aggregation sensitivity but does not validate the proposed instrument. The twelve-family target remains provisional pending feasibility assessment and calibration of the complete analysis. Whether the profile predicts independent decision outcomes beyond capability remains an open empirical question.

Space data centers (SpaceDCs) are emerging as platforms for large language models (LLMs), supported by continuous solar-energy harvesting and high-speed interconnections. The mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture supports distributed LLM inference by deploying experts across satellites. However, skewed expert activation creates uneven computation power demands despite uniform solar-power supply at the dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Consequently, active experts remain power-constrained while harvested power at idle experts is underused. These reduce inference efficiency and increase latency. To address this supply-demand mismatch, we propose the SpaceWPT framework, which uses inter-satellite laser-based wireless power transfer (WPT) to redistribute harvested power. The key design challenge is to balance the computation demands of power-donating and power-receiving satellites under WPT losses: transferring more power accelerates computation at the receiver but leaves less power for the donor. After deriving design principles that simplify WPT control, we characterize the resulting latency tradeoff through a tractable surrogate of average inference latency. Minimizing the surrogate yields a novel two-sided water-filling strategy that determines whether each active expert donates, retains, or receives power according to the water level and its WPT link efficiency. Simulations with Mixtral-8x7B and Phi-3.5-MoE show up to 29.25% lower inference latency than without WPT, with larger gains under more compact formations and higher transfer efficiencies.

Mix-policy optimization incorporates off-policy expert data into the reinforcement learning (RL) loop to transcend the capability boundary of on-policy RL. However, existing methods either provide static full-trace guidance that suppresses self-exploration, or adopt expert prefix guidance without correctness guarantees, leading to suboptimal performance or even training collapse. In this paper, we propose MOER, a mix-policy optimization framework that harmonizes expert guidance with self-exploration. MOER injects a decaying expert chain-of-thought prefix into the prompt and lets the model complete the remaining reasoning, with the prefix length progressively annealed to encourage self-exploration. A selective rollback mechanism replaces failed completions with the original full expert trace, guaranteeing the correctness of every off-policy trajectory. Furthermore, a harmonized mix-policy objective optimizes on-policy tokens with a GRPO loss while supervising both expert prefix and completion tokens with a trust-region SFT loss, substantially stabilizing training. Extensive experiments show that MOER achieves the highest average scores in mathematical and general domain reasoning tasks, outperforming all basic and mix-policy baselines, and generalizes consistently across diverse tasks, model scales, and base model categories. Codes are available at https://github.com/CityU-MLO/MOER.

Existing agricultural advisories to farmers suffer from several limitations: (a) remain largely expert-driven, (b) do not adequately account for in-season weather, and (c) do not scale to individual farms. In this paper, our objective is to close these gaps by developing Agri-SCHOLAR (Simulation-Grounded Crop Harvest Optimization with LLM-Guided In-Season Advisory Rollouts). Agri-SCHOLAR is a rolling, in-season advisory framework that issues, at intervals of every few days or every week, a personalized advisory using the following information: soil and crop properties, observed weather to date, short-range forecast of weather, and a season extrapolation of weather based on historical analogs. The novelty and depth of Agri-SCHOLAR lies in each advisory being produced by a closed-loop system which couples multiple LLM agents with a powerful crop simulator (such as APSIM in our case). The simulator crucially serves as an evaluation oracle. In Agri-SCHOLAR, the LLM agents propose agronomically sound and feasible bounds on actionable parameters and an optimizer searches within those bounds against a multi-objective reward spanning yield, resource utilization, and economic feasibility. We conduct a detailed 11-year analysis of the maize crop in two selected locations of South Asia and show that Agri-SCHOLAR consistently outperforms the region's standard packages of practice and satisfactorily addresses the limitations of existing agricultural advisories.