Science & Mathematics

Livestock 5.0 provides a framework to optimize animal welfare and productivity amidst escalating climate change and current pressures to sustainably increase production through limited expansion of agricultural lands, while equilibrating the food-water-energy nexus. Directly tackling the food-water-energy nexus, agrivoltaics emerges as a promising solution for dual-land use for food and renewable energy production. In this paper, we evaluated the effectiveness of agrivoltaics for dairy-calves in a commercial farm through a joint hierarchical Bayesian model, developed to account for non-linear and time-varying relationships, pedigree structure, and missing information. Uncertainty from missing information was propagated to the posterior estimates. While weight at birth and calf sex were not associated with serum Brix, we found that serum Brix was positively associated with colostrum Brix, which allowed to estimate the probabilities of the serum Brix quality (poor, fair, good, or excellent) given colostrum Brix. Poor serum Brix quality was positively associated with disease event rate, with similar rates for the other quality classes. Serum Brix quality was not associated with calf weight, indicating that farm management overcame the negative effects of low serum Brix quality. Previous number of diseases was positively associated with disease event rate, while weight at birth was negatively associated with disease event rate. Agrivoltaics were not associated with disease event rate, indicating that agrivoltaics can be implemented as a safe, dual-use system for increased calf comfort an welfare.

Accurate ground plane normal estimation is essential for odometry in spherical mobile mapping systems (SMMS), which face challenges from rapid rotations and limited ground coverage. We propose two RANSAC-based approaches: single-scan estimation with normal vector scoring and multi-step validation, and LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO)-based estimation using a global 3D map. Evaluated across diverse real-world datasets against terrestrial laser scanner ground truth, results show that LIO-based estimation significantly outperforms single-scan methods in accuracy and robustness. Integrating ground normal estimates into the motion model improves pose estimation, supporting autonomous navigation in challenging and hazardous environments.

Inline quality assurance for Sheet Molding Compound (SMC) manufacturing is hindered by the lack of large-scale, accurately labeled image datasets for training machine-learning models. This work presents a process-informed, photorealistic digital twin for carbon-fiber SMC strip deposition. A rigid-body simulation reproduces the deposition kinematics (settling, friction, belt motion), while a physically grounded polarization-rendering model produces realistic appearance, so that every image carries exact, mutually consistent labels in synchronized formats: oriented bounding boxes, point annotations, density maps, and polarization renderings (Angle and Degree of Linear Polarization). Because the joint distribution of many overlapping strips cannot be specified analytically, simulation yields exact, scalable ground truth that manual annotation cannot provide. The twin produces over 16,000 images across 3,300 frames, and the synthetic data replicate near-isotropic fiber orientation (axial concentration r < 0.05) consistent with as-deposited commercial SMC. Trained purely on synthetic data, YOLOv11 and CSRNet reach detection mAP50 up to 0.91, with a dedicated oriented-bounding-box detector confirming the oriented labels are directly trainable (mAP50 = 0.83); on real manufacturing images, the synthetic-to-real difference in edge and texture structure (Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance 0.46, distribution overlap 0.56) is of the same magnitude as the difference between two real acquisition series of the same material (0.41, overlap 0.57). The approach substantially reduces the labeling burden for camera-based inline inspection of fiber orientation and volume content.

Understanding how supervision signals shape semantic visual representations remains challenging, particularly in fine-grained, low-data settings. Standard evaluations of vision models rely on downstream accuracy, which often fails to capture structural differences in learned representations. We propose a compact explainability-driven framework for comparing encoders trained with classification-only and caption-generation supervision on CUB-200. Using a controlled two-stage protocol in which both encoders are ultimately optimized for the same classification task, we enable a direct comparison of the resulting representations. Saliency maps are generated using attention rollout and gradient-weighted rollout and evaluated with five metrics covering faithfulness (positive and negative perturbation) and localization (keypoint emphasis, background attribution, and Earth Mover's Distance). Across random seeds and explanation methods, caption supervision yields representations that are more sensitive to the removal of salient regions, better aligned with annotated object parts, and less reliant on background regions, whereas classification supervision produces representations that are slightly more robust to the removal of low-saliency regions. An ablation study on the Oxford-IIIT Pet dataset shows consistent trends across key metrics. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework makes supervision-induced representational differences observable and quantifiable beyond downstream accuracy alone. More broadly, it provides a systematic basis for assessing learned representations and comparing alternative training and transfer-learning strategies.

This paper presents a causal, training-free linker that allows a frozen streaming diarizer to track more speakers than it has output slots. Streaming end-to-end diarizers such as Streaming Sortformer emit a fixed number N of concurrent speaker slots. Above N speakers, they keep detecting speech but reuse slots across people, because N bounds how many speakers the model can express at once, not how many it will meet. The linker uses only the host's slot posteriors and the audio. It keeps the frames where one slot is active, splits each slot where the speaker changes, embeds each piece with an off-the-shelf speaker encoder, and matches it against a bank of speakers seen so far. It only relabels, so missed speech and false alarm are identical to the host's and every gain is a reduction in speaker confusion. On 1418 sessions from eight corpora, it reduces the 4-slot host's DER above its cap from 36.8% to 22.6%, and barely moves it below the cap. The same constants transfer to the host's 8-slot successor and to two streaming EEND hosts from a different model family. On courtroom hearings with up to 23 speakers it reduces cpWER from 82.7% to 24.4%.

User simulators promise to evaluate conversational search systems at a scale human studies cannot reach, but only if their behavior is realistic enough to trust. We study AutoSim, a conversational-search user simulator whose relevance judgments rank a controlled pool of retrieval systems in agreement with NIST across three TREC iKAT years (Kendall's $τ$ of $0.66$, $0.91$, and $0.91$; all $p{\le}0.002$), an agreement that survives removing its persona. AutoSim self-improves against a held-out signal from real users, and we find that fine-tuning its weights makes it behave like real users, which in turn gives a more accurate estimate of how well a system serves them. Reaching that behavior takes more than prompting: when discriminating between real and simulated user sessions, no prompt we tried lowers a held-out real-versus-simulated classifier below AUC $0.85$, whereas fine-tuning the weights drives it to $0.45$, where neither the classifier nor a human reading full dialogues can tell it from a real user. That added realism is what makes the evaluation more accurate: where real users retrieve little, a prompted simulator over-estimates retrieval effectiveness by $+0.136$ nDCG and returns a relevant passage on $57\%$ of the turns where real users find none, enough to change a deployment decision. Only the weight-level simulator escapes this bias. We release the framework and code.

We study universal online convex optimization with delayed feedback. We develop a single algorithm that simultaneously adapts to general convex, strongly convex, and exp-concave losses without prior knowledge of the curvature class or parameters. Our regret bounds match the best known dependence on the time horizon $T$ and delays up to doubly logarithmic factors: roughly $\sqrt{T + d_{\mathrm{tot}}}$ for convex losses and $σ_{\max}\log T$ rates with curved losses, where $d_{\mathrm{tot}}$ is the total cumulative delay and $σ_{\max}$ is the maximum number of simultaneously missing observations. Our main technical contribution is a delayed meta-learner with a second-order excess-loss guarantee, which enables curvature-adaptive aggregation of delayed base learners. In addition, our new exp-concave base learner yields a sharper regret bound which improves the state-of-the-art delay dependence by replacing the maximum delay with the potentially much smaller $σ_{\max}$, while retaining the complementary $\sqrt{d_{\mathrm{tot}}}$ dependence.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) promise predictions that humans can inspect and correct through concepts such as "curved beak". Yet on CUB-200-2011, their standard benchmark, progress is measured like that of ordinary classifiers: by task and concept accuracy. Neither reveals whether the label is predicted from the exposed concept scores, or whether a concept is supported by visual evidence of that concept rather than by co-occurring features such as cues to the species as a whole. We audit where the accuracy of CBMs and Concept Embedding Models (CEMs) on CUB comes from. The CUB annotations are too noisy to explain it: class-level training labels agree with per-image annotations on only ~82% of image--concept pairs, and classifiers trained on per-image annotations reach only ~37% species accuracy. Leakage probes show that CEM predictions cannot be reconstructed from their concept scores; the missing class information sits in internal embeddings. We identify four design axes through which class information can enter concept scores---receptive field, shared versus concept-specific representations, norm-dependent scoring, and task supervision. An ablation shows that most of it enters through non-local features: restricting a ResNet50 backbone to local BagNet patches lowers the accuracy recoverable from concept scores from 72% to 43%, close to what ground-truth annotations support, while joint training raises it again at the cost of concept accuracy. Localization and occlusion show that locality makes grounding measurable but does not guarantee it: under class-level labels, local concept scores use the head as a proxy for body, wing, and tail concepts, and CEM concept scores barely respond to occluding their supporting part. Task and concept accuracy should thus support, not drive, the evaluation of CBMs, and given the noisy annotations, CUB accuracy gaps should not be overinterpreted.

The Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, when applied to long-horizon tasks, it faces severe challenges: i) Due to the high task complexity, the model struggles to sample enough successful trajectories, resulting in slow convergence. ii) Relying solely on sparse final rewards causes all steps to be updated indiscriminately, encouraging redundant step generation. When both the quantity and quality of successful trajectories become difficult to guarantee, the performance is severely constrained. This dilemma stems from the limitations: existing RL paradigms rely entirely on the reasoning capability of base models, lacking the ability to actively optimize trajectories. To address the above issues, we propose a novel trajectory evolution paradigm with hindsight credit assignment, termed TrajEvolve. TrajEvolve not only relies on the trajectory inferred by the model but also generates ``evolutionary trajectories'' by refining low-quality steps in historical trajectories, thereby exposing the policy to high-quality compositions that lie within the base model's support but are rarely sampled within practical training budgets. Furthermore, TrajEvolve reformulates step-level continuous credit assignment as a binary classification task, whether each step is necessary for task completion. This simplification not only reduces the learning difficulty but also enables step labels to be obtained through counterfactual verification, achieving precise identification of redundant steps. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

LLM applications are increasingly built as systems of cooperating components rather than as single prompt-response pipelines. IoT applications add constraints of their own, because sensing, reasoning, control, and actuation are spread across devices, edge nodes, and cloud services to meet latency, privacy, and bandwidth requirements. How multi-agent LLM systems are organized and deployed across this cloud-edge-IoT continuum has not been mapped systematically. We therefore conducted a systematic mapping study. From 831 records retrieved up to March 2026, we selected 45 primary studies and classified each one by architecture family, deployment pattern, application domain, and evaluation practice. We also recorded how each system was evaluated and whether its code or data are public. Five architecture families recur in the corpus. Specialized agent teams run next to sensors, planners delegate subtasks to workers, and small local models cooperate with large cloud models. A fourth group federates model adaptation across devices, and a large fifth group builds the supporting infrastructure for offloading, communication, memory, and serving. Deployment relies on six recurring patterns, ranging from local-only execution to control loops gated by policy checks or human approval. Twenty-four of the 45 studies target IoT, industrial, smart-home, healthcare, vehicular, or robotics settings, and 29 evaluate on physical hardware, where open models below 8B parameters dominate. Based on the mapping, we list the reporting items needed to make future evaluations comparable, give deployment guidance for common IoT constraints, and identify open problems.

Electrons in graphene move like massless relativistic particles, making them exceptionally mobile but difficult to trap because Klein tunnelling permits unimpeded passage through electrostatic barriers. This challenge extends to atomic collapse and hadron confinement. Twisted trilayers form Bernal and rhombohedral domains joined by smooth boundaries, bringing their carriers into contact. Here we show that a new mechanism, distinct from established approaches, confines massless fermions in equilateral triangular Bernal domains without mass barriers, bulk gaps or physical edges. Simulations and analytical modeling reveal that massless carriers have no adiabatic continuation into rhombohedral domains, while escape through nonadiabatic coupling to massive carriers is exponentially suppressed by smooth stacking variation. Perfect reflection in the adiabatic limit turns Bernal domains into quantum cavities in a gapless, edgeless metal. Striking density-of-states oscillations encode Eisenstein-integer arithmetic, linking energies and degeneracies to norms and prime factorizations. These findings bring relativistic confinement and number theory into experimentally accessible electronic spectra.

Groundwater in Ghana's Densu River Basin remains a key domestic water source, but multi-metal contamination threatens children's health. Previous deterministic hazard index assessments provide limited treatment of uncertainty, co-exposure, and spatial variability. This study applies a Bayesian probabilistic framework for non-carcinogenic risk assessment using 94 groundwater samples and measurements of Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Cd, and As. A Bayesian regression model propagates parameter uncertainty and accounts for contaminant co-occurrence. Adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is used for posterior inference, while inverse distance weighting generates spatially continuous risk surfaces. Pb, As, and Cd dominate cumulative risk. Posterior predictive results indicate that approximately 31% of sampling sites have a probability greater than 0.5 of exceeding a hazard index (HI) of 1. The risk surface is highly heterogeneous, with a posterior mean of 0.372 and a standard deviation of 0.416. High-risk zones often reflect moderate co-exposure rather than extreme contamination by a single metal. The framework provides uncertainty-aware, spatially explicit information to support groundwater monitoring, risk mitigation, and public health planning in data-limited regions.

Multilingual evaluations often score a model's opening yes or no, a token that also carries model and language answering conventions. We ask when different ways of eliciting and reading an answer recover the same judgment, and when they measure an answer habit. We collect 1.1 million replies from eight models in six languages on up to 105 moral vignettes, varying the question's form, the answer constraint, and the reading of the reply, token or sentence, in both wordings (the FAR-6 battery). Story-level judgment profiles converge across the tested readouts and question forms, except for the yes/no token after a negative interrogative read under a preset mapping: on the same replies, token and sentence profiles agree at a median r = 0.67 across cells, while sentence profiles agree with free-sentence profiles at 0.94, a known linguistic variability. With each language's story consensus removed, a model's profile is nearest to its own in another language for 39 of 48 model-language cells under proposition labels and 15 under free sentences, against 5 expected by chance. Particle, position, and named-term preferences follow their own patterns. A model can keep its judgment and change its yes: scoring that token requires establishing which proposition it affirms.

LLMs increasingly operate over mixed-sensitivity contexts, where they must reason over information ranging from public to confidential while disclosing only what the user is authorised to receive. Existing approaches enforce access control as a binary decision: either fully answering or refusing, without regulating how much or what kind of information is revealed if access is granted, leading to over-refusal or unintended leakage. We introduce graduated disclosure, an access-control formulation in which the level of detail and sensitivity in a model's response is calibrated to the user's authorisation rather than treated as a grant-or-deny decision. We model graduated disclosure as a disclosure-aware generation problem and propose a reward-based optimisation framework that shapes responses toward level-appropriate abstractions while penalising unauthorised factual leakage, including paraphrases and approximations. We evaluate our approach on enterprise and clinical benchmarks and compare it with prompt-based, gating, and supervised baselines. Experiments show that our method substantially reduces information leakage while preserving correctness and utility. These results suggest that disclosure control must be integrated into the generation process itself to enable secure yet useful LLM deployments.

Training coding agents typically updates the policy while keeping the harness fixed. During training, trajectories reveal flawed repair strategies and interaction problems that vary across tasks and change as the policy learns. We introduce HarnessAdapt-RL, which trains the policy and adapts its harness during reinforcement learning. For flawed repair strategies, a frozen teacher generates task-specific mechanism-level skills. For interaction problems recurring across tasks, a separate teacher model evolves tools and hooks, keeping each change only if it improves the observed pass rate or the observed trainable rate without lowering either. The policy trains with the adapted harness, and its new trajectories guide further adaptation. With a 9B base model, HarnessAdapt-RL improves pass@1 over GRPO by 9.8, 12.6, and 6.4 percentage points on SWE-bench Verified, Multilingual, and Pro, and outperforms GRPO with the human-designed OpenHands harness. Gains from mechanism-level skills persist after their removal at evaluation. Re-evolving tools and hooks as the policy changes outperforms freezing early versions. Removing them at deployment, in contrast, costs up to 7.7 percentage points. Training therefore produces a model-harness pair: the trained policy and the evolved tools and hooks, with skills removed at deployment.