With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various applications, it is empirical to ensure their fairness across all user communities. However, most LLMs are trained and evaluated on Western centric data, with little attention paid to low-resource languages and regional contexts. To address this gap, we introduce PakBBQ, a culturally and regionally adapted extension of the original Bias Benchmark for Question Answering (BBQ) dataset. PakBBQ comprises over 214 templates, 17180 QA pairs across 8 categories in both English and Urdu, covering eight bias dimensions including age, disability, appearance, gender, socio-economic status, religious, regional affiliation, and language formality that are relevant in Pakistan. We evaluate multiple multilingual LLMs under both ambiguous and explicitly disambiguated contexts, as well as negative versus non negative question framings. Our experiments reveal (i) an average accuracy gain of 12\% with disambiguation, (ii) consistently stronger counter bias behaviors in Urdu than in English, and (iii) marked framing effects that reduce stereotypical responses when questions are posed negatively. These findings highlight the importance of contextualized benchmarks and simple prompt engineering strategies for bias mitigation in low resource settings.

Tensors, as higher-order generalizations of matrices, have emerged as powerful tools for representing and analyzing multi-dimensional data. They naturally arise in diverse applications such as multi-relational networks, spatiotemporal measurements, neuroimaging, and latent variable models. Unlike matrices, which capture only pairwise relationships, tensors encode multi-way interactions, offering richer structural insights. Among the various tensor models, orthogonally decomposable (odeco) tensors play a special role. Their decomposition structure parallels the eigendecomposi-tion of matrices, but with important advantages in both statistical robustness and computational tractability. In particular, odeco tensors arise in the method of moments for latent variable models.

We study empirical risk minimization in a single-head tied-attention layer trained on synthetic high-dimensional sequence tasks, given by the recently introduced attention-indexed model. Using tools from random matrix theory, spin-glass physics, and approximate message passing, we derive sharp asymptotics for training and test errors, locate interpolation and recovery thresholds, and characterize the limiting spectral distribution of the learned weights. Weight decay induces an implicit nuclear-norm regularization, favoring low-rank query and key matrices. Leveraging this, we compare the standard factorized training of query and key matrices with a direct parameterization in which their product is trained element-wise, revealing the inductive bias introduced by the factorized form. Remarkably, the predicted spectral distribution echoes empirical trends reported in large-scale transformers, offering a theoretical perspective consistent with these phenomena.

Neural scaling laws underlie many of the recent advances in deep learning, yet their theoretical understanding remains largely confined to linear models. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of scaling laws for quadratic and diagonal neural networks in the feature learning regime. Leveraging connections with matrix compressed sensing and LASSO, we derive a detailed phase diagram for the scaling exponents of the excess risk as a function of sample complexity and weight decay. This analysis uncovers crossovers between distinct scaling regimes and plateau behaviors, mirroring phenomena widely reported in the empirical neural scaling literature. Furthermore, we establish a precise link between these regimes and the spectral properties of the trained network weights, which we characterize in detail. As a consequence, we provide a theoretical validation of recent empirical observations connecting the emergence of power-law tails in the weight spectrum with network generalization performance, yielding an interpretation from first principles.

Neighborhood sampling is an important ingredient in the training of large-scale graph neural networks. It suppresses the exponential growth of the neighborhood size across network layers and maintains feasible memory consumption and time costs. While it becomes a standard implementation in practice, its systemic behaviors are less understood. We conduct a theoretical analysis by using the tool of neural tangent kernels, which characterize the (analogous) training dynamics of neural networks based on their infinitely wide counterparts -- Gaussian processes (GPs). We study several established neighborhood sampling approaches and the corresponding posterior GP. With limited samples, the posteriors are all different, although they converge to the same one as the sample size increases. Moreover, the posterior covariance, which lower-bounds the mean squared prediction error, is uncomparable, aligning with observations that no sampling approach dominates.

We develop a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework for parameter estimation in fractional-order SEIRD epidemic models. By embedding the Caputo fractional derivative into the network residuals via the L1 discretization scheme, our method simultaneously reconstructs epidemic trajectories and infers both epidemiological parameters and the fractional memory order $α$. The fractional formulation extends classical integer-order models by capturing long-range memory effects in disease progression, incubation, and recovery. Our framework learns the fractional memory order $α$ as a trainable parameter while simultaneously estimating the epidemiological rates $(β, σ, γ, μ)$. A composite loss combining data misfit, physics residuals, and initial conditions, with constraints on positivity and population conservation, ensures both accuracy and biological consistency. Tests on synthetic Mpox data confirm reliable recovery of $α$ and parameters under noise, while applications to COVID-19 show that optimal $α\in (0, 1]$ captures memory effects and improves predictive performance over the classical SEIRD model. This work establishes PINNs as a robust tool for learning memory effects in epidemic dynamics, with implications for forecasting, control strategies, and the analysis of non-Markovian epidemic processes.

Deep neural networks remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples, and most defenses collapse once gradients can be reliably estimated. We identify gradient consensus--the tendency of randomized transformations to yield aligned gradients--as a key driver of adversarial transferability. Attackers exploit this consensus to construct perturbations that remain effective across transformations. We introduce DRIFT (Divergent Response in Filtered Transformations), a stochastic ensemble of lightweight, learnable filters trained to actively disrupt gradient consensus. Unlike prior randomized defenses that rely on gradient masking, DRIFT enforces gradient dissonance by maximizing divergence in Jacobian-and logit-space responses while preserving natural predictions. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we formalize gradient consensus and provide a theoretical analysis linking consensus to transferability; (ii) we propose a consensus-divergence training strategy combining prediction consistency, Jacobian separation, logit-space separation, and adversarial robustness; and (iii) we show that DRIFT achieves substantial robustness gains on ImageNet across CNNs and Vision Transformers, outperforming state-of-the-art preprocessing, adversarial training, and diffusion-based defenses under adaptive white-box, transfer-based, and gradient-free attacks. DRIFT delivers these improvements with negligible runtime and memory cost, establishing gradient divergence as a practical and generalizable principle for adversarial defense. An adaptive adversary can approximate gradients across these transformations (e.g., via Expectation over Transformation (EoT) (Athalye et al., 2018)) and exploit the consistent directions that emerge, leading to transferable adversarial examples. This vulnerability stems not from insufficient randomness, but from the fact that most stochastic defenses still preserve a coherent, low-variance surrogate gradient landscape. We argue that true robustness requires not masking gradients, but destroying their alignment.

Smart aquaculture systems depend on rich environmental data streams to protect fish welfare, optimize feeding, and reduce energy use. Yet public datasets that describe the air surrounding indoor tanks remain scarce, limiting the development of forecasting and anomaly-detection tools that couple head-space conditions with water-quality dynamics. We therefore introduce AQUAIR, an open-access public dataset that logs six Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) variables--air temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, total volatile organic compounds, PM2.5 and PM10--inside a fish aquaculture facility in Amghass, Azrou, Morocco. A single Awair HOME monitor sampled every five minutes from 14 October 2024 to 9 January 2025, producing more than 23,000 time-stamped observations that are fully quality-controlled and publicly archived on Figshare. We describe the sensor placement, ISO-compliant mounting height, calibration checks against reference instruments, and an open-source processing pipeline that normalizes timestamps, interpolates short gaps, and exports analysis-ready tables. Exploratory statistics show stable conditions (median CO2 = 758 ppm; PM2.5 = 12 micrograms/m3) with pronounced feeding-time peaks, offering rich structure for short-horizon forecasting, event detection, and sensor drift studies. AQUAIR thus fills a critical gap in smart aquaculture informatics and provides a reproducible benchmark for data-centric machine learning curricula and environmental sensing research focused on head-space dynamics in recirculating aquaculture systems.

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

As large language models (LLMs) expand multilingual capabilities, questions remain about the equity of their performance across languages. While many communities stand to benefit from AI systems, the dominance of English in training data risks disadvantaging non-English speakers. To test the hypothesis that such data disparities may affect model performance, this study compares two monolingual BERT models: one trained and tested entirely on Swahili data, and another on comparable English news data. To simulate how multilingual LLMs process non-English queries through internal translation and abstraction, we translated the Swahili news data into English and evaluated it using the English-trained model. This approach tests the hypothesis by evaluating whether translating Swahili inputs for evaluation on an English model yields better or worse performance compared to training and testing a model entirely in Swahili, thus isolating the effect of language consistency versus cross-lingual abstraction. The results prove that, despite high-quality translation, the native Swahili-trained model performed better than the Swahili-to-English translated model, producing nearly four times fewer errors: 0.36% vs. 1.47% respectively. This gap suggests that translation alone does not bridge representational differences between languages and that models trained in one language may struggle to accurately interpret translated inputs due to imperfect internal knowledge representation, suggesting that native-language training remains important for reliable outcomes. In educational and informational contexts, even small performance gaps may compound inequality. Future research should focus on addressing broader dataset development for underrepresented languages and renewed attention to multilingual model evaluation, ensuring the reinforcing effect of global AI deployment on existing digital divides is reduced.