Container terminals, pivotal nodes in the network of empty container movement, hold significant potential for enhancing operational efficiency within terminal depots through effective collaboration between transporters and terminal operators. This collaboration is crucial for achieving optimization, leading to streamlined operations and reduced congestion, thereby benefiting both parties. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop the most suitable forecasting approaches to address this challenge. This study focuses on developing and evaluating a data-driven approach for forecasting empty container availability at container terminal depots within a Vehicle Booking System (VBS) framework. It addresses the gap in research concerning optimizing empty container dwell time and aims to enhance operational efficiencies in container terminal operations. Four forecasting models-Naive, ARIMA, Prophet, and LSTM-are comprehensively analyzed for their predictive capabilities, with LSTM emerging as the top performer due to its ability to capture complex time series patterns. The research underscores the significance of selecting appropriate forecasting techniques tailored to the specific requirements of container terminal operations, contributing to improved operational planning and management in maritime logistics.

Large Language Models (LLMs) may portray discrimination towards certain individuals, especially those characterized by multiple attributes (aka intersectional bias). Discovering intersectional bias in LLMs is challenging, as it involves complex inputs on multiple attributes (e.g. race and gender). To address this challenge, we propose HInter, a test technique that synergistically combines mutation analysis, dependency parsing and metamorphic oracles to automatically detect intersectional bias in LLMs. HInter generates test inputs by systematically mutating sentences using multiple mutations, validates inputs via a dependency invariant and detects biases by checking the LLM response on the original and mutated sentences. We evaluate HInter using six LLM architectures and 18 LLM models (GPT3.5, Llama2, BERT, etc) and find that 14.61% of the inputs generated by HInter expose intersectional bias. Results also show that our dependency invariant reduces false positives (incorrect test inputs) by an order of magnitude. Finally, we observed that 16.62% of intersectional bias errors are hidden, meaning that their corresponding atomic cases do not trigger biases. Overall, this work emphasize the importance of testing LLMs for intersectional bias.

Training state-of-the-art large language models requires vast amounts of clean and diverse textual data. However, building suitable multilingual datasets remains a challenge. In this work, we present HPLT v2, a collection of high-quality multilingual monolingual and parallel corpora. The monolingual portion of the data contains 8T tokens covering 193 languages, while the parallel data contains 380M sentence pairs covering 51 languages. We document the entire data pipeline and release the code to reproduce it. We provide extensive analysis of the quality and characteristics of our data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of language models and machine translation systems trained on HPLT v2, demonstrating its value.

Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings, a phenomenon known as colexification. The new version includes improvements in the handling, selection and presentation of the data. We compare the new database with previous versions and find that our improvements provide a more balanced sample covering more language families worldwide, with an enhanced data quality, given that all word forms are provided in phonetic transcription. We conclude that the new Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications has the potential to inspire exciting new studies that link cross-linguistic data to open questions in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

The use of the iris as a biometric identifier has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, prompting privacy and security concerns about the use of iris images in research. It can be difficult to acquire iris image databases due to ethical concerns, and this can be a barrier for those performing biometrics research. In this paper, we describe and show how to create a database of realistic, biometrically unidentifiable colored iris images by training a diffusion model within an open-source diffusion framework. Not only were we able to verify that our model is capable of creating iris textures that are biometrically unique from the training data, but we were also able to verify that our model output creates a full distribution of realistic iris pigmentations. We highlight the fact that the utility of diffusion networks to achieve these criteria with relative ease, warrants additional research in its use within the context of iris database generation and presentation attack security.

Training robotic manipulation policies traditionally requires numerous demonstrations and/or environmental rollouts. While recent Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have reduced the number of required demonstrations, they still rely on expert knowledge to collect high-quality data, limiting scalability and accessibility. We propose Sketch-to-Skill, a novel framework that leverages human-drawn 2D sketch trajectories to bootstrap and guide RL for robotic manipulation. Our approach extends beyond previous sketch-based methods, which were primarily focused on imitation learning or policy conditioning, limited to specific trained tasks. Sketch-to-Skill employs a Sketch-to-3D Trajectory Generator that translates 2D sketches into 3D trajectories, which are then used to autonomously collect initial demonstrations. We utilize these sketch-generated demonstrations in two ways: to pre-train an initial policy through behavior cloning and to refine this policy through RL with guided exploration. Experimental results demonstrate that Sketch-to-Skill achieves ~96% of the performance of the baseline model that leverages teleoperated demonstration data, while exceeding the performance of a pure reinforcement learning policy by ~170%, only from sketch inputs. This makes robotic manipulation learning more accessible and potentially broadens its applications across various domains.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the permutation problem where the state space grows exponentially with the number of agents reduces sample efficiency. Additionally, many existing architectures struggle with scalability, relying on a fixed structure tied to a specific number of agents, limiting their applicability to environments with a variable number of entities. While approaches such as graph neural networks (GNNs) and self-attention mechanisms have progressed in addressing these challenges, they have significant limitations as dense GNNs and self-attention mechanisms incur high computational costs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel agent network and a non-linear mixing network that ensure permutation-equivariance and scalability, allowing them to generalize to environments with various numbers of agents. Our agent network significantly reduces computational complexity, and our scalable hypernetwork enables efficient weight generation for non-linear mixing. Additionally, we introduce curriculum learning to improve training efficiency. Experiments on SMACv2 and Google Research Football (GRF) demonstrate that our approach achieves superior learning performance compared to existing methods. By addressing both permutation-invariance and scalability in MARL, our work provides a more efficient and adaptable framework for cooperative MARL. Our code is available at https://github.com/funny-rl/SPECTra.

Implicit bias refers to automatic or spontaneous mental processes that shape perceptions, judgments, and behaviors based on social categories such as race, gender, or age [Greenwald and Lai, 2020, Payne and Gawronski, 2010]. Implicit biases often operate rapidly and with high efficiency, requiring minimal cognitive resources while influencing judgments through the automatic activation of stored information about social groups [Melnikoff and Bargh, 2018, Bargh and Williams, 2006, Fazio et al., 1986]. This efficiency in processing allows implicit biases to operate even under conditions of limited attention or cognitive load. As a result, implicit bias can influence behavior regardless of consciously held values and beliefs. Research demonstrates that implicit bias significantly relates to real-world outcomes, with researchers describing a potential role of implicit bias in domains such as employment [Agerström and Rooth, 2011], healthcare [FitzGerald and Hurst, 2017], and criminal justice [Spencer et al., 2016].

The key-value (KV) cache in autoregressive transformers presents a significant bottleneck during inference, which restricts the context length capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While previous work analyzes the fundamental space complexity barriers in standard attention mechanism [Haris and Onak, 2025], our work generalizes the space complexity barriers result to tensor attention version. Our theoretical contributions rely on a novel reduction from communication complexity and deduce the memory lower bound for tensor-structured attention mechanisms when $d = \Omega(\log n)$. In the low dimensional regime where $d = o(\log n)$, we analyze the theoretical bounds of the space complexity as well. Overall, our work provides a theoretical foundation for us to understand the compression-expressivity tradeoff in tensor attention mechanisms and offers more perspectives in developing more memory-efficient transformer architectures.

The raster-ordered image token sequence exhibits a significant Euclidean distance between index-adjacent tokens at line breaks, making it unsuitable for autoregressive generation. To address this issue, this paper proposes Direction-Aware Diagonal Autoregressive Image Generation (DAR) method, which generates image tokens following a diagonal scanning order. The proposed diagonal scanning order ensures that tokens with adjacent indices remain in close proximity while enabling causal attention to gather information from a broader range of directions. Additionally, two direction-aware modules: 4D-RoPE and direction embeddings are introduced, enhancing the model's capability to handle frequent changes in generation direction. To leverage the representational capacity of the image tokenizer, we use its codebook as the image token embeddings. We propose models of varying scales, ranging from 485M to 2.0B. On the 256$\times$256 ImageNet benchmark, our DAR-XL (2.0B) outperforms all previous autoregressive image generators, achieving a state-of-the-art FID score of 1.37.