Earth's gravity has fundamentally shaped human development by guiding the brain's integration of vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive inputs into an internal model of gravity: a dynamic neural representation enabling prediction and interpretation of gravitational forces. This work presents a dual computational framework to quantitatively model these adaptations. The first component is a lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that predicts g-load-dependent changes in key electroencephalographic (EEG) frequency bands, representing the brain's cortical state. The second component utilizes a suite of independent Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the body's broader physiological state, including Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Electrodermal Activity (EDA), and motor behavior. Both models were trained on data derived from a comprehensive review of parabolic flight literature, using published findings as anchor points to construct robust, continuous functions. To complement this quantitative analysis, we simulated subjective human experience under different gravitational loads, ranging from microgravity (0g) and partial gravity (Moon 0.17g, Mars 0.38g) to hypergravity associated with spacecraft launch and re-entry (1.8g), using a large language model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet). The model was prompted with physiological parameters to generate introspective narratives of alertness and self-awareness, which closely aligned with the quantitative findings from both the EEG and physiological models. This combined framework integrates quantitative physiological modeling with generative cognitive simulation, offering a novel approach to understanding and predicting human performance in altered gravity

This study explores the classification error of Mixture Discriminant Analysis (MDA) in scenarios where the number of mixture components exceeds those present in the actual data distribution, a condition known as overspecification. We use a two-component Gaussian mixture model within each class to fit data generated from a single Gaussian, analyzing both the algorithmic convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and the statistical classification error. We demonstrate that, with suitable initialization, the EM algorithm converges exponentially fast to the Bayes risk at the population level. Further, we extend our results to finite samples, showing that the classification error converges to Bayes risk with a rate $n^{-1/2}$ under mild conditions on the initial parameter estimates and sample size. This work provides a rigorous theoretical framework for understanding the performance of overspecified MDA, which is often used empirically in complex data settings, such as image and text classification. To validate our theory, we conduct experiments on remote sensing datasets.

Urban embodied AI agents, ranging from delivery robots to quadrupeds, are increasingly populating our cities, navigating chaotic streets to provide last-mile connectivity. Training such agents requires diverse, high-fidelity urban environments to scale, yet existing human-crafted or procedurally generated simulation scenes either lack scalability or fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce UrbanVerse, a data-driven real-to-sim system that converts crowd-sourced city-tour videos into physics-aware, interactive simulation scenes. UrbanVerse consists of: (i) UrbanVerse-100K, a repository of 100k+ annotated urban 3D assets with semantic and physical attributes, and (ii) UrbanVerse-Gen, an automatic pipeline that extracts scene layouts from video and instantiates metric-scale 3D simulations using retrieved assets. Running in IsaacSim, UrbanVerse offers 160 high-quality constructed scenes from 24 countries, along with a curated benchmark of 10 artist-designed test scenes. Experiments show that UrbanVerse scenes preserve real-world semantics and layouts, achieving human-evaluated realism comparable to manually crafted scenes. In urban navigation, policies trained in UrbanVerse exhibit scaling power laws and strong generalization, improving success by +6.3% in simulation and +30.1% in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer comparing to prior methods, accomplishing a 300 m real-world mission with only two interventions.

Despite growing research on bias in large language models (LLMs), most work has focused on gender and race, with little attention to religious identity. This paper explores how religion is internally represented in LLMs and how it intersects with concepts of violence and geography. Using mechanistic interpretability and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) via the Neuronpedia API, we analyze latent feature activations across five models. We measure overlap between religion- and violence-related prompts and probe semantic patterns in activation contexts. While all five religions show comparable internal cohesion, Islam is more frequently linked to features associated with violent language. In contrast, geographic associations largely reflect real-world religious demographics, revealing how models embed both factual distributions and cultural stereotypes. These findings highlight the value of structural analysis in auditing not just outputs but also internal representations that shape model behavior.

In recent years, deep learning-based methods have been proposed for solving inverse scattering problems (ISPs), but most of them heavily rely on data and suffer from limited generalization capabilities. In this paper, a new solving scheme is proposed where the solution is iteratively updated following the updating of the physics-driven neural network (PDNN), the hyperparameters of which are optimized by minimizing the loss function which incorporates the constraints from the collected scattered fields and the prior information about scatterers. Unlike data-driven neural network solvers, PDNN is trained only requiring the input of collected scattered fields and the computation of scattered fields corresponding to predicted solutions, thus avoids the generalization problem. Moreover, to accelerate the imaging efficiency, the subregion enclosing the scatterers is identified. Numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has high reconstruction accuracy and strong stability, even when dealing with composite lossy scatterers.

Colors are omnipresent in today's world and play a vital role in how humans perceive and interact with their surroundings. However, it is challenging for computers to imitate human color perception. This paper introduces the Human Perception-Based Fuzzy Color Model, COLIBRI (Color Linguistic-Based Representation and Interpretation), designed to bridge the gap between computational color representations and human visual perception. The proposed model uses fuzzy sets and logic to create a framework for color categorization. Using a three-phase experimental approach, the study first identifies distinguishable color stimuli for hue, saturation, and intensity through preliminary experiments, followed by a large-scale human categorization survey involving more than 1000 human subjects. The resulting data are used to extract fuzzy partitions and generate membership functions that reflect real-world perceptual uncertainty. The model incorporates a mechanism for adaptation that allows refinement based on feedback and contextual changes. Comparative evaluations demonstrate the model's alignment with human perception compared to traditional color models, such as RGB, HSV, and LAB. To the best of our knowledge, no previous research has documented the construction of a model for color attribute specification based on a sample of this size or a comparable sample of the human population (n = 2496). Our findings are significant for fields such as design, artificial intelligence, marketing, and human-computer interaction, where perceptually relevant color representation is critical.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to perform multi-target reasoning in long-context scenarios where relevant information is scattered across extensive documents. To address this challenge, we introduce NeuroSymbolic Augmented Reasoning (NSAR), which combines the benefits of neural and symbolic reasoning during inference. NSAR explicitly extracts symbolic facts from text and generates executable Python code to handle complex reasoning steps. Through extensive experiments across seven languages and diverse context lengths, we demonstrate that NSAR significantly outperforms both a vanilla RAG baseline and advanced prompting strategies in accurately identifying and synthesizing multiple pieces of information. Our results highlight the effectiveness of combining explicit symbolic operations with neural inference for robust, interpretable, and scalable reasoning in multilingual settings.

Ukraine has reported dozens of civilian deaths from Russian attacks over the past week, including three killed in a late-night assault on Wednesday in the southeastern city of Dnipro. A child was among the victims of the drone attack, which came hours before high-stakes meetings in Paris due to take place later on Thursday, during which United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are to meet French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials to discuss the conflict. Ukraine's defence and foreign ministers, as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, are also in the French capital for talks with US and European Union delegations, though Kyiv's delegation has not specified who it plans to meet. But as Moscow's self-imposed 30-day ceasefire on energy infrastructure approached its close, talks to achieve a broader ceasefire so far have showed little sign of progress. Russia has stuck to its hardline positions while accusing Ukraine of violating the energy ceasefire, to which Kyiv never agreed.

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are a class of NP-hard problems ubiquitous in several real-world logistics scenarios that pose significant challenges for optimization. Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising alternative to classical approaches, as it can learn fast heuristics to solve VRPs. However, most research works in NCO for VRPs focus on simplified settings, which do not account for asymmetric distances and travel durations that cannot be derived by simple Euclidean distances and unrealistic data distributions, hindering real-world deployment. This work introduces RRNCO (Real Routing NCO) to bridge the gap of NCO between synthetic and real-world VRPs in the critical aspects of both data and modeling. First, we introduce a new, openly available dataset with real-world data containing a diverse dataset of locations, distances, and duration matrices from 100 cities, considering realistic settings with actual routing distances and durations obtained from Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM). Second, we propose a novel approach that efficiently processes both node and edge features through contextual gating, enabling the construction of more informed node embedding, and we finally incorporate an Adaptation Attention Free Module (AAFM) with neural adaptive bias mechanisms that effectively integrates not only distance matrices but also angular relationships between nodes, allowing our model to capture rich structural information. RRNCO achieves state-of-the-art results in real-world VRPs among NCO methods. We make our dataset and code publicly available at https://github.com/ai4co/real-routing-nco.

Instruction tuning in low-resource languages remains underexplored due to limited text data, particularly in government and cultural domains. To address this, we introduce and open-source a large-scale (10,600 samples) instruction-following (IFT) dataset, covering key institutional and cultural knowledge relevant to Kazakhstan. Our dataset enhances LLMs' understanding of procedural, legal, and structural governance topics. We employ LLM-assisted data generation, comparing open-weight and closed-weight models for dataset construction, and select GPT-4o as the backbone. Each entity of our dataset undergoes full manual verification to ensure high quality. We also show that fine-tuning Qwen, Falcon, and Gemma on our dataset leads to consistent performance improvements in both multiple-choice and generative tasks, demonstrating the potential of LLM-assisted instruction tuning for low-resource languages.