The "black-box" nature of representations, combined with the known susceptibility of networks to learn spurious correlations [

We propose a novel loss function called Energy Discrepancy (ED) which does not rely on the computation of scores or expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo.

Social robots must adjust to human proxemic norms to ensure user comfort and engagement. While prior research demonstrates that eye-tracking features reliably estimate comfort in human-human interactions, their applicability to interactions with humanoid robots remains unexplored. In this study, we investigate user comfort with the robot "Ameca" across four experimentally controlled distances (0.5 m to 2.0 m) using mobile eye-tracking and subjective reporting (N=19). We evaluate multiple machine learning and deep learning models to estimate comfort based on gaze features. Contrary to previous human-human studies where Transformer models excelled, a Decision Tree classifier achieved the highest performance (F1-score = 0.73), with minimum pupil diameter identified as the most critical predictor. These findings suggest that physiological comfort thresholds in human-robot interaction differ from human-human dynamics and can be effectively modeled using interpretable logic.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for synthesizing textual PLC programming languages like Structured Text (ST) code, other IEC 61131-3 standard graphical languages like Sequential Function Charts (SFCs) remain underexplored. Generating SFCs is challenging due to graphical nature and ST actions embedded within, which are not directly compatible with standard generation techniques, often leading to non-executable code that is incompatible with industrial tool-chains In this work, we introduce LLM4SFC, the first framework to receive natural-language descriptions of industrial workflows and provide executable SFCs. LLM4SFC is based on three components: (i) A reduced structured representation that captures essential topology and in-line ST and reduced textual verbosity; (ii) Fine-tuning and few-shot retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for alignment with SFC programming conventions; and (iii) A structured generation approach that prunes illegal tokens in real-time to ensure compliance with the textual format of SFCs. We evaluate LLM4SFC on a dataset of real-world SFCs from automated manufacturing projects, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs. The results show that LLM4SFC reliably generates syntactically valid SFC programs effectively bridging graphical and textual PLC languages, achieving a generation generation success of 75% - 94%, paving the way for automated industrial programming.

This study investigates whether adding ground compliance to visual feedback (VF) gait training is more effective at increasing push-off force (POF) compared to using VF alone, with implications for gait rehabilitation. Ten healthy participants walked on a custom split-belt treadmill. All participants received real-time visual feedback of their ground reaction forces. One group also experienced changes in ground compliance, while a control group received only visual feedback. Intentional increases in propulsive ground reaction forces (POF) were successfully achieved and sustained post-intervention, especially in the group that experienced ground compliance. This group also demonstrated lasting after-effects in muscle activity and joint kinematics, indicating a more robust learning of natural strategies to increase propulsion. This work demonstrates how visual and proprioceptive systems coordinate during gait adaptation. It uniquely shows that combining ground compliance with visual feedback enhances the learning of propulsive forces, supporting the potential use of compliant terrain in long-term rehabilitation targeting propulsion deficits, such as those following a stroke.

Modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) are becoming increasingly complex, and so is their development process. Hardware design verification entails a methodical and disciplined approach to the planning, development, execution, and sign-off of functionally correct hardware designs. This tedious process requires significant effort and time to ensure a bug-free tape-out. The field of Natural Language Processing has undergone a significant transformation with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). These powerful models, often referred to as Generative AI (GenAI), have revolutionized how machines understand and generate human language, enabling unprecedented advancements in a wide array of applications, including hardware design verification. This paper presents an agentic AI-based approach to hardware design verification, which empowers AI agents, in collaboration with Humain-in-the-Loop (HITL) intervention, to engage in a more dynamic, iterative, and self-reflective process, ultimately performing end-to-end hardware design and verification. This methodology is evaluated on five open-source designs, achieving over 95% coverage with reduced verification time while demonstrating superior performance, adaptability, and configurability.

Dataset distillation (DD) promises compact yet faithful synthetic data, but existing approaches often inherit the inductive bias of a single teacher model. As dataset size increases, this bias drives generation toward overly smooth, homogeneous samples, reducing intra-class diversity and limiting generalization. We present PRISM (PRIors from diverse Source Models), a framework that disentangles architectural priors during synthesis. PRISM decouples the logit-matching and regularization objectives, supervising them with different teacher architectures: a primary model for logits and a stochastic subset for batch-normalization (BN) alignment. On ImageNet-1K, PRISM consistently and reproducibly outperforms single-teacher methods (e.g., SRe2L) and recent multi-teacher variants (e.g., G-VBSM) at low- and mid-IPC regimes. The generated data also show significantly richer intra-class diversity, as reflected by a notable drop in cosine similarity between features. We further analyze teacher selection strategies (pre- vs. intra-distillation) and introduce a scalable cross-class batch formation scheme for fast parallel synthesis. Code will be released after the review period.

Modern deep learning techniques focus on extracting intricate information from data to achieve accurate predictions. However, the training datasets may be crowdsourced and include sensitive information, such as personal contact details, financial data, and medical records. As a result, there is a growing emphasis on developing privacy-preserving training algorithms for neural networks that maintain good performance while preserving privacy. In this paper, we investigate the generalization and privacy performances of the differentially private gradient descent (DP-GD) algorithm, which is a private variant of the gradient descent (GD) by incorporating additional noise into the gradients during each iteration. Moreover, we identify a concrete learning task where DP-GD can achieve superior generalization performance compared to GD in training two-layer Huberized ReLU convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we demonstrate that, under mild conditions, a small signal-to-noise ratio can result in GD producing training models with poor test accuracy, whereas DP-GD can yield training models with good test accuracy and privacy guarantees if the signal-to-noise ratio is not too small. This indicates that DP-GD has the potential to enhance model performance while ensuring privacy protection in certain learning tasks. Numerical simulations are further conducted to support our theoretical results.

Video-based AI systems are increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving and healthcare. However, interpreting their decisions remains challenging due to the inherent spatiotemporal complexity of video data and the opacity of deep learning models. Existing explanation techniques often suffer from limited temporal coherence and a lack of actionable causal insights. Current counterfactual explanation methods typically do not incorporate guidance from the target model, reducing semantic fidelity and practical utility. We introduce Latent Diffusion for Video Counterfactual Explanations (LD-ViCE), a novel framework designed to explain the behavior of video-based AI models. Compared to previous approaches, LD-ViCE reduces the computational costs of generating explanations by operating in latent space using a state-of-the-art diffusion model, while producing realistic and interpretable counterfactuals through an additional refinement step. Experiments on three diverse video datasets - EchoNet-Dynamic (cardiac ultrasound), FERV39k (facial expression), and Something-Something V2 (action recognition) with multiple target models covering both classification and regression tasks, demonstrate that LD-ViCE generalizes well and achieves state-of-the-art performance. On the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset, LD-ViCE achieves significantly higher regression accuracy than prior methods and exhibits high temporal consistency, while the refinement stage further improves perceptual quality. Qualitative analyses confirm that LD-ViCE produces semantically meaningful and temporally coherent explanations, providing actionable insights into model behavior. LD-ViCE advances the trustworthiness and interpretability of video-based AI systems through visually coherent counterfactual explanations.