Large Language Model (LLM) powered agents have emerged as effective planners for Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems. While most existing AutoML approaches focus on automating feature engineering and model architecture search, recent studies in time series forecasting suggest that lightweight models can often achieve state-of-the-art performance. This observation led us to explore improving data quality, rather than model architecture, as a potentially fruitful direction for AutoML on time series data. We propose DCATS, a Data-Centric Agent for Time Series. DCATS leverages metadata accompanying time series to clean data while optimizing forecasting performance. We evaluated DCATS using four time series forecasting models on a large-scale traffic volume forecasting dataset. Results demonstrate that DCATS achieves an average 6% error reduction across all tested models and time horizons, highlighting the potential of data-centric approaches in AutoML for time series forecasting.

Payment networks form the backbone of modern commerce, generating high volumes of transaction records from daily activities. Properly modeling this data can enable applications such as abnormal behavior detection and consumer-level insights for hyper-personalized experiences, ultimately improving people's lives. In this paper, we present TREASURE, TRansformer Engine As Scalable Universal transaction Representation Encoder, a multipurpose transformer-based foundation model specifically designed for transaction data. The model simultaneously captures both consumer behavior and payment network signals (such as response codes and system flags), providing comprehensive information necessary for applications like accurate recommendation systems and abnormal behavior detection. Verified with industry-grade datasets, TREASURE features three key capabilities: 1) an input module with dedicated sub-modules for static and dynamic attributes, enabling more efficient training and inference; 2) an efficient and effective training paradigm for predicting high-cardinality categorical attributes; and 3) demonstrated effectiveness as both a standalone model that increases abnormal behavior detection performance by 111% over production systems and an embedding provider that enhances recommendation models by 104%. We present key insights from extensive ablation studies, benchmarks against production models, and case studies, highlighting valuable knowledge gained from developing TREASURE.

Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search methods may not perform efficiently in the non-metric similarity measure.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Two new self-driving car services--one in Atlanta from Lyft and May Mobility, another in Las Vegas from Amazon subsidiary Zoox--prove that the robotaxi race is still on. Now comes the hard part. Today, two robotaxi firms operating on opposite sides of the US say they're opening their services to the public. The Ann Arbor tech developer May Mobility has launched its self-driving car service on the Lyft app in a section of Atlanta, Georgia. Starting today, anyone who orders a Lyft in the area might be paired with an autonomous vehicle.

A novel algorithm is presented for the estimation of collision probabilities between dynamic objects with uncertain trajectories, where the trajectories are given as a sequence of poses with Gaussian distributions. W e propose an adaptive sigma-point sampling scheme, which ultimately produces a fast, simple algorithm capable of estimating the collision probability with a median error of 3.5%, and a median runtime of 0.21ms, when measured on an Intel Xeon Gold 6226R Processor . Importantly, the algorithm explicitly accounts for the collision probability's temporal dependence, which is often neglected in prior work and otherwise leads to an overestimation of the collision probability. Finally, the method is tested on a diverse set of relevant real-world scenarios, consisting of 400 6-second snippets of autonomous vehicle logs, where the accuracy and latency is rigorously evaluated.

Sensor fusion is crucial for a performant and robust Perception system in autonomous vehicles, but sensor staleness--where data from different sensors arrives with varying delays--poses significant challenges. T emporal misalignment between sensor modalities leads to inconsistent object state estimates, severely degrading the quality of trajectory predictions that are critical for safety. W e present a novel and model-agnostic approach to address this problem via (1) a per-point timestamp offset feature (for LiDAR and radar both relative to camera) that enables fine-grained temporal awareness in sensor fusion, and (2) a data augmentation strategy that simulates realistic sensor staleness patterns observed in deployed vehicles. Our method is integrated into a perspective-view detection model that consumes sensor data from multiple LiDARs, radars and cameras. W e demonstrate that while a conventional model shows significant regressions when one sensor modality is stale, our approach reaches consistently good performance across both synchronized and stale conditions.

In today's cross-platform social media landscape, understanding factors that drive engagement for multimodal content, especially text paired with visuals, remains complex. This study investigates how rewriting Reddit post titles adapted from YouTube video titles affects user engagement. First, we build and analyze a large dataset of Reddit posts sharing YouTube videos, revealing that 21% of post titles are minimally modified. Statistical analysis demonstrates that title rewrites measurably improve engagement. Second, we design a controlled, multi-phase experiment to rigorously isolate the effects of textual variations by neutralizing confounding factors like video popularity, timing, and community norms. Comprehensive statistical tests reveal that effective title rewrites tend to feature emotional resonance, lexical richness, and alignment with community-specific norms. Lastly, pairwise ranking prediction experiments using a fine-tuned BERT classifier achieves 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming near-random baselines, including GPT-4o. These results validate that our controlled dataset effectively minimizes confounding effects, allowing advanced models to both learn and demonstrate the impact of textual features on engagement. By bridging quantitative rigor with qualitative insights, this study uncovers engagement dynamics and offers a robust framework for future cross-platform, multimodal content strategies.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) leverages labeled source data to train models for unlabeled target data. Given the prevalence of multivariate time series (MTS) data across various domains, the UDA task for MTS classification has emerged as a critical challenge. However, for MTS data, correlations between variables often vary across domains, whereas most existing UDA works for MTS classification have overlooked this essential characteristic. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel domain shift, {\em correlation shift}, measuring domain differences in multivariate correlation. To mitigate correlation shift, we propose a scalable and parameter-efficient \underline{C}orrelation \underline{A}dapter for M\underline{TS} (CATS). Designed as a plug-and-play technique compatible with various Transformer variants, CATS employs temporal convolution to capture local temporal patterns and a graph attention module to model the changing multivariate correlation. The adapter reweights the target correlations to align the source correlations with a theoretically guaranteed precision. A correlation alignment loss is further proposed to mitigate correlation shift, bypassing the alignment challenge from the non-i.i.d. nature of MTS data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that (1) compared with vanilla Transformer-based models, CATS increases over $10\%$ average accuracy while only adding around $1\%$ parameters, and (2) all Transformer variants equipped with CATS either reach or surpass state-of-the-art baselines.

This paper introduces a novel approach to improving Genetic Algorithms (GA) in large or complex problem spaces by incorporating new chromosome patterns in the breeding process through border trade activities. These strategies increase chromosome diversity, preventing premature convergence and enhancing the GA's ability to explore the solution space more effectively. Empirical evidence demonstrates significant improvements in convergence behavior. This approach offers a promising pathway to addressing challenges in optimizing large or complex problem domains.