Rare-events data refer to binary-response data that are highly imbalanced, i.e., the number of zeros

Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs), equipped with cameras, are employed in numerous applications, including aerial photography, surveillance, and agriculture. In these applications, robust object detection and tracking are essential for the effective deployment of UA Vs.

The paper presents a novel sample-based algorithm, called C*, for real-time coverage path planning (CPP) of unknown environments. C* is built upon the concept of a Rapidly Covering Graph (RCG), which is incrementally constructed during robot navigation via progressive sampling of the search space. By using efficient sampling and pruning techniques, the RCG is constructed to be a minimum-sufficient graph, where its nodes and edges form the potential waypoints and segments of the coverage trajectory, respectively. The RCG tracks the coverage progress, generates the coverage trajectory and helps the robot to escape from the dead-end situations. To minimize coverage time, C* produces the desired back-and-forth coverage pattern, while adapting to the TSP-based optimal coverage of local isolated regions, called coverage holes, which are surrounded by obstacles and covered regions. It is analytically proven that C* provides complete coverage of unknown environments. The algorithmic simplicity and low computational complexity of C* make it easy to implement and suitable for real-time on-board applications. The performance of C* is validated by 1) extensive high-fidelity simulations and 2) laboratory experiments using an autonomous robot. C* yields near optimal trajectories, and a comparative evaluation with seven existing CPP methods demonstrates significant improvements in performance in terms of coverage time, number of turns, trajectory length, and overlap ratio, while preventing the formation of coverage holes. Finally, C* is comparatively evaluated on two different CPP applications using 1) energy-constrained robots and 2) multi-robot teams.

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but it remains vulnerable to privacy leakage because shared model updates can expose sensitive information through inversion, reconstruction, and membership inference attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal safeguards, yet existing DP-enabled DFL methods operate as black-boxes that cannot track cumulative noise added across clients and rounds, forcing each participant to inject worst-case perturbations that severely degrade accuracy. We propose PrivateDFL, a new explainable and privacy-preserving framework that addresses this gap by combining a HyperDimensional Computing (HD) model with a transparent DP noise accountant tailored to decentralized learning. HD offers structured, noise-tolerant high-dimensional representations, while the accountant explicitly tracks cumulative perturbations so each client adds only the minimal incremental noise required to satisfy its (epsilon, delta) budget. This yields significantly tighter and more interpretable privacy-utility tradeoffs than prior DP-DFL approaches. Experiments on MNIST (image), ISOLET (speech), and UCI-HAR (wearable sensor) show that PrivateDFL consistently surpasses centralized DP-SGD and Renyi-DP Transformer and deep learning baselines under both IID and non-IID partitions, improving accuracy by up to 24.4% on MNIST, over 80% on ISOLET, and 14.7% on UCI-HAR, while reducing inference latency by up to 76 times and energy consumption by up to 36 times. These results position PrivateDFL as an efficient and trustworthy solution for privacy-sensitive pattern recognition applications such as healthcare, finance, human-activity monitoring, and industrial sensing. Future work will extend the accountant to adversarial participation, heterogeneous privacy budgets, and dynamic topologies.

Diffusion models show promise for 3D molecular generation, but face a fundamental trade-off between sampling efficiency and conformational accuracy. While flow-based models are fast, they often produce geometrically inaccurate structures, as they have difficulty capturing the multimodal distributions of molecular conformations. In contrast, denoising diffusion models are more accurate but suffer from slow sampling, a limitation attributed to sub-optimal integration between diffusion dynamics and SE(3)-equivariant architectures. To address this, we propose VEDA, a unified SE(3)-equivariant framework that combines variance-exploding diffusion with annealing to efficiently generate conformationally accurate 3D molecular structures. Specifically, our key technical contributions include: (1) a VE schedule that enables noise injection functionally analogous to simulated annealing, improving 3D accuracy and reducing relaxation energy; (2) a novel preconditioning scheme that reconciles the coordinate-predicting nature of SE(3)-equivariant networks with a residual-based diffusion objective, and (3) a new arcsin-based scheduler that concentrates sampling in critical intervals of the logarithmic signal-to-noise ratio. On the QM9 and GEOM-DRUGS datasets, VEDA matches the sampling efficiency of flow-based models, achieving state-of-the-art valency stability and validity with only 100 sampling steps. More importantly, VEDA's generated structures are remarkably stable, as measured by their relaxation energy during GFN2-xTB optimization. The median energy change is only 1.72 kcal/mol, significantly lower than the 32.3 kcal/mol from its architectural baseline, SemlaFlow. Our framework demonstrates that principled integration of VE diffusion with SE(3)-equivariant architectures can achieve both high chemical accuracy and computational efficiency.

Smart manufacturing can significantly improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption, yet the energy demands of AI models may offset these gains. This study utilizes in-situ sensing-based prediction of geometric quality in smart machining to compare the energy consumption, accuracy, and speed of common AI models. HyperDimensional Computing (HDC) is introduced as an alternative, achieving accuracy comparable to conventional models while drastically reducing energy consumption, 200$\times$ for training and 175 to 1000$\times$ for inference. Furthermore, HDC reduces training times by 200$\times$ and inference times by 300 to 600$\times$, showcasing its potential for energy-efficient smart manufacturing.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale LLM capacity efficiently, but deployment on consumer GPUs is limited by the large memory footprint of inactive experts. Static post-training quantization reduces storage costs but cannot adapt to shifting activation patterns, causing accuracy loss under aggressive compression. So we present DynaExq, a runtime system that treats expert precision as a first-class, dynamically managed resource. DynaExq combines (1) a hotness-aware precision controller that continuously aligns expert bit-widths with long-term activation statistics, (2) a fully asynchronous precision-switching pipeline that overlaps promotion and demotion with MoE computation, and (3) a fragmentation-free memory pooling mechanism that supports hybrid-precision experts with deterministic allocation. Together, these components enable stable, non-blocking precision transitions under strict HBM budgets. Across Qwen3-30B and Qwen3-80B MoE models and six representative benchmarks, DynaExq deploys large LLMs on single RTX 5090 and A6000 GPUs and improves accuracy by up to 4.03 points over static low-precision baselines. The results show that adaptive, workload-aware quantization is an effective strategy for memory-constrained MoE serving.

Matrix completion methods can benefit from side information besides the partially observed matrix. The use of side features that describe the row and column entities of a matrix has been shown to reduce the sample complexity for completing the matrix. We propose a novel sparse formulation that explicitly models the interaction between the row and column side features to approximate the matrix entries. Unlike early methods, this model does not require the low rank condition on the model parameter matrix. We prove that when the side features span the latent feature space of the matrix to be recovered, the number of observed entries needed for an exact recovery is O (log N) where N is the size of the matrix. If the side features are corrupted latent features of the matrix with a small perturbation, our method can achieve an null -recovery with O (log N) sample complexity.

In crowd evacuation the time interval before decisive movement towards a safe place is defined as the pre-evacuation phase, and it has crucial impact on the total time required for safe egress. This process mainly refers to situation awareness and response to an external stressors, e.g., fire alarms. Due to the complexity of human cognitive process, simulation is used to study this important time interval. In this paper a binary decision process is formulated to simulate pre-evacuation time of many evacuees in a given social context. The model combines the classic opinion dynamics (the French-DeGroot model) with binary phase transition to describe how group pre-evacuation time emerges from individual interaction. The model parameters are quantitatively meaningful to human factors research within socio-psychological background, e.g., whether an individual is stubborn or open-minded, or what kind of the social topology exists among the individuals and how it matters in aggregating individuals into social groups. The modeling framework also describes collective motion of many evacuee agents in a planar space, and the resulting multi-agent system is partly similar to the Vicsek flocking model, and it is meaningful to explore complex social behavior during phase transition of a non-equilibrium process.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved a significant success in many applications, ranging from image classification He et al. [2016] and object detection Ren et al. [2015] to self driving Maqueda et