The Department of Homeland Security said agents arrested an illegal alien after he “weaponized" his car during a chaotic attempt to evade arrest in a San Antonio parking lot.

This paper establishes convergence rates for learning elliptic pseudo-differential operators, a fundamental operator class in partial differential equations and mathematical physics. In a wavelet-Galerkin framework, we formulate learning over this class as a structured infinite-dimensional regression problem with multiscale sparsity. Building on this structure, we propose a sparse, data- and computation-efficient estimator, which leverages a novel matrix compression scheme tailored to the learning task and a nested-support strategy to balance approximation and estimation errors. In addition to obtaining convergence rates for the estimator, we show that the learned operator induces an efficient and stable Galerkin solver whose numerical error matches its statistical accuracy. Our results therefore contribute to bringing together operator learning, data-driven solvers, and wavelet methods in scientific computing.

Animal traffickers face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It should go without saying, but please don't smuggle spider monkeys. While responding to a human trafficking case earlier this year, United States Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, found two of these tiny primates . The driver failed to yield and fled the scene, leading officers to respond.

Unlike most primary headaches, secondary headaches need specialized care and can have devastating consequences if not treated promptly. Clinical guidelines highlight several 'red flag' features, such as thunderclap onset, meningismus, papilledema, focal neurologic deficits, signs of temporal arteritis, systemic illness, and the 'worst headache of their life' presentation. Despite these guidelines, determining which patients require urgent evaluation remains challenging in primary care settings. Clinicians often work with limited time, incomplete information, and diverse symptom presentations, which can lead to under-recognition and inappropriate care. We present a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent clinical decision support system built on an orchestrator-specialist architecture, designed to perform explicit and interpretable secondary headache diagnosis from free-text clinical vignettes. The multi-agent system decomposes diagnosis into seven domain-specialized agents, each producing a structured and evidence-grounded rationale, while a central orchestrator performs task decomposition and coordinates agent routing. We evaluated the multi-agent system using 90 expert-validated secondary headache cases and compared its performance with a single-LLM baseline across two prompting strategies: question-based prompting (QPrompt) and clinical practice guideline-based prompting (GPrompt). We tested five open-source LLMs (Qwen-30B, GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen-14B, Qwen-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B), and found that the orchestrated multi-agent system with GPrompt consistently achieved the highest F1 scores, with larger gains in smaller models. These findings demonstrate that structured multi-agent reasoning improves accuracy beyond prompt engineering alone and offers a transparent, clinically aligned approach for explainable decision support in secondary headache diagnosis.

The lack of a concrete definition for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) obscures the gap between today's specialized AI and human-level cognition. This paper introduces a quantifiable framework to address this, defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult. To operationalize this, we ground our methodology in Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, the most empirically validated model of human cognition. The framework dissects general intelligence into ten core cognitive domains-including reasoning, memory, and perception-and adapts established human psychometric batteries to evaluate AI systems. Application of this framework reveals a highly "jagged" cognitive profile in contemporary models. While proficient in knowledge-intensive domains, current AI systems have critical deficits in foundational cognitive machinery, particularly long-term memory storage. The resulting AGI scores (e.g., GPT-4 at 27%, GPT-5 at 57%) concretely quantify both rapid progress and the substantial gap remaining before AGI.

Modern IoT deployments for environmental sensing produce high volume spatiotemporal data to support downstream tasks such as forecasting, typically powered by machine learning models. While existing filtering and strategic deployment techniques optimize collected data volume at the edge, they overlook how variations in sampling frequencies and spatial coverage affect downstream model performance. In many forecasting models, incorporating data from additional sensors denoise predictions by providing broader spatial contexts. This interplay between sampling frequency, spatial coverage and different forecasting model architectures remain underexplored. This work presents a systematic study of forecasting models - classical models (VAR), neural networks (GRU, Transformer), spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs), and time series foundation models (TSFMs: Chronos Moirai, TimesFM) under varying spatial sensor nodes density and sampling intervals using real-world temperature data in a wireless sensor network. Our results show that STGNNs are effective when sensor deployments are sparse and sampling rate is moderate, leveraging spatial correlations via encoded graph structure to compensate for limited coverage. In contrast, TSFMs perform competitively at high frequencies but degrade when spatial coverage from neighboring sensors is reduced. Crucially, the multivariate TSFM Moirai outperforms all models by natively learning cross-sensor dependencies. These findings offer actionable insights for building efficient forecasting pipelines in spatio-temporal systems. All code for model configurations, training, dataset, and logs are open-sourced for reproducibility: https://github.com/UIUC-MONET-Projects/Benchmarking-Spatiotemporal-Forecast-Models

Every day we share our personal information through digital systems which are constantly exposed to threats. For this reason, security-oriented disciplines of signal processing have received increasing attention in the last decades: multimedia forensics, digital watermarking, biometrics, network monitoring, steganography and steganalysis are just a few examples. Even though each of these fields has its own peculiarities, they all have to deal with a common problem: the presence of one or more adversaries aiming at making the system fail. Adversarial Signal Processing lays the basis of a general theory that takes into account the impact that the presence of an adversary has on the design of effective signal processing tools. By focusing on the application side of Adversarial Signal Processing, namely adversarial information fusion in distributed sensor networks, and adopting a game-theoretic approach, this thesis contributes to the above mission by addressing four issues. First, we address decision fusion in distributed sensor networks by developing a novel soft isolation defense scheme that protect the network from adversaries, specifically, Byzantines. Second, we develop an optimum decision fusion strategy in the presence of Byzantines. In the next step, we propose a technique to reduce the complexity of the optimum fusion by relying on a novel near-optimum message passing algorithm based on factor graphs. Finally, we introduce a defense mechanism to protect decentralized networks running consensus algorithm against data falsification attacks.

Spelling variation (e.g. funnnn vs. fun) can influence the social perception of texts and their writers: we often have various associations with different forms of writing (is the text informal? does the writer seem young?). In this study, we focus on the social perception of spelling variation in online writing in English and study to what extent this perception is aligned between humans and large language models (LLMs). Building on sociolinguistic methodology, we compare LLM and human ratings on three key social attributes of spelling variation (formality, carefulness, age). We find generally strong correlations in the ratings between humans and LLMs. However, notable differences emerge when we analyze the distribution of ratings and when comparing between different types of spelling variation.

Complex software-driven systems often interleave distributed, concurrent computation processes with physical interactions with the environment. Developing these systems more efficiently and safely can be achieved by employing actionable, software-based models. From a high-level system model, engineers often need to derive multiple specialized models for different purposes, including simulation, deployment, and formal verification. Each of these target models usually rely on its own formalism, specification language, and execution platform. Traditionally, a compiler analyzes a program written in a programming language and generates executable code. In contrast, a model compiler processes a source model written in a modeling language and should ideally support the generation of multiple heterogeneous targets. However, most existing modeling languages are designed with a narrow focus, typically targeting only simulation or implementation. Multi-target compilation, when not considered during the language's early design, becomes significantly harder to achieve. In this paper, we introduce our initiative: a toolchain and modeling language called M, designed to support system modeling and multi-target compilation for model-driven engineering of complex, concurrent, and time-aware systems. M is a textual, grammar-driven language based on the actor model and extended with discrete-event scheduling semantics. It provides constructs for modeling system entities, message-based interactions, and time- or state-triggered reactions. From such models, M enables the systematic generation of diverse target artifacts while preserving semantic conformance to the original model. Moreover, M can serve as a middle language to which other modeling languages may anchor, thereby allowing them to benefit from its compilation framework.

UAV swarms have emerged as transformative systems for complex missions including wildfire surveillance ( Julian and Kochenderfer 2019), intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance ( Kolar 2020), situational awareness ( Scharre 2018), and cooperative interception ( Balhance et al. 2017). In these applications, trajectory optimization is the cornerstone for ensuring both mission success and operational s afety ( Sezer 2022; Qian et al. 2020; Sanchez-Lopez et al. 2020). Over the past decade, trajectory optimization techniques hav e evolved from sophisticated single-agent formulations to distributed multi-agent frameworks, driven by the increasing scale and complexity of swarm-based missions ( Saravanos et al. 2023). For individual UAV trajectory optimization, a variety of numerical m ethods have demonstrated strong performance. Pseudospectral methods achieve high-accuracy solution s by discretizing continuous-time problems ( Chai et al. 2017), while sequential quadratic programming (SQP) ( Hong et al. 2021) and sequential convex programming (SCP) ( Deligiannis et al. 2019) provide flexible tools for handling nonlinear dynamics and constraint s.