The Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025 caused more than 250 billion dollars in damage and lasted for nearly an entire month before containment. Following our previous work, the Digital Twin Building, we modify and leverage the multi-agent large language model framework as well as the cloud-mapping integration to study the air quality during the Los Angeles wildfires. Recent advances in large language models have allowed for out-of-the-box automated large-scale data analysis. We use a multi-agent large language system comprised of an Instructor agent and Worker agents. Upon receiving the users' instructions, the Instructor agent retrieves the data from the cloud platform and produces instruction prompts to the Worker agents. The Worker agents then analyze the data and provide summaries. The summaries are finally input back into the Instructor agent, which then provides the final data analysis. We test this system's capability for data-based policy recommendation by assessing our Instructor-Worker LLM system's health recommendations based on air quality during the Los Angeles wildfires.

User-generated content (UGC) communities, especially those featuring multimodal content, improve user experiences by integrating visual and textual information into results (or items). The challenge of improving user experiences in complex systems with search and recommendation (S\&R) services has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry these years. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has limited the research progress on multimodal S\&R. To address the growing need for developing better S\&R services, we present a novel multimodal information retrieval dataset in this paper, namely Qilin. The dataset is collected from Xiaohongshu, a popular social platform with over 300 million monthly active users and an average search penetration rate of over 70\%. In contrast to existing datasets, \textsf{Qilin} offers a comprehensive collection of user sessions with heterogeneous results like image-text notes, video notes, commercial notes, and direct answers, facilitating the development of advanced multimodal neural retrieval models across diverse task settings. To better model user satisfaction and support the analysis of heterogeneous user behaviors, we also collect extensive APP-level contextual signals and genuine user feedback. Notably, Qilin contains user-favored answers and their referred results for search requests triggering the Deep Query Answering (DQA) module. This allows not only the training \& evaluation of a Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but also the exploration of how such a module would affect users' search behavior. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we provide interesting findings and insights for further improving S\&R systems. We hope that \textsf{Qilin} will significantly contribute to the advancement of multimodal content platforms with S\&R services in the future.

This paper aims to present new alarming trends in the field of child sexual abuse through imagery, as part of SafeLine's research activities in the field of cybercrime, child sexual abuse material and the protection of children's rights to safe online experiences. It focuses primarily on the phenomenon of AI-generated CSAM, sophisticated ways employed for its production which are discussed in dark web forums and the crucial role that the open-source AI models play in the evolution of this overwhelming phenomenon. The paper's main contribution is a correlation analysis between the hotline's reports and domain names identified in dark web forums, where users' discussions focus on exchanging information specifically related to the generation of AI-CSAM. The objective was to reveal the close connection of clear net and dark web content, which was accomplished through the use of the ATLAS dataset of the Voyager system. Furthermore, through the analysis of a set of posts' content drilled from the above dataset, valuable conclusions on forum members' techniques employed for the production of AI-generated CSAM are also drawn, while users' views on this type of content and routes followed in order to overcome technological barriers set with the aim of preventing malicious purposes are also presented. As the ultimate contribution of this research, an overview of the current legislative developments in all country members of the INHOPE organization and the issues arising in the process of regulating the AI- CSAM is presented, shedding light in the legal challenges regarding the regulation and limitation of the phenomenon.

Processing long contexts has become a critical capability for modern large language models (LLMs). However, serving long-context LLMs comes with significant inference costs due to the high memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache. Existing work leverages dynamic sparse attention algorithms (DSAes) to mitigate the KV cache overhead, but these algorithms rely on top-$k$ KV cache selection, which results in a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. A larger $k$ improves accuracy but decreases efficiency, while a smaller $k$ boosts efficiency but compromises accuracy. To overcome this trade-off, this paper presents PSA, a $\underline{P}$rogressive $\underline{S}$parse $\underline{A}$ttention mechanism that integrates algorithmic innovations with system co-design to achieve both high inference accuracy and improved efficiency in LLM serving. The PSA algorithm adaptively adjusts the KV cache budget of different tokens and layers according to their real attention weight distributions, rather than relying on a fixed budget $k$. This enables high accuracy while minimizing KV cache usage. To further enhance execution efficiency, we introduce a pipelined iteration scheme that reduces CPU-GPU interleaving and synchronization overhead during PSA computation. Additionally, we implement unified GPU memory management that optimizes PSA's memory utilization by accounting for uneven memory requirements across different model layers. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PSA reduces KV cache usage for attention computation by up to 2.4$\times$ and 8.8$\times$, and increases end-to-end serving throughput by up to 1.4$\times$ and 2.0$\times$, compared to state-of-the-art DSAes and systems without sparse attention, respectively.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents typically form a single grand coalition based on credit assignment to tackle a composite task, often resulting in suboptimal performance. This paper proposed a nucleolus-based credit assignment grounded in cooperative game theory, enabling the autonomous partitioning of agents into multiple small coalitions that can effectively identify and complete subtasks within a larger composite task. Specifically, our designed nucleolus Q-learning could assign fair credits to each agent, and the nucleolus Q-operator provides theoretical guarantees with interpretability for both learning convergence and the stability of the formed small coalitions. Through experiments on Predator-Prey and StarCraft scenarios across varying difficulty levels, our approach demonstrated the emergence of multiple effective coalitions during MARL training, leading to faster learning and superior performance in terms of win rate and cumulative rewards especially in hard and super-hard environments, compared to four baseline methods. Our nucleolus-based credit assignment showed the promise for complex composite tasks requiring effective subteams of agents.

The modern power grids are integrated with digital technologies and automation systems. The inclusion of digital technologies has made the smart grids vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Cyberattacks on smart grids can compromise data integrity and jeopardize the reliability of the power supply. Traditional intrusion detection systems often need help to effectively detect novel and sophisticated attacks due to their reliance on labeled training data, which may only encompass part of the spectrum of potential threats. This work proposes a semi-supervised method for cyber-attack detection in smart grids by leveraging the labeled and unlabeled measurement data. We implement consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling to identify deviations from expected behavior and predict the attack classes. We use a curriculum learning approach to improve pseudo-labeling performance, capturing the model uncertainty. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in detecting different types of cyberattacks, minimizing the false positives by implementing them on publicly available datasets. The method proposes a promising solution by improving the detection accuracy to 99% in the presence of unknown samples and significantly reducing false positives.

Motivated by applications in trajectory inference and particle tracking, we introduce Smooth Schr\"odinger Bridges. Our proposal generalizes prior work by allowing the reference process in the Schr\"odinger Bridge problem to be a smooth Gaussian process, leading to more regular and interpretable trajectories in applications. Though na\"ively smoothing the reference process leads to a computationally intractable problem, we identify a class of processes (including the Mat\'ern processes) for which the resulting Smooth Schr\"odinger Bridge problem can be lifted to a simpler problem on phase space, which can be solved in polynomial time. We develop a practical approximation of this algorithm that outperforms existing methods on numerous simulated and real single-cell RNAseq datasets. The code can be found at https://github.com/WanliHongC/Smooth_SB

Despite the rising prevalence of neural language models, recent empirical evidence suggests their deficiency in compositional generalization. One of the current de-facto solutions to this problem is compositional data augmentation, which aims to introduce additional compositional inductive bias. However, existing handcrafted augmentation strategies offer limited improvement when systematic generalization of neural language models requires multi-grained compositional bias (i.e., not limited to either lexical or structural biases alone) or when training sentences have an imbalanced difficulty distribution. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel compositional augmentation strategy called Component Substitution (CompSub), which enables multi-grained composition of substantial substructures across the entire training set. Furthermore, we introduce the Learning Component Substitution (LCS) framework. This framework empowers the learning of component substitution probabilities in CompSub in an end-to-end manner by maximizing the loss of neural language models, thereby prioritizing challenging compositions with elusive concepts and novel contexts. We extend the key ideas of CompSub and LCS to the recently emerging in-context learning scenarios of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), proposing the LCS-ICL algorithm to enhance the few-shot compositional generalization of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. Theoretically, we provide insights into why applying our algorithms to language models can improve compositional generalization performance. Empirically, our results on four standard compositional generalization benchmarks(SCAN, COGS, GeoQuery, and COGS-QL) demonstrate the superiority of CompSub, LCS, and LCS-ICL, with improvements of up to 66.5%, 10.3%, 1.4%, and 8.8%, respectively.

ABSTRACT Natural gas (NG) is relatively a clean source of energy, particularly compared to fossil fuels, and worldwide consumption of NG has been increasing almost linearly in the last two decades. A similar trend can also be seen in Turkey, while another similarity is the high dependence on impor ts for the continuous NG supply. It is crucial to accurately forecast future NG demand (NGD) in Turkey, especially, for import contracts; in this respect, forecasts of monthly NGD for the following year are of utmost importance. In the current study, the h istorical monthly NG consumption data between 2014 and 2024 provided by SOCAR, the local residential NG distribution company for two cities in Turkey, Bursa and Kayseri, was used to determine out - of - sample monthly NGD forecasts for a period of one year and nine months using various time series models, including SARIMA and ETS models, and a novel proposed machine learning method. The proposed method, named Just - in - Time - Learning - Gaussia n Process Regression (JITL - GPR), uses a novel feature representation for t he past NG demand values; instead of using past demand values as column - wise separate features, they are placed on a two - dimensional (2 - D) grid of year - month values. For each test point, a kernel function, tailored for the NGD predictions, is used in GPR t o predict the query point. Since a model is constructed separately for each test point, the proposed method is, indeed, an example of JITL. The JITL - GPR method is easy to use and optimize, and offers a reduction in forecast errors compared to traditional t ime series methods and a state - of - the - art combinat ion model; therefore, it is a promising tool for NGD forecasting in similar settings. INTRODUCTION In the last few decades, there has been a shift in energy sources from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, mainly due to environmental concerns and related government regulations . However, these latter sources are depend ent on w eather conditions and require integration with grid technologies for continuous power generation. Natural gas (NG), typically, consists of (up to) ~95% of methane and 2 - 2.5% ethane - hexane+, with the remain der consist ing of nitrogen, CO NG p ower plants are easy to build and highly reliable, mak ing them invaluable for "clean" energy production. On the other hand, m ost countries depend on imports to maintain t heir NG supplies, and there is a delicate balance between import s and domestic demand . S toring excess import ed gas above actual demand is difficult and would result in economic losses, while import ing less than actual demand could result in a nationwide sh ortage.

We present WinoMTDE, a new gender bias evaluation test set designed to assess occupational stereotyping and underrepresentation in German machine translation (MT) systems. Building on the automatic evaluation method introduced by arXiv:1906.00591v1, we extend the approach to German, a language with grammatical gender. The WinoMTDE dataset comprises 288 German sentences that are balanced in regard to gender, as well as stereotype, which was annotated using German labor statistics. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of five widely used MT systems and a large language model. Our results reveal persistent bias in most models, with the LLM outperforming traditional systems. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available under https://github.com/michellekappl/mt_gender_german.