The early 2020s has seen the rise of two strange and potentially quite impactful social phenomena, namely pseudolaw, where users rely upon pseudolegal arguments that mimic the form and ritual of legal argumentation but fundamentally distort the content of law, and generative AI/LLMs, which generate content that uses probabilistic calculations to create outputs that look like human generated text. This article argues that the juxtaposition of the two phenomena helps to reveal that they both share two fundamental traits as both elevate form and appearance over substance and content, and users of both routinely mistake the form for the substance. In drawing upon legal theory, computer science, linguistics and cognitive psychology, the article argues that both phenomena rely upon creating illusions of meaning that users mistake for the underlying primary phenomenon. I then explore four implications of this conception of both phenomena. Firstly, both rely on human tendencies of conceptual pareidolia resulting in the erroneous perception of meaningful linguistic legal patterns from nebulous inputs. Secondly, both rely upon the confidence heuristic, the human cognitive bias for treating confidence as a proxy for competence. Thirdly, both succeed when the primary concern is with the form of the output and not its content. Fourthly, both rely heavily upon the magical thinking of users and the desire for the promise of the approach to be real. The article argues that the legal context helps to reveal a solution for the problems caused by both phenomena as it is only where users possess sufficient legal and technological literacy that it becomes possible to reveal to them the illusionary nature of the phenomena.

While it is commonly accepted that maintaining common ground plays a role in conversational success, little prior research exists connecting conversational grounding to success in task-oriented conversations. We study failures of grounding in the Ubuntu IRC dataset, where participants use text-only communication to resolve technical issues. We find that disruptions in conversational flow often stem from a misalignment in common ground, driven by a divergence in beliefs and assumptions held by participants. These disruptions, which we call conversational friction, significantly correlate with task success. We find that although LLMs can identify overt cases of conversational friction, they struggle with subtler and more context-dependent instances requiring pragmatic or domain-specific reasoning.

Effectively understanding and managing CVD requires advanced diagnostic tools capable of accurately characterizing complex hemodynamics within the cardiovascular system. While medical imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide high-resolution anatomical detail, they lack the capability to directly capture hemodynamics information (e.g., blood flow patterns, pressure, and wall shear stress fields) critical for understanding vascular function and pathology. To bridge this gap, image-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as a powerful computational paradigm that derives hemodynamic information from anatomical images via conservation laws. Although widely utilized in cardiovascular research, the clinical application of image-based CFD for diagnosis and surgical planning remains limited, largely due to the challenges associated with efficient and accurate model construction [2-4]. Constructing patient-specific vascular models for image-based CFD involves multiple steps, including image segmentation, geometry modeling, and mesh generation for the computational domain, all of which are critical to ensuring the fidelity of the final simulation results. However, the standard workflow heavily relies on manual methods, making it highly labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing long sequences, boosting demand for key-value (KV) caching. While recent efforts to evict KV cache have alleviated the inference burden, they often fail to allocate resources rationally across layers with different attention patterns. In this paper, we introduce Cascading and Adaptive KV cache Eviction (CAKE), a novel approach that frames KV cache eviction as a "cake-slicing problem." CAKE assesses layer-specific preferences by considering attention dynamics in both spatial and temporal dimensions, allocates rational cache size for layers accordingly, and manages memory constraints in a cascading manner. This approach enables a global view of cache allocation, adaptively distributing resources across diverse attention mechanisms while maintaining memory budgets. CAKE also employs a new eviction indicator that considers the shifting importance of tokens over time, addressing limitations in existing methods that overlook temporal dynamics. Comprehensive experiments on LongBench and NeedleBench show that CAKE maintains model performance with only 3.2% of the KV cache and consistently outperforms current baselines across various models and memory constraints, particularly in low-memory settings. Additionally, CAKE achieves over 10 speedup in decoding latency compared to full cache when processing contexts of 128K tokens with FlashAttention-2. New models such as GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023), Claude 3.5 (Anthropic, 2024), LLaMA 3.1 (Dubey et al., 2024) and Mistral Large 2 (AI, 2024) have extended token processing capacities beyond 128K. Shazeer (2019); Ainslie et al. (2023) partially address this issue by merging key-value heads during the training phase. However, optimizing key-value cache without additional training is crucial for efficient inference of long contexts under memory constraints, particularly in typical deployment scenarios where the model structure is fixed. One way to maintain a manageable KV cache size on the fly is to remove some KV pairs (Xiao et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2024b; Li et al., 2024b). The idea is to eliminate less important KV pairs based on certain rules. Although recent methods have enhanced pair selection for removal, they typically assign uniform cache sizes across layers, disregarding layer-specific requirements.

The analysis of LLM biases is an active research field. As the application of LLMs in decision-making activities is increasing, their study is critical to better understand their implications on decisional processes. The coherence and the structural preferences that these models are acquiring over several topics could challenge their applications in several fields [4]. The origin of these biases is complicated to study and could come from different steps in LLM training. For example, these biases could be acquired during the pre-training phase, supervised fine-tuning phase, or even during the final alignment phase. This article focuses on understanding the extent of the political biases of LLM through two experiments. The first experiment has the objective of showing the left leaning of multiple LLMs in the context of several virtual European elections, section 4.1. The second experiment shows that LLMs consider "stupidity" and "ignorance" as human characteristics that make voting for the right wing more probable, section 4.2. As different models could exhibit different leans, we tested four of the most used LLMs in both our experiments, Table 1.

Constructing high resolution air pollution maps at lower cost is crucial for sustainable city management and public health risk assessment. However, traditional fixed-site monitoring lacks spatial coverage, while mobile low-cost sensors exhibit significant data instability. This study integrates PM2.5 data from 320 taxi-mounted mobile low-cost sensors and 52 fixed monitoring stations to address these limitations. By employing the machine learning methods, an appropriate mapping relationship was established between fixed and mobile monitoring concentration. The resulting pollution maps achieved 500-meter spatial and 5-minute temporal resolutions, showing close alignment with fixed monitoring data (+4.35% bias) but significant deviation from raw mobile data (-31.77%). The fused map exhibits the fine-scale spatial variability also observed in the mobile pollution map, while showing the stable temporal variability closer to that of the fixed pollution map (fixed: 1.12 plus or minus 0.73%, mobile: 3.15 plus or minus 2.44%, mapped: 1.01 plus or minus 0.65%). These findings demonstrate the potential of large-scale mobile low-cost sensor networks for high-resolution air quality mapping, supporting targeted urban environmental governance and health risk mitigation.

Embedded systems power many modern applications and must often meet strict reliability, real-time, thermal, and power requirements. Task replication can improve reliability by duplicating a task's execution to handle transient and permanent faults, but blindly applying replication often leads to excessive overhead and higher temperatures. Existing design-time methods typically choose the number of replicas based on worst-case conditions, which can waste resources under normal operation. In this paper, we present RL-TIME, a reinforcement learning-based approach that dynamically decides the number of replicas according to actual system conditions. By considering both the reliability target and a core-level Thermal Safe Power (TSP) constraint at run-time, RL-TIME adapts the replication strategy to avoid unnecessary overhead and overheating. Experimental results show that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, RL-TIME reduces power consumption by 63%, increases schedulability by 53%, and respects TSP 72% more often.

Cross-dataset Human Activity Recognition (HAR) suffers from limited model generalization, hindering its practical deployment. To address this critical challenge, inspired by the success of DoReMi in Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a data mixture optimization strategy for pre-training HAR models, aiming to improve the recognition performance across heterogeneous datasets. However, directly applying DoReMi to the HAR field encounters new challenges due to the continuous, multi-channel and intrinsic heterogeneous characteristics of IMU sensor data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework HAR-DoReMi, which introduces a masked reconstruction task based on Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss. By raplacing the discrete language sequence prediction task, which relies on the Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) loss, in the original DoReMi framework, the proposed framework is inherently more appropriate for handling the continuous and multi-channel characteristics of IMU data. In addition, HAR-DoReMi integrates the Mahony fusion algorithm into the self-supervised HAR pre-training, aiming to mitigate the heterogeneity of varying sensor orientation. This is achieved by estimating the sensor orientation within each dataset and facilitating alignment with a unified coordinate system, thereby improving the cross-dataset generalization ability of the HAR model. Experimental evaluation on multiple cross-dataset HAR transfer tasks demonstrates that HAR-DoReMi improves the accuracy by an average of 6.51%, compared to the current state-of-the-art method with only approximately 30% to 50% of the data usage. These results confirm the effectiveness of HAR-DoReMi in improving the generalization and data efficiency of pre-training HAR models, underscoring its significant potential to facilitate the practical deployment of HAR technology.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurological condition characterized by varied developmental impairments, especially in communication and social interaction. Accurate and early diagnosis of ASD is crucial for effective intervention, which is enhanced by richer representations of brain activity. The brain functional connectome, which refers to the statistical relationships between different brain regions measured through neuroimaging, provides crucial insights into brain function. Traditional static methods often fail to capture the dynamic nature of brain activity, in contrast, dynamic brain connectome analysis provides a more comprehensive view by capturing the temporal variations in the brain. We propose BrainTWT, a novel dynamic network embedding approach that captures temporal evolution of the brain connectivity over time and considers also the dynamics between different temporal network snapshots. BrainTWT employs temporal random walks to capture dynamics across different temporal network snapshots and leverages the Transformer's ability to model long term dependencies in sequential data to learn the discriminative embeddings from these temporal sequences using temporal structure prediction tasks. The experimental evaluation, utilizing the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset, demonstrates that BrainTWT outperforms baseline methods in ASD classification.

Despite significant advances in deep learning for image and video segmentation, existing models continue to face challenges in cross-domain adaptability and generalization. Image and video segmentation are fundamental tasks in computer vision with wide-ranging applications in healthcare, agriculture, industrial inspection, and autonomous driving. With the advent of large-scale foundation models, SAM2 - an improved version of SAM (Segment Anything Model)has been optimized for segmentation tasks, demonstrating enhanced performance in complex scenarios. However, SAM2's adaptability and limitations in specific domains require further investigation. This paper systematically analyzes the application of SAM2 in image and video segmentation and evaluates its performance in various fields. We begin by introducing the foundational concepts of image segmentation, categorizing foundation models, and exploring the technical characteristics of SAM and SAM2. Subsequently, we delve into SAM2's applications in static image and video segmentation, emphasizing its performance in specialized areas such as medical imaging and the challenges of cross-domain adaptability. As part of our research, we reviewed over 200 related papers to provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic. Finally, the paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of SAM2 in segmentation tasks, identifies the technical challenges it faces, and proposes future development directions. This review provides valuable insights and practical recommendations for optimizing and applying SAM2 in real-world scenarios.