Accurate power load forecasting is essential for the efficient operation and planning of electrical grids, particularly given the increased variability and complexity introduced by renewable energy sources. This paper introduces GAT-LSTM, a hybrid model that combines Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. A key innovation of the model is the incorporation of edge attributes, such as line capacities and efficiencies, into the attention mechanism, enabling it to dynamically capture spatial relationships grounded in grid-specific physical and operational constraints. Additionally, by employing an early fusion of spatial graph embeddings and temporal sequence features, the model effectively learns and predicts complex interactions between spatial dependencies and temporal patterns, providing a realistic representation of the dynamics of power grids. Experimental evaluations on the Brazilian Electricity System dataset demonstrate that the GAT-LSTM model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving reductions of 21. 8% in MAE, 15. 9% in RMSE and 20. 2% in MAPE. These results underscore the robustness and adaptability of the GAT-LSTM model, establishing it as a powerful tool for applications in grid management and energy planning.

Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

The real-time Railway Traffic Management Problem (rtRTMP) is a challenging optimisation problem in railway transportation. It involves the efficient management of train movements while minimising delay propagation caused by unforeseen perturbations due to, e.g, temporary speed limitations or signal failures. This paper re-frames the rtRTMP as a multi-agent coordination problem and formalises it as a Distributed Constraint Optimisation Problem (DCOP) to explore its potential for decentralised solutions. We propose a novel coordination algorithm that extends the widely known Distributed Stochastic Algorithm (DSA), allowing trains to self-organise and resolve scheduling conflicts. The performance of our algorithm is compared to a classical DSA through extensive simulations on a synthetic dataset reproducing diverse problem configurations. Results show that our approach achieves significant improvements in solution quality and convergence speed, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability in managing large-scale railway networks. Beyond the railway domain, this framework can have broader applicability in autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles or inter-satellite coordination.

The expanding scale of large neural network models introduces significant challenges, driving efforts to reduce memory usage and enhance computational efficiency. Such measures are crucial to ensure the practical implementation and effective application of these sophisticated models across a wide array of use cases. This study examines the impact of parameter bit precision on model performance compared to standard 32-bit models, with a focus on multiclass object classification in images. The models analyzed include those with fully connected layers, convolutional layers, and transformer blocks, with model weight resolution ranging from 1 bit to 4.08 bits. The findings indicate that models with lower parameter bit precision achieve results comparable to 32-bit models, showing promise for use in memory-constrained devices. While low-resolution models with a small number of parameters require more training epochs to achieve accuracy comparable to 32-bit models, those with a large number of parameters achieve similar performance within the same number of epochs. Additionally, data augmentation can destabilize training in low-resolution models, but including zero as a potential value in the weight parameters helps maintain stability and prevents performance degradation. Overall, 2.32-bit weights offer the optimal balance of memory reduction, performance, and efficiency. However, further research should explore other dataset types and more complex and larger models. These findings suggest a potential new era for optimized neural network models with reduced memory requirements and improved computational efficiency, though advancements in dedicated hardware are necessary to fully realize this potential.

The increasing use of generative ML foundation models for image super-resolution calls for robust and interpretable uncertainty quantification methods. We address this need by presenting a novel approach based on conformal prediction techniques to create a "confidence mask" capable of reliably and intuitively communicating where the generated image can be trusted. Our method is adaptable to any black-box generative model, including those locked behind an opaque API, requires only easily attainable data for calibration, and is highly customizable via the choice of a local image similarity metric. We prove strong theoretical guarantees for our method that span fidelity error control (according to our local image similarity metric), reconstruction quality, and robustness in the face of data leakage. Finally, we empirically evaluate these results and establish our method's solid performance.

Sequential recommendation is a key area in the field of recommendation systems aiming to model user interest based on historical interaction sequences with irregular intervals. While previous recurrent neural network-based and attention-based approaches have achieved significant results, they have limitations in capturing system continuity due to the discrete characteristics. In the context of continuous-time modeling, state space model (SSM) offers a potential solution, as it can effectively capture the dynamic evolution of user interest over time. However, existing SSM-based approaches ignore the impact of irregular time intervals within historical user interactions, making it difficult to model complexed user-item transitions in sequences. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid SSM-based model called SS4Rec for continuous-time sequential recommendation. SS4Rec integrates a time-aware SSM to handle irregular time intervals and a relation-aware SSM to model contextual dependencies, enabling it to infer user interest from both temporal and sequential perspectives. In the training process, the time-aware SSM and the relation-aware SSM are discretized by variable stepsizes according to user interaction time intervals and input data, respectively. This helps capture the continuous dependency from irregular time intervals and provides time-specific personalized recommendations. Experimental studies on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of SS4Rec.

When an individual reports a negative interaction with some system, how can their personal experience be contextualized within broader patterns of system behavior? We study the incident database problem, where individual reports of adverse events arrive sequentially, and are aggregated over time. In this work, our goal is to identify whether there are subgroups--defined by any combination of relevant features--that are disproportionately likely to experience harmful interactions with the system. We formalize this problem as a sequential hypothesis test, and identify conditions on reporting behavior that are sufficient for making inferences about disparities in true rates of harm across subgroups. We show that algorithms for sequential hypothesis tests can be applied to this problem with a standard multiple testing correction. We then demonstrate our method on real-world datasets, including mortgage decisions and vaccine side effects; on each, our method (re-)identifies subgroups known to experience disproportionate harm using only a fraction of the data that was initially used to discover them.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as transformative tools for software vulnerability detection, addressing critical challenges in the security domain. Traditional methods, such as static and dynamic analysis, often falter due to inefficiencies, high false positive rates, and the growing complexity of modern software systems. By leveraging their ability to analyze code structures, identify patterns, and generate repair sugges- tions, LLMs, exemplified by models like GPT, BERT, and CodeBERT, present a novel and scalable approach to mitigating vulnerabilities. This paper provides a detailed survey of LLMs in vulnerability detection. It examines key aspects, including model architectures, application methods, target languages, fine-tuning strategies, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We also analyze the scope of current research problems, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches. Further, we address challenges such as cross-language vulnerability detection, multimodal data integration, and repository-level analysis. Based on these findings, we propose solutions for issues like dataset scalability, model interpretability, and applications in low-resource scenarios. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a systematic review of how LLMs are applied in vulnerability detection; (2) an analysis of shared patterns and differences across studies, with a unified framework for understanding the field; and (3) a summary of key challenges and future research directions. This work provides valuable insights for advancing LLM-based vulnerability detection. We also maintain and regularly update latest selected paper on https://github.com/OwenSanzas/LLM-For-Vulnerability-Detection

Hypergraphs provide a superior modeling framework for representing complex multidimensional relationships in the context of real-world interactions that often occur in groups, overcoming the limitations of traditional homogeneous graphs. However, there have been few studies on hypergraphbased contrastive learning, and existing graph-based contrastive learning methods have not been able to fully exploit the highorder correlation information in hypergraphs. Here, we propose a Hypergraph Fine-grained contrastive learning (HyFi) method designed to exploit the complex high-dimensional information inherent in hypergraphs. While avoiding traditional graph augmentation methods that corrupt the hypergraph topology, the proposed method provides a simple and efficient learning augmentation function by adding noise to node features. Furthermore, we expands beyond the traditional dichotomous relationship between positive and negative samples in contrastive learning by introducing a new relationship of weak positives. It demonstrates the importance of fine-graining positive samples in contrastive learning. Therefore, HyFi is able to produce highquality embeddings, and outperforms both supervised and unsupervised baselines in average rank on node classification across 10 datasets. Our approach effectively exploits high-dimensional hypergraph information, shows significant improvement over existing graph-based contrastive learning methods, and is efficient in terms of training speed and GPU memory cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/Noverse0/HyFi.git.