Background: Accurate proton resonance frequency (PRF) MR thermometry is essential for monitoring temperature rise during thermal ablation with high intensity focused ultrasound (FUS). Conventional referenceless methods such as complex field estimation (CFE) and phase finite difference (PFD) tend to exhibit errors when susceptibility-induced phase discontinuities occur at tissue interfaces.

Contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful method in deep learning, excelling at learning effective representations through contrasting samples from different distributions. However, dimensional collapse, where embeddings converge into a lower-dimensional space, poses a significant challenge, especially in semi-supervised and self-supervised setups. In this paper, we first identify a critical learning-rate threshold, beyond which standard contrastive losses converge to collapsed solutions. Building on these insights, we propose CLOP, a novel semi-supervised loss function designed to prevent dimensional collapse by promoting the formation of orthogonal linear subspaces among class embeddings. Through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that CLOP improves performance in image classification and object detection tasks while also exhibiting greater stability across different learning rates and batch sizes.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used tool for learning parts-based, low-dimensional representations of nonnegative data, with applications in vision, text, and bioinformatics. In clustering applications, orthogonal NMF (ONMF) variants further impose (approximate) orthogonality on the representation matrix so that its rows behave like soft cluster indicators. Existing algorithms, however, are typically derived from optimization viewpoints and do not explicitly exploit the conic geometry induced by NMF: data points lie in a convex cone whose extreme rays encode fundamental directions or "topics". In this work we revisit NMF from this geometric perspective and propose Cone Collapse, an algorithm that starts from the full nonnegative orthant and iteratively shrinks it toward the minimal cone generated by the data. We prove that, under mild assumptions on the data, Cone Collapse terminates in finitely many steps and recovers the minimal generating cone of $\mathbf{X}^\top$ . Building on this basis, we then derive a cone-aware orthogonal NMF model (CC-NMF) by applying uni-orthogonal NMF to the recovered extreme rays. Across 16 benchmark gene-expression, text, and image datasets, CC-NMF consistently matches or outperforms strong NMF baselines-including multiplicative updates, ANLS, projective NMF, ONMF, and sparse NMF-in terms of clustering purity. These results demonstrate that explicitly recovering the data cone can yield both theoretically grounded and empirically strong NMF-based clustering methods.

Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles (AV) requires rigorous testing under both everyday driving and rare, safety-critical conditions. A key challenge lies in simulating environment agents, including background vehicles (BVs) and vulnerable road users (VRUs), that behave realistically in nominal traffic while also exhibiting risk-prone behaviors consistent with real-world accidents. We introduce Controllable Risk Agent Generation (CRAG), a framework designed to unify the modeling of dominant nominal behaviors and rare safety-critical behaviors. CRAG constructs a structured latent space that disentangles normal and risk-related behaviors, enabling efficient use of limited crash data. By combining risk-aware latent representations with optimization-based mode-transition mechanisms, the framework allows agents to shift smoothly and plausibly from safe to risk states over extended horizons, while maintaining high fidelity in both regimes. Extensive experiments show that CRAG improves diversity compared to existing baselines, while also enabling controllable generation of risk scenarios for targeted and efficient evaluation of AV robustness.

This report introduces a novel class of reasoning architectures, termed Quantum Circuit Reasoning Models (QCRM), which extend the concept of Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC) from energy minimization and classification tasks to structured logical inference and reasoning. We posit that fundamental quantum mechanical operations, superposition, entanglement, interference, and measurement, naturally map to essential reasoning primitives such as hypothesis branching, constraint propagation, consistency enforcement, and decision making. The resulting framework combines quantum-inspired computation with differentiable optimization, enabling reasoning to emerge as a process of amplitude evolution and interference-driven selection of self-consistent states. We develop the mathematical foundation of QCRM, define its parameterized circuit architecture, and show how logical rules can be encoded as unitary transformations over proposition-qubit states. We further formalize a training objective grounded in classical gradient descent over circuit parameters and discuss simulation-based implementations on classical hardware. Finally, we propose the Quantum Reasoning Layer (QRL) as a differentiable hybrid component for composable reasoning models applicable to scientific, biomedical, and chemical inference domains.

Foundation models have shown remarkable success in fitting biological visual systems; however, their black-box nature inherently limits their utility for understanding brain function. Here, we peek inside a SOTA foundation model of neural activity (Wang et al., 2025) as a physiologist might, characterizing each 'neuron' based on its temporal response properties to parametric stimuli. We analyze how different stimuli are represented in neural activity space by building decoding manifolds, and we analyze how different neurons are represented in stimulus-response space by building neural encoding manifolds. We find that the different processing stages of the model (i.e., the feedforward encoder, recurrent, and readout modules) each exhibit qualitatively different representational structures in these manifolds. The recurrent module shows a jump in capabilities over the encoder module by 'pushing apart' the representations of different temporal stimulus patterns; while the readout module achieves biological fidelity by using numerous specialized feature maps rather than biologically plausible mechanisms. Overall, we present this work as a study of the inner workings of a prominent neural foundation model, gaining insights into the biological relevance of its internals through the novel analysis of its neurons' joint temporal response patterns.

We develop a transparent and fully auditable LLM-based pipeline for macro-financial stress testing, combining structured prompting with optional retrieval of country fundamentals and news. The system generates machine-readable macroeconomic scenarios for the G7, which cover GDP growth, inflation, and policy rates, and are translated into portfolio losses through a factor-based mapping that enables Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall assessment relative to classical econometric baselines. Across models, countries, and retrieval settings, the LLMs produce coherent and country-specific stress narratives, yielding stable tail-risk amplification with limited sensitivity to retrieval choices. Comprehensive plausibility checks, scenario diagnostics, and ANOVA-based variance decomposition show that risk variation is driven primarily by portfolio composition and prompt design rather than by the retrieval mechanism. The pipeline incorporates snapshotting, deterministic modes, and hash-verified artifacts to ensure reproducibility and auditability. Overall, the results demonstrate that LLM-generated macro scenarios, when paired with transparent structure and rigorous validation, can provide a scalable and interpretable complement to traditional stress-testing frameworks.

We transform large-scale Swedish register data into textual life trajectories to address two long-standing challenges in data analysis: high cardinality of categorical variables and inconsistencies in coding schemes over time. Leveraging this uniquely comprehensive population register, we convert register data from 6.9 million individuals (2001-2013) into semantically rich texts and predict individuals' residential mobility in later years (2013-2017). These life trajectories combine demographic information with annual changes in residence, work, education, income, and family circumstances, allowing us to assess how effectively such sequences support longitudinal prediction. We compare multiple NLP architectures (including LSTM, DistilBERT, BERT, and Qwen) and find that sequential and transformer-based models capture temporal and semantic structure more effectively than baseline models. The results show that textualized register data preserves meaningful information about individual pathways and supports complex, scalable modeling. Because few countries maintain longitudinal microdata with comparable coverage and precision, this dataset enables analyses and methodological tests that would be difficult or impossible elsewhere, offering a rigorous testbed for developing and evaluating new sequence-modeling approaches. Overall, our findings demonstrate that combining semantically rich register data with modern language models can substantially advance longitudinal analysis in social sciences.

Semi-supervised anomaly detection (AD) has shown great promise by effectively leveraging limited labeled data. However, existing methods are typically structured around scoring individual points or simple pairs. Such {point- or pair-centric} view not only overlooks the contextual nature of anomalies, which are defined by their deviation from a collective group, but also fails to exploit the rich supervisory signals that can be generated from the combinatorial composition of sets. Consequently, such models struggle to exploit the high-order interactions within the data, which are critical for learning discriminative representations. To address these limitations, we propose SetAD, a novel framework that reframes semi-supervised AD as a Set-level Anomaly Detection task. SetAD employs an attention-based set encoder trained via a graded learning objective, where the model learns to quantify the degree of anomalousness within an entire set. This approach directly models the complex group-level interactions that define anomalies. Furthermore, to enhance robustness and score calibration, we propose a context-calibrated anomaly scoring mechanism, which assesses a point's anomaly score by aggregating its normalized deviations from peer behavior across multiple, diverse contextual sets. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that SetAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. Notably, we show that our model's performance consistently improves with increasing set size, providing strong empirical support for the set-based formulation of anomaly detection.

Time series classification (TSC) is crucial in numerous real-world applications, such as environmental monitoring, medical diagnosis, and posture recognition. TSC tasks require models to effectively capture discriminative information for accurate class identification. Although deep learning architectures excel at capturing temporal dependencies, they often suffer from high computational cost, sensitivity to noise perturbations, and susceptibility to overfitting on small-scale datasets. To address these challenges, we propose FAIM, a lightweight Frequency-Aware Interactive Mamba model. Specifically, we introduce an Adaptive Filtering Block (AFB) that leverages Fourier Transform to extract frequency-domain features from time series data. The AFB incorporates learnable adaptive thresholds to dynamically suppress noise and employs element-wise coupling of global and local semantic adaptive filtering, enabling in-depth modeling of the synergy among different frequency components. Furthermore, we design an Interactive Mamba Block (IMB) to facilitate efficient multi-granularity information interaction, balancing the extraction of fine-grained discriminative features and comprehensive global contextual information, thereby endowing FAIM with powerful and expressive representations for TSC tasks. Additionally, we incorporate a self-supervised pre-training mechanism to enhance FAIM's understanding of complex temporal patterns and improve its robustness across various domains and high-noise scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FAIM consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency and exhibits outstanding performance.