We show for invertible problems that transform data from a source domain (for example, Logic Condition Tables (LCTs)) to a destination domain (for example, Hardware Description Language (HDL) code), an approach of using Large Language Models (LLMs) as a lossless encoder from source to destination followed by as a lossless decoder back to the source, comparable to lossless compression in information theory, can mitigate most of the LLM drawbacks of hallucinations and omissions. Specifically, using LCTs as inputs, we generate the full HDL for a two-dimensional network-on-chip router (13 units, 1500-2000 lines of code) using seven different LLMs, reconstruct the LCTs from the auto-generated HDL, and compare the original and reconstructed LCTs. This approach yields significant productivity improvements, not only confirming correctly generated LLM logic and detecting incorrectly generated LLM logic but also assisting developers in finding design specification errors.

Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool for accelerating the computational design and production of materials. In materials science, ML has primarily supported large-scale discovery of novel compounds using first-principles data and digital twin applications for optimizing manufacturing processes. However, applying general-purpose ML frameworks to complex industrial materials such as steel remains a challenge. A key obstacle is accurately capturing the intricate relationship between chemical composition, processing parameters, and the resulting microstructure and properties. To address this, we introduce a computational framework that combines physical insights with ML to develop a physics-informed continuous cooling transformation (CCT) model for steels. Our model, trained on a dataset of 4,100 diagrams, is validated against literature and experimental data. It demonstrates high computational efficiency, generating complete CCT diagrams with 100 cooling curves in under 5 seconds. It also shows strong generalizability across alloy steels, achieving phase classification F1 scores above 88% for all phases. For phase transition temperature regression, it attains mean absolute errors (MAE) below 20 °C across all phases except bainite, which shows a slightly higher MAE of 27 °C. This framework can be extended with additional generic and customized ML models to establish a universal digital twin platform for heat treatment. Integration with complementary simulation tools and targeted experiments will further support accelerated materials design workflows.

The alignment problem--ensuring advanced AI systems act in accordance with human values-- represents one of the most pressing philosophical and technical challenges of our time. As Bostrom (2014) and Russell (2019) have argued, the difficulty lies not merely in creating capable systems, but in ensuring these systems remain beneficial as their capabilities grow. Current approaches typically attempt to specify human values directly, whether through reward modeling, constitutional AI, or iterative refinement based on human feedback. Yet these content-based approaches face a fundamental philosophical problem: human values are contextual, often contradictory, and resist precise specification. The attempt to encode a complete value system encounters what I call the "specification trap"--the more precisely we attempt to define our values, the more we realize their dependence on implicit knowledge, cultural context, and evolutionary history that cannot be fully articulated. This paper's central thesis is that alignment should be reconceived not as a problem of value specification but as one of process architecture: creating syntropic, reasons-responsive agents whose values emerge through embodied multi-agent interaction rather than being encoded through training. What follows is a framework and research program proposal rather than a report of completed empirical results. I defend this thesis through four interconnected arguments that support three central contributions. Part I diagnoses the specification trap that makes content-based approaches structurally unstable.

Large language model safety is usually assessed with static benchmarks, but key failures are dynamic: value drift under distribution shift, jailbreak attacks, and slow degradation of alignment in deployment. Building on a recent Second Law of Intelligence that treats ethical entropy as a state variable which tends to increase unless countered by alignment work, we make this framework operational for large language models. We define a five-way behavioral taxonomy, train a classifier to estimate ethical entropy S(t) from model transcripts, and measure entropy dynamics for base and instruction-tuned variants of four frontier models across stress tests. Base models show sustained entropy growth, while tuned variants suppress drift and reduce ethical entropy by roughly eighty percent. From these trajectories we estimate an effective alignment work rate gamma_eff and embed S(t) and gamma_eff in a monitoring pipeline that raises alerts when entropy drift exceeds a stability threshold, enabling run-time oversight of value drift.

Data-driven motion priors that can guide agents toward producing naturalistic behaviors play a pivotal role in creating life-like virtual characters. Adversarial imitation learning has been a highly effective method for learning motion priors from reference motion data. However, adversarial priors, with few exceptions, need to be retrained for each new controller, thereby limiting their reusability and necessitating the retention of the reference motion data when training on downstream tasks. In this work, we present Score-Matching Motion Priors (SMP), which leverages pre-trained motion diffusion models and score distillation sampling (SDS) to create reusable task-agnostic motion priors. SMPs can be pre-trained on a motion dataset, independent of any control policy or task. Once trained, SMPs can be kept frozen and reused as general-purpose reward functions to train policies to produce naturalistic behaviors for downstream tasks. We show that a general motion prior trained on large-scale datasets can be repurposed into a variety of style-specific priors. Furthermore SMP can compose different styles to synthesize new styles not present in the original dataset. Our method produces high-quality motion comparable to state-of-the-art adversarial imitation learning methods through reusable and modular motion priors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMP across a diverse suite of control tasks with physically simulated humanoid characters. Video demo available at https://youtu.be/ravlZJteS20

Understanding high-resolution images remains a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent study address this issue by dividing the image into smaller crops and computing the semantic similarity between each crop and a query using a pretrained retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model. The most relevant crops are then selected to localize the target object and suppress irrelevant information. However, such crop-based processing can fragment complete objects across multiple crops, thereby disrupting the computation of semantic similarity. In our experiments, we find that image crops of objects with different sizes are better handled at different resolutions. Based on this observation, we propose Multi-resolution Retrieval-Detection (MRD), a training-free framework for high-resolution image understanding. To address the issue of semantic similarity bias caused by objects being split across different image crops, we propose a multi-resolution semantic fusion method, which integrates semantic similarity maps obtained at different resolutions to produce more accurate semantic information and preserve the integrity of target objects. Furthermore, to achieve direct localization of target objects at a global scale, we introduce an open-vocalbulary object detection (OVD) model that identifies object regions using a sliding-window approach.Experiments on high-resolution image understanding benchmarks using different MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

In decentralized federated learning (DFL), the presence of abnormal clients, often caused by noisy or poisoned data, can significantly disrupt the learning process and degrade the overall robustness of the model. Previous methods on this issue often require a sufficiently large number of normal neighboring clients or prior knowledge of reliable clients, which reduces the practical applicability of DFL. To address these limitations, we develop here a novel adaptive DFL (aDFL) approach for robust estimation. The key idea is to adaptively adjust the learning rates of clients. By assigning smaller rates to suspicious clients and larger rates to normal clients, aDFL mitigates the negative impact of abnormal clients on the global model in a fully adaptive way. Our theory does not put any stringent conditions on neighboring nodes and requires no prior knowledge. A rigorous convergence analysis is provided to guarantee the oracle property of aDFL. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the aDFL method.

Document redaction in public authorities faces critical challenges as traditional manual approaches struggle to balance growing transparency demands with increasingly stringent data protection requirements. This study investigates the implementation of AI-driven document redaction within UK public authorities through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. While AI technologies offer potential solutions to redaction challenges, their actual implementation within public sector organizations remains underexplored. Based on responses from 44 public authorities across healthcare, government, and higher education sectors, this study reveals significant gaps between technological possibilities and organizational realities. Findings show highly limited AI adoption (only one authority reported using AI tools), widespread absence of formal redaction policies (50 percent reported "information not held"), and deficiencies in staff training. The study identifies three key barriers to effective AI implementation: poor record-keeping practices, lack of standardized redaction guidelines, and insufficient specialized training for human oversight. These findings highlight the need for a socio-technical approach that balances technological automation with meaningful human expertise. This research provides the first empirical assessment of AI redaction practices in UK public authorities and contributes evidence to support policymakers navigating the complex interplay between transparency obligations, data protection requirements, and emerging AI technologies in public administration.

We propose the first return time distribution (FRTD) of a random walk as an interpretable and mathematically grounded node embedding. The FRTD assigns a probability mass function to each node, allowing us to define a distance between any pair of nodes using standard metrics for discrete distributions. We present several arguments to motivate the FRTD embedding. First, we show that FRTDs are strictly more informative than eigenvalue spectra, yet insufficient for complete graph identification, thus placing FRTD equivalence between cospectrality and isomorphism. Second, we argue that FRTD equivalence between nodes captures structural similarity. Third, we empirically demonstrate that the FRTD embedding outperforms manually designed graph metrics in network alignment tasks. Finally, we show that random networks that approximately match the FRTD of a desired target also preserve other salient features. Together these results demonstrate the FRTD as a simple and mathematically principled embedding for complex networks.

Wireless connectivity promises to unshackle virtual reality (VR) experiences, allowing users to engage from anywhere, anytime. However, delivering seamless, high-quality, real-time VR video wirelessly is challenging due to the stringent quality of experience requirements, low latency constraints, and limited VR device capabilities. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a novel decentralized multi task fair federated learning (DMTFL) based caching that caches and prefetches each VR user's field of view (FOV) at base stations (BSs) based on the caching strategies tailored to each BS. In federated learning (FL) in its naive form, often biases toward certain users, and a single global model fails to capture the statistical heterogeneity across users and BSs. In contrast, the proposed DMTFL algorithm personalizes content delivery by learning individual caching models at each BS. These models are further optimized to perform well under any target distribution, while providing theoretical guarantees via Rademacher complexity and a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound on the loss. Using a realistic VR head-tracking dataset, our simulations demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DMTFL algorithm compared to baseline algorithms.