We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of social choice functions such as efficiency given ex post awareness. Assuming quasi-linear utilities and private values, we show that we can implement in conditional dominant strategies a social choice function that is utilitarian ex post efficient under pooled awareness without the need of the social planner being fully aware ex ante. To this end, we develop novel dynamic versions of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms in which true types are revealed and subsequently elaborated at endogenous higher awareness levels. We explore how asymmetric awareness affects budget balance and participation constraints. We show that ex ante unforeseen contingencies are no excuse for deficits. Finally, we propose a dynamic elaboration reverse second price auction for efficient procurement of complex incompletely specified projects with budget balance and participation constraints.

On-device machine learning (ML) has become a fundamental component of emerging mobile applications. Adaptive model deployment delivers efficient inference for heterogeneous device capabilities and performance requirements through customizing neural architectures. SuperNet-based approaches offer a promising solution by generating a large number of model variants from a pre-trained ML model. However, applying SuperNet in existing frameworks suffers from tedious model-aware development and time-consuming hardware-aware profiling, which limits their practical adoption. We present AutoTailor, the first framework to enable automated, end-to-end SuperNet-based adaptive model deployment for edge devices. Unlike manual SuperNet construction, AutoTailor employs a computation graph-guided compilation approach to automatically transform user-provided ML models into SuperNets. To support efficient specialization, AutoTailor incorporates learning-free latency and accuracy predictors, enabling low-cost yet accurate performance prediction. Our extended evaluations demonstrate that AutoTailor reduces the lines of code for SuperNet construction by 11--27$\times$, decreases hardware-aware profiling costs by at least 11$\times$, and achieves up to 15.60\% absolute accuracy improvement and 60.03\% latency reduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches across diverse models and devices.

This paper introduces CoMuRoS (Collaborative Multi-Robot System), a generalizable hierarchical architecture for heterogeneous robot teams that unifies centralized deliberation with decentralized execution, and supports event-driven replanning. A Task Manager LLM interprets natural-language goals, classifies tasks, and allocates subtasks using static rules plus dynamic contexts (task, history, robot and task status, and events).Each robot runs a local LLM that composes executable Python code from primitive skills (ROS2 nodes, policies), while onboard perception (VLMs/image processing) continuously monitors events and classifies them into relevant or irrelevant to the task. Task failures or user intent changes trigger replanning, allowing robots to assist teammates, resume tasks, or request human help. Hardware studies demonstrate autonomous recovery from disruptive events, filtering of irrelevant distractions, and tightly coordinated transport with emergent human-robot cooperation (e.g., multirobot collaborative object recovery success rate: 9/10, coordinated transport: 8/8, human-assisted recovery: 5/5).Simulation studies show intention-aware replanning. A curated textual benchmark spanning 22 scenarios (3 tasks each, around 20 robots) evaluates task allocation, classification, IoU, executability, and correctness, with high average scores (e.g., correctness up to 0.91) across multiple LLMs, a separate replanning set (5 scenarios) achieves 1.0 correctness. Compared with prior LLM-based systems, CoMuRoS uniquely demonstrates runtime, event-driven replanning on physical robots, delivering robust, flexible multi-robot and human-robot collaboration.

Existing active learning (AL) strategies capture fundamentally different notions of data value, e.g., uncertainty or representativeness. Consequently, the effectiveness of strategies can vary substantially across datasets, models, and even AL cycles. Committing to a single strategy risks suboptimal performance, as no single strategy dominates throughout the entire AL process. We introduce REFINE, an ensemble AL method that combines multiple strategies without knowing in advance which will perform best. In each AL cycle, REFINE operates in two stages: (1) Progressive filtering iteratively refines the unlabeled pool by considering an ensemble of AL strategies, retaining promising candidates capturing different notions of value. (2) Coverage-based selection then chooses a final batch from this refined pool, ensuring all previously identified notions of value are accounted for. Extensive experiments across 6 classification datasets and 3 foundation models show that REFINE consistently outperforms individual strategies and existing ensemble methods. Notably, progressive filtering serves as a powerful preprocessing step that improves the performance of any individual AL strategy applied to the refined pool, which we demonstrate on an audio spectrogram classification use case. Finally, the ensemble of REFINE can be easily extended with upcoming state-of-the-art AL strategies.

Nonholonomic constraints restrict feasible velocities without reducing configuration-space dimension, which makes collision-free geometric paths generally non-executable for car-like robots. Ackermann steering further imposes curvature bounds and forbids in-place rotation, so escaping from narrow dead ends typically requires tightly sequenced forward and reverse maneuvers. Classical planners that decouple global search and local steering struggle in these settings because narrow passages occupy low-measure regions and nonholonomic reachability shrinks the set of valid connections, which degrades sampling efficiency and increases sensitivity to clearances. We study nonholonomic narrow dead-end escape for Ackermann vehicles and contribute three components. First, we construct a generator that samples multi-phase forward-reverse trajectories compatible with Ackermann kinematics and inflates their envelopes to synthesize families of narrow dead ends that are guaranteed to admit at least one feasible escape. Second, we construct a training environment that enforces kinematic constraints and train a policy using the soft actor-critic algorithm. Third, we evaluate against representative classical planners that combine global search with nonholonomic steering. Across parameterized dead-end families, the learned policy solves a larger fraction of instances, reduces maneuver count, and maintains comparable path length and planning time while under the same sensing and control limits. We provide our project as open source at https://github.com/gitagitty/cisDRL-RobotNav.git

Existing video colorization methods struggle with temporal flickering or demand extensive manual input. We propose a novel approach automating high-fidelity video colorization using rich semantic guidance derived from language and segmentation. We employ a language-conditioned diffusion model to colorize grayscale frames. Guidance is provided via automatically generated object masks and textual prompts; our primary automatic method uses a generic prompt, achieving state-of-the-art results without specific color input. Temporal stability is achieved by warping color information from previous frames using optical flow (RAFT); a correction step detects and fixes inconsistencies introduced by warping. Evaluations on standard benchmarks (DAVIS30, VIDEVO20) show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in colorization accuracy (PSNR) and visual realism (Colorfulness, CDC), demonstrating the efficacy of automated prompt-based guidance for consistent video colorization.

Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains challenging. This study develops ECO-GROW, a multi-graph framework modeling China's inter-city networks (2005-2021) to generate urban embeddings that model urban economic vitality. Traditional approaches relying on static city-level aggregates fail to capture a fundamental dynamic: the developmental trajectory of one city today may mirror that of its structurally similar counterparts tomorrow. ECO-GROW overcomes this limitation by integrating industrial linkages, POI similarities, migration similarities and temporal network evolution over 15 years. The framework combines a Dynamic Top-K GCN to adaptively select influential inter-city connections and an adaptive Graph Scorer mechanism to dynamically weight cross-regional impacts. Additionally, the model incorporates a link prediction task based on Barabasi Proximity, optimizing the graph representation. Experimental results demonstrate ECO-GROW's superior accuracy in predicting entrepreneurial activities and employment trends compared to conventional models. By open-sourcing our code, we enable government agencies and public sector organizations to leverage big data analytics for evidence-based urban planning, economic policy formulation, and resource allocation decisions that benefit society at large.

Quantum networks are becoming increasingly important because of advancements in quantum computing and quantum sensing, such as recent developments in distributed quantum computing and federated quantum machine learning. Routing entanglement in quantum networks poses several fundamental as well as technical challenges, including the high dynamicity of quantum network links and the probabilistic nature of quantum operations. Consequently, designing hand-crafted heuristics is difficult and often leads to suboptimal performance, especially if global network topology information is unavailable. In this paper, we propose RELiQ, a reinforcement learning-based approach to entanglement routing that only relies on local information and iterative message exchange. Utilizing a graph neural network, RELiQ learns graph representations and avoids overfitting to specific network topologies - a prevalent issue for learning-based approaches. Our approach, trained on random graphs, consistently outperforms existing local information heuristics and learning-based approaches when applied to random and real-world topologies. When compared to global information heuristics, our method achieves similar or superior performance because of its rapid response to topology changes.

This work contributes towards balancing the inclusivity and global applicability of natural language processing techniques by proposing the first 'name entity recognition' dataset for Kurdish Sorani, a low-resource and under-represented language, that consists of 64,563 annotated tokens. It also provides a tool for facilitating this task in this and many other languages and performs a thorough comparative analysis, including classic machine learning models and neural systems. The results obtained challenge established assumptions about the advantage of neural approaches within the context of NLP. Conventional methods, in particular CRF, obtain F1-scores of 0.825, outperforming the results of BiLSTM-based models (0.706) significantly. These findings indicate that simpler and more computationally efficient classical frameworks can outperform neural architectures in low-resource settings.

A new measure, value-linked credit exposure between protocols, is defined as the inferred financial dependency relationships derived from changes in Total Value Locked (TVL). We develop a token-to-protocol model using DefiLlama metadata to infer inter-protocol credit exposure from the token's stock dynamics, as reported by the protocols. Based on the curated dataset, we develop three benchmarks for machine learning research with financial applications: (1) graph clustering for global network measurement, tracking the structural evolution of credit exposure networks, (2) vector autoregression for sector-level credit exposure dynamics during major shocks (Terra and FTX), and (3) temporal graph neural networks for dynamic link prediction on temporal graphs. From the analysis, we observe (1) a rapid growth of network volume, (2) a trend of concentration to key protocols, (3) a decline of network density (the ratio of actual connections to possible connections), and (4) distinct shock propagation across sectors, such as lending platforms, trading exchanges, and asset management protocols. The DeXposure dataset and code have been released publicly. We envision they will help with research and practice in machine learning as well as financial risk monitoring, policy analysis, DeFi market modeling, amongst others. The dataset also contributes to machine learning research by offering benchmarks for graph clustering, vector autoregres-sion, and temporal graph analysis.