Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) based on cryptographic protocols has emerged as a promising paradigm to protect user data privacy in cloud-based machine learning services. While it achieves formal privacy protection, PPML often incurs significant efficiency and scalability costs due to orders of magnitude overhead compared to the plaintext counterpart. Therefore, there has been a considerable focus on mitigating the efficiency gap for PPML. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of recent PPML studies with a focus on cross-level optimizations. Specifically, we categorize existing papers into protocol level, model level, and system level, and review progress at each level. We also provide qualitative and quantitative comparisons of existing works with technical insights, based on which we discuss future research directions and highlight the necessity of integrating optimizations across protocol, model, and system levels. We hope this survey can provide an overarching understanding of existing approaches and potentially inspire future breakthroughs in the PPML field. As the field is evolving fast, we also provide a public GitHub repository to continuously track the developments, which is available at https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/Awesome-PPML-Papers.

The increasing demand for autonomous systems in complex and dynamic environments has driven significant research into intelligent path planning methodologies. For decades, graph-based search algorithms, linear programming techniques, and evolutionary computation methods have served as foundational approaches in this domain. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful method for enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal navigation strategies through interaction with their environments. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of traditional approaches as well as the recent advancements in DRL applied to path planning tasks, focusing on autonomous vehicles, drones, and robotic platforms. Key algorithms across both conventional and learning-based paradigms are categorized, with their innovations and practical implementations highlighted. This is followed by a thorough discussion of their respective strengths and limitations in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, adaptability, and robustness. The survey concludes by identifying key open challenges and outlining promising avenues for future research. Special attention is given to hybrid approaches that integrate DRL with classical planning techniques to leverage the benefits of both learning-based adaptability and deterministic reliability, offering promising directions for robust and resilient autonomous navigation.

In recent years, the development of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) has emerged as a critical objective in the deployment of AI systems across sensitive and high-risk domains. TAI frameworks articulate a comprehensive set of ethical, legal, and technical requirements to ensure that AI technologies are aligned with human values, rights, and societal expectations. Among the various AI paradigms, Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising solution to pressing privacy concerns. However, aligning FL with the rest of the requirements of TAI presents a series of challenges, most of which arise from its inherently distributed nature. In this work, we adopt the requirements TAI as a guiding structure to systematically analyze the challenges of adapting FL to TAI. Specifically, we classify and examine the key obstacles to aligning FL with TAI, providing a detailed exploration of what has been done, the trends, and the remaining work within each of the identified challenges.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed their impressive ability to perform multi-step, logic-driven reasoning across complex domains, positioning them as powerful tools and collaborators in scientific discovery while challenging the long-held view that inspiration-driven ideation is uniquely human. However, the lack of a dedicated benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to develop ideas in Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) settings poses a critical barrier to fully understanding their strengths and limitations. To address this gap, we introduce IDRBench -- a pioneering benchmark featuring an expert annotated dataset and a suite of tasks tailored to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in proposing valuable research ideas from different scientific domains for interdisciplinary research. This benchmark aims to provide a systematic framework for assessing LLM performance in complex, cross-domain scientific research. Our dataset consists of scientific publications sourced from the ArXiv platform covering six distinct disciplines, and is annotated by domain experts with diverse academic backgrounds. To ensure high-quality annotations, we emphasize clearly defined dimensions that characterize authentic interdisciplinary research. The design of evaluation tasks in IDRBench follows a progressive, real-world perspective, reflecting the natural stages of interdisciplinary research development, including 1) IDR Paper Identification, 2) IDR Idea Integration, and 3) IDR Idea Recommendation. Using IDRBench, we construct baselines across 10 LLMs and observe that despite fostering some level of IDR awareness, LLMs still struggle to produce quality IDR ideas. These findings could not only spark new research directions, but also help to develop next-generation LLMs that excel in interdisciplinary research.

The success of Machine Learning is increasingly tempered by its significant resource footprint, driving interest in efficient paradigms like TinyML. However, the inherent complexity of designing TinyML systems hampers their broad adoption. To reduce this complexity, we introduce "Data Aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search". Unlike conventional Differentiable Neural Architecture Search, our approach expands the search space to include data configuration parameters alongside architectural choices. This enables Data Aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search to co-optimize model architecture and input data characteristics, effectively balancing resource usage and system performance for TinyML applications. Initial results on keyword spotting demonstrate that this novel approach to TinyML system design can generate lean but highly accurate systems.

This research was a part of a project that developed mobile robots that performed targeted pollen spraying and automated harvesting in pergola structured kiwifruit orchards. Multiple kiwifruit detachment mechanisms were designed and field testing of one of the concepts showed that the mechanism could reliably pick kiwifruit. Furthermore, this kiwifruit detachment mechanism was able to reach over 80 percent of fruit in the cluttered kiwifruit canopy, whereas the previous state of the art mechanism was only able to reach less than 70 percent of the fruit. Artificial pollination was performed by detecting flowers and then spraying pollen in solution onto the detected flowers from a line of sprayers on a boom, while driving at up to 1.4 ms-1. In addition, the height of the canopy was measured and the spray boom was moved up and down to keep the boom close enough to the flowers for the spray to reach the flowers, while minimising collisions with the canopy. Mobile robot navigation was performed using a 2D lidar in apple orchards and vineyards. Lidar navigation in kiwifruit orchards was more challenging because the pergola structure only provides a small amount of data for the direction of rows, compared to the amount of data from the overhead canopy, the undulating ground and other objects in the orchards. Multiple methods are presented here for extracting structure defining features from 3D lidar data in kiwifruit orchards. In addition, a 3D lidar navigation system -- which performed row following, row end detection and row end turns -- was tested for over 30 km of autonomous driving in kiwifruit orchards. Computer vision algorithms for row detection and row following were also tested. The computer vision algorithm worked as well as the 3D lidar row following method in testing.

Gridization, the process of partitioning space into grids where users share similar channel characteristics, serves as a fundamental prerequisite for efficient large-scale network optimization. However, existing methods like Geographical or Beam Space Gridization (GSG or BSG) are limited by reliance on unavailable location data or the flawed assumption that similar signal strengths imply similar channel properties. We propose Channel Space Gridization (CSG), a pioneering framework that unifies channel estimation and gridization for the first time. Formulated as a joint optimization problem, CSG uses only beam-level reference signal received power (RSRP) to estimate Channel Angle Power Spectra (CAPS) and partition samples into grids with homogeneous channel characteristics. To perform CSG, we develop the CSG Autoencoder (CSG-AE), featuring a trainable RSRP-to-CAPS encoder, a learnable sparse codebook quantizer, and a physics-informed decoder based on the Localized Statistical Channel Model. On recognizing the limitations of naive training scheme, we propose a novel Pretraining-Initialization-Detached-Asynchronous (PIDA) training scheme for CSG-AE, ensuring stable and effective training by systematically addressing the common pitfalls of the naive training paradigm. Evaluations reveal that CSG-AE excels in CAPS estimation accuracy and clustering quality on synthetic data. On real-world datasets, it reduces Active Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 30\% and Overall MAE by 65\% on RSRP prediction accuracy compared to salient baselines using the same data, while improving channel consistency, cluster sizes balance, and active ratio, advancing the development of gridization for large-scale network optimization.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1400 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

The guiding principle of AI alignment is to train large language models (LLMs) to be harmless, helpful, and honest (HHH). At the same time, there are mounting concerns that LLMs exhibit a left-wing political bias. Yet, the commitment to AI alignment cannot be harmonized with the latter critique. In this article, I argue that intelligent systems that are trained to be harmless and honest must necessarily exhibit left-wing political bias. Normative assumptions underlying alignment objectives inherently concur with progressive moral frameworks and left-wing principles, emphasizing harm avoidance, inclusivity, fairness, and empirical truthfulness. Conversely, right-wing ideologies often conflict with alignment guidelines. Yet, research on political bias in LLMs is consistently framing its insights about left-leaning tendencies as a risk, as problematic, or concerning. This way, researchers are actively arguing against AI alignment, tacitly fostering the violation of HHH principles.

Adoption of state-of-art Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) aims to revolutionize many industrial areas by reducing the amount of human intervention needed and effort for handling complex underlying processes. Automotive software development is considered to be a significant area for GenAI adoption, taking into account lengthy and expensive procedures, resulting from the amount of requirements and strict standardization. In this paper, we explore the adoption of GenAI for various steps of automotive software development, mainly focusing on requirements handling, compliance aspects and code generation. Three GenAI-related technologies are covered within the state-of-art: Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision Language Models (VLMs), as well as overview of adopted prompting techniques in case of code generation. Additionally, we also derive a generalized GenAI-aided automotive software development workflow based on our findings from this literature review. Finally, we include a summary of a survey outcome, which was conducted among our automotive industry partners regarding the type of GenAI tools used for their daily work activities.