Human language encompasses a wide range of intricate and diverse implicit features, which attackers can exploit to launch adversarial or backdoor attacks, compromising DNN models for NLP tasks. Existing model-oriented defenses often require substantial computational resources as model size increases, whereas sample-oriented defenses typically focus on specific attack vectors or schemes, rendering them vulnerable to adaptive attacks. We observe that the root cause of both adversarial and backdoor attacks lies in the encoding process of DNN models, where subtle textual features, negligible for human comprehension, are erroneously assigned significant weight by less robust or trojaned models. Based on it we propose a unified and adaptive defense framework that is effective against both adversarial and backdoor attacks. Our approach leverages reformulation modules to address potential malicious features in textual inputs while preserving the original semantic integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing sample-oriented defense baselines across a diverse range of malicious textual features.

AI Scaling has traditionally been synonymous with Scaling Up, which builds larger and more powerful models. However, the growing demand for efficiency, adaptability, and collaboration across diverse applications necessitates a broader perspective. This position paper presents a holistic framework for AI scaling, encompassing Scaling Up, Scaling Down, and Scaling Out. It argues that while Scaling Up of models faces inherent bottlenecks, the future trajectory of AI scaling lies in Scaling Down and Scaling Out. These paradigms address critical technical and societal challenges, such as reducing carbon footprint, ensuring equitable access, and enhancing cross-domain collaboration. We explore transformative applications in healthcare, smart manufacturing, and content creation, demonstrating how AI Scaling can enable breakthroughs in efficiency, personalization, and global connectivity. Additionally, we highlight key challenges, including balancing model complexity with interpretability, managing resource constraints, and fostering ethical development. By synthesizing these approaches, we propose a unified roadmap that redefines the future of AI research and application, paving the way for advancements toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

As digital technologies advance, communication networks face challenges in handling the vast data generated by intelligent devices. Autonomous vehicles, smart sensors, and IoT systems necessitate new paradigms. This thesis addresses these challenges by integrating semantic communication and generative models for optimized image compression and edge network resource allocation. Unlike bit-centric systems, semantic communication prioritizes transmitting meaningful data specifically selected to convey the meaning rather than obtain a faithful representation of the original data. The communication infrastructure can benefit to significant improvements in bandwidth efficiency and latency reduction. Central to this work is the design of semantic-preserving image compression using Generative Adversarial Networks and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. These models compress images by encoding only semantically relevant features, allowing for high-quality reconstruction with minimal transmission. Additionally, a Goal-Oriented edge network optimization framework is introduced, leveraging the Information Bottleneck principle and stochastic optimization to dynamically allocate resources and enhance efficiency. By integrating semantic communication into edge networks, this approach balances computational efficiency and communication effectiveness, making it suitable for real-time applications. The thesis compares semantic-aware models with conventional image compression techniques using classical and semantic evaluation metrics. Results demonstrate the potential of combining generative AI and semantic communication to create more efficient semantic-goal-oriented communication networks that meet the demands of modern data-driven applications.

Context propagation remains a central challenge in language model architectures, particularly in tasks requiring the retention of long-range dependencies. Conventional attention mechanisms, while effective in many applications, exhibit limitations in maintaining coherent contextual representations over extended sequences due to their reliance on discrete token interactions. A novel approach is introduced through the formulation of Intrinsic Tensor Field Propagation (ITFP), which models contextual relationships as continuous tensor fields distributed across token embeddings. The propagation dynamics are governed through differential equations that enable a structured flow of contextual information, augmenting the standard attention mechanism to enhance coherence and recall. A series of experiments conducted on an open-source transformer-based model demonstrate that ITFP provides measurable improvements in contextual retention, dependency resolution, and inference stability across various linguistic structures. Comparisons with baseline models reveal a reduction in syntactic inconsistencies and factual errors, while ablation studies indicate that the choice of propagation depth and integration strength significantly impacts model performance. Additional evaluations assessing domain generalization suggest that ITFP effectively adapts across different text genres, reinforcing its applicability beyond conventional language modeling tasks. Although computational trade-offs are introduced through the inclusion of tensor field computations, empirical findings suggest that the benefits in accuracy and coherence outweigh the increased processing demands.

Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACT) register extensive air showers (EAS) generated by gamma rays and cosmic rays (charged particles) when they interact with the atmosphere. These events are images recorded by IACT's highly sensitive camera, which consists of hundreds of photomultiplier tubes. Therefore, the main task of analyzing IACT data is the ability to distinguish between these two types of EAS. In addition, other properties of the primary high-energy particle, such as energy and direction of arrival, may be determined too. In recent years, deep learning methods have made significant progress in identifying gamma events and reconstructing their features. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of works that use deep learning to analyze IACT data. Note that the principles of deep learning methods themselves are not considered here. They can be found, for example, in the books [1, 2] and in the reviews [3, 4, 5].

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) excel at many tasks, often rivaling or surpassing human performance. Yet their internal processes remain elusive, frequently described as "black boxes." While performance can be refined experimentally, achieving a fundamental grasp of their inner workings is still a challenge. Statistical Mechanics has long tackled computational problems, and this thesis applies physics-based insights to understand DNNs via three complementary approaches. First, by averaging over data, we derive an asymptotic bound on generalization that depends solely on the size of the last layer, rather than on the total number of parameters -- revealing how deep architectures process information differently across layers. Second, adopting a data-dependent viewpoint, we explore a finite-width thermodynamic limit beyond the infinite-width regime. This leads to: (i) a closed-form expression for the generalization error in a finite-width one-hidden-layer network (regression task); (ii) an approximate partition function for deeper architectures; and (iii) a link between deep networks in this thermodynamic limit and Student's t-processes. Finally, from a task-explicit perspective, we present a preliminary analysis of how DNNs interact with a controlled dataset, investigating whether they truly internalize its structure -- collapsing to the teacher -- or merely memorize it. By understanding when a network must learn data structure rather than just memorize, it sheds light on fostering meaningful internal representations. In essence, this thesis leverages the synergy between Statistical Physics and Machine Learning to illuminate the inner behavior of DNNs.

Handling long-range dependencies in neural architectures has remained a persistent challenge due to computational limitations and inefficient contextual retention mechanisms. Tensorial operations have provided a foundation for restructuring model representations, yet conventional architectures have struggled to incorporate such techniques without introducing excessive complexity. A novel approach, Context-Preserving Tensorial Reconfiguration (CPTR), enables dynamic reorganization of weight tensors through structured factorization and adaptive contraction, allowing for enhanced contextual integration without substantial computational overhead. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CPTR improves coherence retention across extended sequences, leading to measurable reductions in perplexity and improved recall accuracy for long-context tasks. Performance comparisons reveal that CPTR-enhanced models exhibit greater computational efficiency and reduced memory consumption while maintaining competitive language generation fluency and accuracy. Gradient stability metrics further validate the improved training efficiency, revealing more controlled variance in weight updates. Comparative studies across baseline and CPTR-enhanced models confirm that tensorial reconfiguration contributes to more stable and computationally efficient language modeling. The findings support the potential of CPTR in refining contemporary neural architectures for tasks requiring long-range contextual understanding and efficient memory utilization.

This paper systematically reviews advancements in deep learning (DL) techniques for financial fraud detection, a critical issue in the financial sector. Using the Kitchenham systematic literature review approach, 57 studies published between 2019 and 2024 were analyzed. The review highlights the effectiveness of various deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory, and transformers across domains such as credit card transactions, insurance claims, and financial statement audits. Performance metrics such as precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC-ROC were evaluated. Key themes explored include the impact of data privacy frameworks and advancements in feature engineering and data preprocessing. The study emphasizes challenges such as imbalanced datasets, model interpretability, and ethical considerations, alongside opportunities for automation and privacy-preserving techniques such as blockchain integration and Principal Component Analysis. By examining trends over the past five years, this review identifies critical gaps and promising directions for advancing DL applications in financial fraud detection, offering actionable insights for researchers and practitioners.

Token representations influence the efficiency and adaptability of language models, yet conventional tokenization strategies impose rigid segmentation boundaries that do not adjust dynamically to evolving contextual relationships. The introduction of contextual morphogenesis establishes a self-organizing mechanism that restructures token boundaries based on learned contextual dependencies, allowing embeddings to evolve progressively across iterative processing steps. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that dynamically adjusted tokenization contributes to reductions in perplexity while maintaining representational stability, particularly in linguistically complex domains where static segmentation fails to capture nuanced dependencies. Computational trade-offs associated with self-organizing token structures indicate that additional processing overhead remains within feasible limits, provided that optimization strategies account for segmentation update efficiency. Comparative assessments across different linguistic corpora suggest that adaptive tokenization preserves interpretability while improving alignment with contextual cues, reinforcing the potential of morphogenetic segmentation mechanisms to refine predictive accuracy. Stability analyses confirm that evolving token structures maintain consistent segmentation behaviors across varied text distributions, ensuring that representational adaptations remain linguistically coherent. The effectiveness of contextual morphogenesis in refining structural stability and predictive performance highlights its viability as an alternative to traditional tokenization methods. Further analysis of computational efficiency considerations suggests that hybrid strategies integrating both static and dynamic segmentation techniques may offer a balanced approach to optimizing representational flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency.

In the span of four decades, quantum computation has evolved from an intellectual curiosity to a potentially realizable technology. Today, small-scale demonstrations have become possible for quantum algorithmic primitives on hundreds of physical qubits and proof-of-principle error-correction on a single logical qubit. Nevertheless, despite significant progress and excitement, the path toward a full-stack scalable technology is largely unknown. There are significant outstanding quantum hardware, fabrication, software architecture, and algorithmic challenges that are either unresolved or overlooked. These issues could seriously undermine the arrival of utility-scale quantum computers for the foreseeable future. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of these scaling challenges. We show how the road to scaling could be paved by adopting existing semiconductor technology to build much higher-quality qubits, employing system engineering approaches, and performing distributed quantum computation within heterogeneous high-performance computing infrastructures. These opportunities for research and development could unlock certain promising applications, in particular, efficient quantum simulation/learning of quantum data generated by natural or engineered quantum systems. To estimate the true cost of such promises, we provide a detailed resource and sensitivity analysis for classically hard quantum chemistry calculations on surface-code error-corrected quantum computers given current, target, and desired hardware specifications based on superconducting qubits, accounting for a realistic distribution of errors. Furthermore, we argue that, to tackle industry-scale classical optimization and machine learning problems in a cost-effective manner, heterogeneous quantum-probabilistic computing with custom-designed accelerators should be considered as a complementary path toward scalability.