Abstract--A vertically integrated, end-to-end, research prototype system combines 288 NorthPole neural inference accelerator cards, offline training algorithms, a high-performance runtime stack, and a containerized inference pipeline to deliver a scalable and efficient cloud inference service. The system delivers 115 peta-ops at 4-bit integer precision and 3.7 PB/s of memory bandwidth across 18 2U servers, while consuming only 30 kW of power and weighing 730 kg in a 0.67 m The system can run 3 simultaneous instances of the 8-billion-parameter open-source IBM Granite-3.3-8b-instruct The system is scalable, modular, and reconfigurable, supporting various model sizes and context lengths, and is ideal for deploying agentic workflows for enterprise AI applications in existing data center (cloud, on-prem) environments. For example, the system can support 18 instances of a 3-billion-parameter model or a single instance of a 70-billion-parameter model. Large language models have become a pervasive form of computing, and while the current paradigm has been to push frontier models for all applications, it is becoming evident that "Faith in God-like large language models is waning" [1]. In fact, by continuing along this trajectory, global energy requirements for AI-focused data centers are projected to reach double-digit percentages of total electricity consumption by 2030, with individual facilities requiring up to 1 gigawatt or more of dedicated power--driving both infrastructure and cooling costs toward potentially unsustainable or unprofitable levels [2] [3]. However, for many business applications, frontier models containing trillions of parameters may prove less useful and cost efficient than much smaller language models with only a tenth or even a hundredth as many parameters [4].

Online conformal prediction (OCP) wraps around any pre-trained predictor to produce prediction sets with coverage guarantees that hold irrespective of temporal dependencies or distribution shifts. However, standard OCP faces two key limitations: it operates in the output space using simple nonconformity (NC) scores, and it treats all historical observations uniformly when estimating quantiles. This paper introduces attention-based feature OCP (AFOCP), which addresses both limitations through two key innovations. First, AFOCP operates in the feature space of pre-trained neural networks, leveraging learned representations to construct more compact prediction sets by concentrating on task-relevant information while suppressing nuisance variation. Second, AFOCP incorporates an attention mechanism that adaptively weights historical observations based on their relevance to the current test point, effectively handling non-stationarity and distribution shifts. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that AFOCP maintains long-term coverage while provably achieving smaller prediction intervals than standard OCP under mild regularity conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world time series datasets demonstrate that AFOCP consistently reduces the size of prediction intervals by as much as $88\%$ as compared to OCP, while maintaining target coverage levels, validating the benefits of both feature-space calibration and attention-based adaptive weighting.

Jet tagging is a central task in collider physics. Over the past decade, machine learning has driven major advances in jet tagging, with increasingly sophisticated architectures achieving very high classification performance on simulated datasets [1-11]. This success naturally raises a key question: have current jet taggers already reached the fundamental limit of jet tagging, or does a gap remain between practical performance and the true statistical optimum? The Neyman-Pearson (NP) limit, defined by the likelihood ratio, is the best possible discriminant between two different underlying physics processes - such as top and QCD jets - that any classifier could achieve if it had access to the exact data likelihoods [12]. In practice, however, this limit cannot be evaluated directly because the true likelihood of the data-generating process is unknown. It therefore remains unclear how close existing classifiers are to this ultimate bound. Recently, Ref. [13] proposed using autoregressive GPT-style generative models to probe this limit for top vs. QCD jets from the JetClass dataset [14]. These models operate on discretized, tokenized representations of jet constituents and yield explicit log-likelihoods, enabling the computation of likelihood ratios between jet classes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a foundational general-purpose technology, raising new dilemmas of sovereignty in an interconnected world. While governments seek greater control over it, the very foundations of AI--global data pipelines, semiconductor supply chains, open-source ecosystems, and international standards--resist enclosure. This paper develops a conceptual and formal framework for understanding sovereign AI as a continuum rather than a binary condition, balancing autonomy with interdependence. Drawing on classical theories, historical analogies, and contemporary debates on networked autonomy, we present a planner's model that identifies two policy heuristics: equalizing marginal returns across the four sovereignty pillars and setting openness where global benefits equal exposure risks. We apply the model to India, highlighting sovereign footholds in data, compute, and norms but weaker model autonomy. The near-term challenge is integration via coupled Data x Compute investment, lifecycle governance (ModelOps), and safeguarded procurement. We then apply the model to the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE), where large public investment in Arabic-first models and sovereign cloud implies high sovereignty weights, lower effective fiscal constraints, and strong Data x Compute complementarities. An interior openness setting with guardrails emerges as optimal. Across contexts, the lesson is that sovereignty in AI needs managed interdependence, not isolation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Quality Engineering (QE) by automating the generation of artefacts such as requirements, test cases, and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) scenarios. However, ensuring the quality of these outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents a systematic technique to baseline and evaluate QE artefacts using quantifiable metrics. The approach combines LLM-driven generation, reverse generation , and iterative refinement guided by rubrics technique for clarity, completeness, consistency, and testability. Experimental results across 12 projects show that reverse-generated artefacts can outperform low-quality inputs and maintain high standards when inputs are strong. The framework enables scalable, reliable QE artefact validation, bridging automation with accountability.

As Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning systems are used in safety critical applications. Understanding why agents make decisions and how they achieve collective behavior is crucial. Existing explainable AI methods struggle in multi agent settings. They fail to attribute collective outcomes to individuals, quantify emergent behaviors, or capture complex interactions. We present MACIE Multi Agent Causal Intelligence Explainer, a framework combining structural causal models, interventional counterfactuals, and Shapley values to provide comprehensive explanations. MACIE addresses three questions. First, each agent's causal contribution using interventional attribution scores. Second, system level emergent intelligence through synergy metrics separating collective effects from individual contributions. Third, actionable explanations using natural language narratives synthesizing causal insights. We evaluate MACIE across four MARL scenarios: cooperative, competitive, and mixed motive. Results show accurate outcome attribution, mean phi_i equals 5.07, standard deviation less than 0.05, detection of positive emergence in cooperative tasks, synergy index up to 0.461, and efficient computation, 0.79 seconds per dataset on CPU. MACIE uniquely combines causal rigor, emergence quantification, and multi agent support while remaining practical for real time use. This represents a step toward interpretable, trustworthy, and accountable multi agent AI.

Satellite Earth-observation (EO) time series in the optical and microwave ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum are often irregular due to orbital patterns and cloud obstruction. Compositing addresses these issues but loses information with respect to vegetation phenology, which is critical for many downstream tasks. Instead, we present TESSERA, a pixel-wise foundation model for multi-modal (Sentinel-1/2) EO time series that learns robust, label-efficient em-beddings. During model training, TESSERA uses Barlow Twins and sparse random temporal sampling to enforce invariance to the selection of valid observations. W e employ two key regularizers: global shuffling to decorrelate spatial neighborhoods and mix-based regulation to improve invariance under extreme sparsity. W e find that for diverse classification, segmentation, and regression tasks, TESSERA embeddings deliver state-of-the-art accuracy with high label efficiency, often requiring only a small task head and minimal computation. T o democratize access, adhere to F AIR principles, and simplify use, we release global, annual, 10m, pixel-wise int8 embeddings together with open weights/code and lightweight adaptation heads, thus providing practical tooling for large-scale retrieval and inference at planetary scale. The model training/inference code, downstream task code, and pre-generated embeddings can be accessed at https://github.com/ucam-eo.

Many real-world machine learning tasks require outputs that satisfy hard constraints, such as physical conservation laws, structured dependencies in graphs, or column-level relationships in tabular data. Existing approaches rely either on domain-specific architectures and losses or on strong assumptions on the constraint space, restricting their applicability to linear or convex constraints. We propose a general-purpose framework for constraint-aware refinement that leverages denoising diffusion implicit models (DDIMs). Starting from a coarse prediction, our method iteratively refines it through a deterministic diffusion trajectory guided by a learned prior and augmented by constraint gradient corrections. The approach accommodates a wide class of non-convex and nonlinear equality constraints and can be applied post hoc to any base model. We demonstrate the method in two representative domains: constrained adversarial attack generation on tabular data with column-level dependencies and in AC power flow prediction under Kirchhoff's laws. Across both settings, our diffusion-guided refinement improves both constraint satisfaction and performance while remaining lightweight and model-agnostic.

In real-world applications, data often reside in restricted domains with unknown boundaries, or as high-dimensional point clouds lying on a lower-dimensional, nontrivial, unknown manifold. Traditional Gaussian Processes (GPs) struggle to capture the underlying geometry in such settings. Some existing methods assume a flat space embedded in a point cloud, which can be represented by a single latent chart (latent space), while others exhibit weak performance when the point cloud is sparse or irregularly sampled. The goal of this work is to address these challenges. The main contributions are twofold: (1) We establish the Atlas Brownian Motion (BM) framework for estimating the heat kernel on point clouds with unknown geometries and nontrivial topological structures; (2) Instead of directly using the heat kernel estimates, we construct a Riemannian corrected kernel by combining the global heat kernel with local RBF kernel and leading to the formulation of Riemannian-corrected Atlas Gaussian Processes (RC-AGPs). The resulting RC-AGPs are applied to regression tasks across synthetic and real-world datasets. These examples demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in both heat kernel estimation and regression accuracy. It improves statistical inference by effectively bridging the gap between complex, high-dimensional observations and manifold-based inferences.

We propose a novel Bayesian approach to modelling nonlinear alignments of time series based on latent shared information. We apply the method to the real-world problem of finding common structure in the sensor data of wind turbines introduced by the underlying latent and turbulent wind field. The proposed model allows for both arbitrary alignments of the inputs and non-parametric output warpings to transform the observations. This gives rise to multiple deep Gaussian process models connected via latent generating processes. We present an efficient variational approximation based on nested variational compression and show how the model can be used to extract shared information between dependent time series, recovering an interpretable functional decomposition of the learning problem. We show results for an artificial data set and real-world data of two wind turbines.