If you want to know where AI is headed, this year's Google I/O has you covered. The company's annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you'd expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event. But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive 10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven significant progress, yet their growing parameter counts and context windows incur prohibitive compute, energy, and monetary costs. We introduce EfficientLLM, a novel benchmark and the first comprehensive empirical study evaluating efficiency techniques for LLMs at scale. Conducted on a production-class cluster (48xGH200, 8xH200 GPUs), our study systematically explores three key axes: (1) architecture pretraining (efficient attention variants: MQA, GQA, MLA, NSA; sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)), (2) fine-tuning (parameter-efficient methods: LoRA, RSLoRA, DoRA), and (3) inference (quantization methods: int4, float16). We define six fine-grained metrics (Memory Utilization, Compute Utilization, Latency, Throughput, Energy Consumption, Compression Rate) to capture hardware saturation, latency-throughput balance, and carbon cost. Evaluating over 100 model-technique pairs (0.5B-72B parameters), we derive three core insights: (i) Efficiency involves quantifiable trade-offs: no single method is universally optimal; e.g., MoE reduces FLOPs and improves accuracy but increases VRAM by 40%, while int4 quantization cuts memory/energy by up to 3.9x at a 3-5% accuracy drop. (ii) Optima are task- and scale-dependent: MQA offers optimal memory-latency trade-offs for constrained devices, MLA achieves lowest perplexity for quality-critical tasks, and RSLoRA surpasses LoRA efficiency only beyond 14B parameters. (iii) Techniques generalize across modalities: we extend evaluations to Large Vision Models (Stable Diffusion 3.5, Wan 2.1) and Vision-Language Models (Qwen2.5-VL), confirming effective transferability. By open-sourcing datasets, evaluation pipelines, and leaderboards, EfficientLLM provides essential guidance for researchers and engineers navigating the efficiency-performance landscape of next-generation foundation models.

Existing AutoML systems have advanced the automation of machine learning (ML); however, they still require substantial manual configuration and expert input, particularly when handling multimodal data. We introduce MLZero, a novel multi-agent framework powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that enables end-to-end ML automation across diverse data modalities with minimal human intervention. A cognitive perception module is first employed, transforming raw multimodal inputs into perceptual context that effectively guides the subsequent workflow. To address key limitations of LLMs, such as hallucinated code generation and outdated API knowledge, we enhance the iterative code generation process with semantic and episodic memory. MLZero demonstrates superior performance on MLE-Bench Lite, outperforming all competitors in both success rate and solution quality, securing six gold medals. Additionally, when evaluated on our Multimodal AutoML Agent Benchmark, which includes 25 more challenging tasks spanning diverse data modalities, MLZero outperforms the competing methods by a large margin with a success rate of 0.92 (+263.6\%) and an average rank of 2.28. Our approach maintains its robust effectiveness even with a compact 8B LLM, outperforming full-size systems from existing solutions.

Real-world data distributions often shift continuously across multiple latent factors such as time, geography, and socioeconomic context. However, existing domain generalization approaches typically treat domains as discrete or evolving along a single axis (e.g., time), which fails to capture the complex, multi-dimensional nature of real-world variation. This paper introduces the task of Continuous Domain Generalization (CDG), which aims to generalize predictive models to unseen domains defined by arbitrary combinations of continuous variation descriptors. We present a principled framework grounded in geometric and algebraic theory, showing that optimal model parameters across domains lie on a low-dimensional manifold. To model this structure, we propose a Neural Lie Transport Operator (NeuralLTO), which enables structured parameter transitions by enforcing geometric continuity and algebraic consistency. To handle noisy or incomplete domain descriptors, we introduce a gating mechanism to suppress irrelevant dimensions and a local chart-based strategy for robust generalization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets-including remote sensing, scientific documents, and traffic forecasting-demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in generalization accuracy and robustness under descriptor imperfections.

This study investigates the multifaceted factors influencing wildfire risk in Iran, focusing on the interplay between climatic conditions and human activities. Utilizing advanced remote sensing, geospatial information system (GIS) processing techniques such as cloud computing, and machine learning algorithms, this research analyzed the impact of climatic parameters, topographic features, and human-related factors on wildfire susceptibility assessment and prediction in Iran. Multiple scenarios were developed for this purpose based on the data sampling strategy. The findings revealed that climatic elements such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity significantly contribute to wildfire susceptibility, while human activities-particularly population density and proximity to powerlines-also played a crucial role. Furthermore, the seasonal impact of each parameter was separately assessed during warm and cold seasons. The results indicated that human-related factors, rather than climatic variables, had a more prominent influence during the seasonal analyses. This research provided new insights into wildfire dynamics in Iran by generating high-resolution wildfire susceptibility maps using advanced machine learning classifiers. The generated maps identified high risk areas, particularly in the central Zagros region, the northeastern Hyrcanian Forest, and the northern Arasbaran forest, highlighting the urgent need for effective fire management strategies.

This paper presents AquaSignal, a modular and scalable pipeline for preprocessing, denoising, classification, and novelty detection of underwater acoustic signals. Designed to operate effectively in noisy and dynamic marine environments, AquaSignal integrates state-of-the-art deep learning architectures to enhance the reliability and accuracy of acoustic signal analysis. The system is evaluated on a combined dataset from the Deepship and Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) benchmarks, providing a diverse set of real-world underwater scenarios. AquaSignal employs a U-Net architecture for denoising, a ResNet18 convolutional neural network for classifying known acoustic events, and an AutoEncoder-based model for unsupervised detection of novel or anomalous signals. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study to apply and evaluate this combination of techniques on maritime vessel acoustic data. Experimental results show that AquaSignal improves signal clarity and task performance, achieving 71% classification accuracy and 91% accuracy in novelty detection. Despite slightly lower classification performance compared to some state-of-the-art models, differences in data partitioning strategies limit direct comparisons. Overall, AquaSignal demonstrates strong potential for real-time underwater acoustic monitoring in scientific, environmental, and maritime domains.

Evaluating ecological time series is critical for benchmarking model performance in many important applications, including predicting greenhouse gas fluxes, capturing carbon-nitrogen dynamics, and monitoring hydrological cycles. Traditional numerical metrics (e.g., R-squared, root mean square error) have been widely used to quantify the similarity between modeled and observed ecosystem variables, but they often fail to capture domain-specific temporal patterns critical to ecological processes. As a result, these methods are often accompanied by expert visual inspection, which requires substantial human labor and limits the applicability to large-scale evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that integrates metric learning with large language model (LLM)-based natural language policy extraction to develop interpretable evaluation criteria. The proposed method processes pairwise annotations and implements a policy optimization mechanism to generate and combine different assessment metrics. The results obtained on multiple datasets for evaluating the predictions of crop gross primary production and carbon dioxide flux have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in capturing target assessment preferences, including both synthetically generated and expert-annotated model comparisons. The proposed framework bridges the gap between numerical metrics and expert knowledge while providing interpretable evaluation policies that accommodate the diverse needs of different ecosystem modeling studies.

In this paper, a reinforcement learning technique is employed to maximize the performance of a cognitive radio network (CRN). In the presence of primary users (PUs), it is presumed that two secondary users (SUs) access the licensed band within underlay mode. In addition, the SU transmitter is assumed to be an energy-constrained device that requires harvesting energy in order to transmit signals to their intended destination. Therefore, we propose that there are two main sources of energy; the interference of PUs' transmissions and ambient radio frequency (RF) sources. The SU will select whether to gather energy from PUs or only from ambient sources based on a predetermined threshold. The process of energy harvesting from the PUs' messages is accomplished via the time switching approach. In addition, based on a deep Q-network (DQN) approach, the SU transmitter determines whether to collect energy or transmit messages during each time slot as well as selects the suitable transmission power in order to maximize its average data rate. Our approach outperforms a baseline strategy and converges, as shown by our findings.

Traditional time series models are task-specific and often depend on dataset-specific training and extensive feature engineering. While Transformer-based architectures have improved scalability, foundation models, commonplace in text, vision, and audio, remain under-explored for time series and are largely restricted to forecasting. We introduce $\textbf{CHARM}$, a foundation embedding model for multivariate time series that learns shared, transferable, and domain-aware representations. To address the unique difficulties of time series foundation learning, $\textbf{CHARM}$ incorporates architectural innovations that integrate channel-level textual descriptions while remaining invariant to channel order. The model is trained using a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), with novel augmentation schemes and a loss function designed to improve interpretability and training stability. Our $7$M-parameter model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks, setting a new benchmark for time series representation learning.

Agent-based Transformers have been widely adopted in recent reinforcement learning advances due to their demonstrated ability to solve complex tasks. However, the high computational complexity of Transformers often results in significant energy consumption, limiting their deployment in real-world autonomous systems. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), with their biologically inspired structure, offer an energy-efficient alternative for machine learning. In this paper, a novel Spike-Transformer Reinforcement Learning (STRL) algorithm that combines the energy efficiency of SNNs with the powerful decision-making capabilities of reinforcement learning is developed. Specifically, an SNN using multi-step Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons and attention mechanisms capable of processing spatio-temporal patterns over multiple time steps is designed. The architecture is further enhanced with state, action, and reward encodings to create a Transformer-like structure optimized for reinforcement learning tasks. Comprehensive numerical experiments conducted on state-of-the-art benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed SNN Transformer achieves significantly improved policy performance compared to conventional agent-based Transformers. With both enhanced energy efficiency and policy optimality, this work highlights a promising direction for deploying bio-inspired, low-cost machine learning models in complex real-world decision-making scenarios.