As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural environments, evaluating their cultural understanding capability has become essential for ensuring trustworthy and culturally aligned applications. However, most existing benchmarks lack comprehensiveness and are challenging to scale and adapt across different cultural contexts, because their frameworks often lack guidance from well-established cultural theories and tend to rely on expert-driven manual annotations. To address these issues, we propose CultureScope, the most comprehensive evaluation framework to date for assessing cultural understanding in LLMs. Inspired by the cultural iceberg theory, we design a novel dimensional schema for cultural knowledge classification, comprising 3 layers and 140 dimensions, which guides the automated construction of culture-specific knowledge bases and corresponding evaluation datasets for any given languages and cultures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively evaluate cultural understanding. They also reveal that existing large language models lack comprehensive cultural competence, and merely incorporating multilingual data does not necessarily enhance cultural understanding.

Vision language models (VLMs) excel in multimodal understanding but are prone to adversarial attacks. Existing defenses often demand costly retraining or significant architecture changes. W e introduce a lightweight defense using tensor decomposition suitable for any pre-trained VLM, requiring no retraining. By decomposing and reconstructing vision encoder representations, it filters adversarial noise while preserving meaning. Experiments with CLIP on COCO and Flickr30K show improved robustness. On Flickr30K, it restores 12.3% performance lost to attacks, raising Recall@1 accuracy from 7.5% to 19.8%. On COCO, it recovers 8.1% performance, improving accuracy from 3.8% to 11.9%. Analysis shows T ensor Train decomposition with low rank (8-32) and low residual strength ( α = 0 . 1 0. 2) is optimal. This method is a practical, plug-and-play solution with minimal overhead for existing VLMs.

Randomized smoothing (RS) is one of the prominent techniques to ensure the correctness of machine learning models, where point-wise robustness certificates can be derived analytically. While RS is well understood for classification, its application to generative models is unclear, since their outputs are sequences rather than labels. We resolve this by connecting generative outputs to an oracle classification task and showing that RS can still be enabled: the final response can be classified as a discrete action (e.g., service-robot commands in VLAs), as harmful vs. harmless (content moderation or toxicity detection in VLMs), or even applying oracles to cluster answers into semantically equivalent ones. Provided that the error rate for the oracle classifier comparison is bounded, we develop the theory that associates the number of samples with the corresponding robustness radius. We further derive improved scaling laws analytically relating the certified radius and accuracy to the number of samples, showing that the earlier result of 2 to 3 orders of magnitude fewer samples sufficing with minimal loss remains valid even under weaker assumptions. Together, these advances make robustness certification both well-defined and computationally feasible for state-of-the-art VLMs, as validated against recent jailbreak-style adversarial attacks.

Abstract--Unsupervised multivariate time series (MTS) representation learning aims to extract compact and informative representations from raw sequences without relying on labels, enabling efficient transfer to diverse downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Dual-Masked Autoencoder (DMAE), a novel masked time-series modeling framework for unsupervised MTS representation learning. DMAE formulates two complementary pretext tasks: (1) reconstructing masked values based on visible attributes, and (2) estimating latent representations of masked features, guided by a teacher encoder . T o further improve representation quality, we introduce a feature-level alignment constraint that encourages the predicted latent representations to align with the teacher's outputs. By jointly optimizing these objectives, DMAE learns temporally coherent and semantically rich representations. Comprehensive evaluations across classification, regression, and forecasting tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent and superior performance over competitive baselines. Multivariate time series (MTS) data constitute a fundamental modality that appears in numerous application areas. Typically, MTS data describe the temporal evolution of multiple synchronized variables, such as simultaneous measurements of diverse physical quantities.

Abstract--Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in automating labor-intensive and complex activities, i.e., those consisting of multiple atomic tasks, by deploying robots in dynamic and unpredictable environments such as industrial and agricultural settings. A key characteristic of these contexts is that activities are not predefined: while they involve a limited set of possible tasks, their combinations may vary depending on the situation. Moreover, despite recent advances in robotics, the ability for humans to monitor the progress of high-level activities - in terms of past, present, and future actions - remains fundamental to ensure the correct execution of safety-critical processes. In this paper, we introduce a general architecture that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with automated planning, enabling humans to specify high-level activities (also referred to as processes) using natural language, and to monitor their execution by querying a robot. We also present an implementation of this architecture using state-of-the-art components and quantitatively evaluate the approach in a real-world precision agriculture scenario. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the interest and demand for automating complex and labor-intensive activities through the deployment of robotic systems. These activities, often encountered in industrial and agricultural domains, are typically composed of multiple, smaller atomic subtasksthat must be coordinated to achieve a larger goal. What makes these environments particularly challenging is their dynamic and unpredictable nature: the specific sequence and combination of tasks required can change based on real-time conditions, external events, or evolving objectives. Importantly, while the range of possible jobs is usually limited and known in advance, the structure and flow of the overall activity are not fixed and therefore must be adapted on the fly. In such contexts, human operators must maintain a clear understanding of ongoing high-level activities, both to ensure correctness and to make timely decisions. This includes being aware of what the system has done (past), what it is currently doing (present), and what it intends to do next (future). However, this kind of situational awareness is difficult to maintain in the absence of mechanisms for querying the system in a human-friendly way.

In the k-Kemeny problem, we are given an ordinal election, i.e., a collection of votes ranking the candidates from best to worst, and we seek the smallest number of swaps of adjacent candidates that ensure that the election has at most k different rankings. We study this problem for a number of structured domains, including the single-peaked, single-crossing, group-separable, and Euclidean ones. We obtain two kinds of results: (1) We show that k-Kemeny remains intractable under most of these domains, even for k=2, and (2) we use k-Kemeny to rank these domains in terms of their diversity.

The quality and accessibility of multilingual datasets are crucial for advancing machine translation. However, previous corpora built from United Nations documents have suffered from issues such as opaque process, difficulty of reproduction, and limited scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a complete end-to-end solution, from data acquisition via web scraping to text alignment. The entire process is fully reproducible, with a minimalist single-machine example and optional distributed computing steps for scalability. At its core, we propose a new Graph-Aided Paragraph Alignment (GAPA) algorithm for efficient and flexible paragraph-level alignment. The resulting corpus contains over 713 million English tokens, more than doubling the scale of prior work. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available parallel corpus composed entirely of human-translated, non-AI-generated content. Our code and corpus are accessible under the MIT License.

Creating robust occupation taxonomies, vital for applications ranging from job recommendation to labor market intelligence, is challenging. Manual curation is slow, while existing automated methods are either not adaptive to dynamic regional markets (top-down) or struggle to build coherent hierarchies from noisy data (bottom-up). We introduce CLIMB (CLusterIng-based Multi-agent taxonomy Builder), a framework that fully automates the creation of high-quality, data-driven taxonomies from raw job postings. CLIMB uses global semantic clustering to distill core occupations, then employs a reflection-based multi-agent system to iteratively build a coherent hierarchy. On three diverse, real-world datasets, we show that CLIMB produces taxonomies that are more coherent and scalable than existing methods and successfully capture unique regional characteristics. We release our code and datasets at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CLIMB.

Data-driven models accurately perform early battery prognosis to prevent equipment failure and further safety hazards. Most existing machine learning (ML) models work in offline mode which must consider their retraining post-deployment every time new data distribution is encountered. Hence, there is a need for an online ML approach where the model can adapt to varying distributions. However, existing online incremental multistep forecasts are a great challenge as there is no way to correct the model of its forecasts at the current instance. Also, these methods need to wait for a considerable amount of time to acquire enough streaming data before retraining. In this study, we propose iFSNet (incremental Fast and Slow learning Network) which is a modified version of FSNet for a single-pass mode (sample-by-sample) to achieve multistep forecasting using pseudo targets. It uses a simple linear regressor of the input sequence to extrapolate pseudo future samples (pseudo targets) and calculate the loss from the rest of the forecast and keep updating the model. The model benefits from the associative memory and adaptive structure mechanisms of FSNet, at the same time the model incrementally improves by using pseudo targets. The proposed model achieved 0.00197 RMSE and 0.00154 MAE on datasets with smooth degradation trajectories while it achieved 0.01588 RMSE and 0.01234 MAE on datasets having irregular degradation trajectories with capacity regeneration spikes.

Assessing the impact the training data on machine learning models is crucial for understanding the behavior of the model, enhancing the transparency, and selecting training data. Influence function provides a theoretical framework for quantifying the effect of training data points on model's performance given a specific test data. However, the computational and memory costs of influence function presents significant challenges, especially for large-scale models, even when using approximation methods, since the gradients involved in computation are as large as the model itself. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages dropout as a gradient compression mechanism to compute the influence function more efficiently. Our method significantly reduces computational and memory overhead, not only during the influence function computation but also in gradient compression process. Through theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate that our method could preserves critical components of the data influence and enables its application to modern large-scale models.