Agentic AI frameworks add a decision-making orchestrator embedded with external tools, including web search, Python interpreter, contextual database, and others, on top of monolithic LLMs, turning them from passive text oracles into autonomous problem-solvers that can plan, call tools, remember past steps, and adapt on the fly. This paper aims to characterize and understand the system bottlenecks introduced by agentic AI workloads from a largely overlooked CPU-centric perspective. We first systematically characterize Agentic AI on the basis of orchestrator/decision making component, inference path dynamics and repetitiveness of the agentic flow which directly influences the system-level performance. Thereafter, based on the characterization, we choose five representative agentic AI workloads- Haystack RAG, Toolformer, ChemCrow, Langchain and SWE-Agent to profile latency, throughput and energy metrics and demystify the significant impact of CPUs on these metrics relative to GPUs. We observe that - 1. Tool processing on CPUs can take up to 90.6% of the total latency; 2. Agentic throughput gets bottlenecked either by CPU factors - coherence, synchronization and over-subscription of cores or GPU factors - main memory capacity and bandwidth; \circled{3} CPU dynamic energy consumes up to 44% of the total dynamic energy at large batch sizes. Based on the profiling insights, we present two key optimizations- 1. CPU and GPU-Aware Micro-batching (CGAM) and 2. Mixed Agentic Workload Scheduling (MAWS) for homogeneous and heterogeneous agentic workloads respectively to demonstrate the potential to improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of agentic AI. We achieve up to 2.1x and 1.41x P50 latency speedup compared to the multi-processing benchmark for homogeneous and heterogeneous agentic workloads respectively.

Generating automated reports for 3D positron emission tomography (PET) is an important and challenging task in medical imaging. PET plays a vital role in oncology, but automating report generation is difficult due to the complexity of whole-body 3D volumes, the wide range of potential clinical findings, and the limited availability of annotated datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce PETARSeg-11K, the first large-scale, publicly available dataset that provides lesion-level correspondence between 3D PET/CT volumes and free-text radiological findings. It comprises 11,356 lesion descriptions paired with 3D segmentations. Second, we propose PETAR-4B, a 3D vision-language model designed for mask-aware, spatially grounded PET/CT reporting. PETAR-4B jointly encodes PET, CT, and 3D lesion segmentation masks, using a 3D focal prompt to capture fine-grained details of lesions that normally comprise less than 0.1% of the volume. Evaluations using automated metrics show PETAR-4B substantially outperforming all 2D and 3D baselines. A human study involving five physicians -- the first of its kind for automated PET reporting -- confirms the model's clinical utility and establishes correlations between automated metrics and expert judgment. This work provides a foundational dataset and a novel architecture, advancing 3D medical vision-language understanding in PET.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This visibility could help us spot unsafe or misaligned behavior (monitorability), but only if the CoT is transparent about its internal reasoning (faithfulness). Fully measuring faithfulness is difficult, so researchers often focus on examining the CoT in cases where the model changes its answer after adding a cue to the input. This proxy finds some instances of unfaithfulness but loses information when the model maintains its answer, and does not investigate aspects of reasoning not tied to the cue. We extend these results to a more holistic sense of monitorability by introducing verbosity: whether the CoT lists every factor needed to solve the task. We combine faithfulness and verbosity into a single monitorability score that shows how well the CoT serves as the model's external `working memory', a property that many safety schemes based on CoT monitoring depend on. We evaluate instruction-tuned and reasoning models on BBH, GPQA, and MMLU. Our results show that models can appear faithful yet remain hard to monitor when they leave out key factors, and that monitorability differs sharply across model families. We release our evaluation code using the Inspect library to support reproducible future work.

This study presents a comparative methodological analysis of six machine learning models for survival analysis (MLSA). Using data from nearly 45,000 colorectal cancer patients in the Hospital-Based Cancer Registries of São Paulo, we evaluated Random Survival Forest (RSF), Gradient Boosting for Survival Analysis (GBSA), Survival SVM (SSVM), XGBoost-Cox (XGB-Cox), XGBoost-AFT (XGB-AFT), and LightGBM (LGBM), capable of predicting survival considering censored data. Hyperparameter optimization was performed with different samplers, and model performance was assessed using the Concordance Index (C-Index), C-Index IPCW, time-dependent AUC, and Integrated Brier Score (IBS). Survival curves produced by the models were compared with predictions from classification algorithms, and predictor interpretation was conducted using SHAP and permutation importance. XGB-AFT achieved the best performance (C-Index = 0.7618; IPCW = 0.7532), followed by GBSA and RSF. The results highlight the potential and applicability of MLSA to improve survival prediction and support decision making.

Scene-level captioning in instructional videos can enhance learning by requiring an understanding of both visual cues and temporal structure. By aligning visual cues with textual guidance, this understanding supports procedural learning and multimodal reasoning, providing a richer context for skill acquisition. However, captions that fail to capture this structure may lack coherence and quality, which can create confusion and undermine the video's educational intent. To address this gap, we introduce DynaStride, a pipeline to generate coherent, scene-level captions without requiring manual scene segmentation. Using the YouCookII dataset's scene annotations, DynaStride performs adaptive frame sampling and multimodal windowing to capture key transitions within each scene. It then employs a multimodal chain-of-thought process to produce multiple action-object pairs, which are refined and fused using a dynamic stride window selection algorithm that adaptively balances temporal context and redundancy. The final scene-level caption integrates visual semantics and temporal reasoning in a single instructional caption. Empirical evaluations against strong baselines, including VLLaMA3 and GPT-4o, demonstrate consistent gains on both N-gram-based metrics (BLEU, METEOR) and semantic similarity measures (BERTScore, CLIPScore). Qualitative analyses further show that DynaStride produces captions that are more temporally coherent and informative, suggesting a promising direction for improving AI-powered instructional content generation.

In wireless communication systems, efficient and adaptive resource allocation plays a crucial role in enhancing overall Quality of Service (QoS). Compared to the conventional Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL) scheme, Model-Based RL (MBRL) first learns a generative world model for subsequent planning. The reuse of historical experience in MBRL promises more stable training behavior, yet its deployment in large-scale wireless networks remains challenging due to high-dimensional stochastic dynamics, strong inter-agent cooperation, and communication constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Multi-Agent Conditional Diffusion Model Planner (MA-CDMP) for decentralized communication resource management. Built upon the Distributed Training with Decentralized Execution (DTDE) paradigm, MA-CDMP models each communication node as an autonomous agent and employs Diffusion Models (DMs) to capture and predict environment dynamics. Meanwhile, an inverse dynamics model guides action generation, thereby enhancing sample efficiency and policy scalability. Moreover, to approximate large-scale agent interactions, a Mean-Field (MF) mechanism is introduced as an assistance to the classifier in DMs. This design mitigates inter-agent non-stationarity and enhances cooperation with minimal communication overhead in distributed settings. We further theoretically establish an upper bound on the distributional approximation error introduced by the MF-based diffusion generation, guaranteeing convergence stability and reliable modeling of multi-agent stochastic dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MA-CDMP consistently outperforms existing MARL baselines in terms of average reward and QoS metrics, showcasing its scalability and practicality for real-world wireless network optimization.

This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications (AI 2027; If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies), it explores AGI and superintelligence. Considering machines' exponentially growing cognitive power and hypothetical IQs, it addresses the ethical and existential implications of an intelligence vastly exceeding humanity's, fundamentally alien. Human extinction may result not from malice, but from uncontrollable, indifferent cognitive superiority.

Long-horizon multivariate time-series forecasting is challenging because realistic predictions must (i) denoise heterogeneous signals, (ii) track time-varying cross-series dependencies, and (iii) remain stable and physically plausible over long rollout horizons. We present PRISM, which couples a score-based diffusion preconditioner with a dynamic, correlation-thresholded graph encoder and a forecast head regularized by generic physics penalties. We prove contraction of the induced horizon dynamics under mild conditions and derive Lipschitz bounds for graph blocks, explaining the model's robustness. On six standard benchmarks , PRISM achieves consistent SOTA with strong MSE and MAE gains.

Abstract--Trajectory representation learning (TRL) aims to encode raw trajectory data into low-dimensional embeddings for downstream tasks such as travel time estimation, mobility prediction, and trajectory similarity analysis. From a behavioral perspective, a trajectory reflects a sequence of route choices within an urban environment. However, most existing TRL methods ignore this underlying decision-making process and instead treat trajectories as static, passive spatiotemporal sequences, thereby limiting the semantic richness of the learned representations. T o bridge this gap, we propose CORE, a TRL framework that integrates context-aware route choice semantics into trajectory embeddings. CORE first incorporates a multi-granular Environment Perception Module, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to distill environmental semantics from point of interest (POI) distributions, thereby constructing a context-enriched road network. Building upon this backbone, CORE employs a Route Choice Encoder with a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, which captures route choice patterns by jointly leveraging the context-enriched road network and navigational factors. Extensive experiments on 4 real-world datasets across 6 downstream tasks demonstrate that CORE consistently outperforms 12 state-of-the-art TRL methods, achieving an average improvement of 9.79% over the best-performing baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/caoji2001/CORE. Ji Cao, Y u Wang, Gang Chen, and Mingli Song are with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; Ji Cao is also with the Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou 311121, China (email: {caoj25, yu.wang, cg, brooksong}@zju.edu.cn). Tongya Zheng and Canghong Jin are with the Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Real-Time SmartTech in Urban Security Governance, Hangzhou City University, Hangzhou 310015, China (e-mail: doujiang zheng@163.com; Jie Song is with the School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo 315100, China (e-mail: sjie@zju.edu.cn).

Electroencephalography (EEG) captures neural activity across multiple temporal and spectral scales, yielding signals that are rich but complex for representation learning. Recently, EEG foundation models trained to predict masked signal-tokens have shown promise for learning generalizable representations. However, their performance is hindered by their signal tokenization modules. Existing neural tokenizers fail to preserve high-frequency dynamics, limiting their ability to reconstruct EEG signals with high fidelity. We introduce NeuroRVQ, a scalable Large Brainwave Model (LBM) centered on a codebook-based tokenizer. Our tokenizer integrates: (i) multi-scale feature extraction modules that capture the full frequency neural spectrum; (ii) hierarchical residual vector quantization (RVQ) codebooks for high-resolution encoding; and, (iii) an EEG signal phase- and amplitude-aware loss function for efficient training. This design enables efficient EEG compression while supporting accurate reconstruction across all frequency bands, leading to robust generative masked modeling. Our empirical results demonstrate that NeuroRVQ achieves lower reconstruction error and outperforms existing LBMs on a variety of downstream tasks. More broadly, NeuroRVQ tokenizer establishes a strong prior for codebook-based general-purpose brainwave models, enabling advances in neural decoding, generative modeling and multimodal biosignal integration.