In federated learning (FL), models must \emph{converge quickly} under tight communication budgets while \emph{generalizing} across non-IID client distributions. These twin requirements have naturally led to two widely used techniques: client/server \emph{momentum} to accelerate progress, and \emph{sharpness-aware minimization} (SAM) to prefer flat solutions. However, simply combining momentum and SAM leaves two structural issues unresolved in non-IID FL. We identify and formalize two failure modes: \emph{local-global curvature misalignment} (local SAM directions need not reflect the global loss geometry) and \emph{momentum-echo oscillation} (late-stage instability caused by accumulated momentum). To our knowledge, these failure modes have not been jointly articulated and addressed in the FL literature. We propose \textbf{FedWMSAM} to address both failure modes. First, we construct a momentum-guided global perturbation from server-aggregated momentum to align clients' SAM directions with the global descent geometry, enabling a \emph{single-backprop} SAM approximation that preserves efficiency. Second, we couple momentum and SAM via a cosine-similarity adaptive rule, yielding an early-momentum, late-SAM two-phase training schedule. We provide a non-IID convergence bound that \emph{explicitly models the perturbation-induced variance} $σ_ρ^2=σ^2+(Lρ)^2$ and its dependence on $(S, K, R, N)$ on the theory side. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets and model architectures, and the results validate the effectiveness, adaptability, and robustness of our method, demonstrating its superiority in addressing the optimization challenges of Federated Learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huang-Yongzhi/NeurlPS_FedWMSAM.

Many real-world scenarios involving streaming information can be represented as temporal graphs, where data flows through dynamic changes in edges over time. Anomaly detection in this context has the objective of identifying unusual temporal connections within the graph structure. Detecting edge anomalies in real time is crucial for mitigating potential risks. Unlike traditional anomaly detection, this task is particularly challenging due to concept drifts, large data volumes, and the need for real-time response. To face these challenges, we introduce ARES, an unsupervised anomaly detection framework for edge streams. ARES combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for feature extraction with Half-Space Trees (HST) for anomaly scoring. GNNs capture both spike and burst anomalous behaviors within streams by embedding node and edge properties in a latent space, while HST partitions this space to isolate anomalies efficiently. ARES operates in an unsupervised way without the need for prior data labeling. To further validate its detection capabilities, we additionally incorporate a simple yet effective supervised thresholding mechanism. This approach leverages statistical dispersion among anomaly scores to determine the optimal threshold using a minimal set of labeled data, ensuring adaptability across different domains. We validate ARES through extensive evaluations across several real-world cyber-attack scenarios, comparing its performance against existing methods while analyzing its space and time complexity.

The Internet of Agents (IoA) is rapidly gaining prominence as a foundational architecture for interconnected intelligent systems, designed to facilitate seamless discovery, communication, and collaborative reasoning among a vast network of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. Powered by Large Language and Vision-Language Models, IoA enables the development of interactive, rational agents capable of complex cooperation, moving far beyond traditional isolated models. IoA involves physical entities, i.e., Wireless Agents (WAs) with limited onboard resources, which need to offload their compute-intensive agentic AI services to nearby servers. Such servers can be Mobile Agents (MAs), e.g., vehicle agents, or Fixed Agents (FAs), e.g., end-side units agents. Given their fixed geographical locations and stable connectivity, FAs can serve as reliable communication gateways and task aggregation points. This stability allows them to effectively coordinate with and offload to an Aerial Agent (AA) tier, which has an advantage not affordable for highly mobile MAs with dynamic connectivity limitations. As such, we propose a two-tier optimization approach. The first tier employs a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game. In the game, MAs and FAs act as the leaders who set resource prices. WAs are the followers to determine task offloading ratios. However, when FAs become overloaded, they can further offload tasks to available aerial resources. Therefore, the second tier introduces a Double Dutch Auction model where overloaded FAs act as the buyers to request resources, and AAs serve as the sellers for resource provision. We then develop a diffusion-based Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm to solve the model. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme in facilitating task offloading.

Accurate electric vehicle (EV) charging demand forecasting is essential for stable grid operation and proactive EV participation in electricity market. Existing forecasting methods, particularly those based on graph neural networks, are often limited to modeling pairwise relationships between stations, failing to capture the complex, group-wise dynamics inherent in urban charging networks. To address this gap, we develop a novel forecasting framework namely HyperCast, leveraging the expressive power of hypergraphs to model the higher-order spatiotemporal dependencies hidden in EV charging patterns. HyperCast integrates multi-view hypergraphs, which capture both static geographical proximity and dynamic demand-based functional similarities, along with multi-timescale inputs to differentiate between recent trends and weekly periodicities. The framework employs specialized hyper-spatiotemporal blocks and tailored cross-attention mechanisms to effectively fuse information from these diverse sources: views and timescales. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that HyperCast significantly outperforms a wide array of state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicitly modeling collective charging behaviors for more accurate forecasting.

Score matching has become a central training objective in modern generative modeling, particularly in diffusion models, where it is used to learn high-dimensional data distributions through the estimation of score functions. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of the optimization behavior of score matching, particularly in over-parameterized regimes, remains limited. In this work, we study gradient descent for training over-parameterized models to learn a single Gaussian distribution. Specifically, we use a student model with $n$ learnable parameters and train it on data generated from a single ground-truth Gaussian using the population score matching objective. We analyze the optimization dynamics under multiple regimes. When the noise scale is sufficiently large, we prove a global convergence result for gradient descent. In the low-noise regime, we identify the existence of a stationary point, highlighting the difficulty of proving global convergence in this case. Nevertheless, we show convergence under certain initialization conditions: when the parameters are initialized to be exponentially small, gradient descent ensures convergence of all parameters to the ground truth. We further prove that without the exponentially small initialization, the parameters may not converge to the ground truth. Finally, we consider the case where parameters are randomly initialized from a Gaussian distribution far from the ground truth. We prove that, with high probability, only one parameter converges while the others diverge, yet the loss still converges to zero with a $1/τ$ rate, where $τ$ is the number of iterations. We also establish a nearly matching lower bound on the convergence rate in this regime. This is the first work to establish global convergence guarantees for Gaussian mixtures with at least three components under the score matching framework.

In the realm of black-box jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs), the feasibility of constructing a narrow safety proxy, a lightweight model designed to predict the attack success rate (ASR) of adversarial prompts, remains underexplored. This work investigates the distillability of an LLM's core security logic. We propose a novel framework that incorporates an improved outline filling attack to achieve dense sampling of the model's security boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce a ranking regression paradigm that replaces standard regression and trains the proxy model to predict which prompt yields a higher ASR. Experimental results show that our proxy model achieves an accuracy of 91.1 percent in predicting the relative ranking of average long response (ALR), and 69.2 percent in predicting ASR. These findings confirm the predictability and distillability of jailbreak behaviors, and demonstrate the potential of leveraging such distillability to optimize black-box attacks.

Clinical notes in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) capture rich temporal information on events, clinician reasoning, and lifestyle factors often missing from structured data. Leveraging them for predictive modeling can be impactful for timely identification of chronic diseases. However, they present core natural language processing (NLP) challenges: long text, irregular event distribution, complex temporal dependencies, privacy constraints, and resource limitations. We present two complementary methods for temporally and contextually grounded risk prediction from longitudinal notes. First, we introduce HiTGNN, a hierarchical temporal graph neural network that integrates intra-note temporal event structures, inter-visit dynamics, and medical knowledge to model patient trajectories with fine-grained temporal granularity. Second, we propose ReVeAL, a lightweight, test-time framework that distills the reasoning of large language models into smaller verifier models. Applied to opportunistic screening for Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) using temporally realistic cohorts curated from private and public hospital corpora, HiTGNN achieves the highest predictive accuracy, especially for near-term risk, while preserving privacy and limiting reliance on large proprietary models. ReVeAL enhances sensitivity to true T2D cases and retains explanatory reasoning. Our ablations confirm the value of temporal structure and knowledge augmentation, and fairness analysis shows HiTGNN performs more equitably across subgroups.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading plays a critical role in early clinical intervention and vision preservation. Recent explorations predominantly focus on visual lesion feature extraction through data processing and domain decoupling strategies. However, they generally overlook domain-invariant pathological patterns and underutilize the rich contextual knowledge of foundation models, relying solely on visual information, which is insufficient for distinguishing subtle pathological variations. Therefore, we propose integrating fine-grained pathological descriptions to complement prototypes with additional context, thereby resolving ambiguities in borderline cases. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Anchor Prototype Modulation (HAPM) framework to facilitate DR grading. First, we introduce a variance spectrum-driven anchor prototype library that preserves domain-invariant pathological patterns. We further employ a hierarchical differential prompt gating mechanism, dynamically selecting discriminative semantic prompts from both LVLM and LLM sources to address semantic confusion between adjacent DR grades. Finally, we utilize a two-stage prototype modulation strategy that progressively integrates clinical knowledge into visual prototypes through a Pathological Semantic Injector (PSI) and a Discriminative Prototype Enhancer (DPE). Extensive experiments across eight public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves pathology-guided prototype evolution while outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/HAPM.

The electric power sector is a leading source of air pollutant emissions, impacting the public health of nearly every community. Although regulatory measures have reduced air pollutants, fossil fuels remain a significant component of the energy supply, highlighting the need for more advanced demand-side approaches to reduce the public health impacts. To enable health-informed demand-side management, we introduce HealthPredictor, a domain-specific AI model that provides an end-to-end pipeline linking electricity use to public health outcomes. The model comprises three components: a fuel mix predictor that estimates the contribution of different generation sources, an air quality converter that models pollutant emissions and atmospheric dispersion, and a health impact assessor that translates resulting pollutant changes into monetized health damages. Across multiple regions in the United States, our health-driven optimization framework yields substantially lower prediction errors in terms of public health impacts than fuel mix-driven baselines. A case study on electric vehicle charging schedules illustrates the public health gains enabled by our method and the actionable guidance it can offer for health-informed energy management. Overall, this work shows how AI models can be explicitly designed to enable health-informed energy management for advancing public health and broader societal well-being. Our datasets and code are released at: https://github.com/Ren-Research/Health-Impact-Predictor.

Drowsy driving is a growing cause of traffic accidents, prompting recent exploration of electroencephalography (EEG)-based drowsiness detection systems. However, the inherent variability of EEG signals due to psychological and physical factors necessitates a cumbersome calibration process. In particular, the inter-subject variability of EEG signals leads to a domain shift problem, which makes it challenging to generalize drowsiness detection models to unseen target subjects. To address these issues, we propose a novel driver drowsiness detection framework that leverages online test-time adaptation (TTA) methods to dynamically adjust to target subject distributions. Our proposed method updates the learnable parameters in batch normalization (BN) layers, while preserving pretrained normalization statistics, resulting in a modified configuration that ensures effective adaptation during test time. We incorporate a memory bank that dynamically manages streaming EEG segments, selecting samples based on their reliability determined by negative energy scores and persistence time. In addition, we introduce prototype learning to ensure robust predictions against distribution shifts over time. We validated our method on the sustained-attention driving dataset collected in a simulated environment, where drowsiness was estimated from delayed reaction times during monotonous lane-keeping tasks. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all baselines, achieving an average F1-score of 81.73\%, an improvement of 11.73\% over the best TTA baseline. This demonstrates that our proposed method significantly enhances the adaptability of EEG-based drowsiness detection systems in non-i.i.d. scenarios.