Real-time sea state estimation is vital for applications like shipbuilding and maritime safety. Traditional methods rely on accurate wave-vessel transfer functions to estimate wave spectra from onboard sensors. In contrast, our approach jointly estimates sea state and vessel parameters without needing prior transfer function knowledge, which may be unavailable or variable. We model the wave-vessel system using pseudo mass-spring-dampers and develop a dynamic model for the system. This method allows for recursive modeling of wave excitation as a time-varying input, relaxing prior works' assumption of a constant input. We derive statistically consistent process noise covariance and implement a square root cubature Kalman filter for sensor data fusion. Further, we derive the Posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound to evaluate estimator performance. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations and data from a high-fidelity validated simulator confirm that the estimated wave spectrum matches methods assuming complete transfer function knowledge.

This paper introduces a dynamic and actionable framework for securing agentic AI systems in enterprise deployment. We contend that safety and security are not merely fixed attributes of individual models but also emergent properties arising from the dynamic interactions among models, orchestrators, tools, and data within their operating environments. We propose a new way of identification of novel agentic risks through the lens of user safety. Although, for traditional LLMs and agentic models in isolation, safety and security has a clear separation, through the lens of safety in agentic systems, they appear to be connected. Building on this foundation, we define an operational agentic risk taxonomy that unifies traditional safety and security concerns with novel, uniquely agentic risks, including tool misuse, cascading action chains, and unintended control amplification among others. At the core of our approach is a dynamic agentic safety and security framework that operationalizes contextual agentic risk management by using auxiliary AI models and agents, with human oversight, to assist in contextual risk discovery, evaluation, and mitigation. We further address one of the most challenging aspects of safety and security of agentic systems: risk discovery through sandboxed, AI-driven red teaming. We demonstrate the framework effectiveness through a detailed case study of NVIDIA flagship agentic research assistant, AI-Q Research Assistant, showcasing practical, end-to-end safety and security evaluations in complex, enterprise-grade agentic workflows. This risk discovery phase finds novel agentic risks that are then contextually mitigated. We also release the dataset from our case study, containing traces of over 10,000 realistic attack and defense executions of the agentic workflow to help advance research in agentic safety.

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are vital datasets for geospatial applications such as hydrological modeling and environmental monitoring. However, conventional methods to generate DEM, such as using LiDAR and photogrammetry, require specific types of data that are often inaccessible in resource-constrained settings. To alleviate this problem, this study proposes an approach to generate DEM from freely available RGB satellite imagery using generative deep learning, particularly based on a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We first developed a global dataset consisting of 12K RGB-DEM pairs using Landsat satellite imagery and NASA's SRTM digital elevation data, both from the year 2000. A unique preprocessing pipeline was implemented to select high-quality, cloud-free regions and aggregate normalized RGB composites from Landsat imagery. Additionally, the model was trained in a two-stage process, where it was first trained on the complete dataset and then fine-tuned on high-quality samples filtered by Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) values to improve performance on challenging terrains. The results demonstrate promising performance in mountainous regions, achieving an overall mean root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.4671 and a mean SSIM score of 0.2065 (scale -1 to 1), while highlighting limitations in lowland and residential areas. This study underscores the importance of meticulous preprocessing and iterative refinement in generative modeling for DEM generation, offering a cost-effective and adaptive alternative to conventional methods while emphasizing the challenge of generalization across diverse terrains worldwide.

Organizations investing in artificial intelligence face a fundamental challenge: traditional return on investment calculations fail to capture the dual nature of AI implementations, which simultaneously reduce certain operational risks while introducing novel exposures related to algorithmic malfunction, adversarial attacks, and regulatory liability. This research presents a comprehensive financial framework for quantifying AI project returns that explicitly integrates changes in organizational risk profiles. The methodology addresses a critical gap in current practice where investment decisions rely on optimistic benefit projections without accounting for the probabilistic costs of AI-specific threats including model drift, bias-related litigation, and compliance failures under emerging regulations such as the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and ISO/IEC 42001. Drawing on established risk quantification methods, including annual loss expectancy calculations and Monte Carlo simulation techniques, this framework enables practitioners to compute net benefits that incorporate both productivity gains and the delta between pre-implementation and post-implementation risk exposures. The analysis demonstrates that accurate AI investment evaluation requires explicit modeling of control effectiveness, reserve requirements for algorithmic failures, and the ongoing operational costs of maintaining model performance. Practical implications include specific guidance for establishing governance structures, conducting phased validations, and integrating risk-adjusted metrics into capital allocation decisions, ultimately enabling evidence-based AI portfolio management that satisfies both fiduciary responsibilities and regulatory mandates.

This paper presents a systematic study on developing multi-template machine learning (ML) surrogate models and applying them to the inverse design of transformers (XFMRs) in radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs). Our study starts with benchmarking four widely used ML architectures, including MLP-, CNN-, UNet-, and GT-based models, using the same datasets across different XFMR topologies. To improve modeling accuracy beyond these baselines, we then propose a new frequency-domain self-transfer learning technique that exploits correlations between adjacent frequency bands, leading to around 30%-50% accuracy improvement in the S-parameters prediction. Building on these models, we further develop an inverse design framework based on the covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) algorithm. This framework is validated using multiple impedance-matching tasks, all demonstrating fast convergence and trustworthy performance. These results advance the goal of AI-assisted specs-to-GDS automation for RFICs and provide RFIC designers with actionable tools for integrating AI into their workflows.

Click-through rates prediction is critical in modern advertising systems, where ranking relevance and user engagement directly impact platform efficiency and business value. In this project, we explore how to model CTR more effectively using a large-scale Taobao dataset released by Alibaba. We start with supervised learning models, including logistic regression and Light-GBM, that are trained on static features such as user demographics, ad attributes, and contextual metadata. These models provide fast, interpretable benchmarks, but have limited capabilities to capture patterns of behavior that drive clicks. To better model user intent, we combined behavioral data from hundreds of millions of interactions over a 22-day period. By extracting and encoding user action sequences, we construct representations of user interests over time. We use deep learning models to fuse behavioral embeddings with static features. Among them, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have achieved significant performance improvements. To capture temporal dynamics, we designed a Transformer-based architecture that uses a self-attention mechanism to learn contextual dependencies across behavioral sequences, modeling not only what the user interacts with, but also the timing and frequency of interactions. Transformer improves AUC by 2.81 % over the baseline (LR model), with the largest gains observed for users whose interests are diverse or change over time. In addition to modeling, we propose an A/B testing strategy for real-world evaluation. We also think about the broader implications: personalized ad targeting technology can be applied to public health scenarios to achieve precise delivery of health information or behavior guidance. Our research provides a roadmap for advancing click-through rate predictions and extending their value beyond e-commerce.

This paper presents a comprehensive comparative model analysis on a novel gastrointestinal medical imaging dataset, comprised of 4,000 endoscopic images spanning four critical disease classes: Diverticulosis, Neoplasm, Peritonitis, and Ureters. Leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the study confronts common endoscopic challenges such as variable lighting, fluctuating camera angles, and frequent imaging artifacts. The best performing models, VGG16 and MobileNetV2, each achieved a test accuracy of 96.5%, while Xception reached 94.24%, establishing robust benchmarks and baselines for automated disease classification. In addition to strong classification performance, the approach includes explainable AI via Grad-CAM visualization, enabling identification of image regions most influential to model predictions and enhancing clinical interpretability. Experimental results demonstrate the potential for robust, accurate, and interpretable medical image analysis even in complex real-world conditions. This work contributes original benchmarks, comparative insights, and visual explanations, advancing the landscape of gastrointestinal computer-aided diagnosis and underscoring the importance of diverse, clinically relevant datasets and model explainability in medical AI research.

Non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on Code-Modulated Visual Evoked Potentials (C-VEPs) require highly robust decoding methods to address temporal variability and session-dependent noise in EEG signals. This study proposes and evaluates several deep learning architectures, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for 63-bit m-sequence reconstruction and classification, and Siamese networks for similarity-based decoding, alongside canonical correlation analysis (CCA) baselines. EEG data were recorded from 13 healthy adults under single-target flicker stimulation. The proposed deep models significantly outperformed traditional approaches, with distance-based decoding using Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and constrained EMD showing greater robustness to latency variations than Euclidean and Mahalanobis metrics. Temporal data augmentation with small shifts further improved generalization across sessions. Among all models, the multi-class Siamese network achieved the best overall performance with an average accuracy of 96.89%, demonstrating the potential of data-driven deep architectures for reliable, single-trial C-VEP decoding in adaptive non-invasive BCI systems.

Abstract--Escalating cyber threats and the high-dimensional complexity of IoT traffic have outpaced classical anomaly detection methods. While deep learning offers improvements, computational bottlenecks limit real-time deployment at scale. We present a quantum autoencoder (QAE) framework that compresses network traffic into discriminative latent representations and employs quantum support vector classification (QSVC) for intrusion detection. Evaluated on three datasets, our approach achieves improved accuracy on ideal simulators and on the IBM Quantum hardware (ibm fez)--demonstrating practical quantum advantage on current NISQ devices. This work establishes quantum machine learning as a viable, hardware-ready solution for real-world cybersecurity challenges.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical feedback with language, prior knowledge, and common sense. We introduce Prompted Policy Search (ProPS), a novel RL method that unifies numerical and linguistic reasoning within a single framework. Unlike prior work that augment existing RL components with language, ProPS places a large language model (LLM) at the center of the policy optimization loop-directly proposing policy updates based on both reward feedback and natural language input. We show that LLMs can perform numerical optimization in-context, and that incorporating semantic signals, such as goals, domain knowledge, and strategy hints can lead to more informed exploration and sample-efficient learning. ProPS is evaluated across fifteen Gymnasium tasks, spanning classic control, Atari games, and MuJoCo environments, and compared to seven widely-adopted RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, SAC, TRPO). It outperforms all baselines on eight out of fifteen tasks and demonstrates substantial gains when provided with domain knowledge. These results highlight the potential of unifying semantics and numerics for transparent, generalizable, and human-aligned RL.