Abstract--In this work, we introduce an innovative approach to estimate the vital signs of multiple human subjects simultaneously in a non-contact way using a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar-based system. This work also explores the ambitious goal of extending this capability to an arbitrary number of subjects and details the associated challenges, encompassing both hardware and theoretical limitations. Supported by rigorous experimental results and discussions, the paper paints a vivid picture of the system's potential to redefine vital sign monitoring. An FPGA-based implementation is also presented as proof of concept of an entirely hardware-based and portable solution to vitals monitoring, which improves upon previous works in a multitude of ways, offering 2.7x faster execution and 18.4% lesser Look-Up T able (LUT) utilization and providing over 7400x acceleration compared to its software counterpart. A promising solution to overcome these issues is radar sensing technology for HR and BR measurement, offering non-contact capabilities. This approach also extends to applications including sleep apnea detection [5], fall detection [6] and patient monitoring [7]. This work was supported by the Chips to Startup (C2S) program, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Govt. of India, IHub Mobility, IIIT Hyderabad, Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems (KCIS), IIIT Hyderabad and IHub Anubhuti-IIIT Delhi Foundation. Continuous-wave (CW) Doppler Radar systems have significantly advanced this field, addressing various technical challenges in HR and BR measurement [8] [9].

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction hinges on the quality of health indicators (HIs), yet existing methods often fail to disentangle complex degradation mechanisms in multi-sensor systems or quantify uncertainty in HI reliability. This paper introduces a novel framework for HI construction, advancing three key contributions. First, we adapt Reconstruction along Projected Pathways (RaPP) as a health indicator (HI) for RUL prediction for the first time, showing that it outperforms traditional reconstruction error metrics. Second, we show that augmenting RaPP-derived HIs with aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ)--via Monte Carlo dropout and probabilistic latent spaces-- significantly improves RUL-prediction robustness. Third, and most critically, we propose indicator groups, a paradigm that isolates sensor subsets to model system-specific degradations, giving rise to our novel method, I-GLIDE which enables interpretable, mechanism-specific diagnostics. Evaluated on data sourced from aerospace and manufacturing systems, our approach achieves marked improvements in accuracy and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art HI methods while providing actionable insights into system failure pathways.

Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) is a core technology for future wireless communication systems, enabling the identification of modulation schemes without prior knowledge. This capability is essential for applications in cognitive radio, spectrum monitoring, and intelligent communication networks. We propose an AMC system based on a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture, integrated with a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. The proposed architecture leverages CNNs for spatial feature extraction and LSTMs for capturing temporal dependencies, enabling efficient handling of complex, time-varying communication signals. The system's practical ability was demonstrated by identifying over-the-air (OTA) signals from a custom-built FM transmitter alongside other modulation schemes. The system was trained on a hybrid dataset combining the RadioML2018 dataset with a custom-generated dataset, featuring samples at Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs) from 0 to 30dB. System performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC). The optimized model achieved 93.48% accuracy, 93.53% precision, 93.48% recall, and an F1 score of 93.45%. The AUC-ROC analysis confirmed the model's discriminative power, even in noisy conditions. This paper's experimental results validate the effectiveness of the hybrid CNN-LSTM architecture for AMC, suggesting its potential application in adaptive spectrum management and advanced cognitive radio systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven efficient in giving definition-type answers to user input queries. While for humans giving various types of answers, such as examples and paraphrases, is an easy task, LLMs struggle to provide correct answers for other than definition-type queries. In this study, we evaluated this drop in performance using TrackList, a fine-grained linguistic and statistical analysis pipeline to investigate the impact of the pre-training data on LLMs answers to diverse linguistic queries. We also introduce RefoMed-EN, an English dataset consisting of 6170 human-annotated medical terms alongside their corresponding definitions, denominations, exemplifications, explanations, or paraphrases. We studied whether the high frequency of a concept (head) or low frequency (tail) impacts the language model's performance. We evaluated the quality of the LLM's output using syntactic and semantic similarity metrics, statistical correlations and embeddings. Results showed that the LLM's task performance for definition type questions is the highest, while for the exemplification type it is the lowest. Additionally, we showed that for definition-type questions, large language models are prone to paraphrase more on popular and frequent knowledge and less on tail and technical knowledge, especially in the expert texts.

As language models (LMs) are increasingly adopted across domains, high-quality benchmarking frameworks that accurately estimate performance are essential for guiding deployment decisions. While frameworks such as Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) enable broad evaluation across tasks, they often rely on fixed prompts that fail to generalize across LMs, yielding unrepresentative performance estimates. Unless we approximate each LM's ceiling (maximum achievable via changes to the prompt), we risk underestimating performance. Declarative prompting frameworks, such as DSPy, offer a scalable alternative to manual prompt engineering by crafting structured prompts that can be optimized per task. However, such frameworks have not been systematically evaluated across established benchmarks. We present a reproducible DSPy+HELM framework that introduces structured prompting methods which elicit reasoning, enabling more accurate LM benchmarking. Using four prompting methods, we evaluate four frontier LMs across seven benchmarks (general/medical domain) against existing HELM baseline scores. We find that without structured prompting: (i) HELM underestimates LM performance (by 4% average), (ii) performance estimates vary more across benchmarks ($+$2% standard deviation), (iii) performance gaps are misrepresented (leaderboard rankings flip on 3/7 benchmarks), and (iv) introducing chain-of-thought reduces LM sensitivity to prompt design (smaller $Δ$ across prompts). To our knowledge, this is the first benchmarking study to systematically integrate structured prompting into an established evaluation framework, demonstrating how scalable performance-ceiling approximation yields more robust, decision-useful benchmarks. We open-source (i) DSPy+HELM Integration (https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm/pull/3893) and (ii) Prompt Optimization Pipeline (https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/dspy-helm).

While deep reinforcement learning agents demonstrate high performance across domains, their internal decision processes remain difficult to interp ret when evaluated only through performance metrics. In particular, it is poorly understoo d which input features agents rely on, how these dependencies evolve during training, and how t hey relate to behavior. We introduce a scientific methodology for analyzing the learni ng process through quantitative analysis of saliency. This approach aggregates saliency in formation at the object and modality level into hierarchical attention profiles, quantifyin g how agents allocate attention over time, thereby forming attention trajectories throughout t raining. Applied to Atari benchmarks, custom Pong environments, and muscle-actuated biom echanical user simulations in visuomotor interactive tasks, this methodology uncovers a lgorithm-specific attention biases, reveals unintended reward-driven strategies, and diagnos es overfitting to redundant sensory channels. These patterns correspond to measurable behavio ral differences, demonstrating empirical links between attention profiles, learning dynam ics, and agent behavior. To assess robustness of the attention profiles, we validate our finding s across multiple saliency methods and environments. The results establish attention traj ectories as a promising diagnostic axis for tracing how feature reliance develops during train ing and for identifying biases and vulnerabilities invisible to performance metrics alone.

Adaptive optimizers are the de facto standard in non-private training as they often enable faster convergence and improved performance. In contrast, differentially private (DP) training is still predominantly performed with DP-SGD, typically requiring extensive compute and hyperparameter tuning. We propose DP-MicroAdam, a memory-efficient and sparsity-aware adaptive DP optimizer. We prove that DP-MicroAdam converges in stochastic non-convex optimization at the optimal $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate, up to privacy-dependent constants. Empirically, DP-MicroAdam outperforms existing adaptive DP optimizers and achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to DP-SGD across a range of benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, large-scale ImageNet training, and private fine-tuning of pretrained transformers. These results demonstrate that adaptive optimization can improve both performance and stability under differential privacy.

Abstract--3D reconstruction for Digital Twins often relies on LiDAR-based methods, which provide accurate geometry but lack the semantics and textures naturally captured by cameras. Traditional LiDAR-camera fusion approaches require complex calibration and still struggle with certain materials like glass, which are visible in images but poorly represented in point clouds. We propose a camera-only pipeline that reconstructs scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting from multi-view images, extracts semantic material masks via vision models, converts Gaussian representations to mesh surfaces with projected material labels, and assigns physics-based material properties for accurate sensor simulation in modern graphics engines and simulators. This approach combines photorealistic reconstruction with physics-based material assignment, providing sensor simulation fidelity comparable to LiDAR-camera fusion while eliminating hardware complexity and calibration requirements. Modern Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems rely on sophisticated algorithms and complex multimodal sensor setups, often including LiDAR sensors and cameras. Achieving accurate translation of real-world scenarios to simulation--where virtual sensors exhibit identical behavior to their physical counterparts--requires 3D world reconstruction that captures spatial and geometric features to ensure realistic simulation and synthetic sensor data consistent with reality. Previous LiDAR-based approaches [36, 17] achieve accurate geometry but lack camera-captured texture information. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA).

Counterfactual explanations enhance the actionable interpretability of machine learning models by identifying the minimal changes required to achieve a desired outcome of the model. However, existing methods often ignore the complex dependencies in real-world datasets, leading to unrealistic or impractical modifications. Motivated by cybersecurity applications in the email marketing domain, we propose a method for generating Diverse, Actionable, and kNowledge-Constrained Explanations (DANCE), which incorporates feature dependencies and causal constraints to ensure plausibility and real-world feasibility of counterfactuals. Our method learns linear and nonlinear constraints from data or integrates expert-provided dependency graphs, ensuring counterfactuals are plausible and actionable. By maintaining consistency with feature relationships, the method produces explanations that align with real-world constraints. Additionally, it balances plausibility, diversity, and sparsity, effectively addressing key limitations in existing algorithms. The work is developed based on a real-life case study with Freshmail, the largest email marketing company in Poland and supported by a joint R&D project Sendguard. Furthermore, we provide an extensive evaluation using 140 public datasets, which highlights its ability to generate meaningful, domain-relevant counterfactuals that outperform other existing approaches based on widely used metrics. The source code for reproduction of the results can be found in a GitHub repository we provide.

The prevalence of misinformation on social media threatens public trust, demanding automated fact-checking systems that provide accurate verdicts with interpretable explanations. However, existing large language model-based (LLM-based) approaches often rely heavily on external knowledge sources, introducing substantial latency and even hallucinations that undermine reliability, interpretability, and responsiveness, which is crucial for real-time use. To address these challenges, we propose REason-guided Fact-checking with Latent EXplanations REFLEX paradigm, a plug-and-play, self-refining paradigm that leverages the internal knowledge in backbone model to improve both verdict accuracy and explanation quality. REFLEX reformulates fact-checking as a role-play dialogue and jointly trains verdict prediction and explanation generation. It adaptively extracts contrastive activation pairs between the backbone model and its fine-tuned variant to construct steering vectors that disentangle truth into style and substance naturally. These activation-level signals guide inference and suppress noisy explanations, enabling more faithful and efficient reasoning. Experiments on real-world datasets show that REFLEX outperforms previous methods that steer toward a single truth direction and underscores the challenge traditional approaches face when handling the subtle, human-unknown truth in fact-checking tasks. Remarkably, with only 465 self-refined training samples, RELFEX achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, models trained with explanatory objectives can effectively guide those without them, yielding up to a 7.57% improvement, highlighting that internal explanation signals play a dual role in both interpreting and enhancing factual reasoning.