The Cognitive Buffer Hypothesis (CBH) posits that larger brains evolved to enhance survival in changing conditions. However, larger brains also carry higher energy demands, imposing additional metabolic burdens. Alongside brain size, brain organization plays a key role in cognitive ability and, with suitable architectures, may help mitigate energy challenges. This study evolves Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) used by Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to investigate how environmental variability and energy costs influence the evolution of neural complexity, defined in terms of ANN size and structure. Results indicate that under energy constraints, increasing seasonality led to smaller ANNs. This challenges CBH and supports the Expensive Brain Hypothesis (EBH), as highly seasonal environments reduced net energy intake and thereby constrained brain size. ANN structural complexity primarily emerged as a byproduct of size, where energy costs promoted the evolution of more efficient networks.

Pedestrian crossing intention prediction is essential for autonomous vehicles to improve pedestrian safety and reduce traffic accidents. However, accurate pedestrian intention prediction in urban environments remains challenging due to the multitude of factors affecting pedestrian behavior. In this paper, we propose a multi-context fusion Transformer (MFT) that leverages diverse numerical contextual attributes across four key dimensions, encompassing pedestrian behavior context, environmental context, pedestrian localization context and vehicle motion context, to enable accurate pedestrian intention prediction. MFT employs a progressive fusion strategy, where mutual intra-context attention enables reciprocal interactions within each context, thereby facilitating feature sequence fusion and yielding a context token as a context-specific representation. This is followed by mutual cross-context attention, which integrates features across contexts with a global CLS token serving as a compact multi-context representation. Finally, guided intra-context attention refines context tokens within each context through directed interactions, while guided cross-context attention strengthens the global CLS token to promote multi-context fusion via guided information propagation, yielding deeper and more efficient integration. Experimental results validate the superiority of MFT over state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy rates of 73%, 93%, and 90% on the JAADbeh, JAADall, and PIE datasets, respectively. Extensive ablation studies are further conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the network architecture and contribution of different input context. Our code is open-source: https://github.com/ZhongHang0307/Multi-Context-Fusion-Transformer.

Pedestrian crossing intention prediction is essential for the deplo y-ment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in urban environments. Ideal prediction provides AVs with critical environmental cues, thereby reducing the risk of pedestrian -related collisions. However, the prediction task is challenging due to the diverse nature of pedestrian behavior and its dependence on multiple contextual factors. T his paper proposes a multimodal fusion network that leverages seven modality features from both visual and motion branches, aiming to effectively extract and integrate complementary cues across different modalities. Specifically, motion and visual features are extracted from the raw inputs using multiple Transformer -based extraction modules. D epth -guided attention module leverages depth information to guide attention towards salient regions in another modality through comprehensive spatial feature interactions. To account for the varying importance of different modalities an d frames, m odality attention and temporal attention are designed to selectively emphasize informative modalities and effectively capture temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on the JAAD dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed network, achieving superior performance compared to the basel ine methods.

Automatic Pitch Correction (APC) enhances vocal recordings by aligning pitch deviations with the intended musical notes. However, existing APC systems either rely on reference pitches, which limits their practical applicability, or employ simple pitch estimation algorithms that often fail to preserve expressiveness and naturalness. We propose BERT-APC, a novel reference-free APC framework that corrects pitch errors while maintaining the natural expressiveness of vocal performances. In BERT-APC, a novel stationary pitch predictor first estimates the perceived pitch of each note from the detuned singing voice. A context-aware note pitch predictor estimates the intended pitch sequence by leveraging a music language model repurposed to incorporate musical context. Finally, a note-level correction algorithm fixes pitch errors while preserving intentional pitch deviations for emotional expression. In addition, we introduce a learnable data augmentation strategy that improves the robustness of the music language model by simulating realistic detuning patterns. Compared to two recent singing voice transcription models, BERT-APC demonstrated superior performance in note pitch prediction, outperforming the second-best model, ROSVOT, by 10.49%p on highly detuned samples in terms of the raw pitch accuracy. In the MOS test, BERT-APC achieved the highest score of $4.32 \pm 0.15$, which is significantly higher than those of the widely-used commercial APC tools, AutoTune ($3.22 \pm 0.18$) and Melodyne ($3.08 \pm 0.18$), while maintaining a comparable ability to preserve expressive nuances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first APC model that leverages a music language model to achieve reference-free pitch correction with symbolic musical context. The corrected audio samples of BERT-APC are available online.

Decoder-only rerankers are central to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, generalist models miss domain-specific nuances in high-stakes fields like finance and law, and naive fine-tuning causes surface-form overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we introduce R2R, a domain-aware framework that combines dynamic expert routing with a two-stage training strategy, Entity Abstraction for Generalization (EAG). EAG introduces a counter-shortcut mechanism by masking the most predictive surface cues, forcing the reranker to learn domain-invariant relevance patterns rather than memorizing dataset-specific entities. To efficiently activate domain experts, R2R employs a lightweight Latent Semantic Router that probes internal representations from the frozen backbone decoder to select the optimal LoRA expert per query. Extensive experiments across different reranker backbones and diverse domains (legal, medical, and financial) demonstrate that R2R consistently surpasses generalist and single-domain fine-tuned baselines. Our results confirm that R2R is a model-agnostic and modular approach to domain specialization with strong cross-domain robustness.

Sparsity is essential for deploying large models on resource constrained edge platforms. However, optimizing sparsity patterns for individual tasks in isolation ignores the significant I/O overhead incurred during frequent task switching. We introduce an on-demand multi-task sparsity framework specifically designed to minimize switching costs by maximizing parameter reuse. Unlike monolithic approaches, we decompose weights into reusable block-granular units and align sparse structures across tasks to maximize overlap. By dynamically loading only the small differential set of blocks required for the next task, our method effectively mitigates the cold-start latency inherent in traditional monolithic approaches.Experiments on a real-world autonomous driving platform demonstrate that our framework achieves superior switching efficiency, accelerating task switching by over 6.6X on average compared to existing sparsity methods.

The emergence of graph neural networks (GNNs) has offered a powerful tool for semi-supervised node classification tasks. Subsequent studies have achieved further improvements through refining the message passing schemes in GNN models or exploiting various data augmentation techniques to mitigate limited supervision. In real graphs, nodes often tend to form tightly-knit communities/clusters, which embody abundant signals for compensating label scarcity in semi-supervised node classification but are not explored in prior methods. Inspired by this, this paper presents NCGC that integrates self-supervised graph clustering and semi-supervised classification into a unified framework. Firstly, we theoretically unify the optimization objectives of GNNs and spectral graph clustering, and based on that, develop soft orthogonal GNNs (SOGNs) that leverage a refined message passing paradigm to generate node representations for both classification and clustering. On top of that, NCGC includes a self-supervised graph clustering module that enables the training of SOGNs for learning representations of unlabeled nodes in a self-supervised manner. Particularly, this component comprises two non-trivial clustering objectives and a Sinkhorn-Knopp normalization that transforms predicted cluster assignments into balanced soft pseudo-labels. Through combining the foregoing clustering module with the classification model using a multi-task objective containing the supervised classification loss on labeled data and self-supervised clustering loss on unlabeled data, NCGC promotes synergy between them and achieves enhanced model capacity. Our extensive experiments showcase that the proposed NCGC framework consistently and considerably outperforms popular GNN models and recent baselines for semi-supervised node classification on seven real graphs, when working with various classic GNN backbones.

Recent advancements in multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation (mRAG), which enhance multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with external knowledge, have demonstrated that the collective intelligence of multiple agents can significantly outperform a single model through effective communication. Despite impressive performance, existing multi-agent systems inherently incur substantial token overhead and increased computational costs, posing challenges for large-scale deployment. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-agent hierarchical communication graph PRUNING framework, termed M$^3$Prune. Our framework eliminates redundant edges across different modalities, achieving an optimal balance between task performance and token overhead. Specifically, M$^3$Prune first applies intra-modal graph sparsification to textual and visual modalities, identifying the edges most critical for solving the task. Subsequently, we construct a dynamic communication topology using these key edges for inter-modal graph sparsification. Finally, we progressively prune redundant edges to obtain a more efficient and hierarchical topology. Extensive experiments on both general and domain-specific mRAG benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms both single-agent and robust multi-agent mRAG systems while significantly reducing token consumption.

Forward Collision Warning systems are crucial for vehicle safety and autonomous driving, yet current methods often fail to balance precise multi-agent interaction modeling with real-time decision adaptability, evidenced by the high computational cost for edge deployment and the unreliability stemming from simplified interaction models.To overcome these dual challenges-computational complexity and modeling insufficiency-along with the high false alarm rates of traditional static-threshold warnings, this paper introduces an integrated FCW framework that pairs a Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Attention Network with a Dynamic Risk Threshold Adjustment algorithm. HSTAN employs a decoupled architecture (Graph Attention Network for spatial, cascaded GRU with self-attention for temporal) to achieve superior performance and efficiency, requiring only 12.3 ms inference time (73% faster than Transformer methods) and reducing the Average Displacement Error (ADE) to 0.73m (42.2% better than Social_LSTM) on the NGSIM dataset. Furthermore, Conformalized Quantile Regression enhances reliability by generating prediction intervals (91.3% coverage at 90% confidence), which the DTRA module then converts into timely warnings via a physics-informed risk potential function and an adaptive threshold mechanism inspired by statistical process control.Tested across multi-scenario datasets, the complete system demonstrates high efficacy, achieving an F1 score of 0.912, a low false alarm rate of 8.2%, and an ample warning lead time of 2.8 seconds, validating the framework's superior performance and practical deployment feasibility in complex environments.

Channel coding from 2G to 5G has assumed the inputs bits at the physical layer to be uniformly distributed. However, hybrid automatic repeat request acknowledgement (HARQ-ACK) bits transmitted in the uplink are inherently non-uniformly distributed. For such sources, significant performance gains could be obtained by employing joint source channel coding, aided by deep learning-based techniques. In this paper, we learn a transformer-based encoder using a novel "free-lunch" training algorithm and propose per-codeword power shaping to exploit the source prior at the encoder whilst being robust to small changes in the HARQ-ACK distribution. Furthermore, any HARQ-ACK decoder has to achieve a low negative acknowledgement (NACK) error rate to avoid radio link failures resulting from multiple NACK errors. We develop an extension of the Neyman-Pearson test to a coded bit system with multiple information bits to achieve Unequal Error Protection of NACK over ACK bits at the decoder. Finally, we apply the proposed encoder and decoder designs to a 5G New Radio (NR) compliant uplink setup under a fading channel, describing the optimal receiver design and a low complexity coherent approximation to it. Our results demonstrate 3 - 6 dB reduction in the average transmit power required to achieve the target error rates compared to the NR baseline, while also achieving a 2 - 3 dB reduction in the maximum transmit power, thus providing for significant coverage gains and power savings. The authors are with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc (e-mail: akasdosh@qti.qualcomm.com). A. Motivation Wireless systems from 2G to 5G are designed based on Shannon's Separation Theorem [2]. While design of channel coding at the physical (PHY) layer assumes a uniform source prior, the design of source coding ignores the channel statistics.