Data is often impractical to share for a range of well considered reasons, such as concerns over privacy, intellectual property, and legal constraints. This not only fragments the statistical power of predictive models, but creates an accessibility bias, where accuracy becomes inequitably distributed to those who have the resources to overcome these concerns. We present DISCO: an open-source DIStributed COllaborative learning platform accessible to non-technical users, offering a means to collaboratively build machine learning models without sharing any original data or requiring any programming knowledge. DISCO's web application trains models locally directly in the browser, making our tool cross-platform out-of-the-box, including smartphones. The modular design of \disco offers choices between federated and decentralized paradigms, various levels of privacy guarantees and several approaches to weight aggregation strategies that allow for model personalization and bias resilience in the collaborative training. Code repository is available at https://github.com/epfml/disco and a showcase web interface at https://discolab.ai

As educational systems evolve, ensuring that assessment items remain aligned with content standards is essential for maintaining fairness and instructional relevance. Traditional human alignment reviews are accurate but slow and labor-intensive, especially across large item banks. This study examines whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can accelerate this process without sacrificing accuracy. Using over 12,000 item-skill pairs in grades K-5, we tested three LLMs (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-4o) across three tasks that mirror real-world challenges: identifying misaligned items, selecting the correct skill from the full set of standards, and narrowing candidate lists prior to classification. In Study 1, GPT-4o-mini correctly identified alignment status in approximately 83-94% of cases, including subtle misalignments. In Study 2, performance remained strong in mathematics but was lower for reading, where standards are more semantically overlapping. Study 3 demonstrated that pre-filtering candidate skills substantially improved results, with the correct skill appearing among the top five suggestions more than 95% of the time. These findings suggest that LLMs, particularly when paired with candidate filtering strategies, can significantly reduce the manual burden of item review while preserving alignment accuracy. We recommend the development of hybrid pipelines that combine LLM-based screening with human review in ambiguous cases, offering a scalable solution for ongoing item validation and instructional alignment.

Transformers face scalability challenges due to the quadratic cost of attention, which involves dense similarity computations between queries and keys. We propose CAMformer, a novel accelerator that reinterprets attention as an associative memory operation and computes attention scores using a voltage-domain Binary Attention Content Addressable Memory (BA-CAM). This enables constant-time similarity search through analog charge sharing, replacing digital arithmetic with physical similarity sensing. CAMformer integrates hierarchical two-stage top-k filtering, pipelined execution, and high-precision contextualization to achieve both algorithmic accuracy and architectural efficiency. Evaluated on BERT and Vision Transformer workloads, CAMformer achieves over 10x energy efficiency, up to 4x higher throughput, and 6-8x lower area compared to state-of-the-art accelerators--while maintaining near-lossless accuracy.

Domain-specific text embeddings are critical for clinical natural language processing, yet systematic comparisons across model architectures remain limited. This study evaluates ten transformer-based embedding models adapted for cardiology through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on 106,535 cardiology text pairs derived from authoritative medical textbooks. Results demonstrate that encoder-only architectures, particularly BioLinkBERT, achieve superior domain-specific performance (separation score: 0.510) compared to larger decoder-based models, while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. The findings challenge the assumption that larger language models necessarily produce better domain-specific embeddings and provide practical guidance for clinical NLP system development. All models, training code, and evaluation datasets are publicly available to support reproducible research in medical informatics.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been the cornerstone of clinical evidence; however, their cost, duration, and restrictive eligibility criteria limit power and external validity. Studies using real-world data (RWD), historically considered less reliable for establishing causality, are now recognized to be important for generating real-world evidence (RWE). In parallel, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are being increasingly used throughout the drug development process, providing scalability and flexibility but also presenting challenges in interpretability and rigor that traditional statistics do not face. This Perspective argues that the future of evidence generation will not depend on RCTs versus RWD, or statistics versus AI/ML, but on their principled integration. To this end, a causal roadmap is needed to clarify inferential goals, make assumptions explicit, and ensure transparency about tradeoffs. We highlight key objectives of integrative evidence synthesis, including transporting RCT results to broader populations, embedding AI-assisted analyses within RCTs, designing hybrid controlled trials, and extending short-term RCTs with long-term RWD. We also outline future directions in privacy-preserving analytics, uncertainty quantification, and small-sample methods. By uniting statistical rigor with AI/ML innovation, integrative approaches can produce robust, transparent, and policy-relevant evidence, making them a key component of modern regulatory science.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are crucial in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions due to their ability to monitor vast maritime areas. However, small objects often remain difficult to detect from high altitudes due to low object-to-background pixel ratios. We propose an altitude-aware dynamic tiling method that scales and adaptively subdivides the image into tiles for enhanced small object detection. By integrating altitude-dependent scaling with an adaptive tiling factor, we reduce unnecessary computation while maintaining detection performance. Tested on the SeaDronesSee dataset [1] with YOLOv5 [2] and Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) framework [3], our approach improves Mean Average Precision (mAP) for small objects by 38% compared to a baseline and achieves more than double the inference speed compared to static tiling. This approach enables more efficient and accurate UAV-based SAR operations under diverse conditions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, representing the most significant security threat in production deployments. We present Prompt Fencing, a novel architectural approach that applies cryptographic authentication and data architecture principles to establish explicit security boundaries within LLM prompts. Our approach decorates prompt segments with cryptographically signed metadata including trust ratings and content types, enabling LLMs to distinguish between trusted instructions and untrusted content. While current LLMs lack native fence awareness, we demonstrate that simulated awareness through prompt instructions achieved complete prevention of injection attacks in our experiments, reducing success rates from 86.7% (260/300 successful attacks) to 0% (0/300 successful attacks) across 300 test cases with two leading LLM providers. We implement a proof-of-concept fence generation and verification pipeline with a total overhead of 0.224 seconds (0.130s for fence generation, 0.094s for validation) across 100 samples. Our approach is platform-agnostic and can be incrementally deployed as a security layer above existing LLM infrastructure, with the expectation that future models will be trained with native fence awareness for optimal security. Keywords: Large Language Models, Prompt Injection, Cryptographic Security, Trust Boundaries, LLM Security Note: The experiments described in this paper were conducted in October 2025. This paper was written and submitted in November 2025.

Multi-agent systems often operate under feedback, adaptation, and non-stationarity, yet many simulation studies retain static decision rules and fixed control parameters. This paper introduces a general adaptive multi-agent learning framework that integrates: (i) four dynamic regimes distinguishing static versus adaptive agents and fixed versus adaptive system parameters; (ii) information-theoretic diagnostics (entropy rate, statistical complexity, and predictive information) to assess predictability and structure; (iii) structural causal models for explicit intervention semantics; (iv) procedures for generating agent-level priors from aggregate or sample data; and (v) unsupervised methods for identifying emergent behavioral regimes. The framework offers a domain-neutral architecture for analyzing how learning agents and adaptive controls jointly shape system trajectories, enabling systematic comparison of stability, performance, and interpretability across non-equilibrium, oscillatory, or drifting dynamics. Mathematical definitions, computational operators, and an experimental design template are provided, yielding a structured methodology for developing explainable and contestable multi-agent decision processes.

Consider a service system in which individuals are served by facilities at different locations within a geographical region. For example, the facilities could represent schools, polling places, or commercial fulfillment centers. The geographical partitioning problem (Carlsson & Devulapalli 2013) divides the region into non-overlapping districts, such that all individuals residing in the same district are served by the same facility. The goal is to choose a partition that optimizes some measure of social welfare, most commonly the average travel cost per individual (Carlsson et al. 2016). We formulate and study a novel variant of this problem where the population is heterogeneous, consisting of multiple demographic groups, each with a different spatial distribution throughout the region. Again we optimize the expected cost, but now we also impose a new group fairness condition: each subpopulation can be neither over-nor under-represented at any facility. In other words, the districts are designed in such a way that the proportion of the population belonging to a particular group in any district must match that group's incidence in the entire population. This condition is also known as "demographic parity" in the literature (Dwork et al. 2012).

Abstract--We study distributed convex optimization with two ubiquitous forms of coupling: consensus constraints and gl obal affine equalities. Without smooth ness or strong convexity, we establish non-ergodic sublinear ra tes of order O (1/ k) for both the objective optimality and the consensus violation. Leveraging duality, we then show that the eco nomic dispatch problem admits a dual consensus formulation, and t hat applying the same algorithm to the dual economic dispatch yi elds non-ergodic O (1/ k) decay for the error of the summation of the cost over the network and the equality-constraint resid ual under convexity and Slater's condition. Numerical results on the IEEE 118-bus system demonstrate faster reduction of bot h objective error and feasibility error relative to the state -of-the-art baselines, while the dual variables reach network-wide con sensus. This paper studies large-scale convex optimization proble ms formulated over networks, which frequently arise in engineering applications.