Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a vital role in defending modern cyber physical systems against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Deep Reinforcement Learning-based IDS, have shown promise due to their adaptive and generalization capabilities. However, recent studies reveal their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, including Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs), which can deceive models with a single, input-agnostic perturbation. In this work, we propose a novel UAP attack against Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based IDS under the domain-specific constraints derived from network data rules and feature relationships. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing study that has explored UAP generation for the DRL-based IDS. In addition, this is the first work that focuses on developing a UAP against a DRL-based IDS under realistic domain constraints based on not only the basic domain rules but also mathematical relations between the features. Furthermore, we enhance the evasion performance of the proposed UAP, by introducing a customized loss function based on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, and we denote it as Customized UAP. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first work using the PCC value in the UAP generation, even in the broader context. Four additional established UAP baselines are implemented for a comprehensive comparison. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Customized UAP outperforms two input-dependent attacks including Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Basic Iterative Method (BIM), and four UAP baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world adversarial scenarios.

This research full paper presents an enhancement pipeline for large language models (LLMs) in assessing homework for an undergraduate circuit analysis course, aiming to improve LLMs' capacity to provide personalized support to electrical engineering students. Existing evaluations have demonstrated that GPT-4o possesses promising capabilities in assessing student homework in this domain. Building on these findings, we enhance GPT-4o's performance through multi-step prompting, contextual data augmentation, and the incorporation of targeted hints. These strategies effectively address common errors observed in GPT-4o's responses when using simple prompts, leading to a substantial improvement in assessment accuracy. Specifically, the correct response rate for GPT-4o increases from 74.71% to 97.70% after applying the enhanced prompting and augmented data on entry-level circuit analysis topics. This work lays a foundation for the effective integration of LLMs into circuit analysis instruction and, more broadly, into engineering education.

We explore surface electromyography (sEMG) as a non-invasive input modality for mapping muscle activity to keyboard inputs, targeting immersive typing in next-generation human-computer interaction (HCI). This is especially relevant for spatial computing and virtual reality (VR), where traditional keyboards are impractical. Using attention-based architectures, we significantly outperform the existing convolutional baselines, reducing online generic CER from 24.98% -> 20.34% and offline personalized CER from 10.86% -> 10.10%, while remaining fully causal. We further incorporate a lightweight decoding pipeline with language-model-based correction, demonstrating the feasibility of accurate, real-time muscle-driven text input for future wearable and spatial interfaces.

The Hausdorff distance (HD) is a robust measure of set dissimilarity, but computing it exactly on large, high-dimensional datasets is prohibitively expensive. We propose \textbf{ProHD}, a projection-guided approximation algorithm that dramatically accelerates HD computation while maintaining high accuracy. ProHD identifies a small subset of candidate "extreme" points by projecting the data onto a few informative directions (such as the centroid axis and top principal components) and computing the HD on this subset. This approach guarantees an underestimate of the true HD with a bounded additive error and typically achieves results within a few percent of the exact value. In extensive experiments on image, physics, and synthetic datasets (up to two million points in $D=256$), ProHD runs 10--100$\times$ faster than exact algorithms while attaining 5--20$\times$ lower error than random sampling-based approximations. Our method enables practical HD calculations in scenarios like large vector databases and streaming data, where quick and reliable set distance estimation is needed.

Modern web applications--from real-time content recommendation and dynamic pricing to CDN optimization--increasingly rely on time-series forecasting to deliver personalized experiences to billions of users. Large-scale Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in time-series forecasting but suffer from high computational costs, limiting their deployment in latency-sensitive web applications. To address this challenge, we propose a general inference acceleration framework that adapts speculative decoding to autoregressive time-series models. Our approach employs a smaller "draft" model to propose future time-series patches, which are then verified in parallel by a larger "target" model, reducing the number of sequential forward passes required. We address key technical challenges in adapting this technique from discrete language tokens to continuous time-series distributions, including the design of acceptance criteria for multivariate Gaussian patches and practical variants that balance efficiency with accuracy. Through experiments on time series forecasting benchmarks relevant to web applications, we demonstrate significant inference speedups while maintaining competitive accuracy. The framework requires no architectural modifications to existing foundation models, making it immediately applicable to accelerate deployed time-series forecasting systems. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/PranavSubbaraman/STRIDE

This paper introduces the Creative Intelligence Loop (CIL), a novel socio-technical framework for responsible human-AI co-creation. Rooted in the 'Workflow as Medium' paradigm, the CIL proposes a disciplined structure for dynamic human-AI collaboration, guiding the strategic integration of diverse AI teammates who function as collaborators while the human remains the final arbiter for ethical alignment and creative integrity. The CIL was empirically demonstrated through the practice-led creation of two graphic novellas, investigating how AI could serve as an effective creative colleague within a subjective medium lacking objective metrics. The process required navigating multifaceted challenges including AI's 'jagged frontier' of capabilities, sycophancy, and attention-scarce feedback environments. This prompted iterative refinement of teaming practices, yielding emergent strategies: a multi-faceted critique system integrating adversarial AI roles to counter sycophancy, and prioritizing 'feedback-ready' concrete artifacts to elicit essential human critique. The resulting graphic novellas analyze distinct socio-technical governance failures: 'The Steward' examines benevolent AI paternalism in smart cities, illustrating how algorithmic hubris can erode freedom; 'Fork the Vote' probes democratic legitimacy by comparing centralized AI opacity with emergent collusion in federated networks. This work contributes a self-improving framework for responsible human-AI co-creation and two graphic novellas designed to foster AI literacy and dialogue through accessible narrative analysis of AI's societal implications.

This paper addresses a critical gap in Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MOMARL) by introducing the first dedicated inner-loop actor-critic framework for continuous state and action spaces: Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Actor-Critic (MOMA-AC). Building on single-objective, single-agent algorithms, we instantiate this framework with Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), yielding MOMA-TD3 and MOMA-DDPG. The framework combines a multi-headed actor network, a centralised critic, and an objective preference-conditioning architecture, enabling a single neural network to encode the Pareto front of optimal trade-off policies for all agents across conflicting objectives in a continuous MOMARL setting. We also outline a natural test suite for continuous MOMARL by combining a pre-existing multi-agent single-objective physics simulator with its multi-objective single-agent counterpart. Evaluating cooperative locomotion tasks in this suite, we show that our framework achieves statistically significant improvements in expected utility and hypervolume relative to outer-loop and independent training baselines, while demonstrating stable scalability as the number of agents increases. These results establish our framework as a foundational step towards robust, scalable multi-objective policy learning in continuous multi-agent domains.

Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have enabled Large Language Models to answer financial questions using external knowledge bases of U.S. SEC filings, earnings reports, and regulatory documents. However, existing work lacks systematic comparison of vector-based and non-vector RAG architectures for financial documents, and the empirical impact of advanced RAG techniques on retrieval accuracy, answer quality, latency, and cost remain unclear. We present the first systematic evaluation comparing vector-based agentic RAG using hybrid search and metadata filtering against hierarchical node-based systems that traverse document structure without embeddings. We evaluate two enhancement techniques applied to the vector-based architecture, i) cross-encoder reranking for retrieval precision, and ii) small-to-big chunk retrieval for context completeness. Across 1,200 SEC 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K filings on a 150-question benchmark, we measure retrieval metrics (MRR, Recall@5), answer quality through LLM-as-a-judge pairwise comparisons, latency, and preprocessing costs. Vector-based agentic RAG achieves a 68% win rate over hierarchical node-based systems with comparable latency (5.2 compared to 5.98 seconds). Cross-encoder reranking achieves a 59% absolute improvement at optimal parameters (10, 5) for MRR@5. Small-to-big retrieval achieves a 65% win rate over baseline chunking with only 0.2 seconds additional latency. Our findings reveal that applying advanced RAG techniques to financial Q&A systems improves retrieval accuracy, answer quality, and has cost-performance tradeoffs to be considered in production.

Delicate snap-fit assemblies, such as inserting a lens into an eye-wear frame or during electronics assembly, demand timely engagement detection and rapid force attenuation to prevent overshoot-induced component damage or assembly failure. We address these challenges with two key contributions. First, we introduce SnapNet, a lightweight neural network that detects snap-fit engagement from joint-velocity transients in real-time, showing that reliable detection can be achieved using proprioceptive signals without external sensors. Second, we present a dynamical-systems-based dual-arm coordination framework that integrates SnapNet driven detection with an event-triggered impedance modulation, enabling accurate alignment and compliant insertion during delicate snap-fit assemblies. Experiments across diverse geometries on a heterogeneous bimanual platform demonstrate high detection accuracy (over 96% recall) and up to a 30% reduction in peak impact forces compared to standard impedance control.

This study introduce GeeSanBhava, a high-quality data set of Sinhala song comments extracted from YouTube manually tagged using Russell's Valence-Arousal model by three independent human annotators. The human annotators achieve a substantial inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss' kappa = 84.96%). The analysis revealed distinct emotional profiles for different songs, highlighting the importance of comment-based emotion mapping. The study also addressed the challenges of comparing comment-based and song-based emotions, mitigating biases inherent in user-generated content. A number of Machine learning and deep learning models were pre-trained on a related large data set of Sinhala News comments in order to report the zero-shot result of our Sinhala YouTube comment data set. An optimized Multi-Layer Percep-tron model, after extensive hyperparameter tuning, achieved a ROC-AUC score of 0.887. The model is a three-layer MLP with a configuration of 256, 128, and 64 neurons. This research contributes a valuable annotated dataset and provides insights for future work in Sinhala Natural Language Processing and music emotion recognition.