Dense 3D semantic occupancy perception is critical for mobile robots operating in pedestrian-rich environments, yet it remains underexplored compared to its application in autonomous driving. To address this gap, we present MobileOcc, a semantic occupancy dataset for mobile robots operating in crowded human environments. Our dataset is built using an annotation pipeline that incorporates static object occupancy annotations and a novel mesh optimization framework explicitly designed for human occupancy modeling. It reconstructs deformable human geometry from 2D images and subsequently refines and optimizes it using associated LiDAR point data. Using MobileOcc, we establish benchmarks for two tasks, i) Occupancy prediction and ii) Pedestrian velocity prediction, using different methods including monocular, stereo, and panoptic occupancy, with metrics and baseline implementations for reproducible comparison. Beyond occupancy prediction, we further assess our annotation method on 3D human pose estimation datasets. Results demonstrate that our method exhibits robust performance across different datasets.

Modeling realistic and interactive multi-agent behavior is critical to autonomous driving and traffic simulation. However, existing diffusion and autoregressive approaches are limited by iterative sampling, sequential decoding, or task-specific designs, which hinder efficiency and reuse. We propose Masked Denoising Generation (MDG), a unified generative framework that reformulates multi-agent behavior modeling as the reconstruction of independently noised spatiotemporal tensors. Instead of relying on diffusion time steps or discrete tokenization, MDG applies continuous, per-agent and per-timestep noise masks that enable localized denoising and controllable trajectory generation in a single or few forward passes. This mask-driven formulation generalizes across open-loop prediction, closed-loop simulation, motion planning, and conditional generation within one model. Trained on large-scale real-world driving datasets, MDG achieves competitive closed-loop performance on the Waymo Sim Agents and nuPlan Planning benchmarks, while providing efficient, consistent, and controllable open-loop multi-agent trajectory generation. These results position MDG as a simple yet versatile paradigm for multi-agent behavior modeling.

Recent advances in multimodal deep learning have greatly enhanced the capability of systems for speech analysis and pronunciation assessment. Accurate pronunciation detection remains a key challenge in Arabic, particularly in the context of Quranic recitation, where subtle phonetic differences can alter meaning. Addressing this challenge, the present study proposes a transformer-based multimodal framework for Arabic phoneme mispronunciation detection that combines acoustic and textual representations to achieve higher precision and robustness. The framework integrates UniSpeech-derived acoustic embeddings with BERT-based textual embeddings extracted from Whisper transcriptions, creating a unified representation that captures both phonetic detail and linguistic context. To determine the most effective integration strategy, early, intermediate, and late fusion methods were implemented and evaluated on two datasets containing 29 Arabic phonemes, including eight hafiz sounds, articulated by 11 native speakers. Additional speech samples collected from publicly available YouTube recordings were incorporated to enhance data diversity and generalization. Model performance was assessed using standard evaluation metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, allowing a detailed comparison of the fusion strategies. Experimental findings show that the UniSpeech-BERT multimodal configuration provides strong results and that fusion-based transformer architectures are effective for phoneme-level mispronunciation detection. The study contributes to the development of intelligent, speaker-independent, and multimodal Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems, offering a practical step toward technology-supported Quranic pronunciation training and broader speech-based educational applications.

Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-MS) is a cornerstone in biomolecular analysis, offering precise identification of pathogens through unique mass spectral signatures. Yet, its reliance on labor-intensive sample preparation and multi-shot spectral averaging restricts its use to laboratory settings, rendering it impractical for real-time environmental monitoring. These limitations are especially pronounced in emerging aerosol MALDI-MS systems, where autonomous sampling generates noisy spectra for unknown aerosol analytes, requiring single-shot detection for effective analysis. Addressing these challenges, we propose the Mass Spectral Dictionary-Guided Transformer (MS-DGFormer): a data-driven framework that redefines spectral analysis by directly processing raw, minimally prepared mass spectral data. MS-DGFormer leverages a transformer architecture, designed to capture the long-range dependencies inherent in these time-series spectra. To enhance feature extraction, we introduce a novel dictionary encoder that integrates denoised spectral information derived from Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), enabling the model to discern critical biomolecular patterns from single-shot spectra with robust performance. This innovation provides a system to achieve superior pathogen identification from aerosol samples, facilitating autonomous, real-time analysis in field conditions. By eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing, our method unlocks the potential for portable, deployable MALDI-MS platforms, revolutionizing environmental pathogen detection and rapid response to biological threats.

Foundation Models (FMs) are increasingly used in remote sensing (RS) for tasks such as environmental monitoring, disaster assessment, and land-use mapping. These models include unimodal vision encoders trained on a single data modality and multimodal architectures trained on combinations of SAR, multispectral, hyperspectral, and image-text data. They support diverse RS tasks including semantic segmentation, image classification, change detection, and visual question answering. However, selecting an appropriate remote sensing foundation model (RSFM) remains difficult due to scattered documentation, heterogeneous formats, and varied deployment constraints. We introduce the RSFM Database (RS-FMD), a structured resource covering over 150 RSFMs spanning multiple data modalities, resolutions, and learning paradigms. Built on RS-FMD, we present REMSA, the first LLM-based agent for automated RSFM selection from natural language queries. REMSA interprets user requirements, resolves missing constraints, ranks candidate models using in-context learning, and provides transparent justifications. We also propose a benchmark of 75 expert-verified RS query scenarios, producing 900 configurations under an expert-centered evaluation protocol. REMSA outperforms several baselines, including naive agents, dense retrieval, and unstructured RAG-based LLMs. It operates entirely on publicly available metadata and does not access private or sensitive data.

Continual learning aims to enable neural networks to acquire new knowledge without forgetting previously learned information. While recent prompt-based methods perform strongly in class-incremental settings, they remain vulnerable under domain shifts, where the input distribution changes but the label space remains fixed. This exposes a persistent problem known as representation drift. Shared representations evolve in ways that overwrite previously useful features and cause forgetting even when prompts isolate task-specific parameters. To address this issue, we introduce InTAct, a method that preserves functional behavior in shared layers without freezing parameters or storing past data. InTAct captures the characteristic activation ranges associated with previously learned tasks and constrains updates to ensure the network remains consistent within these regions, while still allowing for flexible adaptation elsewhere. In doing so, InTAct stabilizes the functional role of important neurons rather than directly restricting parameter values. The approach is architecture-agnostic and integrates seamlessly into existing prompt-based continual learning frameworks. By regulating representation changes where past knowledge is encoded, InTAct achieves a principled balance between stability and plasticity. Across diverse domain-incremental benchmarks, including DomainNet and ImageNet-R, InTAct consistently reduces representation drift and improves performance, increasing Average Accuracy by up to 8 percentage points over state-of-the-art baselines.

The rapid evolution of the telecommunication industry necessitates efficient troubleshooting processes to maintain network reliability, software maintainability, and service quality. Trouble Reports (TRs), which document issues in Ericsson's production system, play a critical role in facilitating the timely resolution of software faults. However, the complexity and volume of TR data, along with the presence of diverse criteria that reflect different aspects of each fault, present challenges for retrieval systems. Building on prior work at Ericsson, which utilized a two-stage workflow, comprising Initial Retrieval (IR) and Re-Ranking (RR) stages, this study investigates different TR observation criteria and their impact on the performance of retrieval models. We propose \textbf{CREST} (\textbf{C}riteria-specific \textbf{R}etrieval via \textbf{E}nsemble of \textbf{S}pecialized \textbf{T}R models), a criterion-driven retrieval approach that leverages specialized models for different TR fields to improve both effectiveness and interpretability, thereby enabling quicker fault resolution and supporting software maintenance. CREST utilizes specialized models trained on specific TR criteria and aggregates their outputs to capture diverse and complementary signals. This approach leads to enhanced retrieval accuracy, better calibration of predicted scores, and improved interpretability by providing relevance scores for each criterion, helping users understand why specific TRs were retrieved. Using a subset of Ericsson's internal TRs, this research demonstrates that criterion-specific models significantly outperform a single model approach across key evaluation metrics. This highlights the importance of all targeted criteria used in this study for optimizing the performance of retrieval systems.

Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer an intuitive means for individuals with severe motor impairments to independently operate assistive robotic wheelchairs and navigate built environments. Despite considerable progress in BCI research, most current motion control systems are limited to discrete commands, rather than supporting continuous pursuit, where users can freely adjust speed and direction in real time. Such natural mobility control is, however, essential for wheelchair users to navigate complex public spaces, such as transit stations, airports, hospitals, and indoor corridors, to interact socially with the dynamic populations with agility, and to move flexibly and comfortably as autonomous driving is refined to allow movement at will. In this study, we address the gap of continuous pursuit motion control in BCIs by proposing and validating a brain-inspired Bayesian inference framework, where embodied dynamics in acceleration-based motor representations are decoded. This approach contrasts with conventional kinematics-level decoding and deep learning-based methods. Using a public dataset with sixteen hours of EEG from four subjects performing motor imagery-based target-following, we demonstrate that our method, utilizing Automatic Relevance Determination for feature selection and continual online learning, reduces the normalized mean squared error between predicted and true velocities by 72% compared to autoregressive and EEGNet-based methods in a session-accumulative transfer learning setting. Theoretically, these findings empirically support embodied cognition theory and reveal the brain's intrinsic motor control dynamics in an embodied and predictive nature. Practically, grounding EEG decoding in the same dynamical principles that govern biological motion offers a promising path toward more stable and intuitive BCI control.

Vision Transformers ($\text{ViTs}$) have become the backbone of vision foundation models, yet their optimization for multi-channel domains - such as cell painting or satellite imagery - remains underexplored. A key challenge in these domains is capturing interactions between channels, as each channel carries different information. While existing works have shown efficacy by treating each channel independently during tokenization, this approach naturally introduces a major computational bottleneck in the attention block - channel-wise comparisons leads to a quadratic growth in attention, resulting in excessive $\text{FLOPs}$ and high training cost. In this work, we shift focus from efficacy to the overlooked efficiency challenge in cross-channel attention and ask: "Is it necessary to model all channel interactions?". Inspired by the philosophy of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts ($\text{MoE}$), we propose MoE-ViT, a Mixture-of-Experts architecture for multi-channel images in $\text{ViTs}$, which treats each channel as an expert and employs a lightweight router to select only the most relevant experts per patch for attention. Proof-of-concept experiments on real-world datasets - JUMP-CP and So2Sat - demonstrate that $\text{MoE-ViT}$ achieves substantial efficiency gains without sacrificing, and in some cases enhancing, performance, making it a practical and attractive backbone for multi-channel imaging.

Face verification is a significant component of identity authentication in various applications including online banking and secure access to personal devices. The majority of the existing face image datasets often suffer from notable biases related to race, gender, and other demographic characteristics, limiting the effectiveness and fairness of face verification systems. In response to these challenges, we propose a comprehensive methodology that integrates advanced generative models to create varied and diverse high-quality synthetic face images. This methodology emphasizes the representation of a diverse range of facial traits, ensuring adherence to characteristics permissible in identity card photographs. Furthermore, we introduce the Diverse and Inclusive Faces for Verification (DIF-V) dataset, comprising 27,780 images of 926 unique identities, designed as a benchmark for future research in face verification. Our analysis reveals that existing verification models exhibit biases toward certain genders and races, and notably, applying identity style modifications negatively impacts model performance. By tackling the inherent inequities in existing datasets, this work not only enriches the discussion on diversity and ethics in artificial intelligence but also lays the foundation for developing more inclusive and reliable face verification technologies