The physics programs of current and future collider experiments necessitate the development of surrogate simulators for calorimeter showers. While much progress has been made in the development of generative models for this task, they have typically been evaluated in simplified scenarios and for single particles. This is particularly true for the challenging task of highly granular calorimeter simulation. For the first time, this work studies the use of highly granular generative calorimeter surrogates in a realistic simulation application. We introduce DDML, a generic library which enables the combination of generative calorimeter surrogates with realistic detectors implemented using the DD4hep toolkit. We compare two different generative models - one operating on a regular grid representation, and the other using a less common point cloud approach. In order to disentangle methodological details from model performance, we provide comparisons to idealized simulators which directly sample representations of different resolutions from the full simulation ground-truth. We then systematically evaluate model performance on post-reconstruction benchmarks for electromagnetic shower simulation. Beginning with a typical single particle study, we introduce a first multi-particle benchmark based on di-photon separations, before studying a first full-physics benchmark based on hadronic decays of the tau lepton. Our results indicate that models operating on a point cloud can achieve a favorable balance between speed and accuracy for highly granular calorimeter simulation compared to those which operate on a regular grid representation.

Premium automotive manufacturers face increasingly complex forecasting challenges due to high product variety, sparse variant-level data, and volatile market dynamics. This study addresses monthly automobile demand forecasting across a multi-product, multi-market, and multi-level hierarchy using data from a German premium manufacturer. The methodology combines point and probabilistic forecasts across strategic and operational planning levels, leveraging ensembles of LightGBM models with pooled training sets, quantile regression, and a mixed-integer linear programming reconciliation approach. Results highlight that spatiotemporal dependencies, as well as rounding bias, significantly affect forecast accuracy, underscoring the importance of integer forecasts for operational feasibility. Shapley analysis shows that short-term demand is reactive, shaped by life cycle maturity, autoregressive momentum, and operational signals, whereas medium-term demand reflects anticipatory drivers such as online engagement, planning targets, and competitive indicators, with online behavioral data considerably improving accuracy at disaggregated levels.

Training autonomous driving and navigation systems requires large and diverse point cloud datasets that capture complex edge case scenarios from various dynamic urban settings. Acquiring such diverse scenarios from real-world point cloud data, especially for critical edge cases, is challenging, which restricts system generalization and robustness. Current methods rely on simulating point cloud data within handcrafted 3D virtual environments, which is time-consuming, computationally expensive, and often fails to fully capture the complexity of real-world scenes. To address some of these issues, this research proposes a novel approach that addresses the problem discussed by editing real-world LiDAR scans using semantic mask-based guidance to generate novel synthetic LiDAR point clouds. We incorporate range image projection and semantic mask conditioning to achieve diffusion-based generation. Point clouds are transformed to 2D range view images, which are used as an intermediate representation to enable semantic editing using convex hull-based semantic masks. These masks guide the generation process by providing information on the dimensions, orientations, and locations of objects in the real environment, ensuring geometric consistency and realism. This approach demonstrates high-quality LiDAR point cloud generation, capable of producing complex edge cases and dynamic scenes, as validated on the KITTI-360 dataset. This offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for generating diverse LiDAR data, a step toward improving the robustness of autonomous driving systems.

In this work, we propose a simulator, based on the open-source physics engine MuJoCo, for the design and control of soft robotic nets for the autonomous removal of space debris. The proposed simulator includes net dynamics, contact between the net and the debris, self-contact of the net, orbital mechanics, and a controller that can actuate thrusters on the four satellites at the corners of the net. It showcases the case of capturing Envisat, a large ESA satellite that remains in orbit as space debris following the end of its mission. This work investigates different mechanical models, which can be used to simulate the net dynamics, simulating various degrees of compliance, and different control strategies to achieve the capture of the debris, depending on the relative position of the net and the target. Unlike previous works on this topic, we do not assume that the net has been previously ballistically thrown toward the target, and we start from a relatively static configuration. The results show that a more compliant net achieves higher performance when attempting the capture of Envisat. Moreover, when paired with a sliding mode controller, soft nets are able to achieve successful capture in 100% of the tested cases, whilst also showcasing a higher effective area at contact and a higher number of contact points between net and Envisat.

Nowadays, we are witnessing an Artificial Intelligence revolution that dominates the technology landscape in various application domains, such as healthcare, robotics, automotive, security, and defense. Massive-scale AI models, which mimic the human brain's functionality, typically feature millions and even billions of parameters through data-intensive matrix multiplication tasks. While conventional Von-Neumann architectures struggle with the memory wall and the end of Moore's Law, these AI applications are migrating rapidly towards the edge, such as in robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, thereby adding more constraints to the hardware budget of AI architectures at the edge. Although in-memory computing has been proposed as a promising solution for the memory wall, both analog and digital in-memory computing architectures suffer from substantial degradation of the proposed benefits due to various design limitations. We propose a new digital in-memory stochastic computing architecture, DISCA, utilizing a compressed version of the quasi-stochastic Bent-Pyramid data format. DISCA inherits the same computational simplicity of analog computing, while preserving the same scalability, productivity, and reliability of digital systems. Post-layout modeling results of DISCA show an energy efficiency of 3.59 TOPS/W per bit at 500 MHz using a commercial 180nm CMOS technology. Therefore, DISCA significantly improves the energy efficiency for matrix multiplication workloads by orders of magnitude if scaled and compared to its counterpart architectures.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly influence high-stakes decision-making across global contexts, ensuring their alignment with diverse cultural values has become a critical governance challenge. This study presents a Multi-Layered Auditing Platform for Responsible AI that systematically evaluates cross-cultural value alignment in China-origin and Western-origin LLMs through four integrated methodologies: Ethical Dilemma Corpus for assessing temporal stability, Diversity-Enhanced Framework (DEF) for quantifying cultural fidelity, First-Token Probability Alignment for distributional accuracy, and Multi-stAge Reasoning frameworK (MARK) for interpretable decision-making. Our comparative analysis of 20+ leading models, such as Qwen, GPT-4o, Claude, LLaMA, and DeepSeek, reveals universal challenges-fundamental instability in value systems, systematic under-representation of younger demographics, and non-linear relationships between model scale and alignment quality-alongside divergent regional development trajectories. While China-origin models increasingly emphasize multilingual data integration for context-specific optimization, Western models demonstrate greater architectural experimentation but persistent U.S.-centric biases. Neither paradigm achieves robust cross-cultural generalization. We establish that Mistral-series architectures significantly outperform LLaMA3-series in cross-cultural alignment, and that Full-Parameter Fine-Tuning on diverse datasets surpasses Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback in preserving cultural variation...

Sampling useful three-dimensional molecular structures along with their most favorable conformations is a key challenge in drug discovery. Current state-of-the-art 3D de-novo design flow matching or diffusion-based models are limited to generating a single conformation. However, the conformational landscape of a molecule determines its observable properties and how tightly it is able to bind to a given protein target. By generating a representative set of low-energy conformers, we can more directly assess these properties and potentially improve the ability to generate molecules with desired thermodynamic observables. Towards this aim, we propose FlexiFlow, a novel architecture that extends flow-matching models, allowing for the joint sampling of molecules along with multiple conformations while preserving both equivariance and permutation invariance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the QM9 and GEOM Drugs datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results in molecular generation tasks. Our results show that FlexiFlow can generate valid, unstrained, unique, and novel molecules with high fidelity to the training data distribution, while also capturing the conformational diversity of molecules. Moreover, we show that our model can generate conformational ensembles that provide similar coverage to state-of-the-art physics-based methods at a fraction of the inference time. Finally, FlexiFlow can be successfully transferred to the protein-conditioned ligand generation task, even when the dataset contains only static pockets without accompanying conformations.

This paper presents a novel framework combining group equivariant convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) with equivariant-aware structured pruning to produce compact, transformation-invariant models for resource-constrained environments. Equivariance to rotations is achieved through the C4 cyclic group via the e2cnn library,enabling consistent performance under geometric transformations while reducing computational overhead. Our approach introduces structured pruning that preserves equivariant properties by analyzing e2cnn layer structure and applying neuron-level pruning to fully connected components. To mitigate accuracy degradation, we implement adaptive fine-tuning that automatically triggers when accuracy drop exceeds 2%, using early stopping and learning rate scheduling for efficient recovery. The framework includes dynamic INT8 quantization and a comprehensive pipeline encompassing training, knowledge distillation, structured pruning, fine-tuning, and quantization. We evaluate our method on satellite imagery (EuroSAT) and standard benchmarks (CIFAR-10, Rotated MNIST) demonstrating effectiveness across diverse domains. Experimental results show 29.3% parameter reduction with significant accuracy recovery, demonstrating that structured pruning of equivariant networks achieves substantial compression while maintaining geometric robustness. Our pipeline provides a reproducible framework for optimizing equivariant models, bridging the gap between group-theoretic network design and practical deployment constraints, with particular relevance to satellite imagery analysis and geometric vision tasks.

Understanding and predicting user behavior on social media platforms is crucial for content recommendation and platform design. While existing approaches focus primarily on common actions like retweeting and liking, the prediction of rare but significant behaviors remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a hybrid methodology for social media user behavior prediction that addresses both frequent and infrequent actions across a diverse action vocabulary. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale Bluesky dataset containing 6.4 million conversation threads spanning 12 distinct user actions across 25 persona clusters. Our methodology combines four complementary approaches: (i) a lookup database system based on historical response patterns; (ii) persona-specific LightGBM models with engineered temporal and semantic features for common actions; (iii) a specialized hybrid neural architecture fusing textual and temporal representations for rare action classification; and (iv) generation of text replies. Our persona-specific models achieve an average macro F1-score of 0.64 for common action prediction, while our rare action classifier achieves 0.56 macro F1-score across 10 rare actions. These results demonstrate that effective social media behavior prediction requires tailored modeling strategies recognizing fundamental differences between action types. Our approach achieved first place in the SocialSim: Social-Media Based Personas challenge organized at the Social Simulation with LLMs workshop at COLM 2025.

Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.