Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) translation represents a low-resource NLP task due to the lack of large-scale datasets that address sentence-level translation. Correspondingly, existing research in this field has been limited to word and alphabet level detection. In this work, we introduce Bangla-SGP, a novel parallel dataset consisting of 1,000 human-annotated sentence-gloss pairs which was augmented with around 3,000 synthetically generated pairs using syntactic and morphological rules through a rule-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. The gloss sequences of the spoken Bangla sentences are made up of individual glosses which are Bangla sign supported words and serve as an intermediate representation for a continuous sign. Our dataset consists of 1000 high quality Bangla sentences that are manually annotated into a gloss sequence by a professional signer. The augmentation process incorporates rule-based linguistic strategies and prompt engineering techniques that we have adopted by critically analyzing our human annotated sentence-gloss pairs and by working closely with our professional signer. Furthermore, we fine-tune several transformer-based models such as mBart50, Google mT5, GPT4.1-nano and evaluate their sentence-to-gloss translation performance using BLEU scores, based on these evaluation metrics we compare the model's gloss-translation consistency across our dataset and the RWTH-PHOENIX-2014T benchmark.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the dominant approach for answering questions over large corpora. However, current datasets and methods are highly focused on cases where only a small part of the corpus (usually a few paragraphs) is relevant per query, and fail to capture the rich world of aggregative queries. These require gathering information from a large set of documents and reasoning over them. To address this gap, we propose S-RAG, an approach specifically designed for such queries. At ingestion time, S-RAG constructs a structured representation of the corpus; at inference time, it translates natural-language queries into formal queries over said representation. To validate our approach and promote further research in this area, we introduce two new datasets of aggregative queries: HOTELS and WORLD CUP. Experiments with S-RAG on the newly introduced datasets, as well as on a public benchmark, demonstrate that it substantially outperforms both common RAG systems and long-context LLMs. Most prior work has focused on simple queries, where the answer to a given question is explicitly mentioned within a short text segment in the corpus, and on multi-hop queries, which can be decomposed into smaller steps, each requiring only a few pieces of evidence.

Abstract--Autonomous systems increasingly rely on human feedback to align their behavior, expressed as pairwise comparisons, rankings, or demonstrations. While existing methods can adapt behaviors, they often fail to guarantee safety in safety-critical domains. We propose a safety-guaranteed, optimal, and efficient approach to solve the learning problem from preferences, rankings, or demonstrations using Weighted Signal T emporal Logic (WSTL). WSTL learning problems, when implemented naively, lead to multi-linear constraints in the weights to be learned. By introducing structural pruning and log-transform procedures, we reduce the problem size and recast the problem as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program while preserving safety guarantees. Experiments on robotic navigation and real-world Formula 1 data demonstrate that the method effectively captures nuanced preferences and models complex task objectives. Autonomous systems are increasingly part of our daily lives, from driverless cars in urban navigation to household robots performing domestic chores. Since these systems operate closely alongside humans, learning from human feedback is a natural way to ensure their behaviors align with human desires.

Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) adapted to financial domains often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of general reasoning capabilities essential for customer interactions and complex financial analysis. Our method approximates layer-wise impact on external benchmarks through post-hoc analysis, then selectively freezes or restores transformer layers via spherical interpolation merging. Applied to LLaMA-3.1-8B for financial tasks, SPEAR-MM achieves 91.2% retention of general capabilities versus 69.7% for standard continual pretraining, while maintaining 94% of domain adaptation gains. The approach provides interpretable trade-off control and reduces computational costs by 90% crucial for resource-constrained financial institutions. Financial institutions increasingly require domain-specific language models that can understand regulatory documents, analyze market data, and provide accurate customer support while maintaining broad reasoning capabilities for complex financial scenarios.

With increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats and rising demand for network automation, autonomous cybersecurity mechanisms are becoming critical for securing modern networks. The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) systems amplifies these challenges, as resource-constrained IoT devices demand scalable and efficient security solutions. In this work, an innovative Intrusion Detection System (IDS) utilizing Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) and Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) is proposed for autonomous and optimized cyber-attack detection in modern networking environments. The proposed IDS framework integrates two primary innovative techniques: Optimized Importance and Percentage-based Automated Feature Selection (OIP-AutoFS) and Optimized Performance, Confidence, and Efficiency-based Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization (OPCE-CASH). These components optimize feature selection and model learning processes to strike a balance between intrusion detection effectiveness and computational efficiency. This work presents the first IDS framework that integrates all four AutoML stages and employs multi-objective optimization to jointly optimize detection effectiveness, efficiency, and confidence for deployment in resource-constrained systems. Experimental evaluations over two benchmark cybersecurity datasets demonstrate that the proposed MOO-AutoML IDS outperforms state-of-the-art IDSs, establishing a new benchmark for autonomous, efficient, and optimized security for networks. Designed to support IoT and edge environments with resource constraints, the proposed framework is applicable to a variety of autonomous cybersecurity applications across diverse networked environments.

Concentric tube robots (CTRs) offer dexterous motion at millimeter scales, enabling minimally invasive procedures through natural orifices. This work presents a coordinated model-based resection planner and learning-based retraction network that work together to enable semi-autonomous tissue resection using a dual-arm transurethral concentric tube robot (the Virtuoso). The resection planner operates directly on segmented CT volumes of prostate phantoms, automatically generating tool trajectories for a three-phase median lobe resection workflow: left/median trough resection, right/median trough resection, and median blunt dissection. The retraction network, PushCVAE, trained on surgeon demonstrations, generates retractions according to the procedural phase. The procedure is executed under Level-3 (supervised) autonomy on a prostate phantom composed of hydrogel materials that replicate the mechanical and cutting properties of tissue. As a feasibility study, we demonstrate that our combined autonomous system achieves a 97.1% resection of the targeted volume of the median lobe. Our study establishes a foundation for image-guided autonomy in transurethral robotic surgery and represents a first step toward fully automated minimally-invasive prostate enucleation.

Current safety evaluations for LLM-driven agents primarily focus on atomic harms, failing to address sophisticated threats where malicious intent is concealed or diluted within complex tasks. We address this gap with a two-dimensional analysis of agent safety brittleness under the orthogonal pressures of intent concealment and task complexity. To enable this, we introduce OASIS (Orthogonal Agent Safety Inquiry Suite), a hierarchical benchmark with fine-grained annotations and a high-fidelity simulation sandbox. Our findings reveal two critical phenomena: safety alignment degrades sharply and predictably as intent becomes obscured, and a "Complexity Paradox" emerges, where agents seem safer on harder tasks only due to capability limitations. By releasing OASIS and its simulation environment, we provide a principled foundation for probing and strengthening agent safety in these overlooked dimensions.

We propose patching for large language models (LLM) like software versions, a lightweight and modular approach for addressing safety vulnerability. While vendors release improved LLM versions, major releases are costly, infrequent, and difficult to tailor to customer needs, leaving released models with known safety gaps. Unlike full-model fine-tuning or major version updates, our method enables rapid remediation by prepending a compact, learnable prefix to an existing model. This "patch" introduces only 0.003% additional parameters, yet reliably steers model behavior toward that of a safer reference model. Across three critical domains--toxicity mitigation, bias reduction, and harmfulness refusal--policy patches achieve safety improvements comparable to next-generation safety-aligned models while preserving fluency. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can be "patched" much like software, offering vendors and practitioners a practical mechanism for distributing scalable, efficient, and composable safety updates between major model releases. Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advances in reasoning, generation, and multilingual capabilities (Brown et al., 2020; Wei et al., 2022; Conneau & Lample, 2019). Despite their impressive capabilities, they continue to exhibit serious safety concerns, such as the generation of toxic language (Gehman et al., 2020), biased associations that reinforce stereotypes (Dong et al., 2024), and the production of harmful or dangerous content (Mazeika et al., 2024). Addressing these risks is crucial to the broader challenge of alignment, where models are refined to better align with human values and expectations. Conventional approaches to improving safety rely on alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Christiano et al., 2017; Bai et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2022), preference-based fine-tuning (Rafailov et al., 2023), domain-specific supervised fine-tuning (Li et al., 2024), etc. While these methods have proven effective, they require substantial computational resources, large-scale data curation, and careful model retraining. In practice, model providers (vendors) often release major updates to their models (major versions) on a fixed schedule, typically once or twice a year.

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology and comparative performance analysis for the automated classification and object detection of peripheral blood cells (PBCs) in microscopic images. Addressing the critical challenge of data scarcity and heterogeneity, robust data pipeline was first developed to standardize and merge four public datasets (PBC, BCCD, Chula, Sickle Cell) into a unified resource. Then employed a state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN object detection framework, leveraging a ResNet-50-FPN backbone. Comparative training rigorously evaluated a randomly initialized baseline model (Regimen 1) against a Transfer Learning Regimen (Regimen 2), initialized with weights pre-trained on the Microsoft COCO dataset. The results demonstrate that the Transfer Learning approach achieved significantly faster convergence and superior stability, culminating in a final validation loss of 0.08666, a substantial improvement over the baseline. This validated methodology establishes a robust foundation for building high-accuracy, deployable systems for automated hematological diagnosis.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly promoted and used in qualitative research, it also raises profound methodological issues. This position paper critically interrogates the role of generative AI (genAI) in the context of qualitative coding methodologies. Despite widespread hype and claims of efficiency, we propose that genAI is not methodologically valid within qualitative inquiries, and its use risks undermining the robustness and trustworthiness of qualitative research. The lack of meaningful documentation, commercial opacity, and the inherent tendencies of genAI systems to produce incorrect outputs all contribute to weakening methodological rigor. Overall, the balance between risk and benefits does not support the use of genAI in qualitative research, and our position paper cautions researchers to put sound methodology before technological novelty.