The increasing frequency of heavy rainfall events, which are a major cause of urban flooding, underscores the urgent need for accurate precipitation forecasting - particularly in urban areas where localized events often go undetected by ground-based sensors. In Germany, only 17.3% of hourly heavy rain events between 2001 and 2018 were recorded by rain gauges, highlighting the limitations of traditional monitoring systems. Radar data are another source that effectively tracks ongoing precipitation; however, forecasting the development of heavy rain using radar alone remains challenging due to the brief and unpredictable nature of such events. Our focus is on evaluating the effectiveness of fusing satellite and radar data for nowcasting. We develop a multimodal nowcasting model that combines both radar and satellite imagery for predicting precipitation at lead times of 5, 15, and 30 minutes. We demonstrate that this multimodal strategy significantly outperforms radar-only approaches. Experimental results show that integrating satellite data improves prediction accuracy, particularly for intense precipitation. The proposed model increases the Critical Success Index for heavy rain by 4% and for violent rain by 3% at a 5-minute lead time. Moreover, it maintains higher predictive skill at longer lead times, where radar-only performance declines. A qualitative analysis of the severe flooding event in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in 2021 further illustrates the superior performance of the multimodal model. Unlike the radar-only model, which captures general precipitation patterns, the multimodal model yields more detailed and accurate forecasts for regions affected by heavy rain. This improved precision enables timely, reliable, life-saving warnings. Implementation available at https://github.com/RamaKassoumeh/Multimodal_heavy_rain

Sharing sensitive time series data in domains such as finance, healthcare, and energy consumption, such as patient records or investment accounts, is often restricted due to privacy concerns. Privacy-aware synthetic time series generation addresses this challenge by enforcing noise during training, inherently introducing a trade-off between privacy and utility. In many cases, sensitive sequences is correlated with publicly available, non-sensitive contextual metadata (e.g., household electricity consumption may be influenced by weather conditions and electricity prices). However, existing privacy-aware data generation methods often overlook this opportunity, resulting in suboptimal privacy-utility trade-offs. In this paper, we present Pub2Priv, a novel framework for generating private time series data by leveraging heterogeneous public knowledge. Our model employs a self-attention mechanism to encode public data into temporal and feature embeddings, which serve as conditional inputs for a diffusion model to generate synthetic private sequences. Additionally, we introduce a practical metric to assess privacy by evaluating the identifiability of the synthetic data. Experimental results show that Pub2Priv consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in improving the privacy-utility trade-off across finance, energy, and commodity trading domains.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging suffers from substantial data heterogeneity and the absence of standardized contrast labels across scanners, protocols, and institutions, which severely limits large-scale automated analysis. A unified representation of MRI contrast would enable a wide range of downstream utilities, from automatic sequence recognition to harmonization and quality control, without relying on manual annotations. To this end, we introduce MR-CLIP, a metadata-guided framework that learns MRI contrast representations by aligning volumetric images with their DICOM acquisition parameters. The resulting embeddings shows distinct clusters of MRI sequences and outperform supervised 3D baselines under data scarcity in few-shot sequence classification. Moreover, MR-CLIP enables unsupervised data quality control by identifying corrupted or inconsistent metadata through image-metadata embedding distances. By transforming routinely available acquisition metadata into a supervisory signal, MR-CLIP provides a scalable foundation for label-efficient MRI analysis across diverse clinical datasets.

Most multilingual question-answering benchmarks, while covering a diverse pool of languages, do not factor in regional diversity in the information they capture and tend to be Western-centric. This introduces a significant gap in fairly evaluating multilingual models' comprehension of factual information from diverse geographical locations. To address this, we introduce XNationQA for investigating the cultural literacy of multilingual LLMs. XNationQA encompasses a total of 49,280 questions on the geography, culture, and history of nine countries, presented in seven languages. We benchmark eight standard multilingual LLMs on XNationQA and evaluate them using two novel transference metrics. Our analyses uncover a considerable discrepancy in the models' accessibility to culturally specific facts across languages. Notably, we often find that a model demonstrates greater knowledge of cultural information in English than in the dominant language of the respective culture. The models exhibit better performance in Western languages, although this does not necessarily translate to being more literate for Western countries, which is counterintuitive. Furthermore, we observe that models have a very limited ability to transfer knowledge across languages, particularly evident in open-source models.

Telecom networks are rapidly growing in scale and complexity, making effective management, operation, and optimization increasingly challenging. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied to many telecom tasks, existing models are often narrow in scope, require large amounts of labeled data, and struggle to generalize across heterogeneous deployments. Consequently, network troubleshooting continues to rely heavily on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to manually correlate various data sources to identify root causes and corrective actions. To address these limitations, we propose a Multi-Agent System (MAS) that employs an agentic workflow, with Large Language Models (LLMs) coordinating multiple specialized tools for fully automated network troubleshooting. Once faults are detected by AI/ML-based monitors, the framework dynamically activates agents such as an orchestrator, solution planner, executor, data retriever, and root-cause analyzer to diagnose issues and recommend remediation strategies within a short time frame. A key component of this system is the solution planner, which generates appropriate remediation plans based on internal documentation. To enable this, we fine-tuned a Small Language Model (SLM) on proprietary troubleshooting documents to produce domain-grounded solution plans. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly accelerates troubleshooting automation across both Radio Access Network (RAN) and Core network domains.

As various 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors have been introduced to the market, research on multi-session simultaneous localization and mapping (MSS) using heterogeneous LiDAR sensors has been actively conducted. Existing MSS methods mostly rely on loop closure detection for inter-session alignment; however, the performance of loop closure detection can be potentially degraded owing to the differences in the density and field of view (FoV) of the sensors used in different sessions. In this study, we challenge the existing paradigm that relies heavily on loop detection modules and propose a novel MSS framework, called Multi-Mapcher, that employs large-scale map-to-map registration to perform inter-session initial alignment, which is commonly assumed to be infeasible, by leveraging outlier-robust 3D point cloud registration. Next, after finding inter-session loops by radius search based on the assumption that the inter-session initial alignment is sufficiently precise, anchor node-based robust pose graph optimization is employed to build a consistent global map. As demonstrated in our experiments, our approach shows substantially better MSS performance for various LiDAR sensors used to capture the sessions and is faster than state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/url-kaist/multi-mapcher.

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) are drawing increasing interest across academia and industry. However, many current MAS frameworks struggle with reliability and scalability, especially on complex tasks. We present AgentGit, a framework that brings Git-like rollback and branching to MAS workflows. Built as an infrastructure layer on top of LangGraph, AgentGit supports state commit, revert, and branching, allowing agents to traverse, compare, and explore multiple trajectories efficiently. To evaluate AgentGit, we designed an experiment that optimizes target agents by selecting better prompts. We ran a multi-step A/B test against three baselines -- LangGraph, AutoGen, and Agno -- on a real-world task: retrieving and analyzing paper abstracts. Results show that AgentGit significantly reduces redundant computation, lowers runtime and token usage, and supports parallel exploration across multiple branches, enhancing both reliability and scalability in MAS development. This work offers a practical path to more robust MAS design and enables error recovery, safe exploration, iterative debugging, and A/B testing in collaborative AI systems.

This research explores the evolution of the detective archetype in French detective fiction through computational analysis. Using quantitative methods and character-level embeddings, we show that a supervised model is able to capture the unity of the detective archetype across 150 years of literature, from M. Lecoq (1866) to Commissaire Adamsberg (2017). Building on this finding, the study demonstrates how the detective figure evolves from a secondary narrative role to become the central character and the "reasoning machine" [35] of the classical detective story. In the aftermath of the Second World War, with the importation of the hardboiled tradition into France, the archetype becomes more complex, navigating the genre's turn toward social violence and moral ambiguity.

We present a unified, data-driven framework for quantifying and enhancing offensive momentum and scoring likelihood (expected goals, xG) in professional hockey. Leveraging a Sportlogiq dataset of 541,000 NHL event records, our end-to-end pipeline comprises five stages: (1) interpretable momentum weighting of micro-events via logistic regression; (2) nonlinear xG estimation using gradient-boosted decision trees; (3) temporal sequence modeling with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks; (4) spatial formation discovery through principal component analysis (PCA) followed by K-Means clustering on standardized player coordinates; and (5) use of an X-Learner causal inference estimator to quantify the average treatment effect (ATE) of adopting the identified "optimal" event sequences and formations. We observe an ATE of 0.12 (95% CI: 0.05-0.17, p < 1e-50), corresponding to a 15% relative gain in scoring potential. These results demonstrate that strategically structured sequences and compact formations causally elevate offensive performance. Our framework delivers real-time, actionable insights for coaches and analysts, advancing hockey analytics toward principled, causally grounded tactical optimization.

Abstract--Multimodal recommendation systems utilize various types of information, including images and text, to enhance the effectiveness of recommendations. The key challenge is predicting user purchasing behavior from the available data. They also rely heavily on a single semantic framework (e.g., local or global semantics), resulting in an incomplete or biased representation of user preferences, particularly those less expressed in prior interactions. Furthermore, these approaches fail to capture the complex interactions between users and items limiting the model's ability to meet diverse users. T o address these challenges, we present SRGFormer, a structurally optimized multimodal recommendation model. By modifying the transformer for better integration into our model, we capture the overall behavior patterns of users. Then, we enhance structural information by embedding multimodal information into a hypergraph structure to aid in learning the local structures between users and items. Meanwhile, applying self-supervised tasks to user-item collaborative signals enhances the integration of multimodal information, thereby revealing the representational features inherent to the data's modality. Extensive experiments on three public datasets reveal that SRGFormer surpasses previous benchmark models, achieving an average performance improvement of 4.47% on the Sports dataset. The swift growth of online data has led platforms to implement multimodal recommendation systems, initially using collaborative filtering (CF) to analyze user preferences from historical interactions [1], [2]. However, CF struggles to handle sparse or non-existent interaction records leading to less accurate predictions.