Personalized dialogue generation aims to leverage persona profiles and dialogue history to generate persona-relevant and consistent responses. Mainstream models typically rely on token-level language model training with persona dialogue data, such as Next Token Prediction, to implicitly achieve personalization, making these methods tend to neglect the given personas and generate generic responses. To address this issue, we propose a novel Persona-Aware Alignment Framework (PAL), which directly treats persona alignment as the training objective of dialogue generation. Specifically, PAL employs a two-stage training method including Persona-aware Learning and Persona Alignment, equipped with an easy-to-use inference strategy Select then Generate, to improve persona sensitivity and generate more persona-relevant responses at the semantics level. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework outperforms many state-of-the-art personalized dialogue methods and large language models.

Multi-agent trajectory prediction is a key task in computer vision for autonomous systems, particularly in dense and interactive environments. Existing methods often struggle to jointly model goal-driven behavior and complex social dynamics, which leads to unrealistic predictions. In this paper, we introduce VISTA, a recursive goal-conditioned transformer architecture that features (1) a cross-attention fusion mechanism to integrate long-term goals with past trajectories, (2) a social-token attention module enabling fine-grained interaction modeling across agents, and (3) pairwise attention maps to show social influence patterns during inference. Our model enhances the single-agent goal-conditioned approach into a cohesive multi-agent forecasting framework. In addition to the standard evaluation metrics, we also consider trajectory collision rates, which capture the realism of the joint predictions. Evaluated on the high-density MADRAS benchmark and on SDD, VISTA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with improved interaction modeling. On MADRAS, our approach reduces the average collision rate of strong baselines from 2.14% to 0.03%, and on SDD, it achieves a 0% collision rate while outperforming SOTA models in terms of ADE/FDE and minFDE. These results highlight the model's ability to generate socially compliant, goal-aware, and interpretable trajectory predictions, making it well-suited for deployment in safety-critical autonomous systems.

We present an initial evaluation of NASA and IBM's Prithvi-EO-2.0 geospatial foundation model on shoreline delineation of small sandy islands using satellite images. We curated and labeled a dataset of 225 multispectral images of two Maldivian islands, which we publicly release, and fine-tuned both the 300M and 600M parameter versions of Prithvi on training subsets ranging from 5 to 181 images. Our experiments show that even with as few as 5 training images, the models achieve high performance (F1 of 0.94, IoU of 0.79). Our results demonstrate the strong transfer learning capability of Prithvi, underscoring the potential of such models to support coastal monitoring in data-poor regions.

Accurate exploration of protein conformational ensembles is essential for uncovering function but remains hard because molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations suffer from high computational costs and energy-barrier trapping. This paper presents Energy Preference Optimization (EPO), an online refinement algorithm that turns a pretrained protein ensemble generator into an energy-aware sampler without extra MD trajectories. Specifically, EPO leverages stochastic differential equation sampling to explore the conformational landscape and incorporates a novel energy-ranking mechanism based on list-wise preference optimization. Crucially, EPO introduces a practical upper bound to efficiently approximate the intractable probability of long sampling trajectories in continuous-time generative models, making it easily adaptable to existing pretrained generators. On Tetrapeptides, A T - LAS, and Fast-Folding benchmarks, EPO successfully generates diverse and physically realistic ensembles, establishing a new state-of-the-art in nine evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate that energy-only preference signals can efficiently steer generative models toward thermodynamically consistent conformational ensembles, providing an alternative to long MD simulations and widening the applicability of learned potentials in structural biology and drug discovery.

The performance of Machine Learning (ML) models, particularly those operating within the Interpretable Artificial Intelligence (Interpretable AI) framework, is significantly affected by the presence of noise in both training and production data. Denoising has therefore become a critical preprocessing step, typically categorized into instance removal and instance correction techniques. However, existing correction approaches often degrade performance or oversimplify the problem by altering the original data distribution. This leads to unrealistic scenarios and biased models, which is particularly problematic in contexts where interpretable AI models are employed, as their interpretability depends on the fidelity of the underlying data patterns. In this paper, we argue that defining noise independently of the solution may be ineffective, as its nature can vary significantly across tasks and datasets. Using a task-specific high quality solution as a reference can provide a more precise and adaptable noise definition. To this end, we propose DenoGrad, a novel Gradient-based instance Denoiser framework that leverages gradients from an accurate Deep Learning (DL) model trained on the target data -- regardless of the specific task -- to detect and adjust noisy samples. Unlike conventional approaches, DenoGrad dynamically corrects noisy instances, preserving problem's data distribution, and improving AI models robustness. DenoGrad is validated on both tabular and time series datasets under various noise settings against the state-of-the-art. DenoGrad outperforms existing denoising strategies, enhancing the performance of interpretable IA models while standing out as the only high quality approach that preserves the original data distribution.

The architectural blueprint of today's leading text-to-image models contains a fundamental flaw: an inability to handle logical composition. This survey investigates this breakdown across three core primitives-negation, counting, and spatial relations. Our analysis reveals a dramatic performance collapse: models that are accurate on single primitives fail precipitously when these are combined, exposing severe interference. We trace this failure to three key factors. First, training data show a near-total absence of explicit negations. Second, continuous attention architectures are fundamentally unsuitable for discrete logic. Third, evaluation metrics reward visual plausibility over constraint satisfaction. By analyzing recent benchmarks and methods, we show that current solutions and simple scaling cannot bridge this gap. Achieving genuine compositionality, we conclude, will require fundamental advances in representation and reasoning rather than incremental adjustments to existing architectures.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed over proprietary knowledge bases face growing threats from reconstruction attacks that aggregate model responses to replicate knowledge bases. Such attacks exploit both intra-class and inter-class paths, progressively extracting fine-grained knowledge within topics and diffusing it across semantically related ones, thereby enabling comprehensive extraction of the original knowledge base. However, existing defenses target only one path, leaving the other unprotected. We conduct a systematic exploration to assess the impact of protecting each path independently and find that joint protection is essential for effective defense. Based on this, we propose RAGFort, a structure-aware dual-module defense combining "contrastive reindexing" for inter-class isolation and "constrained cascade generation" for intra-class protection. Experiments across security, performance, and robustness confirm that RAGFort significantly reduces reconstruction success while preserving answer quality, offering comprehensive defense against knowledge base extraction attacks.

We investigate how to couple a learnable brain-like'' controller to a cell-like'' Gray--Scott substrate to steer pattern formation with minimal effort. A compact convolutional policy is embedded in a differentiable PyTorch reaction--diffusion simulator, producing spatially smooth, bounded modulations of the feed and kill parameters ($ΔF$, $ΔK$) under a warm--hold--decay gain schedule. Training optimizes Turing-band spectral targets (FFT-based) while penalizing control effort ($\ell_1/\ell_2$) and instability. We compare three regimes: pure reaction--diffusion, NN-dominant, and a hybrid coupling. The hybrid achieves reliable, fast formation of target textures: 100% strict convergence in $\sim 165$ steps, matching cell-only spectral selectivity (0.436 vs.\ 0.434) while using $\sim 15\times$ less $\ell_1$ effort and $>200\times$ less $\ell_2$ power than NN-dominant control. An amplitude sweep reveals a non-monotonic Goldilocks'' zone ($A \approx 0.03$--$0.045$) that yields 100\% quasi convergence in 94--96 steps, whereas weaker or stronger gains fail to converge or degrade selectivity. These results quantify morphological computation: the controller seeds then cedes,'' providing brief, sparse nudges that place the system in the correct basin of attraction, after which local physics maintains the pattern. The study offers a practical recipe for building steerable, robust, and energy-efficient embodied systems that exploit an optimal division of labor between centralized learning and distributed self-organization.

-- In this paper, m ilitary use cases or applications and implementation thereof are considered for natural language processing and large language models, which have broken into fame with the invention of the generative pre - trained transformer (GPT) and the extensive foundation model pretraining done by OpenAI for ChatGPT and others . First, we interrogate a GPT - based language model (viz. Microsoft Copilot) to make it reveal its own knowledge about their potential military application s and then critically assess the information . Second, we study how commercial cloud services (viz. Microsoft Azure) could be used readily to build such applications and assess which of the m are feasible. We conclude that t he summarization and generative properties of language models directly facilitate many applications at large and other features may find particular uses . This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by ...

Post-hoc explainability methods are a subset of Machine Learning (ML) that aim to provide a reason for why a model behaves in a certain way. In this paper, we show a new black-box model-agnostic adversarial attack for post-hoc explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), particularly in the image domain. The goal of the attack is to modify the original explanations while being undetected by the human eye and maintain the same predicted class. In contrast to previous methods, we do not require any access to the model or its weights, but only to the model's computed predictions and explanations. Additionally, the attack is accomplished in a single step while significantly changing the provided explanations, as demonstrated by empirical evaluation. The low requirements of our method expose a critical vulnerability in current explainability methods, raising concerns about their reliability in safety-critical applications. We systematically generate attacks based on the explanations generated by post-hoc explainability methods (saliency maps, integrated gradients, and DeepLIFT SHAP) for pretrained ResNet-18 and ViT-B16 on ImageNet. The results show that our attacks could lead to dramatically different explanations without changing the predictive probabilities. We validate the effectiveness of our attack, compute the induced change based on the explanation with mean absolute difference, and verify the closeness of the original image and the corrupted one with the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM).