In recent years, Transformer-based architectures have become the dominant method for Computer Vision applications. While Transformers are explainable and scale well with dataset size (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020), they lack the inductive biases of Convolutional Neural Networks (LeCun et al., 1989). While these biases may be learned on large datasets, we show that introducing these inductive biases through learned masks allow Vision Transformers to learn on much smaller datasets without Knowledge Distillation. These Transformers, which we call In-ductively Biased Image Transformers (IBiT), are significantly more accurate on small datasets, while retaining the explainability Transformers. Vision Transformers (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020) have become established as the state-of-the-art Computer Vision backbone.

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) have emerged as a promising solution to the scaling limits of two-dimensional designs, offering higher integration density, shorter interconnects, and improved performance. As design complexity increases, effective space planning becomes essential to reduce dead space and ensure layout quality. This study investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for 3D IC space planning through a post-order slicing tree representation, which guarantees legal space plans while aiming to minimize dead space. Open-source LLMs were fine-tuned on large-scale synthetic datasets and further evaluated on MCNC-derived 3D benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework achieves a favorable balance between runtime efficiency, legality, and dead-space reduction, with zero-dead-space layouts obtained in a significant portion of test cases under practical runtime budgets. Beyond synthetic benchmarks, the method generalizes to MCNC cases such as ami33 and ami49, though larger and irregular instances remain challenging. The approach also shows potential for cross-domain applications, including logistics and 3D object placement, where spatial efficiency is critical. Overall, the results suggest that LLM-based space planning can serve as a data-driven complement to traditional electronic design automation (EDA) methods, providing new insights for scalable 3D layout generation.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integral as productivity assistants, but existing benchmarks fall short in rigorously evaluating their real-world instruction-following capabilities. Current benchmarks often (i) lack sufficient multilinguality, (ii) fail to capture the implicit constraints inherent in user requests, and (iii) overlook the complexities of multi-turn dialogue. To address these critical gaps and provide a more realistic assessment, we introduce TRUEBench (Trustworthy Real-world Usage Evaluation Benchmark)1, a novel benchmark specifically designed for LLM-based productivity assistants. TRUEBench distinguishes itself by featuring input prompts across 12 languages, incorporating intra-instance multilingual instructions, employing rigorous evaluation criteria to capture both explicit and implicit constraints, and including complex multi-turn dialogue scenarios with both accumulating constraints and context switches. Furthermore, to ensure reliability in evaluation, we refined constraints using an LLM validator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TRUEBench presents significantly greater challenges than existing benchmarks; for instance, a strong model like OpenAI o1 achieved only a 69.07% overall pass rate. TRUEBench offers a demanding and realistic assessment of LLMs in practical productivity settings, highlighting their capabilities and limitations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance on diverse medical benchmarks, highlighting their potential in supporting real-world clinical tasks. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key approach for mitigating knowledge gaps and hallucinations by incorporating external medical information. However, RAG still struggles with complex medical questions that require intensive reasoning, as surface-level input often fails to reflect the true knowledge needs of the task. Existing methods typically focus on refining queries without explicitly modeling the reasoning process, limiting their ability to retrieve and integrate clinically relevant knowledge. In this work, we propose RAR$^2$, a joint learning framework that improves both Reasoning-Augmented Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning. RAR$^2$ constructs a thought process to uncover implicit knowledge requirements and uses it to guide retrieval and answer generation. We build a training dataset of mixed preference pairs and apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train the model. Moreover, we design two test-time scaling strategies to explore the boundaries of our framework. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RAR$^2$ across several biomedical question answering datasets, outperforming RAG baselines with or without fine-tuning.

Adversarial attacks in machine learning traditionally focus on global perturbations to input data, yet the potential of localized adversarial noise remains underex-plored. This study systematically evaluates localized adversarial attacks across widely-used methods, including FGSM, PGD, and C&W, to quantify their effectiveness, imperceptibility, and computational efficiency. By introducing a binary mask to constrain noise to specific regions, localized attacks achieve significantly lower mean pixel perturbations, higher Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR), and improved Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) compared to global attacks. However, these benefits come at the cost of increased computational effort and a modest reduction in Attack Success Rate (ASR). Our results highlight that iterative methods, such as PGD and C&W, are more robust to localization constraints than single-step methods like FGSM, maintaining higher ASR and imperceptibility metrics. This work provides a comprehensive analysis of localized adversarial attacks, offering practical insights for advancing attack strategies and designing robust defensive systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse domains but often exhibit disparities in how they handle real-life queries. To systematically investigate these effects within various disability contexts, we introduce \textbf{AccessEval (Accessibility Evaluation)}, a benchmark evaluating 21 closed- and open-source LLMs across 6 real-world domains and 9 disability types using paired Neutral and Disability-Aware Queries. We evaluated model outputs with metrics for sentiment, social perception, and factual accuracy. Our analysis reveals that responses to disability-aware queries tend to have a more negative tone, increased stereotyping, and higher factual error compared to neutral queries. These effects show notable variation by domain and disability type, with disabilities affecting hearing, speech, and mobility disproportionately impacted. These disparities reflect persistent forms of ableism embedded in model behavior. By examining model performance in real-world decision-making contexts, we better illuminate how such biases can translate into tangible harms for disabled users. This framing helps bridges the gap between technical evaluation and user impact, reinforcing importance of bias mitigation in day-to-day applications. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/AccessEval

This is the accepted version of the paper publis hed in 2025 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW) . Given Name Surname line 2: dept. Given Name Surname line 2: dept. Abstract -- This study presents a machine learning - assisted approach to optimize task scheduling in cluster systems, focusing on node - affinity constraints. Traditional schedulers like Kubernetes struggle with real - time adaptability, whereas the proposed continuous transfer learning model evolves dynamically during operations, minimizing retraining needs. Evaluated on Google Cluster Data, the model achieves over 99% accuracy, reducing computational overhead and improving scheduling latency for constrained tasks. This scalable solution enables real - time optimization, advancing ma chine learning integration in cluster management and paving the way for future adaptive scheduling strategies. In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing and distributed high - performance environments, the efficient management of architectural and software resources became apparently paramount for ensuring suitable performance and minimizing latency. As long as the industry organizations increasingly rely on cluster - based architectures to orchestrate their broad areas of possible applications, the importance of effective task scheduling has come to the forefront . Over the last few years, traditional schedulers, such as Kubernetes and some more, have laid the groundwork for managing containerized workloads; however, it was found that it poses a challenge for them to adapt to the dynamic nature of real - time workloads and node - affinity constraints [ 35 ] . These limitations result in inefficient resource utilization and longer scheduling delays, which ultimately affect overall system performance, especially in high - performance systems [9][18] . In mission - critical environments, these issues can escalate, disrupting vital systems like power networks, healthcare, defen s e systems, and others.

Survival analysis is central to clinical research, informing patient prognoses, guiding treatment decisions, and optimising resource allocation. Accurate time-to-event predictions not only improve quality of life but also reveal risk factors that shape clinical practice. For these models to be relevant in healthcare, interpretability is critical: predictions must be traceable to patient-specific characteristics, and risk factors should be identifiable to generate actionable insights for both clinicians and researchers. Traditional survival models often fail to capture non-linear interactions, while modern deep learning approaches, though powerful, are limited by poor interpretability. We propose a Pipeline for Interpretable Survival Analysis (PISA) - a pipeline that provides multiple survival analysis models that trade off complexity and performance. Using multiple-feature, multi-objective feature engineering, PISA transforms patient characteristics and time-to-event data into multiple survival analysis models, providing valuable insights into the survival prediction task. Crucially, every model is converted into simple patient stratification flowcharts supported by Kaplan-Meier curves, whilst not compromising on performance. While PISA is model-agnostic, we illustrate its flexibility through applications of Cox regression and shallow survival trees, the latter avoiding proportional hazards assumptions. Applied to two clinical benchmark datasets, PISA produced interpretable survival models and intuitive stratification flowcharts whilst achieving state-of-the-art performances. Revisiting a prior departmental study further demonstrated its capacity to automate survival analysis workflows in real-world clinical research.

6G wireless networks aim to exploit semantic awareness to optimize radio resources. By optimizing the transmission through the lens of the desired goal, the energy consumption of transmissions can also be reduced, and the latency can be improved. To that end, this paper investigates a paradigm in which the capabilities of generative AI (GenAI) on the edge are harnessed for network optimization. In particular, we investigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) handover framework that takes advantage of GenAI and semantic communication to maintain reliable connectivity. To that end, we propose a framework in which a lightweight MobileBERT language model, fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), is deployed on the UAV. This model processes multi-attribute flight and radio measurements and performs multi-label classification to determine appropriate handover action. Concurrently, the model identifies an appropriate set of contextual "Reason Tags" that elucidate the decision's rationale. Our model, evaluated on a rule-based synthetic dataset of UAV handover scenarios, demonstrates the model's high efficacy in learning these rules, achieving high accuracy in predicting the primary handover decision. The model also shows strong performance in identifying supporting reasons, with an F1 micro-score of approximately 0.9 for reason tags.

Mechanistic microstructure-informed constitutive models for the mechanical response of polycrystals are a cornerstone of computational materials science. However, as these models become increasingly more complex - often involving coupled differential equations describing the effect of specific deformation modes - their associated computational costs can become prohibitive, particularly in optimization or uncertainty quantification tasks that require numerous model evaluations. To address this challenge, surrogate constitutive models that balance accuracy and computational efficiency are highly desirable. Data-driven surrogate models, that learn the constitutive relation directly from data, have emerged as a promising solution. In this work, we develop two local surrogate models for the viscoplastic response of a steel: a piecewise response surface method and a mixture of experts model. These surrogates are designed to adapt to complex material behavior, which may vary with material parameters or operating conditions. The surrogate constitutive models are applied to creep simulations of HT-9 steel, an alloy of considerable interest to the nuclear energy sector due to its high tolerance to radiation damage, using training data generated from viscoplastic self-consistent (VPSC) simulations. We define a set of test metrics to numerically assess the accuracy of our surrogate models for predicting viscoplastic material behavior, and show that the mixture of experts model outperforms the piecewise response surface method in terms of accuracy.