Deep neural networks has been increasingly applied in fault diagnostics, where it uses historical data to capture systems behavior, bypassing the need for high-fidelity physical models. However, despite their competence in prediction tasks, these models often struggle with the evaluation of their confidence. This matter is particularly important in consistency-based diagnosis where decision logic is highly sensitive to false alarms. To address this challenge, this work presents a diagnostic framework that uses ensemble probabilistic machine learning to improve diagnostic characteristics of data driven consistency based diagnosis by quantifying and automating the prediction uncertainty. The proposed method is evaluated across several case studies using both ablation and comparative analyses, showing consistent improvements across a range of diagnostic metrics.

Achieving high image quality for temporal frames in dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) is challenging due to the limited statistic especially for the short frames. Recent studies have shown that deep learning (DL) is useful in a wide range of medical image denoising tasks. In this paper, we propose a model-based neural network for dynamic PET image denoising. The inter-frame spatial correlation and intra-frame structural consistency in dynamic PET are used to establish the kernel space-based multidimensional sparse (KMDS) model. We then substitute the inherent forms of the parameter estimation with neural networks to enable adaptive parameters optimization, forming the end-to-end neural KMDS-Net. Extensive experimental results from simulated and real data demonstrate that the neural KMDS-Net exhibits strong denoising performance for dynamic PET, outperforming previous baseline methods. The proposed method may be used to effectively achieve high temporal and spatial resolution for dynamic PET. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Kuangxd/Neural-KMDS-Net/tree/main.

As fine-tuning becomes the dominant paradigm for improving large language models (LLMs), understanding what changes during this process is increasingly important. Traditional benchmarking often fails to explain why one model outperforms another. In this work, we use model diffing, a mechanistic interpretability approach, to analyze the specific capability differences between Gemma-2-9b-it and a SimPO-enhanced variant. Using crosscoders, we identify and categorize latent representations that differentiate the two models. We find that SimPO acquired latent concepts predominantly enhance safety mechanisms (+32.8%), multilingual capabilities (+43.8%), and instruction-following (+151.7%), while its additional training also reduces emphasis on model self-reference (-44.1%) and hallucination management (-68.5%). Our analysis shows that model diffing can yield fine-grained insights beyond leaderboard metrics, attributing performance gaps to concrete mechanistic capabilities. This approach offers a transparent and targeted framework for comparing LLMs.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure through scripts and tools, streamlining software deployment. Prior studies have shown that IaC scripts often contain recurring security misconfigurations, and several detection and mitigation approaches have been proposed. Most of these rely on static analysis, using statistical code representations or Machine Learning (ML) classifiers to distinguish insecure configurations from safe code. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that enhances static analysis with semantic understanding by jointly leveraging natural language and code representations. Our method builds on two complementary ML models: CodeBERT, to capture semantics across code and text, and LongFormer, to represent long IaC scripts without losing contextual information. We evaluate our approach on misconfiguration datasets from two widely used IaC tools, Ansible and Puppet. To validate its effectiveness, we conduct two ablation studies (removing code text from the natural language input, and truncating scripts to reduce context) and compare against four large language models (LLMs) and prior work. Results show that semantic enrichment substantially improves detection, raising precision and recall from 0.46 and 0.79 to 0.92 and 0.88 on Ansible, and from 0.55 and 0.97 to 0.87 and 0.75 on Puppet, respectively.

Conventional Fourier-domain Optical Coherence Tomography (FD-OCT) systems depend on resampling into wavenumber (k) domain to extract the depth profile. This either necessitates additional hardware resources or amplifies the existing computational complexity. Moreover, the OCT images also suffer from speckle noise, due to systemic reliance on low coherence interferometry. We propose a streamlined and computationally efficient approach based on Deep-Learning (DL) which enables reconstructing speckle-reduced OCT images directly from the wavelength domain. For reconstruction, two encoder-decoder styled networks namely Spatial Domain Convolution Neural Network (SD-CNN) and Fourier Domain CNN (FD-CNN) are used sequentially. The SD-CNN exploits the highly degraded images obtained by Fourier transforming the domain fringes to reconstruct the deteriorated morphological structures along with suppression of unwanted noise. The FD-CNN leverages this output to enhance the image quality further by optimization in Fourier domain (FD). We quantitatively and visually demonstrate the efficacy of the method in obtaining high-quality OCT images. Furthermore, we illustrate the computational complexity reduction by harnessing the power of DL models. We believe that this work lays the framework for further innovations in the realm of OCT image reconstruction.

Deer-vehicle collisions represent a critical safety challenge in the United States, causing nearly 2.1 million incidents annually and resulting in approximately 440 fatalities, 59,000 injuries, and 10 billion USD in economic damages. These collisions also contribute significantly to declining deer populations. This paper presents a real-time detection and driver warning system that integrates thermal imaging, deep learning, and vehicle-to-everything communication to help mitigate deer-vehicle collisions. Our system was trained and validated on a custom dataset of over 12,000 thermal deer images collected in Mars Hill, North Carolina. Experimental evaluation demonstrates exceptional performance with 98.84 percent mean average precision, 95.44 percent precision, and 95.96 percent recall. The system was field tested during a follow-up visit to Mars Hill and readily sensed deer providing the driver with advanced warning. Field testing validates robust operation across diverse weather conditions, with thermal imaging maintaining between 88 and 92 percent detection accuracy in challenging scenarios where conventional visible light based cameras achieve less than 60 percent effectiveness. When a high probability threshold is reached sensor data sharing messages are broadcast to surrounding vehicles and roadside units via cellular vehicle to everything (CV2X) communication devices. Overall, our system achieves end to end latency consistently under 100 milliseconds from detection to driver alert. This research establishes a viable technological pathway for reducing deer-vehicle collisions through thermal imaging and connected vehicles.

Scaling model size, training data, and compute power have driven advances in large language models (LLMs), but these approaches are reaching saturation as human-generated text is exhausted and further gains diminish. We propose experience scaling, a framework for continuous post-deployment evolution for LLMs through autonomous interaction with the environment and collaborative sharing of accumulated experience. The framework captures raw interactions, distills them into compact, reusable knowledge, and periodically refines stored content to preserve relevance and efficiency. We validate the framework in simulated real-world scenarios involving generalization to previously unseen but related tasks, repetitive queries, and over-saturated knowledge stores. Across all settings, experience scaling improves accuracy, sustains performance over time, and maintains gains when applied to novel situations. These results demonstrate that structured post-deployment learning can extend LLM capabilities beyond the limits of static human-generated data, offering a scalable path for continued intelligence progress.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for medical image representation learning, particularly in settings with limited labeled data. However, existing SSL methods often rely on complex architectures, anatomy-specific priors, or heavily tuned augmentations, which limit their scalability and generalizability. More critically, these models are prone to shortcut learning, especially in modalities like chest X-rays, where anatomical similarity is high and pathology is subtle. In this work, we introduce DiSSECT -- Discrete Self-Supervision for Efficient Clinical Transferable Representations, a framework that integrates multi-scale vector quantization into the SSL pipeline to impose a discrete representational bottleneck. This constrains the model to learn repeatable, structure-aware features while suppressing view-specific or low-utility patterns, improving representation transfer across tasks and domains. DiSSECT achieves strong performance on both classification and segmentation tasks, requiring minimal or no fine-tuning, and shows particularly high label efficiency in low-label regimes. We validate DiSSECT across multiple public medical imaging datasets, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become essential for modern software management, yet security flaws in IaC scripts can have severe consequences, as exemplified by the recurring exploits of Cloud Web Services. Prior work has recognized the need to build a precise taxonomy of security smells in IaC scripts as a first step towards developing approaches to improve IaC security. This first effort led to the unveiling of seven sins, limited by the focus on a single IaC tool as well as by the extensive, and potentially biased, manual effort that was required. We propose, in our work to, revisit this taxonomy: first, we extend the study of IaC security smells to a more diverse dataset with scripts associated with seven popular IaC tools, including Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Pulumi, Saltstack, and V agrant; second, we bring in some automation for the analysis by relying on an LLM. While we leverage LLMs for initial pattern processing, all taxonomic decisions underwent systematic human validation and reconciliation with established security standards. Our study yields a comprehensive taxonomy of 62 security smell categories, significantly expanding beyond the previously known seven. We demonstrate actionability by implementing new security checking rules within linters for seven popular IaC tools, often achieving 1.00 precision score. Our evolution study of security smells in GitHub projects reveals that these issues persist for extended periods, likely due to inadequate detection and mitigation tools. This work provides IaC practitioners with insights for addressing common security smells and systematically adopting DevSecOps practices to build safer infrastructure code.

Dynamic Text-Attribute Graphs (DyTAGs), characterized by time-evolving graph interactions and associated text attributes, are prevalent in real-world applications. Existing methods, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), mostly focus on static TAGs. Extending these existing methods to DyTAGs is challenging as they largely neglect the recent-global temporal semantics: the recent semantic dependencies among interaction texts and the global semantic evolution of nodes over time. Furthermore, applying LLMs to the abundant and evolving text in DyTAGs faces efficiency issues. To tackle these challenges, we propose Dynamic Global-Recent Adaptive Semantic Processing (DyGRASP), a novel method that leverages LLMs and temporal GNNs to efficiently and effectively reason on DyTAGs. Specifically, we first design a node-centric implicit reasoning method together with a sliding window mechanism to efficiently capture recent temporal semantics. In addition, to capture global semantic dynamics of nodes, we leverage explicit reasoning with tailored prompts and an RNN-like chain structure to infer long-term semantics. Lastly, we intricately integrate the recent and global temporal semantics as well as the dynamic graph structural information using updating and merging layers. Extensive experiments on DyTAG benchmarks demonstrate DyGRASP's superiority, achieving up to 34% improvement in Hit@10 for destination node retrieval task. Besides, DyGRASP exhibits strong generalization across different temporal GNNs and LLMs.