Interview performance assessment is essential for determining candidates' suitability for professional positions. To ensure holistic and fair evaluations, we propose a novel and comprehensive framework that explores ``365'' aspects of interview performance by integrating \textit{three} modalities (video, audio, and text), \textit{six} responses per candidate, and \textit{five} key evaluation dimensions. The framework employs modality-specific feature extractors to encode heterogeneous data streams and subsequently fused via a Shared Compression Multilayer Perceptron. This module compresses multimodal embeddings into a unified latent space, facilitating efficient feature interaction. To enhance prediction robustness, we incorporate a two-level ensemble learning strategy: (1) independent regression heads predict scores for each response, and (2) predictions are aggregated across responses using a mean-pooling mechanism to produce final scores for the five target dimensions. By listening to the unspoken, our approach captures both explicit and implicit cues from multimodal data, enabling comprehensive and unbiased assessments. Achieving a multi-dimensional average MSE of 0.1824, our framework secured first place in the AVI Challenge 2025, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in advancing automated and multimodal interview performance assessment. The full implementation is available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/365Aspects.

The Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem states that any continuous multivariable function can be exactly represented as a finite superposition of continuous single variable functions. Subsequent simplifications of this representation involve expressing these functions as parameterized sums of a smaller number of unique monotonic functions. These developments led to the proof of the universal approximation capabilities of multilayer perceptron networks with sigmoidal activations, forming the alternative theoretical direction of most modern neural networks. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have been recently proposed as an alternative to multilayer perceptrons. KANs feature learnable nonlinear activations applied directly to input values, modeled as weighted sums of basis spline functions. This approach replaces the linear transformations and sigmoidal post-activations used in traditional perceptrons. Subsequent works have explored alternatives to spline-based activations. In this work, we propose a novel KAN variant by replacing both the inner and outer functions in the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation with weighted sinusoidal functions of learnable frequencies. Inspired by simplifications introduced by Lorentz and Sprecher, we fix the phases of the sinusoidal activations to linearly spaced constant values and provide a proof of its theoretical validity. We also conduct numerical experiments to evaluate its performance on a range of multivariable functions, comparing it with fixed-frequency Fourier transform methods and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). We show that it outperforms the fixed-frequency Fourier transform and achieves comparable performance to MLPs.

We propose a new simple architecture, Zeta Neural Networks (ZeNNs), in order to overcome several shortcomings of standard multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). Namely, in the large width limit, MLPs are non-parametric, they do not have a well-defined pointwise limit, they lose non-Gaussian attributes and become unable to perform feature learning; moreover, finite width MLPs perform poorly in learning high frequencies. The new ZeNN architecture is inspired by three simple principles from harmonic analysis: i) Enumerate the perceptons and introduce a non-learnable weight to enforce convergence; ii) Introduce a scaling (or frequency) factor; iii) Choose activation functions that lead to near orthogonal systems. We will show that these ideas allow us to fix the referred shortcomings of MLPs. In fact, in the infinite width limit, ZeNNs converge pointwise, they exhibit a rich asymptotic structure beyond Gaussianity, and perform feature learning. Moreover, when appropriate activation functions are chosen, (finite width) ZeNNs excel at learning high-frequency features of functions with low dimensional domains.

The workspace limits the operational capabilities and range of motion for the systems with robotic arms. Maximizing workspace utilization has the potential to provide more optimal solutions for aerial manipulation tasks, increasing the system's flexibility and operational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel planning framework for aerial grasping that maximizes workspace utilization. We formulate an optimization problem to optimize the aerial manipulator's trajectory, incorporating task constraints to achieve efficient manipulation. To address the challenge of incorporating the delta arm's non-convex workspace into optimization constraints, we leverage a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to map position points to feasibility probabilities.Furthermore, we employ Reversible Residual Networks (RevNet) to approximate the complex forward kinematics of the delta arm, utilizing efficient model gradients to eliminate workspace constraints. We validate our methods in simulations and real-world experiments to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a dominant approach to learning graph representations, primarily because of their message-passing mechanisms. However, GNNs typically adopt a fixed aggregator function such as Mean, Max, or Sum without principled reasoning behind the selection. This rigidity, especially in the presence of heterophily, often leads to poor, problem dependent performance. Although some attempts address this by designing more sophisticated aggregation functions, these methods tend to rely heavily on labeled data, which is often scarce in real-world tasks. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework, "Aggregation-aware Multilayer Perceptron" (AMLP), which shifts the paradigm from directly crafting aggregation functions to making MLP adaptive to aggregation. Our lightweight approach consists of two key steps: First, we utilize a graph reconstruction method that facilitates high-order grouping effects, and second, we employ a single-layer network to encode varying degrees of heterophily, thereby improving the capacity and applicability of the model. Extensive experiments on node clustering and classification demonstrate the superior performance of AMLP, highlighting its potential for diverse graph learning scenarios.

Deep learning neural networks architectures such Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLP) and Convolutional blocks still play a crucial role in nowadays research advancements. From a topological point of view, these architecture may be represented as graphs in which we learn the functions related to the nodes while fixed edges convey the information from the input to the output. A recent work introduced a new architecture called Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KAN) that reports how putting learnable activation functions on the edges of the neural network leads to better performances in multiple scenarios. Multiple studies are focusing on optimizing the KAN architecture by adding important features such as dropout regularization, Autoencoders (AE), model benchmarking and last, but not least, the KAN Convolutional Network (KCN) that introduced matrix convolution with KANs learning. This study aims to benchmark multiple versions of vanilla AEs (such as Linear, Convolutional and Variational) against their Kolmogorov-Arnold counterparts that have same or less number of parameters. Using cardiological signals as model input, a total of five different classic AE tasks were studied: reconstruction, generation, denoising, inpainting and anomaly detection. The proposed experiments uses a medical dataset \textit{AbnormalHeartbeat} that contains audio signals obtained from the stethoscope.

GNN-to-MLP (G2M) methods have emerged as a promising approach to accelerate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by distilling their knowledge into simpler Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). These methods bridge the gap between the expressive power of GNNs and the computational efficiency of MLPs, making them well-suited for resource-constrained environments. However, existing G2M methods are limited by their inability to flexibly adjust inference cost and accuracy dynamically, a critical requirement for real-world applications where computational resources and time constraints can vary significantly. To address this, we introduce a Progressive framework designed to offer flexible and on-demand trade-offs between inference cost and accuracy for GNN-to-MLP knowledge distillation (ProGMLP). ProGMLP employs a Progressive Training Structure (PTS), where multiple MLP students are trained in sequence, each building on the previous one. Furthermore, ProGMLP incorporates Progressive Knowledge Distillation (PKD) to iteratively refine the distillation process from GNNs to MLPs, and Progressive Mixup Augmentation (PMA) to enhance generalization by progressively generating harder mixed samples. Our approach is validated through comprehensive experiments on eight real-world graph datasets, demonstrating that ProGMLP maintains high accuracy while dynamically adapting to varying runtime scenarios, making it highly effective for deployment in diverse application settings.

Multipactor is a nonlinear electron avalanche phenomenon that can severely impair the performance of high-power radio frequency (RF) devices and accelerator systems. Accurate prediction of multipactor susceptibility across different materials and operational regimes remains a critical yet computationally intensive challenge in accelerator component design and RF engineering. This study presents the first application of supervised machine learning (ML) for predicting multipactor susceptibility in two-surface planar geometries. A simulation-derived dataset spanning six distinct secondary electron yield (SEY) material profiles is used to train regression models - including Random Forest (RF), Extra Trees (ET), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and funnel-structured Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) - to predict the time-averaged electron growth rate, $δ_{avg}$. Performance is evaluated using Intersection over Union (IoU), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Pearson correlation coefficient. Tree-based models consistently outperform MLPs in generalizing across disjoint material domains. MLPs trained using a scalarized objective function that combines IoU and SSIM during Bayesian hyperparameter optimization with 5-fold cross-validation outperform those trained with single-objective loss functions. Principal Component Analysis reveals that performance degradation for certain materials stems from disjoint feature-space distributions, underscoring the need for broader dataset coverage. This study demonstrates both the promise and limitations of ML-based multipactor prediction and lays the groundwork for accelerated, data-driven modeling in advanced RF and accelerator system design.

Inspired by the prevalence of recurrent circuits in biological brains, we investigate the degree to which directionality is a helpful inductive bias for artificial neural networks. Taking directionality as topologically-ordered information flow between neurons, we formalise a perceptron layer with all-to-all connections (mathematically equivalent to a weight-tied recurrent neural network) and demonstrate that directionality, a hallmark of modern feed-forward networks, can be induced rather than hard-wired by applying appropriate pruning techniques. Across different random seeds our pruning schemes successfully induce greater topological ordering in information flow between neurons without compromising performance, suggesting that directionality is not a prerequisite for learning, but may be an advantageous inductive bias discoverable by gradient descent and sparsification.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training on decentralized data without exposing raw data. However, the evaluation phase in FL may leak sensitive information through shared performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol that incorporates Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to enable privacy-preserving and verifiable evaluation for FL. Instead of revealing raw loss values, clients generate a succinct proof asserting that their local loss is below a predefined threshold. Our approach is implemented without reliance on external APIs, using self-contained modules for federated learning simulation, ZKP circuit design, and experimental evaluation on both the MNIST and Human Activity Recognition (HAR) datasets. We focus on a threshold-based proof for a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model (for MNIST) and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model (for HAR), and evaluate the approach in terms of computational overhead, communication cost, and verifiability.