Addressing climate change effectively requires more than cataloguing the number of policies in place; it calls for tools that can reveal their thematic priorities and their tangible impacts on development outcomes. Existing assessments often rely on qualitative descriptions or composite indices, which can mask crucial differences between key domains such as mitigation, adaptation, disaster risk management, and loss and damage. To bridge this gap, we develop a quantitative indicator of climate policy orientation by applying a multilingual transformer-based language model to official national policy documents, achieving a classification accuracy of 0.90 (F1-score). Linking these indicators with World Bank development data in panel regressions reveals that mitigation policies are associated with higher GDP and GNI; disaster risk management correlates with greater GNI and debt but reduced foreign direct investment; adaptation and loss and damage show limited measurable effects. This integrated NLP-econometric framework enables comparable, theme-specific analysis of climate governance, offering a scalable method to monitor progress, evaluate trade-offs, and align policy emphasis with development goals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal extensions are becoming increasingly popular. One common approach to enable multimodality is to cascade domain-specific encoders with an LLM, making the resulting model inherit vulnerabilities from all of its components. In this work, we present the first systematic study of audio backdoor attacks against speech language models. We demonstrate its effectiveness across four speech encoders and three datasets, covering four tasks: automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech emotion recognition, and gender and age prediction. The attack consistently achieves high success rates, ranging from 90.76% to 99.41%. To better understand how backdoors propagate, we conduct a component-wise analysis to identify the most vulnerable stages of the pipeline. Finally, we propose a fine-tuning-based defense that mitigates the threat of poisoned pretrained encoders. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly extended to multimodal settings, processing combinations of text, images, video, and audio (DeepMind, 2023; Biadsy et al., 2023; Radford et al., 2021; Rajaa & Tushar, 2024). While powerful, these systems inherit vulnerabilities from each of their components. Among them are backdoor attacks, in which a model behaves normally on clean inputs but produces targeted outputs when a hidden trigger is present (Gu et al., 2017). Prior backdoor studies have largely focused on single-modality large language models (Xu et al., 2023; Y ao et al., 2024) or speech processing models (Zhai et al., 2021; Koffas et al., 2022), leaving open questions about how such attacks propagate in a cascaded speech language model.

Why should a clinician trust an Artificial Intelligence (AI) prediction? Despite the increasing accuracy of machine learning methods in medicine, the lack of transparency continues to hinder their adoption in clinical practice. In this work, we explore Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for clinical classification tasks on tabular data. In contrast to traditional neural networks, KANs are function-based architectures that offer intrinsic interpretability through transparent, symbolic representations. We introduce \emph{Logistic-KAN}, a flexible generalization of logistic regression, and \emph{Kolmogorov-Arnold Additive Model (KAAM)}, a simplified additive variant that delivers transparent, symbolic formulas. Unlike ``black-box'' models that require post-hoc explainability tools, our models support built-in patient-level insights, intuitive visualizations, and nearest-patient retrieval. Across multiple health datasets, our models match or outperform standard baselines, while remaining fully interpretable. These results position KANs as a promising step toward trustworthy AI that clinicians can understand, audit, and act upon. We release the code for reproducibility in \codeurl.

A common challenge with supervised machine learning (ML) in high energy physics (HEP) is the reliance on simulations for labeled data, which can often mismodel the underlying collision or detector response. To help mitigate this problem of domain shift, we propose RINO (Renormalization Group Invariance with No Labels), a self-supervised learning approach that can instead pretrain models directly on collision data, learning embeddings invariant to renormalization group flow scales. In this work, we pretrain a transformer-based model on jets originating from quantum chromodynamic (QCD) interactions from the JetClass dataset, emulating real QCD-dominated experimental data, and then finetune on the JetNet dataset -- emulating simulations -- for the task of identifying jets originating from top quark decays. RINO demonstrates improved generalization from the JetNet training data to JetClass data compared to supervised training on JetNet from scratch, demonstrating the potential for RINO pretraining on real collision data followed by fine-tuning on small, high-quality MC datasets, to improve the robustness of ML models in HEP.

Machine learning (ML) classification models are increasingly being used in a wide range of applications where it is important that predictions are accompanied by uncertainties, including in climate and earth observation, medical diagnosis and bioaerosol monitoring. The output of an ML classification model is a type of categorical variable known as a nominal property in the International Vocabulary of Metrology (VIM). However, concepts related to uncertainty evaluation for nominal properties are not defined in the VIM, nor is such evaluation addressed by the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM). In this paper we propose a metrological conceptual uncertainty evaluation framework for nominal properties. This framework is based on probability mass functions and summary statistics thereof, and it is applicable to ML classification. We also illustrate its use in the context of two applications that exemplify the issues and have significant societal impact, namely, climate and earth observation and medical diagnosis. Our framework would enable an extension of the GUM to uncertainty for nominal properties, which would make both applicable to ML classification models.

The primary objective of Continual Anomaly Detection (CAD) is to learn the normal patterns of new tasks under dynamic data distribution assumptions while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Existing embedding-based CAD approaches continuously update a memory bank with new embeddings to adapt to sequential tasks. However, these methods require constructing class-specific sub-memory banks for each task, which restricts their flexibility and scalability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel CAD framework where all tasks share a unified memory bank. During training, the method incrementally updates embeddings within a fixed-size coreset, enabling continuous knowledge acquisition from sequential tasks without task-specific memory fragmentation. In the inference phase, anomaly scores are computed via a nearest-neighbor matching mechanism, achieving state-of-the-art detection accuracy. We validate the method through comprehensive experiments on MVTec AD and Visa datasets. Results show that our approach outperforms existing baselines, achieving average image-level AUROC scores of 0.972 (MVTec AD) and 0.891 (Visa). Notably, on a real-world electronic paper dataset, it demonstrates 100% accuracy in anomaly sample detection, confirming its robustness in practical scenarios. The implementation will be open-sourced on GitHub.

Amid growing demands for data privacy and advances in computational infrastructure, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm. Nevertheless, differences in data distribution (such as covariate and semantic shifts) severely affect its reliability in real-world deployments. To address this issue, we propose FedSDWC, a causal inference method that integrates both invariant and variant features. FedSDWC infers causal semantic representations by modeling the weak causal influence between invariant and variant features, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing invariant learning methods in accurately capturing invariant features and directly constructing causal representations. This approach significantly enhances FL's ability to generalize and detect OOD data. Theoretically, we derive FedSDWC's generalization error bound under specific conditions and, for the first time, establish its relationship with client prior distributions. Moreover, extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of FedSDWC in handling covariate and semantic shifts. For example, FedSDWC outperforms FedICON, the next best baseline, by an average of 3.04% on CIFAR-10 and 8.11% on CIFAR-100.

Motion prediction, recently popularized under the term world models, refers to anticipating the future states of agents or the future evolution of a scene, which is rooted in human cognition to bridge perception and decision-making, enabling us to anticipate, adapt, and act within an ever-changing world. It lies at the core of intelligent autonomous systems, such as robotics and self-driving cars, to safely operate in dynamic and human-robot-mixed environments, and also informs broader time-series challenges. With advances in methods, representations, and datasets, the field has seen rapid progress, reflected in rapidly updated benchmark performance. However, when state-of-the-art methods are deployed in the real world, they are often found to struggle to generalize to open-world settings and fall short of deployment standards. This reveals a gap between reality and benchmarks, which are often idealized or ill-posed, and fail to capture real-world complexity. To address the pressing need for problem settings that better reflect real-world challenges and guide future research, this paper focuses on revisiting the generalization and applicability of motion prediction models, with an emphasis on robotics, autonomous driving, and human motion applications. We first provide a comprehensive taxonomy of motion prediction methods, covering representations, modelling methods, application domains, and evaluation protocols. We then revisit two fundamental problems: 1) how to push motion prediction models to be deployable to realistic deployment standards, where motion prediction does not act in a vacuum, but functions as one module of closed-loop autonomy stacks - it takes input from the localization and perception, and informs downstream planning and control.

Now that disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer disease have been approved by regulatory agencies, the early, objective, and accurate clinical diagnosis of AD based on the lowest-cost measurement modalities possible has become an increasingly urgent need. In this study, we propose a novel feature extraction method using persistent homology to analyze structural MRI of the brain. This approach converts topological features into powerful feature vectors through Betti functions. By integrating these feature vectors with a simple machine learning model like XGBoost, we achieve a computationally efficient machine learning model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models in both binary and three-class classification tasks for ADNI 3D MRI disease diagnosis. Using 10-fold cross-validation, our model achieved an average accuracy of 97.43 percent and sensitivity of 99.09 percent for binary classification. For three-class classification, it achieved an average accuracy of 95.47 percent and sensitivity of 94.98 percent. Unlike many deep learning models, our approach does not require data augmentation or extensive preprocessing, making it particularly suitable for smaller datasets. Topological features differ significantly from those commonly extracted using convolutional filters and other deep learning machinery. Because it provides an entirely different type of information from machine learning models, it has the potential to combine topological features with other models later on.