The Point Machine (PM) is a critical piece of railway equipment that switches train routes by diverting tracks through a switchblade. As with any critical safety equipment, a failure will halt operations leading to service disruptions; therefore, pre-emptive maintenance may avoid unnecessary interruptions by detecting anomalies before they become failures. Previous work relies on several inputs and crafting custom features by segmenting the signal. This not only adds additional requirements for data collection and processing, but it is also specific to the PM technology, the installed locations and operational conditions limiting scalability. Based on the available maintenance records, the main failure causes for PM are obstacles, friction, power source issues and misalignment. Those failures affect the energy consumption pattern of PMs, altering the usual (or healthy) shape of the power signal during the PM movement. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art, our method requires only one input. We apply a deep learning model to the power signal pattern to classify if the PM is nominal or associated with any failure type, achieving >99.99\% precision, <0.01\% false positives and negligible false negatives. Our methodology is generic and technology-agnostic, proven to be scalable on several electromechanical PM types deployed in both real-world and test bench environments. Finally, by using conformal prediction the maintainer gets a clear indication of the certainty of the system outputs, adding a confidence layer to operations and making the method compliant with the ISO-17359 standard.

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand interactions is essential for computer-aided drug discovery. However, existing methods often fail to capture solvent-dependent conformational changes and lack the ability to jointly learn multiple related tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce a pre-training method that incorporates ligand conformational ensembles generated under diverse solvent conditions as augmented input. This design enables the model to learn both structural flexibility and environmental context in a unified manner. The training process integrates molecular reconstruction to capture local geometry, interatomic distance prediction to model spatial relationships, and contrastive learning to build solvent-invariant molecular representations. Together, these components lead to significant improvements, including a 3.7% gain in binding affinity prediction, an 82% success rate on the PoseBusters Astex docking benchmarks, and an area under the curve of 97.1% in virtual screening. The framework supports solvent-aware, multi-task modeling and produces consistent results across benchmarks. A case study further demonstrates sub-angstrom docking accuracy with a root-mean-square deviation of 0.157 angstroms, offering atomic-level insight into binding mechanisms and advancing structure-based drug design.

Cross-validation plays a fundamental role in Machine Learning, enabling robust evaluation of model performance and preventing overestimation on training and validation data. However, one of its drawbacks is the potential to create data subsets (folds) that do not adequately represent the diversity of the original dataset, which can lead to biased performance estimates. The objective of this work is to deepen the investigation of cluster-based cross-validation strategies by analyzing the performance of different clustering algorithms through experimental comparison. Additionally, a new cross-validation technique that combines Mini Batch K-Means with class stratification is proposed. Experiments were conducted on 20 datasets (both balanced and imbalanced) using four supervised learning algorithms, comparing cross-validation strategies in terms of bias, variance, and computational cost. The technique that uses Mini Batch K-Means with class stratification outperformed others in terms of bias and variance on balanced datasets, though it did not significantly reduce computational cost. On imbalanced datasets, traditional stratified cross-validation consistently performed better, showing lower bias, variance, and computational cost, making it a safe choice for performance evaluation in scenarios with class imbalance. In the comparison of different clustering algorithms, no single algorithm consistently stood out as superior. Overall, this work contributes to improving predictive model evaluation strategies by providing a deeper understanding of the potential of cluster-based data splitting techniques and reaffirming the effectiveness of well-established strategies like stratified cross-validation. Moreover, it highlights perspectives for increasing the robustness and reliability of model evaluations, especially in datasets with clustering characteristics.

Having access to realistic workloads for a given database instance is extremely important to enable stress and vulnerability testing, as well as to optimize for cost and performance. Recent advances in learned cost models have shown that when enough diverse SQL queries are available, one can effectively and efficiently predict the cost of running a given query against a specific database engine. In this paper, we describe our experience in exploiting modern synthetic data generation techniques, inspired by the generative AI and LLM community, to create high-quality datasets enabling the effective training of such learned cost models. Initial results show that we can improve a learned cost model's predictive accuracy by training it with 45% fewer queries than when using competitive generation approaches.

Mitotic figure (MF) detection in histopathology images is challenging due to large variations in slide scanners, staining protocols, tissue types, and the presence of artifacts. This paper presents a collection of training techniques - a bag of tricks - that enable robust, real-time MF detection across diverse domains. We build on the efficient RTMDet single stage object detector to achieve high inference speed suitable for clinical deployment. Our method addresses scanner variability and tumor heterogeneity via extensive multi-domain training data, balanced sampling, and careful augmentation. Additionally, we employ targeted, hard negative mining on necrotic and debris tissue to reduce false positives. In a grouped 5-fold cross-validation across multiple MF datasets, our model achieves an F1 score between 0.78 and 0.84. On the preliminary test set of the MItosis DOmain Generalization (MIDOG) 2025 challenge, our single-stage RTMDet-S based approach reaches an F1 of 0.81, outperforming larger models and demonstrating adaptability to new, unfamiliar domains. The proposed solution offers a practical trade-off between accuracy and speed, making it attractive for real-world clinical adoption.

-- We present a novel framework for estimating accident-prone regions in everyday indoor scenes, aimed at improving real-time risk awareness in service robots operating in human-centric environments. As robots become integrated into daily life, particularly in homes, the ability to anticipate and respond to environmental hazards is crucial for ensuring user safety, trust, and effective human-robot interaction. Each object is represented as a node with an associated risk score, and risk propagates asymmetrically from high-risk to low-risk objects based on spatial proximity and accident relationship. This enables the robot to infer potential hazards even when they are not explicitly visible or labeled. Designed for interpretability and lightweight onboard deployment, our method is validated on a dataset with human-annotated risk regions, achieving a binary risk detection accuracy of 75%. The system demonstrates strong alignment with human perception, particularly in scenes involving sharp or unstable objects. These results underline the potential of context-aware risk reasoning to enhance robotic scene understanding and proactive safety behaviors in shared human-robot spaces. This framework could serve as a foundation for future systems that make context-driven safety decisions, provide real-time alerts, or autonomously assist users in avoiding or mitigating hazards within home environments. As service robots become increasingly integrated into daily life--supporting tasks such as cleaning, acting as communication companions, searching for objects or navigating shared spaces [1]-[3]--their roles are expected to expand beyond single-function behaviors. With recent advances in embodied intelligence and large language models, these robots are beginning to understand complex instructions and act autonomously in diverse home environments.

Graph-structured data, which captures non-Euclidean relationships and interactions between entities, is growing in scale and complexity. As a result, training state-of-the-art graph machine learning (GML) models have become increasingly resource-intensive, turning these models and data into invaluable Intellectual Property (IP). To address the resource-intensive nature of model training, graph-based Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (GMLaaS) has emerged as an efficient solution by leveraging third-party cloud services for model development and management. However, deploying such models in GMLaaS also exposes them to potential threats from attackers. Specifically, while the APIs within a GMLaaS system provide interfaces for users to query the model and receive outputs, they also allow attackers to exploit and steal model functionalities or sensitive training data, posing severe threats to the safety of these GML models and the underlying graph data. To address these challenges, this survey systematically introduces the first taxonomy of threats and defenses at the level of both GML model and graph-structured data. Such a tailored taxonomy facilitates an in-depth understanding of GML IP protection. Furthermore, we present a systematic evaluation framework to assess the effectiveness of IP protection methods, introduce a curated set of benchmark datasets across various domains, and discuss their application scopes and future challenges. Finally, we establish an open-sourced versatile library named PyGIP, which evaluates various attack and defense techniques in GMLaaS scenarios and facilitates the implementation of existing benchmark methods. The library resource can be accessed at: https://labrai.github.io/PyGIP. We believe this survey will play a fundamental role in intellectual property protection for GML and provide practical recipes for the GML community.

Objectivity in journalism has long been contested, oscillating between ideals of neutral, fact-based reporting and the inevitability of subjective framing. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), these tensions are now mediated by algorithmic systems whose training data and design choices may themselves embed cultural or ideological biases. This study investigates geopolitical parallax-systematic divergence in news quality and subjectivity assessments-by comparing article-level embeddings from Chinese-origin (Qwen, BGE, Jina) and Western-origin (Snowflake, Granite) model families. We evaluate both on a human-annotated news quality benchmark spanning fifteen stylistic, informational, and affective dimensions, and on parallel corpora covering politically sensitive topics, including Palestine and reciprocal China-United States coverage. Using logistic regression probes and matched-topic evaluation, we quantify per-metric differences in predicted positive-class probabilities between model families. Our findings reveal consistent, non-random divergences aligned with model origin. In Palestine-related coverage, Western models assign higher subjectivity and positive emotion scores, while Chinese models emphasize novelty and descriptiveness. Cross-topic analysis shows asymmetries in structural quality metrics Chinese-on-US scoring notably lower in fluency, conciseness, technicality, and overall quality-contrasted by higher negative emotion scores. These patterns align with media bias theory and our distinction between semantic, emotional, and relational subjectivity, and extend LLM bias literature by showing that geopolitical framing effects persist in downstream quality assessment tasks. We conclude that LLM-based media evaluation pipelines require cultural calibration to avoid conflating content differences with model-induced bias.

We stress test monitoring systems for detecting covert misbehavior in autonomous LLM agents (e.g., secretly sharing private information). To this end, we systematize a monitor red teaming (MRT) workflow that incorporates: (1) varying levels of agent and monitor situational awareness; (2) distinct adversarial strategies to evade the monitor, such as prompt injection; and (3) two datasets and environments -- SHADE-Arena for tool-calling agents and our new CUA-SHADE-Arena, which extends TheAgentCompany, for computer-use agents. We run MRT on existing LLM monitor scaffoldings, which orchestrate LLMs and parse agent trajectories, alongside a new hybrid hierarchical-sequential scaffolding proposed in this work. Our empirical results yield three key findings. First, agent awareness dominates monitor awareness: an agent's knowledge that it is being monitored substantially degrades the monitor's reliability. On the contrary, providing the monitor with more information about the agent is less helpful than expected. Second, monitor scaffolding matters more than monitor awareness: the hybrid scaffolding consistently outperforms baseline monitor scaffolding, and can enable weaker models to reliably monitor stronger agents -- a weak-to-strong scaling effect. Third, in a human-in-the-loop setting where humans discuss with the LLM monitor to get an updated judgment for the agent's behavior, targeted human oversight is most effective; escalating only pre-flagged cases to human reviewers improved the TPR by approximately 15% at FPR = 0.01. Our work establishes a standard workflow for MRT, highlighting the lack of adversarial robustness for LLMs and humans when monitoring and detecting agent misbehavior. We release code, data, and logs to spur further research.

--Automated crash reporting systems generate large volumes of duplicate reports, overwhelming issue-tracking systems and increasing developer workload. Traditional stack trace-based deduplication methods--relying on string similarity, rule-based heuristics, or deep learning (DL) models--often fail to capture the contextual and structural relationships within stack traces. We propose dedupT, a transformer-based approach that models stack traces holistically rather than as isolated frames. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that dedupT outperforms existing DL and traditional methods (e.g., sequence alignment and information retrieval techniques) in both duplicate ranking and unique crash detection, significantly reducing manual triage effort. On four public datasets, dedupT improves Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) often by over 15% compared to the best DL baseline and up to 9% over traditional methods while achieving higher Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC) in detecting unique crash reports. Our work advances the integration of modern natural language processing (NLP) techniques into software engineering, providing an effective solution for stack trace-based crash deduplication. Software issues are generally reported through (1) human-submitted reports and (2) automated crash reports. Human-reported issues typically include textual descriptions detailing the issue, expected and observed behavior, and may include attachments such as images or videos. In contrast, automated crash reports are generated by crash reporting tools (e.g., Sentry However, these automated systems often overwhelm ITS platforms by generating numerous duplicate crash reports for the same issue, requiring developers to manually review and triage them, which is a time-consuming process. For instance, Mozilla Firefox received 2.2 million issues in the first week of 2016, the majority being duplicates [1], while 72% of crash reports in the IntelliJ Platform were found to be duplicates [2]. In such scenarios, grouping similar crashes together is essential, a process known as crash deduplication . Unlike human-written reports with detailed descriptions, automated crash reports primarily contain technical data like stack traces and crash dumps. Figure 1: Example of a Java stack trace. Figure 1: Example of C++ stack trace.