Predictive maintenance (PdM) is crucial for optimizing efficiency and minimizing downtime of electric buses. While these vehicles provide environmental benefits, they pose challenges for PdM due to complex electric transmission and battery systems. Traditional maintenance, often based on scheduled inspections, struggles to capture anomalies in multi-dimensional real-time CAN Bus data. This study employs a graph-based feature selection method to analyze relationships among CAN Bus parameters of electric buses and investigates the prediction performance of targeted alarms using artificial intelligence techniques. The raw data collected over two years underwent extensive preprocessing to ensure data quality and consistency. A hybrid graph-based feature selection tool was developed by combining statistical filtering (Pearson correlation, Cramer's V, ANOVA F-test) with optimization-based community detection algorithms (InfoMap, Leiden, Louvain, Fast Greedy). Machine learning models, including SVM, Random Forest, and XGBoost, were optimized through grid and random search with data balancing via SMOTEEN and binary search-based down-sampling. Model interpretability was achieved using LIME to identify the features influencing predictions. The results demonstrate that the developed system effectively predicts vehicle alarms, enhances feature interpretability, and supports proactive maintenance strategies aligned with Industry 4.0 principles.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale in size, the computational overhead has become a major bottleneck for task-specific fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) effectively curtails this cost by confining the weight updates to a low-dimensional subspace, such a restriction can hinder effectiveness and slow convergence. This contribution deals with these limitations by accumulating progressively a high-rank weight update from consecutive low-rank increments. Specifically, the per update optimal low-rank matrix is identified to minimize the loss function and closely approximate full fine-tuning. To endow efficient and seamless optimization without restarting, this optimal choice is formed by appropriately scaling the columns of the original low-rank matrix. Rigorous performance guarantees reveal that the optimal scaling can be found analytically. Extensive numerical tests with popular LLMs scaling up to 12 billion parameters demonstrate a consistent performance gain and fast convergence relative to state-of-the-art LoRA variants on diverse tasks including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem solving.

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam and Adagrad are widely used in machine learning, yet their effect on the generalization of learned models -- relative to methods like gradient descent -- remains poorly understood. Prior work on binary classification suggests that Adam exhibits a ``richness bias,'' which can help it learn nonlinear decision boundaries closer to the Bayes-optimal decision boundary relative to gradient descent. However, the coordinate-wise preconditioning scheme employed by Adam renders the overall method sensitive to orthogonal transformations of feature space. We show that this sensitivity can manifest as a reversal of Adam's competitive advantage: even small rotations of the underlying data distribution can make Adam forfeit its richness bias and converge to a linear decision boundary that is farther from the Bayes-optimal decision boundary than the one learned by gradient descent. To alleviate this issue, we show that a recently proposed reparameterization method -- which applies an orthogonal transformation to the optimization objective -- endows any first-order method with equivariance to data rotations, and we empirically demonstrate its ability to restore Adam's bias towards rich decision boundaries.

Protein design using structure prediction models such as AlphaFold2 has shown remarkable success, but existing approaches like relaxed sequence optimization (RSO) rely on single-path gradient descent and ignore sequence-space constraints, limiting diversity and designability. We introduce Relaxed Sequence Sampling (RSS), a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework that integrates structural and evolutionary information for protein design. RSS operates in continuous logit space, combining gradient-guided exploration with protein language model-informed jumps. Its energy function couples AlphaFold2-derived structural objectives with ESM2-derived sequence priors, balancing accuracy and biological plausibility. In an in silico protein binder design task, RSS produces 5$\times$ more designable structures and 2-3$\times$ greater structural diversity than RSO baselines, at equal computational cost. These results highlight RSS as a principled approach for efficiently exploring the protein design landscape.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a central challenge in continual learning, where models are required to integrate new knowledge over time without losing what they have previously learned. In prior work, we introduced Cobweb/4V, a hierarchical concept formation model that exhibited robustness to catastrophic forgetting in visual domains. Motivated by this robustness, we examine three hypotheses regarding the factors that contribute to such stability: (1) adaptive structural reorganization enhances knowledge retention, (2) sparse and selective updates reduce interference, and (3) information-theoretic learning based on sufficiency statistics provides advantages over gradient-based backpropagation. To test these hypotheses, we compare Cobweb/4V with neural baselines, including CobwebNN, a neural implementation of the Cobweb framework introduced in this work. Experiments on datasets of varying complexity (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, MedMNIST, and CI-FAR10) show that adaptive restructuring enhances learning plasticity, sparse updates help mitigate interference, and the information-theoretic learning process preserves prior knowledge without revisiting past data. Together, these findings provide insight into mechanisms that can mitigate catastrophic forgetting and highlight the potential of concept-based, information-theoretic approaches for building stable and adaptive continual learning systems.

Recently, there has been growing attention on combining quantum machine learning (QML) with classical deep learning approaches, as computational techniques are key to improving the performance of image classification tasks. This study presents a hybrid approach that uses ResNet-50 (Residual Network) for feature extraction and Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) for classification in the context of potato disease detection. Classical machine learning as well as deep learning models often struggle with high-dimensional and complex datasets, necessitating advanced techniques like quantum computing to improve classification efficiency. In our research, we use ResNet-50 to extract deep feature representations from RGB images of potato diseases. These features are then subjected to dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The resulting features are processed through QSVM models which apply various quantum feature maps such as ZZ, Z, and Pauli-X to transform classical data into quantum states. To assess the model performance, we compared it with classical machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) using five-fold stratified cross-validation for comprehensive evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the Z-feature map-based QSVM outperforms classical models, achieving an accuracy of 99.23 percent, surpassing both SVM and RF models. This research highlights the advantages of integrating quantum computing into image classification and provides a potential disease detection solution through hybrid quantum-classical modeling.

Multimodal molecular models often suffer from 3D conformer unreliability and modality collapse, limiting their robustness and generalization. We propose MuMo, a structured multimodal fusion framework that addresses these challenges in molecular representation through two key strategies. To reduce the instability of conformer-dependent fusion, we design a Structured Fusion Pipeline (SFP) that combines 2D topology and 3D geometry into a unified and stable structural prior. To mitigate modality collapse caused by naive fusion, we introduce a Progressive Injection (PI) mechanism that asymmetrically integrates this prior into the sequence stream, preserving modality-specific modeling while enabling cross-modal enrichment. Built on a state space backbone, MuMo supports long-range dependency modeling and robust information propagation. Across 29 benchmark tasks from Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC) and MoleculeNet, MuMo achieves an average improvement of 2.7% over the best-performing baseline on each task, ranking first on 22 of them, including a 27% improvement on the LD50 task. These results validate its robustness to 3D conformer noise and the effectiveness of multimodal fusion in molecular representation. The code is available at: github.com/selmiss/MuMo.

Each year, fare evasion costs the UK railway system approximately 240 million pounds [1] with short ticketing, where passengers buy tickets for shorter, cheaper journeys but travel beyond the permitted destination, representing a specific and often undetected aspect of the broader issue. A simple but practical example would be: a passenger travelling from Seaside Station to International Terminus Station via Commuter Hub Station and Financial District Station might purchase two separate tickets (Seaside Station to Commuter Hub Station, and Financial District Station to International Terminus Station) instead of the complete journey ticket, potentially saving money while committing ticket fraud leading to revenue loss for the Train Operating Companies (TOCs). To solve this problem, this comprehensive report provides an in-depth analysis of the short ticketing detection framework developed by researchers Yuyang Miao and Huijun Xing at Imperial College London. This study represents an unsupervised machine learning approach. This work is based on a dataset collected from the UK railway system, including 100 stations' entry and exit data for seven days, with approximately 6.5 million trials of records.

Data valuation has become central in the era of data-centric AI. It drives efficient training pipelines and enables objective pricing in data markets by assigning a numeric value to each data point. Most existing data valuation methods estimate the effect of removing individual data points by evaluating changes in model validation performance under in-distribution (ID) settings, as opposed to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios where data follow different patterns. Since ID and OOD data behave differently, data valuation methods based on ID loss often fail to generalize to OOD settings, particularly when the validation set contains no OOD data. Furthermore, although OOD-aware methods exist, they involve heavy computational costs, which hinder practical deployment. To address these challenges, we introduce \emph{Eigen-Value} (EV), a plug-and-play data valuation framework for OOD robustness that uses only an ID data subset, including during validation. EV provides a new spectral approximation of domain discrepancy, which is the gap of loss between ID and OOD using ratios of eigenvalues of ID data's covariance matrix. EV then estimates the marginal contribution of each data point to this discrepancy via perturbation theory, alleviating the computational burden. Subsequently, EV plugs into ID loss-based methods by adding an EV term without any additional training loop. We demonstrate that EV achieves improved OOD robustness and stable value rankings across real-world datasets, while remaining computationally lightweight. These results indicate that EV is practical for large-scale settings with domain shift, offering an efficient path to OOD-robust data valuation.

We show how to replace the O(2^n) coalition enumeration over n features behind Shapley values and Shapley-style interaction indices with a few-evaluation scheme on a tensor-network (TN) surrogate: TN-SHAP. The key idea is to represent a predictor's local behavior as a factorized multilinear map, so that coalitional quantities become linear probes of a coefficient tensor. TN-SHAP replaces exhaustive coalition sweeps with just a small number of targeted evaluations to extract order-k Shapley interactions. In particular, both order-1 (single-feature) and order-2 (pairwise) computations have cost O(n*poly(chi) + n^2), where chi is the TN's maximal cut rank. We provide theoretical guarantees on the approximation error and tractability of TN-SHAP. On UCI datasets, our method matches enumeration on the fitted surrogate while reducing evaluation by orders of magnitude and achieves 25-1000x wall-clock speedups over KernelSHAP-IQ at comparable accuracy, while amortizing training across local cohorts.