Speech emotion recognition predicts a speaker's emotional state from speech signals using discrete labels or continuous dimensions such as arousal, valence, and dominance (V AD). We propose EmoSphere-SER, a joint model that integrates spherical V AD region classification to guide V AD regression for improved emotion prediction. In our framework, V AD values are transformed into spherical coordinates that are divided into multiple spherical regions, and an auxiliary classification task predicts which spherical region each point belongs to, guiding the regression process. Additionally, we incorporate a dynamic weighting scheme and a style pooling layer with multi-head self-attention to capture spectral and temporal dynamics, further boosting performance. This combined training strategy reinforces structured learning and improves prediction consistency. Experimental results show that our approach exceeds baseline methods, confirming the validity of the proposed framework.

Cross-speaker emotion transfer in speech synthesis relies on extracting speaker-independent emotion embeddings for accurate emotion modeling without retaining speaker traits. However, existing timbre compression methods fail to fully separate speaker and emotion characteristics, causing speaker leakage and degraded synthesis quality. To address this, we propose DiEmo-TTS, a self-supervised distillation method to minimize emotional information loss and preserve speaker identity. We introduce cluster-driven sampling and information perturbation to preserve emotion while removing irrelevant factors. To facilitate this process, we propose an emotion clustering and matching approach using emotional attribute prediction and speaker embeddings, enabling generalization to unlabeled data. Additionally, we designed a dual conditioning transformer to integrate style features better. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method in learning speaker-irrelevant emotion embeddings.

Recent probing studies reveal that large language models exhibit linear subspaces that separate true from false statements, yet the mechanism behind their emergence is unclear. We introduce a transparent, one-layer transformer toy model that reproduces such truth subspaces end-to-end and exposes one concrete route by which they can arise. We study one simple setting in which truth encoding can emerge: a data distribution where factual statements co-occur with other factual statements (and vice-versa), encouraging the model to learn this distinction in order to lower the LM loss on future tokens. We corroborate this pattern with experiments in pretrained language models. Finally, in the toy setting we observe a two-phase learning dynamic: networks first memorize individual factual associations in a few steps, then -- over a longer horizon -- learn to linearly separate true from false, which in turn lowers language-modeling loss. Together, these results provide both a mechanistic demonstration and an empirical motivation for how and why linear truth representations can emerge in language models.

Abstract--Accurate forecasting is critical for reliable power grid operations, particularly as the share of renewable generation, such as wind and solar, continues to grow. Given the inherent uncertainty and variability in renewable generation, probabilistic forecasts have become essential for informed operational decisions. However, such forecasts frequently suffer from calibration issues, potentially degrading decision-making performance. Building on recent advances in Conformal Predictions, this paper introduces a tailored calibration framework that constructs context-aware calibration sets using a novel weighting scheme. The proposed framework improves the quality of probabilistic forecasts at the site and fleet levels, as demonstrated by numerical experiments on large-scale datasets covering several systems in the United States. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves higher forecast reliability and robustness for renewable energy applications compared to existing baselines.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by predicting human-understandable concepts as intermediate representations. However, existing CBMs often suffer from input-to-concept mapping bias and limited controllability, which restricts their practical value, directly damage the responsibility of strategy from concept-based methods. We propose a lightweight Disentangled Concept Bottleneck Model (LDCBM) that automatically groups visual features into semantically meaningful components without region annotation. By introducing a filter grouping loss and joint concept supervision, our method improves the alignment between visual patterns and concepts, enabling more transparent and robust decision-making. Notably, Experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate that LDCBM achieves higher concept and class accuracy, outperforming previous CBMs in both interpretability and classification performance. By grounding concepts in visual evidence, our method overcomes a fundamental limitation of prior models and enhances the reliability of interpretable AI.

Despite the impressive generative capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, they remain vulnerable to generating inappropriate content, especially when confronted with implicit sexual prompts. Unlike explicit harmful prompts, these subtle cues, often disguised as seemingly benign terms, can unexpectedly trigger sexual content due to underlying model biases, raising significant ethical concerns. However, existing detection methods are primarily designed to identify explicit sexual content and therefore struggle to detect these implicit cues. Fine-tuning approaches, while effective to some extent, risk degrading the model's generative quality, creating an undesirable trade-off. To address this, we propose NDM, the first noise-driven detection and mitigation framework, which could detect and mitigate implicit malicious intention in T2I generation while preserving the model's original generative capabilities. Specifically, we introduce two key innovations: first, we leverage the separability of early-stage predicted noise to develop a noise-based detection method that could identify malicious content with high accuracy and efficiency; second, we propose a noise-enhanced adaptive negative guidance mechanism that could optimize the initial noise by suppressing the prominent region's attention, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of adaptive negative guidance for sexual mitigation. Experimentally, we validate NDM on both natural and adversarial datasets, demonstrating its superior performance over existing SOTA methods, including SLD, UCE, and RECE, etc. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/lorraine021/NDM.

While most continual learning methods focus on mitigating forgetting and improving accuracy, they often overlook the critical aspect of network calibration, despite its importance. Neural collapse, a phenomenon where last-layer features collapse to their class means, has demonstrated advantages in continual learning by reducing feature-classifier misalignment. Few works aim to improve the calibration of continual models for more reliable predictions. Our work goes a step further by proposing a novel method that not only enhances calibration but also improves performance by reducing overconfidence, mitigating forgetting, and increasing accuracy. We introduce Sphere-Adaptive Mixup (SAMix), an adaptive mixup strategy tailored for neural collapse-based methods. SAMix adapts the mixing process to the geometric properties of feature spaces under neural collapse, ensuring more robust regularization and alignment. Experiments show that SAMix significantly boosts performance, surpassing SOTA methods in continual learning while also improving model calibration. SAMix enhances both across-task accuracy and the broader reliability of predictions, making it a promising advancement for robust continual learning systems.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with reinforcement learning. Recent alternatives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplify this pipeline by directly optimizing on preferences. However, both approaches often assume uniform annotator preferences and rely on binary comparisons, overlooking two key limitations: the diversity of human evaluators and the limitations of pairwise feedback. In this work, we address both these issues. First, we connect preference learning in RLHF with the econometrics literature and show that binary comparisons are insufficient for identifying latent user preferences from finite user data and infinite users, while (even incomplete) rankings over three or more responses ensure identifiability. Second, we introduce methods to incorporate heterogeneous preferences into alignment algorithms. We develop an Expectation-Maximization adaptation of DPO that discovers latent annotator types and trains a mixture of LLMs accordingly. Then we propose an aggregation algorithm using a min-max regret fairness criterion to produce a single generative policy with equitable performance guarantees. Together, these contributions establish a theoretical and algorithmic framework for fairness and personalization for diverse users in generative model alignment.

The demand for high efficiency and precise control in electric drive systems has led to the widespread adoption of Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (IPMSMs). The performance of these motors is significantly influenced by rotor geometry. Traditionally, rotor shape analysis has been conducted using the finite element method (FEM), which involves high computational costs. This study aims to classify the rotor shape (2D type, V type, Nabla type) of IPMSMs using electromagnetic parameters through machine learning-based methods and to demonstrate the applicability of this approach as an alternative to classical methods. In this context, a custom deep learning model, KS-Net, developed by the user, was comparatively evaluated against Cubic SVM, Quadratic SVM, Fine KNN, Cosine KNN, and Fine Tree algorithms. The balanced dataset, consisting of 9,000 samples, was tested using 10-fold cross-validation, and performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were employed. The results indicate that the Cubic SVM and Quadratic SVM algorithms classified all samples flawlessly, achieving 100% accuracy, while the KS-Net model achieved 99.98% accuracy with only two misclassifications, demonstrating competitiveness with classical methods. This study shows that the rotor shape of IPMSMs can be predicted with high accuracy using data-driven approaches, offering a fast and cost-effective alternative to FEM-based analyses. The findings provide a solid foundation for accelerating motor design processes, developing automated rotor identification systems, and enabling data-driven fault diagnosis in engineering applications.

Abstract--This work pushes the boundaries of learning-based methods in autonomous robot exploration in terms of environmental scale and exploration efficiency. HEADER follows existing conventional methods to construct hierarchical representations for the robot belief/map, but further designs a novel community-based algorithm to construct and update a global graph, which remains fully incremental, shape-adaptive, and operates with linear complexity. Building upon attention-based networks, our planner finely reasons about the nearby belief within the local range while coarsely leveraging distant information at the global scale, enabling next-best-viewpoint decisions that consider multi-scale spatial dependencies. Beyond novel map representation, we introduce a parameter-free privileged reward that significantly improves model performance and produces near-optimal exploration behaviors, by avoiding training objective bias caused by handcrafted reward shaping. In simulated challenging, large-scale exploration scenarios, HEADER demonstrates better scalability than most existing learning and non-learning methods, while achieving a significant improvement in exploration efficiency (up to 20%) over state-of-the-art baselines. N autonomous exploration, a mobile robot is tasked with exploring and mapping an unknown environment as fast as possible. By planning and executing its exploration path, the robot classifies unknown areas into free or obstacle areas based on its accumulated sensor measurements. In this work, we focus on tasks where a ground robot is equipped with an omnidirectional 3D LiDAR to obtain long-range, low-noise, and dense point cloud measurements. Recent advancements in LiDAR odometry have enabled accurate and robust localization and mapping in large-scale environments [1]-[3], allowing recent planners to focus on exploring the environment without concerns about mapping/localization accuracy [4]- [9]. Despite this, few planners support exploration at large scale in real-world environments [5], [10], mainly due to the complexity that comes with long-term, real-time path planning requirements. That is, to achieve efficient exploration, the planner must actively react to belief and map updates at a high frequency by (re-)reasoning about the full partial belief, to replan a long-term, non-myopic exploration path. Authors are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore. Example hierarchical graph constructed by HEADER during its autonomous exploration of our campus.