The widespread use of social media applications has raised significant privacy concerns, often highlighted in user reviews. These reviews also provide developers with valuable insights into improving apps by addressing issues and introducing better features. However, the sheer volume and nuanced nature of reviews make manual identification and prioritization of privacy-related concerns challenging for developers. Previous studies have developed software utilities to automatically classify user reviews as privacy-relevant, privacy-irrelevant, bug reports, feature requests, etc., using machine learning. Notably, there is a lack of focus on classifying reviews specifically as privacy-related feature requests, privacy-related bug reports, or privacy-irrelevant. This paper introduces SENtinel SORt (SENSOR), an automated online annotation tool designed to help developers annotate and classify user reviews into these categories. For automating the annotation of such reviews, this paper introduces the annotation model, GRACE (GRU-based Attention with CBOW Embedding), using Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) with Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Attention mechanism. Approximately 16000 user reviews from seven popular social media apps on Google Play Store, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook Lite, and Line were analyzed. Two annotators manually labelled the reviews, achieving a Cohen's Kappa value of 0.87, ensuring a labeled dataset with high inter-rater agreement for training machine learning models. Among the models tested, GRACE demonstrated the best performance (macro F1-score: 0.9434, macro ROC-AUC: 0.9934, and accuracy: 95.10%) despite class imbalance. SENSOR demonstrates significant potential to assist developers with extracting and addressing privacy-related feature requests or bug reports from user reviews, enhancing user privacy and trust.

The rapid development of urban low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) economy poses new challenges for dynamic site selection of UAV landing points and supply stations. Traditional deep reinforcement learning methods face computational complexity bottlenecks, particularly with standard attention mechanisms, when handling large-scale urban-level location problems. This paper proposes GeoHopNet, a Hopfield-augmented sparse spatial attention network specifically designed for dynamic UAV site location problems. Our approach introduces four core innovations: (1) distance-biased multi-head attention mechanism that explicitly encodes spatial geometric information; (2) K-nearest neighbor sparse attention that reduces computational complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O(NK)$; (3) a modern Hopfield external memory module; and (4) a memory regularization strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that GeoHopNet extends the boundary of solvable problem sizes. For large-scale instances with 1,000 nodes, where standard attention models become prohibitively slow (over 3 seconds per instance) and traditional solvers fail, GeoHopNet finds high-quality solutions (0.22\% optimality gap) in under 0.1 seconds. Compared to the state-of-the-art ADNet baseline on 100-node instances, our method improves solution quality by 22.2\% and is 1.8$\times$ faster.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) relies heavily on seawater desalination to meet over 90% of its drinking water needs. Desalination processes are highly energy intensive and account for approximately 15% of the UAE's electricity consumption, contributing to over 22% of the country's energy-related CO2 emissions. Moreover, these processes face significant sustainability challenges in the face of climate uncertainties such as rising seawater temperatures, salinity, and aerosol optical depth (AOD). AOD greatly affects the operational and economic performance of solar-powered desalination systems through photovoltaic soiling, membrane fouling, and water turbidity cycles. This study proposes a novel pipelined two-stage predictive modelling architecture: the first stage forecasts AOD using satellite-derived time series and meteorological data; the second stage uses the predicted AOD and other meteorological factors to predict desalination performance efficiency losses. The framework achieved 98% accuracy, and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used to reveal key drivers of system degradation. Furthermore, this study proposes a dust-aware rule-based control logic for desalination systems based on predicted values of AOD and solar efficiency. This control logic is used to adjust the desalination plant feed water pressure, adapt maintenance scheduling, and regulate energy source switching. To enhance the practical utility of the research findings, the predictive models and rule-based controls were packaged into an interactive dashboard for scenario and predictive analytics. This provides a management decision-support system for climate-adaptive planning.

Learning from demonstration provides a sample-efficient approach to acquiring complex behaviors, enabling robots to move robustly, compliantly, and with fluidity. In this context, Dynamic Motion Primitives offer built - in stability and robustness to disturbances but often struggle to capture complex periodic behaviors. Moreover, they are limited in their ability to interpolate between different tasks. These shortcomings substantially narrow their applicability, excluding a wide class of practically meaningful tasks such as locomotion and rhythmic tool use. In this work, we introduce Orbitally Stable Motion Primitives (OSMPs) - a framework that combines a learned diffeomorphic encoder with a supercritical Hopf bifurcation in latent space, enabling the accurate acquisition of periodic motions from demonstrations while ensuring formal guarantees of orbital stability and transverse contraction. Furthermore, by conditioning the bijective encoder on the task, we enable a single learned policy to represent multiple motion objectives, yielding consistent zero-shot generalization to unseen motion objectives within the training distribution. We validate the proposed approach through extensive simulation and real-world experiments across a diverse range of robotic platforms - from collaborative arms and soft manipulators to a bio-inspired rigid-soft turtle robot - demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines such as diffusion policies, among others.

The ability to transfer knowledge from prior experiences to novel tasks stands as a pivotal capability of intelligent agents, including both humans and computational models. This principle forms the basis of transfer learning, where large pre-trained neural networks are fine-tuned to adapt to downstream tasks. Transfer learning has demonstrated tremendous success, both in terms of task adaptation speed and performance. However there are several domains where, due to lack of data, training such large pre-trained models or foundational models is not a possibility - computational chemistry, computational immunology, and medical imaging are examples. To address these challenges, our work focuses on designing architectures to enable efficient acquisition of priors when large amounts of data are unavailable. In particular, we demonstrate that we can use neural memory to enable adaptation on non-stationary distributions with only a few samples. Then we demonstrate that our hypernetwork designs (a network that generates another network) can acquire more generalizable priors than standard networks when trained with Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). Subsequently, we apply hypernetworks to 3D scene generation, demonstrating that they can acquire priors efficiently on just a handful of training scenes, thereby leading to faster text-to-3D generation. We then extend our hypernetwork framework to perform 3D segmentation on novel scenes with limited data by efficiently transferring priors from earlier viewed scenes. Finally, we repurpose an existing molecular generative method as a pre-training framework that facilitates improved molecular property prediction, addressing critical challenges in computational immunology.

In the study of complex dynamical systems, understanding and accurately modeling the underlying physical processes is crucial for predicting system behavior and designing effective interventions. Yet real-world systems exhibit pronounced input (or system) variability and are observed through noisy, limited data conditions that confound traditional discovery methods that assume fixed-coefficient deterministic models. In this work, we theorize that accounting for system variability together with measurement noise is the key to consistently discover the governing equations underlying dynamical systems. As such, we introduce a stochastic inverse physics-discovery (SIP) framework that treats the unknown coefficients as random variables and infers their posterior distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the push-forward of the posterior samples and the empirical data distribution. Benchmarks on four canonical problems -- the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system (multi- and single-trajectory), the historical Hudson Bay lynx-hare data, the chaotic Lorenz attractor, and fluid infiltration in porous media using low- and high-viscosity liquids -- show that SIP consistently identifies the correct equations and lowers coefficient root-mean-square error by an average of 82\% relative to the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) approach and its Bayesian variant. The resulting posterior distributions yield 95\% credible intervals that closely track the observed trajectories, providing interpretable models with quantified uncertainty. SIP thus provides a robust, data-efficient approach for consistent physics discovery in noisy, variable, and data-limited settings.

We study convergence in high-probability of SGD-type methods in non-convex optimization and the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy-tailed noise, a general black-box nonlinear framework is considered, subsuming nonlinearities like sign, clipping, normalization and their smooth counterparts. Our first result shows that nonlinear SGD (N-SGD) achieves the rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-1/2})$, for any noise with unbounded moments and a symmetric probability density function (PDF). Crucially, N-SGD has exponentially decaying tails, matching the performance of linear SGD under light-tailed noise. To handle non-symmetric noise, we propose two novel estimators, based on the idea of noise symmetrization. The first, dubbed Symmetrized Gradient Estimator (SGE), assumes a noiseless gradient at any reference point is available at the start of training, while the second, dubbed Mini-batch SGE (MSGE), uses mini-batches to estimate the noiseless gradient. Combined with the nonlinear framework, we get N-SGE and N-MSGE methods, respectively, both achieving the same convergence rate and exponentially decaying tails as N-SGD, while allowing for non-symmetric noise with unbounded moments and PDF satisfying a mild technical condition, with N-MSGE additionally requiring bounded noise moment of order $p \in (1,2]$. Compared to works assuming noise with bounded $p$-th moment, our results: 1) are based on a novel symmetrization approach; 2) provide a unified framework and relaxed moment conditions; 3) imply optimal oracle complexity of N-SGD and N-SGE, strictly better than existing works when $p < 2$, while the complexity of N-MSGE is close to existing works. Compared to works assuming symmetric noise with unbounded moments, we: 1) provide a sharper analysis and improved rates; 2) facilitate state-dependent symmetric noise; 3) extend the strong guarantees to non-symmetric noise.

This survey reviews a clustering method based on solving a convex optimization problem. Despite the plethora of existing clustering methods, convex clustering has several uncommon features that distinguish it from prior art. The optimization problem is free of spurious local minima, and its unique global minimizer is stable with respect to all its inputs, including the data, a tuning parameter, and weight hyperparameters. Its single tuning parameter controls the number of clusters and can be chosen using standard techniques from penalized regression. We give intuition into the behavior and theory for convex clustering as well as practical guidance. We highlight important algorithms and give insight into how their computational costs scale with the problem size. Finally, we highlight the breadth of its uses and flexibility to be combined and integrated with other inferential methods.

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently susceptible to divergence. While more principled approaches like Gradient TD (GTD) methods have strong convergence guarantees, they have rarely been used in deep RL. Recent work introduced the Generalized Projected Bellman Error ($\GPBE$), enabling GTD methods to work efficiently with nonlinear function approximation. However, this work is only limited to one-step methods, which are slow at credit assignment and require a large number of samples. In this paper, we extend the $\GPBE$ objective to support multistep credit assignment based on the $λ$-return and derive three gradient-based methods that optimize this new objective. We provide both a forward-view formulation compatible with experience replay and a backward-view formulation compatible with streaming algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithms and show that they outperform both PPO and StreamQ in MuJoCo and MinAtar environments, respectively. Code available at https://github.com/esraaelelimy/gtd\_algos

Traditional Low Rank Decompositions Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) are foundational techniques in statistical signal processing and dimensionality reduction [1, 2, 3]. Both methods aim to recover latent source signals from observed mixtures by identifying a (linear) transformation that reveals underlying structure in the data. PCA achieves this by finding statistically decorrelated source components, whereas ICA seeks maximally statistically independent components through higher-order statistics [4]. These methods have widespread application in dataset feature generation and blind signal separation. Traditional formulations of PCA and ICA operate on finite-dimensional vectors (discretely indexed), and there exist established algorithms to compute the source signal vectors from given datasets [1, 3].