-- Accurate prediction of surrounding road users' trajectories is essential for safe and efficient autonomous driving. While deep learning models have improved performance, challenges remain in preventing off-road predictions and ensuring kinematic feasibility. Existing methods incorporate road-awareness modules and enforce kinematic constraints but lack plausibility guarantees and often introduce trade-offs in complexity and flexibility. This paper proposes a novel framework that formulates trajectory prediction as a constrained regression guided by permissible driving directions and their boundaries. Using the agent's current state and an HD map, our approach defines the valid boundaries and ensures on-road predictions by training the network to learn superimposed paths between left and right boundary polylines. T o guarantee feasibility, the model predicts acceleration profiles that determine the vehicle's travel distance along these paths while adhering to kinematic constraints. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse-2 dataset against the HPTR baseline. Our approach shows a slight decrease in benchmark metrics compared to HPTR but notably improves final displacement error and eliminates infeasible trajectories. Moreover, the proposed approach has a superior generalization to less prevalent maneuvers and unseen out-of-distribution scenarios, reducing the off-road rate under adversarial attacks from 66% to just 1%.

Deep generative models have achieved tremendous success in designing novel drug molecules in recent years. A new thread of works have shown the great potential in advancing the specificity and success rate of in silico drug design by considering the structure of protein pockets. This setting posts fundamental computational challenges in sampling new chemical compounds that could satisfy multiple geometrical constraints imposed by pockets. Previous sampling algorithms either sample in the graph space or only consider the 3D coordinates of atoms while ignoring other detailed chemical structures such as bond types and functional groups. To address the challenge, we develop Pocket2Mol, an E(3)-equivariant generative network composed of two modules: 1) a new graph neural network capturing both spatial and bonding relationships between atoms of the binding pockets and 2) a new efficient algorithm which samples new drug candidates conditioned on the pocket representations from a tractable distribution without relying on MCMC. Experimental results demonstrate that molecules sampled from Pocket2Mol achieve significantly better binding affinity and other drug properties such as druglikeness and synthetic accessibility.

This study presents a hybrid model for classifying handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset, combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with a multi-well Hopfield network. The approach employs a CNN to extract high-dimensional features from input images, which are then clustered into class-specific prototypes using k-means clustering. These prototypes serve as attractors in a multi-well energy landscape, where a Hopfield network performs classification by minimizing an energy function that balances feature similarity and class assignment.The model's design enables robust handling of intraclass variability, such as diverse handwriting styles, while providing an interpretable framework through its energy-based decision process. Through systematic optimization of the CNN architecture and the number of wells, the model achieves a high test accuracy of 99.2% on 10,000 MNIST images, demonstrating its effectiveness for image classification tasks. The findings highlight the critical role of deep feature extraction and sufficient prototype coverage in achieving high performance, with potential for broader applications in pattern recognition.

Catastrophic forgetting in deep neural networks occurs when learning new tasks degrades performance on previously learned tasks due to knowledge overwriting. Among the approaches to mitigate this issue, regularization techniques aim to identify and constrain "important" parameters to preserve previous knowledge. In the highly nonconvex optimization landscape of deep learning, we propose a novel perspective: tracking parameters during the final training plateau is more effective than monitoring them throughout the entire training process. We argue that parameters that exhibit higher activity (movement and variability) during this plateau reveal directions in the loss landscape that are relatively flat, making them suitable for adaptation to new tasks while preserving knowledge from previous ones. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that this approach achieves superior performance in balancing catastrophic forgetting mitigation with strong performance on newly learned tasks.

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) systems inherit vulnerabilities from classical machine learning while introducing new attack surfaces rooted in the physical and algorithmic layers of quantum computing. Despite a growing body of research on individual attack vectors - ranging from adversarial poisoning and evasion to circuit-level backdoors, side-channel leakage, and model extraction - these threats are often analyzed in isolation, with unrealistic assumptions about attacker capabilities and system environments. This fragmentation hampers the development of effective, holistic defense strategies. In this work, we argue that QML security requires more structured modeling of the attack surface, capturing not only individual techniques but also their relationships, prerequisites, and potential impact across the QML pipeline. We propose adapting kill chain models, widely used in classical IT and cybersecurity, to the quantum machine learning context. Such models allow for structured reasoning about attacker objectives, capabilities, and possible multi-stage attack paths - spanning reconnaissance, initial access, manipulation, persistence, and exfiltration. Based on extensive literature analysis, we present a detailed taxonomy of QML attack vectors mapped to corresponding stages in a quantum-aware kill chain framework that is inspired by the MITRE ATLAS for classical machine learning. We highlight interdependencies between physical-level threats (like side-channel leakage and crosstalk faults), data and algorithm manipulation (such as poisoning or circuit backdoors), and privacy attacks (including model extraction and training data inference). This work provides a foundation for more realistic threat modeling and proactive security-in-depth design in the emerging field of quantum machine learning.

Collaborative fairness is a crucial challenge in federated learning. However, existing approaches often overlook a practical yet complex form of heterogeneity: imbalanced covariate shift. We provide a theoretical analysis of this setting, which motivates the design of FedAKD (Federated Asynchronous Knowledge Distillation)- simple yet effective approach that balances accurate prediction with collaborative fairness. FedAKD consists of client and server updates. In the client update, we introduce a novel asynchronous knowledge distillation strategy based on our preliminary analysis, which reveals that while correctly predicted samples exhibit similar feature distributions across clients, incorrectly predicted samples show significant variability. This suggests that imbalanced covariate shift primarily arises from misclassified samples. Leveraging this insight, our approach first applies traditional knowledge distillation to update client models while keeping the global model fixed. Next, we select correctly predicted high-confidence samples and update the global model using these samples while keeping client models fixed. The server update simply aggregates all client models. We further provide a theoretical proof of FedAKD's convergence. Experimental results on public datasets (FashionMNIST and CIFAR10) and a real-world Electronic Health Records (EHR) dataset demonstrate that FedAKD significantly improves collaborative fairness, enhances predictive accuracy, and fosters client participation even under highly heterogeneous data distributions.

This paper presents our system for SemEval 2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection (Track A), which focuses on multi-label emotion detection in short texts. We propose a feature-centric framework that dynamically adapts document representations and learning algorithms to optimize language-specific performance. Our study evaluates three key components: document representation, dimensionality reduction, and model training in 28 languages, highlighting five for detailed analysis. The results show that TF-IDF remains highly effective for low-resource languages, while contextual embeddings like FastText and transformer-based document representations, such as those produced by Sentence-BERT, exhibit language-specific strengths. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reduces training time without compromising performance, particularly benefiting FastText and neural models such as Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP). Computational efficiency analysis underscores the trade-off between model complexity and processing cost. Our framework provides a scalable solution for multilingual emotion detection, addressing the challenges of linguistic diversity and resource constraints.

Essays are considered a valuable mechanism for evaluating learning outcomes in writing. Textual cohesion is an essential characteristic of a text, as it facilitates the establishment of meaning between its parts. Automatically scoring cohesion in essays presents a challenge in the field of educational artificial intelligence. The machine learning algorithms used to evaluate texts generally do not consider the individual characteristics of the instances that comprise the analysed corpus. In this meaning, item response theory can be adapted to the context of machine learning, characterising the ability, difficulty and discrimination of the models used. This work proposes and analyses the performance of a cohesion score prediction approach based on item response theory to adjust the scores generated by machine learning models. In this study, the corpus selected for the experiments consisted of the extended Essay-BR, which includes 6,563 essays in the style of the National High School Exam (ENEM), and the Brazilian Portuguese Narrative Essays, comprising 1,235 essays written by 5th to 9th grade students from public schools. We extracted 325 linguistic features and treated the problem as a machine learning regression task. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms conventional machine learning models and ensemble methods in several evaluation metrics. This research explores a potential approach for improving the automatic evaluation of cohesion in educational essays.

Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCI) aim to decode behavior from neural population activity, enabling individuals with motor impairments to regain motor functions and communication abilities. A key challenge in long-term iBCI is the nonstationarity of neural recordings, where the composition and tuning profiles of the recorded populations are unstable across recording sessions. Existing methods attempt to address this issue by explicit alignment techniques; however, they rely on fixed neural identities and require test-time labels or parameter updates, limiting their generalization across sessions and imposing additional computational burden during deployment. In this work, we introduce SPINT - a Spatial Permutation-Invariant Neural Transformer framework for behavioral decoding that operates directly on unordered sets of neural units. Central to our approach is a novel context-dependent positional embedding scheme that dynamically infers unit-specific identities, enabling flexible generalization across recording sessions. SPINT supports inference on variable-size populations and allows few-shot, gradient-free adaptation using a small amount of unlabeled data from the test session. To further promote model robustness to population variability, we introduce dynamic channel dropout, a regularization method for iBCI that simulates shifts in population composition during training. We evaluate SPINT on three multi-session datasets from the FALCON Benchmark, covering continuous motor decoding tasks in human and non-human primates. SPINT demonstrates robust cross-session generalization, outperforming existing zero-shot and few-shot unsupervised baselines while eliminating the need for test-time alignment and fine-tuning. Our work contributes an initial step toward a robust and scalable neural decoding framework for long-term iBCI applications.

Abstract--This work presents PanMatch, a versatile foundation model for robust correspondence matching. Unlike previous methods that rely on task-specific architectures and domain-specific fine-tuning to support tasks like stereo matching, optical flow or feature matching, our key insight is that any two-frame correspondence matching task can be addressed within a 2D displacement estimation framework using the same model weights. Such a formulation eliminates the need for designing specialized unified architectures or task-specific ensemble models. Instead, it achieves multi-task integration by endowing displacement estimation algorithms with unprecedented generalization capabilities. T o this end, we highlight the importance of a robust feature extractor applicable across multiple domains and tasks, and propose the feature transformation pipeline that leverage all-purpose features from Large Vision Models to endow matching baselines with zero-shot cross-view matching capabilities. Furthermore, we assemble a cross-domain dataset with near 1.8 million samples from stereo matching, optical flow, and feature matching domains to pretrain PanMatch. We demonstrate the versatility of PanMatch across a wide range of domains and downstream tasks using the same model weights . Our model outperforms UniMatch and Flow-Anything on cross-task evaluations, and achieves comparable performance to most state-of-the-art task-specific algorithms on task-oriented benchmarks. Additionally, PanMatch presents unprecedented zero-shot performance in abnormal scenarios, such as rainy day and satellite imagery, where most existing robust algorithms fail to yield meaningful results. This technique serves as the foundation for various real-world applications, including stereo matching for driving and navigation, optical flow for video editing and action recognition, and feature matching for 3D reconstruction. Previous research developed specialized architectures and model weights for specific correspondence tasks due to significant difference in task settings, as outlined in T able 1. For instance, stereo matching operates on a pair of synchronized, rectified images and identifies correspondences along horizontal epipolar lines. Feature matching focus on finding reliable correspondence of rigid scenes from varying camera poses and times. Optical flow estimates pixel-wise displacements in dynamic scenes over consecutive frames. Using task-specific priors to construct models simplifies network design and enhances inference efficiency . However, these individual pipelines inherently limits the adaptability of the algorithms across tasks, resulting in numerous specialized architectures and weights for different scenarios, which complicates real-world deployment.