The accumulation of time-series signals and the absence of labels make time-series Anomaly Detection (AD) a self-supervised task of deep learning. Methods based on normality assumptions face the following three limitations: (1) A single assumption could hardly characterize the whole normality or lead to some deviation. (2) Some assumptions may go against the principle of AD. (3) Their basic assumption is that the training data is uncontaminated (free of anomalies), which is unrealistic in practice, leading to a decline in robustness. This paper proposes a novel robust approach, RoCA, which is the first to address all of the above three challenges, as far as we are aware. It fuses the separated assumptions of one-class classification and contrastive learning in a single training process to characterize a more complete so-called normality. Additionally, it monitors the training data and computes a carefully designed anomaly score throughout the training process. This score helps identify latent anomalies, which are then used to define the classification boundary, inspired by the concept of outlier exposure. The performance on AIOps datasets improved by 6% compared to when contamination was not considered (COCA). On two large and high-dimensional multivariate datasets, the performance increased by 5% to 10%. RoCA achieves the highest average performance on both univariate and multivariate datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/ruiking04/RoCA.

While voice technologies increasingly serve aging populations, current systems exhibit significant performance gaps due to inadequate training data capturing elderly-specific vocal characteristics like presbyphonia and dialectal variations. The limited data available on super-aged individuals in existing elderly speech datasets, coupled with overly simple recording styles and annotation dimensions, exacerbates this issue. To address the critical scarcity of speech data from individuals aged 75 and above, we introduce SeniorTalk, a carefully annotated Chinese spoken dialogue dataset. This dataset contains 55.53 hours of speech from 101 natural conversations involving 202 participants, ensuring a strategic balance across gender, region, and age. Through detailed annotation across multiple dimensions, it can support a wide range of speech tasks. We perform extensive experiments on speaker verification, speaker diarization, speech recognition, and speech editing tasks, offering crucial insights for the development of speech technologies targeting this age group.

--Deep Neural Networks are increasingly leveraging sparsity to reduce the scaling up of model parameter size. However, reducing wall-clock time through sparsity and pruning remains challenging due to irregular memory access patterns, leading to frequent cache misses. In this paper, we present NPU V ector Runahead (NVR), a prefetching mechanism tailored for NPUs to address cache miss problems in sparse DNN workloads. NVR provides a general micro-architectural solution for sparse DNN workloads without requiring compiler or algorithmic support, operating as a decoupled, speculative, lightweight hardware sub-thread alongside the NPU, with minimal hardware overhead (under 5%). NVR achieves an average 90% reduction in cache misses compared to SOT A prefetching in general-purpose processors, delivering 4x average speedup on sparse workloads versus NPUs without prefetching. Moreover, we investigate the advantages of incorporating a small cache (16KB) into the NPU combined with NVR. Our evaluation shows that expanding this modest cache delivers 5x higher performance benefits than increasing the L2 cache size by the same amount. Fortunately, these workloads are typically over-parameterised [3], where up to 90% of parameters in prevalent models can be pruned while maintaining comparable performance [4]. This redundancy presents an opportunity to leverage sparsity to reduce such intensive resource demands. Theoretically, more fine-grained sparsity patterns yield higher acceleration by skipping more zero-valued elements.

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single conversation, presents significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing Mandarin-English code-switching datasets often suffer from limitations in size, spontaneity, and the lack of full-length dialogue recordings with transcriptions, hindering the development of robust ASR models for real-world conversational scenarios. This paper introduces CS-Dialogue, a novel large-scale Mandarin-English code-switching speech dataset comprising 104 hours of spontaneous conversations from 200 speakers. Unlike previous datasets, CS-Dialogue provides full-length dialogue recordings with complete transcriptions, capturing naturalistic code-switching patterns in continuous speech. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, present detailed statistics of the dataset, and establish benchmark ASR performance using state-of-the-art models. Our experiments, using Transformer, Conformer, and Branchformer, demonstrate the challenges of code-switching ASR, and show that existing pre-trained models such as Whisper still have the space to improve. The CS-Dialogue dataset will be made freely available for all academic purposes.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in multilingual language understanding and generation. However, due to the imbalance in training data, their capabilities in non-English languages are limited. Recent studies revealed the English-pivot multilingual mechanism of LLMs, where LLMs implicitly convert non-English queries into English ones at the bottom layers and adopt English for thinking at the middle layers. However, due to the absence of explicit supervision for cross-lingual alignment in the intermediate layers of LLMs, the internal representations during these stages may become inaccurate. In this work, we introduce a deep supervision fine-tuning method (DFT) that incorporates additional supervision in the internal layers of the model to guide its workflow. Specifically, we introduce two training objectives on different layers of LLMs: one at the bottom layers to constrain the conversion of the target language into English, and another at the middle layers to constrain reasoning in English. To effectively achieve the guiding purpose, we designed two types of supervision signals: logits and feature, which represent a stricter constraint and a relatively more relaxed guidance. Our method guides the model to not only consider the final generated result when processing non-English inputs but also ensure the accuracy of internal representations. We conducted extensive experiments on typical English-centric large models, LLaMA-2 and Gemma-2, and the results on multiple multilingual datasets show that our method significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods.

Achieving real-time SLAM on mobile robotic systems with limited computational resources is challenging because the complexity of SLAM algorithms increases over time. This restriction can be lifted by offloading computations to edge servers, forming the emerging paradigm of edge-assisted SLAM. Nevertheless, the exogenous and stochastic input processes affect the dynamics of the edge-assisted SLAM system. Moreover, the requirements of clients on SLAM metrics change over time, exerting implicit and time-varying effects on the system. In this paper, we aim to push the limit beyond existing edge-assist SLAM by proposing a new architecture that can handle the input-driven processes and also satisfy clients' implicit and time-varying requirements. The key innovations of our work involve a regional feature prediction method for importance-aware local data processing, a configuration adaptation policy that integrates data compression/decompression and task offloading, and an input-dependent learning framework for task scheduling with constraint satisfaction. Extensive experiments prove that our architecture improves pose estimation accuracy and saves up to 47% of communication costs compared with a popular edge-assisted SLAM system, as well as effectively satisfies the clients' requirements. Index Terms --Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), mobile edge computing (MEC), task offloading, task scheduling, and constrained reinforcement learning.

Graph-theoretic problems arise in real-world applications like logistics, communication networks, and traffic optimization. These problems are often complex, noisy, and irregular, posing challenges for traditional algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) offer potential solutions but face challenges, including limited accuracy and input length constraints. To address these challenges, we propose MA-GTS (Multi-Agent Graph Theory Solver), a multi-agent framework that decomposes these complex problems through agent collaboration. MA-GTS maps the implicitly expressed text-based graph data into clear, structured graph representations and dynamically selects the most suitable algorithm based on problem constraints and graph structure scale. This approach ensures that the solution process remains efficient and the resulting reasoning path is interpretable. We validate MA-GTS using the G-REAL dataset, a real-world-inspired graph theory dataset we created. Experimental results show that MA-GTS outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, with strong results across multiple benchmarks (G-REAL 94.2%, GraCoRe 96.9%, NLGraph 98.4%).MA-GTS is open-sourced at https://github.com/ZIKEYUAN/MA-GTS.git.

This paper introduces a data-driven algorithm for modeling and compensating shape deviations in additive manufacturing (AM), addressing challenges in geometric accuracy and batch production. While traditional methods, such as analytical models and metrology, laid the groundwork for geometric precision, they are often impractical for large-scale production. Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) have improved compensation precision, but issues remain in generalizing across complex geometries and adapting to position-dependent variations. We present a novel approach for powder bed fusion (PBF) processes, using GraphCompNet, which is a computational framework combining graph-based neural networks with a generative adversarial network (GAN)-inspired training process. By leveraging point cloud data and dynamic graph convolutional neural networks (DGCNNs), GraphCompNet models complex shapes and incorporates position-specific thermal and mechanical factors. A two-stage adversarial training procedure iteratively refines compensated designs via a compensator-predictor architecture, offering real-time feedback and optimization. Experimental validation across diverse shapes and positions shows the framework significantly improves compensation accuracy (35 to 65 percent) across the entire print space, adapting to position-dependent variations. This work advances the development of Digital Twin technology for AM, enabling scalable, real-time monitoring and compensation, and addressing critical gaps in AM process control. The proposed method supports high-precision, automated industrial-scale design and manufacturing systems.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making~(MCDM) is widely applied in various fields, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of multiple levels and attributes to support decision makers in making scientific and rational decisions in complex scenarios. However, traditional MCDM methods face bottlenecks in high-dimensional problems. Given the fact that Large Language Models~(LLMs) achieve impressive performance in various complex tasks, but limited work evaluates LLMs in specific MCDM problems with the help of human domain experts, we further explore the capability of LLMs by proposing an LLM-based evaluation framework to automatically deal with general complex MCDM problems. Within the framework, we assess the performance of various typical open-source models, as well as commercial models such as Claude and ChatGPT, on 3 important applications, these models can only achieve around 60\% accuracy rate compared to the evaluation ground truth. Upon incorporation of Chain-of-Thought or few-shot prompting, the accuracy rates rise to around 70\%, and highly depend on the model. In order to further improve the performance, a LoRA-based fine-tuning technique is employed. The experimental results show that the accuracy rates for different applications improve significantly to around 95\%, and the performance difference is trivial between different models, indicating that LoRA-based fine-tuned LLMs exhibit significant and stable advantages in addressing MCDM tasks and can provide human-expert-level solutions to a wide range of MCDM challenges.

Recently, Gumbel AlphaZero (GAZ) was proposed to solve classic combinatorial optimization problems such as TSP and JSSP by creating a carefully designed competition model (consisting of a learning player and a competitor player), which leverages the idea of self-play. However, if the competitor is too strong or too weak, the effectiveness of self-play training can be reduced, particularly in complex CO problems. To address this problem, we further propose a two-stage self-play strategy to improve the GAZ method (named TSS GAZ PTP). In the first stage, the learning player uses the enhanced policy network based on the Gumbel Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), and the competitor uses the historical best trained policy network (acts as a greedy player). In the second stage, we employ Gumbel MCTS for both players, which makes the competition fiercer so that both players can continuously learn smarter trajectories. We first investigate the performance of our proposed TSS GAZ PTP method on TSP since it is also used as a test problem by the original GAZ. The results show the superior performance of TSS GAZ PTP . Then we extend TSS GAZ PTP to deal with multi-constrained Electric V ehicle Routing Problems (EVRP), which is a recently well-known real application research topic and remains challenging as a complex CO problem. Impressively, the experimental results show that the TSS GAZ PTP outperforms the state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning methods in all types of instances tested and outperforms the optimization solver in tested large-scale instances, indicating the importance and promising of employing more dynamic self-play strategies for complex CO problems.