Existing machine learning frameworks for compliance monitoring -- Markov Logic Networks, Probabilistic Soft Logic, supervised models -- share a fundamental paradigm: they treat observed data as ground truth and attempt to approximate rules from it. This assumption breaks down in rule-governed domains such as taxation or regulatory compliance, where authoritative rules are known a priori and the true challenge is to infer the latent state of rule activation, compliance, and parametric drift from partial and noisy observations. We propose Rule-State Inference (RSI), a Bayesian framework that inverts this paradigm by encoding regulatory rules as structured priors and casting compliance monitoring as posterior inference over a latent rule-state space S = {(a_i, c_i, delta_i)}, where a_i captures rule activation, c_i models the compliance rate, and delta_i quantifies parametric drift. We prove three theoretical guarantees: (T1) RSI absorbs regulatory changes in O(1) time via a prior ratio correction, independently of dataset size; (T2) the posterior is Bernstein-von Mises consistent, converging to the true rule state as observations accumulate; (T3) mean-field variational inference monotonically maximizes the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO). We instantiate RSI on the Togolese fiscal system and introduce RSI-Togo-Fiscal-Synthetic v1.0, a benchmark of 2,000 synthetic enterprises grounded in real OTR regulatory rules (2022-2025). Without any labeled training data, RSI achieves F1=0.519 and AUC=0.599, while absorbing regulatory changes in under 1ms versus 683-1082ms for full model retraining -- at least a 600x speedup.

With its opposable thumb, multiple joints and gripping skin, human hands are often considered to be the pinnacle of dexterity, and many robotic hands are designed in their image. But having been shaped by the slow process of evolution, human hands are far from optimized, with the biggest drawbacks including our single, asymmetrical thumbs and attachment to arms with limited mobility. "We can easily see the limitations of the human hand when attempting to reach objects underneath furniture or behind shelves, or performing simultaneous tasks like holding a bottle while picking up a chip can," says Aude Billard, head of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) in EPFL's School of Engineering. "Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand while keeping the grip stable can be extremely challenging, requiring awkward wrist contortions or body repositioning." A team composed of Billard, LASA researcher Xiao Gao, and Kai Junge and Josie Hughes from the Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab designed a robotic hand that overcomes these challenges.

As generative models continue to evolve, detecting AI-generated images remains a critical challenge. While effective detection methods exist, they often lack formal interpretability and may rely on implicit assumptions about fake content, potentially limiting robustness to distributional shifts. In this work, we introduce a rigorous, statistically grounded framework for fake image detection that focuses on producing a probability score interpretable with respect to the real-image population. Our method leverages the strengths of multiple existing detectors by combining training-free statistics. We compute p-values over a range of test statistics and aggregate them using classical statistical ensembling to assess alignment with the unified real-image distribution. This framework is generic, flexible, and training-free, making it well-suited for robust fake image detection across diverse and evolving settings.

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), enhancing sample efficiency is crucial, particularly in scenarios when data acquisition is costly and risky. In principle, off-policy RL algorithms can improve sample efficiency by allowing multiple updates per environment interaction. However, these multiple updates often lead the model to overfit to earlier interactions, which is referred to as the loss of plasticity. Our study investigates the underlying causes of this phenomenon by dividing plasticity into two aspects.

Effective traffic control is essential for mitigating congestion in transportation networks. Conventional traffic management strategies, including route guidance, ramp metering, and traffic signal control, often rely on state feedback controllers, used for their simplicity and reactivity; however, they lack the adaptability required to cope with complex and time-varying traffic dynamics. This paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework in which each agent adaptively tunes the parameters of a state feedback traffic controller, combining the reactivity of state feedback controllers with the adaptability of reinforcement learning. By tuning parameters at a lower frequency rather than directly determining control actions at a high frequency, the reinforcement learning agents achieve improved training efficiency while maintaining adaptability to varying traffic conditions. The multi-agent structure further enhances system robustness, as local controllers can operate independently in the event of partial failures. The proposed framework is evaluated on a simulated multi-class transportation network under varying traffic conditions. Results show that the proposed multi-agent framework outperforms the no control and fixed-parameter state feedback control cases, while performing on par with the single-agent RL-based adaptive state feedback control, with a much better resilience to partial failures.

While tabular machine learning has achieved remarkable success, temporal distribution shifts pose significant challenges in real-world deployment, as the relationships between features and labels continuously evolve. Static models assume fixed mappings to ensure generalization, whereas adaptive models may overfit to transient patterns, creating a dilemma between robustness and adaptability. In this paper, we analyze key factors essential for constructing an effective dynamic mapping for temporal tabular data. We discover that evolving feature semantics-particularly objective and subjective meanings-introduce concept drift over time. Crucially, we identify that feature transformation strategies are able to mitigate discrepancies in feature representations across temporal stages. Motivated by these insights, we propose a feature-aware temporal modulation mechanism that conditions feature representations on temporal context, modulating statistical properties such as scale and skewness. By aligning feature semantics across time, our approach achieves a lightweight yet powerful adaptation, effectively balancing generalizability and adaptability. Benchmark evaluations validate the effectiveness of our method in handling temporal shifts in tabular data.

Multi-Agent System (MAS) developing frameworks serve as the foundational infrastructure for social simulations powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing frameworks fail to adequately support large-scale simulation development due to inherent limitations in adaptability, configurability, reliability, and code reusability. For example, they cannot simulate a society where the agent population and profiles change over time. To fill this gap, we propose Agent-Kernel, a framework built upon a novel society-centric modular microkernel architecture. It decouples core system functions from simulation logic and separates cognitive processes from physical environments and action execution. Consequently, Agent-Kernel achieves superior adaptability, configurability, reliability, and reusability. We validate the framework's superiority through two distinct applications: a simulation of the Universe 25 (Mouse Utopia) experiment, which demonstrates the handling of rapid population dynamics from birth to death; and a large-scale simulation of the Zhejiang University Campus Life, successfully coordinating 10,000 heterogeneous agents, including students and faculty.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become valuable intellectual property of model owners, due to the substantial resources required for their development. To protect these assets in the deployed environment, recent research has proposed model usage control mechanisms to ensure models cannot be used without proper authorization. These methods typically lock the utility of the model by embedding an access key into its parameters. However, they often assume static deployment, and largely fail to withstand continual post-deployment model updates, such as fine-tuning or task-specific adaptation. In this paper, we propose ADALOC, to endow key-based model usage control with adaptability during model evolution. It strategically selects a subset of weights as an intrinsic access key, which enables all model updates to be confined to this key throughout the evolution lifecycle. ADALOC enables using the access key to restore the keyed model to the latest authorized states without redistributing the entire network (i.e., adaptation), and frees the model owner from full re-keying after each model update (i.e., lock preservation). We establish a formal foundation to underpin ADALOC, providing crucial bounds such as the errors introduced by updates restricted to the access key. Experiments on standard benchmarks, such as CIFAR-100, Caltech-256, and Flowers-102, and modern architectures, including ResNet, DenseNet, and ConvNeXt, demonstrate that ADALOC achieves high accuracy under significant updates while retaining robust protections. Specifically, authorized usages consistently achieve strong task-specific performance, while unauthorized usage accuracy drops to near-random guessing levels (e.g., 1.01% on CIFAR-100), compared to up to 87.01% without ADALOC. This shows that ADALOC can offer a practical solution for adaptive and protected DNN deployment in evolving real-world scenarios.

Abstract-- Wheeled bipedal robots are emerging as flexible platforms for field exploration. However, head instability induced by uneven terrain can degrade the accuracy of onboard sensors (e.g., cameras) or damage fragile payloads. Existing research primarily focuses on stabilizing the mobile platform but overlooks active stabilization of the head in the world frame, resulting in vertical oscillations that undermine overall stability. T o address this challenge, we developed a model-based ground force estimation method for our 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) wheeled bipedal robot. Leveraging these force estimates, we implemented an admittance control algorithm to enhance terrain adaptability. I. INTRODUCTION As robotics technology advances, wheeled bipedal robots are being increasingly deployed for agile exploration [1].