The aggregation of responses from multiple large language models has been widely used in practice. For example, a popular application is to improve reasoning via multi-agent LLM debate [Khan et al., 2024, Subramaniam et al., 2025, Choi et al., 2025] and LLM council [Zhao et al., 2024]. Previous works thus far have mostly employed the simple majority voting (MV) rule as a natural first instinct to aggregate different LLMs' responses into a single answer. Intuitively, MV can be viewed as a zero-order aggregation method that only depends on the observed answers and fails to account for heterogeneity and correlation among models, which are often captured by higher-order information such as LLMs' expected accuracies (first-order information) and answer correlation (second-order information). This thus raises the following natural question: is it possible to leverage such higher-order information to develop better methods for aggregating LLMs' responses?

Internet service providers (ISPs) need to connect with other ISPs to provide global connectivity services to their users. To ensure global connectivity, ISPs can either use transit service(s) or establish direct peering relationships between themselves via Internet exchange points (IXPs). Peering offers more room for ISP-specific optimizations and is preferred, but it often involves a lengthy and complex process. Automating peering partner selection can enhance efficiency in the global Internet ecosystem. We explore the use of publicly available data on ISPs to develop a machine learning (ML) model that can predict whether an ISP pair should peer or not. At first, we explore public databases, e.g., PeeringDB, CAIDA, etc., to gather data on ISPs. Then, we evaluate the performance of three broad types of ML models for predicting peering relationships: tree-based, neural network-based, and transformer-based. Among these, we observe that tree-based models achieve the highest accuracy and efficiency in our experiments. The XGBoost model trained with publicly available data showed promising performance, with a 98% accuracy rate in predicting peering partners. In addition, the model demonstrated great resilience to variations in time, space, and missing data. We envision that ISPs can adopt our method to fully automate the peering partner selection process, thus transitioning to a more efficient and optimized Internet ecosystem.

This paper introduces a dual-layer framework for network operator-side quality of experience (QoE) assessment that integrates both objective network modeling and subjective user perception extracted from live-streaming platforms. On the objective side, we develop a machine learning model trained on mean opinion scores (MOS) computed via the ITU-T P.1203 reference implementation, allowing accurate prediction of user-perceived video quality using only network parameters such as packet loss, delay, jitter, and throughput without reliance on video content or client-side instrumentation. On the subjective side, we present a semantic filtering and scoring pipeline that processes user comments from live streams to extract performance-related feedback. A large language model is used to assign scalar MOS scores to filtered comments in a deterministic and reproducible manner. To support scalable and interpretable analysis, we construct a labeled dataset of 47,894 live-stream comments, of which about 34,000 are identified as QoE-relevant through multi-layer semantic filtering. Each comment is enriched with simulated Internet Service Provider attribution and temporally aligned using synthetic timestamps in 5-min intervals. The resulting dataset enables operator-level aggregation and time-series analysis of user-perceived quality. A delta MOS metric is proposed to measure each Internet service provider's deviation from platform-wide sentiment, allowing detection of localized degradations even in the absence of direct network telemetry. A controlled outage simulation confirms the framework's effectiveness in identifying service disruptions through comment-based trends alone. The system provides each operator with its own subjective MOS and the global platform average per interval, enabling real-time interpretation of performance deviations and comparison with objective network-based QoE estimates.

The Image Signal Processor (ISP) is a fundamental component in modern smartphone cameras responsible for conversion of RA W sensor image data to RGB images with a strong focus on perceptual quality. Recent work highlights the potential of deep learning approaches and their ability to capture details with a quality increasingly close to that of professional cameras. A difficult and costly step when developing a learned ISP is the acquisition of pixel-wise aligned paired data that maps the raw captured by a smart-phone camera sensor to high-quality reference images. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing a novel training method for a learnable ISP that eliminates the need for direct correspondences between raw images and ground-truth data with matching content. Our unpaired approach employs a multi-term loss function guided by adversarial training with multiple discriminators processing feature maps from pre-trained networks to maintain content structure while learning color and texture characteristics from the target RGB dataset. Using lightweight neural network architectures suitable for mobile devices as backbones, we evaluated our method on the Zurich RA W to RGB and Fujifilm UltraISP datasets. Compared to paired training methods, our unpaired learning strategy shows strong potential and achieves high fidelity across multiple evaluation metrics. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.

Cable broadband networks are one of the few "last-mile" broadband technologies widely available in the U.S. Unfortunately, they have poor reliability after decades of deployment. The cable industry proposed a framework called Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) to diagnose the cable networks. However, there is little public knowledge or systematic study on how to use these data to detect and localize cable network problems. Existing tools in the public domain have prohibitive high false-positive rates. In this paper, we propose CableMon, the first public-domain system that applies machine learning techniques to PNM data to improve the reliability of cable broadband networks. CableMon tackles two key challenges faced by cable ISPs: accurately detecting failures, and distinguishing whether a failure occurs within a network or at a subscriber's premise. CableMon uses statistical models to generate features from time series data and uses customer trouble tickets as hints to infer abnormal/failure thresholds for these generated features. Further, CableMon employs an unsupervised learning model to group cable devices sharing similar anomalous patterns and effectively identify impairments that occur inside a cable network and impairments occur at a subscriber's premise, as these two different faults require different types of technical personnel to repair them. We use eight months of PNM data and customer trouble tickets from an ISP and experimental deployment to evaluate CableMon's performance. Our evaluation results show that CableMon can effectively detect and distinguish failures from PNM data and outperforms existing public-domain tools.

Two types of radio frequency (RF) impairments frequently occur in a cable broadband network: impairments that occur inside a cable network and impairments occur at the edge of the broadband network, i.e., in a subscriber's premise. Differentiating these two types of faults is important, as different faults require different types of technical personnel to repair them. Presently, the cable industry lacks publicly available tools to automatically diagnose the type of fault. In this work, we present TelApart, a fault diagnosis system for cable broadband networks. TelApart uses telemetry data collected by the Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) infrastructure in cable networks to effectively differentiate the type of fault. Integral to TelApart's design is an unsupervised machine learning model that groups cable devices sharing similar anomalous patterns together. We use metrics derived from an ISP's customer trouble tickets to programmatically tune the model's hyper-parameters so that an ISP can deploy TelApart in various conditions without hand-tuning its hyper-parameters. We also address the data challenge that the telemetry data collected by the PNM system contain numerous missing, duplicated, and unaligned data points. Using real-world data contributed by a cable ISP, we show that TelApart can effectively identify different types of faults.

In this work, we propose a deep learning-based imaging method for addressing the multi-frequency electromagnetic (EM) inverse scattering problem (ISP). By combining deep learning technology with EM physical laws, we have successfully developed a multi-frequency neural Born iterative method (NeuralBIM), guided by the principles of the single-frequency NeuralBIM. This method integrates multitask learning techniques with NeuralBIM's efficient iterative inversion process to construct a robust multi-frequency Born iterative inversion model. During training, the model employs a multitask learning approach guided by homoscedastic uncertainty to adaptively allocate the weights of each frequency's data. Additionally, an unsupervised learning method, constrained by the physical laws of ISP, is used to train the multi-frequency NeuralBIM model, eliminating the need for contrast and total field data. The effectiveness of the multi-frequency NeuralBIM is validated through synthetic and experimental data, demonstrating improvements in accuracy and computational efficiency for solving ISP. Moreover, this method exhibits strong generalization capabilities and noise resistance. The multi-frequency NeuralBIM method explores a novel inversion method for multi-frequency EM data and provides an effective solution for the electromagnetic ISP of multi-frequency data.

Modern smartphone camera quality heavily relies on the image signal processor (ISP) to enhance captured raw images, utilizing carefully designed modules to produce final output images encoded in a standard color space (e.g., sRGB). Neural-based end-to-end learnable ISPs offer promising advancements, potentially replacing traditional ISPs with their ability to adapt without requiring extensive tuning for each new camera model, as is often the case for nearly every module in traditional ISPs. However, the key challenge with the recent learning-based ISPs is the urge to collect large paired datasets for each distinct camera model due to the influence of intrinsic camera characteristics on the formation of input raw images. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel method for unpaired learning of raw-to-raw translation across diverse cameras. Specifically, we propose Rawformer, an unsupervised Transformer-based encoder-decoder method for raw-to-raw translation. It accurately maps raw images captured by a certain camera to the target camera, facilitating the generalization of learnable ISPs to new unseen cameras. Our method demonstrates superior performance on real camera datasets, achieving higher accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art techniques, and preserving a more robust correlation between the original and translated raw images. The codes and the pretrained models are available at https://github.com/gosha20777/rawformer.

VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using "dual use" DPI technology. To investigate the potential for VPN blocking, we develop mechanisms for accurately fingerprinting connections using OpenVPN, the most popular protocol for commercial VPN services. We identify three fingerprints based on protocol features such as byte pattern, packet size, and server response. Playing the role of an attacker who controls the network, we design a two-phase framework that performs passive fingerprinting and active probing in sequence.

Correctly classifying brain tumors is imperative to the prompt and accurate treatment of a patient. While several classification algorithms based on classical image processing or deep learning methods have been proposed to rapidly classify tumors in MR images, most assume the unrealistic setting of noise-free training data. In this work, we study a difficult but realistic setting of training a deep learning model on noisy MR images to classify brain tumors. We propose two training methods that are robust to noisy MRI training data, Influence-based Sample Reweighing (ISR) and Influence-based Sample Perturbation (ISP), which are based on influence functions from robust statistics. Using the influence functions, in ISR, we adaptively reweigh training examples according to how helpful/harmful they are to the training process, while in ISP, we craft and inject helpful perturbation proportional to the influence score. Both ISR and ISP harden the classification model against noisy training data without significantly affecting the generalization ability of the model on test data. We conduct empirical evaluations over a common brain tumor dataset and compare ISR and ISP to three baselines. Our empirical results show that ISR and ISP can efficiently train deep learning models robust against noisy training data.