Test-time scaling has been shown to substantially improve large language models' (LLMs) mathematical reasoning. However, for a large portion of mathematical corpora, especially theorem proving, RLVR's scalability is limited: intermediate reasoning is crucial, while final answers are difficult to directly and reliably verify. Meanwhile, token-level SFT often degenerates into rote memorization rather than inducing longer chains of thought. Inspired by BERT's self-supervised tasks, we propose MR-RLVR (Masked-and-Reordered RLVR), which constructs process-level self-supervised rewards via "masked-then-fill" and "step reordering" to extract learnable signals from intermediate reasoning. Our training pipeline comprises two stages: we first perform self-supervised training on sampled mathematical calculation and proof data; we then conduct RLVR fine-tuning on mathematical calculation datasets where only outcomes are verifiable. We implement MR-RLVR on Qwen2.5-3B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, and evaluate on AIME24, AIME25, AMC23, and MATH500. Under a fixed sampling and decoding budget, MR-RLVR achieves average relative gains over the original RLVR of +9.86% Pass@1, +5.27% Pass@5, and +4.00% Pass@8. These results indicate that incorporating process-aware self-supervised signals can effectively enhance RLVR's scalability and performance in only outcome-verifiable settings.

Although passwords remain the primary defense against unauthorized access, users often tend to use passwords that are easy to remember. This behavior significantly increases security risks, also due to the fact that traditional password strength evaluation methods are often inadequate. In this discussion paper, we present SODA ADVANCE, a data reconstruction tool also designed to enhance evaluation processes related to the password strength. In particular, SODA ADVANCE integrates a specialized module aimed at evaluating password strength by leveraging publicly available data from multiple sources, including social media platforms. Moreover, we investigate the capabilities and risks associated with emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) in evaluating and generating passwords, respectively. Experimental assessments conducted with 100 real users demonstrate that LLMs can generate strong and personalized passwords possibly defined according to user profiles. Additionally, LLMs were shown to be effective in evaluating passwords, especially when they can take into account user profile data.

Predictive Physics has been historically based upon the development of mathematical models that describe the evolution of a system under certain external stimuli and constraints. The structure of such mathematical models relies on a set of hysical hypotheses that are assumed to be fulfilled by the system within a certain range of environmental conditions. A new perspective is now raising that uses physical knowledge to inform the data prediction capability of artificial neural networks. A particular extension of this data-driven approach is Physically-Guided Neural Networks with Internal Variables (PGNNIV): universal physical laws are used as constraints in the neural network, in such a way that some neuron values can be interpreted as internal state variables of the system. This endows the network with unraveling capacity, as well as better predictive properties such as faster convergence, fewer data needs and additional noise filtering. Besides, only observable data are used to train the network, and the internal state equations may be extracted as a result of the training processes, so there is no need to make explicit the particular structure of the internal state model. We extend this new methodology to continuum physical problems, showing again its predictive and explanatory capacities when only using measurable values in the training set. We show that the mathematical operators developed for image analysis in deep learning approaches can be used and extended to consider standard functional operators in continuum Physics, thus establishing a common framework for both. The methodology presented demonstrates its ability to discover the internal constitutive state equation for some problems, including heterogeneous and nonlinear features, while maintaining its predictive ability for the whole dataset coverage, with the cost of a single evaluation.

This paper introduces an information-theoretic constraint on learned policy complexity in the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) reinforcement learning algorithm. Previous research with a related approach in continuous control experiments suggests that this method favors learning policies that are more robust to changing environment dynamics. The multi-agent game setting naturally requires this type of robustness, as other agents' policies change throughout learning, introducing a nonstationary environment. For this reason, recent methods in continual learning are compared to our approach, termed Capacity-Limited MADDPG. Results from experimentation in multi-agent cooperative and competitive tasks demonstrate that the capacity-limited approach is a good candidate for improving learning performance in these environments.

Predictive models with a focus on different spatial-temporal scales benefit governments and healthcare systems to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we present the conditional Long Short-Term Memory networks with Quantile output (condLSTM-Q), a well-performing model for making quantile predictions on COVID-19 death tolls at the county level with a two-week forecast window. This fine geographical scale is a rare but useful feature in publicly available predictive models, which would especially benefit state-level officials to coordinate resources within the state. The quantile predictions from condLSTM-Q inform people about the distribution of the predicted death tolls, allowing better evaluation of possible trajectories of the severity. Given the scalability and generalizability of neural network models, this model could incorporate additional data sources with ease, and could be further developed to generate other useful predictions such as new cases or hospitalizations intuitively.