Modern industrial and service processes generate high-dimensional, non-Gaussian, and contamination-prone data that challenge the foundational assumptions of classical Statistical Process Control (SPC). Heavy tails, multimodality, nonlinear dependencies, and sparse special-cause observations can distort baseline estimation, mask true anomalies, and prevent reliable identification of an in-control (IC) reference set. To address these challenges, we introduce VSCOUT, a distribution-free framework designed specifically for retrospective (Phase I) monitoring in high-dimensional settings. VSCOUT combines an Automatic Relevance Determination Variational Autoencoder (ARD-VAE) architecture with ensemble-based latent outlier filtering and changepoint detection. The ARD prior isolates the most informative latent dimensions, while the ensemble and changepoint filters identify pointwise and structural contamination within the determined latent space. A second-stage retraining step removes flagged observations and re-estimates the latent structure using only the retained inliers, mitigating masking and stabilizing the IC latent manifold. This two-stage refinement produces a clean and reliable IC baseline suitable for subsequent Phase II deployment. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets demonstrate that VSCOUT achieves superior sensitivity to special-cause structure while maintaining controlled false alarms, outperforming classical SPC procedures, robust estimators, and modern machine-learning baselines. Its scalability, distributional flexibility, and resilience to complex contamination patterns position VSCOUT as a practical and effective method for retrospective modeling and anomaly detection in AI-enabled environments.

--Anomaly Detection (AD) defines the task of identifying observations or events that deviate from typical - or normal - patterns, a critical capability in IT security for recognizing incidents such as system misconfigurations, malware infections, or cyberattacks. In enterprise environments like SAP HANA Cloud systems, this task often involves monitoring high-dimensional, multivariate time series (MTS) derived from telemetry and log data. One approach is the Quantum Autoencoder (QAE), an emerging and promising method with potential for application in both data compression and AD. However, prior applications of QAEs to time series AD have been restricted to univariate data, limiting their relevance for real-world enterprise systems. In this work, we introduce a novel QAE-based framework designed specifically for MTS AD towards enterprise scale. We theoretically develop and experimentally validate the architecture, demonstrating that our QAE achieves performance competitive with neural-network-based autoencoders while requiring fewer trainable parameters. We evaluate our model on datasets that closely reflect SAP system telemetry and show that the proposed QAE is a viable and efficient alternative for semisupervised AD in real-world enterprise settings. Anomaly Detection (AD) refers to the process of identifying patterns or events that deviate from typical - or normal - behavior [1]. It plays a critical role in IT security and many other domains, as anomalies often correspond to potential security breaches, frauds, or system failures [2], [3]. Modern enterprise infrastructure, such as SAP HANA Cloud and other large scale cloud native applications, rely on continuous monitoring to ensure optimal performance, availability, and reliability. With increasing system complexity and scale, observability platforms generate large volumes of telemetry data, including structured multivariate time series (MTS) and unstructured log streams.

Data-driven decision making relies on estimating the effect of interventions, i.e. causal effect estimation . For example, a doctor must decide which medicine she will give her patient, ideally the one with the greatest effect on positive outcomes.

Abstract-- Detecting anomalies in multivariate time series is essential for monitoring complex industrial systems, where high dimensionality, limited labeled data, and subtle dependencies between sensors cause significant challenges. This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning framework that combines a V ari-ational Autoencoder (V AE), an LSTM-based Deep Q-Network (DQN), dynamic reward shaping, and an active learning module to address these issues in a unified learning framework. The main contribution is the implementation of Dynamic Reward Scaling for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (DRSMT), which demonstrates how each component enhances the detection process. The V AE captures compact latent representations and reduces noise. The DQN enables adaptive, sequential anomaly classification, and the dynamic reward shaping balances exploration and exploitation during training by adjusting the importance of reconstruction and classification signals. In addition, active learning identifies the most uncertain samples for labeling, reducing the need for extensive manual supervision. Experiments on two multivariate benchmarks, namely Server Machine Dataset (SMD) and Water Distribution T estbed (W ADI), show that the proposed method outperforms existing baselines in F1-score and AU-PR. In many of today's applications, identifying and removing anomalies (i.e., outliers) has become essential to ensure system reliability. In multivariate time series data, specifically, different factors can result in anomalies.

Section 3 presents uncurated samples for both baselines and our approach. Section 4 reports additional experiments. Lastly, we provide details on training configurations, hyperparameters, and compute in Section 5. Code, models, and supplementary videos can be found on the project page https://sites. The following proof follows the consistency proofs in [23] and [7]. We now show that the result above still holds when applying stochastic differentiable augmentations before the feature projections.

The intuition is that the mixture of group transformations "smears" probability mass among the different transformed versions of the distribution.

V alence, Arousal and Emotion label, with annotations gathered using Prolific.

Music language models (Music LMs), like vision language models, leverage mul-timodal representations to answer natural language queries about musical audio recordings. Although Music LMs are reportedly improving, we find that current evaluations fail to capture whether their answers are correct. Specifically, for all Music LMs that we examine, widely-used evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and BERTScore fail to measure anything beyond linguistic fluency of the model's responses. To measure the true performance of Music LMs, we propose (1) a better general-purpose evaluation metric for Music LMs adapted to the music domain and (2) a factual evaluation framework to quantify the correctness of a Music LM's responses. Our framework is agnostic to the modality of the question-answering model and could be generalized to quantify performance in other open-ended question-answering domains. We use open datasets in our experiments and will release all code on publication. Music Language Models (Music LMs) are an emerging family of multimodal models that consume both language and audio as input. Music LMs are typically benchmarked with Natural Language Processing (NLP) metrics such as BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2020), which compare reference text with model outputs using a question-answering (QA) dataset, e.g., MusicQA. Prior work has identified that these metrics may be inadequate (Gardner et al., 2024; Lee & Lee, 2024; Zang et al., 2025), but they remain the predominant approach for evaluating Music LMs. In this work, we show that the standard NLP metrics used to assess Music LMs are not just inadequate; they fail to measure any ability of these models to extract information from audio. Specifically, we propose a baseline experiment that pairs each question in a Music QA dataset with a random, unrelated music recording from the dataset; this baseline tells us how a Music LM scores when it receives no useful information with which to answer the question; nevertheless, the standard NLP metrics judge outputs of this baseline to be equally good as when the correct music is provided. Furthermore, we show that adversarially crafted answers achieve very high scores under the standard metrics, despite being factually incorrect.

Cognitive workload is a topic of increasing interest across various fields such as health, psychology, and defense applications. In this research, we focus on classifying cognitive workload using the COLET dataset, employing a window-based approach for feature generation and machine/deep learning techniques for classification. We apply window-based temporal partitioning to enhance features used in existing research, followed by machine learning and deep learning models to classify different levels of cognitive workload. The results demonstrate that deep learning models, particularly tabular architectures, outperformed traditional machine learning methods in precision, F1-score, accuracy, and classification precision. This study highlights the effectiveness of window-based temporal feature extraction and the potential of deep learning techniques for real-time cognitive workload assessment in complex and dynamic tasks.

Data-driven decision making relies on estimating the effect of interventions, i.e. causal effect estimation . For example, a doctor must decide which medicine she will give her patient, ideally the one with the greatest effect on positive outcomes.