Quantum Reservoir Computing with Neutral Atoms on a Small, Complex, Medical Dataset

Biomarker-based prediction of clinical outcomes is challenging due to nonlinear relationships, correlated features, and the limited size of many medical datasets. Classical machine-learning methods can struggle under these conditions, motivating the search for alternatives. In this work, we investigate quantum reservoir computing (QRC), using both noiseless emulation and hardware execution on the neutral-atom Rydberg processor \textit{Aquila}. We evaluate performance with six classical machine-learning models and use SHAP to generate feature subsets. We find that models trained on emulated quantum features achieve mean test accuracies comparable to those trained on classical features, but have higher training accuracies and greater variability over data splits, consistent with overfitting. When comparing hardware execution of QRC to noiseless emulation, the models are more robust over different data splits and often exhibit statistically significant improvements in mean test accuracy. This combination of improved accuracy and increased stability is suggestive of a regularising effect induced by hardware execution. To investigate the origin of this behaviour, we examine the statistical differences between hardware and emulated quantum feature distributions. We find that hardware execution applies a structured, time-dependent transformation characterised by compression toward the mean and a progressive reduction in mutual information relative to emulation.

RECUR: Resource Exhaustion Attack via Recursive-Entropy Guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) employ reasoning to address complex tasks. Such explicit reasoning requires extended context lengths, resulting in substantially higher resource consumption. Prior work has shown that adversarially crafted inputs can trigger redundant reasoning processes, exposing LRMs to resource-exhaustion vulnerabilities. However, the reasoning process itself, especially its reflective component, has received limited attention, even though it can lead to over-reflection and consume excessive computing power. In this paper, we introduce Recursive Entropy to quantify the risk of resource consumption in reflection, thereby revealing the safety issues inherent in inference itself. Based on Recursive Entropy, we introduce RECUR, a resource exhaustion attack via Recursive Entropy guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection. It constructs counterfactual questions to verify the inherent flaws and risks of LRMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under benign inference, recursive entropy exhibits a pronounced decreasing trend. RECUR disrupts this trend, increasing the output length by up to 11x and decreasing throughput by 90%. Our work provides a new perspective on robust reasoning.

A first realization of reinforcement learning-based closed-loop EEG-TMS

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a powerful tool to investigate neurophysiology of the human brain and treat brain disorders. Traditionally, therapeutic TMS has been applied in a one-size-fits-all approach, disregarding inter- and intra-individual differences. Brain state-dependent EEG-TMS, such as coupling TMS with a pre-specified phase of the sensorimotor mu-rhythm, enables the induction of differential neuroplastic effects depending on the targeted phase. But this approach is still user-dependent as it requires defining an a-priori target phase. Objectives: To present a first realization of a machine-learning-based, closed-loop real-time EEG-TMS setup to identify user-independently the individual mu-rhythm phase associated with high- vs. low-corticospinal excitability states. Methods: We applied EEG-TMS to 25 participants targeting the supplementary motor area-primary motor cortex network and used a reinforcement learning algorithm to identify the mu-rhythm phase associated with high- vs. low corticospinal excitability. We employed linear mixed effects models and Bayesian analysis to determine effects of reinforced learning on corticospinal excitability indexed by motor evoked potential amplitude, and functional connectivity indexed by the imaginary part of resting-state EEG coherence. Results: Reinforcement learning effectively identified the mu-rhythm phase associated with high- vs. low-excitability states, and their repetitive stimulation resulted in long-term increases vs. decreases in functional connectivity in the stimulated sensorimotor network. Conclusions: We demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of closed-loop EEG-TMS in humans, a critical step towards individualized treatment of brain disorders.

Live or Lie: Action-Aware Capsule Multiple Instance Learning for Risk Assessment in Live Streaming Platforms

Live streaming has become a cornerstone of today's internet, enabling massive real-time social interactions. However, it faces severe risks arising from sparse, coordinated malicious behaviors among multiple participants, which are often concealed within normal activities and challenging to detect timely and accurately. In this work, we provide a pioneering study on risk assessment in live streaming rooms, characterized by weak supervision where only room-level labels are available. We formulate the task as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, treating each room as a bag and defining structured user-timeslot capsules as instances. These capsules represent subsequences of user actions within specific time windows, encapsulating localized behavioral patterns. Based on this formulation, we propose AC-MIL, an Action-aware Capsule MIL framework that models both individual behaviors and group-level coordination patterns. AC-MIL captures multi-granular semantics and behavioral cues through a serial and parallel architecture that jointly encodes temporal dynamics and cross-user dependencies. These signals are integrated for robust room-level risk prediction, while also offering interpretable evidence at the behavior segment level. Extensive experiments on large-scale industrial datasets from Douyin demonstrate that AC-MIL significantly outperforms MIL and sequential baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in room-level risk assessment for live streaming. Moreover, AC-MIL provides capsule-level interpretability, enabling identification of risky behavior segments as actionable evidence for intervention. The project page is available at: https://qiaoyran.github.io/AC-MIL/.

Reasoning in a Combinatorial and Constrained World: Benchmarking LLMs on Natural-Language Combinatorial Optimization

While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in math and logic reasoning, their ability to handle combinatorial optimization (CO) -- searching high-dimensional solution spaces under hard constraints -- remains underexplored. To bridge the gap, we introduce NLCO, a \textbf{N}atural \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{C}ombinatorial \textbf{O}ptimization benchmark that evaluates LLMs on end-to-end CO reasoning: given a language-described decision-making scenario, the model must output a discrete solution without writing code or calling external solvers. NLCO covers 43 CO problems and is organized using a four-layer taxonomy of variable types, constraint families, global patterns, and objective classes, enabling fine-grained evaluation. We provide solver-annotated solutions and comprehensively evaluate LLMs by feasibility, solution optimality, and reasoning efficiency. Experiments across a wide range of modern LLMs show that high-performing models achieve strong feasibility and solution quality on small instances, but both degrade as instance size grows, even if more tokens are used for reasoning. We also observe systematic effects across the taxonomy: set-based tasks are relatively easy, whereas graph-structured problems and bottleneck objectives lead to more frequent failures.

The Forecast After the Forecast: A Post-Processing Shift in Time Series

Time series forecasting has long been dominated by advances in model architecture, with recent progress driven by deep learning and hybrid statistical techniques. However, as forecasting models approach diminishing returns in accuracy, a critical yet underexplored opportunity emerges: the strategic use of post-processing. In this paper, we address the last-mile gap in time-series forecasting, which is to improve accuracy and uncertainty without retraining or modifying a deployed backbone. We propose $δ$-Adapter, a lightweight, architecture-agnostic way to boost deployed time series forecasters without retraining. $δ$-Adapter learns tiny, bounded modules at two interfaces: input nudging (soft edits to covariates) and output residual correction. We provide local descent guarantees, $O(δ)$ drift bounds, and compositional stability for combined adapters. Meanwhile, it can act as a feature selector by learning a sparse, horizon-aware mask over inputs to select important features, thereby improving interpretability. In addition, it can also be used as a distribution calibrator to measure uncertainty. Thus, we introduce a Quantile Calibrator and a Conformal Corrector that together deliver calibrated, personalized intervals with finite-sample coverage. Our experiments across diverse backbones and datasets show that $δ$-Adapter improves accuracy and calibration with negligible compute and no interface changes.

Deja Vu in Plots: Leveraging Cross-Session Evidence with Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Live Streaming Risk Assessment

The rise of live streaming has transformed online interaction, enabling massive real-time engagement but also exposing platforms to complex risks such as scams and coordinated malicious behaviors. Detecting these risks is challenging because harmful actions often accumulate gradually and recur across seemingly unrelated streams. To address this, we propose CS-VAR (Cross-Session Evidence-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Detector) for live streaming risk assessment. In CS-VAR, a lightweight, domain-specific model performs fast session-level risk inference, guided during training by a Large Language Model (LLM) that reasons over retrieved cross-session behavioral evidence and transfers its local-to-global insights to the small model. This design enables the small model to recognize recurring patterns across streams, perform structured risk assessment, and maintain efficiency for real-time deployment. Extensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets, combined with online validation, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CS-VAR. Furthermore, CS-VAR provides interpretable, localized signals that effectively empower real-world moderation for live streaming.

Airy Beamforming for Radiative Near-Field MU-XL-MIMO: Overcoming Half-Space Blockage

The move to next-generation wireless communications with extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs) brings the communications into the radiative near-field (RNF) region, where distance-aware focusing is feasible. However, high-frequency RNF links are highly vulnerable to blockage in indoor environments dominated by half-space obstacles (walls, corners) that create knife-edge shadows. Conventional near-field focused beams offer high gain in line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios but suffer from severe energy truncation and effective-rank collapse in shadowed regions, often necessitating the deployment of auxiliary hardware such as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) to restore connectivity. We propose a beamforming strategy that exploits the auto-bending property of Airy beams to mitigate half-space blockage without additional hardware. The Airy beam is designed to ``ride'' the diffraction edge, accelerating its main lobe into the shadow to restore connectivity. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a Green's function-based RNF multi-user channel model that analytically reveals singular-value collapse behind knife-edge obstacles; (ii) an Airy analog beamforming scheme that optimizes the bending trajectory to recover the effective channel rank; and (iii) an Airy null-steering method that aligns oscillatory nulls with bright-region users to suppress interference in mixed shadow/bright scenarios. Simulations show that the proposed edge-riding Airy strategy achieves a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement of over 20 dB and restores full-rank connectivity in shadowed links compared to conventional RNF focusing, virtually eliminating outage in geometric shadows and increasing multi-user spectral efficiency by approximately 35\% under typical indoor ELAA configurations. These results demonstrate robust RNF multi-user access in half-space blockage scenarios without relying on RIS.

MathMixup: Boosting LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Difficulty-Controllable Data Synthesis and Curriculum Learning

In mathematical reasoning tasks, the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on high-quality training data with clearly defined and well-graded difficulty levels. However, existing data synthesis methods often suffer from limited diversity and lack precise control over problem difficulty, making them insufficient for supporting efficient training paradigms such as curriculum learning. To address these challenges, we propose MathMixup, a novel data synthesis paradigm that systematically generates high-quality, difficulty-controllable mathematical reasoning problems through hybrid and decomposed strategies. Automated self-checking and manual screening are incorporated to ensure semantic clarity and a well-structured difficulty gradient in the synthesized data. Building on this, we construct the MathMixupQA dataset and design a curriculum learning strategy that leverages these graded problems, supporting flexible integration with other datasets. Experimental results show that MathMixup and its curriculum learning strategy significantly enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of LLMs. Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B achieves an average score of 52.6\% across seven mathematical benchmarks, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. These results fully validate the effectiveness and broad applicability of MathMixup in improving the mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs and advancing data-centric curriculum learning.

Toward expert-level motivational interviewing for health behavior improvement with LLMs

Background: Motivational interviewing (MI) is an effective counseling approach for promoting health behavior change, but its impact is constrained by the need for highly trained human counselors. Objective: This study aimed to explore a scalable alternative by developing and evaluating Large Language Models for Motivational Interviewing (MI-LLMs). Methods: We first curated five Chinese psychological counseling corpora and, using GPT-4 with an MI-informed prompt, transcribed multi-turn dialogues from the two highest-quality datasets (CPsyCounD and PsyDTCorpus) into 2,040 MI-style counseling conversations, of which 2,000 were used for training and 40 for testing. Three Chinese-capable open-source LLMs (Baichuan2-7B-Chat, ChatGLM-4-9B-Chat and Llama-3-8B-Chinese-Chat-v2) were fine-tuned on this corpus and were named as MI-LLMs. We evaluated MI-LLMs using round-based automatic metrics and expert manual coding with the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) Coding Manual 4.2.1. Results: Across all three models, fine-tuning substantially improved BLEU-4 and ROUGE scores compared with the base models, and manual coding showed that MI-LLMs achieved technical and relational global scores, and MI-adherent ratios that approached those of real MI dialogues, although complex reflections and reflection-to-question ratios remained less frequent. Conclusions: These findings provide initial evidence that MI-oriented fine-tuning can endow general-purpose LLMs with core MI-consistent counseling behaviors, suggesting a scalable pathway toward AI-assisted health behavior change support while underscoring the need for further work on data scale, complex MI skills and real-world intervention trials.