AstuteRAG-FQA: Task-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Proprietary Data Challenges in Financial Question Answering

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shows significant promise in knowledge-intensive tasks by improving domain specificity, enhancing temporal relevance, and reducing hallucinations. However, applying RAG to finance encounters critical challenges: restricted access to proprietary datasets, limited retrieval accuracy, regulatory constraints, and sensitive data interpretation. We introduce AstuteRAG-FQA, an adaptive RAG framework tailored for Financial Question Answering (FQA), leveraging task-aware prompt engineering to address these challenges. The framework uses a hybrid retrieval strategy integrating both open-source and proprietary financial data while maintaining strict security protocols and regulatory compliance. A dynamic prompt framework adapts in real time to query complexity, improving precision and contextual relevance. To systematically address diverse financial queries, we propose a four-tier task classification: explicit factual, implicit factual, interpretable rationale, and hidden rationale involving implicit causal reasoning. For each category, we identify key challenges, datasets, and optimization techniques within the retrieval and generation process. The framework incorporates multi-layered security mechanisms including differential privacy, data anonymization, and role-based access controls to protect sensitive financial information. Additionally, AstuteRAG-FQA implements real-time compliance monitoring through automated regulatory validation systems that verify responses against industry standards and legal obligations. We evaluate three data integration techniques - contextual embedding, small model augmentation, and targeted fine-tuning - analyzing their efficiency and feasibility across varied financial environments.

Deep Neural Watermarking for Robust Copyright Protection in 3D Point Clouds

The protection of intellectual property has become critical due to the rapid growth of three-dimensional content in digital media. Unlike traditional images or videos, 3D point clouds present unique challenges for copyright enforcement, as they are especially vulnerable to a range of geometric and non-geometric attacks that can easily degrade or remove conventional watermark signals. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a robust deep neural watermarking framework for 3D point cloud copyright protection and ownership verification. Our approach embeds binary watermarks into the singular values of 3D point cloud blocks using spectral decomposition, i.e. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and leverages the extraction capabilities of Deep Learning using PointNet++ neural network architecture. The network is trained to reliably extract watermarks even after the data undergoes various attacks such as rotation, scaling, noise, cropping and signal distortions. We validated our method using the publicly available ModelNet40 dataset, demonstrating that deep learning-based extraction significantly outperforms traditional SVD-based techniques under challenging conditions. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the deep learning-based extraction approach significantly outperforms existing SVD-based methods with deep learning achieving bitwise accuracy up to 0.83 and Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.80, compared to SVD achieving a bitwise accuracy of 0.58 and IoU of 0.26 for the Crop (70%) attack, which is the most severe geometric distortion in our experiment. This demonstrates our method's ability to achieve superior watermark recovery and maintain high fidelity even under severe distortions.

Optimised Design of a Current Mirror in 150 nm GaAs Technology

The Current Mirror (CM) is a basic building block commonly used in analogue and mixed-signal integrated circuits. Its significance lies in its ability to replicate and precisely regulate the current, making it crucial in various applications such as amplifiers, filters and data converters. Recently, there has been a growing need for smaller and more energy-efficient Radio Frequency (RF) devices due to the advancements in wireless communication, the Internet of Things (IoT) and portable electronics. This research aims to propose an improved and optimised CM design focusing on compactness and energy-efficient operation. Through a comprehensive methodology involving transistor sizing, biasing techniques, load resistance selection, frequency response stabilisation and noise analysis, the proposed high swing CM design achieves a gain of at least 6.005 dB, a reduced power consumption of 91.17 mW, a wide bandwidth of 22.60 kHz and improved linearity as well as accuracy through precise current matching and minimised mismatch. This optimised CM design will further boost the realisation of compact and lower power RF devices, contributing to the advancement of analogue circuit design techniques and enhancing system performance, accuracy and reliability.

Enhancing Depressive Post Detection in Bangla: A Comparative Study of TF-IDF, BERT and FastText Embeddings

Due to massive adoption of social media, detection of users' depression through social media analytics bears significant importance, particularly for underrepresented languages, such as Bangla. This study introduces a well-grounded approach to identify depressive social media posts in Bangla, by employing advanced natural language processing techniques. The dataset used in this work, annotated by domain experts, includes both depressive and non-depressive posts, ensuring high-quality data for model training and evaluation. To address the prevalent issue of class imbalance, we utilised random oversampling for the minority class, thereby enhancing the model's ability to accurately detect depressive posts. We explored various numerical representation techniques, including Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) embedding and FastText embedding, by integrating them with a deep learning-based Convolutional Neural Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-BiLSTM) model. The results obtained through extensive experimentation, indicate that the BERT approach performed better the others, achieving a F1-score of 84%. This indicates that BERT, in combination with the CNN-BiLSTM architecture, effectively recognises the nuances of Bangla texts relevant to depressive contents. Comparative analysis with the existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our approach with BERT embedding performs better than others in terms of evaluation metrics and the reliability of dataset annotations. Our research significantly contribution to the development of reliable tools for detecting depressive posts in the Bangla language. By highlighting the efficacy of different embedding techniques and deep learning models, this study paves the way for improved mental health monitoring through social media platforms.

Enhancing Robot Navigation Efficiency Using Cellular Automata with Active Cells

Enhancing robot navigation efficiency is a crucial objective in modern robotics. Robots relying on external navigation systems are often susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI) and encounter environmental disturbances, resulting in orientation errors within their surroundings. Therefore, the study employed an internal navigation system to enhance robot navigation efficacy under interference conditions, based on the analysis of the internal parameters and the external signals. This article presents details of the robot's autonomous operation, which allows for setting the robot's trajectory using an embedded map. The robot's navigation process involves counting the number of wheel revolutions as well as adjusting wheel orientation after each straight path section. In this article, an autonomous robot navigation system has been presented that leverages an embedded control navigation map utilising cellular automata with active cells which can effectively navigate in an environment containing various types of obstacles. By analysing the neighbouring cells of the active cell, the cellular environment determines which cell should become active during the robot's next movement step. This approach ensures the robot's independence from external control inputs. Furthermore, the accuracy and speed of the robot's movement have been further enhanced using a hexagonal mosaic for navigation surface mapping. This concept of utilising on cellular automata with active cells has been extended to the navigation of a group of robots on a shared navigation surface, taking into account the intersections of the robots' trajectories over time. To achieve this, a distance control module has been used that records the travelled trajectories in terms of wheel turns and revolutions.

Design of a W-band High-PAE Class A&AB Power Amplifier in 150nm GaAs Technology

Nanometer scale power amplifiers (PA) at sub-THz suffer from severe parasitic effects that lead to experience limited maximum frequency and reduced power performance at the device transceiver front end. The integrated circuits researchers proposed different PA design architecture combinations at scaled down technologies to overcome these limitations. Although the designs meet the minimum requirements, the power added efficiency (PAE) of PA is still quite low. In this paper, a W-band single-ended common-source (CS) and cascode integrated 3-stage 2-way PA design is proposed. The design integrated different key design methodologies to mitigate the parasitic; such as combined Class AB and Class A stages for gain-boosting and efficiency enhancement, Wilkinson power combiner for higher output power, linearity, and bandwidth, and transmission line (TL)-based wide band matching network for better inter-stage matching and compact size. The proposed PA design is validated using UMS 150-nm GaAs pHEMT using advanced design system (ADS) simulator. The results show that the proposed PA achieved a gain of 20.1 dB, an output power of 17.2 dBm, a PAE of 33 % and a 21 GHz bandwidth at 90 GHz Sub-THz band. The PA layout consumes only 5.66 X 2.51 mm2 die space including pads. Our proposed PA design will boost the research on sub-THz integrated circuits research and will smooth the wide spread adoption of 6G in near future.

Deep Learning Based Cyberbullying Detection in Bangla Language

The Internet is currently the largest platform for global communication including expressions of opinions, reviews, contents, images, videos and so forth. Moreover, social media has now become a very broad and highly engaging platform due to its immense popularity and swift adoption trend. Increased social networking, however, also has detrimental impacts on the society leading to a range of unwanted phenomena, such as online assault, intimidation, digital bullying, criminality and trolling. Hence, cyberbullying has become a pervasive and worrying problem that poses considerable psychological and emotional harm to the people, particularly amongst the teens and the young adults. In order to lessen its negative effects and provide victims with prompt support, a great deal of research to identify cyberbullying instances at various online platforms is emerging. In comparison to other languages, Bangla (also known as Bengali) has fewer research studies in this domain. This study demonstrates a deep learning strategy for identifying cyberbullying in Bengali, using a dataset of 12282 versatile comments from multiple social media sites. In this study, a two-layer bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model has been built to identify cyberbullying, using a variety of optimisers as well as 5-fold cross validation. To evaluate the functionality and efficacy of the proposed system, rigorous assessment and validation procedures have been employed throughout the project. The results of this study reveals that the proposed model's accuracy, using momentum-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimiser, is 94.46%. It also reflects a higher accuracy of 95.08% and a F1 score of 95.23% using Adam optimiser as well as a better accuracy of 94.31% in 5-fold cross validation.