arXiv:2603.28780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of distributed training (DT) under Byzantine attacks with communication constraints. While prior work has developed various robust aggregation rules at the server to enhance robustness to Byzantine attacks, the existing methods suffer from a critical limitation in that the solution error does not diminish when the local gradients sent by different devices vary considerably, as a result of data heterogeneity among the subsets held by different devices. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel DT method, cyclic gradient coding-based DT (LAD). In LAD, the server allocates the entire training dataset to the devices before training begins. In each iteration, it assigns computational tasks redundantly to the devices using cyclic gradient coding. Each honest device then computes local gradients on a fixed number of data subsets and encodes the local gradients before transmitting to the server. The server aggregates the coded vectors from the honest devices and the potentially incorrect messages from Byzantine devices using a robust aggregation rule. Leveraging the redundancy of computation across devices, the convergence performance of LAD is analytically characterized, demonstrating improved robustness against Byzantine attacks and significantly lower solution error. Furthermore, we extend LAD to a communication-efficient variant, compressive and cyclic gradient coding-based DT (Com-LAD), which further reduces communication overhead under constrained settings. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enhancing both Byzantine resilience and communication efficiency.

arXiv:2603.28787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional liquid identification instruments are often unavailable to the general public. This paper shows the feasibility of identifying unknown liquids with commercial lightweight devices, such as a smartphone. The key insight is that different liquid molecules have different viscosity coefficients and therefore must overcome different energy barriers during relative motion. With this intuition in mind, we introduce a novel model that measures liquids' viscosity based on active vibration. However, building a robust system using built-in smartphone accelerometers is challenging. Practical issues include under-sampling, self-interference, and the impact of liquid-volume changes. Instead of machine learning, we tackle these issues through multiple signal processing stages to reconstruct the original signals and cancel out the interference. Our approach estimates liquid viscosity with a mean relative error of 2.9% and distinguishes 30 types of liquids with an average accuracy of 95.47%.

arXiv:2603.28795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We address LLM serving workloads where repeated requests share a common solution structure but differ in localized constraints, such as output schema, variable names, or numeric constants. Prior caching approaches typically reuse either full responses (semantic caching) or model-internal KV/prefix states, which are respectively brittle under partial changes or tightly coupled to specific backends. We present StepCache, a backend-agnostic step-level reuse layer that segments outputs into ordered steps, retrieves the best-matching cached request, verifies steps using lightweight task-aware checks, and regenerates only failing regions via selective patching. StepCache additionally supports strict structured-output enforcement for JSON, including single-step extraction, required-key constraints, and one-shot repair, as well as conservative skip-reuse fallbacks for semantic changes. For linear equations, StepCache promotes verification into correction via a bounded repair loop with a deterministic fallback that guarantees correctness when the backend model fails. In a CPU-only perturbation-heavy micro-benchmark on math and JSON variants, averaged over three seeds, StepCache reduces mean latency from 2.13 s to 0.67 s, median latency from 2.42 s to 0.01 s, and p95 latency from 3.38 s to 3.30 s. It also reduces total token usage from 36.1k to 27.3k and improves end-to-end correctness from 72.5% to 100% under task-specific checks and a stitched-output integrity check. Across requests, 79.7% take the reuse-only fast path, 5.4% require patching, and 14.9% trigger skip-reuse.

arXiv:2603.29002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) increasingly depends on efficient long-context processing and generation mechanisms, including sparse attention, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and compressed contextual memory, to support complex reasoning. We show that these optimizations can be unified into a four-step memory processing pipeline: Prepare Memory, Compute Relevancy, Retrieval, and Apply to Inference. Through systematic profiling, we identify a 22%-97% memory processing overhead in LLM inference and strong heterogeneity in its computational characteristics. Motivated by this insight, we argue that \textbf{heterogeneous systems} are well-suited to accelerate memory processing and thus end-to-end inference. We demonstrate this approach on a GPU-FPGA system by offloading sparse, irregular, and memory-bounded operations to FPGAs while retaining compute-intensive operations on GPUs. Evaluated on an AMD MI210 GPU and an Alveo U55C FPGA, our system is $1.04\sim2.2\times$ faster and requires $1.11\sim4.7\times$ less energy across multiple LLM inference optimizations than the GPU baseline (similar results hold on NVIDIA A100). These results establish heterogeneous systems as a practical direction for efficient LLM memory processing and inform future heterogeneous hardware design.

arXiv:2603.29289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The fast pace of modern AI is rapidly transforming traditional industrial systems into vast, intelligent and potentially unmanned autonomous operational environments driven by AI-based solutions. These solutions leverage various forms of machine learning, reinforcement learning, and generative AI. The introduction of such smart capabilities has pushed the envelope in multiple industrial domains, enabling predictive maintenance, optimized performance, and streamlined workflows. These solutions are often deployed across the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and supported by the Edge-Fog-Cloud computing continuum to enable urgent (i.e., real-time or near real-time) decision-making. Despite the current trend of aggressively adopting these smart industrial solutions to increase profit, quality, and efficiency, large-scale integration and deployment also bring serious hazards that if ignored can undermine the benefits of smart industries. These hazards include unforeseen interoperability side-effects and heightened vulnerability to cyber threats, particularly in environments operating with a plethora of heterogeneous IIoT systems. The goal of this study is to shed light on the potential consequences of industrial smartness, with a particular focus on security implications, including vulnerabilities, side effects, and cyber threats. We distinguish software-level downsides stemming from both traditional AI solutions and generative AI from those originating in the infrastructure layer, namely IIoT and the Edge-Cloud continuum. At each level, we investigate potential vulnerabilities, cyber threats, and unintended side effects. As industries continue to become smarter, understanding and addressing these downsides will be crucial to ensure secure and sustainable development of smart industrial systems.

arXiv:2603.29328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor attacks on federated learning (FL) are most often evaluated with synthetic corner patches or out-of-distribution (OOD) patterns that are unlikely to arise in practice. In this paper, we revisit the backdoor threat to standard FL (a single global model) under a more realistic setting where triggers must be semantically meaningful, in-distribution, and visually plausible. We propose SABLE, a Semantics-Aware Backdoor for LEarning in federated settings, which constructs natural, content-consistent triggers (e.g., semantic attribute changes such as sunglasses) and optimizes an aggregation-aware malicious objective with feature separation and parameter regularization to keep attacker updates close to benign ones. We instantiate SABLE on CelebA hair-color classification and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), poisoning only a small, interpretable subset of each malicious client's local data while otherwise following the standard FL protocol. Across heterogeneous client partitions and multiple aggregation rules (FedAvg, Trimmed Mean, MultiKrum, and FLAME), our semantics-driven triggers achieve high targeted attack success rates while preserving benign test accuracy. These results show that semantics-aligned backdoors remain a potent and practical threat in federated learning, and that robustness claims based solely on synthetic patch triggers can be overly optimistic.

arXiv:2603.29878v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud systems generate large, heterogeneous log data containing critical infrastructure, application, and security information. Transforming these logs into RDF triples enables their integration into knowledge graphs, improving interpretability, root-cause analysis, and cross-service reasoning beyond what raw logs allow. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising approach to automate RDF knowledge graph generation; however, their effectiveness on complex cloud logs remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we evaluate multiple LLM architectures and prompting strategies for automated RDF extraction using a controlled framework with two pipelines for systematically processing semi-structured log data. The extraction pipeline integrates multiple LLMs to identify relevant entities and relationships, automatically generating subject-predicate-object triples. These outputs are evaluated using a dedicated validation pipeline with both syntactic and semantic metrics to assess accuracy, completeness, and quality. Due to the lack of public ground-truth datasets, we created a reference Log-to-KG dataset from OpenStack logs using manual annotation and ontology-driven methods, enabling objective baseline. Our analysis shows that Few-Shot learning is the most effective strategy, with Llama achieving a 99.35% F1 score and 100% valid RDF output while Qwen, NuExtract, and Gemma also perform well under Few-Shot prompting, with Chain-of-Thought approaches maintaining similar accuracy. One-Shot prompting offers a lighter but effective alternative, while Zero-Shot and advanced strategies such as Tree-of-Thought, Self-Critique, and Generate-Multiple perform substantially worse. These results highlight the importance of contextual examples and prompt design for accurate RDF extraction and reveal model-specific limitations across LLM architectures.

arXiv:2603.30014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Production and Distributed Analysis (PanDA) system, originally developed for the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has evolved into a robust platform for orchestrating large-scale workflows across distributed computing resources. Coupled with its intelligent Distributed Dispatch and Scheduling (iDDS) component, PanDA supports AI/ML-driven workflows through a scalable and flexible workflow engine. We present an AI-assisted framework for detector design optimization that integrates multi-objective Bayesian optimization with the PanDA--iDDS workflow engine to coordinate iterative simulations across heterogeneous resources. The framework addresses the challenge of exploring high-dimensional parameter spaces inherent in modern detector design. We demonstrate the framework using benchmark problems and realistic studies of the ePIC and dRICH detectors for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Results show improved automation, scalability, and efficiency in multi-objective optimization. This work establishes a flexible and extensible paradigm for AI-driven detector design and other computationally intensive scientific applications.

arXiv:2511.22302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Numerical simulations have revolutionized the industrial design process by reducing prototyping costs, design iterations, and enabling product engineers to explore the design space more efficiently. However, the growing scale of simulations demands substantial expert knowledge, computational resources, and time. A key challenge is identifying input parameters that yield optimal results, as iterative simulations are costly and can have a large environmental impact. This paper presents an AI-assisted workflow that reduces expert involvement in parameter optimization through the use of Bayesian optimization. Furthermore, we present an active learning variant of the approach, assisting the expert if desired. A deep learning model provides an initial parameter estimate, from which the optimization cycle iteratively refines the design until a termination condition (e.g.,energy budget or iteration limit) is met. We demonstrate our approach, based on a sheet metal forming process, and show how it enables us to accelerate the exploration of the design space while reducing the need for expert involvement.

arXiv:2603.14841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Road crashes remain a leading cause of preventable fatalities. Existing prediction models predominantly produce binary outcomes, which offer limited actionable insights for real-time driver feedback. These approaches often lack continuous risk quantification, interpretability, and explicit consideration of vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists. This research introduces SafeDriver-IQ, a framework that transforms binary crash classifiers into continuous 0-100 safety scores by combining national crash statistics with naturalistic driving data from autonomous vehicles. The framework fuses National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) crash records with Waymo Open Motion Dataset scenarios, engineers domain-informed features, and incorporates a calibration layer grounded in transportation safety literature. Evaluation across 15 complementary analyses indicates that the framework reliably differentiates high-risk from low-risk driving conditions with strong discriminative performance. Findings further reveal that 87% of crashes involve multiple co-occurring risk factors, with non-linear compounding effects that increase the risk to 4.5x baseline. SafeDriver-IQ delivers proactive, explainable safety intelligence relevant to advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), fleet management, and urban infrastructure planning. This framework shifts the focus from reactive crash counting to real-time risk prevention.

arXiv:2603.27914v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present ITQ3_S (Interleaved Ternary Quantization -- Specialized), a novel 3-bit weight quantization format for LLMs integrating TurboQuant (TQ), a rotation-domain strategy based on the Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (FWHT). Conventional 3-bit methods suffer precision loss from heavy-tailed weight distributions and inter-channel outliers. ITQ3_S pre-rotates the weight space via FWHT before quantization, spreading outlier energy across the vector and inducing a near-Gaussian distribution amenable to uniform ternary coding. We derive a rigorous dequantization procedure fusing a 256-point Inverse FWHT into the CUDA shared-memory loading stage, ensuring reconstruction error is bounded exclusively by the ternary quantization grid with no additional error from the transform inversion. For any weight vector $\mathbf{w} \in \mathbb{R}^{256}$, the reconstruction satisfies $\|\hat{\mathbf{w}} - \mathbf{w}\|_2 \leq \epsilon_q$, strictly smaller than uniform 3-bit baselines that do not exploit rotation-induced distribution normalization. TurboQuant lacks a native CUDA kernel, precluding direct deployment; naively composing TQ with existing weight quantizers introduces domain mismatch errors that accumulate across layers, degrading quality below standard 3-bit baselines. ITQ3_S resolves this by co-designing the FWHT rotation and quantization kernel as a unified pipeline grounded in the IQ3_S weight format, with the inverse transform fused into the CUDA MMQ kernel. Empirically, on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 (Blackwell), ITQ3_S achieves perplexity competitive with FP16 while delivering throughput exceeding 1.5x that of 4-bit alternatives via optimized DP4A and Tensor Core scheduling. Our results establish ITQ3_S as a practical, mathematically grounded solution for high-fidelity LLM deployment on consumer hardware.