Molten Pool

A coding agent halfway through an issue has already read much of what a retriever ranks highest. Relevance is scored per passage, but sufficiency belongs to the set: a ranker can fill its budget with variants of one required fact and leave the decision unsupported. We formulate state-conditioned minimal sufficient evidence recovery: given a captured agent state, recover a compact evidence combination that supplies the support its next decision still lacks. SERBench measures this on 500 held-out states from 45 repositories, recording what the agent has seen and crediting only sets that cover every fact the current decision was annotated to require. MSS-Complement treats acquisition as set construction, not ranking. Three semantic calls propose a jointly sufficient set, search for what it lacks, and return 4-8 intact source units within 6,144 tokens. One configuration, fixed on calibration data, recovers a complete set for 73.0% of those states at five items and 80.6% at eight, against 61.4% and 72.4% for Qwen3 embedding with reranking. A matched control ranking by similarity alone reaches 66.6%, placing the gain in the set-level policy, not the computation. From frozen repository source with no gold-derived pool, the lead is 5.0 points. On AMA-Bench it answers from a 76.2% smaller answer prompt, with accuracy 2.08 points above that benchmark's own memory agent. Removing one required group from an otherwise complete set costs 12.3 and 11.1 points of repair-localization precision under two executors. Retrieval for agents is better posed as recovering what a decision lacks than re-ranking what an issue resembles.

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has sparked intense debate about their risks and opportunities for education, as well as the ways researchers should investigate them. In this paper, we approach these discussions through an analogy with the Thermomix, a smart kitchen appliance that has similarly provoked both enthusiasm and critique. By mapping Thermomix use cases onto examples of learning with generative AI, and situating them within the ICAP and SAMR frameworks, we show how different modes of tool use can either support or undermine meaningful engagement and learning. The Thermomix metaphor underscores that the central question is not whether learners employ AI, but how such use shapes their learning processes. In doing so, we provide a conceptual lens for researchers and practitioners to critically examine - and more effectively guide - the integration of generative AI into educational practice.

Microscopic image analysis has long been recognized as a promising approach for monitoring activated sludge. In recent years, deep learning-based image analysis has been increasingly adopted in this field because of its high performance. However, previous studies on microscopic image analysis of activated sludge have rarely explored transformer-based models or self-supervised foundation models and have instead relied on CNNs and supervised ImageNet pretraining. In addition, previous studies often downsampled image sizes, but the effects of downsampling have not been sufficiently investigated, and the relationship between downsampling strategies and image analysis performance remains unclear. Furthermore, no study has quantitatively compared deep learning performance with quantitative image analysis (QIA), which was widely used before the emergence of deep learning. In this study, to examine how model architecture and learning strategies affect performance in microscopic image analysis of activated sludge and to quantitatively determine whether deep learning outperforms QIA, we prepared three types of activated sludge samples, classified their microscopic images, and evaluated classification accuracy. Our results showed that transformer-based architectures and alternative pretraining methods were effective in terms of classification accuracy. Our downsampling analysis showed that using overly small images reduced accuracy, but increasing image size beyond a certain point did not improve it further. In addition, the analysis indicated that, to achieve high classification accuracy, maintaining the field of view was a more effective downsampling strategy than maintaining resolution. Finally, our comparison between deep learning and QIA showed that deep learning outperformed QIA in terms of accuracy.

The laser welding full-penetration is of critical importance, as it constitutes one of the fundamental factors in achieving defect-free welded joints. Accurate prediction of the penetration state is therefore essential for ensuring weld quality. To this end, this paper introduces SimPhysNet, a novel algorithm that achieves high classification accuracy in laser welding penetration prediction using only a limited number of labelled images. This approach effectively overcomes the limitations of supervised learning classification algorithms, which are hindered in industrial applications by their dependence on extensive, high-quality labelled data. The core of SimPhysNet is a unique self-supervised learning paradigm that embeds physical priors into a contrastive learning framework. By incorporating a physics-informed neural network (PINN), the model is guided to extract physically meaningful features of the molten pool and keyhole from a large set of unlabelled data, while three image augmentation tasks further enhance its generalization capabilities. Subsequently, a few-shot learning strategy, based on prototypical networks, enables robust classification by constructing class representations from a minimal set of labelled images. Experimental results demonstrate that SimPhysNet achieves a classification accuracy of 96.06% using only 200 labelled images (approximately 5% of the total labelled dataset), which is comparable to the performance of conventional supervised learning algorithms that utilize the entire labelled dataset. This work presents a new, efficient, and highly accurate method, providing the way for the intelligent automation of laser welding.

This work investigates the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for real-time monitoring in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing. We developed a binary image classification framework for distinguishing normal and abnormal melt pool images using a balanced dataset of 1,200 images collected from Nickel superalloy 625 on the NIST AMMT platform. The study evaluates accuracy and inference time based on control requirements and hardware limitations of open-architecture LPBF machines. We benchmark three transfer learning architectures (ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, and MobileNetV2) against two Random Forest approaches: one trained on EfficientNetB0 feature embeddings (hybrid) and one trained on raw pixel features (baseline). Images are stratified into 80/20 train-test splits, with a further 90/10 validation split on the training set, and undergo standardized resizing, normalization, and label-preserving data augmentation to emulate realistic process variability. Each model is evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), along with training time, inference latency, and CPU & GPU usage to capture deployability constraints relevant to factory-floor monitoring. The hybrid EfficientNetB0-plus-Random Forest approach achieves the best performance on the held-out test set, with an F1 score of 0.9451, accuracy of 0.9458, and AUC of 0.9904, while maintaining sub-millisecond per-image inference (1.15 ms). In contrast, purely deep learning models exhibit significantly higher inference times with lower accuracy. These results demonstrate that combining pre-trained convolutional features with classical ensemble methods provides a robust, computationally efficient route to real-time melt pool anomaly detection in data-limited additive manufacturing environments.

Real-time weld-pool perception is critical for closed-loop control in laser wire-feed welding, where sensing, computation, and actuator response introduce unavoidable delay. This paper presents a physics-guided spatiotemporal state space network for lookahead weld-pool segmentation. The model uses historical coaxial grayscale images, welding process parameters, and aligned wire-state electrical signals to predict the future semantic layout of three physically meaningful regions: keyhole, wire, and molten pool. It combines a visual encoder, process- and sensor-conditioned feature normalization, patch-level temporal state space modeling, horizon-conditioned latent prediction, dense future feature prediction, and a motion-aware mask decoder. Auxiliary signed-distance-function supervision, temporal consistency, feature distillation, and fine-grained keyhole losses further constrain the predicted geometry and local motion. Experiments on a 43-sequence laser welding dataset show that the proposed WeldMamba reaches 74.63% mIoU at a 500 ms lookahead. Ablation studies further show that temporal history, patch-level state space modeling, and keyhole motion awareness are the main contributors to robust future segmentation.

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a promising additive manufacturing technique that suffers from quality assurance concerns. Predicting melt pools from process parameters is crucial for assessing quality prior to manufacturing but remains a difficult problem because of the complex physical processes underlying LPBF. Quantum computers present a new computing paradigm, providing a new approach to information processing using quantum entanglement and superposition. This paper presents a practical demonstration of a hybrid quantum-classical model that leverages quantum computing to improve process parameter feature extraction with a quantum feature encoder. To make the quantum approach computationally feasible for large datasets, we first employ a clustering algorithm to reduce the number of expensive quantum computations. These quantum features are then processed by a classical neural network to predict the melt pool morphology, allowing for more accurate predictions of melt pools. We demonstrate the method using a quantum simulator, analyze the effect of measurement shot noise on the predictive performance of the network, and verify the results using quantum hardware. Finally, by examining which quantum features are most important, we provide insights that can inform the future design of more effective quantum encoding circuits. Ultimately, the performance improvement over purely classical networks validates the hybrid approach, demonstrating an engineering application of quantum computing using noisy and intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

Modern neural audio models run on accelerators whose peak throughput comes from dense matrix multiplication, increasingly at the edge and in datacenters. The conventional acoustic frontend, however -- a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) followed by sparse Mel aggregation -- remains a multi-stage pipeline centered on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), with execution overheads unlike the dense linear algebra dominating the inference stack. This work introduces MelT, a portable single-stage Mel frontend that precomputes Mel-spaced Non-Uniform Discrete Fourier Transform (NDFT) bases and applies them to time-domain frames through General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM). The contribution is a computational design principle: decoupling Mel feature extraction from vendor-specific FFT primitives and lowering it onto the matrix-multiplication substrate accelerators already optimize. It is not a new spectral operator. MelT's direct projection performs more arithmetic than the FFT pipeline. Yet in the compact-resolution regime of neural audio frontends, it achieves a 1.64-times to 3.29-times latency reduction and up to a 3.03-times reduction in measured active energy, from the Apple A18 Pro to the NVIDIA H100. All gains are within-platform comparisons, accompanied by task-level validation. Word error rate stays statistically equivalent to the native frontend's on frozen Whisper models of medium size and larger; speaker-attribute classification on VoxCeleb1 is non-inferior. The cepstral extension MFCCT preserves utility on a clinical respiratory-insufficiency classification task (SPIRA) while improving on the MFCC baseline. These results indicate that, in practical regimes on the accelerators evaluated here, hardware alignment rather than arithmetic count can govern the realized cost of feature extraction.

Two-phase boiling enables heat transfer rates an order of magnitude higher than single-phase cooling, but it remains difficult to model due to the strong coupling between phase change, turbulence, and transport, as well as extreme sensitivity to fluid properties and thermodynamic conditions. Existing learning-based surrogates are either condition- or fluid-specific, limiting generalization and requiring separate models. We present NUCLEUS, a mixture-of-experts model for pool boiling that replaces collections of specialized surrogates with a single architecture. NUCLEUS combines neighborhood attention, signed distance field reinitialization for interface consistency, and expert routing that exhibits emergent specialization across distinct boiling dynamics. Trained on high-fidelity simulations of pool boiling, NUCLEUS jointly models saturated and subcooled boiling across three fluid classes (dielectrics, refrigerants, and cryogens), resolving failure modes of prior models on extreme fluids. We show that expert routing exhibits coherent spatial structure and specialization without explicit supervision. Quantitatively, NUCLEUS matches or exceeds baselines while maintaining physical consistency across heterogeneous boiling configurations. We also show zero-shot and few-shot generalization capabilities on downstream tasks such as a new fluid (Opteon 2P50 developed for immersion cooling). These results demonstrate that mixture-of-experts models are a scalable pathway toward unified surrogate modeling of boiling dynamics and lay the groundwork for broader generalization across scientific ML.

Background. Traditional safety benchmarks for language models evaluate generated text: whether a model outputs toxic language, reproduces bias, or follows harmful instructions. When models are deployed as agents, the safety-relevant object shifts from what the system says to what it does within an environment, and evaluating model responses under prompting is no longer sufficient to address the safety challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Recent developments have seen the rise of benchmarks that evaluate large language models as agents. We contribute to this strand of research. Approach. We introduce Boiling the Frog, a benchmark that evaluates whether tool-using AI models deployed in corporate and office settings are susceptible to incremental attacks. Each scenario begins with benign workspace edits and later introduces a risk-bearing request. The benchmark focuses on stateful multi-turn evaluation: chains expose a persistent workspace, place the risk-bearing payload at controlled positions in the turn sequence, and score whether the resulting artifact state becomes unsafe. Scenarios are organized through a three-level operational risk taxonomy grounded in the Boiling the Frog risks, the AI Act Annex I and Annex III high-risk contexts, and EU AI Act's Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI (GPAI). Results. Across a nine-model panel, aggregate strict attack success rate (ASR) is 44.4%. Model-level ASR ranges from 20.5% for Claude Haiku 4.5 to 92.9% for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, with Seed 2.0 Lite also above 80%. Average chain category-level ASR reaches 93.3% for Code of Practice loss-of-control scenarios.

Standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets process highly sensitive personal, professional, and health-related data, yet their susceptibility to non-contact physical side channels remains largely unexplored. Existing side-channel attacks typically require malicious software execution or physical access to peripherals, making them conspicuous and potentially patchable. This paper introduces ThermalTap, the first passive, non-contact side-channel attack that fingerprints VR applications solely from the long-wave infrared (LWIR) radiation emitted by the headset chassis. By treating a headset's thermal signature as a high-fidelity proxy for internal computational workloads, ThermalTap enables remote application inference at meter-scale distances without any device interaction. To achieve robust performance in real-world settings, the system combines a commodity thermal camera with a multi-modal sensor suite (capturing ambient temperature, humidity, and airflow) to normalize environmental noise. We evaluate ThermalTap using six applications across three commercial standalone headsets. In indoor settings, ThermalTap identifies applications with over 90% accuracy using only 10 seconds of thermal camera data. Under outdoor conditions, with longer session-level observations, several applications remain identifiable despite environmental variability, with the strongest outdoor application reaching 81% accuracy. Our findings establish thermal radiation as a fundamental and unavoidable privacy risk for immersive systems, exposing a critical security gap that bypasses current software-level protections and physical access controls.

This work presents ThermoMesh, a passive thin-film thermoelectric mesh sensor designed to detect and characterize spatio-temporally sparse heat sources through conduction-based thermal imaging. The device integrates thermoelectric junctions with linear or nonlinear interlayer resistive elements to perform simultaneous sensing and in-sensor compression. We focus on the single-event (1-sparse) operation and define four performance metrics: range, efficiency, sensitivity, and accuracy. Numerical modeling shows that a linear resistive interlayer flattens the sensitivity distribution and improves minimum sensitivity by approximately tenfold for a $16\times16$ mesh. Nonlinear temperature-dependent interlayers further enhance minimum sensitivity at scale: a ceramic negative-temperature-coefficient (NTC) layer over 973-1273K yields a $\sim14{,}500\times$ higher minimum sensitivity than the linear design at a $200\times200$ mesh, while a VO$_2$ interlayer modeled across its metal-insulator transition (MIT) over 298-373K yields a $\sim24\times$ improvement. Using synthetic 1-sparse datasets with white boundary-channel noise at a signal-to-noise ratio of 40dB, the VO$_2$ case achieved $98\%$ localization accuracy, a mean absolute temperature error of $0.23$K, and a noise-equivalent temperature (NET) of $0.07$K. For the ceramic-NTC case no localization errors were observed under the tested conditions, with a mean absolute temperature error of $1.83$K and a NET of $1.49$K. These results indicate that ThermoMesh could enable energy-efficient embedded thermal sensing in scenarios where conventional infrared imaging is limited, such as molten-droplet detection or hot-spot monitoring in harsh environments.

Multi-modal scene reconstruction integrating RGB and thermal infrared data is essential for robust environmental perception across diverse lighting and weather conditions. However, extending 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to multi-spectral scenarios remains challenging. Current approaches often struggle to fully leverage the complementary information of multi-modal data, typically relying on mechanisms that either tend to neglect cross-modal correlations or leverage shared representations that fail to adaptively handle the complex structural correlations and physical discrepancies between spectrums. To address these limitations, we propose ThermoSplat, a novel framework that enables deep spectral-aware reconstruction through active feature modulation and adaptive geometry decoupling. First, we introduce a Spectrum-Aware Adaptive Modulation that dynamically conditions shared latent features on thermal structural priors, effectively guiding visible texture synthesis with reliable cross-modal geometric cues. Second, to accommodate modality-specific geometric inconsistencies, we propose a Modality-Adaptive Geometric Decoupling scheme that learns independent opacity offsets and executes an independent rasterization pass for the thermal branch. Additionally, a hybrid rendering pipeline is employed to integrate explicit Spherical Harmonics with implicit neural decoding, ensuring both semantic consistency and high-frequency detail preservation. Extensive experiments on the RGBT-Scenes dataset demonstrate that ThermoSplat achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality across both visible and thermal spectrums.