Daily Briefing – Mar 21 (80 Articles)
Babak's Daily Briefing
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Sources: 16 | Total Articles: 80
6G World
1.SpaceRAN: Airbus UpNext explores software-defined 5G NTN from orbit
Airbus UpNext has launched its SpaceRAN (Space Radio Access Network) demonstrator, a key initiative to advance standardised 5G…
2.SoftBank’s Transformer-Based AI-RAN Hits 30% Uplink Gain at Sub-Millisecond Latency
On August 21, 2025, SoftBank published results from a live, standards-compliant AI-RAN trial that replaces parts of classical signal processing with a lightweight Transformer.
3.6G as a Platform for Value
Reframing the Future with NGMN’s Chairman, Laurent Leboucher By Piotr (Peter) Pietrzyk, Managing Editor, 6GWorld.com In the race…
4.SoftBank Road-Tests 7 GHz in Central Tokyo
SoftBank and Nokia have begun outdoor field trials in Tokyo’s Ginza district using 7 GHz spectrum, installing three pre-commercial base stations to compare coverage and radio characteristics against today’s sub-6 GHz 5G sites.
5.NXP’s Acquisition of TTTech Auto Signals Growing Focus on Middleware for Software-Defined Vehicles
On June 17, 2025, NXP Semiconductors finalized its acquisition of TTTech Auto—a strategic move to integrate TTTech’s flagship…
AI Agents
1.I Can't Believe It's Corrupt: Evaluating Corruption in Multi-Agent Governance Systems
Large language models are increasingly proposed as autonomous agents for high-stakes public workflows, yet we lack systematic evidence about whether they would follow institutional rules when granted authority. We present evidence that integrity in institutional AI should be treated as a pre-deployment requirement rather than a post-deployment assumption. We evaluate multi-agent governance simulations in which agents occupy formal governmental roles under different authority structures, and we score rule-breaking and abuse outcomes with an independent rubric-based judge across 28,112 transcript segments. While we advance this position, the core contribution is empirical: among models operating below saturation, governance structure is a stronger driver of corruption-related outcomes than model identity, with large differences across regim...
2.Measuring and Exploiting Confirmation Bias in LLM-Assisted Security Code Review
Security code reviews increasingly rely on systems integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), ranging from interactive assistants to autonomous agents in CI/CD pipelines. We study whether confirmation bias (i.e., the tendency to favor interpretations that align with prior expectations) affects LLM-based vulnerability detection, and whether this failure mode can be exploited in software supply-chain attacks. We conduct two complementary studies. Study 1 quantifies confirmation bias through controlled experiments on 250 CVE vulnerability/patch pairs evaluated across four state-of-the-art models under five framing conditions for the review prompt. Framing a change as bug-free reduces vulnerability detection rates by 16-93%, with strongly asymmetric effects: false negatives increase sharply while false positive rates change little. Bias effect...
3.D-Mem: A Dual-Process Memory System for LLM Agents
Driven by the development of persistent, self-adapting autonomous agents, equipping these systems with high-fidelity memory access for long-horizon reasoning has emerged as a critical requirement. However, prevalent retrieval-based memory frameworks often follow an incremental processing paradigm that continuously extracts and updates conversational memories into vector databases, relying on semantic retrieval when queried. While this approach is fast, it inherently relies on lossy abstraction, frequently missing contextually critical information and struggling to resolve queries that rely on fine-grained contextual understanding. To address this, we introduce D-Mem, a dual-process memory system. It retains lightweight vector retrieval for routine queries while establishing an exhaustive Full Deliberation module as a high-fidelity fallbac...
4.IEMAS: An Incentive-Efficiency Routing Framework for Open Agentic Web Ecosystems
The transition to open, distributed Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promises scalable intelligence but introduces a non-trivial tension: maximizing global efficiency requires cooperative, resource-aware scheduling, yet autonomous agents may be self-interested and cannot be managed by a centralized controller. Prior approaches fall short in two key areas: they typically focus on single-query routing, neglecting long-term resource reuse (e.g., KV-caching) and the complexities of system-level many-to-many matching; furthermore, they rely on generic incentive mechanisms that ignore the distinct characteristics of LLM inference. To bridge this gap, we propose IEMAS (Incentive-Efficiency Mechanism for Multi-Agent Systems), a distributed framework that aligns economic incentives with system performance. IEMAS integrates a probabilistic predictive mode...
5.Protein Design with Agent Rosetta: A Case Study for Specialized Scientific Agents
Large language models (LLMs) are capable of emulating reasoning and using tools, creating opportunities for autonomous agents that execute complex scientific tasks. Protein design provides a natural testbed: although machine learning (ML) methods achieve strong results, these are largely restricted to canonical amino acids and narrow objectives, leaving unfilled need for a generalist tool for broad design pipelines. We introduce Agent Rosetta, an LLM agent paired with a structured environment for operating Rosetta, the leading physics-based heteropolymer design software, capable of modeling non-canonical building blocks and geometries. Agent Rosetta iteratively refines designs to achieve user-defined objectives, combining LLM reasoning with Rosetta's generality. We evaluate Agent Rosetta on design with canonical amino acids, matching spec...
Financial AI
1.Adaptive Regime-Aware Stock Price Prediction Using Autoencoder-Gated Dual Node Transformers with Reinforcement Learning Control
Stock markets exhibit regime-dependent behavior where prediction models optimized for stable conditions often fail during volatile periods. Existing approaches typically treat all market states uniformly or require manual regime labeling, which is expensive and quickly becomes stale as market dynamics evolve. This paper introduces an adaptive prediction framework that adaptively identifies deviations from normal market conditions and routes data through specialized prediction pathways. The architecture consists of three components: (1) an autoencoder trained on normal market conditions that identifies anomalous regimes through reconstruction error, (2) dual node transformer networks specialized for stable and event-driven market conditions respectively, and (3) a Soft Actor-Critic reinforcement learning controller that adaptively tunes th...
2.Can Blindfolded LLMs Still Trade? An Anonymization-First Framework for Portfolio Optimization
For LLM trading agents to be genuinely trustworthy, they must demonstrate understanding of market dynamics rather than exploitation of memorized ticker associations. Building responsible multi-agent systems demands rigorous signal validation: proving that predictions reflect legitimate patterns, not pre-trained recall. We address two sources of spurious performance: memorization bias from ticker-specific pre-training, and survivorship bias from flawed backtesting. Our approach is to blindfold the agents--anonymizing all identifiers--and verify whether meaningful signals persist. BlindTrade anonymizes tickers and company names, and four LLM agents output scores along with reasoning. We construct a GNN graph from reasoning embeddings and trade using PPO-DSR policy. On 2025 YTD (through 2025-08-01), we achieved Sharpe 1.40 +/- 0.22 across 20...
3.ARTEMIS: A Neuro Symbolic Framework for Economically Constrained Market Dynamics
Deep learning models in quantitative finance often operate as black boxes, lacking interpretability and failing to incorporate fundamental economic principles such as no-arbitrage constraints. This paper introduces ARTEMIS (Arbitrage-free Representation Through Economic Models and Interpretable Symbolics), a novel neuro-symbolic framework combining a continuous-time Laplace Neural Operator encoder, a neural stochastic differential equation regularised by physics-informed losses, and a differentiable symbolic bottleneck that distils interpretable trading rules. The model enforces economic plausibility via two novel regularisation terms: a Feynman-Kac PDE residual penalising local no-arbitrage violations, and a market price of risk penalty bounding the instantaneous Sharpe ratio. We evaluate ARTEMIS against six strong baselines on four data...
4.Shallow Representation of Option Implied Information
Option prices encode the market's collective outlook through implied density and implied volatility. An explicit link between implied density and implied volatility translates the risk-neutrality of the former into conditions on the latter to rule out static arbitrage. Despite earlier recognition of their parity, the two had been studied in isolation for decades until the recent demand in implied volatility modeling rejuvenated such parity. This paper provides a systematic approach to build neural representations of option implied information. As a preliminary, we first revisit the explicit link between implied density and implied volatility through an alternative and minimalist lens, where implied volatility is viewed not as volatility but as a pointwise corrector mapping the Black-Scholes quasi-density into the implied risk-neutral dens...
5.Conditioning on a Volatility Proxy Compresses the Apparent Timescale of Collective Market Correlation
We address the attribution problem for apparent slow collective dynamics: is the observed persistence intrinsic, or inherited from a persistent driver? For the leading eigenvalue fraction $ψ_1=λ_{\max}/N$ of S\&P 500 60-day rolling correlation matrices ($237$ stocks, 2004--2023), a VIX-coupled Ornstein--Uhlenbeck model reduces the effective relaxation time from $298$ to $61$ trading days and improves the fit over bare mean reversion by $Δ$BIC$=109$. On the decomposition sample, an informational residual of $\log(\mathrm{VIX})$ alone retains most of that gain ($Δ$BIC$=78.6$), whereas a mechanical VIX proxy alone does not improve the fit. Autocorrelation-matched placebo fields fail ($Δ$BIC$_{\max}=2.7$), disjoint weekly reconstructions still favor the field-coupled model ($Δ$BIC$=140$--$151$), and six anchored chronological holdouts preserv...
GSMA Newsroom
1.Strengthening the Global Fight Against Fraud and Scams – Takeaways from the Global Fraud Summit in Vienna
Summary available at source link.
2.GSMA MWC26 Barcelona closes 20th anniversary edition
Summary available at source link.
3.From Ambition to Execution: How Open Gateway Is Scaling the Global API Economy
Summary available at source link.
4.Pioneering Affordable Access in Africa: GSMA and Handset Affordability Coalition Members Identify Six African Countries to Pilot Affordable $40 Smartphones
Summary available at source link.
5.GSMA Calls for Regulatory Readiness for Direct-to-User LEO Satellite Services
Summary available at source link.
Generative AI (arXiv)
1.Generation Models Know Space: Unleashing Implicit 3D Priors for Scene Understanding
While Multimodal Large Language Models demonstrate impressive semantic capabilities, they often suffer from spatial blindness, struggling with fine-grained geometric reasoning and physical dynamics. Existing solutions typically rely on explicit 3D modalities or complex geometric scaffolding, which are limited by data scarcity and generalization challenges. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift by leveraging the implicit spatial prior within large-scale video generation models. We posit that to synthesize temporally coherent videos, these models inherently learn robust 3D structural priors and physical laws. We introduce VEGA-3D (Video Extracted Generative Awareness), a plug-and-play framework that repurposes a pre-trained video diffusion model as a Latent World Simulator. By extracting spatiotemporal features from intermediate noise l...
2.FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs
Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning over how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To take advantage of the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded ...
3.How Auditory Knowledge in LLM Backbones Shapes Audio Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as knowledge backbones of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), yet how much auditory knowledge they encode through text-only pre-training and how this affects downstream performance remains unclear. We study this gap by comparing different LLMs under two text-only and one audio-grounded setting: (1) direct probing on AKB-2000, a curated benchmark testing the breadth and depth of auditory knowledge; (2) cascade evaluation, where LLMs reason over text descriptions from an audio captioner; and (3) audio-grounded evaluation, where each LLM is fine-tuned into a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) with an audio encoder. Our findings reveal that auditory knowledge varies substantially across families, and text-only results are strongly correlated with audio performance. Our work provides empirical...
4.Box Maze: A Process-Control Architecture for Reliable LLM Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucination and unreliable reasoning under adversarial prompting. Existing safety approaches -- such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and output filtering -- primarily operate at the behavioral level and may lack explicit architectural mechanisms for enforcing reasoning process integrity. This paper proposes the Box Maze framework, a conceptual process-control architecture that decomposes LLM reasoning into three explicit layers: memory grounding, structured inference, and boundary enforcement. We introduce preliminary simulation-based evaluation involving progressive boundary erosion scenarios across multiple heterogeneous LLM systems (DeepSeek-V3, Doubao, Qwen). Results from n=50 adversarial scenarios suggest that expli...
5.Evaluating Counterfactual Strategic Reasoning in Large Language Models
We evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in repeated game-theoretic settings to assess whether strategic performance reflects genuine reasoning or reliance on memorized patterns. We consider two canonical games, Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) and Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS), upon which we introduce counterfactual variants that alter payoff structures and action labels, breaking familiar symmetries and dominance relations. Our multi-metric evaluation framework compares default and counterfactual instantiations, showcasing LLM limitations in incentive sensitivity, structural generalization and strategic reasoning within counterfactual environments.
Hugging Face Daily Papers
1.Generation Models Know Space: Unleashing Implicit 3D Priors for Scene Understanding
While Multimodal Large Language Models demonstrate impressive semantic capabilities, they often suffer from spatial blindness, struggling with fine-grained geometric reasoning and physical dynamics. Existing solutions typically rely on explicit 3D modalities or complex geometric scaffolding, which are limited by data scarcity and generalization challenges. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift by leveraging the implicit spatial prior within large-scale video generation models. We posit that to synthesize temporally coherent videos, these models inherently learn robust 3D structural priors and physical laws. We introduce VEGA-3D (Video Extracted Generative Awareness), a plug-and-play framework that repurposes a pre-trained video diffusion model as a Latent World Simulator. By extracting spatiotemporal features from intermediate noise l...
2.Spectrally-Guided Diffusion Noise Schedules
Denoising diffusion models are widely used for high-quality image and video generation. Their performance depends on noise schedules, which define the distribution of noise levels applied during training and the sequence of noise levels traversed during sampling. Noise schedules are typically handcrafted and require manual tuning across different resolutions. In this work, we propose a principled way to design per-instance noise schedules for pixel diffusion, based on the image's spectral properties. By deriving theoretical bounds on the efficacy of minimum and maximum noise levels, we design ``tight'' noise schedules that eliminate redundant steps. During inference, we propose to conditionally sample such noise schedules. Experiments show that our noise schedules improve generative quality of single-stage pixel diffusion models, particul...
3.CRAFT: Aligning Diffusion Models with Fine-Tuning Is Easier Than You Think
Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become principled tools for fine-tuning diffusion models. However, SFT relies on high-quality images that are costly to obtain, while DPO-style methods depend on large-scale preference datasets, which are often inconsistent in quality. Beyond data dependency, these methods are further constrained by computational inefficiency. To address these two challenges, we propose Composite Reward Assisted Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a lightweight yet powerful fine-tuning paradigm that requires significantly reduced training data while maintaining computational efficiency. It first leverages a Composite Reward Filtering (CRF) techniq...
4.Cognitive Amplification vs Cognitive Delegation in Human-AI Systems: A Metric Framework
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in human decision-making, where it can either enhance human reasoning or induce excessive cognitive dependence. This paper introduces a conceptual and mathematical framework for distinguishing cognitive amplification, in which AI improves hybrid human-AI performance while preserving human expertise, from cognitive delegation, in which reasoning is progressively outsourced to AI systems. To characterize these regimes, we define a set of operational metrics: the Cognitive Amplification Index (CAI*), the Dependency Ratio (D), the Human Reliance Index (HRI), and the Human Cognitive Drift Rate (HCDR). Together, these quantities provide a low-dimensional metric space for evaluating not only whether human-AI systems achieve genuine synergistic performance, but also whether such performance is cogn...
5.Correlation-Weighted Multi-Reward Optimization for Compositional Generation
Text-to-image models produce images that align well with natural language prompts, but compositional generation has long been a central challenge. Models often struggle to satisfy multiple concepts within a single prompt, frequently omitting some concepts and resulting in partial success. Such failures highlight the difficulty of jointly optimizing multiple concepts during reward optimization, where competing concepts can interfere with one another. To address this limitation, we propose Correlation-Weighted Multi-Reward Optimization (\ours), a framework that leverages the correlation structure among concept rewards to adaptively weight each attribute concept in optimization. By accounting for interactions among concepts, \ours balances competing reward signals and emphasizes concepts that are partially satisfied yet inconsistently genera...
IEEE Xplore AI
1.AI Aims for Autonomous Wheelchair Navigation
Wheelchair users with severe disabilities can often navigate tight spaces better than most robotic systems can. A wave of new smart-wheelchair research, including findings presented in Anaheim, Calif., earlier this month, is now testing whether AI-powered systems can, or should, fully close this gap. Christian Mandel —senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen, Germany— co-led a research team together with his colleague Serge Autexier that developed prototype sensor-equipped electric wheelchairs designed to navigate a roomful of potential obstacles. The researchers also tested a new safety system that integrated sensor data from the wheelchair and from sensors in the room, including from drone -based color and depth cameras . Mandel says the team’s smart wheelchairs were both semiautonomou...
2.Startups Bring Optical Metamaterials to AI Data Centers
Light-warping physics made “invisibility cloaks” a possibility. Now two startups hope to harness the science underlying this advance to boost the bandwidth of data centers and speed artificial intelligence. Roughly 20 years ago, scientists developed the first structures capable of curving light around objects to conceal them. These are composed of optical metamaterials —materials with structures smaller than the wavelengths they are designed to manipulate, letting them bend light in unexpected ways. The problem with optical cloaks? “There’s no market for them,” says Patrick Bowen, cofounder and CEO of photonic computing startup Neurophos in Austin, Texas. For instance, each optical cloak typically works only on a single color of light instead of on all visible colors as you might want for stealth applications. Now companies are devising m...
3.How Your Virtual Twin Could One Day Save Your Life
One morning in May 2019, a cardiac surgeon stepped into the operating room at Boston Children’s Hospital more prepared than ever before to perform a high-risk procedure to rebuild a child’s heart. The surgeon was experienced, but he had an additional advantage: He had already performed the procedure on this child dozens of times—virtually. He knew exactly what to do before the first cut was made. Even more important, he knew which strategies would provide the best possible outcome for the child whose life was in his hands. How was this possible? Over the prior weeks, the hospital’s surgical and cardio-engineering teams had come together to build a fully functioning model of the child’s heart and surrounding vascular system from MRI and CT scans. They began by carefully converting the medical imaging into a 3D model, then used physics to b...
4.Nvidia’s Always-On Chip Detects Faces in Less Than a Millisecond
Always-on vision systems might be used in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or to help consumer electronics save power by turning screens off when no one’s around. But to be used in such a way, these systems need to minimize their own power consumption. An always-on computer vision system developed by Nvidia researchers can detect human faces in less than a millisecond. The face detector, which is part of an chip that could be integrated into robots, autonomous vehicles, or laptops, saves power by storing all data locally and “racing to sleep” after detections. NVIDIA electrical engineer Ben Keller presented the system on 18 February at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Efficient Vision Processing Technology According to the researchers, this kind of vision processing typically requires about 10 watts. ...
5.AI Trained on Birdsong Can Recognize Whale Calls
Birds’ chirps, trills, and warbles echo through the air, while whales’ boings , “ biotwangs ,” and whistles vibrate underwater. Despite the variations in sounds and the medium through which they travel, both birdsong and whale vocalizations can be classified by Perch 2.0 , an AI audio model from Google DeepMind . As a bioacoustics foundation model, Perch 2.0 was trained on millions of recordings of birds and other land-based animals, including amphibians, insects, and mammals. Yet researchers were surprised to learn how strongly the AI model performed when repurposed for whales . Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research have been working on whale bioacoustics for almost a decade, with work including algorithms that can detect humpback whale calls , as well as a more recent multispecies whale model that can identify eight distinct...
MIT Sloan Management
1.How Goldman Sachs Stays Agile: HR Leader Jacqueline Arthur
Aleksandar Savic After World War II, Goldman Sachs ranked 10th among the top 30 U.S. investment banks. Twenty-seven of those once-mighty Wall Street rivals, including Salomon, Lehman, and First Boston, have been relegated to the annals of business history. Goldman, in contrast, is a global powerhouse, employing more than 46,000 people, operating in more than […]
2.Retro-Innovation: How Smart Companies Profit From the Past
AI may be today’s hot topic, but there’s a robust market for old-fashioned products. Board games, vinyl records, and even 1990s-style video game consoles are making a comeback, especially with Generation Z. What does this mean for teams building modern products? In this video, MIT Sloan Management Review senior features editor Kaushik Viswanath explains “retro-innovation” […]
3.Bridge the Intergenerational Leadership Gap
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Today’s workforce spans five generations, with millennials and Generation Z together accounting for over 60% of workers globally — a share projected to reach 74% by 2030. Yet there’s a widening intergenerational gap in business leadership. While age diversity in the workplace is growing, decision-making power increasingly rests with […]
4.How Schneider Electric Scales AI in Both Products and Processes
Matt Harrison Clough/Ikon Images At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Schneider Electric CEO Olivier Blum accepted awards recognizing the company’s AI solutions as part of the WEF’s MINDS (Meaningful, Intelligent, Novel, Deployable Solutions) program — for the second time. The distinction highlighted two of the company’s AI-enabled applications: […]
5.Leaders at All Levels: Kraft Heinz’s 5X Speed Secret
Is 36 months too long for a new-product cycle? It was for Kraft Heinz. So, starting with a pilot project, it was able to cut time to market to just six months by redesigning how people worked. Today, units throughout the company are applying that model’s step-by-step approach to change and are seeing measurable improvements […]
NY Fed - Liberty Street
1.The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—March 2026
This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since December 2025. To summarize, growth in 2026 is expected to be more robust, and inflation more persistent, than predicted in December. Stronger investment is the main driver for higher growth, while cost-push shocks, possibly capturing the effects of tariffs, are the key factors behind higher inflation. Projections for the short-run real natural rate of interest (r*) are the same as in December.
2.Firms’ Inflation Expectations Return to 2024 Levels
Businesses experienced substantial cost pressures in 2025 as the cost of insurance and utilities rose sharply, while an increase in tariffs contributed to rising goods and materials costs. This post examines how firms in the New York-Northern New Jersey region adjusted their prices in response to these cost pressures and describes their expectations for future price increases and inflation. Survey results show an acceleration in firms’ price increases in 2025, with an especially sharp increase in the manufacturing sector. While both cost and price increases intensified last year, our surveys re...
3.Are Rising Employee Health Insurance Costs Dampening Wage Growth?
Employer-sponsored health insurance represents a substantial component of total compensation paid by firms to many workers in the United States. Such costs have climbed by close to 20 percent over the past five years. Indeed, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was about $27,000 in 2025—roughly equivalent to the wage of a full-time worker paid $15 per hour. Our February regional business surveys asked firms whether their wage setting decisions were influenced by the rising cost of employee health insurance. As we showed in our
4.What’s Driving Rising Business Costs?
After a period of moderating cost increases, businesses faced mounting cost pressures in 2025. While tariffs played a role in driving up the costs of many inputs—especially among manufacturers—they represent only part of the story. Indeed, firms grappled with substantial cost increases across many categories in the past year. This post is the first in a three-part series analyzing cost and price dynamics among businesses in the New York-Northern New Jersey region based on data collected through our regional business surveys. Firms reported that the sharpest cost increases over the...
5.The Post‑Pandemic Global R*
In this post we provide a measure of “global” r* using data on short- and long-term yields and inflation for several countries with the approach developed in “Global Trends in Interest Rates” (Del Negro, Giannone, Giannoni, and Tambalotti). After declining significantly from the 1990s to before the COVID-19 pandemic, global r* has risen but remains well below its pre-1990s level. These conclusions are based on an econometric model called “trendy VAR” that extracts common trends across a multitude of variables. Specifically, the common trend in real rates across all the countries in the sample is what we call global r*. The post is based on the
Project Syndicate
1.Iran Is Sanctioning America
By choking off the Strait of Hormuz to oil flowing from pro-US Persian Gulf countries, while still shipping a substantial amount of its own oil to China, Iran has effectively slapped painful sanctions on the US. If these de facto sanctions last, they will impose high economic costs on many Americans – and political costs on Donald Trump.
2.Africa Is Forging Its Own Green Future
Despite bearing the brunt of a climate crisis it did not create, Africa is being held back by a financial system that has long failed to meet its needs. But instead of waiting for outside solutions, African institutions are laying the groundwork for a green transition that advances both development and climate resilience.
3.Is the Private Credit Boom Going Bust?
Since 2008, private credit has expanded into a $3.5 trillion industry, driven by private equity and operating outside the reach of traditional banking rules. As cracks begin to appear, the risks embedded in a system built on opaque valuations and rising leverage are becoming harder to ignore.
4.Telling Americans the Truth About Immigration
Donald Trump’s mass deportations are raising the prices of critical goods and services, gutting a key driver of innovation, and eliminating just about the only force working to rein in the national debt. With immigrants less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, to call his crackdown misguided is an understatement.
5.Selective Outrage Won’t End the Iran War
The United Nations Security Council’s resolution condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on US bases and energy facilities in neighboring countries ignores why they occurred. The resolution is less about international law than about protecting oil flows, global economic stability, and the Gulf states’ privileged status.
RCR Wireless
1.Nokia touts massive TCO reduction with new line of coherent optical solutions
Post-Infinera integration, the Finnish vendor’s growth target is data center interconnect Nokia’s optical pitch this year at OFC was crystalline, more intentional, and landed somewhere between breakthrough and inevitable. A new building block-based approach A diverse set of new applications have emerged in effect of AI, bringing explosive and variegated demands for bandwidth, reach, and […]
2.Ciena and Meta claim record subsea transmission speed
The trial used Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) coherent optics over an unregenerated link In sum – what to know: Record distance – 800 Gb/s transmitted over 16,608 km without regeneration on a transpacific subsea link. Higher capacity – The trial achieved 18 Tb/s per fiber pair, indicating increased throughput potential. Efficiency gains – Results […]
3.Physical AI, without the theatre – Siemens finds its private 5G groove
The tech is not the story (stupid!), says Siemens; it is a part of a solution, of course – just like IoT, and just like AI. Industrial enterprises have their own problems, and don’t buy the hype anyway; but sometimes private 5G helps – and so they call their crane supplier (etc), and not their […]
4.Telefónica targets AI-era monetization with automation push, transport overhaul
At OFC, Telefónica’s CTO outlined its strategy to reverse persistent revenue challenges In sum — what to know: Modernization focus: Telefónica is eyeing a combination of strategies to modernize the network in an effort to generate new revenue streams Level 4 automation: The operator is targeting to achieve Level 4 network autonomy by 2030 using […]
5.Nvidia and global telecom operators pivot to distributed AI grids
Major carriers are using Nvidia’s “AI Grid” to repurpose their networks In sum – what we know: Nvidia GTC 2026 brought a wave of announcements from some of the biggest telecom operators on the planet, rallying around a concept Nvidia is branding “AI grids” — essentially, geographically distributed AI infrastructure designed to run and monetize […]
Semantic Scholar – Machine Learning
1.Physics-informed machine learning
Abstract not available.
2.Machine Learning: Algorithms, Real-World Applications and Research Directions
In the current age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR or Industry 4.0), the digital world has a wealth of data, such as Internet of Things (IoT) data, cybersecurity data, mobile data, business data, social media data, health data, etc. To intelligently analyze these data and develop the corresponding smart and automated applications, the knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly, machine learning (ML) is the key. Various types of machine learning algorithms such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning exist in the area. Besides, the deep learning, which is part of a broader family of machine learning methods, can intelligently analyze the data on a large scale. In this paper, we present a comprehensive view on these machine learning algorithms that can be applied to enhance the intellig...
3.Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms
We present Fashion-MNIST, a new dataset comprising of 28x28 grayscale images of 70,000 fashion products from 10 categories, with 7,000 images per category. The training set has 60,000 images and the test set has 10,000 images. Fashion-MNIST is intended to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms, as it shares the same image size, data format and the structure of training and testing splits. The dataset is freely available at this https URL
4.A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning
With the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and applications in our everyday lives, accounting for fairness has gained significant importance in designing and engineering of such systems. AI systems can be used in many sensitive environments to make important and life-changing decisions; thus, it is crucial to ensure that these decisions do not reflect discriminatory behavior toward certain groups or populations. More recently some work has been developed in traditional machine learning and deep learning that address such challenges in different subdomains. With the commercialization of these systems, researchers are becoming more aware of the biases that these applications can contain and are attempting to address them. In this survey, we investigated different real-world applications that have shown biases in various...
5.Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead
Abstract not available.
Telecom & 6G AI
1.Outage Probability Analysis of NOMA Enabled Hierarchical UAV Networks with Non-Linear Energy Harvesting
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to enhance connectivity, extend network coverage, and support advanced communication services in sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks, particularly in public and civil domains. Although multi-UAV systems enhance connectivity for IoT networks more than single-UAV systems, energy-efficient communication systems and the integration of energy harvesting (EH) are crucial for their widespread adoption and effectiveness. In this regard, this paper proposes a hierarchical ad hoc UAV network with non-linear EH and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance both energy and cost efficiency. The proposed system consists of two UAV layers: a cluster head UAV (CHU), which acts as the source, and cluster member UAVs (CMUs), which serve as relays and are capable of harvesting energy from a terrestrial...
2.RadioDiff-FS: Physics-Informed Manifold Alignment in Few-Shot Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Radio Map Construction
Radio maps (RMs) provide spatially continuous propagation characterizations essential for 6G network planning, but high-fidelity RM construction remains challenging. Rigorous electromagnetic solvers incur prohibitive computational latency, while data-driven models demand massive labeled datasets and generalize poorly from simplified simulations to complex multipath environments. This paper proposes RadioDiff-FS, a few-shot diffusion framework that adapts a pre-trained main-path generator to multipath-rich target domains with only a small number of high-fidelity samples. The adaptation is grounded in a theoretical decomposition of the multipath RM into a dominant main-path component and a directionally sparse residual. This decomposition shows that the cross-domain shift corresponds to a bounded and geometrically structured feature transla...
3.Learn for Variation: Variationally Guided AAV Trajectory Learning in Differentiable Environments
Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) empower sixth-generation (6G) Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks through mobility-driven data collection. However, conventional reward-driven reinforcement learning for AAV trajectory planning suffers from severe credit assignment issues and training instability, because sparse scalar rewards fail to capture the long-term and nonlinear effects of sequential movements. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Learn for Variation (L4V), a gradient-informed trajectory learning framework that replaces high-variance scalar reward signals with dense and analytically grounded policy gradients. Particularly, the coupled evolution of AAV kinematics, distance-dependent channel gains, and per-user data-collection progress is first unrolled into an end-to-end differentiable computational graph. Backpropagation...
4.Holistic Energy Performance Management: Enablers, Capabilities, and Features
Energy consumption is a significant concern for mobile network operators, and to enable further network energy improvements it is also an important target when developing the emerging 6G standard. In this paper we show that, despite the existence of many energy-saving features in 5G new radio (NR) networks, activating them in isolation yields only suboptimal savings and often compromises other network key performance indicators (KPIs) such as coverage or latency. We first introduce a compact taxonomy that distinguishes hardware capabilities from higher-layer features. Features fall into two classes: (i) signaling and scheduling mechanisms that create idle windows, and (ii) features that utilize those windows to save energy. We then present a feature orchestrator as a logical node to coordinate between features to maximize the gain. Using ...
5.Enabling 6G Wireless Communications: UWB Characterization of Corridors within the H-Band
Future sixth-generation of wireless system is expected to provide data-rates in the order of 1 Tbps and latencies below 1 ms. Among others, one of the most promising strategies to meet these requirements is to operate at higher frequencies than millimeter wave bands: the THz bands. Nevertheless, because of the higher losses and the detriment of classical propagation mechanisms, deploying systems operating at these frequencies becomes a real challenge. Consequently, short-range scenarios are of special interest since these effects of THz bands can be managed. This work conducts an extensive campaign within corridors at frequencies within the H-band in the range from 250 GHz to 330 GHz. For the first time in literature, an ultra wideband of 80 GHz is studied simultaneously. Large scale effects are assessed by estimating and modeling path ga...
arXiv Quantitative Finance
1.Adaptive Regime-Aware Stock Price Prediction Using Autoencoder-Gated Dual Node Transformers with Reinforcement Learning Control
Stock markets exhibit regime-dependent behavior where prediction models optimized for stable conditions often fail during volatile periods. Existing approaches typically treat all market states uniformly or require manual regime labeling, which is expensive and quickly becomes stale as market dynamics evolve. This paper introduces an adaptive prediction framework that adaptively identifies deviations from normal market conditions and routes data through specialized prediction pathways. The architecture consists of three components: (1) an autoencoder trained on normal market conditions that identifies anomalous regimes through reconstruction error, (2) dual node transformer networks specialized for stable and event-driven market conditions respectively, and (3) a Soft Actor-Critic reinforcement learning controller that adaptively tunes th...
2.LR-Robot: A Unified Supervised Intelligent Framework for Real-Time Systematic Literature Reviews with Large Language Models
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have enabled tools to support systematic literature reviews (SLRs), yet existing frameworks often produce outputs that are efficient but contextually limited, requiring substantial expert oversight.The framework employs a human-in-the-loop process to define sub-SLR tasks, evaluate models, and ensure methodological rigor, while leveraging structured knowledge sources and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance factual grounding and transparency. LR-Robot enables multidimensional categorization of research, maps relationships among papers, identifies high-impact works, and supports historical, fine-grained analyses of topic evolution. We demonstrate the framework using an option pricing case study, enabling comprehensive literature analysis. Empiri...
3.ARTEMIS: A Neuro Symbolic Framework for Economically Constrained Market Dynamics
Deep learning models in quantitative finance often operate as black boxes, lacking interpretability and failing to incorporate fundamental economic principles such as no-arbitrage constraints. This paper introduces ARTEMIS (Arbitrage-free Representation Through Economic Models and Interpretable Symbolics), a novel neuro-symbolic framework combining a continuous-time Laplace Neural Operator encoder, a neural stochastic differential equation regularised by physics-informed losses, and a differentiable symbolic bottleneck that distils interpretable trading rules. The model enforces economic plausibility via two novel regularisation terms: a Feynman-Kac PDE residual penalising local no-arbitrage violations, and a market price of risk penalty bounding the instantaneous Sharpe ratio. We evaluate ARTEMIS against six strong baselines on four data...
4.Multivariate GARCH and portfolio variance prediction: A forecast reconciliation perspective
We assess the advantage of combining univariate and multivariate portfolio risk forecasts with the aid of forecast reconciliation techniques. In our analyzes, we assume knowledge of portfolio weights, a standard for portfolio risk management applications. With an extensive simulation experiment, we show that, if the true covariance is known, forecast reconciliation improves over a standard multivariate approach, in particular when the adopted multivariate model is misspecified. However, if noisy proxies are used, correctly specified models and the misspecified ones (for instance, neglecting spillovers) turn out to be, in several cases, indistinguishable, with forecast reconciliation still providing improvements. The noise in the covariance proxy plays a crucial role in determining the improvement of both the forecast reconciliation and th...
5.Discrimination-insensitive pricing
Rendering fair prices for financial, credit, and insurance products is of ethical and regulatory interest. In many jurisdictions, discriminatory covariates, such as gender and ethnicity, are prohibited from use in pricing such instruments. In this work, we propose a discrimination-insensitive pricing framework, where we require the pricing principle to be insensitive to the (exogenously determined) protected covariates, that is the sensitivity of the pricing principle to the protected covariate is zero. We formulate and solve the optimisation problem that finds the nearest (in Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence) "pricing" measure to the real world probability, such that under this pricing measure the principle is discrimination-insensitive. We call the solution the discrimination-insensitive measure and provide conditions for its existence ...
arXiv – 6G & Networking
1.Outage Probability Analysis of NOMA Enabled Hierarchical UAV Networks with Non-Linear Energy Harvesting
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to enhance connectivity, extend network coverage, and support advanced communication services in sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks, particularly in public and civil domains. Although multi-UAV systems enhance connectivity for IoT networks more than single-UAV systems, energy-efficient communication systems and the integration of energy harvesting (EH) are crucial for their widespread adoption and effectiveness. In this regard, this paper proposes a hierarchical ad hoc UAV network with non-linear EH and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance both energy and cost efficiency. The proposed system consists of two UAV layers: a cluster head UAV (CHU), which acts as the source, and cluster member UAVs (CMUs), which serve as relays and are capable of harvesting energy from a terrestrial...
2.RadioDiff-FS: Physics-Informed Manifold Alignment in Few-Shot Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Radio Map Construction
Radio maps (RMs) provide spatially continuous propagation characterizations essential for 6G network planning, but high-fidelity RM construction remains challenging. Rigorous electromagnetic solvers incur prohibitive computational latency, while data-driven models demand massive labeled datasets and generalize poorly from simplified simulations to complex multipath environments. This paper proposes RadioDiff-FS, a few-shot diffusion framework that adapts a pre-trained main-path generator to multipath-rich target domains with only a small number of high-fidelity samples. The adaptation is grounded in a theoretical decomposition of the multipath RM into a dominant main-path component and a directionally sparse residual. This decomposition shows that the cross-domain shift corresponds to a bounded and geometrically structured feature transla...
3.Learn for Variation: Variationally Guided AAV Trajectory Learning in Differentiable Environments
Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) empower sixth-generation (6G) Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks through mobility-driven data collection. However, conventional reward-driven reinforcement learning for AAV trajectory planning suffers from severe credit assignment issues and training instability, because sparse scalar rewards fail to capture the long-term and nonlinear effects of sequential movements. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Learn for Variation (L4V), a gradient-informed trajectory learning framework that replaces high-variance scalar reward signals with dense and analytically grounded policy gradients. Particularly, the coupled evolution of AAV kinematics, distance-dependent channel gains, and per-user data-collection progress is first unrolled into an end-to-end differentiable computational graph. Backpropagation...
4.Holistic Energy Performance Management: Enablers, Capabilities, and Features
Energy consumption is a significant concern for mobile network operators, and to enable further network energy improvements it is also an important target when developing the emerging 6G standard. In this paper we show that, despite the existence of many energy-saving features in 5G new radio (NR) networks, activating them in isolation yields only suboptimal savings and often compromises other network key performance indicators (KPIs) such as coverage or latency. We first introduce a compact taxonomy that distinguishes hardware capabilities from higher-layer features. Features fall into two classes: (i) signaling and scheduling mechanisms that create idle windows, and (ii) features that utilize those windows to save energy. We then present a feature orchestrator as a logical node to coordinate between features to maximize the gain. Using ...
5.Enabling 6G Wireless Communications: UWB Characterization of Corridors within the H-Band
Future sixth-generation of wireless system is expected to provide data-rates in the order of 1 Tbps and latencies below 1 ms. Among others, one of the most promising strategies to meet these requirements is to operate at higher frequencies than millimeter wave bands: the THz bands. Nevertheless, because of the higher losses and the detriment of classical propagation mechanisms, deploying systems operating at these frequencies becomes a real challenge. Consequently, short-range scenarios are of special interest since these effects of THz bands can be managed. This work conducts an extensive campaign within corridors at frequencies within the H-band in the range from 250 GHz to 330 GHz. For the first time in literature, an ultra wideband of 80 GHz is studied simultaneously. Large scale effects are assessed by estimating and modeling path ga...
arXiv – Network Architecture (6G/Slicing)
1.Holistic Energy Performance Management: Enablers, Capabilities, and Features
Energy consumption is a significant concern for mobile network operators, and to enable further network energy improvements it is also an important target when developing the emerging 6G standard. In this paper we show that, despite the existence of many energy-saving features in 5G new radio (NR) networks, activating them in isolation yields only suboptimal savings and often compromises other network key performance indicators (KPIs) such as coverage or latency. We first introduce a compact taxonomy that distinguishes hardware capabilities from higher-layer features. Features fall into two classes: (i) signaling and scheduling mechanisms that create idle windows, and (ii) features that utilize those windows to save energy. We then present a feature orchestrator as a logical node to coordinate between features to maximize the gain. Using ...
2.RIS-Aided Mobile Network Design
In this paper, we examine the distribution of radio signal propagation within the city of Poznan (Poland) to determine optimal locations for deploying Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS). The study focuses on designing a 5G/6G Radio Access Network (RAN), incorporating eight Base Stations (BSs) that utilize either Single Input Single Output (SISO), or Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna technologies, depending on the network cell configuration. Through detailed simulations and analyses, we explore various propagation scenarios in both Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions, considering the complex urban landscape characterized by high-rise buildings. The results demonstrate the potential of using RISs in mobile networks to enhance radio signal quality in urban environments through strategic placements. ...
3.HAPS-RIS-assisted IoT Networks for Disaster Recovery and Emergency Response: Architecture, Application Scenarios, and Open Challenges
Reliable and resilient communication is essential for disaster recovery and emergency response, yet terrestrial infrastructure often fails during large-scale natural disasters. This paper proposes a High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS)-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) communication system to restore connectivity in disaster-affected areas. Distributed IoT sensors collect critical environmental data and forward it to nearby gateways via short-range links, while the HAPS-RIS system provides backhaul to these gateways. To overcome the severe double path loss of passive RIS at high altitudes, we propose a dynamically adjustable sub-connected active RIS architecture that can reconfigure the number of elements connected to each power amplifier through switching mechanisms. Simulation results demon...
4.Agentic AI for SAGIN Resource Management_Semantic Awareness, Orchestration, and Optimization
Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN) promise ubiquitous 6G connectivity but face significant resource management challenges due to heterogeneous infrastructure, dynamic topologies, and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Conventional model-driven approaches struggle with scalability and adaptability in such complex environments. This paper presents an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework for autonomous SAGIN resource management by embedding large language model (LLM)-based agents into a Monitor-Analyze-Plan- Execute-Knowledge (MAPE-K) control plane. The framework incorporates three specialized agents, namely semantic resource perceivers, intent-driven orchestrators, and adaptive learners, that collaborate through natural language reasoning to bridge the gap between operator intents and network execution. A k...
5.Toward Experimentation-as-a-Service in 5G/6G: The Plaza6G Prototype for AI-Assisted Trials
This paper presents Plaza6G, the first operational Experiment-as-a-Service (ExaS) platform unifying cloud resources with next-generation wireless infrastructure. Developed at CTTC in Barcelona, Plaza6G integrates GPU-accelerated compute clusters, multiple 5G cores, both open-source (e.g., Free5GC) and commercial (e.g., Cumucore), programmable RANs, and physical or emulated user equipment under unified orchestration. In Plaza6G, the experiment design requires minimal expertise as it is expressed in natural language via a web portal or a REST API. The web portal and REST API are enhanced with a Large Language Model (LLM)-based assistant, which employs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for up-to-date experiment knowledge and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for continuous domain fine-tuning. Over-the-air (OTA) trials leverage a four-chamber ane...