March 2026

The orienteering problem with time windows and variable profits (OPTWVP) is common in many real-world applications and involves continuous time variables. Current approaches fail to develop an efficient solver for this orienteering problem variant with discrete and continuous variables. In this paper, we propose a learning-based two-stage DEcoupled discrete-Continuous optimization with Service-time-guided Trajectory (DeCoST), which aims to effectively decouple the discrete and continuous decision variables in the OPTWVP problem, while enabling efficient and learnable coordination between them. In […]

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Reinforcement Learning (RL) lacks benchmarks that enable precise, white-box diagnostics of agent behavior. Current environments often entangle complexity factors and lack ground-truth optimality metrics, making it difficult to isolate why algorithms fail. We introduce Synthetic Monitoring Environments (SMEs), an infinite suite of continuous control tasks. SMEs provide fully configurable task characteristics and known optimal policies. As such, SMEs allow for the exact calculation of instantaneous regret. Their rigorous geometric state space bounds allow for systematic within-distribution (WD) and […]

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Balancing real-time edge performance with safety-critical sensitivity using Foundation Models and Knowledge Distillation. Photo by Tim Meyer on Unsplash If you’ve ever tried building a perception system for a self-driving car or a smart city grid, you know the harsh reality: the real world is chaotic. It doesn’t care about your clean, curated training dataset. As machine learning engineers, we spend weeks training models to recognize standard traffic patterns. But what happens when the camera captures a sudden, chaotic anomaly? […]

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Learning similarity metrics for glyphs and writing systems faces a fundamental challenge: while individual graphemes within invented alphabets can be reliably labeled, the historical relationships between different scripts remain uncertain and contested. We propose a two-stage framework that addresses this epistemological constraint. First, we train an encoder with contrastive loss on labeled invented alphabets, establishing a teacher model with robust discriminative features. Second, we extend to historically attested scripts through teacher-student distillation, where the student learns unsupervised representations […]

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In 2026, you don’t need a developer, a designer, or a $50K budget to build a professional web application. You just need to describe what you want. The idea of building a website without writing a single line of code is not new. Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress have offered drag-and-drop builders for over a decade. But there has always been a ceiling. You could build a marketing site, maybe a simple blog, but the moment you […]

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I’ve run design crits I was quietly proud of. Structured agendas. A Notion template with all the right sections. The kind of process that looked, from the outside, like a team that had figured it out. Then I started running work past AI before every crit. In Figma, this looked like due diligence. In practice, it worked like a smoke detector with a dead battery – present, installed, completely silent when it mattered. This is what I learned […]

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