Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Alexander Miller

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Miller.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents

LLM agents hold significant promise for advancing scientific research. To accelerate this progress, we introduce AIRS-Bench (the AI Research Science Benchmark), a suite of 20 tasks sourced from state-of-the-art machine learning papers. These tasks span diverse domains, including language modeling, mathematics, bioinformatics, and time series forecasting. AIRS-Bench tasks assess agentic capabilities over the full research lifecycle -- including idea generation, experiment analysis and iterative refinement -- without providing baseline code. The AIRS-Bench task format is versatile, enabling easy integration of new tasks and rigorous comparison across different agentic frameworks. We establish baselines using frontier models paired with both sequential and parallel scaffolds. Our results show that agents exceed human SOTA in four tasks but fail to match it in sixteen others. Even when agents surpass human benchmarks, they do not reach the theoretical performance ceiling for the underlying tasks. These findings indicate that AIRS-Bench is far from saturated and offers substantial room for improvement. We open-source the AIRS-Bench task definitions and evaluation code to catalyze further development in autonomous scientific research.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

Aerial Assistance System for Automated Firefighting during Turntable Ladder Operations

Fires in industrial facilities pose special challenges to firefighters, e.g., due to the sheer size and scale of the buildings. The resulting visual obstructions impair firefighting accuracy, further compounded by inaccurate assessments of the fire's location. Such imprecision simultaneously increases the overall damage and prolongs the fire-brigades operation unnecessarily. We propose an automated assistance system for firefighting using a motorized fire monitor on a turntable ladder with aerial support from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV flies autonomously within an obstacle-free flight funnel derived from geodata, detecting and localizing heat sources. An operator supervises the operation on a handheld controller and selects a fire target in reach. After the selection, the UAV automatically plans and traverses between two triangulation poses for continued fire localization. Simultaneously, our system steers the fire monitor to ensure the water jet reaches the detected heat source. In preliminary tests, our assistance system successfully localized multiple heat sources and directed a water jet towards the fires.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2025

Micius, the world's first quantum communication satellite, was hackable

The decoy-state BB84 protocol for quantum key distribution (QKD) is used on Micius, the world's first satellite for quantum communications. The method of decoy states can detect photon-number-splitting eavesdropping and thus enables, in theory, secure QKD using weak coherent pulses over long distances with high channel loss inherent in satellite communication systems. However, it is widely known that realistic QKD devices can be vulnerable to various types of side-channel attacks that rely on flaws in experimental implementation. In most free-space QKD systems, including that on board Micius, multiple semiconductor lasers with passive optics are utilized to randomly generate polarization states. Optical pulses from independent laser diodes can to some extent differ in their temporal, spectral, and/or spatial distribution, and the quantum states can thus be distinguishable. Such distinguishability of photons in additional non-operational degrees of freedom compromises unconditional security of QKD since an eavesdropper can exploit this loophole to improve their attack strategy. The author carried out a thorough analysis of the experimental data obtained during multiple communication sessions between Micius and one of the ground stations designed specifically for it. Relative time delays between all the eight laser diodes on board have been found. The typical desynchronization between the lasers exceeds 100 ps, which is comparable with their pulse duration of 200 ps. The largest time delay was observed between signal and decoy states for vertically polarized photons and is about 300 ps. With such mismatch in timing, a potential attacker using as perfect equipment as possible unless it violates the laws of physics was shown to be capable of distinguishing decoy states from signal ones in at least 98.7% of cases.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2022

Ultrafast x-ray scattering reveals composite amplitude collective mode in the Weyl charge density wave material (TaSe$_4$)$_2$I

We report ultrafast x-ray scattering experiments of the quasi-1D charge density wave (CDW) material (TaSe$_4$)$_2$I following photoexcitation with femtosecond infrared laser pulses. From the time-dependent diffraction signal at the CDW sidebands we identify an amplitude mode derived primarily from the transverse acoustic component of the CDW static distortion. The dynamics of this acoustic amplitude mode are described well by a model of a displacive excitation, which we interpret as mediated through a coupling to the optical phonon component associated with the tetramerization of the Ta chains.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2022

How to Deploy a 10-km Interferometric Radio Telescope on the Moon with Just Four Tethered Robots

The Far-side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE) is a proposed mission concept to the lunar far side that seeks to deploy and operate an array of 128 dual-polarization, dipole antennas over a region of 100 square kilometers. The resulting interferometric radio telescope would provide unprecedented radio images of distant star systems, allowing for the investigation of faint radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events and could also lead to the detection of magnetospheres around exoplanets within their parent star's habitable zone. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would also measure the "Dark Ages" of the early Universe at a global 21-cm signal across a range of red shifts (z approximately 50-100). Each discrete antenna node in the array is connected to a central hub (located at the lander) via a communication and power tether. Nodes are driven by cold=operable electronics that continuously monitor an extremely wide-band of frequencies (200 kHz to 40 MHz), which surpass the capabilities of Earth-based telescopes by two orders of magnitude. Achieving this ground-breaking capability requires a robust deployment strategy on the lunar surface, which is feasible with existing, high TRL technologies (demonstrated or under active development) and is capable of delivery to the surface on next-generation commercial landers, such as Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. This paper presents an antenna packaging, placement, and surface deployment trade study that leverages recent advances in tethered mobile robots under development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which are used to deploy a flat, antenna-embedded, tape tether with optical communication and power transmission capabilities.

astro-ph.IM↗
arXiv2019

The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)

We describe the setting and results of the ConvAI2 NeurIPS competition that aims to further the state-of-the-art in open-domain chatbots. Some key takeaways from the competition are: (i) pretrained Transformer variants are currently the best performing models on this task, (ii) but to improve performance on multi-turn conversations with humans, future systems must go beyond single word metrics like perplexity to measure the performance across sequences of utterances (conversations) -- in terms of repetition, consistency and balance of dialogue acts (e.g. how many questions asked vs. answered).

cs.AI↗
arXiv2018

An Investigation on Partitions with Equal Products

An ordered triple $(s,p,n)$ is called admissible if there exist two different multisets $X=\{x_1,x_2,\dotsc,x_n\}$ and $Y=\{y_1,y_2,\dotsc,y_n\}$ such that $X$ and $Y$ share the same sum $s$, the same product $p$, and the same size $n$. We first count the number of $n$ such that $(s,p,n)$ are admissible for a fixed $s$. We also fully characterize the values $p$ such that $(s,p,n)$ is admissible. Finally, we consider the situation where $r$ different multisets are needed, instead of just two. This project is also related to John Conway's wizard puzzle from the 1960s.

math.NT↗
arXiv2016

Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documents

Directly reading documents and being able to answer questions from them is an unsolved challenge. To avoid its inherent difficulty, question answering (QA) has been directed towards using Knowledge Bases (KBs) instead, which has proven effective. Unfortunately KBs often suffer from being too restrictive, as the schema cannot support certain types of answers, and too sparse, e.g. Wikipedia contains much more information than Freebase. In this work we introduce a new method, Key-Value Memory Networks, that makes reading documents more viable by utilizing different encodings in the addressing and output stages of the memory read operation. To compare using KBs, information extraction or Wikipedia documents directly in a single framework we construct an analysis tool, WikiMovies, a QA dataset that contains raw text alongside a preprocessed KB, in the domain of movies. Our method reduces the gap between all three settings. It also achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing WikiQA benchmark.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2015

Evaluating Prerequisite Qualities for Learning End-to-End Dialog Systems

A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; Shang et al., 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (Weston et al., 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2011

Reflection arrangements and ribbon representations

Ehrenborg and Jung recently related the order complex for the lattice of d-divisible partitions with the simplicial complex of pointed ordered set partitions via a homotopy equivalence. The latter has top homology naturally identified as a Specht module. Their work unifies that of Calderbank, Hanlon, Robinson, and Wachs. By focusing on the underlying geometry, we strengthen and extend these results from type A to all real reflection groups and the complex reflection groups known as Shephard groups.

math.CO↗
arXiv2008

Differential posets and Smith normal forms

We conjecture a strong property for the up and down maps U and D in an r-differential poset: DU+tI and UD+tI have Smith normal forms over Z[t]. In particular, this would determine the integral structure of the maps U, D, UD, DU, including their ranks in any characteristic. As evidence, we prove the conjecture for the Young-Fibonacci lattice YF studied by Okada and its r-differential generalizations Z(r), as well as verifying many of its consequences for Young's lattice Y and the r-differential Cartesian products Y^r.

math.CO↗