This paper explores the application of a reinforcement learning (RL) framework using the Q-Learning algorithm to enhance dynamic pricing strategies in the retail sector. Unlike traditional pricing methods, which often rely on static demand models, our RL approach continuously adapts to evolving market dynamics, offering a more flexible and responsive pricing strategy. By creating a simulated retail environment, we demonstrate how RL effectively addresses real-time changes in consumer behavior and market conditions, leading to improved revenue outcomes. Our results illustrate that the RL model not only surpasses traditional methods in terms of revenue generation but also provides insights into the complex interplay of price elasticity and consumer demand. This research underlines the significant potential of applying artificial intelligence in economic decision-making, paving the way for more sophisticated, data-driven pricing models in various commercial domains.

Network intrusion detection is critical for securing modern networks, yet the complexity of network traffic poses significant challenges to traditional methods. This study proposes a Temporal Convolutional Network(TCN) model featuring a residual block architecture with dilated convolutions to capture dependencies in network traffic data while ensuring training stability. The TCN's ability to process sequences in parallel enables faster, more accurate sequence modeling than Recurrent Neural Networks. Evaluated on the Edge-IIoTset dataset, which includes 15 classes with normal traffic and 14 cyberattack types, the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 96.72% and a loss of 0.0688, outperforming 1D CNN, CNN-LSTM, CNN-GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and CNN-GRU-LSTM models. A class-wise classification report, encompassing metrics such as recall, precision, accuracy, and F1-score, demonstrated the TCN model's superior performance across varied attack categories, including Malware, Injection, and DDoS. These results underscore the model's potential in addressing the complexities of network intrusion detection effectively.

Deepfakes have emerged as a significant threat to digital media authenticity, increasing the need for advanced detection techniques that can identify subtle and time-dependent manipulations. CNNs are effective at capturing spatial artifacts, and Transformers excel at modeling temporal inconsistencies. However, many existing CNN-Transformer models process spatial and temporal features independently. In particular, attention-based methods often use separate attention mechanisms for spatial and temporal features and combine them using naive approaches like averaging, addition, or concatenation, which limits the depth of spatio-temporal interaction. To address this challenge, we propose a unified CAST model that leverages cross-attention to effectively fuse spatial and temporal features in a more integrated manner. Our approach allows temporal features to dynamically attend to relevant spatial regions, enhancing the model's ability to detect fine-grained, time-evolving artifacts such as flickering eyes or warped lips. This design enables more precise localization and deeper contextual understanding, leading to improved performance across diverse and challenging scenarios. We evaluate the performance of our model using the FaceForensics++, Celeb-DF, and DeepfakeDetection datasets in both intra- and cross-dataset settings to affirm the superiority of our approach. Our model achieves strong performance with an AUC of 99.49 percent and an accuracy of 97.57 percent in intra-dataset evaluations. In cross-dataset testing, it demonstrates impressive generalization by achieving a 93.31 percent AUC on the unseen DeepfakeDetection dataset. These results highlight the effectiveness of cross-attention-based feature fusion in enhancing the robustness of deepfake video detection.

In the age of IoT and mobile platforms, ensuring that content stay authentic whilst avoiding overburdening limited hardware is a key problem. This study introduces hybrid Fast Wavelet Transform & Additive Quantization index Modulation (FWT-AQIM) scheme, a lightweight watermarking approach that secures digital pictures on low-power, memory-constrained small scale devices to achieve a balanced trade-off among robustness, imperceptibility, and computational efficiency. The method embeds watermark in the luminance component of YCbCr color space using low-frequency FWT sub-bands, minimizing perceptual distortion, using additive QIM for simplicity. Both the extraction and embedding processes run in less than 40 ms and require minimum RAM when tested on a Raspberry Pi 5. Quality assessments on standard and high-resolution images yield PSNR greater than equal to 34 dB and SSIM greater than equal to 0.97, while robustness verification includes various geometric and signal-processing attacks demonstrating near-zero bit error rates and NCC greater than equal to 0.998. Using a mosaic-based watermark, redundancy added enhancing robustness without reducing throughput, which peaks at 11 MP/s. These findings show that FWT-AQIM provides an efficient, scalable solution for real-time, secure watermarking in bandwidth- and power-constrained contexts, opening the way for dependable content protection in developing IoT and multimedia applications.

In the rapidly evolving field of financial forecasting, the application of neural networks presents a compelling advancement over traditional statistical models. This research paper explores the effectiveness of two specific neural forecasting models, N-HiTS and N-BEATS, in predicting financial market trends. Through a systematic comparison with conventional models, this study demonstrates the superior predictive capabilities of neural approaches, particularly in handling the non-linear dynamics and complex patterns inherent in financial time series data. The results indicate that N-HiTS and N-BEATS not only enhance the accuracy of forecasts but also boost the robustness and adaptability of financial predictions, offering substantial advantages in environments that require real-time decision-making. The paper concludes with insights into the practical implications of neural forecasting in financial markets and recommendations for future research directions.

In the dynamic realm of deepfake detection, this work presents an innovative approach to validate video content. The methodology blends advanced 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks. The 3D model is uniquely tailored to capture spatiotemporal features via sliding filters, extending through both spatial and temporal dimensions. This configuration enables nuanced pattern recognition in pixel arrangement and temporal evolution across frames. Simultaneously, the 2D model leverages EfficientNet architecture, harnessing auto-scaling in Convolutional Neural Networks. Notably, this ensemble integrates Voting Ensembles and Adaptive Weighted Ensembling. Strategic prioritization of the 3-dimensional model's output capitalizes on its exceptional spatio-temporal feature extraction. Experimental validation underscores the effectiveness of this strategy, showcasing its potential in countering deepfake generation's deceptive practices.

Malware detection using machine learning requires feature extraction from binary files, as models cannot process raw binaries directly. A common approach involves using LIEF for raw feature extraction and the EMBER vectorizer to generate 2381-dimensional feature vectors. However, the high dimensionality of these features introduces significant computational challenges. This study addresses these challenges by applying two dimensionality reduction techniques: XGBoost-based feature selection and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We evaluate three reduced feature dimensions (128, 256, and 384), which correspond to approximately 5.4%, 10.8%, and 16.1% of the original 2381 features, across four models-XGBoost, LightGBM, Extra Trees, and Random Forest-using a unified training, validation, and testing split formed from the EMBER-2018, ERMDS, and BODMAS datasets. This approach ensures generalization and avoids dataset bias. Experimental results show that LightGBM trained on the 384-dimensional feature set after XGBoost feature selection achieves the highest accuracy of 97.52% on the unified dataset, providing an optimal balance between computational efficiency and detection performance. The best model, trained in 61 minutes using 30 GB of RAM and 19.5 GB of disk space, generalizes effectively to completely unseen datasets, maintaining 95.31% accuracy on TRITIUM and 93.98% accuracy on INFERNO. These findings present a scalable, compute-efficient approach for malware detection without compromising accuracy.

This research provides a critical analysis regarding the way blockchain is being implemented in the financial industry, highlighting its vital role in promoting green finance, guaranteeing compliance with regulations, improving supply chain finance, boosting decentralized finance (DeFi), and strengthening the Internet of Things (IoT). It discusses how blockchain's inherent attributes could significantly boost transparency, operational efficiency, and security across these domains while also addressing the pressing challenges of scalability, system integration, and the evolving regulatory landscape.

The rapid advancement in Large Language Models has been met with significant challenges in their training processes, primarily due to their considerable computational and memory demands. This research examines parallelization techniques developed to address these challenges, enabling the efficient and scalable training of Large Language Models. A comprehensive analysis of both data and model parallelism strategies, including Fully Sharded Data Parallelism and Distributed Data-Parallel frameworks, is provided to assess methods that facilitate efficient model training. Furthermore, the architectural complexities and training methodologies of the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-2 model are explored. The application of these strategies is further investigated, which is crucial in managing the substantial computational and memory demands of training sophisticated models. This analysis not only highlights the effectiveness of these parallel training strategies in enhancing training efficiency but also their role in enabling the scalable training of large language models. Drawing on recent research findings, through a comprehensive literature review, this research underscores the critical role of parallelization techniques in addressing the computational challenges of training state-of-the-art Large Language Models, thereby contributing to the advancement of training more sophisticated and capable artificial intelligence systems.

Air pollution is a significant health concern worldwide, contributing to various respiratory diseases. Advances in air quality mapping, driven by the emergence of smart cities and the proliferation of Internet-of-Things sensor devices, have led to an increase in available data, fueling momentum in air pollution forecasting. The objective of this study is to devise an integrated approach for predicting air quality using image data and subsequently assessing lung disease severity based on Air Quality Index (AQI).The aim is to implement an integrated approach by refining existing techniques to improve accuracy in predicting AQI and lung disease severity. The study aims to forecast additional atmospheric pollutants like AQI, PM10, O3, CO, SO2, NO2 in addition to PM2.5 levels. Additionally, the study aims to compare the proposed approach with existing methods to show its effectiveness. The approach used in this paper uses VGG16 model for feature extraction in images and neural network for predicting this http URL predicting lung disease severity, Support Vector Classifier (SVC) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms are utilized. The neural network model for predicting AQI achieved training accuracy of 88.54 % and testing accuracy of 87.44%,which was measured using loss function, while the KNN model used for predicting lung disease severity achieved training accuracy of 98.4% and testing accuracy of 97.5% In conclusion, the integrated approach presented in this study forecasts air quality and evaluates lung disease severity, achieving high testing accuracies of 87.44% for AQI and 97.5% for lung disease severity using neural network, KNN, and SVC models. The future scope involves implementing transfer learning and advanced deep learning modules to enhance prediction capabilities. While the current study focuses on India, the objective is to expand its scope to encompass global coverage.

Plagiarism involves using another person's work or concepts without proper attribution, presenting them as original creations. With the growing amount of data communicated in regional languages such as Marathi -- one of India's regional languages -- it is crucial to design robust plagiarism detection systems tailored for low-resource languages. Language models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have demonstrated exceptional capability in text representation and feature extraction, making them essential tools for semantic analysis and plagiarism detection. However, the application of BERT for low-resource languages remains under-explored, particularly in the context of plagiarism detection. This paper presents a method to enhance the accuracy of plagiarism detection for Marathi texts using BERT sentence embeddings in conjunction with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) feature representation. This approach effectively captures statistical, semantic, and syntactic aspects of text features through a weighted voting ensemble of machine learning models.

An important question in the study of quasi-perfect codes is whether such codes can be constructed for all possible lengths $n$. In this paper, we address this question for specific values of $n$. First, we investigate the existence of quasi-perfect codes in the Cartesian product of a graph $G$ and a path (or cycle), assuming that $G$ admits a perfect code. Second, we explore quasi-perfect codes in the Cartesian products of two or three cycles, $C_m\square C_n$ and $C_m\square C_n\square C_l$, as well as in the Cartesian products of two or three paths, $P_m\square P_n$ and $P_m\square P_n\square P_l$.

Cache side channel attacks are a sophisticated and persistent threat that exploit vulnerabilities in modern processors to extract sensitive information. These attacks leverage weaknesses in shared computational resources, particularly the last level cache, to infer patterns in data access and execution flows, often bypassing traditional security defenses. Such attacks are especially dangerous as they can be executed remotely without requiring physical access to the victim's device. This study focuses on a specific class of these threats: fingerprinting attacks, where an adversary monitors and analyzes the behavior of co-located processes via cache side channels. This can potentially reveal confidential information, such as encryption keys or user activity patterns. A comprehensive threat model illustrates how attackers sharing computational resources with target systems exploit these side channels to compromise sensitive data. To mitigate such risks, a hybrid deep learning model is proposed for detecting cache side channel attacks. Its performance is compared with five widely used deep learning models: Multi-Layer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network, Simple Recurrent Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, and Gated Recurrent Unit. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid model achieves a detection rate of up to 99.96%. These findings highlight the limitations of existing models, the need for enhanced defensive mechanisms, and directions for future research to secure sensitive data against evolving side channel threats.

Landslides inflict substantial societal and economic damage, underscoring their global significance as recurrent and destructive natural disasters. Recent landslides in northern parts of India and Nepal have caused significant disruption, damaging infrastructure and posing threats to local communities. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a type of deep learning technique, have shown remarkable success in image processing. Because of their sophisticated architectures, advanced CNN-based models perform better in landslide detection than conventional algorithms. The purpose of this work is to investigate CNNs' potential in more detail, with an emphasis on comparison of CNN based models for better landslide detection. We compared four traditional semantic segmentation models (U-Net, LinkNet, PSPNet, and FPN) and utilized the ResNet50 backbone encoder to implement them. Moreover, we have experimented with the hyperparameters such as learning rates, batch sizes, and regularization techniques to fine-tune the models. We have computed the confusion matrix for each model and used performance metrics including precision, recall and f1-score to evaluate and compare the deep learning models. According to the experimental results, LinkNet gave the best results among the four models having an Accuracy of 97.49% and a F1-score of 85.7% (with 84.49% precision, 87.07% recall). We have also presented a comprehensive comparison of all pixel-wise confusion matrix results and the time taken to train each model.

As short text data in native languages like Hindi increasingly appear in modern media, robust methods for topic modeling on such data have gained importance. This study investigates the performance of BERTopic in modeling Hindi short texts, an area that has been under-explored in existing research. Using contextual embeddings, BERTopic can capture semantic relationships in data, making it potentially more effective than traditional models, especially for short and diverse texts. We evaluate BERTopic using 6 different document embedding models and compare its performance against 8 established topic modeling techniques, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Additive Regularization of Topic Models (ARTM), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA), Embedded Topic Model (ETM), Combined Topic Model (CTM), and Top2Vec. The models are assessed using coherence scores across a range of topic counts. Our results reveal that BERTopic consistently outperforms other models in capturing coherent topics from short Hindi texts.

This research explores the integration of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) into Hybrid Quantum-HPC systems for solving the Max-Cut problem, comparing its performance with classical algorithms like brute-force search and greedy heuristics. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the time complexity, scalability, and communication overhead in hybrid systems. Using simulations, we evaluate QAOA's performance on small-scale Max-Cut instances, benchmarking its runtime, solution accuracy, and resource utilization. The study also investigates the scalability of QAOA with increasing problem size, offering insights into its potential advantages over classical methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, with implications for future Quantum computing applications in HPC environments.

This study presents a proof of concept for a contactless elevator operation system aimed at minimizing human intervention while enhancing safety, intelligence, and efficiency. A microcontroller-based edge device executing tiny Machine Learning (tinyML) inferences is developed for elevator operation. Using person detection and keyword spotting algorithms, the system offers cost-effective and robust units requiring minimal infrastructural changes. The design incorporates preprocessing steps and quantized convolutional neural networks in a multitenant framework to optimize accuracy and response time. Results show a person detection accuracy of 83.34% and keyword spotting efficacy of 80.5%, with an overall latency under 5 seconds, indicating effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Unlike current high-cost and inconsistent contactless technologies, this system leverages tinyML to provide a cost-effective, reliable, and scalable solution, enhancing user safety and operational efficiency without significant infrastructural changes. The study highlights promising results, though further exploration is needed for scalability and integration with existing systems. The demonstrated energy efficiency, simplicity, and safety benefits suggest that tinyML adoption could revolutionize elevator systems, serving as a model for future technological advancements. This technology could significantly impact public health and convenience in multi-floor buildings by reducing physical contact and improving operational efficiency, particularly relevant in the context of pandemics or hygiene concerns.