Binary code similarity analysis (BCSA) serves as a foundational technique for binary analysis tasks such as vulnerability detection and malware identification. Existing graph based BCSA approaches capture more binary code semantics and demonstrate remarkable performance. However, when code obfuscation is applied, the unstable control flow structure degrades their performance. To address this issue, we develop ORCAS, an Obfuscation-Resilient BCSA model based on Dominance Enhanced Semantic Graph (DESG). The DESG is an original binary code representation, capturing more binaries' implicit semantics without control flow structure, including inter-instruction relations (e.g., def-use), inter-basic block relations (i.e., dominance and post-dominance), and instruction-basic block relations. ORCAS takes binary functions from different obfuscation options, optimization levels, and instruction set architectures as input and scores their semantic similarity more robustly. Extensive experiments have been conducted on ORCAS against eight baseline approaches over the BinKit dataset. For example, ORCAS achieves an average 12.1% PR-AUC improvement when using combined three obfuscation options comp
Motivated by the need for channel codes with low-complexity soft-decision decoding algorithms, we consider the recursive Plotkin concatenation of optimal low-rate and high-rate codes based on simplex codes and their duals. These component codes come with low-complexity maximum likelihood (ML) decoding which, in turn, enables efficient successive cancellation (SC)-based decoding. As a result, the proposed optimally recursively concatenated simplex (ORCAS) codes achieve a performance that is at least as good as that of polar codes. For practical parameters, the proposed construction significantly outperforms polar codes in terms of block error rate by up to 0.5 dB while maintaining similar decoding complexity. Furthermore, the codes offer greater flexibility in codeword length than conventional polar codes.
Orcinus orca (killer whales) exhibit complex calls. They last about a second. In a call, an orca typically uses multiple frequencies simultaneously, varies the frequencies, and varies their volumes. Behavior data is hard to obtain because orcas live under water and travel quickly. Sound data is relatively easy to capture. As a science goal, we would like to know whether orca vocalizations constitute a semantic language. We do this by studying whether machine learning can predict behavior from vocalizations. Such prediction would also help scientific research and safety applications because one would like to predict behavior while only having to capture sound. A significant challenge in this process is lack of labeled data. We work with recent recordings of McMurdo Sound orcas [Wellard et al. 2020] where each recording is labeled with the behaviors observed during the recording. This yields a dataset where sound segments - continuous vocalizations that can be thought of as call sequences or more general structures - within the recordings are labeled with superfluous behaviors. Despite that, with a careful combination of recent machine learning techniques, we achieve 96.4% classifica
The NASA concept mission ORCAS (Orbiting Configurable Artificial Star) aims to provide near diffraction-limited angular resolution at visible and near-infrared wavelengths using laser signals from space-based cubesats as Adaptive Optics beacons for ground-based 8-30 meter telescopes, in particular the 10 meter Keck Telescopes. When built as designed, ORCAS+Keck would deliver images of ~0.01-0.02" FWHM at 0.5-1.2 micron wavelength that reach AB<31 mag for point sources in a few hours over a 5x5" FOV that includes IFU capabilities. We summarize the potential of high-resolution faint galaxy science with ORCAS. We show that the ability to detect optical-near-IR point sources with r_e>0.01" FWHM to AB<31 mag will yield about 5.0x10^6 faint star-forming (SF) clumps per square degree, or ~0.4 per arcsec^2. From recent HST lensing data, the typical intrinsic (unlensed) sizes of SF clumps at z~1-7 will be r_e ~1-80 m.a.s. to AB<31 mag, with intrinsic (unmagnified) fluxes as faint as AB<35-36 mag when searching with ORCAS around the critical curves of lensing clusters imaged with HST and JWST. About half of these SF clumps will have sizes below the ORCAS diffraction limit, and
In this paper, a new swarm intelligence algorithm based on orca behaviors is proposed for problem solving. The algorithm called artificial orca algorithm (AOA) consists of simulating the orca lifestyle and in particular the social organization, the echolocation mechanism, and some hunting techniques. The originality of the proposal is that for the first time a meta-heuristic simulates simultaneously several behaviors of just one animal species. AOA was adapted to discrete problems and applied on the maze game with four level of complexity. A bunch of substantial experiments were undertaken to set the algorithm parameters for this issue. The algorithm performance was assessed by considering the success rate, the run time, and the solution path size. Finally, for comparison purposes, the authors conducted a set of experiments on state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms, namely ACO, BA, BSO, EHO, PSO, and WOA. The overall obtained results clearly show the superiority of AOA over the other tested algorithms.
User intent classification is an important task in information retrieval. In this work, we introduce a revised taxonomy of user intent. We take the widely used differentiation between navigational, transactional and informational queries as a starting point, and identify three different sub-classes for the informational queries: instrumental, factual and abstain. The resulting classification of user queries is more fine-grained, reaches a high level of consistency between annotators, and can serve as the basis for an effective automatic classification process. The newly introduced categories help distinguish between types of queries that a retrieval system could act upon, for example by prioritizing different types of results in the ranking.We have used a weak supervision approach based on Snorkel to annotate the ORCAS dataset according to our new user intent taxonomy, utilising established heuristics and keywords to construct rules for the prediction of the intent category. We then present a series of experiments with a variety of machine learning models, using the labels from the weak supervision stage as training data, but find that the results produced by Snorkel are not outper
Spoken dialogue is a primary source of information in videos; therefore, accurately identifying who spoke what and when is essential for deep video understanding. We introduce D-ORCA, a \textbf{d}ialogue-centric \textbf{o}mni-modal large language model optimized for \textbf{r}obust audio-visual \textbf{ca}ptioning. We further curate DVD, a large-scale, high-quality bilingual dataset comprising nearly 40,000 multi-party dialogue videos for training and 2000 videos for evaluation in English and Mandarin, addressing a critical gap in the open-source ecosystem. To ensure fine-grained captioning accuracy, we adopt group relative policy optimization with three novel reward functions that assess speaker attribution accuracy, global speech content accuracy, and sentence-level temporal boundary alignment. These rewards are derived from evaluation metrics widely used in speech processing and, to our knowledge, are applied for the first time as reinforcement learning objectives for audio-visual captioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D-ORCA substantially outperforms existing open-source models in speaker identification, speech recognition, and temporal grounding. Notably, despite h
Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning -- closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video -- yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. W
We introduce Orca, an initial instantiation of a general world foundation model. Orca learns a unified world latent space from multimodal world signals and exposes it through multimodal readout interfaces. Rather than optimizing isolated next-token, next-frame, or next-action prediction, we are centered on Next-State-Prediction modeling, offering a unified state-transition modeling route toward understanding, predicting, and acting upon the world. Orca learns through two complementary paradigms: unconscious learning captures dense natural state transitions from continuous videos, and conscious learning models sparse meaningful state transitions by language-described events and VQA supervision. For pre-training, we construct a large-scale world-learning inventory data, including 125K hours of video data and 160M event annotations. After pre-training, Orca learns a unified world latent space. To examine whether the learned latent supports downstream, we evaluate it by three representative downstream readouts: text generation, image prediction, and embodied action generation. Orca's backbone is frozen, and only the lightweight modality-specific decoders are trainable. Experiments show
Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) remains challenging for existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs), especially under complex reasoning and multi-step workflows. Current approaches struggle to decompose intricate questions into manageable sub-tasks and often fail to leverage specialized processing paths for different document elements. We present ORCA: Orchestrated Reasoning with Collaborative Agents for Document Visual Question Answering, a novel multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through strategic agent coordination and iterative refinement. ORCA begins with a reasoning agent that decomposes queries into logical steps, followed by a routing mechanism that activates task-specific agents from a specialized agent dock. Our framework leverages a set of specialized AI agents, each dedicated to a distinct modality, enabling fine-grained understanding and collaborative reasoning across diverse document components. To ensure answer reliability, ORCA employs a debate mechanism with stress-testing, and when necessary, a thesis-antithesis adjudication process. This is followed by a sanity checker to ensure format consistency. Extensive experiments on three benchma
Counting the orbits of graphlets in a network is a vital tool for understanding the structural roles of vertices in various graph analytics tasks. While existing algorithms efficiently compute orbits of induced graphlets, many real-world applications require non-induced orbit counts. However, no current method offers exact, scalable, and parallel support for non-induced orbit counting. This paper presents NI-ORCA, a parallel algorithm to efficiently compute the orbits of non-induced graphlets up to size four (4-clique). NI-ORCA extends the ORCA framework for non-induced orbit counting by reformulating a system of linear equations. The algorithm consists of three stages: triangle counting, 4-clique enumeration, and orbit solving. We design and implement stage-specific parallelisation strategies using thread and vertex-local memory models and data structures, minimising contention and balancing workload. We further analyse the impact of scheduling policies, chunk sizes, and affinity strategies on performance. Experimental analysis on eight real-world datasets and a series of synthetic Erddos-Renyi graphs demonstrates that a mixed mode combining stage-specific data structure, with dyn
Standard risk models reduce the rich dependence structure of financial markets to scalar volatility estimates, discarding the topological information encoded in cross-asset correlation networks. We present ORCA (Online Regime Correlation Analyzer), an end-to-end framework that fuses spectral graph theory, random matrix theory, and supervised machine learning to deliver calibrated probability estimates for both rally and crash events over a ten-day forward horizon. ORCA constructs rolling correlation matrices from 24 diversified exchange-traded instruments using three parallel estimators at different time scales, and extracts 127 spectral features (absorption ratios, eigenvalue entropy, effective rank, spectral gap, eigenvector concentration, and graph-topological descriptors at multiple correlation thresholds), concatenated with 79 traditional price-derived indicators to form a 206-dimensional feature vector. A depth-limited Random Forest with balanced sub-sample weighting is evaluated under a strict eight-fold walk-forward protocol with ten-day anti-leakage gaps spanning fifteen years of daily US market data. ORCA achieves a Balanced Crisis Detection AUC (BCD-AUC, the geometric me
Heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms with tensor cores, such as AMD ACAP, are increasingly adopted for deep neural network (DNN) inference due to their high throughput and flexibility. However, their suitability for microsecond-scale inference on small problem sizes remains underexplored. In jet-tagging applications in high-energy physics, inefficient on-chip communication and large inter-layer latency prevent existing frameworks from meeting the 1-μs latency budget. Moreover, hardware overheads such as synchronization and VLIW processor prologue are often overlooked, making it infeasible to optimize accelerators correctly. To address these problems, we propose μ-ORCA, a customized heterogeneous accelerator framework for ultra-low-latency model inference. μ-ORCA enables direct inter-layer communication between DNN layers on the AIE array, instead of using shared memory tiles or FPGA fabric. Moreover, a 512-bit/cycle cascade connection is applied instead of a 32-bit/cycle DMA connection. μ-ORCA also provides an overhead-aware performance model that adapts to different NN layer sizes, and conducts design space exploration to optimize end-to-end latency. μ-ORCA supports MLP and Deep
Causal analysis is a crucial task in many domains, including manufacturing, social science, and medicine. However, despite recent progress, the conceptual and methodological complexity of causal methods makes them largely inaccessible to domain experts. This gap prevents experts from leveraging these advances and hinders researchers who lack access to real-world data for validation. To bridge this divide, we introduce ORCA, a copilot for end-to-end causal analysis. ORCA orchestrates agents to understand the user's goals and guide them through the most appropriate causal analysis workflow, from fully automatic to highly user-guided execution. It features causal discovery, causal effect estimation, explainability and Root-Cause-Analysis (RCA). ORCA evaluates and compares performance, generates key metrics and diagrams, and generates insights through structured reports. We highlight its effectiveness across several real-world use-cases.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a problem that requires computing collision-free paths for a set of agents from their start locations to designated goal locations. The problem has broad applications in domains where teams of robots must operate in a coordinated manner. ORCA* is a real time MAPF solver that assigns for each timestep a velocity for each agent. Due to its real time nature, it is myopic to future deadlocks that result from current decisions. ORCA*-MAPF attempts to remedy this limitation by introducing fallback mechanisms when deadlocks are detected. However, post hoc interventions often introduce significant flowtime overhead. In this paper, we introduce C-ORCA* and C-ORCA*-MAPF, continuous space MAPF algorithms that incorporate agents' entire spatial trajectory and their spatial dependencies to proactively prevent deadlocks from occurring, thus avoiding the high flowtime overhead associated with post hoc corrections in ORCA*-MAPF. The C-ORCA* family of algorithms significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art in terms of solve rate, runtime, and flowtime.
Dwell time (DT) is a critical post-click metric for evaluating user preference in recommender systems, complementing the traditional click-through rate (CTR). Although multi-task learning is widely adopted to jointly optimize DT and CTR, we observe that multi-task models systematically collapse their DT predictions to the shortest and longest bins, under-predicting the moderate durations. We attribute this moderate-duration bin under-representation to over-reliance on the CTR-DT spurious correlation, and propose ORCA to address it with causal-decoupling. Specifically, ORCA explicitly models and subtracts CTR's negative transfer while preserving its positive transfer. We further introduce (i) feature-level counterfactual intervention, and (ii) a task-interaction module with instance inverse-weighting, weakening CTR-mediated effect and restoring direct DT semantics. ORCA is model-agnostic and easy to deploy. Experiments show an average 10.6% lift in DT metrics without harming CTR. Code is available at https://github.com/Chrissie-Law/ORCA-Mitigating-Over-Reliance-for-Multi-Task-Dwell-Time-Prediction-with-Causal-Decoupling.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucinations from intrinsic errors and adversarial attacks from external exploitations, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. We present ORCA, an agentic reasoning framework that improves the factual accuracy and adversarial robustness of pretrained LVLMs through inference-time structured inference reasoning with a suite of small vision models (less than 3B parameters). ORCA operates via an Observe-Reason-Critique-Act loop, querying multiple visual tools with evidential questions, validating cross-model inconsistencies, and refining predictions iteratively without access to model internals or retraining. ORCA also stores intermediate reasoning traces, which supports auditable decision-making. Though designed primarily to mitigate object-level hallucinations, ORCA also exhibits emergent adversarial robustness without requiring adversarial training or defense mechanisms. We evaluate ORCA across three settings: (1) clean images on hallucination benchmarks, (2) adversarially perturbed images without defense, and (3) adversarially perturbed images with defense applied.
Boson Sampling, a non-universal computing paradigm, has resulted in impressive claims of quantum supremacy. ORCA Computing have developed a time-bin interferometer (TBI) that claims to use the principles of boson sampling to solve a number of computational problems including optimisation and generative adversarial networks. We solve a dominating set problem with a surveillance use case on the ORCA TBI simulator to benchmark the use of these devices against classical algorithms. Simulation has been used to consider the optimal performance of the computing paradigm without having to factor in noise, errors and scaling limitations. We show that the ORCA TBI is capable of solving moderately sized (n<250) dominating set problems with comparable success to linear programming and greedy methods. Wall clock timing shows that the simulator has worse scaling than the classical methods, but this is unlikely to carry over to the physical device where the outputs are measured rather than calculated.
Digital pathology has emerged as a transformative approach to tissue analysis, offering unprecedented opportunities for objective, quantitative assessment of histopathological features. However, the complexity of implementing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in pathology workflows has limited widespread adoption. Here we present ORCA (Optimized Research and Clinical Analytics), a comprehensive no-code AI platform specifically designed for digital pathology applications. ORCA addresses critical barriers to AI adoption by providing an intuitive interface that enables pathologists and researchers to train, deploy, and validate custom AI models without programming expertise. The platform integrates advanced deep learning architectures with clinical workflow management, supporting applications from tissue classification and cell segmentation to spatial distribution scoring and novel biomarker discovery. We demonstrate ORCA's capabilities through validation studies across multiple cancer types, showing significant improvements in analytical speed, reproducibility, and clinical correlation compared to traditional manual assessment methods. Our results indicate that ORCA successfully
Causal analysis on relational databases is challenging, as analysis datasets must be repeatedly queried from complex schemas. Recent LLM systems can automate individual steps, but they hardly manage dependencies across analysis stages, making it difficult to preserve consistency between causal hypothesis. We propose ORCA (ORchestrating Causal Agent), an interactive multi-agent framework to enable coherent causal analysis on relational databases by maintaining shared state and introducing human checkpoints. In a controlled user study, participants using ORCA successfully completed end-to-end analysis more often than with a baseline LLM (GPT-4o-mini) assistant by 42 percentage points, achieved substantially lower ATE error, and reduced time spent on repetitive data exploration and query refinement by 76\% on average. These results show that ORCA improves both how users interact with the causal analysis pipeline and the reliability of the resulting causal conclusions.