Large language models (LLMs) are no longer just language generators-they are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, perspectives, and demographic variation across social domains, from public opinion surveys to experimental research.Amid this shift, the use of LLMs to simulate historical narratives has emerged as a timely frontier.It is crucial to scrutinize the asymmetries these models embed when framing, interpreting, and retelling the past.Building on prior work that defines caricature as the combination of individuation and exaggeration, we analyze LLM-generated responses across 197 historically significant events-each featuring a directly and an indirectly affected persona.We find that LLMs reliably distinguish persona-based responses from neutral baselines, and that directly affected personas consistently exhibit higher exaggeration-amplifying identity-specific portrayals.Beyond lexical patterns, personas often frame the same event in conflicting ways-especially in military, political, and morally charged contexts.Grammatical analysis further reveals that direct personas adopt more passive constructions in institutional contexts, but shift to active framing when emotional immediacy is foregrounded.Our findings show how subtle asymmetries in tone, stance, and emphasis-not overt toxicity-can quietly, yet systematically, distort how history is told and remembered.

Blind image deblurring is the process of recovering a sharp image from a blurred one without prior knowledge about the blur kernel. It is a small data problem, since the key challenge lies in estimating the unknown degrees of blur from a single image or limited data, instead of learning from large datasets. The solution depends heavily on developing algorithms that effectively model the image degradation process. We introduce a method that leverages a prior which targets the blur kernel to achieve effective deblur-ring across a wide range of image types. In our extensive empirical analysis, our algorithm achieves results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art blind image deblurring algorithms, and it offers up to two times faster inference, making it a highly efficient solution.11The source code is available in the authors' Github profile.

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are a widely studied constraint handling framework. The objective of a DCOP algorithm is to optimize a global objective function that can be described as the aggregation of several distributed constraint cost functions. In a DCOP, each of these functions is defined by a set of discrete variables. However, in many applications, such as target tracking or sleep scheduling in sensor networks, continuous valued variables are more suited than the discrete ones. Considering this, Functional DCOPs (F-DCOPs) have been proposed that can explicitly model a problem containing continuous variables. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art F-DCOPs approaches experience onerous memory or computation overhead. To address this issue, we propose a new F-DCOP algorithm, namely Particle Swarm based F-DCOP (PFD), which is inspired by a meta-heuristic, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Although it has been successfully applied to many continuous optimization problems, the potential of PSO has not been utilized in F-DCOPs. To be exact, PFD devises a distributed method of solution construction while significantly reducing the computation and memory requirements. Moreover, we theoretically prove that PFD is an anytime algorithm. Finally, our empirical results indicate that PFD outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of solution quality and computation overhead.

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are an important framework for modeling coordinated decision-making problems in multi-agent systems with a set of discrete variables. Later works have extended DCOPs to model problems with a set of continuous variables, named Functional DCOPs (F-DCOPs). In this paper, we combine both of these frameworks into the Mixed Integer Functional DCOP (MIF-DCOP) framework that can deal with problems regardless of their variables' type. We then propose a novel algorithm - Distributed Parallel Simulated Annealing (DPSA), where agents cooperatively learn the optimal parameter configuration for the algorithm while also solving the given problem using the learned knowledge. Finally, we empirically evaluate our approach in DCOP, F-DCOP, and MIF-DCOP settings and show that DPSA produces solutions of significantly better quality than the state-of-the-art non-exact algorithms in their corresponding settings.

This paper develops a new approach to speed up Generalized Distributive Law (GDL) based message passing algorithms that are used to solve large-scale Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) in multi-agent systems. In particular, we significantly reduce computation and communication costs in terms of convergence time for algorithms such as Max-Sum, Bounded Max-Sum, Fast Max-Sum, Bounded Fast Max-Sum, BnB Max-Sum, BnB Fast Max-Sum and Generalized Fast Belief Propagation. This is important since it is often observed that the outcome obtained from such algorithms becomes outdated or unusable if the optimization process takes too much time. Specifically, the issue of taking too long to complete the internal operation of a DCOP algorithm is even more severe and commonplace in a system where the algorithm has to deal with a large number of agents, tasks and resources. This, in turn, limits the practical scalability of such algorithms. In other words, an optimization algorithm can be used in larger systems if the completion time can be reduced. However, it is challenging to maintain the solution quality while minimizing the completion time. Considering this trade-off, we propose a generic message passing protocol for GDL-based algorithms that combines clustering with domain pruning, as well as the use of a regression method to determine the appropriate number of clusters for a given scenario. We empirically evaluate the performance of our method in a number of settings and find that it brings down the completion time by around 37–85% (1.6–6.5 times faster) for 100–900 nodes, and by around 47–91% (1.9–11 times faster) for 3000–10 000 nodes compared to the current state-of-the-art.