Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into update_hc

Author: Hongyu Chen

.gitignore

@@ -197,3 +197,19 @@ docs/tutorials/
 runs/
 tutorials/dataset
 tutorials/figure_*
+
+# Local experiment / planning artifacts (not for upstream)
+.Rhistory
+.claude/
+paper_sections_v2.tex
+paper_section_4_2.tex
+paper_section_6_3.tex
+paper_appendix_rank_table.tex
+run_experiments.py
+run_experiments_big.py
+run_experiments_arxiv_seeds.py
+run_experiments_products_seeds.py
+run_experiments_rownorm.py
+distributed_setup.sh
+backup_ec2/
+experiment_results/

.gitmodules

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+[submodule "third_party/openfhe-python"]
+	path = third_party/openfhe-python
+	url = https://github.com/openfheorg/openfhe-python.git