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Pick-to-Learn for Systems and Control: Data-driven Synthesis with State-of-the-art Safety Guarantees

Paccagnan, Dario, Marks, Daniel, Campi, Marco C., Garatti, Simone

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data-driven methods have become paramount in modern systems and control problems characterized by growing levels of complexity . In safety-critical environments, deploying these methods requires rigorous guarantees, a need that has motivated much recent work at the interface of statistical learning and control. However, many existing approaches achieve this goal at the cost of sacrificing valuable data for testing and calibration, or by constraining the choice of learning algorithm, thus leading to suboptimal performances. In this paper, we describe Pick-to-Learn (P2L) for Systems and Control, a framework that allows any data-driven control method to be equipped with state-of-the-art safety and performance guarantees. P2L enables the use of all available data to jointly synthesize and certify the design, eliminating the need to set aside data for calibration or validation purposes. In presenting a comprehensive version of P2L for systems and control, this paper demonstrates its effectiveness across a range of core problems, including optimal control, reachability analysis, safe synthesis, and robust control. In many of these applications, P2L delivers designs and certificates that outperform commonly employed methods, and shows strong potential for broad applicability in diverse practical settings.


Harnessing Self-Supervised Deep Learning and Geostationary Remote Sensing for Advancing Wildfire and Associated Air Quality Monitoring: Improved Smoke and Fire Front Masking using GOES and TEMPO Radiance Data

LaHaye, Nicholas, Munashinge, Thilanka, Lee, Hugo, Pan, Xiaohua, Abad, Gonzalo Gonzalez, Mahmoud, Hazem, Wei, Jennifer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work demonstrates the possibilities for improving wildfire and air quality management in the western United States by leveraging the unprecedented hourly data from NASA's TEMPO satellite mission and advances in self-supervised deep learning. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for mapping the near real-time hourly spread of wildfire fronts and smoke plumes using an innovative self-supervised deep learning-system: successfully distinguishing smoke plumes from clouds using GOES-18 and TEMPO data, strong agreement across the smoke and fire masks generated from different sensing modalities as well as significant improvement over operational products for the same cases.


Weak Form Scientific Machine Learning: Test Function Construction for System Identification

Tran, April, Bortz, David

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Weak form Scientific Machine Learning (WSciML) is a recently developed framework for data-driven modeling and scientific discovery. It leverages the weak form of equation error residuals to provide enhanced noise robustness in system identification via convolving model equations with test functions, reformulating the problem to avoid direct differentiation of data. The performance, however, relies on wisely choosing a set of compactly supported test functions. In this work, we mathematically motivate a novel data-driven method for constructing Single-scale-Local reference functions for creating the set of test functions. Our approach numerically approximates the integration error introduced by the quadrature and identifies the support size for which the error is minimal, without requiring access to the model parameter values. Through numerical experiments across various models, noise levels, and temporal resolutions, we demonstrate that the selected supports consistently align with regions of minimal parameter estimation error. We also compare the proposed method against the strategy for constructing Multi-scale-Global (and orthogonal) test functions introduced in our prior work, demonstrating the improved computational efficiency.


Cognitive Guardrails for Open-World Decision Making in Autonomous Drone Swarms

Cleland-Huang, Jane, Granadeno, Pedro Antonio Alarcon, Bernal, Arturo Miguel Russell, Hernandez, Demetrius, Murphy, Michael, Petterson, Maureen, Scheirer, Walter

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) are increasingly deployed as autonomous swarms in search-and-rescue and other disaster-response scenarios. In these settings, they use computer vision (CV) to detect objects of interest and autonomously adapt their missions. However, traditional CV systems often struggle to recognize unfamiliar objects in open-world environments or to infer their relevance for mission planning. To address this, we incorporate large language models (LLMs) to reason about detected objects and their implications. While LLMs can offer valuable insights, they are also prone to hallucinations and may produce incorrect, misleading, or unsafe recommendations. To ensure safe and sensible decision-making under uncertainty, high-level decisions must be governed by cognitive guardrails. This article presents the design, simulation, and real-world integration of these guardrails for sUAS swarms in search-and-rescue missions.


Near-optimal Sensor Placement for Detecting Stochastic Target Trajectories in Barrier Coverage Systems

Kim, Mingyu, Stilwell, Daniel J., Yetkin, Harun, Jimenez, Jorge

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--This paper addresses the deployment of sensors for a 2-D barrier coverage system. The challenge is to compute near-optimal sensor placements for detecting targets whose trajectories follow a log-Gaussian Cox line process. We explore sensor deployment in a transformed space, where linear target trajectories are represented as points. T o illustrate our approach, we focus on positioning sensors of the barrier coverage system on the seafloor to detect passing ships. Through numerical experiments using historical ship data, we compute sensor locations that maximize the probability all ship passing over the barrier coverage system are detected. I NTRODUCTION Barrier coverage systems have been widely studied in various multi-agent system applications, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) and sensor networks. In these scenarios, devices are deployed to create a coverage area that detects targets within a specified region.


Call for Action: towards the next generation of symbolic regression benchmark

Aldeia, Guilherme S. Imai, Zhang, Hengzhe, Bomarito, Geoffrey, Cranmer, Miles, Fonseca, Alcides, Burlacu, Bogdan, La Cava, William G., de França, Fabrício Olivetti

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Symbolic Regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering interpretable mathematical expressions. However, benchmarking SR methods remains challenging due to the diversity of algorithms, datasets, and evaluation criteria. In this work, we present an updated version of SRBench. Our benchmark expands the previous one by nearly doubling the number of evaluated methods, refining evaluation metrics, and using improved visualizations of the results to understand the performances. Additionally, we analyze trade-offs between model complexity, accuracy, and energy consumption. Our results show that no single algorithm dominates across all datasets. We propose a call for action from SR community in maintaining and evolving SRBench as a living benchmark that reflects the state-of-the-art in symbolic regression, by standardizing hyperparameter tuning, execution constraints, and computational resource allocation. We also propose deprecation criteria to maintain the benchmark's relevance and discuss best practices for improving SR algorithms, such as adaptive hyperparameter tuning and energy-efficient implementations.


Risk Analysis and Design Against Adversarial Actions

Campi, Marco C., Carè, Algo, Crespo, Luis G., Garatti, Simone, Ramponi, Federico A.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In particular, Theorem 5 applies when null A δ = { δ }, i.e., when θ null A is just a standard, non-robust, solution. This is different from [56], whose main result is only applicable to solutions satisfying the infinitely many constraints f (θ, δ) 0, δ A δ i, i = 1,...,N, where A δ i is tuned to the Wasserstein bound. As previously noted, R plays the role of a tunable parameter, and the result in Theorem 5 holds for any choice of the value ofR . As a consequence, the user can play with R to optimize the bound on Risk ( θ null A) given in Theorem 5. As R increases, s A, null A (and, thereby, ε (s A, null A)) tends to increase while µ/R diminishes. While the best compromise is difficult to foresee, one can experimentally try various choices R 1 < R 2 < < R i < R h and select the one giving the best result. The corresponding confidence level can be bounded as follows: P Nnull D: Risk (θ null A) > ε (s A, null A,i) + µ R i for at least one i { 1,...h } null h null i =1P Nnull D: Risk (θ null A) > ε (s A, null A,i) + µ R i null h null i =1β = hβ, 29 from which P Nnull D: Risk ( θ null A) ε ( s A, null A,i) + µ R i for all i = 1,...h null 1 hβ.


Generative Modeling of Microweather Wind Velocities for Urban Air Mobility

Shah, Tristan A., Stanley, Michael C., Warner, James E.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Motivated by the pursuit of safe, reliable, and weather-tolerant urban air mobility (UAM) solutions, this work proposes a generative modeling approach for characterizing microweather wind velocities. Microweather, or the weather conditions in highly localized areas, is particularly complex in urban environments owing to the chaotic and turbulent nature of wind flows. Furthermore, traditional means of assessing local wind fields are not generally viable solutions for UAM applications: 1) field measurements that would rely on permanent wind profiling systems in operational air space are not practical, 2) physics-based models that simulate fluid dynamics at a sufficiently high resolution are not computationally tractable, and 3) data-driven modeling approaches that are largely deterministic ignore the inherent variability in turbulent flows that dictates UAM reliability. Thus, advancements in predictive capabilities are needed to help mitigate the unique operational safety risks that microweather winds pose for smaller, lighter weight UAM aircraft. This work aims to model microweather wind velocities in a manner that is computationally-efficient, captures random variability, and would only require a temporary, rather than permanent, field measurement campaign. Inspired by recent breakthroughs in conditional generative AI such as text-to-image generation, the proposed approach learns a probabilistic macro-to-microweather mapping between regional weather forecasts and measured local wind velocities using generative modeling (denoising diffusion probabilistic models, flow matching, and Gaussian mixture models). A simple proof of concept was implemented using a dataset comprised of local (micro) measurements from a Sonic Detection and Ranging (SoDAR) wind profiler along with (macro) forecast data from a nearby weather station over the same time period.


Runway vs. Taxiway: Challenges in Automated Line Identification and Notation Approaches

Ganeriwala, Parth, Alvarez, Amy, AlQahtani, Abdullah, Bhattacharyya, Siddhartha, Khan, Mohammed Abdul Hafeez, Neogi, Natasha

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing complexity of autonomous systems has amplified the need for accurate and reliable labeling of runway and taxiway markings to ensure operational safety. Precise detection and labeling of these markings are critical for tasks such as navigation, landing assistance, and ground control automation. Existing labeling algorithms, like the Automated Line Identification and Notation Algorithm (ALINA), have demonstrated success in identifying taxiway markings but encounter significant challenges when applied to runway markings. This limitation arises due to notable differences in line characteristics, environmental context, and interference from elements such as shadows, tire marks, and varying surface conditions. To address these challenges, we modified ALINA by adjusting color thresholds and refining region of interest (ROI) selection to better suit runway-specific contexts. While these modifications yielded limited improvements, the algorithm still struggled with consistent runway identification, often mislabeling elements such as the horizon or non-relevant background features. This highlighted the need for a more robust solution capable of adapting to diverse visual interferences. In this paper, we propose integrating a classification step using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named AssistNet. By incorporating this classification step, the detection pipeline becomes more resilient to environmental variations and misclassifications. This work not only identifies the challenges but also outlines solutions, paving the way for improved automated labeling techniques essential for autonomous aviation systems.


Separation Assurance in Urban Air Mobility Systems using Shared Scheduling Protocols

Murthy, Surya, Ingebrand, Tyler, Smith, Sophia, Topcu, Ufuk, Wei, Peng, Neogi, Natasha

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring safe separation between aircraft is a critical challenge in air traffic management, particularly in urban air mobility (UAM) environments where high traffic density and low altitudes require precise control. In these environments, conflicts often arise at the intersections of flight corridors, posing significant risks. We propose a tactical separation approach leveraging shared scheduling protocols, originally designed for Ethernet networks and operating systems, to coordinate access to these intersections. Using a decentralized Markov decision process framework, the proposed approach enables aircraft to autonomously adjust their speed and timing as they navigate these critical areas, maintaining safe separation without a central controller. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in simulated UAM scenarios, demonstrating its ability to reduce separation violations to zero while acknowledging trade-offs in flight times as traffic density increases. Additionally, we explore the impact of non-compliant aircraft, showing that while shared scheduling protocols can no longer guarantee safe separation, they still provide significant improvements over systems without scheduling protocols.