You still need to wash your hands with soap and warm water though. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The most dreaded time of year rolls around every winter like clockwork: cold and flu season. The time when hand washing increases, sanitizing surfaces intensifies, and old and young schedule regular seasonal vaccines in an attempt to prevent sickness from descending on their households. But there's one piece of ammunition you should absolutely skip this season--and all year-round--because it does more harm than good: antibacterial hand soap.

The justification for the "test point" derives from the test pilot's obligation to reproduce faithfully the pre-specified conditions of some model prediction. Pilot deviation from those conditions invalidates the model assumptions. Flight test aids have been proposed to increase accuracy on more challenging test points. However, the very existence of databands and tolerances is the problem more fundamental than inadequate pilot skill. We propose a novel approach, which eliminates test points. We start with a high-fidelity digital model of an air vehicle. Instead of using this model to generate a point prediction, we use a machine learning method to produce a reduced-order model (ROM). The ROM has two important properties. First, it can generate a prediction based on any set of conditions the pilot flies. Second, if the test result at those conditions differ from the prediction, the ROM can be updated using the new data. The outcome of flight test is thus a refined ROM at whatever conditions were flown. This ROM in turn updates and validates the high-fidelity model. We present a single example of this "point-less" architecture, using T-38C flight test data. We first use a generic aircraft model to build a ROM of longitudinal pitching motion as a hypersurface. We then ingest unconstrained flight test data and use Gaussian Process Regression to update and condition the hypersurface. By proposing a second-order equivalent system for the T-38C, this hypersurface then generates parameters necessary to assess MIL-STD-1797B compliance for longitudinal dynamics.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained from vast repositories of text authored by millions of distinct authors, reflecting an enormous diversity of human traits. While these models bear the potential to be used as approximations of human subjects in behavioral studies, prior efforts have been limited in steering model responses to match individual human users. In this work, we introduce "Anthology", a method for conditioning LLMs to particular virtual personas by harnessing open-ended life narratives, which we refer to as "backstories." We show that our methodology enhances the consistency and reliability of experimental outcomes while ensuring better representation of diverse sub-populations. Across three nationally representative human surveys conducted as part of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), we demonstrate that Anthology achieves up to 18% improvement in matching the response distributions of human respondents and 27% improvement in consistency metrics. Our code and generated backstories are available at https://github.com/CannyLab/anthology.

This paper presents a robust estimator-based safety-critical controller for formation control of non-holonomic mobile robots in communication-limited environments. The proposed decentralized framework integrates a robust state estimator with a formation tracking control law that guarantees inter-agent collision avoidance using control barrier functions. String stability is incorporated into the control design to maintain stability against noise from predecessors in leader-follower formations. Rigorous stability analysis using Lyapunov functions ensures the stability of estimation errors and the convergence of the formation to desired configurations. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach are validated through numerical simulations of various maneuvers and realistic Gazebo experiments involving formations in a warehouse environment. The results demonstrate the controller's ability to maintain safety, achieve precise formation control, and mitigate disturbances in scenarios without inter-robot communication.

FAQ documents are commonly used with text documents and websites to provide important information in the form of question answer pairs to either aid in reading comprehension or provide a shortcut to the key ideas. We suppose that salient sentences from a given document serve as a good proxy fro the answers to an aggregated set of FAQs from readers. We propose a system for generating FAQ documents that extract the salient questions and their corresponding answers from sizeable text documents scraped from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We use existing text summarization, sentence ranking via the Text rank algorithm, and question-generation tools to create an initial set of questions and answers. Finally, we apply some heuristics to filter out invalid questions. We use human evaluation to rate the generated questions on grammar, whether the question is meaningful, and whether the question's answerability is present within a summarized context. On average, participants thought 71 percent of the questions were meaningful.

Currently, the generative model has garnered considerable attention due to its application in addressing the challenge of scarcity of abnormal samples in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). However, challenges persist regarding the edge deployment of generative models and the optimization of joint edge AI-generated content (AIGC) tasks. In this paper, we focus on the edge optimization of AIGC task execution and propose GMEL, a generative model-driven industrial AIGC collaborative edge learning framework. This framework aims to facilitate efficient few-shot learning by leveraging realistic sample synthesis and edge-based optimization capabilities. First, a multi-task AIGC computational offloading model is presented to ensure the efficient execution of heterogeneous AIGC tasks on edge servers. Then, we propose an attention-enhanced multi-agent reinforcement learning (AMARL) algorithm aimed at refining offloading policies within the IoT system, thereby supporting generative model-driven edge learning. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in optimizing the total system latency of the edge-based AIGC task completion.

Nanosatellite constellations equipped with sensors capturing large geographic regions provide unprecedented opportunities for Earth observation. As constellation sizes increase, network contention poses a downlink bottleneck. Orbital Edge Computing (OEC) leverages limited onboard compute resources to reduce transfer costs by processing the raw captures at the source. However, current solutions have limited practicability due to reliance on crude filtering methods or over-prioritizing particular downstream tasks. This work presents FOOL, an OEC-native and task-agnostic feature compression method that preserves prediction performance. FOOL partitions high-resolution satellite imagery to maximize throughput. Further, it embeds context and leverages inter-tile dependencies to lower transfer costs with negligible overhead. While FOOL is a feature compressor, it can recover images with competitive scores on perceptual quality measures at lower bitrates. We extensively evaluate transfer cost reduction by including the peculiarity of intermittently available network connections in low earth orbit. Lastly, we test the feasibility of our system for standardized nanosatellite form factors. We demonstrate that FOOL permits downlinking over 100x the data volume without relying on prior information on the downstream tasks.

Optimization methods for long-horizon, dynamically feasible motion planning in robotics tackle challenging non-convex and discontinuous optimization problems. Traditional methods often falter due to the nonlinear characteristics of these problems. We introduce a technique that utilizes learned representations of the system, known as Polytopic Action Sets, to efficiently compute long-horizon trajectories. By employing a suitable sequence of Polytopic Action Sets, we transform the long-horizon dynamically feasible motion planning problem into a Linear Program. This reformulation enables us to address motion planning as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). We demonstrate the effectiveness of a Polytopic Action-Set and Motion Planning (PAAMP) approach by identifying swing-up motions for a torque-constrained pendulum within approximately 0.75 milliseconds. This approach is well-suited for solving complex motion planning and long-horizon Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) in dynamic and underactuated systems such as legged and aerial robots.

In this paper, we apply a machine-learning approach to learn traveling solitary waves across various families of partial differential equations (PDEs). Our approach integrates a novel interpretable neural network (NN) architecture, called Separable Gaussian Neural Networks (SGNN) into the framework of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Unlike the traditional PINNs that treat spatial and temporal data as independent inputs, the present method leverages wave characteristics to transform data into the so-called co-traveling wave frame. This adaptation effectively addresses the issue of propagation failure in PINNs when applied to large computational domains. Here, the SGNN architecture demonstrates robust approximation capabilities for single-peakon, multi-peakon, and stationary solutions within the (1+1)-dimensional, $b$-family of PDEs. In addition, we expand our investigations, and explore not only peakon solutions in the $ab$-family but also compacton solutions in (2+1)-dimensional, Rosenau-Hyman family of PDEs. A comparative analysis with MLP reveals that SGNN achieves comparable accuracy with fewer than a tenth of the neurons, underscoring its efficiency and potential for broader application in solving complex nonlinear PDEs.

Real-world data often exhibits sequential dependence, across diverse domains such as human behavior, medicine, finance, and climate modeling. Probabilistic methods capture the inherent uncertainty associated with prediction in these contexts, with autoregressive models being especially prominent. This dissertation focuses on using autoregressive models to answer complex probabilistic queries that go beyond single-step prediction, such as the timing of future events or the likelihood of a specific event occurring before another. In particular, we develop a broad class of novel and efficient approximation techniques for marginalization in sequential models that are model-agnostic. These techniques rely solely on access to and sampling from next-step conditional distributions of a pre-trained autoregressive model, including both traditional parametric models as well as more recent neural autoregressive models. Specific approaches are presented for discrete sequential models, for marked temporal point processes, and for stochastic jump processes, each tailored to a well-defined class of informative, long-range probabilistic queries.