Vector fields are advantageous in handling nonholonomic motion planning as they provide reference orientation for robots. However, additionally incorporating curvature constraints becomes challenging, due to the interconnection between the design of the curvature-bounded vector field and the tracking controller under underactuation. In this paper, we present a novel framework to co-develop the vector field and the control laws, guiding the nonholonomic robot to the target configuration with curvature-bounded trajectory. First, we formulate the problem by introducing the target positive limit set, which allows the robot to converge to or pass through the target configuration, depending on different dynamics and tasks. Next, we construct a curvature-constrained vector field (CVF) via blending and distributing basic flow fields in workspace and propose the saturated control laws with a dynamic gain, under which the tracking error's magnitude decreases even when saturation occurs. Under the control laws, kinematically constrained nonholonomic robots are guaranteed to track the reference CVF and converge to the target positive limit set with bounded trajectory curvature. Numerical simulations show that the proposed CVF method outperforms other vector-field-based algorithms. Experiments on Ackermann UGVs and semi-physical fixed-wing UAVs demonstrate that the method can be effectively implemented in real-world scenarios.

The growing scale of power systems and the increasing uncertainty introduced by renewable energy sources necessitates novel optimization techniques that are significantly faster and more accurate than existing methods. The AC Optimal Power Flow (AC-OPF) problem, a core component of power grid optimization, is often approximated using linearized DC Optimal Power Flow (DC-OPF) models for computational tractability, albeit at the cost of suboptimal and inefficient decisions. To address these limitations, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for network equivalency that enhances DC-OPF to more closely mimic the behavior of AC-OPF. The approach utilizes recent advances in differentiable optimization, incorporating a neural network trained to predict adjusted nodal shunt conductances and branch susceptances in order to account for nonlinear power flow behavior. The model can be trained end-to-end using modern deep learning frameworks by leveraging the implicit function theorem. Results demonstrate the framework's ability to significantly improve prediction accuracy.

Abstract-- Human-swarm interaction (HSI) is an active research challenge in the realms of swarm robotics and human-factors engineering. Here we apply a cognitive systems engineering perspective and introduce a neuro-inspired joint-systems theory of HSI. The mindset defines predictions for adaptive, robust and scalable HSI dynamics and therefore has the potential to inform human-swarm loop design. For the real world application of swarm robotics, human operators are required to be part of the system loop. Reasons are (1) the swarm's inability to achieve mission goals independently [1], (2) human out of loop phenomena [2] as well as (3) legal and ethical concerns [3].

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have garnered significant attention for their promise of improved parameter efficiency and explainability compared to traditional Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). KANs' key innovation lies in the use of learnable non-linear activation functions, which are parametrized as splines. Splines are expressed as a linear combination of basis functions (B-splines). B-splines prove particularly challenging to accelerate due to their recursive definition. Systolic Array (SA)based architectures have shown great promise as DNN accelerators thanks to their energy efficiency and low latency. However, their suitability and efficiency in accelerating KANs have never been assessed. Thus, in this work, we explore the use of SA architecture to accelerate the KAN inference. We show that, while SAs can be used to accelerate part of the KAN inference, their utilization can be reduced to 30%. Hence, we propose KAN-SAs, a novel SA-based accelerator that leverages intrinsic properties of B-splines to enable efficient KAN inference. By including a nonrecursive B-spline implementation and leveraging the intrinsic KAN sparsity, KAN-SAs enhances conventional SAs, enabling efficient KAN inference, in addition to conventional DNNs. KAN-SAs achieves up to 100% SA utilization and up to 50% clock cycles reduction compared to conventional SAs of equivalent area, as shown by hardware synthesis results on a 28nm FD-SOI technology. We also evaluate different configurations of the accelerator on various KAN applications, confirming the improved efficiency of KAN inference provided by KAN-SAs.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces significant challenges in adaptive healthcare interventions, such as dementia care, where data is scarce, decisions require interpretability, and underlying patient-state dynamic are complex and causal in nature. In this work, we present a novel framework called Causal structure-aware Reinforcement Learning (CRL) that explicitly integrates causal discovery and reasoning into policy optimization. This method enables an agent to learn and exploit a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that describes the causal dependencies between human behavioral states and robot actions, facilitating more efficient, interpretable, and robust decision-making. We validate our approach in a simulated robot-assisted cognitive care scenario, where the agent interacts with a virtual patient exhibiting dynamic emotional, cognitive, and engagement states. The experimental results show that CRL agents outperform conventional model-free RL baselines by achieving higher cumulative rewards, maintaining desirable patient states more consistently, and exhibiting interpretable, clinically-aligned behavior. We further demonstrate that CRL's performance advantage remains robust across different weighting strategies and hyperparameter settings. In addition, we demonstrate a lightweight LLM-based deployment: a fixed policy is embedded into a system prompt that maps inferred states to actions, producing consistent, supportive dialogue without LLM finetuning. Our work illustrates the promise of causal reinforcement learning for human-robot interaction applications, where interpretability, adaptiveness, and data efficiency are paramount.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in collaborative settings, yet little is known about how they coordinate when treated as black-box agents. We simulate 7500 multi-agent, multi-round discussions in an inductive coding task, generating over 125000 utterances that capture both final annotations and their interactional histories. We introduce process-level metrics: code stability, semantic self-consistency, and lexical confidence alongside sentiment and convergence measures, to track coordination dynamics. To probe deeper alignment signals, we analyze the evolving geometry of output embeddings, showing that intrinsic dimensionality declines over rounds, suggesting semantic compression. The results reveal that LLM groups converge lexically and semantically, develop asymmetric influence patterns, and exhibit negotiation-like behaviors despite the absence of explicit role prompting. This work demonstrates how black-box interaction analysis can surface emergent coordination strategies, offering a scalable complement to internal probe-based interpretability methods.

This paper investigates the automation of qualitative data analysis, focusing on inductive coding using large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional approaches that rely on deductive methods with predefined labels, this research investigates the inductive process where labels emerge from the data. The study evaluates the performance of six open-source LLMs compared to human experts. As part of the evaluation, experts rated the perceived difficulty of the quotes they coded. The results reveal a peculiar dichotomy: human coders consistently perform well when labeling complex sentences but struggle with simpler ones, while LLMs exhibit the opposite trend. Additionally, the study explores systematic deviations in both human and LLM generated labels by comparing them to the golden standard from the test set. While human annotations may sometimes differ from the golden standard, they are often rated more favorably by other humans. In contrast, some LLMs demonstrate closer alignment with the true labels but receive lower evaluations from experts.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow language instructions while acting in continuous real-world spaces. Prior image imagination based VLN work shows benefits for discrete panoramas but lacks online, action-conditioned predictions and does not produce explicit planning values; moreover, many methods replace the planner with long-horizon objectives that are brittle and slow. To bridge this gap, we propose VISTAv2, a generative world model that rolls out egocentric future views conditioned on past observations, candidate action sequences, and instructions, and projects them into an online value map for planning. Unlike prior approaches, VISTAv2 does not replace the planner. The online value map is fused at score level with the base objective, providing reachability and risk-aware guidance. Concretely, we employ an action-aware Conditional Diffusion Transformer video predictor to synthesize short-horizon futures, align them with the natural language instruction via a vision-language scorer, and fuse multiple rollouts in a differentiable imagination-to-value head to output an imagined egocentric value map. For efficiency, rollouts occur in VAE latent space with a distilled sampler and sparse decoding, enabling inference on a single consumer GPU. Evaluated on MP3D and RoboTHOR, VISTAv2 improves over strong baselines, and ablations show that action-conditioned imagination, instruction-guided value fusion, and the online value-map planner are all critical, suggesting that VISTAv2 offers a practical and interpretable route to robust VLN.

Modern networks support network slicing, which partitions physical infrastructure into virtual slices tailored to different service requirements (for example, high bandwidth or low latency). Optimally allocating users to slices is a constrained optimization problem that traditionally requires complex algorithms. In this paper, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle radio resource allocation for network slicing. We focus on two approaches: (1) using an LLM in a zero-shot setting to directly assign user service requests to slices, and (2) formulating an integer programming model where the LLM provides semantic insight by estimating similarity between requests. Our experiments show that an LLM, even with zero-shot prompting, can produce a reasonable first draft of slice assignments, although it may violate some capacity or latency constraints. We then incorporate the LLM's understanding of service requirements into an optimization solver to generate an improved allocation. The results demonstrate that LLM-guided grouping of requests, based on minimal textual input, achieves performance comparable to traditional methods that use detailed numerical data, in terms of resource utilization and slice isolation. While the LLM alone does not perfectly satisfy all constraints, it significantly reduces the search space and, when combined with exact solvers, provides a promising approach for efficient 5G network slicing resource allocation.

Building on advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), we can tackle complex analytical and mathematical reasoning tasks requiring nuanced contextual understanding. A prime example of such complex tasks is modelling resource allocation optimization in networks, which extends beyond translating natural language inputs into mathematical equations or Linear Programming (LP), Integer Linear Programming (ILP), and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models. However, existing benchmarks and datasets cannot address the complexities of such problems with dynamic environments, interdependent variables, and heterogeneous constraints. To address this gap, we introduce NL4RA, a curated dataset comprising 50 resource allocation optimization problems formulated as LP, ILP, and MILP. We then evaluate the performance of well-known open-source LLMs with varying parameter counts. To enhance existing LLM based methods, we introduce LM4Opt RA, a multi candidate framework that applies diverse prompting strategies such as direct, few shot, and chain of thought, combined with a structured ranking mechanism to improve accuracy. We identified discrepancies between human judgments and automated scoring such as ROUGE, BLEU, or BERT scores. However, human evaluation is time-consuming and requires specialized expertise, making it impractical for a fully automated end-to-end framework. To quantify the difference between LLM-generated responses and ground truth, we introduce LLM-Assisted Mathematical Evaluation (LAME), an automated metric designed for mathematical formulations. Using LM4Opt-RA, Llama-3.1-70B achieved a LAME score of 0.8007, outperforming other models by a significant margin, followed closely by Llama-3.1-8B. While baseline LLMs demonstrate considerable promise, they still lag behind human expertise; our proposed method surpasses these baselines regarding LAME and other metrics.