Magnetic soft continuum robots (MSCRs) have emerged as powerful devices in endovascular interventions owing to their hyperelastic fibre matrix and enhanced magnetic manipulability. Effective closed-loop control of tethered magnetic devices contributes to the achievement of autonomous vascular robotic surgery. In this article, we employ a magnetic actuation system equipped with a single rotatable permanent magnet to achieve closed-loop deflection control of the MSCR. To this end, we establish a differential kinematic model of MSCRs exposed to non-uniform magnetic fields. The relationship between the existence and uniqueness of Jacobian and the geometric position between robots is deduced. The control direction induced by Jacobian is demonstrated to be crucial in simulations. Then, the corresponding quasi-static control (QSC) framework integrates a linear extended state observer to estimate model uncertainties. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed QSC framework is validated through comparative trajectory tracking experiments with the PD controller under external disturbances. Further extensions are made for the Jacobian to path-following control at the distal end position. The proposed control framework prevents the actuator from reaching the joint limit and achieves fast and low error-tracking performance without overshooting.

Sensor fusion combines data from multiple sensor sources to improve reliability, robustness, and accuracy of data interpretation. The Fuzzy Integral (FI), in particular, the Choquet integral (ChI), is often used as a powerful nonlinear aggregator for fusion across multiple sensors. However, existing supervised ChI learning algorithms typically require precise training labels for each input data point, which can be difficult or impossible to obtain. Additionally, prior work on ChI fusion is often based only on the normalized fuzzy measures, which bounds the fuzzy measure values between [0, 1]. This can be limiting in cases where the underlying scales of input data sources are bipolar (i.e., between [-1, 1]). To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Choquet integral-based fusion framework, named Bi-MIChI (pronounced "bi-mi-kee"), which uses bi-capacities to represent the interactions between pairs of subsets of the input sensor sources on a bi-polar scale. This allows for extended non-linear interactions between the sensor sources and can lead to interesting fusion results. Bi-MIChI also addresses label uncertainty through Multiple Instance Learning, where training labels are applied to "bags" (sets) of data instead of per-instance. Our proposed Bi-MIChI framework shows effective classification and detection performance on both synthetic and real-world experiments for sensor fusion with label uncertainty. We also provide detailed analyses on the behavior of the fuzzy measures to demonstrate our fusion process.

This paper presents and evaluates an approach for coupling together subdomain-local reduced order models (ROMs) constructed via non-intrusive operator inference (OpInf) with each other and with subdomain-local full order models (FOMs), following a domain decomposition of the spatial geometry on which a given partial differential equation (PDE) is posed. Joining subdomain-local models is accomplished using the overlapping Schwarz alternating method, a minimally-intrusive multiscale coupling technique that works by transforming a monolithic problem into a sequence of subdomain-local problems, which communicate through transmission boundary conditions imposed on the subdomain interfaces. After formulating the overlapping Schwarz alternating method for OpInf ROMs, termed OpInf-Schwarz, we evaluate the method's accuracy and efficiency on several test cases involving the heat equation in two spatial dimensions. We demonstrate that the method is capable of coupling together arbitrary combinations of OpInf ROMs and FOMs, and that speed-ups over a monolithic FOM are possible when performing OpInf ROM coupling.

This paper proposes a novel learning-based framework for autonomous driving based on the concept of maximal safety probability. Efficient learning requires rewards that are informative of desirable/undesirable states, but such rewards are challenging to design manually due to the difficulty of differentiating better states among many safe states. On the other hand, learning policies that maximize safety probability does not require laborious reward shaping but is numerically challenging because the algorithms must optimize policies based on binary rewards sparse in time. Here, we show that physics-informed reinforcement learning can efficiently learn this form of maximally safe policy. Unlike existing drift control methods, our approach does not require a specific reference trajectory or complex reward shaping, and can learn safe behaviors only from sparse binary rewards. This is enabled by the use of the physics loss that plays an analogous role to reward shaping. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through lane keeping in a normal cornering scenario and safe drifting in a high-speed racing scenario.

International AI governance agreements and institutions may play an important role in reducing global security risks from advanced AI. To inform the design of such agreements and institutions, we conducted case studies of historical and contemporary international security agreements. We focused specifically on those arrangements around dual-use technologies, examining agreements in nuclear security, chemical weapons, biosecurity, and export controls. For each agreement, we examined four key areas: (a) purpose, (b) core powers, (c) governance structure, and (d) instances of non-compliance. From these case studies, we extracted lessons for the design of international AI agreements and governance institutions. We discuss the importance of robust verification methods, strategies for balancing power between nations, mechanisms for adapting to rapid technological change, approaches to managing trade-offs between transparency and security, incentives for participation, and effective enforcement mechanisms.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant popularity in scene reconstruction. This paper presents SOAR, a LiDAR-Visual heterogeneous multi-UAV system specifically designed for fast autonomous reconstruction of complex environments. Our system comprises a LiDAR-equipped explorer with a large field-of-view (FoV), alongside photographers equipped with cameras. To ensure rapid acquisition of the scene's surface geometry, we employ a surface frontier-based exploration strategy for the explorer. As the surface is progressively explored, we identify the uncovered areas and generate viewpoints incrementally. These viewpoints are then assigned to photographers through solving a Consistent Multiple Depot Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (Consistent-MDMTSP), which optimizes scanning efficiency while ensuring task consistency. Finally, photographers utilize the assigned viewpoints to determine optimal coverage paths for acquiring images. We present extensive benchmarks in the realistic simulator, which validates the performance of SOAR compared with classical and state-of-the-art methods. For more details, please see our project page at https://sysu-star.github.io/SOAR}{sysu-star.github.io/SOAR.

The connection between galaxies and their host dark matter (DM) halos is critical to our understanding of cosmology, galaxy formation, and DM physics. To maximize the return of upcoming cosmological surveys, we need an accurate way to model this complex relationship. Many techniques have been developed to model this connection, from Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) to empirical and semi-analytic models to hydrodynamic. Hydrodynamic simulations can incorporate more detailed astrophysical processes but are computationally expensive; HODs, on the other hand, are computationally cheap but have limited accuracy. In this work, we present NeHOD, a generative framework based on variational diffusion model and Transformer, for painting galaxies/subhalos on top of DM with an accuracy of hydrodynamic simulations but at a computational cost similar to HOD. By modeling galaxies/subhalos as point clouds, instead of binning or voxelization, we can resolve small spatial scales down to the resolution of the simulations. For each halo, NeHOD predicts the positions, velocities, masses, and concentrations of its central and satellite galaxies. We train NeHOD on the TNG-Warm DM suite of the DREAMS project, which consists of 1024 high-resolution zoom-in hydrodynamic simulations of Milky Way-mass halos with varying warm DM mass and astrophysical parameters. We show that our model captures the complex relationships between subhalo properties as a function of the simulation parameters, including the mass functions, stellar-halo mass relations, concentration-mass relations, and spatial clustering. Our method can be used for a large variety of downstream applications, from galaxy clustering to strong lensing studies.

For reasons such as privacy, there are use cases for language models at the edge. This has given rise to small language models (SLMs) targeted for deployment in resource-constrained devices where energy efficiency is a significant concern. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising solution due to their energy efficiency, and there are already works on realizing transformer-based models on SNNs. However, key operations like softmax and layer normalization (LN) are difficult to implement on neuromorphic hardware, and many of these early works sidestepped them. To address these challenges, we introduce Sorbet, a transformer-based spiking language model that is more neuromorphic hardware-compatible. Sorbet incorporates a novel shifting-based softmax called PTsoftmax and a power normalization method using bit-shifting (BSPN), both designed to replace the respective energy-intensive operations. By leveraging knowledge distillation and model quantization, Sorbet achieved a highly compressed binary weight model that maintains competitive performance while significantly reducing energy consumption. We validate Sorbet's effectiveness through extensive testing on the GLUE benchmark and a series of ablation studies, demonstrating its potential as an energy-efficient solution for language model inference.

Among the many candidates for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's leadership race, which effectively decides who Japan's next prime minister will be, an anti-nuclear policy stance is fading. Some candidates who were once known as anti-nuclear advocates are shifting their position as energy demands are likely to see a big jump due to developments in artificial intelligence and the need to build more data centers to power such technology. "As for energy, it would be a huge blow to the economy if companies choose to move their data centers outside of Japan and invest in AI in other countries, just because Japan is unable to provide electricity," said digital minister Taro Kono, who recently declared his candidacy for the Sept. 27 LDP leadership race.

Recent large language model (LLM) defenses have greatly improved models' ability to refuse harmful queries, even when adversarially attacked. However, LLM defenses are primarily evaluated against automated adversarial attacks in a single turn of conversation, an insufficient threat model for real-world malicious use. We demonstrate that multi-turn human jailbreaks uncover significant vulnerabilities, exceeding 70% attack success rate (ASR) on HarmBench against defenses that report single-digit ASRs with automated single-turn attacks. Human jailbreaks also reveal vulnerabilities in machine unlearning defenses, successfully recovering dual-use biosecurity knowledge from unlearned models. We compile these results into Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks (MHJ), a dataset of 2,912 prompts across 537 multi-turn jailbreaks. We publicly release MHJ alongside a compendium of jailbreak tactics developed across dozens of commercial red teaming engagements, supporting research towards stronger LLM defenses.