The rapid advancement of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft offers a promising opportunity to alleviate urban traffic congestion. Thus, developing optimal takeoff trajectories for minimum energy consumption becomes essential for broader eVTOL aircraft applications. Conventional optimal control methods (such as dynamic programming and linear quadratic regulator) provide highly efficient and well-established solutions but are limited by problem dimensionality and complexity. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) emerges as a special type of artificial intelligence tackling complex, nonlinear systems; however, the training difficulty is a key bottleneck that limits DRL applications. To address these challenges, we propose the transformer-guided DRL to alleviate the training difficulty by exploring a realistic state space at each time step using a transformer. The proposed transformer-guided DRL was demonstrated on an optimal takeoff trajectory design of an eVTOL drone for minimal energy consumption while meeting takeoff conditions (i.e., minimum vertical displacement and minimum horizontal velocity) by varying control variables (i.e., power and wing angle to the vertical). Results presented that the transformer-guided DRL agent learned to take off with $4.57\times10^6$ time steps, representing 25% of the $19.79\times10^6$ time steps needed by a vanilla DRL agent. In addition, the transformer-guided DRL achieved 97.2% accuracy on the optimal energy consumption compared against the simulation-based optimal reference while the vanilla DRL achieved 96.3% accuracy. Therefore, the proposed transformer-guided DRL outperformed vanilla DRL in terms of both training efficiency as well as optimal design verification.

Autonomous systems must sustain justified confidence in their correctness and safety across their operational lifecycle-from design and deployment through post-deployment evolution. Traditional assurance methods often separate development-time assurance from runtime assurance, yielding fragmented arguments that cannot adapt to runtime changes or system updates - a significant challenge for assured autonomy. Towards addressing this, we propose a unified Continuous Assurance Framework that integrates design-time, runtime, and evolution-time assurance within a traceable, model-driven workflow as a step towards assured autonomy. In this paper, we specifically instantiate the design-time phase of the framework using two formal verification methods: RoboChart for functional correctness and PRISM for probabilistic risk analysis. We also propose a model-driven transformation pipeline, implemented as an Eclipse plugin, that automatically regenerates structured assurance arguments whenever formal specifications or their verification results change, thereby ensuring traceability. We demonstrate our approach on a nuclear inspection robot scenario, and discuss its alignment with the Trilateral AI Principles, reflecting regulator-endorsed best practices.

Accurate renewable energy forecasting is essential to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and enabling grid decarbonization. However, current approaches fail to effectively integrate the rich spatial context of weather patterns with their temporal evolution. This work introduces a novel approach that treats weather maps as tokens in transformer sequences to predict renewable energy. Hourly weather maps are encoded as spatial tokens using a lightweight convolutional neural network, and then processed by a transformer to capture temporal dynamics across a 45-hour forecast horizon. Despite disadvantages in input initialization, evaluation against ENTSO-E operational forecasts shows a reduction in RMSE of about 60% and 20% for wind and solar respectively. A live dashboard showing daily forecasts is available at: https://www.sardiniaforecast.ifabfoundation.it.

The advent of smart manufacturing is addressing the limitations of traditional centralized scheduling and inflexible production line configurations in the rubber tyre industry, especially in terms of coping with dynamic production demands. Contemporary tyre manufacturing systems form complex networks of tightly coupled subsystems pronounced nonlinear interactions and emergent dynamics. This complexity renders the effective coordination of multiple subsystems, posing an essential yet formidable task. For high-dimensional, multi-objective optimization problems in this domain, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning algorithm: Multi-path Differentiated Clipping Proximal Policy Optimization (MPD-PPO). This algorithm employs a multi-branch policy architecture with differentiated gradient clipping constraints to ensure stable and efficient high-dimensional policy updates. Validated through experiments on width and thickness control in rubber tyre film production, MPD-PPO demonstrates substantial improvements in both tuning accuracy and operational efficiency. The framework successfully tackles key challenges, including high dimensionality, multi-objective trade-offs, and dynamic adaptation, thus delivering enhanced performance and production stability for real-time industrial deployment in tyre manufacturing.

Deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices faces two critical challenges: maintaining accuracy under aggressive quantization while ensuring predictable inference latency. We present a curiosity-driven quantized Mixture-of-Experts framework that addresses both through Bayesian epistemic uncertainty-based routing across heterogeneous experts (BitNet ternary, 1-16 bit BitLinear, post-training quantization). Evaluated on audio classification benchmarks (ESC-50, Quinn, UrbanSound8K), our 4-bit quantization maintains 99.9 percent of 16-bit accuracy (0.858 vs 0.859 F1) with 4x compression and 41 percent energy savings versus 8-bit. Crucially, curiosity-driven routing reduces MoE latency variance by 82 percent (p = 0.008, Levene's test) from 230 ms to 29 ms standard deviation, enabling stable inference for battery-constrained devices. Statistical analysis confirms 4-bit/8-bit achieve practical equivalence with full precision (p > 0.05), while MoE architectures introduce 11 percent latency overhead (p < 0.001) without accuracy gains. At scale, deployment emissions dominate training by 10000x for models serving more than 1,000 inferences, making inference efficiency critical. Our information-theoretic routing demonstrates that adaptive quantization yields accurate (0.858 F1, 1.2M params), energy-efficient (3.87 F1/mJ), and predictable edge models, with simple 4-bit quantized architectures outperforming complex MoE for most deployments.

Current wildfire risk assessments rely on coarse hazard maps and opaque machine learning models that optimize regional accuracy while sacrificing interpretability at the decision scale. WildfireGenome addresses these gaps through three components: (1) fusion of seven federal wildfire indicators into a sign-aligned, PCA-based composite risk label at H3 Level-8 resolution; (2) Random Forest classification of local wildfire risk; and (3) SHAP and ICE/PDP analyses to expose county-specific nonlinear driver relationships. Across seven ecologically diverse U.S. counties, models achieve accuracies of 0.755-0.878 and Quadratic Weighted Kappa up to 0.951, with principal components explaining 87-94% of indicator variance. Transfer tests show reliable performance between ecologically similar regions but collapse across dissimilar contexts. Explanations consistently highlight needleleaf forest cover and elevation as dominant drivers, with risk rising sharply at 30-40% needleleaf coverage. WildfireGenome advances wildfire risk assessment from regional prediction to interpretable, decision-scale analytics that guide vegetation management, zoning, and infrastructure planning.

This paper proposes a competitive and computationally efficient approach to probabilistic rainfall nowcasting. A video projector (V-JEPA Vision Transformer) associated to a lightweight probabilistic head is attached to a pre-trained satellite vision encoder (DINOv3-SAT493M) to map encoder tokens into a discrete empirical CDF (eCDF) over 4-hour accumulated rainfall. The projector-head is optimized end-to-end over the Ranked Probability Score (RPS). As an alternative, 3D-UNET baselines trained with an aggregate Rank Probability Score and a per-pixel Gamma-Hurdle objective are used. On the Weather4Cast 2025 benchmark, the proposed method achieved a promising performance, with a CRPS of 3.5102, which represents $\approx$ 26% in effectiveness gain against the best 3D-UNET.

Swarm UA V autonomous flight for Embodied Long-Horizon (ELH) tasks is crucial for advancing the low-altitude economy. However, existing methods focus only on specific basic tasks due to dataset limitations, failing in real-world deployment for ELH tasks. ELH tasks are not mere concatenations of basic tasks, requiring handling long-term dependencies, maintaining embodied persistent states, and adapting to dynamic goal shifts. This paper presents U2UData+, the first large-scale swarm UA V autonomous flight dataset for ELH tasks and the first scalable swarm UA V data online collection and algorithm closed-loop verification platform. The dataset is captured by 15 UA Vs in autonomous collaborative flights for ELH tasks, comprising 12 scenes, 720 traces, 120 hours, 600 seconds per trajectory, 4.32M LiDAR frames, and 12.96M RGB frames. This dataset also includes brightness, temperature, humidity, smoke, and airflow values covering all flight routes. The platform supports the customization of simulators, UA Vs, sensors, flight algorithms, formation modes, and ELH tasks. Through a visual control window, this platform allows users to collect customized datasets through one-click deployment online and to verify algorithms by closed-loop simulation. U2UData+ also introduces an ELH task for wildlife conservation and provides comprehensive benchmarks with 9 SOT A models.

To bridge the temporal granularity gap in energy network design and operation based on Energy System Models, resampling of time series is required. While conventional upsampling methods are computationally efficient, they often result in significant information loss or increased noise. Advanced models such as time series generation models, Super-Resolution models and imputation models show potential, but also face fundamental challenges. The goal of time series generative models is to learn the distribution of the original data to generate high-resolution series with similar statistical characteristics. This is not entirely consistent with the definition of upsampling. Time series Super-Resolution models or imputation models can degrade the accuracy of upsampling because the input low-resolution time series are sparse and may have insufficient context. Moreover, such models usually rely on supervised learning paradigms. This presents a fundamental application paradox: their training requires the high-resolution time series that is intrinsically absent in upsampling application scenarios. To address the mentioned upsampling issue, this paper introduces a new method utilizing Generative Adversarial Transformers (GATs), which can be trained without access to any ground-truth high-resolution data. Compared with conventional interpolation methods, the introduced method can reduce the root mean square error (RMSE) of upsampling tasks by 10%, and the accuracy of a model predictive control (MPC) application scenario is improved by 13%.

Information about room-level occupancy is crucial to many building-related tasks, such as building automation or energy performance simulation. Current occupancy detection literature focuses on data-driven methods, but is mostly based on small case studies with few rooms. The necessity to collect room-specific data for each room of interest impedes applicability of machine learning, especially data-intensive deep learning approaches, in practice. To derive accurate predictions from less data, we suggest knowledge transfer from synthetic data. In this paper, we conduct an experiment with data from a CO$_2$ sensor in an office room, and additional synthetic data obtained from a simulation. Our contribution includes (a) a simulation method for CO$_2$ dynamics under randomized occupant behavior, (b) a proof of concept for knowledge transfer from simulated CO$_2$ data, and (c) an outline of future research implications. From our results, we can conclude that the transfer approach can effectively reduce the required amount of data for model training.