Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) fills the role of a critical interface fostering interactions between sophisticated intelligent systems and diverse individuals, including data scientists, domain experts, end-users, and more. It aids in deciphering the intricate internal mechanisms of ``black box'' Machine Learning (ML), rendering the reasons behind their decisions more understandable. However, current research in XAI primarily focuses on two aspects; ways to facilitate user trust, or to debug and refine the ML model. The majority of it falls short of recognising the diverse types of explanations needed in broader contexts, as different users and varied application areas necessitate solutions tailored to their specific needs. One such domain is Predictive Maintenance (PdM), an exploding area of research under the Industry 4.0 \& 5.0 umbrella. This position paper highlights the gap between existing XAI methodologies and the specific requirements for explanations within industrial applications, particularly the Predictive Maintenance field. Despite explainability's crucial role, this subject remains a relatively under-explored area, making this paper a pioneering attempt to bring relevant challenges to the research community's attention. We provide an overview of predictive maintenance tasks and accentuate the need and varying purposes for corresponding explanations. We then list and describe XAI techniques commonly employed in the literature, discussing their suitability for PdM tasks. Finally, to make the ideas and claims more concrete, we demonstrate XAI applied in four specific industrial use cases: commercial vehicles, metro trains, steel plants, and wind farms, spotlighting areas requiring further research.

Battery endurance represents a key challenge for long-term autonomy and long-range operations, especially in the case of aerial robots. In this paper, we propose AutoCharge, an autonomous charging solution for quadrotors that combines a portable ground station with a flexible, lightweight charging tether and is capable of universal, highly efficient, and robust charging. We design and manufacture a pair of circular magnetic connectors to ensure a precise orientation-agnostic electrical connection between the ground station and the charging tether. Moreover, we supply the ground station with an electromagnet that largely increases the tolerance to localization and control errors during the docking maneuver, while still guaranteeing smooth un-docking once the charging process is completed. We demonstrate AutoCharge on a perpetual 10 hours quadrotor flight experiment and show that the docking and un-docking performance is solidly repeatable, enabling perpetual quadrotor flight missions.

The need to execute Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) at low latency and low power at the edge has spurred the development of new heterogeneous Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) encapsulating a diverse set of hardware accelerators. How to optimally map a DNN onto such multi-accelerator systems is an open problem. We propose ODiMO, a hardware-aware tool that performs a fine-grain mapping across different accelerators on-chip, splitting individual layers and executing them in parallel, to reduce inference energy consumption or latency, while taking into account each accelerator's quantization precision to maintain accuracy. Pareto-optimal networks in the accuracy vs. energy or latency space are pursued for three popular dataset/DNN pairs, and deployed on the DIANA heterogeneous ultra-low power edge AI SoC. We show that ODiMO reduces energy/latency by up to 33%/31% with limited accuracy drop (-0.53%/-0.32%) compared to manual heuristic mappings.

Existing pruning methods utilize the importance of each weight based on specified criteria only when searching for a sparse structure but do not utilize it during training. In this work, we propose a novel approach - \textbf{M}agnitude \textbf{A}ttention-based Dynamic \textbf{P}runing (MAP) method, which applies the importance of weights throughout both the forward and backward paths to explore sparse model structures dynamically. Magnitude attention is defined based on the magnitude of weights as continuous real-valued numbers enabling a seamless transition from a redundant to an effective sparse network by promoting efficient exploration. Additionally, the attention mechanism ensures more effective updates for important layers within the sparse network. In later stages of training, our approach shifts from exploration to exploitation, exclusively updating the sparse model composed of crucial weights based on the explored structure, resulting in pruned models that not only achieve performance comparable to dense models but also outperform previous pruning methods on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet.

Recently, denoising diffusion models have led to significant breakthroughs in the generation of images, audio and text. However, it is still an open question on how to adapt their strong modeling ability to model time series. In this paper, we propose TimeDiff, a non-autoregressive diffusion model that achieves high-quality time series prediction with the introduction of two novel conditioning mechanisms: future mixup and autoregressive initialization. Similar to teacher forcing, future mixup allows parts of the ground-truth future predictions for conditioning, while autoregressive initialization helps better initialize the model with basic time series patterns such as short-term trends. Extensive experiments are performed on nine real-world datasets. Results show that TimeDiff consistently outperforms existing time series diffusion models, and also achieves the best overall performance across a variety of the existing strong baselines (including transformers and FiLM).

This paper presents a novel Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model based on a transformer-based attention mechanism and temporal pooling for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) of smart buildings. The paper aims to improve the accuracy of NILM by using a deep learning-based method. The proposed method uses a Seq2Seq model with a transformer-based attention mechanism to capture the long-term dependencies of NILM data. Additionally, temporal pooling is used to improve the model's accuracy by capturing both the steady-state and transient behavior of appliances. The paper evaluates the proposed method on a publicly available dataset and compares the results with other state-of-the-art NILM techniques. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.

The Linear-Quadratic Regulation (LQR) problem with unknown system parameters has been widely studied, but it has remained unclear whether $\tilde{ \mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret, which is the best known dependence on time, can be achieved almost surely. In this paper, we propose an adaptive LQR controller with almost surely $\tilde{ \mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret upper bound. The controller features a circuit-breaking mechanism, which circumvents potential safety breach and guarantees the convergence of the system parameter estimate, but is shown to be triggered only finitely often and hence has negligible effect on the asymptotic performance of the controller. The proposed controller is also validated via simulation on Tennessee Eastman Process~(TEP), a commonly used industrial process example.

Autonomous vehicles are suited for continuous area patrolling problems. However, finding an optimal patrolling strategy can be challenging for many reasons. Firstly, patrolling environments are often complex and can include unknown environmental factors, such as wind or landscape. Secondly, autonomous vehicles can have failures or hardware constraints, such as limited battery life. Importantly, patrolling large areas often requires multiple agents that need to collectively coordinate their actions. In this work, we consider these limitations and propose an approach based on model-free, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this approach, the agents are trained to patrol an environment with various unknown dynamics and factors. They can automatically recharge themselves to support continuous collective patrolling. A distributed homogeneous multi-agent architecture is proposed, where all patrolling agents execute identical policies locally based on their local observations and shared location information. This architecture provides a patrolling system that can tolerate agent failures and allow supplementary agents to be added to replace failed agents or to increase the overall patrol performance. The solution is validated through simulation experiments from multiple perspectives, including the overall patrol performance, the efficiency of battery recharging strategies, the overall fault tolerance, and the ability to cooperate with supplementary agents.

Cruise line Hurtigruten Norway has unveiled pictures of its first zero-emission ship - and it features extraordinary retractable sails fitted with solar panels. The 164ft- (50m) tall sails are one of several'firsts and improved solutions' on the electric vessel - due to launch in 2030 - that'do not exist on cruise ships today', including'AI manoeuvring' and'retractable thrusters'. Renderings showcase the striking design of the 443ft- (135m) long vessel, which will boast 270 cabins to hold 500 guests and 99 crew. The ship will run on a combination of energy from 60-megawatt battery and wind technology, charging up with renewable energy when it's docked in port. Battery levels will be displayed on the sides of the cruise ship.

Abstract--Existing visual question answering methods often suffer from cross-modal spurious correlations and oversimplified eventlevel reasoning processes that fail to capture event temporality, causality, and dynamics spanning over the video. In this work, to address the task of event-level visual question answering, we propose a framework for cross-modal causal relational reasoning. In particular, a set of causal intervention operations is introduced to discover the underlying causal structures across visual and linguistic modalities. Our framework, named Cross-Modal Causal RelatIonal Reasoning (CMCIR), involves three modules: i) Causality-aware Visual-Linguistic Reasoning (CVLR) module for collaboratively disentangling the visual and linguistic spurious correlations via front-door and backdoor causal interventions; ii) Spatial-Temporal Transformer (STT) module for capturing the fine-grained interactions between visual and linguistic semantics; iii) Visual-Linguistic Feature Fusion (VLFF) module for learning the global semantic-aware visual-linguistic representations adaptively. Extensive experiments on four event-level datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CMCIR in discovering visual-linguistic causal structures and achieving robust event-level visual question answering. A: No, the road is not congested and the side-collision happened at the crossing. Actually, understanding events in multi-modal visual-linguistic context is a long-standing challenge. Existing visual question answering methods [10], [11], [12], First, existing visual question answering methods usually [13] use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) [14], attention focus on simple events that do not require a deep understanding mechanisms [15] or Graph Convolutional Networks [16] for of causality, temporal relations, and linguistic relation reasoning between visual and linguistic modalities. Although achieving promising results, these methods suffer In Figure 1, given a video and an associated question, a typical from two common limitations.