Large-scale disaster Search And Rescue (SAR) operations are persistently challenged by complex terrain and disrupted communications. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms offer a promising solution for tasks like wide-area search and supply delivery, yet their effective coordination places a significant cognitive burden on human operators. The core human-machine collaboration bottleneck lies in the ``intention-to-action gap'', which is an error-prone process of translating a high-level rescue objective into a low-level swarm command under high intensity and pressure. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a novel LLM-CRF system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to model and augment human-swarm teaming cognition. The proposed framework initially captures the operator's intention through natural and multi-modal interactions with the device via voice or graphical annotations. It then employs the LLM as a cognitive engine to perform intention comprehension, hierarchical task decomposition, and mission planning for the UAV swarm. This closed-loop framework enables the swarm to act as a proactive partner, providing active feedback in real-time while reducing the need for manual monitoring and control, which considerably advances the efficacy of the SAR task. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulated SAR scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional order and command-based interfaces, the proposed LLM-driven approach reduced task completion time by approximately $64.2\%$ and improved task success rate by $7\%$. It also leads to a considerable reduction in subjective cognitive workload, with NASA-TLX scores dropping by $42.9\%$. This work establishes the potential of LLMs to create more intuitive and effective human-swarm collaborations in high-stakes scenarios.

Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperative Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems face critical challenges in coordinating trajectory planning, task offloading, and resource allocation while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) under dynamic and uncertain environments. Existing approaches suffer from limited scalability, slow convergence, and inefficient knowledge sharing among UAVs, particularly when handling large-scale IoT device deployments with stringent deadline constraints. This paper proposes AirFed, a novel federated graph-enhanced multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations. First, we design dual-layer dynamic Graph Attention Networks (GATs) that explicitly model spatial-temporal dependencies among UAVs and IoT devices, capturing both service relationships and collaborative interactions within the network topology. Second, we develop a dual-Actor single-Critic architecture that jointly optimizes continuous trajectory control and discrete task offloading decisions. Third, we propose a reputation-based decentralized federated learning mechanism with gradient-sensitive adaptive quantization, enabling efficient and robust knowledge sharing across heterogeneous UAVs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AirFed achieves 42.9% reduction in weighted cost compared to state-of-the-art baselines, attains over 99% deadline satisfaction and 94.2% IoT device coverage rate, and reduces communication overhead by 54.5%. Scalability analysis confirms robust performance across varying UAV numbers, IoT device densities, and system scales, validating AirFed's practical applicability for large-scale UAV-MEC deployments.

Rigorous evaluation of commercial Augmented Reality (AR) hardware is crucial, yet public benchmarks for tool tracking on modern Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) are limited. This paper addresses this gap by systematically assessing the Magic Leap 2 (ML2) controllers tracking performance. Using a robotic arm for repeatable motion (EN ISO 9283) and an optical tracking system as ground truth, our protocol evaluates static and dynamic performance under various conditions, including realistic paths from a hydrogen leak inspection use case. The results provide a quantitative baseline of the ML2 controller's accuracy and repeatability and present a robust, transferable evaluation methodology. The findings provide a basis to assess the controllers suitability for the inspection use case and similar industrial sensor-based AR guidance tasks.

Accurate grain orientation mapping is essential for understanding and optimizing the performance of polycrystalline materials, particularly in energy-related applications. Lithium nickel oxide (LiNiO$_{2}$) is a promising cathode material for next-generation lithium-ion batteries, and its electrochemical behaviour is closely linked to microstructural features such as grain size and crystallographic orientations. Traditional orientation mapping methods--such as manual indexing, template matching (TM), or Hough transform-based techniques--are often slow and noise-sensitive when handling complex or overlapping patterns, creating a bottleneck in large-scale microstructural analysis. This work presents a machine learning-based approach for predicting Euler angles directly from scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) diffraction patterns (DPs). This enables the automated generation of high-resolution crystal orientation maps, facilitating the analysis of internal microstructures at the nanoscale. Three deep learning architectures--convolutional neural networks (CNNs), Dense Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), and Shifted Windows (Swin) Transformers--are evaluated, using an experimentally acquired dataset labelled via a commercial TM algorithm. While the CNN model serves as a baseline, both DenseNets and Swin Transformers demonstrate superior performance, with the Swin Transformer achieving the highest evaluation scores and the most consistent microstructural predictions. The resulting crystal maps exhibit clear grain boundary delineation and coherent intra-grain orientation distributions, underscoring the potential of attention-based architectures for analyzing diffraction-based image data. These findings highlight the promise of combining advanced machine learning models with STEM data for robust, high-throughput microstructural characterization.

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical tasks where predictions must satisfy hard constraints, such as physical laws, fairness requirements, or safety limits. However, standard architectures lack built-in mechanisms to enforce such constraints, and existing approaches based on regularization or projection are often limited to simple constraints, computationally expensive, or lack feasibility guarantees. This paper proposes a model-agnostic framework for enforcing input-dependent linear equality and inequality constraints on neural network outputs. The architecture combines a task network trained for prediction accuracy with a safe network trained using decision rules from the stochastic and robust optimization literature to ensure feasibility across the entire input space. The final prediction is a convex combination of the two subnetworks, guaranteeing constraint satisfaction during both training and inference without iterative procedures or runtime optimization. We prove that the architecture is a universal approximator of constrained functions and derive computationally tractable formulations based on linear decision rules. Empirical results on benchmark regression tasks show that our method consistently satisfies constraints while maintaining competitive accuracy and low inference latency.

Time series analysis has found widespread applications in areas such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and healthcare. While deep learning approaches have achieved significant success in this field, existing methods often adopt a "one-model one-task" architecture, limiting their generalization across different tasks. To address these limitations, we perform local energy analysis in the time-frequency domain to more precisely capture and disentangle transient and non-stationary oscillatory components. Furthermore, our representational analysis reveals that generative tasks tend to capture long-period patterns from low-frequency components, whereas discriminative tasks focus on high-frequency abrupt signals, which constitutes our core contribution. Concretely, we propose Pets, a novel "one-model many-tasks" architecture based on the General fluctuation Pattern Assisted (GPA) framework that is adaptable to versatile model structures for time series analysis. Pets integrates a Fluctuation Pattern Assisted (FPA) module and a Context-Guided Mixture of Predictors (MoP). The FPA module facilitates information fusion among diverse fluctuation patterns by capturing their dependencies and progressively modeling these patterns as latent representations at each layer. Meanwhile, the MoP module leverages these generalizable pattern representations to guide and regulate the reconstruction of distinct fluctuations hierarchically by energy proportion. Pets demonstrates strong versatility and achieves state-of-the-art performance across 60 benchmarks on various tasks, including forecasting, imputation, anomaly detection, and classification, while demonstrating strong generalization and robustness.

Walkability is a key component of sustainable urban development. In walkability studies, collecting detailed pedestrian infrastructure data remains challenging due to the high costs and limited scalability of traditional methods. Sidewalk delivery robots, increasingly deployed in urban environments, offer a promising solution to these limitations. This paper explores how these robots can serve as mobile data collection platforms, capturing sidewalk-level features related to walkability in a scalable, automated, and real-time manner. A sensor-equipped robot was deployed on a sidewalk network at KTH in Stockholm, completing 101 trips covering 900 segment records. From the collected data, different typologies of features are derived, including robot trip characteristics (e.g., speed, duration), sidewalk conditions (e.g., width, surface unevenness), and sidewalk utilization (e.g., pedestrian density). Their walkability-related implications were investigated with a series of analyses. The results demonstrate that pedestrian movement patterns are strongly influenced by sidewalk characteristics, with higher density, reduced width, and surface irregularity associated with slower and more variable trajectories. Notably, robot speed closely mirrors pedestrian behavior, highlighting its potential as a proxy for assessing pedestrian dynamics. The proposed framework enables continuous monitoring of sidewalk conditions and pedestrian behavior, contributing to the development of more walkable, inclusive, and responsive urban environments.

Abstract--Time series anomaly detection is widely used in IoT and cyber-physical systems, yet its evaluation remains challenging due to diverse application objectives and heterogeneous metric assumptions. This study introduces a problem-oriented framework that reinterprets existing metrics based on the specific evaluation challenges they are designed to address, rather than their mathematical forms or output structures. We categorize over twenty commonly used metrics into six dimensions: (1) basic accuracy-driven evaluation, (2) timeliness-aware reward mechanisms, (3) tolerance to labeling imprecision, (4) penalties reflecting human-audit cost, (5) robustness against random or inflated scores, and (6) parameter-free comparability for cross-dataset benchmark-ing. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to examine metric behavior under genuine, random, and oracle detection scenarios. By comparing their resulting score distributions, we quantify each metric's discriminative ability--its capability to distinguish meaningful detections from random noise. The results show that while most event-level metrics exhibit strong separability, several widely used metrics (e.g., NAB, Point-Adjust) demonstrate limited resistance to random-score inflation. These findings reveal that metric suitability must be inherently task-dependent and aligned with the operational objectives of IoT applications. The proposed framework offers a unified analytical perspective for understanding existing metrics and provides practical guidance for selecting or developing more context-aware, robust, and fair evaluation methodologies for time series anomaly detection. He emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated digital transformation across numerous domains. Its defining characteristic lies in the large-scale deployment of intelligent and heterogeneous devices--such as sensors, actuators, and RFID systems--that are interconnected via the Internet to enable autonomous communication without human intervention [1]. Currently, more than 12 billion IoT devices are in operation, and this number is projected to reach 125 billion by 2030 [2]. Consequently, the volume of data generated by these devices continues to soar, with an expected total of 79.4 ZB by 2025 [3]. In industrial contexts, the integration of IoT technologies has driven the ongoing Industry 4.0 revolution, emphasizing connectivity, automation, and intelligence. Kaixiang Y ang, Jiarong Liu, Y upeng Song, and Y ujue Zhou are with the School of Artificial Intelligence, Y unnan University, Kunming 650091, China. Shuanghua Y ang is with Beijing Normal University - Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai 519087, China. This work was supported in part by the Y unnan Fundamental Research Projects under Grant 202401AU070151, and in part by the Y unnan Provincial Science and Technology Talent and Platform Plan under Grant 202505AF350053.

This study proposes a Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT)-enhanced quantum kernel for short-term time-series forecasting. Exogenous predictors are incorporated by convexly fusing feature-specific kernels. For both quantum and classical models, the only tuned quantities are the feature-mixing weights and the KRR ridge α; classical hyperparameters (γ, r, d) are fixed, with the same validation set size for all models. Experiments are conducted on a noiseless simulator (5 qubits; window length L=32). Limitations and ablations are discussed, and paths toward NISQ execution are outlined. Introduction Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging discipline that combines the principles of quantum physics with traditional machine learning (ML) to exploit the distinctive characteristics of quantum systems, including superposition and entanglement phenomena [1]. This distinction facilitates the expeditious execution of certain tasks [2], such as classification and dimensionality reduction, where QML has demonstrated significant acceleration [3]. QML applications have extended to time-series data, leveraging quantum phenomena to model complex temporal dependencies. The goal is to enhance the results of traditional tasks by performing computations on qubits, which can process data more efficiently than classical bits [4, 5]. For example, Thakkar et al. [6] demonstrated that quantum machine-learning methods could enhance financial forecasting by improving both churn prediction and credit-risk assessment. Likewise, Kea et al. [7] developed a hybrid quantum-classical Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) to improve stock-price forecasting by leveraging quantum data encoding and high-dimensional quantum representations.

Flow Matching has limited ability in achieving one-step generation due to its reliance on learned curved trajectories. Previous studies have attempted to address this limitation by either modifying the coupling distribution to prevent interpolant intersections or introducing consistency and mean-velocity modeling to promote straight trajectory learning. However, these approaches often suffer from discrete approximation errors, training instability, and convergence difficulties. To tackle these issues, in the present work, we propose \textbf{S}traight \textbf{V}ariational \textbf{F}low \textbf{M}atching (\textbf{S-VFM}), which integrates a variational latent code representing the ``generation overview'' into the Flow Matching framework. \textbf{S-VFM} explicitly enforces trajectory straightness, ideally producing linear generation paths. The proposed method achieves competitive performance across three challenge benchmarks and demonstrates advantages in both training and inference efficiency compared with existing methods.