We examine frugal federated learning approaches to violence detection by comparing two complementary strategies: (i) zero-shot and federated fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs), and (ii) personalized training of a compact 3D convolutional neural network (CNN3D). Using LLaVA-7B and a 65.8M parameter CNN3D as representative cases, we evaluate accuracy, calibration, and energy usage under realistic non-IID settings. Both approaches exceed 90% accuracy. CNN3D slightly outperforms Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA)-tuned VLMs in ROC AUC and log loss, while using less energy. VLMs remain favorable for contextual reasoning and multimodal inference. We quantify energy and CO$_2$ emissions across training and inference, and analyze sustainability trade-offs for deployment. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative study of LoRA-tuned vision-language models and personalized CNNs for federated violence detection, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and environmental metrics. These findings support a hybrid model: lightweight CNNs for routine classification, with selective VLM activation for complex or descriptive scenarios. The resulting framework offers a reproducible baseline for responsible, resource-aware AI in video surveillance, with extensions toward real-time, multimodal, and lifecycle-aware systems.

Traditional PID controllers have limited adaptability for plasma shape control, and task-specific reinforcement learning (RL) methods suffer from limited generalization and the need for repetitive retraining. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework for developing a versatile, zero-shot control policy from a large-scale offline dataset of historical PID-controlled discharges. Our approach synergistically combines Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) with Hilbert space representation learning to achieve dual objectives: mimicking the stable operational style of the PID data and constructing a geometrically structured latent space for efficient, goal-directed control. The resulting foundation policy can be deployed for diverse trajectory tracking tasks in a zero-shot manner without any task-specific fine-tuning. Evaluations on the HL-3 tokamak simulator demonstrate that the policy excels at precisely and stably tracking reference trajectories for key shape parameters across a range of plasma scenarios. This work presents a viable pathway toward developing highly flexible and data-efficient intelligent control systems for future fusion reactors.

Accurate prediction of lithium-ion battery capacity and its associated uncertainty is essential for reliable battery management but remains challenging due to the stochastic nature of aging. This paper presents a novel method, termed the Condition Diffusion U-Net with Attention (CDUA), which integrates feature engineering and deep learning to address this challenge. The proposed approach employs a diffusion-based generative model for time-series forecasting and incorporates attention mechanisms to enhance predictive performance. Battery capacity is first derived from real-world vehicle operation data. The most relevant features are then identified using the Pearson correlation coefficient and the XGBoost algorithm. These features are used to train the CDUA model, which comprises two core components: (1) a contextual U-Net with self-attention to capture complex temporal dependencies, and (2) a denoising network to reconstruct accurate capacity values from noisy observations. Experimental validation on the real-world vehicle data demonstrates that the proposed CDUA model achieves a relative Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.94% and a relative Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.14%, with a narrow 95% confidence interval of 3.74% in relative width. These results confirm that CDUA provides both accurate capacity estimation and reliable uncertainty quantification. Comparative experiments further verify its robustness and superior performance over existing mainstream approaches.

-- This paper presents a novel methodology that integrates trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) with an energy - efficient robotic arm for intelligent waste classification and sorting. By utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) enhanced through trans fer learning with MobileNetV2, the system accurately classifies waste into six categories: plastic, glass, metal, paper, cardboard, and trash. The model achieved a high training accuracy of 99.8% and a validation accuracy of 80.5%, demonstrating strong lea rning and generalization. A robotic arm simulator is implemented to perform virtual sorting, calculating the energy cost for each action using Euclidean distance to ensure optimal and efficient movement. The framework incorporates key elements of trustwort hy AI, such as transparency, robustness, fairness, and safety, making it a reliable and scalable solution for smart waste management systems in urban settings. I. INTRODUCTION As cities grow and industries expand, managing waste effectively has become a major global issue.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming education by answering questions, explaining complex concepts, and generating content across a wide range of subjects. Despite strong performance on academic benchmarks, they often fail to tailor responses to students' grade levels. This is a critical need in K-12 education, where age-appropriate vocabulary and explanation are essential for effective learning. Existing models frequently produce outputs that are too advanced or vague for younger learners, and there are no standardized benchmarks to evaluate their ability to adjust across cognitive and developmental stages. To address this gap, we introduce EduAdapt, a benchmark of nearly 48k grade-labeled QA pairs across nine science subjects, spanning Grades 1-12 and grouped into four grade levels. We evaluate a diverse set of open-source LLMs on EduAdapt and find that while larger models generally perform better, they still struggle with generating suitable responses for early-grade students (Grades 1-5). Our work presents the first dataset and evaluation framework for assessing grade-level adaptability in LLMs, aiming to foster more developmentally aligned educational AI systems through better training and prompting strategies. EduAdapt code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/NaumanNaeem/EduAdapt.

Optimizing the energy management within a smart grids scenario presents significant challenges, primarily due to the complexity of real-world systems and the intricate interactions among various components. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is gaining prominence as a solution for addressing the challenges of Optimal Power Flow (OPF) in smart grids. However, RL needs to iterate compulsively throughout a given environment to obtain the optimal policy. This means obtaining samples from a, most likely, costly simulator, which can lead to a sample e fficiency problem. In this work, we address this problem by substituting costly smart grid simulators with surrogate models built using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN)s, optimizing the RL policy training process by arriving to convergent results in a fraction of the time employed by the original environment. Specifically, we tested the performance of our PINN surrogate against other state-of-the-art data-driven surrogates and found that the understanding of the underlying physical nature of the problem makes the PINN surrogate the only method that we studied capable of learning a good RL policy, in addition to not having to use samples from the real simulator. Our work shows that, by employing PINN surrogates, we can improve training speed by 50%, comparing to training the RL policy by not using any surrogate model, enabling us to achieve results with score on par with the original simulator more rapidly. Keywords: Smart Grids Control, Reinforcement Learning, Physics-informed Neural Networks, Active Network Management, Optimal Power Flow, Surrogate Models, Renewable EnergyRL Reinforcement Learning EA Expert agent PINN Physics-Informed Neural Networks ANN Artificial Neural Network OPF Optimal Power Flow ESS Energy Storage Systems SoC State of Change MAE Mean Absolute Error 1. Introduction Smart grids are a pivotal concept driving the current modernization of electrical networks, addressing the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance energy e fficiency, and improve grid stability through demand response mechanisms. The European Union aims to achieve 43% renewable energy generation by 2030 [1], and in 2021, the renewable energy share rose to 32 .1% [2]. Corresponding author Email address: julen.cestero@polimi.it Modern societies require advanced grids capable of predicting and mitigating the uncertainties associated with renewable energy sources.

Human collaboration with robots requires flexible role adaptation, enabling robot to switch between active leader and passive follower. Effective role switching depends on accurately estimating human intention, which is typically achieved through external force analysis, nominal robot dynamics, or data-driven approaches. However, these methods are primarily effective in contact-sparse environments. When robots under hybrid or unified force-impedance control physically interact with active humans or non-passive environments, the robotic system may lose passivity and thus compromise safety. To address this challenge, this paper proposes the unified Interactive Force-Impedance Control (IFIC) framework that adapts to the interaction power flow, ensuring effortless and safe interaction in contact-rich environments. The proposed control architecture is formulated within a port-Hamiltonian framework, incorporating both interaction and task control ports, through which system passivity is guaranteed.

Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially quadrupeds, can overcome these limitations by handling uneven, obstacle-rich, and deformable terrains. However, deploying such robots in unknown conditions is challenging due to the need for environment-specific control, which is infeasible when terrain and robot parameters are uncertain. This work presents a modular control framework that combines model-based dynamic control with online model adaptation and adaptive footstep planning to address uncertainties in both robot and terrain properties. The framework includes state estimation for quadrupeds with and without contact sensing, supports runtime reconfiguration, and is integrated into ROS 2 with open-source availability. Its performance was validated on two quadruped platforms, multiple hardware architectures, and in a volcano field test, where the robot walked over 700 m.

Effective and accurate diagnosis of fuel cell health status is crucial for ensuring the stable operation of fuel cell stacks. Among various parameters, high-frequency impedance serves as a critical indicator for assessing fuel cell state and health conditions. However, its online testing is prohibitively complex and costly. This paper employs a deep sparse auto-encoding network for the prediction and classification of high-frequency impedance in fuel cells, achieving metric of accuracy rate above 92\%. The network is further deployed on an FPGA, attaining a hardware-based recognition rate almost 90\%.

Automated plankton recognition models face significant challenges during real-world deployment due to distribution shifts (Out-of-Distribution, OoD) between training and test data. This stems from plankton's complex morphologies, vast species diversity, and the continuous discovery of novel species, which leads to unpredictable errors during inference. Despite rapid advancements in OoD detection methods in recent years, the field of plankton recognition still lacks a systematic integration of the latest computer vision developments and a unified benchmark for large-scale evaluation. T o address this, this paper meticulously designed a series of OoD benchmarks simulating various distribution shift scenarios based on the DYB-PlanktonNet dataset [27], and systematically evaluated twenty-two OoD detection methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the ViM [57] method significantly outperforms other approaches in our constructed benchmarks, particularly excelling in Far-OoD scenarios with substantial improvements in key metrics. This comprehensive evaluation not only provides a reliable reference for algorithm selection in automated plankton recognition but also lays a solid foundation for future research in plankton OoD detection. T o our knowledge, this study marks the first large-scale, systematic evaluation and analysis of Out-of-Distribution data detection methods in plankton recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/BlackJack0083/