In cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), it is a common practice to tune hyperparameters in ideal simulated environments to maximize cooperative performance. However, policies tuned for cooperation often fail to maintain robustness and resilience under real-world uncertainties. Building trustworthy MARL systems requires a deep understanding of robustness, which ensures stability under uncertainties, and resilience, the ability to recover from disruptions--a concept extensively studied in control systems but largely overlooked in MARL. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study comprising over 82,620 experiments to evaluate cooperation, robustness, and resilience in MARL across 4 real-world environments, 13 uncertainty types, and 15 hyperparameters. Our key findings are: (1) Under mild uncertainty, optimizing cooperation improves robustness and resilience, but this link weakens as perturbations intensify. Robustness and resilience also varies by algorithm and uncertainty type. (2) Robustness and resilience do not generalize across uncertainty modalities or agent scopes: policies robust to action noise for all agents may fail under observation noise on a single agent. (3) Hyperparameter tuning is critical for trustworthy MARL: surprisingly, standard practices like parameter sharing, GAE, and PopArt can hurt robustness, while early stopping, high critic learning rates, and Leaky ReLU consistently help. By optimizing hyperparameters only, we observe substantial improvement in cooperation, robustness and resilience across all MARL backbones, with the phenomenon also generalizing to robust MARL methods across these backbones. Code and results available at https://github.com/BUAA-TrustworthyMARL/adv_marl_benchmark .

Time Series Forecasting (TSF) faces persistent challenges in modeling intricate temporal dependencies across different scales. Despite recent advances leveraging different decomposition operations and novel architectures based on CNN, MLP or Transformer, existing methods still struggle with static decomposition strategies, fragmented dependency modeling, and inflexible fusion mechanisms, limiting their ability to model intricate temporal dependencies. To explicitly solve the mentioned three problems respectively, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-Scale Coordination Framework (DMSC) with Multi-Scale Patch Decomposition block (EMPD), Triad Interaction Block (TIB) and Adaptive Scale Routing MoE block (ASR-MoE). Specifically, EMPD is designed as a built-in component to dynamically segment sequences into hierarchical patches with exponentially scaled granularities, eliminating predefined scale constraints through input-adaptive patch adjustment. TIB then jointly models intra-patch, inter-patch, and cross-variable dependencies within each layer's decomposed representations. EMPD and TIB are jointly integrated into layers forming a multi-layer progressive cascade architecture, where coarse-grained representations from earlier layers adaptively guide fine-grained feature extraction in subsequent layers via gated pathways. And ASR-MoE dynamically fuses multi-scale predictions by leveraging specialized global and local experts with temporal-aware weighting. Comprehensive experiments on thirteen real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DMSC consistently maintains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and superior computational efficiency for TSF tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/1327679995/DMSC.

Sensor-based sorting systems enable the physical separation of a material stream into two fractions. The sorting decision is based on the image data evaluation of the sensors used and is carried out using actuators. Various process parameters must be set depending on the properties of the material stream, the dimensioning of the system, and the required sorting accuracy. However, continuous verification and re-adjustment are necessary due to changing requirements and material stream compositions. In this paper, we introduce an approach for optimizing, recurrently monitoring and adjusting the process parameters of a sensor-based sorting system. Based on Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian process regression models are used as surrogate models to achieve specific requirements for system behavior with the uncertainties contained therein. This method minimizes the number of necessary experiments while simultaneously considering two possible optimization targets based on the requirements for both material output streams. In addition, uncertainties are considered during determining sorting accuracies in the model calculation. We evaluated the method with three example process parameters.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have significantly advanced computer vision, demonstrating strong performance across various tasks. However, the attention mechanism in ViTs makes each layer function as a low-pass filter, and the stacked-layer architecture in existing transformers suffers from frequency vanishing. This leads to the loss of critical details and textures. We propose a novel, circuit-theory-inspired strategy called Frequency-Dynamic Attention Modulation (FDAM), which can be easily plugged into ViTs. FDAM directly modulates the overall frequency response of ViTs and consists of two techniques: Attention Inversion (AttInv) and Frequency Dynamic Scaling (FreqScale). Since circuit theory uses low-pass filters as fundamental elements, we introduce AttInv, a method that generates complementary high-pass filtering by inverting the low-pass filter in the attention matrix, and dynamically combining the two. We further design FreqScale to weight different frequency components for fine-grained adjustments to the target response function. Through feature similarity analysis and effective rank evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach avoids representation collapse, leading to consistent performance improvements across various models, including SegFormer, DeiT, and MaskDINO. These improvements are evident in tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Additionally, we apply our method to remote sensing detection, achieving state-of-the-art results in single-scale settings. The code is available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDAM.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer low-latency and energy-efficient decision making on neuromorphic hardware, making them attractive for Reinforcement Learning (RL) in resource-constrained edge devices. However, most RL algorithms for continuous control are designed for Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), particularly the target network soft update mechanism, which conflicts with the discrete and non-differentiable dynamics of spiking neurons. We show that this mismatch destabilizes SNN training and degrades performance. To bridge the gap between discrete SNNs and continuous-control algorithms, we propose a novel proxy target framework. The proxy network introduces continuous and differentiable dynamics that enable smooth target updates, stabilizing the learning process. Since the proxy operates only during training, the deployed SNN remains fully energy-efficient with no additional inference overhead. Extensive experiments on continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently improves stability and achieves up to $32\%$ higher performance across various spiking neuron models. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that enables SNNs with simple Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF) neurons to surpass their ANN counterparts in continuous control. This work highlights the importance of SNN-tailored RL algorithms and paves the way for neuromorphic agents that combine high performance with low power consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/xuzijie32/Proxy-Target.

Expectile regression neural networks (ERNNs) are powerful tools for capturing heterogeneity and complex nonlinear structures in data. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fully observed data, with limited attention paid to scenarios involving censored observations. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation-based ERNNs algorithm, termed DAERNN, for modeling heterogeneous censored data. The proposed DAERNN is fully data-driven, requires minimal assumptions, and offers substantial flexibility. Simulation studies and real-data applications demonstrate that DAERNN outperforms existing censored ERNNs methods and achieves predictive performance comparable to models trained on fully observed data. Moreover, the algorithm provides a unified framework for handling various censoring mechanisms without requiring explicit parametric model specification, thereby enhancing its applicability to practical censored data analysis. Introduction Expectile regression (ER), first proposed by Newey and Powell (1987), has been extensively studied as a flexible alternative to quantile regression (QR) for modeling heterogeneous distributions.

Simulating coupled PDE systems is computationally intensive, and prior efforts have largely focused on training surrogates on the joint (coupled) data, which requires a large amount of data. In the paper, we study compositional diffusion approaches where diffusion models are only trained on the decoupled PDE data and are composed at inference time to recover the coupled field. Specifically, we investigate whether the compositional strategy can be feasible under long time horizons involving a large number of time steps. In addition, we compare a baseline diffusion model with that trained using the v-parameterization strategy. We also introduce a symmetric compositional scheme for the coupled fields based on the Euler scheme. We evaluate on Reaction-Diffusion and modified Burgers with longer time grids, and benchmark against a Fourier Neural Operator trained on coupled data. Despite seeing only decoupled training data, the compositional diffusion models recover coupled trajectories with low error. v-parameterization can improve accuracy over a baseline diffusion model, while the neural operator surrogate remains strongest given that it is trained on the coupled data. These results show that compositional diffusion is a viable strategy towards efficient, long-horizon modeling of coupled PDEs.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The devices bring wireless installation and familiar Wyze features like AI detection and local storage to the outdoors. Wyze Labs expands its budget-priced smart home security lineup this week with two new wireless outdoor cameras: the Battery Video Doorbell and the Solar Cam Pan pan/tilt camera. The Wyze Battery Video Doorbell is built for easy installation and full front-door coverage. The doorbell can operate wire-free for three to six months on a charge, or you can connect it to your existing low-voltage wiring for continuous power.

Found Energy, a startup in Boston, aims to harness the energy in scraps of aluminum metal to power industrial processes without fossil fuels. Since 2022, the company has worked to develop ways to rapidly release energy from aluminum on a small scale. Now it's just switched on a much larger version of its aluminum-powered engine, which it claims is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. Early next year, it will be installed to supply heat and hydrogen to a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US, using the aluminum waste produced by the plant itself as fuel. If everything works as planned, this technology, which uses a catalyst to unlock the energy stored within aluminum metal, could transform a growing share of aluminum scrap into a zero-carbon fuel. Rondo Energy just turned on what it says is the world's largest thermal battery, an energy storage system that can take in electricity and provide a consistent source of heat.

How much of Europe's oil still comes from Russia? The European Union is preparing to adopt a new round of sweeping sanctions against Russian energy exports on Thursday, a day after United States President Donald Trump imposed similar measures against Moscow amid setbacks to his efforts at diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. These steps come as Russia and Ukraine are increasingly targeting each other's energy infrastructure in an attempt to make it economically harder to wage war. On the ground, Russia's war in Ukraine remained stagnant. Russia claimed it had taken another handful of villages during the past week - Tykhe and Pishchane in Kharkiv, Novopavlivka, Chunyshyne and Pleshcheyevka in Donetsk, Poltavka in Zaporizhia and Privillia in Dnipropetrovsk. On the whole, however, Ukrainian front lines remained resilient and Russia scored no major breakthrough.