Conventional time-series generation often ignores domain-specific physical constraints, limiting statistical and physical consistency. We propose a hierarchical framework that embeds the inherent hierarchy of physical laws-conservation, dynamics, boundary, and empirical relations-directly into deep generative models, introducing a new paradigm of physics-informed inductive bias. Our method combines Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) for learning physical operators with Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) for probabilistic generation, integrated via time-dependent hierarchical constraints and FNO-guided corrections. Experiments on harmonic oscillators, human activity recognition, and lithium-ion battery degradation show 16.3% higher generation quality, 46% fewer physics violations, and 18.5% improved predictive accuracy over baselines.

Large Language Model (LLM) inference in production must meet stringent service-level objectives for both time-to-first-token (TTFT) and time-between-token (TBT) while maximizing throughput under fixed compute, memory, and interconnect budgets. Modern serving systems adopt stall-free scheduling techniques such as chunked prefill, which splits long prompt processing along the token dimension and interleaves prefill with ongoing decode iterations. While effective at stabilizing TBT, chunked prefill incurs substantial overhead in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models: redundant expert weight loads increase memory traffic by up to 39% and inflate energy consumption. We propose layered prefill, a new scheduling paradigm that treats transformer layer groups as the primary scheduling unit. By vertically partitioning the model into contiguous layer groups and interleaving prefill and decode across the groups, layered prefill sustains stall-free decoding while eliminating chunk-induced MoE weight reloads. It reduces off-chip bandwidth demand, lowering TTFT by up to 70%, End-to-End latency by 41% and per-token energy by up to 22%. Evaluations show that layered prefill consistently improves the TTFT--TBT Pareto frontier over chunked prefill, reducing expert-load traffic and energy cost while maintaining stall-free decoding. Overall, shifting the scheduling axis from tokens to layers unlocks a new operating regime for high-efficiency, energy-aware LLM serving in co-located environments.

This paper presents a machine learning framework for electricity demand forecasting across diverse geographical regions using the gradient boosting algorithm XGBoost. The model integrates historical electricity demand and comprehensive weather and socioeconomic variables to predict normalized electricity demand profiles. To enable robust training and evaluation, we developed a large-scale dataset spanning multiple years and countries, applying a temporal data-splitting strategy that ensures benchmarking of out-of-sample performance. Our approach delivers accurate and scalable demand forecasts, providing valuable insights for energy system planners and policymakers as they navigate the challenges of the global energy transition.

Climate policy studies require models that capture the combined effects of multiple greenhouse gases on global temperature, but these models are computationally expensive and difficult to embed in reinforcement learning. We present a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that integrates a high-fidelity, highly efficient climate surrogate directly in the environment loop, enabling regional agents to learn climate policies under multi-gas dynamics. As a proof of concept, we introduce a recurrent neural network architecture pretrained on ($20{,}000$) multi-gas emission pathways to surrogate the climate model CICERO-SCM. The surrogate model attains near-simulator accuracy with global-mean temperature RMSE $\approx 0.0004 \mathrm{K}$ and approximately $1000\times$ faster one-step inference. When substituted for the original simulator in a climate-policy MARL setting, it accelerates end-to-end training by $>\!100\times$. We show that the surrogate and simulator converge to the same optimal policies and propose a methodology to assess this property in cases where using the simulator is intractable. Our work allows to bypass the core computational bottleneck without sacrificing policy fidelity, enabling large-scale multi-agent experiments across alternative climate-policy regimes with multi-gas dynamics and high-fidelity climate response.

LLM-based financial agents have attracted widespread excitement for their ability to trade like human experts. However, most systems exhibit a "profit mirage": dazzling back-tested returns evaporate once the model's knowledge window ends, because of the inherent information leakage in LLMs. In this paper, we systematically quantify this leakage issue across four dimensions and release FinLake-Bench, a leakage-robust evaluation benchmark. Furthermore, to mitigate this issue, we introduce FactFin, a framework that applies counterfactual perturbations to compel LLM-based agents to learn causal drivers instead of memorized outcomes. FactFin integrates four core components: Strategy Code Generator, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and Counterfactual Simulator. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses all baselines in out-of-sample generalization, delivering superior risk-adjusted performance.

In real-time and safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPSs), control synthesis must guarantee that generated policies meet stringent timing and correctness requirements under uncertain and dynamic conditions. Signal temporal logic (STL) has emerged as a powerful formalism of expressing real-time constraints, with its semantics enabling quantitative assessment of system behavior. Meanwhile, reinforcement learning (RL) has become an important method for solving control synthesis problems in unknown environments. Recent studies incorporate STL-based reward functions into RL to automatically synthesize control policies. However, the automatically inferred rewards obtained by these methods represent the global assessment of a whole or partial path but do not accumulate the rewards of local changes accurately, so the sparse global rewards may lead to non-convergence and unstable training performances. In this paper, we propose an online reward generation method guided by the online causation monitoring of STL. Our approach continuously monitors system behavior against an STL specification at each control step, computing the quantitative distance toward satisfaction or violation and thereby producing rewards that reflect instantaneous state dynamics. Additionally, we provide a smooth approximation of the causation semantics to overcome the discontinuity of the causation semantics and make it differentiable for using deep-RL methods. We have implemented a prototype tool and evaluated it in the Gym environment on a variety of continuously controlled benchmarks. Experimental results show that our proposed STL-guided RL method with online causation semantics outperforms existing relevant STL-guided RL methods, providing a more robust and efficient reward generation framework for deep-RL.

Over the years, significant contributions have been made by the research and industrial sectors to improve wearable devices towards the Internet of Wearable Things (IoWT) paradigm. However, wearables are still facing several challenges. Many stem from the limited battery power and insufficient computation resources available on wearable devices. On the other hand, with the popularity of smart wearables, there is a consistent increase in the development of new computationally intensive and latency-critical applications. In such a context, task offloading allows wearables to leverage the resources available on nearby edge devices to enhance the overall user experience. This paper proposes a framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based task offloading in the IoWT. We formulate the task offloading process considering the tradeoff between energy consumption and task accomplishment time. Moreover, we model the task offloading problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and utilize the Q-learning technique to enable the wearable device to make optimal task offloading decisions without prior knowledge. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework through extensive simulations for various applications and system configurations conducted in the ns-3 network simulator. We also show how varying the main system parameters of the Q-learning algorithm affects the overall performance in terms of average task accomplishment time, average energy consumption, and percentage of tasks offloaded.

This paper presents a rotation-invariant embedded platform for simulating (neural) cellular automata (NCA) in modular robotic systems. Inspired by previous work on physical NCA, we introduce key innovations that overcome limitations in prior hardware designs. Our platform features a symmetric, modular structure, enabling seamless connections between cells regardless of orientation. Additionally, each cell is battery-powered, allowing it to operate independently and retain its state even when disconnected from the collective. To demonstrate the platform's applicability, we present a novel rotation-invariant NCA model for isotropic shape classification. The proposed system provides a robust foundation for exploring the physical realization of NCA, with potential applications in distributed robotic systems and self-organizing structures.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong abilities in reasoning and problem solving, but recent studies reveal that they still struggle with time series reasoning tasks, where outputs are often affected by hallucination or knowledge leakage. In this work we propose TS-Agent, a time series reasoning agent that leverages LLMs strictly for what they excel at, i.e., gathering evidence and synthesizing it into conclusions through step-by-step reasoning, while delegating the extraction of statistical and structural information to time series analytical tools. Instead of mapping time series into text tokens, images, or embeddings, our agent interacts with raw numeric sequences through atomic operators, records outputs in an explicit evidence log, and iteratively refines its reasoning under the guidance of a self-critic and a final quality gate. This design avoids multi-modal alignment training, preserves the native form of time series, ensures interpretability and verifiability, and mitigates knowledge leakage or hallucination. Empirically, we evaluate the agent on established benchmarks. Our experiments show that TS-Agent achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs on understanding benchmarks, and delivers significant improvements on reasoning tasks, where existing models often rely on memorization and fail in zero-shot settings.

With increasing processing power, deploying AI models for remote sensing directly onboard satellites is becoming feasible. However, new constraints arise, mainly when using raw, unprocessed sensor data instead of preprocessed ground-based products. While current solutions primarily rely on preprocessed sensor images, few approaches directly leverage raw data. This study investigates the effects of utilising raw data on deep learning models for object detection and classification tasks. We introduce a simulation workflow to generate raw-like products from high-resolution L1 imagery, enabling systemic evaluation. Two object detection models (YOLOv11n and YOLOX-S) are trained on both raw and L1 datasets, and their performance is compared using standard detection metrics and explainability tools. Results indicate that while both models perform similarly at low to medium confidence thresholds, the model trained on raw data struggles with object boundary identification at high confidence levels. It suggests that adapting AI architectures with improved contouring methods can enhance object detection on raw images, improving onboard AI for remote sensing.