Autonomous Raman instruments on Mars rovers, deep-sea landers, and field robots must interpret raw spectra distorted by fluorescence baselines, peak shifts, and limited ground-truth labels. Using curated subsets of the RRUFF database, we evaluate one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and report four advances: (i) Baseline-independent classification: compact CNNs surpass $k$-nearest-neighbors and support-vector machines on handcrafted features, removing background-correction and peak-picking stages while ensuring reproducibility through released data splits and scripts. (ii) Pooling-controlled robustness: tuning a single pooling parameter accommodates Raman shifts up to $30 \,\mathrm{cm}^{-1}$, balancing translational invariance with spectral resolution. (iii) Label-efficient learning: semi-supervised generative adversarial networks and contrastive pretraining raise accuracy by up to $11\%$ with only $10\%$ labels, valuable for autonomous deployments with scarce annotation. (iv) Constant-time adaptation: freezing the CNN backbone and retraining only the softmax layer transfers models to unseen minerals at $\mathcal{O}(1)$ cost, outperforming Siamese networks on resource-limited processors. This workflow, which involves training on raw spectra, tuning pooling, adding semi-supervision when labels are scarce, and fine-tuning lightly for new targets, provides a practical path toward robust, low-footprint Raman classification in autonomous exploration.

Abstract--T o maximize hardware efficiency and performance accuracy in Compute-In-Memory (CIM)-based neural network accelerators for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, co-optimizing both software and hardware design parameters is essential. Manual tuning is impractical due to the vast number of parameters and their complex interdependencies. T o effectively automate the design and optimization of CIM-based neural network accelerators, hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) techniques can be applied. This work introduces CIMNAS, a joint model-quantization-hardware optimization framework for CIM architectures. CIMNAS simultaneously searches across software parameters, quantization policies, and a broad range of hardware parameters, incorporating device-, circuit-, and architecture-level co-optimizations. CIMNAS experiments were conducted over a search space of 9.9 10 Evaluated on the ImageNet dataset, CIMNAS achieved a reduction in energy-delay-area product (EDAP) ranging from 90.1 to 104.5, an improvement in TOPS/W between 4.68 and 4.82, and an enhancement in TOPS/mm The adaptability and robustness of CIMNAS are demonstrated by extending the framework to support the SRAM-based ResNet50 architecture, achieving up to an 819.5 reduction in EDAP . Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, CIMNAS achieves EDAP-focused optimization without any accuracy loss, generating diverse software-hardware parameter combinations for high-performance CIMbased neural network designs. The exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and increasing AI model complexity are raising the energy demands for training and processing AI workloads [1]. This trend has created a demand for more sustainable and energy-efficient hardware solutions for AI applications. Compute-In-Memory (CIM) neural network accelerators have emerged as promising architectures for achieving energy-efficient AI processing [2]-[6]. To maximize the hardware efficiency of CIM accelerators and maintain high performance for neural network workloads, it is essential to co-optimize both neural network model parameters and CIM hardware parameters [7]. Mohammed Fouda is with Compumacy for Artificial Intelligence Solutions, Cairo, Egypt.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for time series analysis, driven by large-scale pretraining on diverse data corpora. However, time series inherently exhibit heterogeneous information density over time, influenced by system states and signal complexity, presenting significant modeling challenges especially in a zero-shot scenario. Current TSFMs rely on non-adaptive processing pipelines that fail to capture this dynamic nature. For example, common tokenization strategies such as fixed-size patching enforce rigid observational granularity, limiting their ability to adapt to varying information densities. Similarly, conventional positional encodings impose a uniform temporal scale, making it difficult to model diverse periodicities and trends across series. To overcome these limitations, we propose Kairos, a flexible TSFM framework that integrates a dynamic patching tokenizer and an instance-adaptive positional embedding. Kairos adaptively selects tokenization granularity and tailors positional encodings to the unique characteristics of each time series instance. Trained on a large-scale Predictability-Stratified Time Series (PreSTS) corpus comprising over 300 billion time points and adopting a multi-patch prediction strategy in the inference stage, Kairos achieves superior performance with much fewer parameters on two common zero-shot benchmarks, GIFT-Eval and the Time-Series-Library benchmark, consistently outperforming established methods across diverse tasks. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/Kairos .

Ensuring power grid resilience requires the timely and unsupervised detection of anomalies in synchrophasor data streams. We introduce T-BiGAN, a novel framework that integrates window-attention Transformers within a bidirectional Generative Adversarial Network (BiGAN) to address this challenge. Its self-attention encoder-decoder architecture captures complex spatio-temporal dependencies across the grid, while a joint discriminator enforces cycle consistency to align the learned latent space with the true data distribution. Anomalies are flagged in real-time using an adaptive score that combines reconstruction error, latent space drift, and discriminator confidence. Evaluated on a realistic hardware-in-the-loop PMU benchmark, T-BiGAN achieves an ROC-AUC of 0.95 and an average precision of 0.996, significantly outperforming leading supervised and unsupervised methods. It shows particular strength in detecting subtle frequency and voltage deviations, demonstrating its practical value for live, wide-area monitoring without relying on manually labeled fault data.

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers such as Bayesian optimization -- form the backbone of BBO, yet often struggle in high-dimensional, noisy, or mixed-integer settings. Recent advances use machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance BBO: ML provides expressive surrogates, adaptive updates, meta-learning portfolios, and generative models, while RL enables dynamic operator configuration, robustness, and meta-optimization across tasks. This paper surveys these developments, covering representative algorithms such as NNs with the modular model-based optimization framework (mlrMBO), zeroth-order adaptive momentum methods (ZO-AdaMM), automated BBO (ABBO), distributed block-wise optimization (DiBB), partition-based Bayesian optimization (SPBOpt), the transformer-based optimizer (B2Opt), diffusion-model-based BBO, surrogate-assisted RL for differential evolution (Surr-RLDE), robust BBO (RBO), coordinate-ascent model-based optimization with relative entropy (CAS-MORE), log-barrier stochastic gradient descent (LB-SGD), policy improvement with black-box (PIBB), and offline Q-learning with Mamba backbones (Q-Mamba). We also review benchmark efforts such as the NeurIPS 2020 BBO Challenge and the MetaBox framework. Overall, we highlight how ML and RL transform classical inexact solvers into more scalable, robust, and adaptive frameworks for real-world optimization.

Weather foundation models (WFMs) have recently set new benchmarks in global forecast skill, yet their concrete value for the weather-sensitive infrastructure that powers modern society remains largely unexplored. In this study, we fine-tune Silurian AI's 1.5B-parameter WFM, Generative Forecasting Transformer (GFT), on a rich archive of Hydro-Québec asset observations--including transmission-line weather stations, wind-farm met-mast streams, and icing sensors--to deliver hyper-local, asset-level forecasts for five grid-critical variables: surface temperature, precipitation, hub-height wind speed, wind-turbine icing risk, and rime-ice accretion on overhead conductors. Across 6-72 h lead times, the tailored model surpasses state-of-the-art NWP benchmarks, trimming temperature mean absolute error (MAE) by 15%, total-precipitation MAE by 35%, and lowering wind speed MAE by 15%. Most importantly, it attains an average precision score of 0.72 for day-ahead rime-ice detection, a capability absent from existing operational systems, which affords several hours of actionable warning for potentially catastrophic outage events. These results show that WFMs, when post-trained with small amounts of high-fidelity, can serve as a practical foundation for next-generation grid-resilience intelligence.

Integrated wind-solar-wave marine energy systems hold broad promise for supplying clean electricity in offshore and coastal regions. By leveraging the spatiotemporal complementarity of multiple resources, such systems can effectively mitigate the intermittency and volatility of single-source outputs, thereby substantially improving overall power-generation efficiency and resource utilization. Accurate ultra-short-term forecasting is crucial for ensuring secure operation and optimizing proactive dispatch. However, most existing forecasting methods construct separate models for each energy source, insufficiently account for the complex couplings among multiple energies, struggle to capture the system's nonlinear and nonstationary dynamics, and typically depend on extensive manual parameter tuning-limitations that constrain both predictive performance and practicality. We address this issue using a Bayesian-optimized Multivariate Variational Mode Decomposition-Long Short-Term Memory (MVMD-LSTM) framework. The framework first applies MVMD to jointly decompose wind, solar and wave power series so as to preserve cross-source couplings; it uses Bayesian optimization to automatically search the number of modes and the penalty parameter in the MVMD process to obtain intrinsic mode functions (IMFs); finally, an LSTM models the resulting IMFs to achieve ultra-short-term power forecasting for the integrated system. Experiments based on field measurements from an offshore integrated energy platform in China show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms benchmark models in terms of MAPE, RMSE and MAE. The results demonstrate superior predictive accuracy, robustness, and degree of automation.

The recent progress in TinyML technologies triggers the need to address the challenge of balancing inference time and classification quality. TinyML systems are defined by specific constraints in computation, memory and energy. These constraints emphasize the need for specialized optimization techniques when implementing Machine Learning (ML) applications on such platforms. While deep neural networks are widely used in TinyML, the exploration of Dynamic Ensemble Selection (DES) methods is also beneficial. This study examines a DES-Clustering approach for a multi-class computer vision task within TinyML systems. This method allows for adjusting classification accuracy, thereby affecting latency and energy consumption per inference. We implemented the TinyDES-Clustering library, optimized for embedded system limitations. Experiments have shown that a larger pool of classifiers for dynamic selection improves classification accuracy, and thus leads to an increase in average inference time on the TinyML device. Keywords: Embedded Machine Learning TinyML Dynamic Ensemble Selection.

We present the AgriCruiser, an open-source over-the-row agricultural robot developed for low-cost deployment and rapid adaptation across diverse crops and row layouts. The chassis provides an adjustable track width of 1.42 m to 1.57 m, along with a ground clearance of 0.94 m. The AgriCruiser achieves compact pivot turns with radii of 0.71 m to 0.79 m, enabling efficient headland maneuvers. The platform is designed for the integration of the other subsystems, and in this study, a precision spraying system was implemented to assess its effectiveness in weed management. In twelve flax plots, a single robotic spray pass reduced total weed populations (pigweed and Venice mallow) by 24- to 42-fold compared to manual weeding in four flax plots, while also causing less crop damage. Mobility experiments conducted on concrete, asphalt, gravel, grass, and both wet and dry soil confirmed reliable traversal consistent with torque sizing. The complete chassis can be constructed from commodity T-slot extrusion with minimal machining, resulting in a bill of materials costing approximately $5,000 - $6,000, which enables replication and customization. The mentioned results demonstrate that low-cost, reconfigurable over-the-row robots can achieve effective weed management with reduced crop damage and labor requirements, while providing a versatile foundation for phenotyping, sensing, and other agriculture applications. Design files and implementation details are released to accelerate research and adoption of modular agricultural robotics.

Recent advances in multimodal time series learning underscore a paradigm shift from analytics centered on basic patterns toward advanced time series understanding and reasoning. However, existing multimodal time series datasets mostly remain at the level of surface alignment and question answering, without reaching the depth of genuine reasoning. The absence of well-defined tasks that genuinely require time series reasoning, along with the scarcity of high-quality data, has limited progress in building practical time series reasoning models (TSRMs). To this end, we introduce Time Series Reasoning Suite (TSR-Suite), which formalizes four atomic tasks that span three fundamental capabilities for reasoning with time series: (1) perception, acquired through scenario understanding and causality discovery; (2) extrapolation, realized via event-aware forecasting; and (3) decision-making, developed through deliberation over perception and extrapolation. TSR-Suite is the first comprehensive time series reasoning suite that supports not only thorough evaluation but also the data pipeline and training of TSRMs. It contains more than 23K samples, of which 2.3K are carefully curated through a human-guided hierarchical annotation process. Building on this foundation, we introduce TimeOmni-1, the first unified reasoning model designed to address diverse real-world problems demanding time series reasoning. The model is trained in multiple stages, integrating a mixture of task scenarios, novel reward functions, and tailored optimizations. Experiments show that TimeOmni-1 delivers strong out-of-distribution generalization across all tasks and achieves a high rate of valid responses. It significantly improves causality discovery accuracy (64.0% vs. 35.9% with GPT-4.1) and raises the valid response rate by over 6% compared to GPT-4.1 on the event-aware forecasting task.