Fast and reliable validation of novel designs in complex physical systems such as batteries is critical to accelerating technological innovation. However, battery research and development remain bottlenecked by the prohibitively high time and energy costs required to evaluate numerous new design candidates, particularly in battery prototyping and life testing. Despite recent progress in data-driven battery lifetime prediction, existing methods require labeled data of target designs to improve accuracy and cannot make reliable predictions until after prototyping, thus falling far short of the efficiency needed to enable rapid feedback for battery design. Here, we introduce Discovery Learning (DL), a scientific machine-learning paradigm that integrates active learning, physics-guided learning, and zero-shot learning into a human-like reasoning loop, drawing inspiration from learning theories in educational psychology. DL can learn from historical battery designs and actively reduce the need for prototyping, thus enabling rapid lifetime evaluation for unobserved material-design combinations without requiring additional data labeling. To test DL, we present 123 industrial-grade large-format lithium-ion pouch cells, spanning eight material-design combinations and diverse cycling protocols. Trained solely on public datasets of small-capacity cylindrical cells, DL achieves 7.2% test error in predicting the average cycle life under unknown device variability. This results in savings of 98% in time and 95% in energy compared to industrial practices. This work highlights the potential of uncovering insights from historical designs to inform and accelerate the development of next-generation battery technologies. DL represents a key advance toward efficient data-driven modeling and helps realize the promise of machine learning for accelerating scientific discovery and engineering innovation.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong semantic understanding and zero-shot generalization, yet most existing systems assume an accurate low-level controller with hand-crafted action "vocabulary" such as end-effector pose or root velocity. This assumption confines prior work to quasi-static tasks and precludes the agile, whole-body behaviors required by humanoid whole-body control (WBC) tasks. To capture this gap in the literature, we start by introducing the first sim-to-real-ready, vision-language, closed-loop benchmark for humanoid WBC, comprising over 150 tasks from 10 categories. We then propose LeVERB: Latent Vision-Language-Encoded Robot Behavior, a hierarchical latent instruction-following framework for humanoid vision-language WBC, the first of its kind. At the top level, a vision-language policy learns a latent action vocabulary from synthetically rendered kinematic demonstrations; at the low level, a reinforcement-learned WBC policy consumes these latent verbs to generate dynamics-level commands. In our benchmark, LeVERB can zero-shot attain a 80% success rate on simple visual navigation tasks, and 58.5% success rate overall, outperforming naive hierarchical whole-body VLA implementation by 7.8 times.

The bi-objective shortest-path (BOSP) problem seeks to find paths between start and target vertices of a graph while optimizing two conflicting objective functions. We consider the BOSP problem in the presence of correlated objectives. Such correlations often occur in real-world settings such as road networks, where optimizing two positively correlated objectives, such as travel time and fuel consumption, is common. BOSP is generally computationally challenging as the size of the search space is exponential in the number of objective functions and the graph size. Bounded sub-optimal BOSP solvers such as A*pex alleviate this complexity by approximating the Pareto-optimal solution set rather than computing it exactly (given a user-provided approximation factor). As the correlation between objective functions increases, smaller approximation factors are sufficient for collapsing the entire Pareto-optimal set into a single solution. We leverage this insight to propose an efficient algorithm that reduces the search effort in the presence of correlated objectives. Our approach for computing approximations of the entire Pareto-optimal set is inspired by graph-clustering algorithms. It uses a preprocessing phase to identify correlated clusters within a graph and to generate a new graph representation. This allows a natural generalization of A*pex to run up to five times faster on DIMACS dataset instances, a standard benchmark in the field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm proposed that efficiently and effectively exploits correlations in the context of bi-objective search while providing theoretical guarantees on solution quality.

Closed -loop brain stimulation holds potential as personalized treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) but still suffers from limitations that result in highly variable efficacy. First, stimulation is typically delivered upon detection of the seizure to abort rather than prevent it; second, the stimulation parameters are established by trial and error, requiring lengthy rounds of fine -tuning, which delay steady-state therapeutic efficacy. Here, we address these limitations by leveraging the potential of neuromorphic computing. We present a neuromorphic reservoir computing hardware system capable of driving real - time personalized free-run stimulations based on seizure forecasting, wherein each forecast triggers an electrical pulse rather than an arbitrarily predefined fixed -frequency stimulus train. The system achieves 83.33% accuracy in forecasting seizure occurrences during the training phase. We validate the system using hippocampal spheroids coupled to 3D microelectrode array as a simplified testbed, achieving seizure reduction >97% during the real -time processing while primarily using instantaneous stimulation frequencies within 20 Hz, well below what typically used in clinical practice. Our work demonstrates the potential of neuromorphic systems as a next -generation neuromodulation strategy for personalized DRE treatment, leveraging their sparse and event-driven processing for real -time applications. Keywords: Neuromorphic system, drug-resistant epilepsy, seizure forecasting, neuromodulation, closed -loop stimulation, edge-devices.

Conventional multi-rotors are under-actuated systems, hindering them from independently controlling attitude from position. In this study, we present several distinct configurations that incorporate additional control inputs for manipulating the angles of the propeller axes. This addresses the mentioned limitations, making the systems "omniorientational". We comprehensively derived detailed dynamic models for all introduced configurations and validated by a methodology using Simscape Multibody simulations. Two controllers are designed: a sliding mode controller for robust handling of disturbances and a novel PID-based controller with gravity compensation integrating linear and non-linear allocators, designed for computational efficiency. A custom control allocation strategy is implemented to manage the input-non-affine nature of these systems, seeking to maximize battery life by minimizing the "Power Consumption Factor" defined in this study. Moreover, the controllers effectively managed harsh disturbances and uncertainties. Simulations compare and analyze the proposed configurations and controllers, majorly considering their power consumption. Furthermore, we conduct a qualitative comparison to evaluate the impact of different types of uncertainties on the control system, highlighting areas for potential model or hardware improvements. The analysis in this study provides a roadmap for future researchers to design omniorientational drones based on their design objectives, offering practical insights into configuration selection and controller design. This research aligns with the project SAC-1, one of the objectives of Sharif AgRoLab.

Abstract--Cloud segmentation is a critical preprocessing step for many Earth observation tasks, yet most models are tightly coupled to specific sensor configurations and rely on ground-based processing. In this work, we propose Fast-SEnSeI, a lightweight, sensor-independent encoder module that enables flexible, on-board cloud segmentation across multispectral sensors with varying band configurations. Building upon SEnSeI-v2, Fast-SEnSeI integrates an improved spectral descriptor, lightweight architecture, and robust padding-band handling. It accepts arbitrary combinations of spectral bands and their wavelengths, producing fixed-size feature maps that feed into a compact, quantized segmentation model based on a modified U-Net. The module runs efficiently on embedded CPUs using Apache TVM, while the segmentation model is deployed on FPGA, forming a CPU-FPGA hybrid pipeline suitable for space-qualified hardware. Evaluations on Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 datasets demonstrate accurate segmentation across diverse input configurations. As the volume of satellite imagery captured in orbit continues to grow, the traditional paradigm of ground-based data processing is reaching its limits. Downlink bottlenecks, limited bandwidth, and the need for timely data products have driven the development of on-board artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities [1], [2], [3], [4]. By moving parts of the processing pipeline directly onto the satellite, it becomes possible to filter, analyze, and prioritize data before transmission, enhancing mission efficiency and enabling new forms of real-time decision-making. A particularly promising application of on-board AI is cloud segmentation.

In target-driven navigation and autonomous exploration, reasonable prediction of unknown regions is crucial for efficient navigation and environment understanding. Existing methods mostly focus on single objects or geometric occupancy maps, lacking the ability to model room-level semantic structures. We propose SemSight, a probabilistic bird's-eye-view prediction model for multi-level scene semantics. The model jointly infers structural layouts, global scene context, and target area distributions, completing semantic maps of unexplored areas while estimating probability maps for target categories. To train SemSight, we simulate frontier-driven exploration on 2,000 indoor layout graphs, constructing a diverse dataset of 40,000 sequential egocentric observations paired with complete semantic maps. We adopt an encoder-decoder network as the core architecture and introduce a mask-constrained supervision strategy. This strategy applies a binary mask of unexplored areas so that supervision focuses only on unknown regions, forcing the model to infer semantic structures from the observed context. Experimental results show that SemSight improves prediction performance for key functional categories in unexplored regions and outperforms non-mask-supervised approaches on metrics such as Structural Consistency (SC) and Region Recognition Accuracy (PA). It also enhances navigation efficiency in closed-loop simulations, reducing the number of search steps when guiding robots toward target areas.

Real-world time-series data often exhibit non-stationarity, including changing trends, irregular seasonality, and residuals. In terms of changing trends, recently proposed multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models have shown excellent performance owing to their computational efficiency and ability to capture long-term dependency. However, the linear nature of MLP architectures poses limitations when applied to channels with diverse distributions, resulting in local variations such as seasonal patterns and residual components being ignored. However, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can effectively incorporate these variations. To resolve the limitations of MLP, we propose combining them with CNNs. The overall trend is modeled using an MLP to consider long-term dependencies. The CNN uses diverse kernels to model fine-grained local patterns in conjunction with MLP trend predictions. To focus on modeling local variation, we propose IConv, a novel convolutional architecture that processes the temporal dependency channel independently and considers the inter-channel relationship through distinct layers. Independent channel processing enables the modeling of diverse local temporal dependencies and the adoption of a large kernel size. Distinct inter-channel considerations reduce computational cost. The proposed model is evaluated through extensive experiments on time-series datasets. The results reveal the superiority of the proposed method for multivariate time-series forecasting.