Box/cabinet scenarios with stacked objects pose significant challenges for robotic motion due to visual occlusions and constrained free space. Traditional collision-free trajectory planning methods often fail when no collision-free paths exist, and may even lead to catastrophic collisions caused by invisible objects. To overcome these challenges, we propose an operational aware interactive motion planner (PaiP) a real-time closed-loop planning framework utilizing multimodal tactile perception. This framework autonomously infers object interaction features by perceiving motion effects at interaction interfaces. These interaction features are incorporated into grid maps to generate operational cost maps. Building upon this representation, we extend sampling-based planning methods to interactive planning by optimizing both path cost and operational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that PaiP achieves robust motion in narrow spaces.

Operating in environments too harsh or inaccessible for humans is one of the critical roles expected of robots. However, such environments often pose risks to electronic components as well. To overcome this, various approaches have been developed, including autonomous mobile robots without electronics, hydraulic remotely actuated mobile robots, and long-reach robot arms driven by wires. Among these, electronics-free autonomous robots cannot make complex decisions, while hydraulically actuated mobile robots and wire-driven robot arms are used in harsh environments such as nuclear power plants. Mobile robots offer greater reach and obstacle avoidance than robot arms, and wire mechanisms offer broader environmental applicability than hydraulics. However, wire-driven systems have not been used for remote actuation of mobile robots. In this study, we propose a novel mechanism called Remote Wire Drive that enables remote actuation of mobile robots via wires. This mechanism is a series connection of decoupled joints, a mechanism used in wire-driven robot arms, adapted for power transmission. We experimentally validated its feasibility by actuating a wire-driven quadruped robot, which we also developed in this study, through Remote Wire Drive.

The proliferation of spectroscopic data across various scientific and engineering fields necessitates automated processing. We introduce OASIS (Omni-purpose Analysis of Spectra via Intelligent Systems), a machine learning (ML) framework for technique-independent, automated spectral analysis, encompassing denoising, baseline correction, and comprehensive peak parameter (location, intensity, FWHM) retrieval without human intervention. OASIS achieves its versatility through models trained on a strategically designed synthetic dataset incorporating features from numerous spectroscopy techniques. Critically, the development of innovative, task-specific loss functions-such as the vicinity peak response (ViPeR) for peak localization-enabled the creation of compact yet highly accurate models from this dataset, validated with experimental data from Raman, UV-vis, and fluorescence spectroscopy. OASIS demonstrates significant potential for applications including in situ experiments, high-throughput optimization, and online monitoring. This study underscores the optimization of the loss function as a key resource-efficient strategy to develop high-performance ML models.

Accurate precipitation forecasting is indispensable in agriculture, disaster management, and sustainable strategies. However, predicting rainfall has been challenging due to the complexity of climate systems and the heterogeneous nature of multi-source observational data, including radar, satellite imagery, and surface-level measurements. The multi-source data vary in spatial and temporal resolution, and they carry domain-specific features, making it challenging for effective integration in conventional deep learning models. Previous research has explored various machine learning techniques for weather prediction; however, most struggle with the integration of data with heterogeneous modalities. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Mixture of Experts (MoE) model tailored for precipitation rate prediction. Each expert within the model specializes in a specific modality or spatio-temporal pattern. We also incorporated a dynamic router that learns to assign inputs to the most relevant experts. Our results show that this modular design enhances predictive accuracy and interpretability. In addition to the modeling framework, we introduced an interactive web-based visualization tool that enables users to intuitively explore historical weather patterns over time and space. The tool was designed to support decision-making for stakeholders in climate-sensitive sectors. We evaluated our approach using a curated multimodal climate dataset capturing real-world conditions during Hurricane Ian in 2022. The benchmark results show that the Adaptive MoE significantly outperformed all the baselines.

Graphs are a fundamental data structure for modeling relational systems, where entities (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (edges). This representation naturally arises in a wide range of domains, including chemistry (molecular structures) [2], social networks [3], Transportation & Logistics [4], Electrical Grids & Circuits [5], Communication Networks, Finance and Economics [6], and many more. Traditional machine learning models often struggle to process such non-Euclidean data due to their irregular topology. To address this, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful class of models that learn over graph-structured inputs by iteratively aggregating and transforming information from a node's neighborhood. By capturing both local structure and node features, GNNs enable tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph-level regression. Among their many variants, models like Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) [7], Graph Attention Networks (GATs) [8], and GraphSAGE [9] have demonstrated strong performance in both transductive and inductive settings, making GNNs a key building block in modern geometric deep learning. While classical GNNs have achieved remarkable success, their scalability and expressiveness can be limited by the classical nature of their computation [10], especially when modeling systems with inherent quantum structure, such as molecules or quantum materials. Quantum Graph Neural Networks (QGNNs) aim to address this by leveraging the computational power of parameterized quantum circuits to encode and process graph data in a quantum-enhanced latent space.

This paper introduces a novel framework for optimizing observer-based soft sensors through dynamic causality analysis. Traditional approaches to sensor selection often rely on linearized observability indices or statistical correlations that fail to capture the temporal evolution of complex systems. We address this gap by leveraging liquid-time constant (LTC) networks, continuous-time neural architectures with input-dependent time constants, to systematically identify and prune sensor inputs with minimal causal influence on state estimation. Our methodology implements an iterative workflow: training an LTC observer on candidate inputs, quantifying each input's causal impact through controlled perturbation analysis, removing inputs with negligible effect, and retraining until performance degradation occurs. We demonstrate this approach on three mechanistic testbeds representing distinct physical domains: a harmonically forced spring-mass-damper system, a nonlinear continuous stirred-tank reactor, and a predator-prey model following the structure of the Lotka-Volterra model, but with seasonal forcing and added complexity. Results show that our causality-guided pruning consistently identifies minimal sensor sets that align with underlying physics while improving prediction accuracy. The framework automatically distinguishes essential physical measurements from noise and determines when derived interaction terms provide complementary versus redundant information. Beyond computational efficiency, this approach enhances interpretability by grounding sensor selection decisions in dynamic causal relationships rather than static correlations, offering significant benefits for soft sensing applications across process engineering, ecological monitoring, and agricultural domains.

Detecting and localizing leaks in water distribution network systems is an important topic with direct environmental, economic, and social impact. Our paper is the first to explore the use of factor graph optimization techniques for leak localization in water distribution networks, enabling us to perform sensor fusion between pressure and demand sensor readings and to estimate the network's temporal and structural state evolution across all network nodes. The methodology introduces specific water network factors and proposes a new architecture composed of two factor graphs: a leak-free state estimation factor graph and a leak localization factor graph. When a new sensor reading is obtained, unlike Kalman and other interpolation-based methods, which estimate only the current network state, factor graphs update both current and past states. Results on Modena, L-TOWN and synthetic networks show that factor graphs are much faster than nonlinear Kalman-based alternatives such as the UKF, while also providing improvements in localization compared to state-of-the-art estimation-localization approaches. Implementation and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/pirofti/FGLL.

Branched broomrape (Phelipanche ramosa (L.) Pomel) is a chlorophyll-deficient parasitic plant that threatens tomato production by extracting nutrients from the host, with reported yield losses up to 80 percent. Its mostly subterranean life cycle and prolific seed production (more than 200,000 seeds per plant, viable for up to 20 years) make early detection essential. We present an end-to-end pipeline that uses Sentinel-2 imagery and time-series analysis to identify broomrape-infested tomato fields in California. Regions of interest were defined from farmer-reported infestations, and images with less than 10 percent cloud cover were retained. We processed 12 spectral bands and sun-sensor geometry, computed 20 vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI, NDMI), and derived five plant traits (Leaf Area Index, Leaf Chlorophyll Content, Canopy Chlorophyll Content, Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation, and Fractional Vegetation Cover) using a neural network calibrated with ground-truth and synthetic data. Trends in Canopy Chlorophyll Content delineated transplanting-to-harvest periods, and phenology was aligned using growing degree days. Vegetation pixels were segmented and used to train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network on 18,874 pixels across 48 growing-degree-day time points. The model achieved 88 percent training accuracy and 87 percent test accuracy, with precision 0.86, recall 0.92, and F1 0.89. Permutation feature importance ranked NDMI, Canopy Chlorophyll Content, FAPAR, and a chlorophyll red-edge index as most informative, consistent with the physiological effects of infestation. Results show the promise of satellite-driven time-series modeling for scalable detection of parasitic stress in tomato farms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning and question-answering capabilities. However, they often produce inaccurate or unreliable content known as hallucinations. This unreliability significantly limits their deployment in high-stakes applications. Thus, there is a growing need for a general-purpose method to detect hallucinations in LLMs. In this work, we introduce HalluField, a novel field-theoretic approach for hallucination detection based on a parametrized variational principle and thermodynamics. Inspired by thermodynamics, HalluField models an LLM's response to a given query and temperature setting as a collection of discrete likelihood token paths, each associated with a corresponding energy and entropy. By analyzing how energy and entropy distributions vary across token paths under changes in temperature and likelihood, HalluField quantifies the semantic stability of a response. Hallucinations are then detected by identifying unstable or erratic behavior in this energy landscape. HalluField is computationally efficient and highly practical: it operates directly on the model's output logits without requiring fine-tuning or auxiliary neural networks. Notably, the method is grounded in a principled physical interpretation, drawing analogies to the first law of thermodynamics. Remarkably, by modeling LLM behavior through this physical lens, HalluField achieves state-of-the-art hallucination detection performance across models and datasets.

This survey offers a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in LiDAR-based autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), covering their design, perception, planning, and control strategies. Over the past decade, LiDAR technology has become a crucial enabler for high-speed, agile, and reliable UAV navigation, especially in GPS-denied environments. The paper begins by examining the evolution of LiDAR sensors, emphasizing their unique advantages such as high accuracy, long-range depth measurements, and robust performance under various lighting conditions, making them particularly well-suited for UAV applications. The integration of LiDAR with UAVs has significantly enhanced their autonomy, enabling complex missions in diverse and challenging environments. Subsequently, we explore essential software components, including perception technologies for state estimation and mapping, as well as trajectory planning and control methodologies, and discuss their adoption in LiDAR-based UAVs. Additionally, we analyze various practical applications of the LiDAR-based UAVs, ranging from industrial operations to supporting different aerial platforms and UAV swarm deployments. The survey concludes by discussing existing challenges and proposing future research directions to advance LiDAR-based UAVs and enhance multi-UAV collaboration. By synthesizing recent developments, this paper aims to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working to push the boundaries of LiDAR-based UAV systems.