Traditional fixed architectures struggle to cope with dynamic and unpredictable environments, leading to inefficiencies in energy consumption and connectivity. This paper addresses this gap by proposing an adaptive architecture for drone swarms, leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically select the optimal architecture--centralized, hierarchical, or holonic--based on real-time mission parameters such as task complexity, swarm size, and communication stability. Our system addresses the challenges of scalability, adaptability, and robustness, ensuring efficient energy consumption and maintaining connectivity under varying conditions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our adaptive architecture outperforms traditional static models in terms of scalability, energy efficiency, and connectivity. These results highlight the potential of our approach to provide a scalable, adaptable, and resilient solution for real-world disaster response scenarios.

We introduce perioperation, a paradigm for robotic data collection that sensorizes and records human manipulation while maximizing the transferability of the data to real robots. We implement this paradigm in DEXOP, a passive hand exoskeleton designed to maximize human ability to collect rich sensory (vision + tactile) data for diverse dexterous manipulation tasks in natural environments. DEXOP mechanically connects human fingers to robot fingers, providing users with direct contact feedback (via proprioception) and mirrors the human hand pose to the passive robot hand to maximize the transfer of demonstrated skills to the robot. The force feedback and pose mirroring make task demonstrations more natural for humans compared to teleoperation, increasing both speed and accuracy. We evaluate DEXOP across a range of dexterous, contact-rich tasks, demonstrating its ability to collect high-quality demonstration data at scale. Policies learned with DEXOP data significantly improve task performance per unit time of data collection compared to teleoperation, making DEXOP a powerful tool for advancing robot dexterity. Our project page is at https://dex-op.github.io.

Rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are a ubiquitous element of modern technology. In the last decades, the production and design of such batteries and their adjacent embedded charging and safety protocols, denoted by Battery Management Systems (BMS), has taken central stage. A fundamental challenge to be addressed is the trade-off between the speed of charging and the ageing behavior, resulting in the loss of capacity in the battery cell. We rely on a high-fidelity physics-based battery model and propose an approach to data-driven charging and safety protocol design. Following a Counterexample-Guided Inductive Synthesis scheme, we combine Reinforcement Learning (RL) with recent developments in data-driven formal methods to obtain a hybrid control strategy: RL is used to synthesise the individual controllers, and a data-driven abstraction guides their partitioning into a switched structure, depending on the initial output measurements of the battery. The resulting discrete selection among RL-based controllers, coupled with the continuous battery dynamics, realises a hybrid system. When a design meets the desired criteria, the abstraction provides probabilistic guarantees on the closed-loop performance of the cell.

The multifaceted nature of disaster impact shows that densely populated areas contribute more to aggregate burden, while sparsely populated but heavily affected regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study introduces a framework for quantifying the societal impacts of power outages by translating customer weighted outage exposure into deprivation measures, integrating welfare metrics with three recovery indicators, average outage days per customer, restoration duration, and relative restoration rate, computed from sequential EAGLE I observations and linked to Zip Code Tabulation Area demographics. Applied to four United States hurricanes, Beryl 2024 Texas, Helene 2024 Florida, Milton 2024 Florida, and Ida 2021 Louisiana, this standardized pipeline provides the first cross event, fine scale evaluation of outage impacts and their drivers. Results demonstrate regressive patterns with greater burdens in lower income areas, mechanistic analysis shows deprivation increases with longer restoration durations and decreases with faster restoration rates, explainable modeling identifies restoration duration as the dominant driver, and clustering reveals distinct recovery typologies not captured by conventional reliability metrics. This framework delivers a transferable method for assessing outage impacts and equity, comparative cross event evidence linking restoration dynamics to social outcomes, and actionable spatial analyses that support equity informed restoration planning and resilience investment.

Legged robots offer mobility where wheeled platforms fail, such as stairs, rubble, soft substrates, and cluttered indoor-outdoor settings, enabling applications in inspection, search and rescue, agriculture, and planetary exploration [1]. Robust locomotion control is therefore a foundational capability for practical quadrupedal systems, underpinning safe navigation and dependable operation across diverse terrains and disturbances [2]. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a compelling paradigm for such control because it optimizes closed-loop policies through interaction and can produce adaptive behaviors [3]. A substantial body of prior work has focused on training blind controllers that rely exclusively on proprioceptive inputs such as inertial measurement units (IMUs) and joint feedback [4]. While these blind policies can traverse uneven and unknown terrains through large-scale simulation and domain randomization, they inherently lack foresight: without exteroceptive input, they respond only upon contact and struggle to proactively avoid obstacles or plan foot placement on irregular ground. Vision complements proprioception by providing anticipatory geometric information, enabling early detection of distant obstacles and terrain changes [5]. As a result, cross-modal policies that integrate proprioception with depth imaging have gained prominence, facilitating safer and more efficient locomotion through earlier trajectory adjustments. Most existing cross-modal pipelines adopt multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) for the proprioceptive encoder and for the decision head that fuses proprioception with vision.

As the particle physics community needs higher and higher precisions in order to test our current model of the subatomic world, larger and larger datasets are necessary. With upgrades scheduled for the detectors of colliding-beam experiments around the world, and specifically at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, more collisions and more complex interactions are expected. This directly implies an increase in data produced and consequently in the computational resources needed to process them. At CERN, the amount of data produced is gargantuan. This is why the data have to be heavily filtered and selected in real time before being permanently stored. This data can then be used to perform physics analyses, in order to expand our current understanding of the universe and improve the Standard Model of physics. This real-time filtering, known as triggering, involves complex processing happening often at frequencies as high as 40 MHz. This thesis contributes to understanding how machine learning models can be efficiently deployed in such environments, in order to maximize throughput and minimize energy consumption. Inevitably, modern hardware designed for such tasks and contemporary algorithms are needed in order to meet the challenges posed by the stringent, high-frequency data rates. In this work, I present our graph neural network-based pipeline, developed for charged particle track reconstruction at the LHCb experiment at CERN. The pipeline was implemented end-to-end inside LHCb's first-level trigger, entirely on GPUs. Its performance was compared against the classical tracking algorithms currently in production at LHCb. The pipeline was also accelerated on the FPGA architecture, and its performance in terms of power consumption and processing speed was compared against the GPU implementation.

Remote sensing change detection is essential for monitoring urban expansion, disaster assessment, and resource management, offering timely, accurate, and large-scale insights into dynamic landscape transformations. While deep learning has revolutionized change detection, the increasing complexity and computational demands of modern models have not necessarily translated into significant accuracy gains. Instead of following this trend, this study explores a more efficient approach, focusing on lightweight models that maintain high accuracy while minimizing resource consumption, which is an essential requirement for on-satellite processing. To this end, we propose FlickCD, which means quick flick then get great results, pushing the boundaries of the performance-resource trade-off. FlickCD introduces an Enhanced Difference Module (EDM) to amplify critical feature differences between temporal phases while suppressing irrelevant variations such as lighting and weather changes, thereby reducing computational costs in the subsequent change decoder. Additionally, the FlickCD decoder incorporates Local-Global Fusion Blocks, leveraging Shifted Window Self-Attention (SWSA) and Efficient Global Self-Attention (EGSA) to effectively capture semantic information at multiple scales, preserving both coarse- and fine-grained changes. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlickCD reduces computational and storage overheads by more than an order of magnitude while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance or incurring only a minor (<1% F1) accuracy trade-off. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/xulsh8/FlickCD.

Large Language Models (LLMs) display remarkable capabilities to understand or even produce political discourse, but have been found to consistently display a progressive left-leaning bias. At the same time, so-called persona or identity prompts have been shown to produce LLM behavior that aligns with socioeconomic groups that the base model is not aligned with. In this work, we analyze whether zero-shot persona prompting with limited information can accurately predict individual voting decisions and, by aggregation, accurately predict positions of European groups on a diverse set of policies. We evaluate if predictions are stable towards counterfactual arguments, different persona prompts and generation methods. Finally, we find that we can simulate voting behavior of Members of the European Parliament reasonably well with a weighted F1 score of approximately 0.793. Our persona dataset of politicians in the 2024 European Parliament and our code are available at https://github.com/dess-mannheim/european_parliament_simulation.

While Generative AI stands to be one of the fastest adopted technologies ever, studies have made evident that the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) puts significant burden on energy grids and our environment. It may prove a hindrance to the Sustainability goals of any organization. A crucial step in any Sustainability strategy is monitoring or estimating the energy consumption of various components. While there exist multiple tools for monitoring energy consumption, there is a dearth of tools/frameworks for estimating the consumption or carbon emissions. Current drawbacks of both monitoring and estimation tools include high input data points, intrusive nature, high error margin, etc. We posit that leveraging emerging LLM benchmarks and related data points can help overcome aforementioned challenges while balancing accuracy of the emission estimations. To that extent, we discuss the challenges of current approaches and present our evolving framework, R-ICE, which estimates prompt level inference carbon emissions by leveraging existing state-of-the-art(SOTA) benchmark. This direction provides a more practical and non-intrusive way to enable emerging use-cases like dynamic LLM routing, carbon accounting, etc. Our promising validation results suggest that benchmark-based modelling holds great potential for inference emission estimation and warrants further exploration from the scientific community.

Climate control is crucial for greenhouse production as it directly affects crop growth and resource use. Reinforcement learning (RL) has received increasing attention in this field, but still faces challenges, including limited training efficiency and high reliance on initial learning conditions. Interactive RL, which combines human (grower) input with the RL agent's learning, offers a potential solution to overcome these challenges. However, interactive RL has not yet been applied to greenhouse climate control and may face challenges related to imperfect inputs. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the possibility and performance of applying interactive RL with imperfect inputs into greenhouse climate control, by: (1) developing three representative interactive RL algorithms tailored for greenhouse climate control (reward shaping, policy shaping and control sharing); (2) analyzing how input characteristics are often contradicting, and how the trade-offs between them make grower's inputs difficult to perfect; (3) proposing a neural network-based approach to enhance the robustness of interactive RL agents under limited input availability; (4) conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the three interactive RL algorithms with imperfect inputs in a simulated greenhouse environment. The demonstration shows that interactive RL incorporating imperfect grower inputs has the potential to improve the performance of the RL agent. RL algorithms that influence action selection, such as policy shaping and control sharing, perform better when dealing with imperfect inputs, achieving 8.4% and 6.8% improvement in profit, respectively. In contrast, reward shaping, an algorithm that manipulates the reward function, is sensitive to imperfect inputs and leads to a 9.4% decrease in profit. This highlights the importance of selecting an appropriate mechanism when incorporating imperfect inputs.