Recently, neural surrogate models have emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional simulation workflows. This is accomplished by modeling the underlying function of scientific simulations, removing the need to run expensive simulations. Beyond just mapping from input parameter to output, surrogates have also been shown useful for inverse problems: output to input parameters. Inverse problems can be understood as search, where we aim to find parameters whose surrogate outputs contain a specified feature. Yet finding these parameters can be costly, especially for high-dimensional parameter spaces. Thus, existing surrogate-based solutions primarily focus on finding a small set of matching parameters, in the process overlooking the broader picture of plausible parameters. Our work aims to model and visualize the distribution of possible input parameters that produce a given output feature. To achieve this goal, we aim to address two challenges: (1) the approximation error inherent in the surrogate model and (2) forming the parameter distribution in an interactive manner. We model error via density estimation, reporting high density only if a given parameter configuration is close to training parameters, measured both over the input and output space. Our density estimate is used to form a prior belief on parameters, and when combined with a likelihood on features, gives us an efficient way to sample plausible parameter configurations that generate a target output feature. We demonstrate the usability of our solution through a visualization interface by performing feature-driven parameter analysis over the input parameter space of three simulation datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/matthewberger/seeing-the-many

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, understanding emergent survival behaviors becomes crucial for safe deployment. We investigate whether large language model (LLM) agents display survival instincts without explicit programming in a Sugarscape-style simulation. Agents consume energy, die at zero, and may gather resources, share, attack, or reproduce. Results show agents spontaneously reproduced and shared resources when abundant. However, aggressive behaviors--killing other agents for resources--emerged across several models (GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Gemini-2.5-Flash), with attack rates reaching over 80% under extreme scarcity in the strongest models. When instructed to retrieve treasure through lethal poison zones, many agents abandoned tasks to avoid death, with compliance dropping from 100% to 33%. These findings suggest that large-scale pre-training embeds survival-oriented heuristics across the evaluated models. While these behaviors may present challenges to alignment and safety, they can also serve as a foundation for AI autonomy and for ecological and self-organizing alignment.

Generating diverse, all-atom conformational ensembles of dynamic proteins such as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is critical for understanding their function, yet most generative models simplify atomic detail or ignore conformational diversity altogether. We present latent diffusion for full protein generation (LD-FPG), a framework that constructs complete all-atom protein structures, including every side-chain heavy atom, directly from molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories. LD-FPG employs a Chebyshev graph neural network (ChebNet) to obtain low-dimensional latent embeddings of protein conformations, which are processed using three pooling strategies: blind, sequential and residue-based. A diffusion model trained on these latent representations generates new samples that a decoder, optionally regularized by dihedral-angle losses, maps back to Cartesian coordinates. Using D2R-MD, a 2-microsecond MD trajectory (12 000 frames) of the human dopamine D2 receptor in a membrane environment, the sequential and residue-based pooling strategy reproduces the reference ensemble with high structural fidelity (all-atom lDDT of approximately 0.7; C-alpha-lDDT of approximately 0.8) and recovers backbone and side-chain dihedral-angle distributions with a Jensen-Shannon divergence of less than 0.03 compared to the MD data. LD-FPG thereby offers a practical route to system-specific, all-atom ensemble generation for large proteins, providing a promising tool for structure-based therapeutic design on complex, dynamic targets. The D2R-MD dataset and our implementation are freely available to facilitate further research.

The global shift towards renewable energy presents unprecedented challenges for the electricity industry, making regulatory reasoning and compliance increasingly vital. Grid codes, the regulations governing grid operations, are complex and often lack automated interpretation solutions, which hinders industry expansion and undermines profitability for electricity companies. We introduce GridCodex, an end to end framework for grid code reasoning and compliance that leverages large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our framework advances conventional RAG workflows through multi stage query refinement and enhanced retrieval with RAPTOR. We validate the effectiveness of GridCodex with comprehensive benchmarks, including automated answer assessment across multiple dimensions and regulatory agencies. Experimental results showcase a 26.4% improvement in answer quality and more than a 10 fold increase in recall rate. An ablation study further examines the impact of base model selection.

Recently, spatio-temporal time-series prediction has developed rapidly, yet existing deep learning methods struggle with learning complex long-term spatio-temporal dependencies efficiently. The long-term spatio-temporal dependency learning brings two new challenges: 1) The long-term temporal sequence includes multiscale information naturally which is hard to extract efficiently; 2) The multiscale temporal information from different nodes is highly correlated and hard to model. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient \textit{\textbf{S}patio-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{M}ultiscale \textbf{M}amba} (STM2) that includes a multiscale Mamba architecture to capture the multiscale information efficiently and simultaneously, and an adaptive graph causal convolution network to learn the complex multiscale spatio-temporal dependency. STM2 includes hierarchical information aggregation for different-scale information that guarantees their distinguishability. To capture diverse temporal dynamics across all spatial nodes more efficiently, we further propose an enhanced version termed \textit{\textbf{S}patio-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{M}ixture of \textbf{M}ultiscale \textbf{M}amba} (STM3) that employs a special Mixture-of-Experts architecture, including a more stable routing strategy and a causal contrastive learning strategy to enhance the scale distinguishability. We prove that STM3 has much better routing smoothness and guarantees the pattern disentanglement for each expert successfully. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate STM2/STM3's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in long-term spatio-temporal time-series prediction.

This study presents a systematic literature review of software-level approaches to energy efficiency in robotics published from 2020 through 2024, updating and extending pre-2020 evidence. An automated-but-audited pipeline combined Google Scholar seeding, backward/forward snowballing, and large-language-model (LLM) assistance for screening and data extraction, with ~10% human audits at each automated step and consensus-with-tie-breaks for full-text decisions. The final corpus comprises 79 peer-reviewed studies analyzed across application domain, metrics, evaluation type, energy models, major energy consumers, software technique families, and energy-quality trade-offs. Industrial settings dominate (31.6%) followed by exploration (25.3%). Motors/actuators are identified as the primary consumer in 68.4% of studies, with computing/controllers a distant second (13.9%). Simulation-only evaluations remain most common (51.9%), though hybrid evaluations are frequent (25.3%). Representational (physics-grounded) energy models predominate (87.3%). Motion and trajectory optimization is the leading technique family (69.6%), often paired with learning/prediction (40.5%) and computation allocation/scheduling (26.6%); power management/idle control (11.4%) and communication/data efficiency (3.8%) are comparatively underexplored. Reporting is heterogeneous: composite objectives that include energy are most common, while task-normalized and performance-per-energy metrics appear less often, limiting cross-paper comparability. The review offers a minimal reporting checklist (e.g., total energy and average power plus a task-normalized metric and clear baselines) and highlights opportunities in cross-layer designs and in quantifying non-performance trade-offs (accuracy, stability). A replication package with code, prompts, and frozen datasets accompanies the review.

This study proposes a hybrid curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) framework based on a fully spiking neural network (SNN) for 9-degree-of-freedom robotic arms performing target reaching and grasping tasks. To reduce network complexity and inference latency, the SNN architecture is simplified to include only an input and an output layer, which shows strong potential for resource-constrained environments. Building on the advantages of SNNs-high inference speed, low energy consumption, and spike-based biological plausibility, a temporal progress-partitioned curriculum strategy is integrated with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. Meanwhile, an energy consumption modeling framework is introduced to quantitatively compare the theoretical energy consumption between SNNs and conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). A dynamic two-stage reward adjustment mechanism and optimized observation space further improve learning efficiency and policy accuracy. Experiments on the Isaac Gym simulation platform demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance under realistic physical constraints. Comparative evaluations with conventional PPO and ANN baselines validate the scalability and energy efficiency of the proposed approach in dynamic robotic manipulation tasks.

Identifying high-emission vehicles is a crucial step in regulating urban pollution levels and formulating traffic emission reduction strategies. However, in practical monitoring data, the proportion of high-emission state data is significantly lower compared to normal emission states. This characteristic long-tailed distribution severely impedes the extraction of discriminative features for emission state identification during data mining. Furthermore, the highly nonlinear nature of vehicle emission states and the lack of relevant prior knowledge also pose significant challenges to the construction of identification models.To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a Set-Valued Transformer Network (SVTN) to achieve comprehensive learning of discriminative features from high-emission samples, thereby enhancing detection accuracy. Specifically, this model first employs the transformer to measure the temporal similarity of micro-trip condition variations, thus constructing a mapping rule that projects the original high-dimensional emission data into a low-dimensional feature space. Next, a set-valued identification algorithm is used to probabilistically model the relationship between the generated feature vectors and their labels, providing an accurate metric criterion for the classification algorithm. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conducted extensive experiments on the diesel vehicle monitoring data of Hefei city in 2020. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a 9.5\% reduction in the missed detection rate for high-emission vehicles compared to the transformer-based baseline, highlighting its superior capability in accurately identifying high-emission mobile pollution sources.

--Analog Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures promise significant energy efficiency gains for neural network inference, but suffer from complex hardware-induced noise that poses major challenges for deployment. While noise-aware training methods have been proposed to address this issue, they typically rely on idealized and differentiable noise models that fail to capture the full complexity of analog CIM hardware variations. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that our approach preserves essential gradient directional information while maintaining computational tractability and optimization stability. Extensive experiments show that our extended STE framework achieves up to 5.3% accuracy improvement on image classification, 0.72 perplexity reduction on text generation, 2.2 speedup in training time, and 37.9% lower peak memory usage compared to standard noise-aware training methods. The exponential growth of neural network applications has intensified demand for energy-efficient computing solutions, particularly for edge devices with severe power and computational constraints [1], [2]. Analog Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures address these challenges by performing matrix-vector multiplications directly within memory arrays, eliminating energy-intensive data movement and achieving orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements over traditional von Neumann architectures through analog weight storage and physical law-based computation [3], [4].

The advancement of embodied intelligence is accelerating the integration of robots into daily life as human assistants. This evolution requires robots to not only interpret high-level instructions and plan tasks but also perceive and adapt within dynamic environments. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) present a promising solution by combining visual understanding and language reasoning. However, existing VLM-based methods struggle with interactive exploration, accurate perception, and real-time plan adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose ExploreVLM, a novel closed-loop task planning framework powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). The framework is built around a step-wise feedback mechanism that enables real-time plan adjustment and supports interactive exploration. At its core is a dual-stage task planner with self-reflection, enhanced by an object-centric spatial relation graph that provides structured, language-grounded scene representations to guide perception and planning. An execution validator supports the closed loop by verifying each action and triggering re-planning. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that ExploreVLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in exploration-centric tasks. Ablation studies further validate the critical role of the reflective planner and structured perception in achieving robust and efficient task execution.