Energy
REFN: A Reinforcement-Learning-From-Network Framework against 1-day/n-day Exploitations
Yu, Tianlong, Liu, Lihong, Zhou, Ziyi, Xing, Fudu, Wang, Kailong, Yang, Yang
The exploitation of 1 day or n day vulnerabilities poses severe threats to networked devices due to massive deployment scales and delayed patching (average Mean Time To Patch exceeds 60 days). Existing defenses, including host based patching and network based filtering, are inadequate due to limited scalability across diverse devices, compatibility issues especially with embedded or legacy systems, and error prone deployment process (manual patch validation). To address these issues, we introduce REFN (Reinforcement Learning From Network), a novel framework that trains Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously generate network filters to prevent 1 day or n day exploitations. REFN ensures scalability by uniquely employs Reinforcement Learning (RL) driven by online network rewards instead of traditional Human Feedback (RLHF). REFN guarantees compatibility via unified deployment on edge security gateways (Amazon Eero). REFN provides robustness via online validation using real network traffic. Crucially, REFN addresses three core challenges in training LLMs for exploit prevention: 1) expanding current LLMs limited vulnerability fixing expertise via Agentic RAG based Knowledge Distillation, 2) bridging current LLMs language to network gaps through an RL From VNF Pipeline that translates language context (vulnerability description) into network enforcement, 3) addressing the LLM hallucination and non determinism via the Online Agentic Validation that penalizes erroneous outputs. Evaluated across 22 families of 1 day or n day exploits, REFN demonstrates effectiveness (21.1 percent higher accuracy than alternatives), efficiency (Mean Time To Patch of 3.65 hours) and scalability (easily scale to 10K devices). REFN serves as an initial step toward training LLMs to rapidly prevent massive scale 1 day or n day exploitations.
Geospatial Diffusion for Land Cover Imperviousness Change Forecasting
Varshney, Debvrat, Vats, Vibhas, Pandey, Bhartendu, Brelsford, Christa, Dias, Philipe
Land cover, both present and future, has a significant effect on several important Earth system processes. For example, impervious surfaces heat up and speed up surface water runoff and reduce groundwater infiltration, with concomitant effects on regional hydrology and flood risk. While regional Earth System models have increasing skill at forecasting hydrologic and atmospheric processes at high resolution in future climate scenarios, our ability to forecast land-use and land-cover change (LULC), a critical input to risk and consequences assessment for these scenarios, has lagged behind. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm exploiting Generative AI (GenAI) for land cover change forecasting by framing LULC forecasting as a data synthesis problem conditioned on historical and auxiliary data-sources. We discuss desirable properties of generative models that fundament our research premise, and demonstrate the feasibility of our methodology through experiments on imperviousness forecasting using historical data covering the entire conterminous United States. Specifically, we train a diffusion model for decadal forecasting of imperviousness and compare its performance to a baseline that assumes no change at all. Evaluation across 12 metropolitan areas for a year held-out during training indicate that for average resolutions $\geq 0.7\times0.7km^2$ our model yields MAE lower than such a baseline. This finding corroborates that such a generative model can capture spatiotemporal patterns from historical data that are significant for projecting future change. Finally, we discuss future research to incorporate auxiliary information on physical properties about the Earth, as well as supporting simulation of different scenarios by means of driver variables.
Synthesis of Deep Neural Networks with Safe Robust Adaptive Control for Reliable Operation of Wheeled Mobile Robots
Shahna, Mehdi Heydari, Mattila, Jouni
Deep neural networks (DNNs) can enable precise control while maintaining low computational costs by circumventing the need for dynamic modeling. However, the deployment of such black-box approaches remains challenging for heavy-duty wheeled mobile robots (WMRs), which are subject to strict international standards and prone to faults and disturbances. We designed a hierarchical control policy for heavy-duty WMRs, monitored by two safety layers with differing levels of authority. To this end, a DNN policy was trained and deployed as the primary control strategy, providing high-precision performance under nominal operating conditions. When external disturbances arise and reach a level of intensity such that the system performance falls below a predefined threshold, a low-level safety layer intervenes by deactivating the primary control policy and activating a model-free robust adaptive control (RAC) policy. This transition enables the system to continue operating while ensuring stability by effectively managing the inherent trade-off between system robustness and responsiveness. Regardless of the control policy in use, a high-level safety layer continuously monitors system performance during operation. It initiates a shutdown only when disturbances become sufficiently severe such that compensation is no longer viable and continued operation would jeopardize the system or its environment. The proposed synthesis of DNN and RAC policy guarantees uniform exponential stability of the entire WMR system while adhering to safety standards to some extent. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was further validated through real-time experiments using a 6,000 kg WMR.
Virtual Sensing for Solder Layer Degradation and Temperature Monitoring in IGBT Modules
Urgolo, Andrea, Stipsitz, Monika, Sanchis-Alepuz, Helios
Monitoring the degradation state of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) modules is essential for ensuring the reliability and longevity of power electronic systems, especially in safety-critical and high-performance applications. However, direct measurement of key degradation indicators - such as junction temperature, solder fatigue or delamination - remains challenging due to the physical inaccessibility of internal components and the harsh environment. In this context, machine learning-based virtual sensing offers a promising alternative by bridging the gap from feasible sensor placement to the relevant but inaccessible locations. This paper explores the feasibility of estimating the degradation state of solder layers, and the corresponding full temperature maps based on a limited number of physical sensors. Based on synthetic data of a specific degradation mode, we obtain a high accuracy in the estimation of the degraded solder area (1.17% mean absolute error), and are able to reproduce the surface temperature of the IGBT with a maximum relative error of 4.56% (corresponding to an average relative error of 0.37%).
Pinet: Optimizing hard-constrained neural networks with orthogonal projection layers
Grontas, Panagiotis D., Terpin, Antonio, Balta, Efe C., D'Andrea, Raffaello, Lygeros, John
We introduce an output layer for neural networks that ensures satisfaction of convex constraints. Our approach, $ฮ $net, leverages operator splitting for rapid and reliable projections in the forward pass, and the implicit function theorem for backpropagation. We deploy $ฮ $net as a feasible-by-design optimization proxy for parametric constrained optimization problems and obtain modest-accuracy solutions faster than traditional solvers when solving a single problem, and significantly faster for a batch of problems. We surpass state-of-the-art learning approaches in terms of training time, solution quality, and robustness to hyperparameter tuning, while maintaining similar inference times. Finally, we tackle multi-vehicle motion planning with non-convex trajectory preferences and provide $ฮ $net as a GPU-ready package implemented in JAX with effective tuning heuristics.
On Understanding of the Dynamics of Model Capacity in Continual Learning
Chakraborty, Supriyo, Raghavan, Krishnan
The stability-plasticity dilemma, closely related to a neural network's (NN) capacity-its ability to represent tasks-is a fundamental challenge in continual learning (CL). Within this context, we introduce CL's effective model capacity (CLEMC) that characterizes the dynamic behavior of the stability-plasticity balance point. We develop a difference equation to model the evolution of the interplay between the NN, task data, and optimization procedure. We then leverage CLEMC to demonstrate that the effective capacity-and, by extension, the stability-plasticity balance point is inherently non-stationary. We show that regardless of the NN architecture or optimization method, a NN's ability to represent new tasks diminishes when incoming task distributions differ from previous ones. We conduct extensive experiments to support our theoretical findings, spanning a range of architectures-from small feedforward network and convolutional networks to medium-sized graph neural networks and transformer-based large language models with millions of parameters.
On-Device Crack Segmentation for Edge Structural Health Monitoring
Zhang, Yuxuan, Xu, Ye, Martinez-Rau, Luciano Sebastian, Vu, Quynh Nguyen Phuong, Oelmann, Bengt, Bader, Sebastian
Crack segmentation can play a critical role in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) by enabling accurate identification of crack size and location, which allows to monitor structural damages over time. However, deploying deep learning models for crack segmentation on resource-constrained microcontrollers presents significant challenges due to limited memory, computational power, and energy resources. To address these challenges, this study explores lightweight U-Net architectures tailored for TinyML applications, focusing on three optimization strategies: filter number reduction, network depth reduction, and the use of Depthwise Separable Convolutions (DWConv2D). Our results demonstrate that reducing convolution kernels and network depth significantly reduces RAM and Flash requirement, and inference times, albeit with some accuracy trade-offs. Specifically, by reducing the filer number to 25%, the network depth to four blocks, and utilizing depthwise convolutions, a good compromise between segmentation performance and resource consumption is achieved. This makes the network particularly suitable for low-power TinyML applications. This study not only advances TinyML-based crack segmentation but also provides the possibility for energy-autonomous edge SHM systems.
Goal-Oriented Time-Series Forecasting: Foundation Framework Design
Fechete, Luca-Andrei, Sana, Mohamed, Ayed, Fadhel, Piovesan, Nicola, Li, Wenjie, De Domenico, Antonio, Salem, Tareq Si
Conventional time-series forecasting methods typically aim to minimize overall prediction error, without accounting for the varying importance of different forecast ranges in downstream applications. We propose a training methodology that enables forecasting models to adapt their focus to application-specific regions of interest at inference time, without retraining. The approach partitions the prediction space into fine-grained segments during training, which are dynamically reweighted and aggregated to emphasize the target range specified by the application. Unlike prior methods that predefine these ranges, our framework supports flexible, on-demand adjustments. Experiments on standard benchmarks and a newly collected wireless communication dataset demonstrate that our method not only improves forecast accuracy within regions of interest but also yields measurable gains in downstream task performance.
Large Model Empowered Embodied AI: A Survey on Decision-Making and Embodied Learning
Liang, Wenlong, Zhou, Rui, Ma, Yang, Zhang, Bing, Li, Songlin, Liao, Yijia, Kuang, Ping
Embodied AI aims to develop intelligent systems with physical forms capable of perceiving, decision-making, acting, and learning in real-world environments, providing a promising way to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Despite decades of explorations, it remains challenging for embodied agents to achieve human-level intelligence for general-purpose tasks in open dynamic environments. Recent breakthroughs in large models have revolutionized embodied AI by enhancing perception, interaction, planning and learning. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on large model empowered embodied AI, focusing on autonomous decision-making and embodied learning. We investigate both hierarchical and end-to-end decision-making paradigms, detailing how large models enhance high-level planning, low-level execution, and feedback for hierarchical decision-making, and how large models enhance Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end decision making. For embodied learning, we introduce mainstream learning methodologies, elaborating on how large models enhance imitation learning and reinforcement learning in-depth. For the first time, we integrate world models into the survey of embodied AI, presenting their design methods and critical roles in enhancing decision-making and learning. Though solid advances have been achieved, challenges still exist, which are discussed at the end of this survey, potentially as the further research directions.
Source Component Shift Adaptation via Offline Decomposition and Online Mixing Approach
This paper addresses source component shift adaptation, aiming to update predictions adapting to source component shifts for incoming data streams based on past training data. Existing online learning methods often fail to utilize recurring shifts effectively, while model-pool-based methods struggle to capture individual source components, leading to poor adaptation. In this paper, we propose a source component shift adaptation method via an offline decomposition and online mixing approach. We theoretically identify that the problem can be divided into two subproblems: offline source component decomposition and online mixing weight adaptation. Based on this, our method first determines prediction models, each of which learns a source component solely based on past training data offline through the EM algorithm. Then, it updates the mixing weight of the prediction models for precise prediction through online convex optimization. Thanks to our theoretical derivation, our method fully leverages the characteristics of the shifts, achieving superior adaptation performance over existing methods. Experiments conducted on various real-world regression datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines, reducing the cumulative test loss by up to 67.4%.