Aquatic organisms are known for their ability to generate efficient propulsion with low energy expenditure. While existing research has sought to leverage bio-inspired structures to reduce energy costs in underwater robotics, the crucial role of control policies in enhancing efficiency has often been overlooked. In this study, we optimize the motion of a bio-mimetic robotic fish using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to maximize propulsion efficiency and minimize energy consumption. Our novel DRL approach incorporates extended pressure perception, a transformer model processing sequences of observations, and a policy transfer scheme. Notably, significantly improved training stability and speed within our approach allow for end-to-end training of the robotic fish. This enables agiler responses to hydrodynamic environments and possesses greater optimization potential compared to pre-defined motion pattern controls. Our experiments are conducted on a serially connected rigid robotic fish in a free stream with a Reynolds number of 6000 using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The DRL-trained policies yield impressive results, demonstrating both high efficiency and propulsion. The policies also showcase the agent's embodiment, skillfully utilizing its body structure and engaging with surrounding fluid dynamics, as revealed through flow analysis. This study provides valuable insights into the bio-mimetic underwater robots optimization through DRL training, capitalizing on their structural advantages, and ultimately contributing to more efficient underwater propulsion systems.

Entity structure extraction, which aims to extract entities and their associated attribute-value structures from text, is an essential task for text understanding and knowledge graph construction. Existing methods based on large language models (LLMs) typically rely heavily on predefined entity attribute schemas or annotated datasets, often leading to incomplete extraction results. To address these challenges, we introduce Zero-Shot Open-schema Entity Structure Discovery (ZOES), a novel approach to entity structure extraction that does not require any schema or annotated samples. ZOES operates via a principled mechanism of enrichment, refinement, and unification, based on the insight that an entity and its associated structure are mutually reinforcing. Experiments demonstrate that ZOES consistently enhances LLMs' ability to extract more complete entity structures across three different domains, showcasing both the effectiveness and generalizability of the method. These findings suggest that such an enrichment, refinement, and unification mechanism may serve as a principled approach to improving the quality of LLM-based entity structure discovery in various scenarios.

Natural disasters have caused significant losses to human society, and the timely and efficient acquisition of post-disaster environmental information is crucial for the effective implementation of rescue operations. Due to the complexity of post-disaster environments, existing sensing technologies face challenges such as weak environmental adaptability, insufficient specialized sensing capabilities, and limited practicality of sensing solutions. This paper explores the heterogeneous multi-agent online autonomous collaborative scheduling algorithm HoAs-PALN, aimed at achieving efficient collection of post-disaster environmental information. HoAs-PALN is realized through adaptive dimensionality reduction in the matching process and local Nash equilibrium game, facilitating autonomous collaboration among time-dependent UAVs, workers and vehicles to enhance sensing scheduling. (1) In terms of adaptive dimensionality reduction during the matching process, HoAs-PALN significantly reduces scheduling decision time by transforming a five-dimensional matching process into two categories of three-dimensional matching processes; (2) Regarding the local Nash equilibrium game, HoAs-PALN combines the softmax function to optimize behavior selection probabilities and introduces a local Nash equilibrium determination mechanism to ensure scheduling decision performance. Finally, we conducted detailed experiments based on extensive real-world and simulated data. Compared with the baselines (GREEDY, K-WTA, MADL and MARL), HoAs-PALN improves task completion rates by 64.12%, 46.48%, 16.55%, and 14.03% on average, respectively, while each online scheduling decision takes less than 10 seconds, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic post-disaster environments.

Amid the challenges posed by global population growth and climate change, traditional agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) systems is currently undergoing a significant digital transformation to facilitate efficient big data processing. While smart agriculture utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable precise control, it still encounters significant challenges, including excessive reliance on agricultural expert knowledge, difficulties in fusing multimodal data, poor adaptability to dynamic environments, and bottlenecks in real-time decision-making at the edge. Large language models (LLMs), with their exceptional capabilities in knowledge acquisition and semantic understanding, provide a promising solution to address these challenges. To this end, we propose Farm-LightSeek, an edge-centric multimodal agricultural IoT data analytics framework that integrates LLMs with edge computing. This framework collects real-time farmland multi-source data (images, weather, geographic information) via sensors, performs cross-modal reasoning and disease detection at edge nodes, conducts low-latency management decisions, and enables cloud collaboration for model updates. The main innovations of Farm-LightSeek include: (1) an agricultural "perception-decision-action" closed-loop architecture; (2) cross-modal adaptive monitoring; and (3)a lightweight LLM deployment strategy balancing performance and efficiency. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Farm-LightSeek consistently achieves reliable performance in mission-critical tasks, even under the limitations of edge computing resources. This work advances intelligent real-time agricultural solutions and highlights the potential for deeper integration of agricultural IoT with LLMs.

We introduce FailureSensorIQ, a novel Multi-Choice Question-Answering (MCQA) benchmarking system designed to assess the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason and understand complex, domain-specific scenarios in Industry 4.0. Unlike traditional QA benchmarks, our system focuses on multiple aspects of reasoning through failure modes, sensor data, and the relationships between them across various industrial assets. Through this work, we envision a paradigm shift where modeling decisions are not only data-driven using statistical tools like correlation analysis and significance tests, but also domain-driven by specialized LLMs which can reason about the key contributors and useful patterns that can be captured with feature engineering. We evaluate the Industrial knowledge of over a dozen LLMs-including GPT-4, Llama, and Mistral-on FailureSensorIQ from different lens using Perturbation-Uncertainty-Complexity analysis, Expert Evaluation study, Asset-Specific Knowledge Gap analysis, ReAct agent using external knowledge-bases. Even though closed-source models with strong reasoning capabilities approach expert-level performance, the comprehensive benchmark reveals a significant drop in performance that is fragile to perturbations, distractions, and inherent knowledge gaps in the models. We also provide a real-world case study of how LLMs can drive the modeling decisions on 3 different failure prediction datasets related to various assets. We release: (a) expert-curated MCQA for various industrial assets, (b) FailureSensorIQ benchmark and Hugging Face leaderboard based on MCQA built from non-textual data found in ISO documents, and (c) LLMFeatureSelector, an LLM-based feature selection scikit-learn pipeline. The software is available at https://github.com/IBM/FailureSensorIQ.

Considering the proliferation of responses to Piantadosi's original paper and the ongoing debate sparked by this special issue of the Italian Journal of Linguistics, it is clear that the discussion has touched a raw nerve in linguistic theorizing . In the original target paper (Chesi, this issue), I illustrated three prototypical (and in many respects, extreme) positions -- the computational, theoretical, and experimental perspectives -- without explicitly endorsing any of them. Instead, I attempted to highlight what I believe are the key weaknesses o f each of these prototypical stances, ultimately concluding that formal (i.e., ' generative ') linguistics -- more specifically, Minimalis m, my theoretical comfort zone -- must adopt practices and tools that are common in both computational and experimental fields . As noted by most respondents, the title and some of the more extreme statements were intended as mild provocations to draw attention to core issues affecting linguistic theorizing . M y position -- somehow obscured behind the ' three - body problem ' -- is that any relevant scientific progress is driven by theoretical insight, not by trawling using experimental or computational methods that are cost - inefficient, energy - intensive, and ultimately unsustainable . Moreover, in full agreement with most of the replies, I believe that the success of certain large language models (L L Ms), which are based on specific architectural assumptions, do es not constitute a refutation of the generative paradigm. On the contrary, it strongly supports several key intuitions that have emerged within the generative linguistic tradition (Rizzi this issue) . H owever, a concrete problem of ' incommensurability ' arises (Hao this issue), as differing methodologies and specialized jargon (Butt this issue) often result in circular, unresolved discussions .

AI for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Management aims to automate complex operational workflows -- such as condition monitoring, maintenance planning, and intervention scheduling -- to reduce human workload and minimize system downtime. Traditional AI/ML approaches have primarily tackled these problems in isolation, solving narrow tasks within the broader operational pipeline. In contrast, the emergence of AI agents and large language models (LLMs) introduces a next-generation opportunity: enabling end-to-end automation across the entire asset lifecycle. This paper envisions a future where AI agents autonomously manage tasks that previously required distinct expertise and manual coordination. To this end, we introduce AssetOpsBench -- a unified framework and environment designed to guide the development, orchestration, and evaluation of domain-specific agents tailored for Industry 4.0 applications. We outline the key requirements for such holistic systems and provide actionable insights into building agents that integrate perception, reasoning, and control for real-world industrial operations. The software is available at https://github.com/IBM/AssetOpsBench.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) uniquely combine high accuracy with interpretability, making them valuable for scientific modeling. However, it is unclear a priori how deep a network needs to be for any given task, and deeper KANs can be difficult to optimize. Here we introduce multi-exit KANs, where each layer includes its own prediction branch, enabling the network to make accurate predictions at multiple depths simultaneously. This architecture provides deep supervision that improves training while discovering the right level of model complexity for each task. Multi-exit KANs consistently outperform standard, single-exit versions on synthetic functions, dynamical systems, and real-world datasets. Remarkably, the best predictions often come from earlier, simpler exits, revealing that these networks naturally identify smaller, more parsimonious and interpretable models without sacrificing accuracy. To automate this discovery, we develop a differentiable "learning to exit" algorithm that balances contributions from exits during training. Our approach offers scientists a practical way to achieve both high performance and interpretability, addressing a fundamental challenge in machine learning for scientific discovery.

CubeSats offer a low-cost platform for space research, particularly for Earth observation. However, their resource-constrained nature and being in space, challenge the flexibility and complexity of the deployed image processing pipelines and their orchestration. This paper introduces two novel systems, DIPP and DISH, to address these challenges. DIPP is a modular and configurable image processing pipeline framework that allows for adaptability to changing mission goals even after deployment, while preserving robustness. DISH is a domain-specific language (DSL) and runtime system designed to schedule complex imaging workloads on low-power and memory-constrained processors. Our experiments demonstrate that DIPP's decomposition of the processing pipelines adds negligible overhead, while significantly reducing the network requirements of updating pipelines and being robust against erroneous module uploads. Furthermore, we compare DISH to Lua, a general purpose scripting language, and demonstrate its comparable expressiveness and lower memory requirement.

Despite recent progress in general purpose robotics, robot policies still lag far behind basic human capabilities in the real world. Humans interact constantly with the physical world, yet this rich data resource remains largely untapped in robot learning. We propose EgoZero, a minimal system that learns robust manipulation policies from human demonstrations captured with Project Aria smart glasses, $\textbf{and zero robot data}$. EgoZero enables: (1) extraction of complete, robot-executable actions from in-the-wild, egocentric, human demonstrations, (2) compression of human visual observations into morphology-agnostic state representations, and (3) closed-loop policy learning that generalizes morphologically, spatially, and semantically. We deploy EgoZero policies on a gripper Franka Panda robot and demonstrate zero-shot transfer with 70% success rate over 7 manipulation tasks and only 20 minutes of data collection per task. Our results suggest that in-the-wild human data can serve as a scalable foundation for real-world robot learning - paving the way toward a future of abundant, diverse, and naturalistic training data for robots. Code and videos are available at https://egozero-robot.github.io.