W e discuss the challenges and propose a framework for evalua ting engineering artificial general intelligence ( eAGI) agents. W e consider eAGI as a specialization of artificial general intelligence (AGI), deemed capab le of addressing a broad range of problems in the engineering of physical systems and associated controllers. W e exclude software engineering for a tractable s coping of eAGI and expect dedicated software engineering AI agents to address the software implementation challenges. Similar to human engineers, eAGI agents should possess a unique blend of background knowledge (recall and retrieve) of facts and methods, demonstrate familiarity with tools and processes, exhibit deep understanding of industrial components and well-known design families, and be able to engage in creative problem solving (analyze and synthesize), transf erring ideas acquired in one context to another . Given this broad mandate, evaluatin g and qualifying the performance of eAGI agents is a challenge in itself and, arguably, a critical ena bler to developing eAGI agents. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposin g an extensible evaluation framework that specializes and gr ounds Bloom's taxonomy - a framework for evaluating human learning that has also been recently used for evaluating LLMs - in an engineering design context. Our p roposed framework advances the state of the art in benchmarking and evaluation of AI agents in terms of the following: (a) developing a rich taxonomy of evaluati on questions spanning from methodological knowledge to real-world design proble ms; (b) motivating a pluggable evaluation framework that can evaluate not only t extual responses but also evaluate structured design artifacts such as CAD model s and SysML models; and (c) outlining an automatable procedure to customize the evaluation benchmark to different engineering contexts.

AI power demand is growing unprecedentedly thanks to the high power density of AI compute and the emerging inferencing workload. On the supply side, abundant wind power is waiting for grid access in interconnection queues. In this light, this paper argues bringing AI workload to modular compute clusters co-located in wind farms. Our deployment right-sizing strategy makes it economically viable to deploy more than 6 million high-end GPUs today that could consume cheap, green power at its source. We built Heron, a cross-site software router, that could efficiently leverage the complementarity of power generation across wind farms by routing AI inferencing workload around power drops. Using 1-week ofcoding and conversation production traces from Azure and (real) variable wind power traces, we show how Heron improves aggregate goodput of AI compute by up to 80% compared to the state-of-the-art.

Classification of multi-dimensional time series from real-world systems require fine-grained learning of complex features such as cross-dimensional dependencies and intra-class variations-all under the practical challenge of low training data availability. However, standard deep learning (DL) struggles to learn generalizable features in low-data environments due to model overfitting. We propose a versatile yet data-efficient framework, Intelligently Augmented Contrastive Tensor Factorization (ITA-CTF), to learn effective representations from multi-dimensional time series. The CTF module learns core explanatory components of the time series (e.g., sensor factors, temporal factors), and importantly, their joint dependencies. Notably, unlike standard tensor factorization (TF), the CTF module incorporates a new contrastive loss optimization to induce similarity learning and class-awareness into the learnt representations for better classification performance. To strengthen this contrastive learning, the preceding ITA module generates targeted but informative augmentations that highlight realistic intra-class patterns in the original data, while preserving class-wise properties. This is achieved by dynamically sampling a "soft" class prototype to guide the warping of each query data sample, which results in an augmentation that is intelligently pattern-mixed between the "soft" class prototype and the query sample. These augmentations enable the CTF module to recognize complex intra-class variations despite the limited original training data, and seek out invariant class-wise properties for accurate classification performance. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on five different classification tasks. Compared to standard TF and several DL benchmarks, notable performance improvements up to 18.7% were achieved.

Achieving animal-like agility is a longstanding goal in quadrupedal robotics. While recent studies have successfully demonstrated imitation of specific behaviors, enabling robots to replicate a broader range of natural behaviors in real-world environments remains an open challenge. Here we propose an integrated controller comprising a Basic Behavior Controller (BBC) and a Task-Specific Controller (TSC) which can effectively learn diverse natural quadrupedal behaviors in an enhanced simulator and efficiently transfer them to the real world. Specifically, the BBC is trained using a novel semi-supervised generative adversarial imitation learning algorithm to extract diverse behavioral styles from raw motion capture data of real dogs, enabling smooth behavior transitions by adjusting discrete and continuous latent variable inputs. The TSC, trained via privileged learning with depth images as input, coordinates the BBC to efficiently perform various tasks. Additionally, we employ evolutionary adversarial simulator identification to optimize the simulator, aligning it closely with reality. After training, the robot exhibits diverse natural behaviors, successfully completing the quadrupedal agility challenge at an average speed of 1.1 m/s and achieving a peak speed of 3.2 m/s during hurdling. This work represents a substantial step toward animal-like agility in quadrupedal robots, opening avenues for their deployment in increasingly complex real-world environments.

Location Intelligence (LI), the science of transforming location-centric geospatial data into actionable knowledge, has become a cornerstone of modern spatial decision-making. The rapid evolution of Geospatial Representation Learning is fundamentally reshaping LI development through two successive technological revolutions: the deep learning breakthrough and the emerging large language model (LLM) paradigm. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in automated feature extraction from structured geospatial data (e.g., satellite imagery, GPS trajectories), the recent integration of LLMs introduces transformative capabilities for cross-modal geospatial reasoning and unstructured geo-textual data processing. This survey presents a comprehensive review of geospatial representation learning across both technological eras, organizing them into a structured taxonomy based on the complete pipeline comprising: (1) data perspective, (2) methodological perspective and (3) application perspective. We also highlight current advancements, discuss existing limitations, and propose potential future research directions in the LLM era. This work offers a thorough exploration of the field and providing a roadmap for further innovation in LI. The summary of the up-to-date paper list can be found in https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/Awesome-Location-Intelligence and will undergo continuous updates.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks, especially, few-shot learning (FSL), which is increasingly important for generalizing from limited examples. However, DNNs are computationally expensive with scalability issues in real world. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with their event-driven nature and low energy consumption, are particularly efficient in processing sparse and dynamic data, though they still encounter difficulties in capturing complex spatiotemporal features and performing accurate cross-class comparisons. To further enhance the performance and efficiency of SNNs in few-shot learning, we propose a few-shot learning framework based on SNNs, which combines a self-feature extractor module and a cross-feature contrastive module to refine feature representation and reduce power consumption. W e apply the combination of temporal efficient training loss and InfoNCE loss to optimize the temporal dynamics of spike trains and enhance the discriminative power. Experimental results show that the proposed FSL-SNN significantly improves the classification performance on the neuromorphic dataset N-Omniglot, and also achieves competitive performance to ANNs on static datasets such as CUB and miniImageNet with low power consumption.

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is conceived, where the time horizon includes multiple charging and operating periods in a day, while each period is further divided into multiple time steps. To overcome the challenge of long-range multi-phase planning with sparse reward, we conceive Hierarchical DRL (HDRL) for decoupling the original MDP into a high-level Semi-MDP (SMDP) and multiple low-level MDPs. The Hierarchical Double Deep Q-Network (HDDQN)-Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) algorithm is proposed for simultaneously solving the decision problems arising at different temporal resolutions. As a result, the high-level agent learns an effective policy for prescribing the charging targets for every charging period, while the low-level agent learns an optimal policy for setting the charging power of every time step within a single charging period, with the aim of minimizing the charging costs while meeting the charging target. It is proved that the flat policy constructed by superimposing the optimal high-level policy and the optimal low-level policy performs as well as the optimal policy of the original MDP . Since jointly learning both levels of policies is challenging due to the non-stationarity of the high-level agent and the sampling inefficiency of the low-level agent, we divide the joint learning process into two phases and exploit our new HER algorithm to manipulate the experience replay buffers for both levels of agents. Numerical experiments are performed with the aid of real-world data to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Index T erms Deep Reinforcement Learning; Electric Bus; Hierarchical Reinforcement learning; Charging Control A CRONYMS DDQN Double Deep Q Network DNN Deep Neural Network DQL Double Q-learning DQN Deep Q Network DRL Deep Reinforcement Learning EB Electric Bus EBCSP Electric Bus Charging Scheduling Problem GA Genetic Algorithm GHG GreenHouse Gas HAC Hierarchical Actor-Critic HDDQN Hierarchical Double Deep Q Network HDRL Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning HER Hindsight Experience Replay HRL Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning IA Immune Algorithm MDP Markov Decision Process MILP Mixed Integer Linear Programming ML Machine Learning MRP Markov Reward Process RES Renewable Energy Source RL Reinforcement Learning RO Robust Optimization RTEM Real Time Energy Market 1 J. Qi and L. Lei are with the School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada, jiaju@uoguelph.ca;

Conventional forecasting methods rely on unimodal time series data, limiting their ability to exploit rich textual information. Recently, large language models (LLMs) and time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated powerful capability in textual reasoning and temporal modeling, respectively. Integrating the strengths of both to construct a multimodal model that concurrently leverages both temporal and textual information for future inference has emerged as a critical research challenge. To address the scarcity of event-series paired data, we propose a decoupled framework: an LLM is employed to transform textual events into revision instructions, which are then used to steer the output of TSFM. To implement this framework, we introduce ChronoSteer, a multimodal TSFM that can be steered through textual revision instructions, effectively bridging LLM and TSFM. Moreover, to mitigate the shortage of cross-modal instruction-series paired data, we devise a two-stage training strategy based on synthetic data. In addition, we also construct a high-quality multimodal time series forecasting benchmark to address the information leakage concerns during evaluation. After integrating with an LLM, ChronoSteer, which is trained exclusively on synthetic data, achieves a 25.7% improvement in prediction accuracy compared to the unimodal backbone and a 22.5% gain over the previous state-of-the-art multimodal method.

The fields of autonomous systems and robotics are receiving considerable attention in civil applications such as construction, logistics, and firefighting. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of these technologies is hindered by the necessity for robust processing units to run AI models. Edge-AI solutions offer considerable promise, enabling low-power, cost-effective robotics that can automate civil services, improve safety, and enhance sustainability. This paper presents a novel Edge-AI-enabled drone-based surveillance system for autonomous multi-robot operations at construction sites. Our system integrates a lightweight MCU-based object detection model within a custom-built UAV platform and a 5G-enabled multi-agent coordination infrastructure. We specifically target the real-time obstacle detection and dynamic path planning problem in construction environments, providing a comprehensive dataset specifically created for MCU-based edge applications. Field experiments demonstrate practical viability and identify optimal operational parameters, highlighting our approach's scalability and computational efficiency advantages compared to existing UAV solutions. The present and future roles of autonomous vehicles on construction sites are also discussed, as well as the effectiveness of edge-AI solutions. We share our dataset publicly at github.com/egirgin/storaige-b950

Realistic temporal dynamics are crucial for many video generation, processing and modelling applications, e.g. in computational fluid dynamics, weather prediction, or long-term climate simulations. Video diffusion models (VDMs) are the current state-of-the-art method for generating highly realistic dynamics. However, training VDMs from scratch can be challenging and requires large computational resources, limiting their wider application. Here, we propose a time-consistency discriminator that enables pretrained image diffusion models to generate realistic spatiotemporal dynamics. The discriminator guides the sampling inference process and does not require extensions or finetuning of the image diffusion model. We compare our approach against a VDM trained from scratch on an idealized turbulence simulation and a real-world global precipitation dataset. Our approach performs equally well in terms of temporal consistency, shows improved uncertainty calibration and lower biases compared to the VDM, and achieves stable centennial-scale climate simulations at daily time steps.