Energy
SAEN-BGS: Energy-Efficient Spiking AutoEncoder Network for Background Subtraction
Zhang, Zhixuan, Li, Xiaopeng, Liu, Qi
Background subtraction (BGS) is utilized to detect moving objects in a video and is commonly employed at the onset of object tracking and human recognition processes. Nevertheless, existing BGS techniques utilizing deep learning still encounter challenges with various background noises in videos, including variations in lighting, shifts in camera angles, and disturbances like air turbulence or swaying trees. To address this problem, we design a spiking autoencoder network, termed SAEN-BGS, based on noise resilience and time-sequence sensitivity of spiking neural networks (SNNs) to enhance the separation of foreground and background. To eliminate unnecessary background noise and preserve the important foreground elements, we begin by creating the continuous spiking conv-and-dconv block, which serves as the fundamental building block for the decoder in SAEN-BGS. Moreover, in striving for enhanced energy efficiency, we introduce a novel self-distillation spiking supervised learning method grounded in ANN-to-SNN frameworks, resulting in decreased power consumption. In extensive experiments conducted on CDnet-2014 and DAVIS-2016 datasets, our approach demonstrates superior segmentation performance relative to other baseline methods, even when challenged by complex scenarios with dynamic backgrounds.
Continuous-Time Control Synthesis for Multiple Quadrotors under Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
-- Ensuring continuous-time control of multiple quadrotors in constrained environments under signal temporal logic (STL) specifications is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics, safety constraints, and disturbances. This letter proposes a two-stage framework to address this challenge. First, exponentially decaying tracking error bounds are derived with multidimensional geometric control gains obtained via differential evolution. These bounds are less conservative, while the resulting tracking errors exhibit smaller oscillations and improved transient performance. Second, leveraging the time-varying bounds, a mixed-integer convex programming (MICP) formulation generates piecewise Bรฉzier reference trajectories that satisfy STL and velocity limits, while ensuring inter-agent safety through convex-hull properties. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables formally verifiable multi-agent coordination in constrained environments, with provable tracking guarantees under bounded disturbances. I. INTRODUCTION As drone technology progresses, quadrotors are increasingly required to execute complex tasks in confined environments--particularly narrow passages and strict terminal zones [1]. In this context, signal temporal logic (STL) offers a formal language to define tasks over continuous signals with explicit time semantics.
UAV-CodeAgents: Scalable UAV Mission Planning via Multi-Agent ReAct and Vision-Language Reasoning
Sautenkov, Oleg, Yaqoot, Yasheerah, Mustafa, Muhammad Ahsan, Batool, Faryal, Sam, Jeffrin, Lykov, Artem, Wen, Chih-Yung, Tsetserukou, Dzmitry
We present UAV-CodeAgents, a scalable multi-agent framework for autonomous UAV mission generation, built on large language and vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs). The system leverages the ReAct (Reason + Act) paradigm to interpret satellite imagery, ground high-level natural language instructions, and collaboratively generate UAV trajectories with minimal human supervision. A core component is a vision-grounded, pixel-pointing mechanism that enables precise localization of semantic targets on aerial maps. To support real-time adaptability, we introduce a reactive thinking loop, allowing agents to iteratively reflect on observations, revise mission goals, and coordinate dynamically in evolving environments. UAV-CodeAgents is evaluated on large-scale mission scenarios involving industrial and environmental fire detection. Our results show that a lower decoding temperature (0.5) yields higher planning reliability and reduced execution time, with an average mission creation time of 96.96 seconds and a success rate of 93%. We further fine-tune Qwen2.5VL-7B on 9,000 annotated satellite images, achieving strong spatial grounding across diverse visual categories. To foster reproducibility and future research, we will release the full codebase and a novel benchmark dataset for vision-language-based UAV planning.
Physics-informed Multiple-Input Operators for efficient dynamic response prediction of structures
Ahmed, Bilal, Qiu, Yuqing, Abueidda, Diab W., El-Sekelly, Waleed, Abdoun, Tarek, Mobasher, Mostafa E.
Finite element (FE) modeling is essential for structural analysis but remains computationally intensive, especially under dynamic loading. While operator learning models have shown promise in replicating static structural responses at FEM level accuracy, modeling dynamic behavior remains more challenging. This work presents a Multiple Input Operator Network (MIONet) that incorporates a second trunk network to explicitly encode temporal dynamics, enabling accurate prediction of structural responses under moving loads. Traditional DeepONet architectures using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are limited by fixed time discretization and struggle to capture continuous dynamics. In contrast, MIONet predicts responses continuously over both space and time, removing the need for step wise modeling. It maps scalar inputs including load type, velocity, spatial mesh, and time steps to full field structural responses. To improve efficiency and enforce physical consistency, we introduce a physics informed loss based on dynamic equilibrium using precomputed mass, damping, and stiffness matrices, without solving the governing PDEs directly. Further, a Schur complement formulation reduces the training domain, significantly cutting computational costs while preserving global accuracy. The model is validated on both a simple beam and the KW-51 bridge, achieving FEM level accuracy within seconds. Compared to GRU based DeepONet, our model offers comparable accuracy with improved temporal continuity and over 100 times faster inference, making it well suited for real-time structural monitoring and digital twin applications.
ParaView-MCP: An Autonomous Visualization Agent with Direct Tool Use
Liu, Shusen, Miao, Haichao, Bremer, Peer-Timo
While powerful and well-established, tools like ParaView present a steep learning curve that discourages many potential users. This work introduces ParaView-MCP, an autonomous agent that integrates modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with ParaView to not only lower the barrier to entry but also augment ParaView with intelligent decision support. By leveraging the state-of-the-art reasoning, command execution, and vision capabilities of MLLMs, ParaView-MCP enables users to interact with ParaView through natural language and visual inputs. Specifically, our system adopted the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - a standardized interface for model-application communication - that facilitates direct interaction between MLLMs with ParaView's Python API to allow seamless information exchange between the user, the language model, and the visualization tool itself. Furthermore, by implementing a visual feedback mechanism that allows the agent to observe the viewport, we unlock a range of new capabilities, including recreating visualizations from examples, closed-loop visualization parameter updates based on user-defined goals, and even cross-application collaboration involving multiple tools. Broadly, we believe such an agent-driven visualization paradigm can profoundly change the way we interact with visualization tools. We expect a significant uptake in the development of such visualization tools, in both visualization research and industry.
Secure Safety Filter: Towards Safe Flight Control under Sensor Attacks
Tan, Xiao, Sundar, Junior, Bruzzone, Renzo, Ong, Pio, Lunardi, Willian T., Andreoni, Martin, Tabuada, Paulo, Ames, Aaron D.
Modern autopilot systems are prone to sensor attacks that can jeopardize flight safety. To mitigate this risk, we proposed a modular solution: the secure safety filter, which extends the well-established control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filter to account for, and mitigate, sensor attacks. This module consists of a secure state reconstructor (which generates plausible states) and a safety filter (which computes the safe control input that is closest to the nominal one). Differing from existing work focusing on linear, noise-free systems, the proposed secure safety filter handles bounded measurement noise and, by leveraging reduced-order model techniques, is applicable to the nonlinear dynamics of drones. Software-in-the-loop simulations and drone hardware experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the secure safety filter in rendering the system safe in the presence of sensor attacks.
Sandcastles in the Storm: Revisiting the (Im)possibility of Strong Watermarking
Harel-Canada, Fabrice Y, Erol, Boran, Choi, Connor, Liu, Jason, Song, Gary Jiarui, Peng, Nanyun, Sahai, Amit
Watermarking AI-generated text is critical for combating misuse. Yet recent theoretical work argues that any watermark can be erased via random walk attacks that perturb text while preserving quality. However, such attacks rely on two key assumptions: (1) rapid mixing (watermarks dissolve quickly under perturbations) and (2) reliable quality preservation (automated quality oracles perfectly guide edits). Through large-scale experiments and human-validated assessments, we find mixing is slow: 100% of perturbed texts retain traces of their origin after hundreds of edits, defying rapid mixing. Oracles falter, as state-of-the-art quality detectors misjudge edits (77% accuracy), compounding errors during attacks. Ultimately, attacks underperform: automated walks remove watermarks just 26% of the time -- dropping to 10% under human quality review. These findings challenge the inevitability of watermark removal. Instead, practical barriers -- slow mixing and imperfect quality control -- reveal watermarking to be far more robust than theoretical models suggest. The gap between idealized attacks and real-world feasibility underscores the need for stronger watermarking methods and more realistic attack models.
A Novel Framework for Significant Wave Height Prediction based on Adaptive Feature Extraction Time-Frequency Network
Zhang, Jianxin, Jiang, Lianzi, Han, Xinyu, Wang, Xiangrong
Precise forecasting of significant wave height (Hs) is essential for the development and utilization of wave energy. The challenges in predicting Hs arise from its non-linear and non-stationary characteristics. The combination of decomposition preprocessing and machine learning models have demonstrated significant effectiveness in Hs prediction by extracting data features. However, decomposing the unknown data in the test set can lead to data leakage issues. To simultaneously achieve data feature extraction and prevent data leakage, a novel Adaptive Feature Extraction Time-Frequency Network (AFE-TFNet) is proposed to improve prediction accuracy and stability. It is encoder-decoder rolling framework. The encoder consists of two stages: feature extraction and feature fusion. In the feature extraction stage, global and local frequency domain features are extracted by combining Wavelet Transform (WT) and Fourier Transform (FT), and multi-scale frequency analysis is performed using Inception blocks. In the feature fusion stage, time-domain and frequency-domain features are integrated through dominant harmonic sequence energy weighting (DHSEW). The decoder employed an advanced long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Hourly measured wind speed (Ws), dominant wave period (DPD), average wave period (APD) and Hs from three stations are used as the dataset, and the four metrics are employed to evaluate the forecasting performance. Results show that AFE-TFNet significantly outperforms benchmark methods in terms of prediction accuracy. Feature extraction can significantly improve the prediction accuracy. DHSEW has substantially increased the accuracy of medium-term to long-term forecasting. The prediction accuracy of AFE-TFNet does not demonstrate significant variability with changes of rolling time window size. Overall, AFE-TFNet shows strong potential for handling complex signal forecasting.
Sponge Attacks on Sensing AI: Energy-Latency Vulnerabilities and Defense via Model Pruning
Hasan, Syed Mhamudul, Zangoti, Hussein, Anagnostopoulos, Iraklis, Shahid, Abdur R.
Recent studies have shown that sponge attacks can significantly increase the energy consumption and inference latency of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, prior work has focused primarily on computer vision and natural language processing tasks, overlooking the growing use of lightweight AI models in sensing-based applications on resource-constrained devices, such as those in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. These attacks pose serious threats of energy depletion and latency degradation in systems where limited battery capacity and real-time responsiveness are critical for reliable operation. This paper makes two key contributions. First, we present the first systematic exploration of energy-latency sponge attacks targeting sensing-based AI models. Using wearable sensing-based AI as a case study, we demonstrate that sponge attacks can substantially degrade performance by increasing energy consumption, leading to faster battery drain, and by prolonging inference latency. Second, to mitigate such attacks, we investigate model pruning, a widely adopted compression technique for resource-constrained AI, as a potential defense. Our experiments show that pruning-induced sparsity significantly improves model resilience against sponge poisoning. We also quantify the trade-offs between model efficiency and attack resilience, offering insights into the security implications of model compression in sensing-based AI systems deployed in IoT environments.
Adaptive Bayesian Very Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting Based on the Generalised Logit Transformation
Shen, Tao, Browell, Jethro, Castro-Camilo, Daniela
Wind power plays an increasingly significant role in achieving the 2050 Net Zero Strategy. Despite its rapid growth, its inherent variability presents challenges in forecasting. Accurately forecasting wind power generation is one key demand for the stable and controllable integration of renewable energy into existing grid operations. This paper proposes an adaptive method for very short-term forecasting that combines the generalised logit transformation with a Bayesian approach. The generalised logit transformation processes double-bounded wind power data to an unbounded domain, facilitating the application of Bayesian methods. A novel adaptive mechanism for updating the transformation shape parameter is introduced to leverage Bayesian updates by recovering a small sample of representative data. Four adaptive forecasting methods are investigated, evaluating their advantages and limitations through an extensive case study of over 100 wind farms ranging four years in the UK. The methods are evaluated using the Continuous Ranked Probability Score and we propose the use of functional reliability diagrams to assess calibration. Results indicate that the proposed Bayesian method with adaptive shape parameter updating outperforms benchmarks, yielding consistent improvements in CRPS and forecast reliability. The method effectively addresses uncertainty, ensuring robust and accurate probabilistic forecasting which is essential for grid integration and decision-making.