The global effort toward renewable energy and the electrification of energy-intensive sectors have significantly increased the demand for electricity, making energy efficiency a critical focus. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) enables detailed analyses of household electricity usage by disaggregating the total power consumption into individual appliance-level data. In this paper, we propose COLD (Concurrent Loads Disaggregator), a transformer-based model specifically designed to address the challenges of disaggregating high-frequency data with multiple simultaneously working devices. COLD supports up to 42 devices and accurately handles scenarios with up to 11 concurrent loads, achieving 95% load identification accuracy and 82% disaggregation performance on the test data. In addition, we introduce a new fully labeled high-frequency NILM dataset for load disaggregation derived from the UK-DALE 16 kHz dataset. Finally, we analyze the decline in NILM model performance as the number of concurrent loads increases.

High-resolution land cover mapping plays a crucial role in addressing a wide range of global challenges, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and sustainable development. However, creating accurate, large-scale land cover datasets remains a significant challenge due to the inherent complexities of geospatial data, such as diverse terrain, varying sensor modalities, and atmospheric conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, with its ability to penetrate clouds and capture data in all-weather, day-and-night conditions, offers unique advantages for land cover mapping. Despite these strengths, the lack of benchmark datasets tailored for SAR imagery has limited the development of robust models specifically designed for this data modality. To bridge this gap and facilitate advancements in SAR-based geospatial analysis, we introduce OpenEarthMap-SAR, a benchmark SAR dataset, for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap-SAR consists of 1.5 million segments of 5033 aerial and satellite images with the size of 1024$\times$1024 pixels, covering 35 regions from Japan, France, and the USA, with partially manually annotated and fully pseudo 8-class land cover labels at a ground sampling distance of 0.15--0.5 m. We evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation and present challenging problem settings suitable for further technical development. The dataset also serves the official dataset for IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest Track I. The dataset has been made publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/14622048.

In recent years, the integration of deep learning techniques with remote sensing technology has revolutionized the way natural hazards, such as floods, are monitored and managed. However, existing methods for flood segmentation using remote sensing data often overlook the utility of correlative features among multispectral satellite information. In this study, we introduce a progressive cross attention network (ProCANet), a deep learning model that progressively applies both self- and cross-attention mechanisms to multispectral features, generating optimal feature combinations for flood segmentation. The proposed model was compared with state-of-the-art approaches using Sen1Floods11 dataset and our bespoke flood data generated for the Citarum River basin, Indonesia. Our model demonstrated superior performance with the highest Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.815. Our results in this study, coupled with the ablation assessment comparing scenarios with and without attention across various modalities, opens a promising path for enhancing the accuracy of flood analysis using remote sensing technology.

Robotic systems' mobility is constrained by power sources and wiring. While pneumatic actuators remain tethered to air supplies, we developed a new actuator utilizing light energy. Inspired by nocturnal animals' eyes, we designed a bilayer soft actuator incorporating Laser-Induced Graphene (LIG) on the inner surface of a silicone layer. This design maintains silicone's transparency and flexibility while achieving 54% faster response time compared to conventional actuators through enhanced photothermal conversion.

This work presents the application of reinforcement learning to improve the performance of a highly dynamic hopping system with a parallel mechanism. Unlike serial mechanisms, parallel mechanisms can not be accurately simulated due to the complexity of their kinematic constraints and closed-loop structures. Besides, learning to hop suffers from prolonged aerial phase and the sparse nature of the rewards. To address them, we propose a learning framework to encode long-history feedback to account for the under-actuation brought by the prolonged aerial phase. In the proposed framework, we also introduce a simplified serial configuration for the parallel design to avoid directly simulating parallel structure during the training. A torque-level conversion is designed to deal with the parallel-serial conversion to handle the sim-to-real issue. Simulation and hardware experiments have been conducted to validate this framework.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various applications by generating outputs based on given prompts. However, achieving the desired output requires iterative prompt refinement. This paper presents a novel approach that draws parallels between the iterative prompt optimization process in LLMs and feedback control systems. We iteratively refine the prompt by treating the deviation between the LLM output and the desired result as an error term until the output criteria are met. This process is akin to a feedback control system, where the LLM, despite being non-linear and non-deterministic, is managed using principles from linear feedback control systems. We explore the application of different types of controllers within this framework, providing a mathematical foundation for integrating linear feedback control mechanisms with LLMs.

Existing approaches to enforcing design constraints in Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications often rely on training-time penalties in the reward function or training/inference-time invalid action masking, but these methods either cannot be modified after training, or are limited in the types of constraints that can be implemented. To address this limitation, we propose Reinforcement Learning Constrained Beam Search (RLCBS) for inference-time refinement in combinatorial optimization problems. This method respects flexible, inference-time constraints that support exclusion of invalid actions and forced inclusion of desired actions, and employs beam search to maximize sequence probability for more sensible constraint incorporation. RLCBS is extensible to RL-based planning and optimization problems that do not require real-time solution, and we apply the method to optimize process parameters for a novel modular testbed for paper drying. An RL agent is trained to minimize energy consumption across varying machine speed levels by generating optimal dryer module and air supply temperature configurations. Our results demonstrate that RLCBS outperforms NSGA-II under complex design constraints on drying module configurations at inference-time, while providing a 2.58-fold or higher speed improvement.

The general idea of this work is clearly in a direction of interest to the community and the results look strong. However, there are a few aspects to this work that I find quite unclear. If they were clearer this work would have much more potential for impact. In particular, it is not clear enough if this work uses a truly'end-to-end' approach (as stated for one of the contributions). For example on line 46 it is stated that: "We show step by step how approximations are made to use an end-to-end learning CNN for implementing such CRF model."

An important goal of modern scheduling systems is to efficiently manage power usage. In energy-efficient scheduling, the operating system controls the speed at which a machine is processing jobs with the dual objective of minimizing energy consumption and optimizing the quality of service cost of the resulting schedule. Since machine-learned predictions about future requests can often be learned from historical data, a recent line of work on learning-augmented algorithms aims to achieve improved performance guarantees by leveraging predictions. We show that, when the prediction error is small, this framework gives improved competitive ratios for many different energy-efficient scheduling problems, including energy minimization with deadlines, while also maintaining a bounded competitive ratio regardless of the prediction error. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that this framework achieves an improved performance on real and synthetic datasets.

As extreme weather events become more frequent, understanding their impact on human health becomes increasingly crucial. However, the utilization of Earth Observation to effectively analyze the environmental context in relation to health remains limited. This limitation is primarily due to the lack of fine-grained spatial and temporal data in public and population health studies, hindering a comprehensive understanding of health outcomes. Additionally, obtaining appropriate environmental indices across different geographical levels and timeframes poses a challenge. For the years 2019 (pre-COVID) and 2020 (COVID), we collected spatio-temporal indicators for all Lower Layer Super Output Areas in England.