Developing environmentally sustainable refrigerants is critical for mitigating the impact of anthropogenic greenhouse gases on global warming. This study presents a predictive modeling framework to estimate the 100-year global warming potential (GWP 100) of single-component refrigerants using a fully connected neural network implemented on the Multi-Sigma platform. Molecular descriptors from RDKit, Mordred, and alvaDesc were utilized to capture various chemical features. The RDKit-based model achieved the best performance, with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 481.9 and an R2 score of 0.918, demonstrating superior predictive accuracy and generalizability. Dimensionality reduction through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and quantile transformation were applied to address the high-dimensional and skewed nature of the dataset,enhancing model stability and performance. Factor analysis identified vital molecular features, including molecular weight, lipophilicity, and functional groups, such as nitriles and allylic oxides, as significant contributors to GWP values. These insights provide actionable guidance for designing environmentally sustainable refrigerants. Integrating RDKit descriptors with Multi-Sigma's framework, which includes PCA, quantile transformation, and neural networks, provides a scalable solution for the rapid virtual screening of low-GWP refrigerants. This approach can potentially accelerate the identification of eco-friendly alternatives, directly contributing to climate mitigation by enabling the design of next-generation refrigerants aligned with global sustainability objectives.

Head-to-head racing against opponents is a challenging and emerging topic in the domain of autonomous racing. We propose Predictive Spliner, a data-driven overtaking planner that learns the behavior of opponents through Gaussian Process (GP) regression, which is then leveraged to compute viable overtaking maneuvers in future sections of the racing track. Experimentally validated on a 1:10 scale autonomous racing platform using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) information to perceive the opponent, Predictive Spliner outperforms State-of-the-Art (SotA) algorithms by overtaking opponents at up to 83.1% of its own speed, being on average 8.4% faster than the previous best-performing method. Additionally, it achieves an average success rate of 84.5%, which is 47.6% higher than the previous best-performing method. The method maintains computational efficiency with a Central Processing Unit (CPU) load of 22.79% and a computation time of 8.4 ms, evaluated on a Commercial off-the-Shelf (CotS) Intel i7-1165G7, making it suitable for real-time robotic applications. These results highlight the potential of Predictive Spliner to enhance the performance and safety of autonomous racing vehicles. The code for Predictive Spliner is available at: https://github.com/ForzaETH/predictive-spliner.

This paper studies reinforcement learning (RL) in infinite-horizon dynamic decision processes with almost-sure safety constraints. Such safety-constrained decision processes are central to applications in autonomous systems, finance, and resource management, where policies must satisfy strict, state-dependent constraints. We consider a doubly-regularized RL framework that combines reward and parameter regularization to address these constraints within continuous state-action spaces. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a convex regularized objective with parametrized policies in the mean-field regime. Our approach leverages recent developments in mean-field theory and Wasserstein gradient flows to model policies as elements of an infinite-dimensional statistical manifold, with policy updates evolving via gradient flows on the space of parameter distributions. Our main contributions include establishing solvability conditions for safety-constrained problems, defining smooth and bounded approximations that facilitate gradient flows, and demonstrating exponential convergence towards global solutions under sufficient regularization. We provide general conditions on regularization functions, encompassing standard entropy regularization as a special case. The results also enable a particle method implementation for practical RL applications. The theoretical insights and convergence guarantees presented here offer a robust framework for safe RL in complex, high-dimensional decision-making problems.

Sub-seasonal wind speed forecasts provide valuable guidance for wind power system planning and operations, yet the forecasting skills of surface winds decrease sharply after two weeks. However, large-scale variables exhibit greater predictability on this time scale. This study explores the potential of leveraging non-linear relationships between 500 hPa geopotential height (Z500) and surface wind speed to improve subs-seasonal wind speed forecasting skills in Europe. Our proposed framework uses a Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) or a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to regress surface wind speed from Z500. Evaluations on ERA5 reanalysis indicate that the CNN performs better due to their non-linearity. Applying these models to sub-seasonal forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, various verification metrics demonstrate the advantages of non-linearity. Yet, this is partly explained by the fact that these statistical models are under-dispersive since they explain only a fraction of the target variable variance. Introducing stochastic perturbations to represent the stochasticity of the unexplained part from the signal helps compensate for this issue. Results show that the perturbed CNN performs better than the perturbed MLR only in the first weeks, while the perturbed MLR's performance converges towards that of the perturbed CNN after two weeks. The study finds that introducing stochastic perturbations can address the issue of insufficient spread in these statistical models, with improvements from the non-linearity varying with the lead time of the forecasts.

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially for tasks that require complex, multi-step decision-making. Humans excel at these tasks by leveraging deliberate planning with an internal world model to simulate the potential outcomes of various actions. Inspired by this, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework for LLMs, referred to as Structure-aware Planning with Accurate World Model (SWAP). Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in natural language, SWAP incorporates structural information to guide the reasoning process via a world model and provides a soft verification mechanism over the steps. Moreover, SWAP overcomes the challenge of accurate world state predictions in complex reasoning tasks by introducing a Generator-Discriminator architecture, which enables more reliable world modeling. Specifically, the generator predicts the next state, and the discriminator ensures alignment with the logical consistency required by the problem context. SWAP also encourages the policy model to explore a broad range of potential actions to prevent premature convergence. By resolving the bottlenecks of generation diversity for both actions and states using diversity-based modeling (DBM) and improving discrimination accuracy through contrastive ranking (CR), SWAP significantly enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs. We evaluate SWAP across diverse reasoning-intensive benchmarks including math reasoning, logical reasoning, and coding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAP achieves substantial improvements over the baselines and consistently outperforms existing methods.

This paper introduces a local planner that synergizes the decision making and trajectory planning modules towards autonomous driving. The decision making and trajectory planning tasks are jointly formulated as a nonlinear programming problem with an integrated objective function. However, integrating the discrete decision variables into the continuous trajectory optimization leads to a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem with inherent nonlinearity and nonconvexity. To address the challenge in solving the problem, the original problem is decomposed into two sub-stages, and a two-stage optimization (TSO) based approach is presented to ensure the coherence in outcomes for the two stages. The optimization problem in the first stage determines the optimal decision sequence that acts as an informed initialization. With the outputs from the first stage, the second stage necessitates the use of a high-fidelity vehicle model and strict enforcement of the collision avoidance constraints as part of the trajectory planning problem. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed planner across diverse multi-lane scenarios. The results demonstrate that the proposed planner simultaneously generates a sequence of optimal decisions and the corresponding trajectory that significantly improves driving performance in terms of driving safety and traveling efficiency as compared to alternative methods. Additionally, we implement the closed-loop simulation in CARLA, and the results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed planner to adapt to changing driving situations with high computational efficiency.

Urgent applications like wildfire management and renewable energy generation require precise, localized weather forecasts near the Earth's surface. However, weather forecast products from machine learning or numerical weather models are currently generated on a global regular grid, on which a naive interpolation cannot accurately reflect fine-grained weather patterns close to the ground. In this work, we train a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) end-to-end to downscale gridded forecasts to off-grid locations of interest. This multi-modal GNN takes advantage of local historical weather observations (e.g., wind, temperature) to correct the gridded weather forecast at different lead times towards locally accurate forecasts. Each data modality is modeled as a different type of node in the graph. Using message passing, the node at the prediction location aggregates information from its heterogeneous neighbor nodes. Experiments using weather stations across the Northeastern United States show that our model outperforms a range of data-driven and non-data-driven off-grid forecasting methods. Our approach demonstrates how the gap between global large-scale weather models and locally accurate predictions can be bridged to inform localized decision-making.

Clean water and sanitation are essential for health, well-being, and sustainable development, yet significant global disparities remain. Although the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 6 has clear targets for universal access to clean water and sanitation, data coverage and openness remain obstacles for tracking progress in many countries. Nontraditional data sources are needed to fill this gap. This study incorporated Afrobarometer survey data, satellite imagery (Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2), and deep learning techniques (Meta's DINO model) to develop a modelling framework for evaluating access to piped water and sewage systems across diverse African regions. The modelling framework demonstrated high accuracy, achieving over 96% and 97% accuracy in identifying areas with piped water access and sewage system access respectively using satellite imagery. It can serve as a screening tool for policymakers and stakeholders to potentially identify regions for more targeted and prioritized efforts to improve water and sanitation infrastructure. When coupled with spatial population data, the modelling framework can also estimate and track the national-level percentages of the population with access to piped water and sewage systems. In the future, this approach could potentially be extended to evaluate other SDGs, particularly those related to critical infrastructure.

Predictor feedback designs are critical for delay-compensating controllers in nonlinear systems. However, these designs are limited in practical applications as predictors cannot be directly implemented, but require numerical approximation schemes. These numerical schemes, typically combining finite difference and successive approximations, become computationally prohibitive when the dynamics of the system are expensive to compute. To alleviate this issue, we propose approximating the predictor mapping via a neural operator. In particular, we introduce a new perspective on predictor designs by recasting the predictor formulation as an operator learning problem. We then prove the existence of an arbitrarily accurate neural operator approximation of the predictor operator. Under the approximated-predictor, we achieve semiglobal practical stability of the closed-loop nonlinear system. The estimate is semiglobal in a unique sense - namely, one can increase the set of initial states as large as desired but this will naturally increase the difficulty of training a neural operator approximation which appears practically in the stability estimate. Furthermore, we emphasize that our result holds not just for neural operators, but any black-box predictor satisfying a universal approximation error bound. From a computational perspective, the advantage of the neural operator approach is clear as it requires training once, offline and then is deployed with very little computational cost in the feedback controller. We conduct experiments controlling a 5-link robotic manipulator with different state-of-the-art neural operator architectures demonstrating speedups on the magnitude of $10^2$ compared to traditional predictor approximation schemes.

The huge amount of energy required to train artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a concern. To train the large language model (LLM) powering Chat GPT-3, for example, almost 1,300 megawatt hours of energy was used, according to an estimate by researchers from Google and the University of California, Berkeley, a similar quantity of energy to what is used by 130 American homes in one year. Furthermore, an analysis by OpenAI suggests that the amount of power needed to train AI models has been growing exponentially since 2012, doubling roughly every 3.4 months as the models become bigger and more sophisticated. However, our energy production capacity is not increasing as steeply, and doing so is likely to further contribute to global warming: generating electricity is the single biggest contributor to climate change given that coal, oil, and gas are still widely used to generate electricity, compared to cleaner energy sources. "At this rate, we are running into a brick wall in terms of the ability to scale up machine learning networks," said Menachem Stern, a theoretical physicist at the AMOLF research institute in the Netherlands.