Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to control robotic systems such as drones, but their risks of causing physical threats and harm in real-world applications remain unexplored. Our study addresses the critical gap in evaluating LLM physical safety by developing a comprehensive benchmark for drone control. We classify the physical safety risks of drones into four categories: (1) human-targeted threats, (2) object-targeted threats, (3) infrastructure attacks, and (4) regulatory violations. Our evaluation of mainstream LLMs reveals an undesirable trade-off between utility and safety, with models that excel in code generation often performing poorly in crucial safety aspects. Furthermore, while incorporating advanced prompt engineering techniques such as In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought can improve safety, these methods still struggle to identify unintentional attacks. In addition, larger models demonstrate better safety capabilities, particularly in refusing dangerous commands. Our findings and benchmark can facilitate the design and evaluation of physical safety for LLMs.

The EcoCropsAID dataset is a comprehensive collection of 5,400 aerial images captured between 2014 and 2018 using the Google Earth application. This dataset focuses on five key economic crops in Thailand: rice, sugarcane, cassava, rubber, and longan. The images were collected at various crop growth stages: early cultivation, growth, and harvest, resulting in significant variability within each category and similarities across different categories. These variations, coupled with differences in resolution, color, and contrast introduced by multiple remote imaging sensors, present substantial challenges for land use classification. The dataset is an interdisciplinary resource that spans multiple research domains, including remote sensing, geoinformatics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. The unique features of the EcoCropsAID dataset offer opportunities for researchers to explore novel approaches, such as extracting spatial and temporal features, developing deep learning architectures, and implementing transformer-based models. The EcoCropsAID dataset provides a valuable platform for advancing research in land use classification, with implications for optimizing agricultural practices and enhancing sustainable development. This study explicitly investigates the use of deep learning algorithms to classify economic crop areas in northeastern Thailand, utilizing satellite imagery to address the challenges posed by diverse patterns and similarities across categories.

Building a robust underwater acoustic recognition system in real-world scenarios is challenging due to the complex underwater environment and the dynamic motion states of targets. A promising optimization approach is to leverage the intrinsic physical characteristics of targets, which remain invariable regardless of environmental conditions, to provide robust insights. However, our study reveals that while physical characteristics exhibit robust properties, they may lack class-specific discriminative patterns. Consequently, directly incorporating physical characteristics into model training can potentially introduce unintended inductive biases, leading to performance degradation. To utilize the benefits of physical characteristics while mitigating possible detrimental effects, we propose DEMONet in this study, which utilizes the detection of envelope modulation on noise (DEMON) to provide robust insights into the shaft frequency or blade counts of targets. DEMONet is a multi-expert network that allocates various underwater signals to their best-matched expert layer based on DEMON spectra for fine-grained signal processing. Thereinto, DEMON spectra are solely responsible for providing implicit physical characteristics without establishing a mapping relationship with the target category. Furthermore, to mitigate noise and spurious modulation spectra in DEMON features, we introduce a cross-temporal alignment strategy and employ a variational autoencoder (VAE) to reconstruct noise-resistant DEMON spectra to replace the raw DEMON features. The effectiveness of the proposed DEMONet with cross-temporal VAE was primarily evaluated on the DeepShip dataset and our proprietary datasets. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach could achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.

Common challenges in fault diagnosis include the lack of labeled data and the need to build models for each domain, resulting in many models that require supervision. Transfer learning can help tackle these challenges by learning cross-domain knowledge. Many approaches still require at least some labeled data in the target domain, and often provide unexplainable results. To this end, we propose a supervised transfer learning framework for fault diagnosis in wind turbines that operates in an Anomaly-Space. This space was created using SCADA data and vibration data and was built and provided to us by our research partner. Data within the Anomaly-Space can be interpreted as anomaly scores for each component in the wind turbine, making each value intuitive to understand. We conducted cross-domain evaluation on the train set using popular supervised classifiers like Random Forest, Light-Gradient-Boosting-Machines and Multilayer Perceptron as metamodels for the diagnosis of bearing and sensor faults. The Multilayer Perceptron achieved the highest classification performance. This model was then used for a final evaluation in our test set. The results show, that the proposed framework is able to detect cross-domain faults in the test set with a high degree of accuracy by using one single classifier, which is a significant asset to the diagnostic team.

In the context of safety-critical control, we propose and analyse the use of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to limit the kinetic energy of torque-controlled robots. The proposed scheme is able to modify a nominal control action in a minimally invasive manner to achieve the desired kinetic energy limit. We show how this safety condition is achieved by appropriately injecting damping in the underlying robot dynamics independently of the nominal controller structure. We present an extensive experimental validation of the approach on a 7-Degree of Freedom (DoF) Franka Emika Panda robot. The results demonstrate that this approach provides an effective, minimally invasive safety layer that is straightforward to implement and is robust in real experiments.

We present a framework for Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) in heterogeneous teams performing long-endurance missions in dynamic scenarios. Given the limited battery of robots, especially in the case of aerial vehicles, we allow for robot recharges and the possibility of fragmenting and/or relaying certain tasks. We also address tasks that must be performed by a coalition of robots in a coordinated manner. Given these features, we introduce a new class of heterogeneous MRTA problems which we analyze theoretically and optimally formulate as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program. We then contribute a heuristic algorithm to compute approximate solutions and integrate it into a mission planning and execution architecture capable of reacting to unexpected events by repairing or recomputing plans online. Our experimental results show the relevance of our newly formulated problem in a realistic use case for inspection with aerial robots. We assess the performance of our heuristic solver in comparison with other variants and with exact optimal solutions in small-scale scenarios. In addition, we evaluate the ability of our replanning framework to repair plans online.

Transformers are set to become ubiquitous with applications ranging from chatbots and educational assistants to visual recognition and remote sensing. However, their increasing computational and memory demands is resulting in growing energy consumption. Building models with fast and energy-efficient inference is imperative to enable a variety of transformer-based applications. Look Up Table (LUT) based Weightless Neural Networks are faster than the conventional neural networks as their inference only involves a few lookup operations. Recently, an approach for learning LUT networks directly via an Extended Finite Difference method was proposed. We build on this idea, extending it for performing the functions of the Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) layers in transformer models and integrating them with transformers to propose Quasi Weightless Transformers (QuWeiT). This allows for a computational and energy-efficient inference solution for transformer-based models. On I-ViT-T, we achieve a comparable accuracy of 95.64% on CIFAR-10 dataset while replacing approximately 55% of all the multiplications in the entire model and achieving a 2.2x energy efficiency. We also observe similar savings on experiments with the nanoGPT framework.

As recommender systems become increasingly prevalent, the environmental impact and energy efficiency of training large-scale models have come under scrutiny. This paper investigates the potential for energy-efficient algorithm performance by optimizing dataset sizes through downsampling techniques in the context of Green Recommender Systems. We conducted experiments on the MovieLens 100K, 1M, 10M, and Amazon Toys and Games datasets, analyzing the performance of various recommender algorithms under different portions of dataset size. Our results indicate that while more training data generally leads to higher algorithm performance, certain algorithms, such as FunkSVD and BiasedMF, particularly with unbalanced and sparse datasets like Amazon Toys and Games, maintain high-quality recommendations with up to a 50% reduction in training data, achieving nDCG@10 scores within approximately 13% of full dataset performance. These findings suggest that strategic dataset reduction can decrease computational and environmental costs without substantially compromising recommendation quality. This study advances sustainable and green recommender systems by providing insights for reducing energy consumption while maintaining effectiveness.

Earth Observation (EO) data are increasingly used in policy analysis by enabling granular estimation of treatment effects. However, a challenge in EO-based causal inference lies in balancing the trade-off between capturing fine-grained individual heterogeneity and broader contextual information. This paper introduces Multi-scale Concatenation, a family of composable procedures that transform arbitrary single-scale CATE estimation algorithms into multi-scale algorithms. We benchmark the performance of Multi-scale Concatenation on a CATE estimation pipeline combining Vision Transformer (ViT) models fine-tuned on satellite images to encode images of different scales with Causal Forests to obtain the final CATE estimate. We first perform simulation studies, showing how a multi-scale approach captures multi-level dynamics that single-scale ViT models fail to capture. We then apply the multi-scale method to two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in Peru and Uganda using Landsat satellite imagery. In the RCT analysis, the Rank Average Treatment Effect Ratio (RATE Ratio) measure is employed to assess performance without ground truth individual treatment effects. Results indicate that Multi-scale Concatenation improves the performance of deep learning models in EO-based CATE estimation without the complexity of designing new multi-scale architectures for a specific use case.

Identification of nonlinear dynamical systems is crucial across various fields, facilitating tasks such as control, prediction, optimization, and fault detection. Many applications require methods capable of handling complex systems while providing strong learning guarantees for safe and reliable performance. However, existing approaches often focus on simplified scenarios, such as deterministic models, known diffusion, discrete systems, one-dimensional dynamics, or systems constrained by strong structural assumptions such as linearity. This work proposes a novel method for estimating both drift and diffusion coefficients of continuous, multidimensional, nonlinear controlled stochastic differential equations with non-uniform diffusion. We assume regularity of the coefficients within a Sobolev space, allowing for broad applicability to various dynamical systems in robotics, finance, climate modeling, and biology. Leveraging the Fokker-Planck equation, we split the estimation into two tasks: (a) estimating system dynamics for a finite set of controls, and (b) estimating coefficients that govern those dynamics. We provide strong theoretical guarantees, including finite-sample bounds for \(L^2\), \(L^\infty\), and risk metrics, with learning rates adaptive to coefficients' regularity, similar to those in nonparametric least-squares regression literature. The practical effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through extensive numerical experiments. Our method is available as an open-source Python library.