Accurate shape sensing, only achievable through distributed proprioception, is a key requirement for closed-loop control of soft robots. Low-cost power efficient optoelectronic sensors manufactured from flexible materials represent a natural choice as they can cope with the large deformations of soft robots without loss of performance. However, existing integration approaches are cumbersome and require manual steps and complex assembly. We propose a semi-automated printing process where plastic optical fibers are embedded with readout electronics in 3D printed flexures. The fibers become locked in place and the readout electronics remain optically coupled to them while the flexures undergo large bending deformations, creating a repeatable, monolithically manufactured bending transducer with only 10 minutes required in total for the manual embedding steps. We demonstrate the process by manufacturing multi-material 3D printed fingers and extensively evaluating the performance of each proprioceptive joint. The sensors achieve 70% linearity and 4.81{\deg} RMS error on average. Furthermore, the distributed architecture allows for maintaining an average fingertip position estimation accuracy of 12 mm in the presence of external static forces. To demonstrate the potential of the distributed sensor architecture in robotics applications, we build a data-driven model independent of actuation feedback to detect contact with objects in the environment.

While the Water-Gas Shift (WGS) reaction plays a crucial role in hydrogen production for fuel cells, finding suitable catalysts to achieve high yields for low-temperature WGS reactions remains a persistent challenge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown promise in accelerating catalyst design by exploring vast candidate spaces, however, two key gaps limit its effectiveness. First, AI models primarily train on numerical data, which fail to capture essential text-based information, such as catalyst synthesis methods. Second, the cross-disciplinary nature of catalyst design requires seamless collaboration between AI, theory, experiments, and numerical simulations, often leading to communication barriers. To address these gaps, we present AceWGS, a Large Language Models (LLMs)-aided framework to streamline WGS catalyst design. AceWGS interacts with researchers through natural language, answering queries based on four features: (i) answering general queries, (ii) extracting information about the database comprising WGS-related journal articles, (iii) comprehending the context described in these articles, and (iv) identifying catalyst candidates using our proposed AI inverse model. We presented a practical case study demonstrating how AceWGS can accelerate the catalyst design process. AceWGS, built with open-source tools, offers an adjustable framework that researchers can readily adapt for a range of AI-accelerated catalyst design applications, supporting seamless integration across cross-disciplinary studies.

Retrieval, re-ranking, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are critical components of modern natural language processing (NLP) applications in information retrieval, question answering, and knowledge-based text generation. However, existing solutions are often fragmented, lacking a unified framework that easily integrates these essential processes. The absence of a standardized implementation, coupled with the complexity of retrieval and re-ranking workflows, makes it challenging for researchers to compare and evaluate different approaches in a consistent environment. While existing toolkits such as Rerankers and RankLLM provide general-purpose reranking pipelines, they often lack the flexibility required for fine-grained experimentation and benchmarking. In response to these challenges, we introduce \textbf{Rankify}, a powerful and modular open-source toolkit designed to unify retrieval, re-ranking, and RAG within a cohesive framework. Rankify supports a wide range of retrieval techniques, including dense and sparse retrievers, while incorporating state-of-the-art re-ranking models to enhance retrieval quality. Additionally, Rankify includes a collection of pre-retrieved datasets to facilitate benchmarking, available at Huggingface (https://huggingface.co/datasets/abdoelsayed/reranking-datasets). To encourage adoption and ease of integration, we provide comprehensive documentation (http://rankify.readthedocs.io/), an open-source implementation on GitHub(https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/rankify), and a PyPI package for effortless installation(https://pypi.org/project/rankify/). By providing a unified and lightweight framework, Rankify allows researchers and practitioners to advance retrieval and re-ranking methodologies while ensuring consistency, scalability, and ease of use.

Symbolic regression (SR) is an emerging branch of machine learning focused on discovering simple and interpretable mathematical expressions from data. Although a wide-variety of SR methods have been developed, they often face challenges such as high computational cost, poor scalability with respect to the number of input dimensions, fragility to noise, and an inability to balance accuracy and complexity. This work introduces SyMANTIC, a novel SR algorithm that addresses these challenges. SyMANTIC efficiently identifies (potentially several) low-dimensional descriptors from a large set of candidates (from $\sim 10^5$ to $\sim 10^{10}$ or more) through a unique combination of mutual information-based feature selection, adaptive feature expansion, and recursively applied $\ell_0$-based sparse regression. In addition, it employs an information-theoretic measure to produce an approximate set of Pareto-optimal equations, each offering the best-found accuracy for a given complexity. Furthermore, our open-source implementation of SyMANTIC, built on the PyTorch ecosystem, facilitates easy installation and GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SyMANTIC across a range of problems, including synthetic examples, scientific benchmarks, real-world material property predictions, and chaotic dynamical system identification from small datasets. Extensive comparisons show that SyMANTIC uncovers similar or more accurate models at a fraction of the cost of existing SR methods.

One critical challenge in the institutional adoption journey of Large Language Models (LLMs) stems from their propensity to hallucinate in generated responses. To address this, we propose MultiQ&A, a systematic approach for evaluating the robustness and consistency of LLM-generated answers. We demonstrate MultiQ&A's ability to crowdsource question perturbations and their respective answers through independent LLM agents at scale. Our experiments culminated in the examination of 1.9 million question perturbations and 2.3 million answers. Furthermore, MultiQ&A shows that ensembled LLMs, such as gpt-3.5-turbo, remain relatively robust and consistent under perturbations. MultiQ&A provides clarity in the response generation space, offering an effective method for inspecting disagreements and variability. Therefore, our system offers a potential framework for institutional LLM adoption with the ability to measure confidence, consistency, and the quantification of hallucinations.

Fire safety is a critical area of research in civil and mechanical engineering, particularly in ensuring the structural stability of buildings during fire events. The Most Fire-Sensitive Point (MFSP) in a structure is the location where a fire would cause the greatest impact on structural stability. Accurate prediction of the MFSP is vital for streamlining structural assessments and optimizing the design process. This paper presents a novel framework for MFSP prediction using a neural network-based approach that integrates fire dynamics and finite element analysis through a differentiable agent model. The framework focuses on predicting the Maximum Interstory Drift Ratio (MIDR), a key indicator of structural performance under fire conditions. By leveraging the differentiable agent model, we efficiently generate labeled data for MFSP and directly train a predictor for this critical metric. To achieve this, we generated extensive simulation data encompassing structural and fire scenarios and employed graph neural networks to represent the building structures. Transfer learning was applied to optimize the training process, and an edge update mechanism was introduced to dynamically adjust edge attributes, reflecting property changes under fire conditions. The proposed model was rigorously evaluated on simulation data, demonstrating strong performance in accurately predicting both MIDR and MFSP, thus advancing fire safety analysis for building structures.

Data-driven soft sensors help in process operations by providing real-time estimates of otherwise hard- to-measure process quantities, e.g., viscosities or product concentrations. Currently, soft sensors need to be developed individually per plant. Using transfer learning, machine learning-based soft sensors could be reused and fine-tuned across plants and applications. However, transferring data-driven soft sensor models is in practice often not possible, because the fixed input structure of standard soft sensor models prohibits transfer if, e.g., the sensor information is not identical in all plants. We propose a topology-aware graph neural network approach for transfer learning of soft sensor models across multiple plants. In our method, plants are modeled as graphs: Unit operations are nodes, streams are edges, and sensors are embedded as attributes. Our approach brings two advantages for transfer learning: First, we not only include sensor data but also crucial information on the plant topology. Second, the graph neural network algorithm is flexible with respect to its sensor inputs. This allows us to model data from different plants with different sensor networks. We test the transfer learning capabilities of our modeling approach on ammonia synthesis loops with different process topologies. We build a soft sensor predicting the ammonia concentration in the product. After training on data from one process, we successfully transfer our soft sensor model to a previously unseen process with a different topology. Our approach promises to extend the data-driven soft sensors to cases to leverage data from multiple plants.

A trained Large Language Model (LLM) contains much of human knowledge. Yet, it is difficult to gauge the extent or accuracy of that knowledge, as LLMs do not always ``know what they know'' and may even be actively misleading. In this work, we give a general method for detecting semantic concepts in the internal activations of LLMs. Furthermore, we show that our methodology can be easily adapted to steer LLMs toward desirable outputs. Our innovations are the following: (1) we use a nonlinear feature learning method to identify important linear directions for predicting concepts from each layer; (2) we aggregate features across layers to build powerful concept detectors and steering mechanisms. We showcase the power of our approach by attaining state-of-the-art results for detecting hallucinations, harmfulness, toxicity, and untruthful content on seven benchmarks. We highlight the generality of our approach by steering LLMs towards new concepts that, to the best of our knowledge, have not been previously considered in the literature, including: semantic disambiguation, human languages, programming languages, hallucinated responses, science subjects, poetic/Shakespearean English, and even multiple concepts simultaneously. Moreover, our method can steer concepts with numerical attributes such as product reviews. We provide our code (including a simple API for our methods) at https://github.com/dmbeaglehole/neural_controllers .

Materials design is an important component of modern science and technology, yet traditional approaches rely heavily on trial-and-error and can be inefficient. Computational techniques, enhanced by modern artificial intelligence (AI), have greatly accelerated the design of new materials. Among these approaches, inverse design has shown great promise in designing materials that meet specific property requirements. In this mini-review, we summarize key computational advancements for materials design over the past few decades. We follow the evolution of relevant materials design techniques, from high-throughput forward machine learning (ML) methods and evolutionary algorithms, to advanced AI strategies like reinforcement learning (RL) and deep generative models. We highlight the paradigm shift from conventional screening approaches to inverse generation driven by deep generative models. Finally, we discuss current challenges and future perspectives of materials inverse design. This review may serve as a brief guide to the approaches, progress, and outlook of designing future functional materials with technological relevance.

Multiscale simulations are indispensable for connecting microstructural features to the macroscopic behavior of polycrystalline materials, but their high computational demands limit their practicality. Deep material networks (DMNs) have been proposed as efficient surrogate models, yet they fall short of capturing texture evolution. To address this limitation, we propose the orientation-aware interaction-based deep material network (ODMN), which incorporates an orientation-aware mechanism and an interaction mechanism grounded in the Hill-Mandel principle. The orientation-aware mechanism learns the crystallographic textures, while the interaction mechanism captures stress-equilibrium directions among representative volume element (RVE) subregions, offering insight into internal microstructural mechanics. Notably, ODMN requires only linear elastic data for training yet generalizes effectively to complex nonlinear and anisotropic responses. Our results show that ODMN accurately predicts both mechanical responses and texture evolution under complex plastic deformation, thus expanding the applicability of DMNs to polycrystalline materials. By balancing computational efficiency with predictive fidelity, ODMN provides a robust framework for multiscale simulations of polycrystalline materials.