pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From Automation to Autonomy in Smart Manufacturing: A Bayesian Optimization Framework for Modeling Multi-Objective Experimentation and Sequential Decision Making
Authors: Avijit Saha Asru, Hamed Khosravi, Imtiaz Ahmed, Abdullahil Azeem
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Data Integration, Decision Making, Efficient Exploration, Sequential Decision Making

Discovering novel materials with desired properties is essential for driving innovation. Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing have promised transformative advances in this area through real-time data integration and automated production planning and control. However, the reliance on automation alone has often fallen short, lacking the flexibility needed for complex processes. To fully unlock the potential of smart manufacturing, we must evolve from automation to autonomous systems that go beyond rigid programming and can dynamically optimize the search for solutions. Current discovery approaches are often slow, requiring numerous trials to find optimal combinations, and costly, particularly when optimizing multiple properties simultaneously. This paper proposes a Bayesian multi-objective sequential decision-making (BMSDM) framework that can intelligently select experiments as manufacturing progresses, guiding us toward the discovery of optimal design faster and more efficiently. The framework leverages sequential learning through Bayesian Optimization, which iteratively refines a statistical model representing the underlying manufacturing process. This statistical model acts as a surrogate, allowing for efficient exploration and optimization without requiring numerous real-world experiments. This approach can significantly reduce the time and cost of data collection required by traditional experimental designs. The proposed framework is compared with traditional DoE methods and two other multi-objective optimization methods. Using a manufacturing dataset, we evaluate and compare the performance of these approaches across five evaluation metrics. BMSDM comprehensively outperforms the competing methods in multi-objective decision-making scenarios. Our proposed approach represents a significant leap forward in creating an intelligent autonomous platform capable of novel material discovery.
Model Predictive Building Climate Control for Mitigating Heat Pump Noise Pollution (Extended Version)
Authors: Yun Li, Jicheng Shi, Colin N. Jones, Neil Yorke-Smith, Tamas Keviczky
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

Noise pollution from heat pumps (HPs) has been an emerging concern to their broader adoption, especially in densely populated areas. This paper explores a model predictive control (MPC) approach for building climate control, aimed at minimizing the noise nuisance generated by HPs. By exploiting a piecewise linear approximation of HP noise patterns and assuming linear building thermal dynamics, the proposed design can be generalized to handle various HP acoustic patterns with mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). Additionally, two computationally efficient options for defining the noise cost function in the proposed MPC design are discussed. Numerical experiments on a high-fidelity building simulator are performed to demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of the proposed design. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the noise pollution caused by HPs with negligible energy cost increase.
Data-driven Method to Ensure Cascade Stability of Traffic Load Balancing in O-RAN Based Networks
Authors: Mengbang Zou, Yun Tang, Weisi Guo
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00

Load balancing in open radio access networks (O-RAN) is critical for ensuring efficient resource utilization, and the user's experience by evenly distributing network traffic load. Current research mainly focuses on designing load-balancing algorithms to allocate resources while overlooking the cascade stability of load balancing, which is critical to prevent endless handover. The main challenge to analyse the cascade stability lies in the difficulty of establishing an accurate mathematical model to describe the process of load balancing due to its nonlinearity and high-dimensionality. In our previous theoretical work, a simplified general dynamic function was used to analyze the stability. However, it is elusive whether this function is close to the reality of the load balance process. To solve this problem, 1) a data-driven method is proposed to identify the dynamic model of the load balancing process according to the real-time traffic load data collected from the radio units (RUs); 2) the stability condition of load balancing process is established for the identified dynamics model. Based on the identified dynamics model and the stability condition, the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) can control RUs to achieve a desired load-balancing state while ensuring cascade stability.
Deep-Learning-Directed Preventive Dynamic Security Control via Coordinated Demand Response
Authors: Amin Masoumi, Mert Korkali
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00

Unlike common faults, three-phase short-circuit faults in power systems pose significant challenges. These faults can lead to out-of-step (OOS) conditions and jeopardize the system's dynamic security. The rapid dynamics of these faults often exceed the time of protection actions, thus limiting the effectiveness of corrective schemes. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep-learning-based mechanism, namely, a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism, to predict OOS conditions early and enhance the system's fault resilience. The results of the study demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of early prediction and robustness against such faults in various operating conditions.
Meta-Learning Driven Movable-Antenna-assisted Full-Duplex RSMA for Multi-User Communication: Performance and Optimization
Authors: Shreya Khisa, Ali Amhaz, Mohamed Elhattab, Chadi Assi, Sanaa Sharafeddine
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Full-duplex (FD) radios at base station (BS) have gained significant interest because of their ability to simultaneously transmit and receive signals on the same frequency band. However, FD communication is hindered by self-interference (SI) and intra-cell interference caused by simultaneous uplink (UL) transmissions affecting downlink (DL) reception. These interferences significantly limit the ability to fully exploit FD's potential. Recently, movable antenna (MA) technology has emerged as a groundbreaking innovation, offering an effective way to mitigate interference by adjusting the position of each MA within the transmitter or receiver region. This dynamic repositioning allows MAs to move away from high-interference zones to areas with minimal interference, thereby enhancing multiplexing gain and improving spectral efficiency (SE). In light of this, in this paper, we investigate an FD communication system by integrating it with MAs to evaluate and investigate its effectiveness in handling SI and intra-cell interference. Moreover, we utilize rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) as our multiple access technique in both UL and DL transmission. To achieve the full potential of the system, we evaluated three different scenarios with FD-BS-RSMA with MAs where our goal is to maximize the total sum rate of the system by jointly optimizing the transmitting and receiving beamforming vectors, UL user equipment (UE) transmission power, MA positions, and common stream split ratio of RSMA while satisfying the minimum data rate requirements of all UEs, common stream constraint, power budget requirements of BS and UL UEs, and inter-MA distance. The formulated optimization problem is highly non-convex in nature, and hence, we propose a gradient-based meta-learning (GML) approach which can handle the non-convexity in a discrete manner by optimizing each variable in a different neural network.
A New Approach to Controlling Linear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Anand Brahmbhatt, Gon Buzaglo, Sofiia Druchyna, Elad Hazan
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00

We propose a new method for controlling linear dynamical systems under adversarial disturbances and cost functions. Our algorithm achieves a running time that scales polylogarithmically with the inverse of the stability margin, improving upon prior methods with polynomial dependence maintaining the same regret guarantees. The technique, which may be of independent interest, is based on a novel convex relaxation that approximates linear control policies using spectral filters constructed from the eigenvectors of a specific Hankel matrix.
An Exploration-free Method for a Linear Stochastic Bandit Driven by a Linear Gaussian Dynamical System
Authors: Jonathan Gornet, Yilin Mo, Bruno Sinopoli
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization, Multi-Armed Bandits

In stochastic multi-armed bandits, a major problem the learner faces is the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Recently, exploration-free methods -- methods that commit to the action predicted to return the highest reward -- have been studied from the perspective of linear bandits. In this paper, we introduce a linear bandit setting where the reward is the output of a linear Gaussian dynamical system. Motivated by a problem encountered in hyperparameter optimization for reinforcement learning, where the number of actions is much higher than the number of training iterations, we propose Kalman filter Observability Dependent Exploration (KODE), an exploration-free method that utilizes the Kalman filter predictions to select actions. Our major contribution of this work is our analysis of the performance of the proposed method, which is dependent on the observability properties of the underlying linear Gaussian dynamical system. We evaluate KODE via two different metrics: regret, which is the cumulative expected difference between the highest possible reward and the reward sampled by KODE, and action alignment, which measures how closely KODE's chosen action aligns with the linear Gaussian dynamical system's state variable. To provide intuition on the performance, we prove that KODE implicitly encourages the learner to explore actions depending on the observability of the linear Gaussian dynamical system. This method is compared to several well-known stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms to validate our theoretical results.
Sparsity-Promoting Reachability Analysis and Optimization of Constrained Zonotopes
Authors: Joshua A. Robbins, Jacob A. Siefert, Herschel C. Pangborn
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

The constrained zonotope is a polytopic set representation widely used for set-based analysis and control of dynamic systems. This paper considers the problem of tailoring a quadratic program (QP) optimization algorithm to the particular structure of constrained zonotopes and vice-versa. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is presented that makes efficient use of the constrained zonotope structure. To increase the efficiency of the ADMM iterations, reachability calculations are presented that increase the sparsity of the matrices used to define a constrained zonotope. Numerical results show that the ADMM algorithm solves optimal control problems built using these reachability calculations faster than state-of-the-art QP solvers using conventional problem formulations, especially for large problems. Constrained zonotope reachability and optimization calculations are combined within a set-valued state estimation and moving horizon estimation algorithm, and a projection-based infeasibility detection method is presented for efficient safety verification of system trajectories.
Koopman-Based Methods for EV Climate Dynamics: Comparing eDMD Approaches
Authors: Luca Meda, Stephanie Stockar
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning, Management

In this paper, data-driven algorithms based on Koopman Operator Theory are applied to identify and predict the nonlinear dynamics of a vapor compression system and cabin temperature in a light-duty electric vehicle. By leveraging a high-fidelity nonlinear HVAC model, the system behavior is captured in a lifted higher-dimensional state space, enabling a linear representation. A comparative analysis of three Koopman-based system identification approaches (polynomial libraries, radial basis functions (RBF), and neural network-based dictionary learning) is conducted. Accurate prediction of power consumption over entire driving cycles is demonstrated by incorporating power as a measurable output within the Koopman framework. The performance of each method is rigorously evaluated through simulations under various driving cycles and ambient conditions, highlighting their potential for real-time prediction and control in energy-efficient vehicle climate management. This study offers a scalable, data-driven methodology that can be extended to other complex nonlinear systems.
Agile Temporal Discretization for Symbolic Optimal Control
Authors: Adrien Janssens, Adrien Banse, Julien Calbert, Raphaël M. Jungers
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00

As control systems grow in complexity, abstraction-based methods have become essential for designing controllers with formal guarantees. However, a key limitation of these methods is their reliance on discrete-time models, typically obtained by discretizing continuous-time systems with a fixed time step. This discretization leads to two major problems: when the time step is small, the abstraction includes numerous stuttering and spurious trajectories, making controller synthesis suboptimal or even infeasible; conversely, a large time step may also render control design infeasible due to a lack of flexibility. In this work, drawing inspiration from Reinforcement Learning concepts, we introduce temporal abstractions, which allow for a flexible time-step. We provide a method for constructing such abstractions and formally establish their correctness in controller design. Furthermore we show how to apply these to optimal control under reachability specifications. Finally we showcase our methods on two numerical examples, highlighting that our approach leads to better controllers.
IAEmu: Learning Galaxy Intrinsic Alignment Correlations
Authors: Sneh Pandya, Yuanyuan Yang, Nicholas Van Alfen, Jonathan Blazek, Robin Walters
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Position

The intrinsic alignments (IA) of galaxies, a key contaminant in weak lensing analyses, arise from correlations in galaxy shapes driven by tidal interactions and galaxy formation processes. Accurate IA modeling is essential for robust cosmological inference, but current approaches rely on perturbative methods that break down on nonlinear scales or on expensive simulations. We introduce IAEmu, a neural network-based emulator that predicts the galaxy position-position ($\xi$), position-orientation ($\omega$), and orientation-orientation ($\eta$) correlation functions and their uncertainties using mock catalogs based on the halo occupation distribution (HOD) framework. Compared to simulations, IAEmu achieves ~3% average error for $\xi$ and ~5% for $\omega$, while capturing the stochasticity of $\eta$ without overfitting. The emulator provides both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, helping identify regions where predictions may be less reliable. We also demonstrate generalization to non-HOD alignment signals by fitting to IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulation data. As a fully differentiable neural network, IAEmu enables $\sim$10,000$\times$ speed-ups in mapping HOD parameters to correlation functions on GPUs, compared to CPU-based simulations. This acceleration facilitates inverse modeling via gradient-based sampling, making IAEmu a powerful surrogate model for galaxy bias and IA studies with direct applications to Stage IV weak lensing surveys.
Adaptive Detection of Fast Moving Celestial Objects Using a Mixture of Experts and Physical-Inspired Neural Network
Authors: Peng Jia, Ge Li, Bafeng Cheng, Yushan Li, Rongyu Sun
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, object-detection, Object Detection

Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the typical appearances of stars. Depending on the observational method employed, these celestial entities may be designated as near-Earth objects or asteroids. Historically, fast moving celestial objects have been observed using ground-based telescopes, where the relative stability of stars and Earth facilitated effective image differencing techniques alongside traditional fast moving celestial object detection and classification algorithms. However, the growing prevalence of space-based telescopes, along with their diverse observational modes, produces images with different properties, rendering conventional methods less effective. This paper presents a novel algorithm for detecting fast moving celestial objects within star fields. Our approach enhances state-of-the-art fast moving celestial object detection neural networks by transforming them into physical-inspired neural networks. These neural networks leverage the point spread function of the telescope and the specific observational mode as prior information; they can directly identify moving fast moving celestial objects within star fields without requiring additional training, thereby addressing the limitations of traditional techniques. Additionally, all neural networks are integrated using the mixture of experts technique, forming a comprehensive fast moving celestial object detection algorithm. We have evaluated our algorithm using simulated observational data that mimics various observations carried out by space based telescope scenarios and real observation images. Results demonstrate that our method effectively detects fast moving celestial objects across different observational modes.
Earth-like planet predictor: A machine learning approach
Authors: Jeanne Davoult, Romain Eltschinger, Yann Alibert
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00

Searching for planets analogous to Earth in terms of mass and equilibrium temperature is currently the first step in the quest for habitable conditions outside our Solar System and, ultimately, the search for life in the universe. Future missions such as PLATO or LIFE will begin to detect and characterise these small, cold planets, dedicating significant observation time to them. The aim of this work is to predict which stars are most likely to host an Earth-like planet (ELP) to avoid blind searches, minimises detection times, and thus maximises the number of detections. Using a previous study on correlations between the presence of an ELP and the properties of its system, we trained a Random Forest to recognise and classify systems as 'hosting an ELP' or 'not hosting an ELP'. The Random Forest was trained and tested on populations of synthetic planetary systems derived from the Bern model, and then applied to real observed systems. The tests conducted on the machine learning (ML) model yield precision scores of up to 0.99, indicating that 99% of the systems identified by the model as having ELPs possess at least one. Among the few real observed systems that have been tested, 44 have been selected as having a high probability of hosting an ELP, and a quick study of the stability of these systems confirms that the presence of an Earth-like planet within them would leave them stable. The excellent results obtained from the tests conducted on the ML model demonstrate its ability to recognise the typical architectures of systems with or without ELPs within populations derived from the Bern model. If we assume that the Bern model adequately describes the architecture of real systems, then such a tool can prove indispensable in the search for Earth-like planets. A similar approach could be applied to other planetary system formation models to validate those predictions.
EclipseNETs: Learning Irregular Small Celestial Body Silhouettes
Authors: Giacomo Acciarini, Dario Izzo, Francesco Biscani
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Accurately predicting eclipse events around irregular small bodies is crucial for spacecraft navigation, orbit determination, and spacecraft systems management. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging neural implicit representations to model eclipse conditions efficiently and reliably. We propose neural network architectures that capture the complex silhouettes of asteroids and comets with high precision. Tested on four well-characterized bodies - Bennu, Itokawa, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and Eros - our method achieves accuracy comparable to traditional ray-tracing techniques while offering orders of magnitude faster performance. Additionally, we develop an indirect learning framework that trains these models directly from sparse trajectory data using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, removing the requirement to have prior knowledge of an accurate shape model. This approach allows for the continuous refinement of eclipse predictions, progressively reducing errors and improving accuracy as new trajectory data is incorporated.
AstroClearNet: Deep image prior for multi-frame astronomical image restoration
Authors: Yashil Sukurdeep, Fausto Navarro, Tamás Budavári
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration

Recovering high-fidelity images of the night sky from blurred observations is a fundamental problem in astronomy, where traditional methods typically fall short. In ground-based astronomy, combining multiple exposures to enhance signal-to-noise ratios is further complicated by variations in the point-spread function caused by atmospheric turbulence. In this work, we present a self-supervised multi-frame method, based on deep image priors, for denoising, deblurring, and coadding ground-based exposures. Central to our approach is a carefully designed convolutional neural network that integrates information across multiple observations and enforces physically motivated constraints. We demonstrate the method's potential by processing Hyper Suprime-Cam exposures, yielding promising preliminary results with sharper restored images.
Autoencoder-Based Detection of Anomalous Stokes V Spectra in the Flare-Producing Active Region 13663 Using Hinode/SP Observations
Authors: Jargalmaa Batmunkh, Yusuke Iida, Takayoshi Oba
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Detecting unusual signals in observational solar spectra is crucial for understanding the features associated with impactful solar events, such as solar flares. However, existing spectral analysis techniques face challenges, particularly when relying on pre-defined, physics-based calculations to process large volumes of noisy and complex observational data. To address these limitations, we applied deep learning to detect anomalies in the Stokes V spectra from the Hinode/SP instrument. Specifically, we developed an autoencoder model for spectral compression, which serves as an anomaly detection method. Our model effectively identifies anomalous spectra within spectro-polarimetric maps captured prior to the onset of the X1.3 flare on May 5, 2024, in NOAA AR 13663. These atypical spectral points exhibit highly complex profiles and spatially align with polarity inversion lines in magnetogram images, indicating their potential as sites of magnetic energy storage and possible triggers for flares. Notably, the detected anomalies are highly localized, making them particularly challenging to identify in magnetogram images using current manual methods.