Papers

A scalar hyperbolic PDE, actuated at one boundary, is coupled with a fast PDE in two spatial dimensions: transport in the axial coordinate and in an internal coordinate, and possibly diffusion in the internal coordinate. Backstepping designs exist for coupled hyperbolic systems, for their ensembles, and for their continua, but in all of these the second variable of the fast subsystem carries no transport or diffusion; when it does, no design is available, and from a scalar input no exact control of the two-dimensional state is to be expected. The pair is stabilized here by time-scale separation: in the quasi-steady limit the two-dimensional subsystem collapses into a spatial Volterra operator inside a one-dimensional reduced plant, backstepping applies there, and the two-dimensional subsystem is left to be a stable boundary layer. One theorem establishes exponential stability of the pair for every time-scale ratio below an explicit threshold, uniformly in the internal diffusion coefficient down to the pure-transport case.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are studied mainly in robotics, where visual observations and language instructions are mapped to physical actions. This paper introduces Energy Vision-Language-Action (EVLA), a controlled multimodal benchmark for intent-conditioned residential energy management. EVLA frames battery scheduling as a multimodal trajectory-prediction problem in which an RGB energy-field representation, a numerical operating state, and a natural-language objective are mapped to a 16-step battery-action trajectory generated by a finite-horizon sampling-based reference generator. Source windows are derived from public residential electrical-load data, while electricity price, battery state of charge, indoor temperature, and time of day are generated benchmark metadata. A hidden operating regime is encoded only through energy-field texture, enabling paired visual changes while the explicit numerical state is fixed. Crossing 439,203 retained base windows with three hidden regimes and five language objectives yields 6,588,045 multimodal instances. An initial study evaluates 36 configurations over three training seeds using fixed subsets of 5,000 training, 500 validation, and 500 test instances. In the MobileNet-family comparison, removing processed language increases trajectory mean-squared error from 0.3856 +/- 0.0039 to 0.8628 +/- 0.0001, whereas removing vision yields 0.3843 +/- 0.0013, comparable to the full model. The results show strong asymmetry in modality use: the processed-language pathway is strongly associated with prediction quality, while the current RGB pathway provides no aggregate error advantage. These results characterize the fixed pilot subset and executed protocol rather than full-benchmark training. EVLA provides a controlled setting for studying how semantic intent and latent context influence residential energy-action prediction.

Red-light violations and harsh braking at signalized intersections are major contributors to traffic accidents. This paper analyzes and predicts human driver decision-making and longitudinal trajectory behavior during traffic light signal transitions. We collected a diverse real-world dataset comprising 449 approach runs under varying speed and distance conditions. Vehicle motion was recorded using RTK-corrected GNSS with centimeter-level accuracy, and driver heart rate and multi-level comfort ratings were monitored. Spatial and temporal calibration ensured precise alignment between vehicle state and signal timing. Statistical analysis identifies required deceleration as the dominant single predictor of the stop-go decision, and heteroscedastic Gaussian modeling of peak deceleration reveals five empirical comfort ranges derived from human stopping behavior. Based on this insight, we propose a two-stage modeling framework. Stage 1 predicts the binary maneuver decision, and Stage 2 generates the longitudinal acceleration trajectory using a decision-conditioned autoregressive Transformer with physics constraints, including target-state conditioning and jerk limits. The proposed architecture outperforms baseline methods and achieves 0.49m/s^2 acceleration MAE and 0.62m distance MAE. It also estimates the future stopping-comfort level of the human driver from a single yellow-onset snapshot. Qualitative results demonstrate realistic human-like braking behavior. The dataset and source code are publicly available.

Reliable online autonomy is critical for quadrotor operation in urban airspaces, where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) measurements suffer from multipath, blockage, and latency issues, introducing non-stationary, temporally correlated errors that degrade conventional GNSS-IMU fusion. This paper presents a belief-adaptive online autonomy framework that augments an extended Kalman filter (EKF) with explicit GNSS trust modelling, second-order online belief adaptation, and latency-aware out-of-sequence measurement handling. GNSS trust is represented as a latent belief state that modulates measurement weighting and multipath bias uncertainty, and is updated online using EKF consistency signals. Unlike reactive covariance tuning, the proposed approach enables proactive and stable sensor trust adaptation without prior environmental knowledge or offline training. Evaluation in simulated urban air mobility scenarios with correlated multipath, stochastic latency, and obstacle constraints demonstrates improved belief convergence, smoother trajectories, and reduced estimation and tracking errors compared to naive, adaptive, and first-order baselines. The framework preserves classical GNSS-IMU fusion structure and can be integrated directly into existing flight control pipelines, supporting robust online autonomy in GNSS degraded environments.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) paired with rooftop photovoltaics (PVs) can deliver measurable cost savings under time-of-use (TOU) electricity tariffs; however, the relative performance of model-based and model-free dispatch strategies remains insufficiently benchmarked on full-year, real-world commercial datasets. This paper presents a full-year (2023) comparative evaluation of three BESS dispatch approaches using data from a commercial PV installation operating under a TOU tariff. The examined strategies include: (i) a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation with perfect foresight, providing an oracle performance benchmark under the assumed model; (ii) a model predictive control (MPC) scheme based on a day-ahead persistence forecast, representing a low-complexity deployable approach; and (iii) a soft actor-critic (SAC) deep reinforcement learning agent trained under causal information constraints. The MILP benchmark achieves an annual cost reduction of 24.6% relative to a no-storage baseline. The persistence-based MPC approach recovers 99.2% of this benchmark using only prior-day data. In contrast, the evaluated SAC agent yields an annual cost higher than the no-storage baseline. This outcome is analyzed in the context of known challenges in reinforcement learning for energy systems, including limited observability and reward design. Overall, the results indicate that, for the studied dataset and tariff structure, persistence-based MPC captures nearly all achievable economic benefits under practical deployment constraints, whereas the considered RL configuration does not yield competitive performance under the same information limitations.

Hip exoskeletons may improve recovery from unexpected gait perturbations, yet personalizing assistance remains difficult because balance is multidimensional and human-in-the-loop experiments are small-sample and noisy. We present a participant-specific composite balance cost that integrates seven biomechanical sub-metrics spanning margin of stability, center-of-mass dynamics, and whole-body angular momentum. The sub-metrics are converted to direction-aligned, dimensionless cost features, and nonnegative fusion weights are learned on the simplex. Coupled with an empirical-Bayes hierarchical model, the learned-composite selector estimates each tested condition's posterior probability of being best, P(best), and a high-probability candidate set with size $K_{0.8}$. The framework was evaluated with three participants walking at 1.1 m/s during unilateral belt-slip perturbations across 46 hip-assistance conditions. In the full-budget analysis (B = 4 repeats per condition), the selector concentrated 80% of the posterior probability within 1 to 5 of 46 conditions, compared with 2 to 12 for equal-weight fusion and 4 to 37 for principal component analysis fusion. This smaller candidate set could shorten personalization experiments and limit participants' exposure to repeated perturbations in future studies. Selected-condition trials showed lower observed composite costs than no-torque trials, with nominal p < 0.05 for P2 and P3. Leave-one-repeat-out refits yielded positive mean held-out rank correlations for all participants and moderate stability of the learned weights and candidate sets. These proof-of-concept results support participant-specific composite balance evaluation for candidate selection in perturbation-based human-in-the-loop experiments.

Reliable path tracking is crucial for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating in dynamic and uncertain marine environments. However, traditional line-of-sight (LOS) guidance methods rely on asymptotic convergence, resulting in slow disturbance recovery and unpredictable tracking performance. Existing robust control methods typically require modifications to the underlying vehicle controller, limiting their practical application on commercial AUV platforms. This paper proposes a robust fixed-time adaptive LOS guidance framework for 3D path tracking for AUVs. By combining fixed-time stability theory with LOS guidance, this method guarantees path tracking convergence within a preset time range, with the convergence time independent of initial conditions. Furthermore, a fixed-time adaptive estimator is developed to rapidly compensate for time-varying sideslip disturbances caused by ocean currents. A time-varying look-ahead mechanism is also introduced to improve tracking performance on curved paths. Lyapunov analysis proves the fixed-time stability of the proposed framework, and numerical simulations and physical experiments demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art adaptive LOS methods, this framework exhibits superior tracking accuracy, convergence speed, and anti-interference capability. In simulation, the time-varying look-ahead variant reduced cross-track and vertical-track RMSE by 69.37% and 67.46%, respectively, during curved-path tracking. In field experiments with an Iver 3 AUV, the proposed fixed-time guidance reduced average tracking error by 56.35% in straight-path evaluation and 27.59% in curved-path evaluation compared with conventional adaptive LOS guidance.The proposed method provides a practical guidance-level solution for achieving reliable autonomous navigation of AUVs in complex marine environments.

This paper addresses the velocity-free leaderless and leader–follower distributed attitude synchronization of a network of rigid body systems, with inertial vector measurements, under an undirected communication graph topology. In the leaderless case all agents achieve consensus on a common constant orientation. In the leader–follower case, all agents synchronize with a prescribed constant orientation available to only one agent. The proposed schemes require neither attitude reconstruction nor angular-velocity, avoid unwinding, and achieve almost-global asymptotic stability of the desired synchronization sets. Numerical simulations illustrate their effectiveness.

Climate change is a global threat to the long-term sustainable development of energy systems. Recent works have explored the emerging opportunity of coordinating different energy carriers and sectors (e.g. electricity, natural gas, heating, hydrogen, transportation, and water sectors) to unlock the cross-sector flexibility against climate change. This review has established a holistic framework for resilient multi-energy systems through the lens of nested coupling. It covers the most recent progress in resilience resources, resilience evaluation, resilience-oriented operation & planning, resilience pricing & investment, and real-world implementation. This work differs from prior studies through a full investigation on climate change impacts (distribution shifts), resilience pricing, and global projects. Within this area, we advocate for a unique and interdisciplinary perspective spanning across energy systems, climate science, sociology, economics, and data science. At the end, seven major challenges and opportunities are identified, including data deficiency, distributed coordination & privacy, high-fidelity simulation, and machine learning techniques. Researchers, industrial experts, and policy makers can follow this review to capture the emerging trend and future opportunities in this growing area.

Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a key technology for future 6G networks, providing wide coverage and flexible computing services. However, the limited resources of UAVs and the dynamic changes in the network structure make it difficult to maintain high efficiency. Existing methods often ignore the semantic information of tasks and the complex relationships among UAVs and mobile terminals, resulting in poor coordination. This paper proposes a joint optimization framework for task offloading, task migration, and trajectory control in semantic communication-enabled multi-UAV edge computing systems, aiming to maximize semantic similarity while minimizing task latency and system energy consumption. To tackle the resultant problem, we develop a Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network-based Multi-Agent Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (HAN-MATD3) algorithm. Specifically, we use a heterogeneous graph to model the network topology and apply HAN to extract important semantic features. These features are then integrated into the MATD3 framework to support joint optimization.

Although flexible resource aggregators (FRAs), represented by electric vehicle aggregators (EVAs) and load aggregators (LAs), possess inherent flexibility to mitigate three-phase unbalance, the key challenge lies in how to effectively incentivize them to actively participate in unbalance mitigation. To address this, this paper proposes a generalized Nash bargaining (GNB)-based chance-constrained coordinated operation model for the distribution system operator (DSO) and FRAs. In this framework, the DSO and FRAs cooperate to mitigate three-phase unbalance, where FRAs provide flexibility to reduce the DSO's unbalance mitigation costs, and the DSO offers economic incentives to FRAs in return. Bargaining power is tailored according to each participant's contribution to unbalance mitigation to ensure fair profit allocation. Moreover, a scenario-based chance-constrained formulation is integrated to handle photovoltaic (PV) output uncertainties. To solve the model, a distributed proximal decomposition algorithm (PDA) is introduced for the independent model, while the coordinated model is decomposed into a social welfare maximization subproblem and a payment bargaining subproblem, with an improved bilinear Benders decomposition algorithm developed to solve the former. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in mitigating unbalance, ensuring fair profit distribution, and enhancing robustness against uncertainties.

In an integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, targets may intercept information. We address this specific security issue in a full-duplex ISAC system with malicious eavesdroppers aiming to intercept uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) communication exchanges between the dual-functional radar and communication base station and legitimate communication users. We formulate an optimization framework to maximize the sum secrecy rate for both DL and UL, considering power budget constraints for sensing and communications. The optimization problem is non-convex, so we introduce an iterative joint Taylor-block cyclic coordinate descent (IJTB) method to approximate it as a convex problem. The IJTB method alternates between sub-problems: one for UL beamformers and another for UL power allocation, artificial noise covariance, and DL beamforming, using Taylor approximations to simplify optimization. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to standard benchmarks.

A new robustness metric $\nu$ was recently proposed as a substitute for the structured singular value $\mu$ to better capture robustness to sparse diagonal uncertainty, but its computation has remained an open problem. In this paper, we show that computing $\nu$ is equivalent to maximizing the spectral radius of a nonnegative matrix product. This equivalence allows us to transfer existing results on spectral-radius maximization to $\nu$, including a refined upper bound and conditions under which the bounds coincide. We then provide reformulations and structural results that enable an algorithm to solve the nonconvex optimization problem for nontrivial problems using global solvers. This also enables identification of the most fragile parts of the system. Our results do not yet provide a scalable solution for computing $\nu$, but they are an important step toward computability and interpretability.

We present a learning-based approach to kinodynamic online motion planning for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operating at a fixed altitude in unknown dynamic environments, where real-time avoidance of both static and dynamic obstacles must be achieved under conditions of extreme partial observability. The UAV is controlled with a single degree of freedom (yaw only), resulting in constrained, nonholonomic motion similar to fixed-wing platforms. The proposed framework integrates a behavior grid map representation with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for stable policy learning in continuous control. The key idea is the co-design of a state representation and control policy that enables reliable navigation using only three low-cost directional range sensors, without reliance on dense sensing modalities such as LiDAR or vision-based systems. The behavior grid map dynamically aggregates sparse measurements into a structured local representation that supports real-time decision-making for obstacle avoidance and target reaching. Extensive simulations across environments of varying sizes and obstacle densities demonstrate that the proposed standard and enhanced methods achieve higher success rates than PPO variants and Model Predictive Control (MPC) (94% vs. 79–90% in small-scale high-congestion scenarios, and 83% vs. 62–71% in large-scale high-congestion scenarios), while maintaining real-time performance. Real-world experiments across four scenarios further confirm practical feasibility, with consistent target-reaching behaviour and no collisions under the tested conditions.

This paper addresses the angle-based formation tracking problem for a class of heterogeneous planar underactuated agents subject to disturbances. A representative example is a group of underactuated surface vessels (USVs) operating in the surge-sway-yaw plane, in which each vessel has three degrees of freedom but only two independent control inputs, which are surge force and yaw moment. The desired formation is characterized by a set of longitudinal offset points, referred to as hand points, together with prescribed angular constraints among triplets of these points. The formation tracking problem is studied on a leader-follower interaction graph, assuming the leader moves at constant velocity. Under the assumption that relative velocity measurements are available, the first control law achieves asymptotic formation tracking with internal stability guarantees. Moreover, a second algorithm that does not rely on relative velocity information is introduced, which successfully drives the followers' hand points to their desired configuration. Numerical simulations involving USVs are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Soft robots are commonly sought for safety-critical interactions in delicate environments, where accurate position and orientation control is imperative. Model predictive control (MPC) offers a solution, but it requires a model of the robot's infinite-dimensional nonlinear dynamics that is at once accurate and computationally cheap. Recent theory on adiabatic spectral submanifolds (aSSMs) and their applications to soft robots provide data-driven model-reduction methods to construct such models. Here, we extend these methods to identify aSSMs from enlarged observable datasets and upgrade the currently available aSSM-MPC schemes. Evaluated on a high-fidelity finite-element simulation of a pressure-actuated soft arm, our controller reduces position and orientation tracking error by more than 60% compared to existing data-driven baselines.

Dynamic trajectory prediction has become an important paradigm for data-driven transient stability analysis (TSA), yet most existing predictors remain system-specific and require substantial retraining when network configurations, generation mixes, or state-variable sets change. Uni-TSA introduced a general-purpose TSA framework that combines channel-independent modeling with a pretrained large language model (LLM) predictor. Nevertheless, its application to heterogeneous systems is limited by ambiguity in short observations, a mismatch between numerical trajectories and LLM embeddings, neglected coupling among state variables, and the high inference cost of dense backbones. This paper proposes LLaTSA, an LLM-aligned framework for general-purpose trajectory-based TSA. LLaTSA first incorporates operating conditions, disturbance attributes, and state-variable identity through a structured textual prefix. It then aligns normalized temporal patches with a TSA-related vocabulary before processing them with a pretrained sparse decoder-only mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone. A state-variable coupling module captures coordinated post-fault evolution, while teacher forcing and rollout-based training support iterative long-horizon prediction. Case studies on multiple test systems demonstrate accurate trajectory prediction, reliable stability discrimination, and effective adaptation across unseen scenarios.

Transmission grids are increasingly stressed by the fluctuating nature of renewable energy sources and by increasing electricity demand. Such grids were mainly built for a different generation fleet and load conditions. Grid topology optimization offers the possibility to redistribute power flows by modifying the busbar topology of substations in the grid. However, the combinatorial explosion of feasible busbar configurations makes topology optimization impractical for system operators. This paper proposes a methodology to identify a small subset of high-value busbar topologies to capture the economic benefit of topology optimization across a range of renewable-demand patterns. The optimization model is based on a LPAC approximation of the optimal power flow formulation, and AC-feasibility checks of the optimal topology applied to the IEEE 118-bus test case. In the test case, we select two distinct pairs of substations (46-49 and 24-69) and we optimize their topology separately over 365 clustered timesteps with different wind and load conditions. For each pair, we identify the four most recurrent optimal topologies and evaluate their performance under standard, and congested conditions, with and without a discrete load growth. Results show that selecting from this reduced set of topologies reduces total generation costs by up to 0.147% compared to a plain AC-OPF. In addition, we show the influence of topology optimization on the hosting capacity of selected busbars under discrete load growth. Our findings provide a practical methodology for system operators to select a subset of optimal busbar topologies to be used in their grid for different wind-load conditions, resulting in decreasing generation costs without the computational and operational risks of real-time switching decisions.

Inspecting or servicing a non-cooperative spacecraft is a two-player game: the target can thrust to defeat the inspector's plan. Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs reachability answers such games exactly but its cost grows exponentially with state dimension, while learning-based controllers scale yet certify nothing. Convex formulations are the usual escape, typically cast as convex-concave saddle-point problems. That framing fails in the terminal-distance orbital game: with effort regularization, the payoff is convex in both controls, so no pure open-loop saddle point need exist. In its place we derive two exact one-sided guarantees read from the players' terminal reachable sets via support functions: an escape certificate proving the target can hold a guaranteed standoff, and a security strategy bounding the miss distance the inspector can force. Together they bracket the engagement without assuming player rationality, and over two hundred perturbed trials the escape certificate separated capture from escape without error. A projected extragradient method supplies a strategy pair in about 25 ms, certified in place by best-response gaps. The construction carries unchanged to elliptical reference orbits via Yamanaka-Ankersen dynamics, where the orbital phase moves miss distance by nearly a factor of two, reproduced by nonlinear Keplerian propagation. Under receding-horizon play the inspector captures in half of ten representative engagements. Angles-only navigation error, keep-out zones, multiple pursuers, and closed-loop play are treated as extensions.

We study the problem of identifying nontrivial, i.e., nonzero, periodic fixed-points in discrete-time Lur'e feedback systems. Using the circulant matrix constructed from the transfer function of the linear subsystem, whether stable or unstable, we introduce an algebraic framework that allows us to determine when such fixed-points exist. This framework yields a sector bound defined by two vectors, whose slopes correspond to the maximum and minimum positive singular values of the circulant matrix. Assuming that the nonlinear feedback function is memoryless, we show that a necessary condition for the existence of nontrivial $P$-periodic fixed-points is that the intersection of the continuous completion of the nonlinear feedback function with that sector bound contains at least one point other than the origin. Our characterization provides a unified condition valid for all periods $P$, and further enables us to derive upper bounds on the amplitudes of admissible periodic fixed-points with bounded feedback functions. In particular, for relay feedback systems with passive feedback functions, we derive both upper and lower bounds for the amplitudes of such periodic fixed-points.

Kalman filters (KFs) choose the gain as the product of the state-measurement cross-covariance and the inverse of the innovation covariance. In nonlinear systems, the predictive distribution generally changes shape, and these covariances require approximation. Conventional nonlinear KFs approximate them around a single center, the predicted state. They can produce inaccurate gains and overconfident covariance estimates when one local approximation does not represent the measurement geometry across the uncertainty region. To address this issue, we introduce probe sets, small covariance-scaled collections of states at which the filter repeats its local approximation. We then select the gain that minimizes the average covariance reported by these local approximations. The same construction is used in our previously proposed covariance recalibration step to improve covariance consistency. The construction applies to different KF variants without requiring a specific approximation rule. For quadratic measurements, we derive conditions under which probing yields lower normalized true error variance than the corresponding single-center gain when prediction uncertainty is sufficiently understated. We apply the framework to four KF variants and compare the resulting filters with multiple baselines across 300 randomized setups for each of two systems. The results show that probing preserves typical accuracy while substantially reducing covariance inconsistency and the rare large-error trajectories that dominate the root mean square of per-run errors. The code is available at https://github.com/Shida-Jiang/Probe_KF.

This is a position paper. We demonstrate that recursive self-improvement (RSI) large language model (LLM) agents are a natural search engine for dynamic model identification of inverter-based resources (IBRs) whose internal controls are often proprietary and hidden from grid operators. White-box models provide physical transparency but require vendor disclosure; black-box models avoid this requirement but sacrifice interpretability; and existing grey-box approaches, including sparse and symbolic regression, are poorly suited to discovering feedback control architectures or incorporating control-engineering priors. Our position is that this gap can be alleviated by (1) restricting the search space to a typed vocabulary of standard control modules, including PI controllers, phase-locked loops (PLLs), low-pass filters, etc., composed under block-diagram grammar rules, and (2) using an RSI LLM agent to perform program search over candidate block-diagram models, guided by measured frequency-domain admittance data at the point of common coupling (PCC), while fitting the free parameters of each candidate by nonlinear least squares. We instantiate this position by adapting ThetaEvolve, an open-source program-evolution framework supporting in-context evolution and test-time learning, to inverter model discovery. In a proof-of-concept study on a grid-following (GFL) inverter benchmark, the RSI loop reduces the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) of a naive open-loop model from 0.470 to 0.0435 and identifies a 15-module closed-loop structure that closely resembles the hidden ground-truth GFL controller.

Surgical tissue manipulation demands precision; however, tool-tissue manipulation force magnitudes under realistic conditions are rarely quantified. To address this gap, we proposed and validated a portable ex-vivo force-sensing platform that measures tool-tissue interaction forces across the skull-brain interface during simulated neurosurgery. The system involves fresh calf brain tissue, used as a biological surrogate for brain parenchyma, placed in a 3D-printed human skull model equipped with a 6 degree-of-freedom force/torque sensor and a real-time data acquisition system. Five validation protocols assessed the accuracy and dynamic fidelity of the platform against ground-truth measurement, static accuracy and linearity using calibrated weights (0.5-50 g), minimum detectable force, spatial consistency across different anatomical regions, effect of surgical draping, and long-duration stability. Across protocols, measured forces showed excellent agreement with reference loads (correlation R = 0.9997), with RMSE < 0.005 N and mean relative error under 2%. The platform reliably detected low-magnitude forces down to 1 g (9.8 mN), while surgical drapes introduced no meaningful signal distortion and prolonged recordings exhibited minimal drift. Overall, the proposed framework provides objective, high-fidelity force quantification for skill training and performance assessment using fresh calf brain tissue and may serve as a foundation for force-based evaluation across other surgical procedures. Future work will integrate clinically used surgical instruments to increase procedural realism and will progress toward clinical trials to evaluate usability, educational impact, and translational relevance in practice-adjacent settings.

Concurrent local LLM serving on unified-memory desktops must preserve memory headroom and output fidelity, which speed-only rankings overlook. We introduce SiliconBench, which evaluates nine Apple Silicon serving engines through three lenses: speed, memory, and fidelity. We evaluate chat and agent serving on Qwen3, Qwen3.5, and Gemma 4. We use a classification task to check for quality regressions against an NVIDIA reference. DGX Spark provides a complementary serving-performance reference. Three desiderata guide interpretation: serving architecture readiness, memory discipline, and multi-node scaling. On Qwen3-0.6B, vllm-metal alone more than doubles throughput on both workloads from concurrency 1 to 16. CUDA vLLM and SGLang show stronger concurrency scaling on the same prompts. Explicit memory budgets do not guarantee memory headroom: two stacks complete every request while memory use approaches physical capacity and throughput declines. The newer model architectures have narrower engine support. Their evaluated implementations match the fidelity reference. Only three stacks satisfy the completion, fidelity, and model-coverage gates. Comparisons on larger dense and MoE models reinforce the importance of scheduling prompt processing alongside ongoing generation: vllm-metal's packed prefill-decode path maintains lower first-token latency than omlx under concurrent load. In the tested two-machine configurations, tensor parallelism over Thunderbolt RDMA scales while pipeline parallelism over TCP regresses. We release benchmark code, per-run results, and maintenance journals, supported by a workflow combining bounded agent fixes with human review.

Extremum seeking control (ESC) relies on deliberately injected excitation to extract optimization information from measured outputs, making its networked implementation particularly vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This paper develops a resilient discrete-time ESC architecture for cyber-physical systems subject to DoS attacks. By holding the most recently successfully transmitted signals during DoS intervals, the proposed mechanism yields averaged error dynamics with an exponentially contracting mode under successful communication and a neutral mode under attack. For deterministic DoS attacks, practical exponential convergence to the extremum is established under an average bound on the attack duration, with an explicit convergence rate depending on the fraction of time under attack. For probabilistic DoS attacks, almost-sure and in-probability convergence properties are established via stochastic averaging, with the attack success probability explicitly entering the convergence rate. A key finding is that a seemingly natural zero-input strategy can fundamentally compromise ESC: attacks synchronized with the dither generate an $\mathcal{O}(1/a)$ bias in the averaged dynamics, where $a$ is the dither amplitude, and can displace the equilibrium from the true optimizer. Thus, under the proposed hold-based architecture, increasingly severe DoS attacks primarily slow the optimization process rather than destroy its stability, provided that communication is not permanently blocked. Numerical simulations illustrate the theoretical guarantees and the failure mechanism induced by dither-synchronized attacks.

Repeated AC power-flow calculations are common tasks in transmission system operations, in particular for contingency analysis and remedial-action assessment. For large networks, their cumulative runtime can become a computational bottleneck in operational processes. This paper develops a sparse reformulation of the generalized bus-admittance power-flow method known as PFPD. Loads and generators are represented by fixed shunt admittance terms on the diagonal of the admittance matrix, while corrective nodal currents are iteratively computed to match the constant-power and regulated-voltage constraints. In contrast to the original formulation, the slack bus is treated as a fixed-voltage boundary and removed from the admittance block decomposition. The resulting iteration reuses sparse LU factorizations of the initial generalized non-slack matrix and its PQ block, without explicitly forming dense inverse matrices. The same formulation admits two initialization modes: an unsolved base case using the same flat-start shunt heuristic as in the primary PFPD method, and repeated post-action calculations initialized from a solved operating point. Localized topology and parameter changes are expressed as low-rank admittance updates and the resulting admittance matrices are inverted by means of the Woodbury identity. An optional local-network formulation can provide an warm start before full-network refinement. N-1 experiments on the 1354-bus and 9241-bus PEGASE systems and the 6717-bus synthetic Texas system yield average per-contingency speedups between 14.4 and 18.0 relative to pandapower. On transformer tap-position actions, the method is 2.8–2.9 times faster than pandapower and 7.2–29.9 times faster than PowSyBl OpenLoadFlow.

Safety-critical control of autonomous systems requires formal safety certificates, such as controlled invariant sets, that must be computed online as conditions change. Although standard synthesis algorithms scale poorly with state dimension, monotone dynamical systems with lower-closed safety specifications allow for accelerated computation of controlled invariant sets. In particular, lazy fixed-point algorithms exploit monotonicity and track only the antichain basis of the set. However, membership tests and redundancy checks against an evolving basis remain major bottlenecks. We introduce a threshold-function reformulation in which a lower-closed set on a d-dimensional grid is represented by its column heights along a designated axis. This reformulates the greatest-fixed-point iteration as independent one-dimensional binary searches, one per grid column, yielding an embarrassingly parallel iteration with asymptotically lower computational complexity than the lazy fixed-point algorithm. Experiments synthesize invariant sets on 3D grids with 10^9 cells in under 50 ms and 10^14 cells in under two minutes. We further demonstrate online re-synthesis in a safety-informed model predictive controller example.

Structured feedback controllers provide rigorous stability guarantees, but often require manual parameter tuning to achieve good closed-loop performance. Policy-gradient methods offer a systematic approach to parameter optimization; however, conventional gradient evaluation requires sequential forward state rollout and backward costate propagation. This letter develops a time-parallel policy-gradient framework for discrete-time nonlinear control-affine systems. We derive the policy-gradient expression where the state and costate rollouts required for policy-gradient evaluation are formulated as residual-minimization problems and solved using Gauss-Newton (GN) iterations with parallel associative scans. For closed-loop systems that are globally asymptotically stable and locally exponentially stable, we show that the residual-minimization problems satisfy a local Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality and that the GN iterates converge locally at a quadratic rate. Moreover, the PL constant, the size of the convergence neighborhood, and the quadratic convergence bound are independent of the rollout horizon T. We also prove that, for any finite horizon T, the state solver recovers the exact trajectory from any initialization in at most T iterations. Finally, an inertia-wheel pendulum example with interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) demonstrates improved closed-loop performance and the computational benefits of the proposed parallel policy-gradient framework.

Software-defined vehicular networks (SDVNs) under high mobility and fluctuating traffic demand offer programmable, centralized control for latency-sensitive intelligent transportation systems. However, data-plane Quality of Service (QoS) is often degraded by control-plane overload due to frequent handovers and dense vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) contacts. To address this, we propose two lightweight mechanisms for low-latency control-plane resizing in multi-controller SDVNs. The first - Control-plane Centric Control-plane Resizing Mechanism - proactively offloads roadside units from overloaded controllers to underloaded or idle ones when a predefined load threshold is exceeded, preventing prolonged overload with minimal decision latency. The second - Data-plane Centric Control-plane Resizing Mechanism - triggers resizing based on observable data-plane QoS degradation, such as average round-trip time exceeding a QoS threshold, aligning control-plane adaptation with V2I service experience. Both mechanisms are implemented and evaluated on Mininet-WiFi emulation testbeds with realistic worst-case vehicles mobility. Compared to fixed single-controller and static multi-controller benchmarks, the proposed algorithms significantly reduce end-to-end delay and packet loss while improving load balancing rate.

This paper studies output-feedback safety filtering for linear systems using high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) when the full state is unavailable. Since the HOCBF conditions depend only on specific state functionals, full-state reconstruction is unnecessary; instead, their implementation requires only functional observability or detectability of these quantities. We show that the HOCBF gains determine the required functionals and hence their observability properties, coupling safety and estimation design. We exploit this structure using scalar functional observers and develop a polynomial co-design framework that characterizes HOCBF observability and detectability, observer existence and order, and convergence-rate limitations. A certified one-sided estimation-error bound then enables safe output-feedback implementation.