Environment

We present OSMGraphCLIP, a CLIP-style geospatial representation model that learns global location embeddings from freely available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. OSMGraphCLIP represents geographic environments as heterogeneous graphs of typed OSM features, preserving the topological and semantic relationships among roads, buildings, land-use regions, and points of interest. A multi-scale graph encoder captures both fine-grained local structure and broader landscape composition, and supervises a spher

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We pr

Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, and their increasing frequency under climate change makes satellite-based inundation mapping essential for disaster response. Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite archives offer geographic transferability, but their operational reliability across diverse, unseen events remains uncharacterized. Here we deploy Prithvi-EO-2.0 across 19 out-of-distribution flood events (2017-2025) spanning six continents, eight climate zones, and

Instruction-following audio language models (ALMs) can be augmented with explicit acoustic cues, yet it remains unclear whether such cues are used in a grounded way when the raw audio is already available. We study this question in speech emotion recognition (SER) by deriving six interpretable acoustic concept tokens from the standardised eGeMAPS paralinguistic feature set. These tokens summarise energy, pitch, dynamics, brightness, formants, and voice quality, and are appended to the textual pr

Teachers and researchers need to adapt educational AI to local goals, but most systems remain difficult to customize or study without coding expertise. We present LearnAdapt Agentic Studio on PedOS 1.1 Lumina, a no-code authoring and governed runtime environment for educational AI plugins. A non-coder describes a desired learning interaction in plain English; the system prepares a previewable plugin artifact, runs safety checks, and supports submission for review. PedOS then deploys approved plu

This paper presents an autonomous agentic resource negotiation framework designed to enable zero-touch network slicing in 6G architectures using Large Language Model (LLM) agents. While LLMs offer powerful reasoning capabilities, we demonstrate that such agents inherently suffer from anchoring bias, rigidly adhering to initial heuristic proposals and causing severe network over-provisioning. To systematically mitigate this cognitive bias, we propose a novel randomized anchoring strategy modeled

When a disaster unfolds, responders must answer not only what is happening, but also why it is happening, what will happen next, and what to do now, often from noisy low-altitude UAV views and under tight on-site compute constraints. However, most existing multimodal benchmarks emphasize perception (e.g., recognition/description), cover limited disaster types, and provide insufficient support for the multi-stage reasoning required in practical emergency response. We introduce DisasterBench, a mu

In this policy memorandum, we explain why deployers of AI models in high-stakes contexts should treat those AI models as insider risk vectors. High-stakes contexts include AI model deployment within government agencies and contractors, where AI models are privileged with access to, among others, classified and sensitive unclassified information, IL6 and IL7 network environments, cleared personnel, and other critical resources. AI models are increasingly embedded in high-stakes contexts and capab

Phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry ($φ$-OTDR) is widely used in large-scale distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) because it provides distributed spatiotemporal monitoring over long sensing distances. Its field performance can still deteriorate because of polarization-induced fading (PIF), local signal degradation, and strong environmental interference. This study develops a Sagnac-assisted enhanced $φ$-OTDR sensing architecture and a standardized benchmark framework for engineering-

Demand for low-precision inference, including NVFP4-based approaches, has grown as large language models are increasingly deployed in latency and cost constrained production environments. Quantization-aware distillation (QAD) helps recover accuracy lost under low bit quantization by training a quantized student to match the output distribution of a frozen higher precision teacher via a KL-divergence loss. In this work, we first provide a representation level diagnosis of QAD: output matching alo

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems are transforming the risk landscape by extending beyond information generation to autonomous planning, tool invocation, decision execution, and persistent modification of digital and physical environments. These capabilities introduce novel exposures that do not fit neatly within traditional insurance categories such as cyber, professional liability, product liability, or directors and officers coverage. This paper examines the emerging insurance mark

As urban environments continue to evolve rapidly, accurately modeling the dynamic behaviour of Points of Interest is essential for supporting data-driven urban planning and commercial decision-making. While recent advancements in spatio-temporal graph learning have improved POI forecasting, most methods rely on proximity-based graphs and correlation-driven modeling, which overlook the functional dependencies between POIs and fail to capture the causal effects of urban interventions. In this pape

Reusable robot skills are becoming the basic units through which embodied agents turn open-ended instructions into long-horizon physical behavior. We argue that, while foundation models have collapsed the cost of creating these skills, the cost of trusting them has not. Existing skill-evolution loops refine skills through execution feedback, unit tests, environment reward, or LLM self-critique, but these signals provide only trace-level evidence: they show that a skill worked on sampled executio

Designing a neural network processor is an end-to-end co-design problem: network architecture and training budget determine the inference workload; hardware mapping decisions determine chip area, latency, and energy; and these characteristics govern fabrication yield and manufacturing cost. In practice, these decisions are made in separate stages, and existing co-design methodologies are tightly coupled to specific algorithms, making it difficult to improve one component without reworking the en

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We intr

Offline multi-objective optimization (Offline MOO) seeks Pareto-optimal designs from static datasets without additional environment interactions. Existing generative methods typically guide sampling with external surrogate or preference models, which adds training complexity and may provide unreliable guidance. We propose ParetoPilot, a plug-and-play method that guides designs to Pareto front at inference time using a pre-trained conditional diffusion model without any surrogate. ParetoPilot int

Current AI benchmarks evaluate agents on task execution within human-designed workflows. These evaluations fundamentally fail to measure a critical next-level capability: whether models can autonomously develop agent systems. We introduce the Meta-Agent Challenge (MAC), an evaluation framework designed to test the capacity of frontier models for autonomous agent development. Specifically, a code agent (the meta-agent) is given a sandboxed environment, an evaluation API, and a time limitation to

As large language models (LLMs) become default tools for online information verification, an implicit assumption follows them: that scale and general capability are sufficient for nuanced classification of misinformation discourse. We test this assumption directly on 900 Reddit comments spanning three PolitiFact-verified misinformation claims (environment, health, immigration), labelled as belief (propagates the claim), fact-check (corrects it), or other. We compare nine models across three para

Simulation environments are useful for both robot policy learning and planning verification and validation. Traditionally, the process of creating a simulation was onerous. Creating a bespoke simulation environment for each individual environment that a robot would operate in was simply infeasible. In this work, we introduce PerceptTwin, a fully automatic pipeline that constructs interactive simulations directly from semantic scene representations produced by a robot's perception stack. PerceptT

Datacenter expansion under generative AI is increasingly framed as compatible with sustainability because of efficiency gains, cleaner electricity procurement, and improved facility design. Yet these claims often do not show that absolute electricity, water, material, waste, and community-facing burdens are falling. This Perspective addresses that evidentiary gap. Rather than asking whether efficiency gains are real, we ask when such gains are being enlarged into claims of system-wide sustainabi

We tackle the Metro Network Expansion Problem (MNEP), a subset of the Transport Network Design Problem (TNDP), which focuses on expanding metro systems to satisfy travel demand. Traditional methods rely on exact and heuristic approaches that require expert-defined constraints to reduce the search space. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) has emerged due to its effectiveness in complex sequential decision-making processes-it remains, however, computationally expensive, environmentall

Accurate flood forecasting is essential for mitigating disaster risks and protecting communities. However, purely data-driven machine learning models often struggle in data-scarce environments and may violate fundamental hydrological principles. Standard Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can generate physically inconsistent predictions, particularly when extrapolating to extreme weather conditions. To address these limitations, we propose a Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) framework

Computationally-intensive research (CIR) takes place on a wide variety of topics including AI. Its environmental impact is potentially significant yet it does not always fall clearly within the scope of organisational ethics review policy on its own merits. Many academic institutions have ethics oversight bodies (e.g. Research Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards) that occupy a potentially powerful position to encourage recognition of these issues and seek reflexive practice in resea

Reward transfer in Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is unreliable when policies must generalize to unseen combinations of environment dynamics and task goals. We propose Factorized Contrastive Abstractions for Transferable IRL (ConTraIRL), a framework that enables compositional reward transfer by learning decoupled latent representations of these two factors. ConTraIRL uses a dual-encoder architecture that maps observations into separate dynamics and goal latent spaces, trained with a dual c

The space industry is quietly building toward something nobody has fully reckoned with: orbital data centers running thousands of autonomous AI workloads with no human in the loop, 550 km above the Earth. Microsoft, AWS, and a growing list of orbital computing ventures are moving cloud-scale processing off the ground and into orbit. What none of them have answered yet is the governance question -- when autonomous AI systems at orbital data center scale make wrong decisions in space, what stops t

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled agentic AI capable of complex reasoning and tool use; however, deploying such autonomy in pervasive computing environments remains challenging due to the strict memory and energy constraints of embedded microcontrollers. Existing frameworks typically assume server-class resources or continuous connectivity, leaving a gap for deeply embedded systems. This paper proposes a modular reference architecture for Embedded Agent Systems that bridges th

Assessing built-environment interaction, such as wheelchair accessibility, is difficult because real-world mobility is shaped by distributed, context-dependent, and temporary barriers that are hard to capture at scale. To support scalable assessment, this paper examines whether vision-language models (VLMs) can identify accessibility barriers from Google Street View (GSV) imagery. We propose an expert-guided retrieval-augmented framework that combines GSV images, ADA-informed guidance, and exper

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in sustainability-related decision support, reporting, and public communication, yet little systematic evidence exists on the environmental attitudes embedded in their outputs. This paper develops a benchmark for evaluating environmental cognition, affect, and behavioural recommendations in LLMs and applies it to 31 widely used proprietary and open-weight models. Drawing on questions from established environmental awareness surveys and additiona

Earth Observation (EO) has fundamentally transformed the monitoring of environmental processes and human activities up to planetary scale. Recent advances in self-supervised learning have given rise to Earth Observation Foundation Models (EOFMs), which leverage petabyte-scale unlabeled EO data to learn transferable representations across a wide range of downstream geospatial tasks. Despite these advances, current EOFMs remain largely confined to raster modalities, overlooking the rich, structure

In dynamic environments, large language models need to keep adapting to new tasks, but continual learning often suffers from forgetting, limited transfer, and vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. To address this, we present AdvCL, which repurposes adversarial perturbations as a geometric control signal for stable continual adaptation. AdvCL combines three plug-in modules: Intra-Smooth promotes local smoothness via small adversarial perturbations; Proto-Clip uses similarity clipping to pre

Despite the success of audio-visual large-language models (LLMs), they can produce plausible but ungrounded outputs, termed hallucination. Existing benchmarks focus on environmental sounds (e.g., dog barking) to indicate event occurrence. In contrast, human speech carries fundamentally different, rich semantics and temporal structures, yet it remains unexplored whether current models can accurately align speech content with corresponding visual signals. In this work, we show that speech content

This tech note describes the architecture and execution results of the LPDDR5X-PIM simulator, developed by Samsung Electronics. Based on the latest research and internal specifications, the simulator provides a high-fidelity model of both the hardware data paths and the software control layers of the LPDDR5X-PIM block. This integrated hardware-software simulation approach enables precise evaluation of system performance and energy efficiency while maximizing PIM resource utilization. We have ref

Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixe

Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) reflects real-world search environments in which queries and relevant documents may appear in different languages within a mixed-language corpus. However, existing embedding models are primarily optimized for Multi-Monolingual retrieval and their performance often degrades in MLIR settings. Moreover, directly applying conventional contrastive learning to MLIR can exacerbate language clustering and expose a trade-off between cross-lingual alignment and em

Rising household debt and cost-of-living pressures in the United Kingdom have intensified the role of AI-driven financial technologies in mediating credit assessment, repayment structuring, and debt support services. These systems increasingly shape consequential financial decisions, yet they operate within complex socio-technical environments characterised by regulatory constraint, algorithmic opacity, and heightened vulnerability risk. User Experience Research (UXR) Points of View (PoVs) are c

Outdoor vision-language navigation (VLN) in long-range, open-world environments is frequently disrupted by semantic-cue interruptions, where informative goal cues become sparse, occluded, or leave the field of view. Once such cues disappear, agents enter a cue-free phase and often degrade into backtracking, oscillatory headings, or aimless exploration. While memory-based methods attempt to bridge these gaps, they often fail under traversability-driven detours: the remembered cue direction may be

Recent advancements in text-guided audio generation have yielded promising results in diverse domains, including sound effects, speech, and music. However, jointly generating speech with environmental audio remains challenging due to the inherent disparities in their acoustic patterns and temporal dynamics. We propose ImmersiveTTS, an environment-aware text-to-speech (TTS) model that generates natural speech seamlessly integrated within environmental contexts by explicitly modeling cross-modal i

Chaotic dynamical systems pose a fundamental challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): exponential sensitivity to initial conditions induces high-variance bootstrap targets and poorly conditioned gradient updates. Chaotic dynamics arise across scientific and engineering domains, from fluid flows and climate systems to multi-agent systems, where reliable learning is highly desirable. Standard RL methods optimise expected returns through scalar value functions, implicitly averaging over diverging

Modern open-world agents such as OpenClaw exhibit powerful cross-environment execution capabilities yet introduce broad new safety risk sources. Meanwhile, advanced frontier AI models drastically lower attack barriers, rendering current agent alignment frameworks inadequate for real-world deployment. To tackle these emerging threats, we propose a lightweight and scalable agent safety alignment framework. Specifically, we update the agent safety taxonomy to accommodate emergent risks from Codex a

Tool calling extends large language models (LLMs) by enabling grounded interaction with external executable interfaces, thereby supporting environment-coupled problem solving. However, mainstream in-context learning (ICL) approaches typically incorporate detailed tool documentation and usage examples directly into the context. This results in substantial inference overhead and heightened risks of hallucination as the context length grows. Conversely, while tuning-based methods improve general to