Environment

Ethical decision governance has become a critical requirement for autonomous robotic systems operating in human-centered and safety-sensitive environments. This paper presents a real-time neuro-symbolic ethical governor designed to enable risk-aware supervisory control in autonomous robotic manipulation tasks. The proposed framework integrates transformer-based ethical reasoning with a probabilistic ethical risk field formulation and a threshold-based override control mechanism. language-grounde

Gait recognition is an emerging biometric technology that enables non-intrusive and hard-to-spoof human identification. However, most existing methods are confined to short-range, unimodal settings and fail to generalize to long-range and cross-distance scenarios under real-world conditions. To address this gap, we present \textbf{LRGait}, the first LiDAR-Camera multimodal benchmark designed for robust long-range gait recognition across diverse outdoor distances and environments. We further prop

Classical scaling laws model AI performance as monotonically improving with model size. We challenge this assumption by deriving the Institutional Scaling Law, showing that institutional fitness -- jointly measuring capability, trust, affordability, and sovereignty -- is non-monotonic in model scale, with an environment-dependent optimum N*(epsilon). Our framework extends the Sustainability Index of Han et al. (2025) from hardware-level to ecosystem-level analysis, proving that capability and tr

Climate-vulnerable road networks require a paradigm shift from reactive, fix-on-failure repairs to predictive, decision-ready maintenance. This paper introduces ST-ResGAT, a novel Spatio-Temporal Residual Graph Attention Network that fuses residual graph-attention encoding with GRU temporal aggregation to forecast pavement deterioration. Engineered for resource-constrained deployment, the framework translates continuous Pavement Condition Index (PCI) forecasts directly into the American Society

As corporate responsibility increasingly incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, ESG reporting is becoming a legal requirement in many regions and a key channel for documenting sustainability practices and assessing firms' long-term and ethical performance. However, the length and complexity of ESG disclosures make them difficult to interpret and automate the analysis reliably. To support scalable and trustworthy analysis, this paper introduces ESG-Bench, a benchmark d

Real-time understanding of continuous video streams is essential for interactive assistants and multimodal agents operating in dynamic environments. However, most existing video reasoning approaches follow a batch paradigm that defers reasoning until the full video context is observed, resulting in high latency and growing computational cost that are incompatible with streaming scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ThinkStream, a framework for streaming video reasoning based on a Watch--Think--

Point cloud registration (PCR) is a fundamental task in 3D vision and provides essential support for applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and environmental modeling. Despite its widespread use, existing methods often fail when facing real-world challenges like heavy noise, significant occlusions, and large-scale transformations. These limitations frequently result in compromised registration accuracy and insufficient robustness in complex environments. In this paper, we propose IGA

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is driving unprecedented growth in global computational demand, placing increasing pressure on electricity systems. This study introduces an AI-energy coupling framework that combines large language models (LLMs)-based analysis of corporate, policy, and media data with quantitative energy-system modeling to forecast the electricity footprint of AI-driven data centers from 2025 to 2030. Results show that the new AI infrastructure is highly

Location-Based Services (LBS) such as ride-sharing, accommodation, food delivery, and location-driven social media platforms entangle digital systems with physical spaces, thereby generating impacts that extend beyond users to others who share the same environments. Existing design approaches struggle to address the dual challenge of value tensions that arise in shared physical spaces and the locality-specific contexts in which LBS operate. To respond, we introduce Location-Aware Value Sensitive

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly embedded in high-stakes decision environments, yet many governance approaches focus primarily on policy guidance rather than operational stability mechanisms. As AI deployments scale, organizations require governance architectures capable of maintaining reliable, auditable, and accountable behavior over time. This paper introduces the AI Governance Control Stack for Operational Stability, a layered governance architecture designed to ensure tracea

This article, a lightly adapted version of Perplexity's response to NIST/CAISI Request for Information 2025-0035, details our observations and recommendations concerning the security of frontier AI agents. These insights are informed by Perplexity's experience operating general-purpose agentic systems used by millions of users and thousands of enterprises in both controlled and open-world environments. Agent architectures change core assumptions around code-data separation, authority boundaries,

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a robust alternative to traditional control methods for autonomous underwater docking, particularly in adapting to unpredictable environmental conditions. However, bridging the "sim-to-real" gap and managing high training latencies remain significant bottlenecks for practical deployment. This paper presents a systematic approach for autonomous docking using the Girona Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) by leveraging a high-fidelity digital twin environme

Digital Human Modelling (DHM) is increasingly shaped by advances in AI, wearable biosensing, and interactive digital environments, particularly in research addressing accessibility and inclusion. However, many AI-enabled DHM approaches remain tightly coupled to specific platforms, tasks, or interpretative pipelines, limiting reproducibility, scalability, and ethical reuse. This paper presents a platform-agnostic DHM framework designed to support AI-ready multimodal interaction research by explic

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are emerging as a new paradigm in human-computer interaction, enabling autonomous execution of tasks in desktop environment by perceiving high-level natural-language instructions. As such agents become increasingly capable and are deployed across diverse desktop environments, evaluating their behavior in a scalable and reliable manner becomes a critical challenge. Existing evaluation pipelines rely on static benchmarks, rule-based success checks, or manual inspection,

Active infrared thermography (AIRT) is currently witnessing a surge of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies being deployed for automated subsurface defect analysis of high performance carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP). Deploying AI-based AIRT methodologies for inspecting CFRPs requires the creation of time consuming and expensive datasets of CFRP inspection sequences to train neural networks. To address this challenge, this work introduces a novel language-guided framework for cognit

A fundamental requirement for intelligent systems is the ability to learn continuously under changing environments. However, models trained in this regime often suffer from catastrophic forgetting. Leveraging pre-trained models has recently emerged as a promising solution, since their generalized feature extractors enable faster and more robust adaptation. While some earlier works mitigate forgetting by fine-tuning only on the first task, this approach quickly deteriorates as the number of tasks

Autonomous agent frameworks still struggle to reconcile long-term experiential learning with real-time, context-sensitive decision-making. In practice, this gap appears as static cognition, rigid workflow dependence, and inefficient context usage, which jointly limit adaptability in open-ended and non-stationary environments. To address these limitations, we present AutoAgent, a self-evolving multi-agent framework built on three tightly coupled components: evolving cognition, on-the-fly contextu

Simulation-to-decision learning enables safe policy training in digital environments without risking real-world deployment, and has become essential in mission-critical domains such as supply chains and industrial systems. However, simulators learned from noisy or biased real-world data often exhibit prediction errors in decision-critical regions, leading to unstable action ranking and unreliable policies. Existing approaches either focus on improving average simulation fidelity or adopt conserv

Deep learning models often encounter two key challenges in developing intelligent and scalable forecasting frameworks for renewable energy systems: input feature space dimensionality and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings. These limitations increase computational cost and compromise generalization and robustness. This paper presents a hybrid deep learning-optimization framework that leverages cognitively inspired metaheuristics to address these challenges, employing the Binary iHow Optimizat

Software supply-chain security requires provenance mechanisms that support reproducibility and vulnerability assessment under dynamic execution conditions. Conventional Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) provide static dependency inventories but cannot capture runtime behaviour, environment drift, or exploitability context. This paper introduces agentic Artificial Intelligence Bills of Materials (AIBOMs), extending SBOMs into active provenance artefacts through autonomous, policy-constrained re

Long-horizon task planning for heterogeneous multi-robot systems is essential for deploying collaborative teams in real-world environments; yet, it remains challenging due to the large volume of perceptual information, much of which is irrelevant to task objectives and burdens planning. Traditional symbolic planners rely on manually constructed problem specifications, limiting scalability and adaptability, while recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches often suffer from hallucinations

In-context imitation learning allows robots to acquire skills from demonstrations, yet one-shot trajectory generation remains fragile under environmental variation. We propose SAIL, a framework that reframes robot imitation as an iterative refinement problem capable of scaling with test-time compute. SAIL utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search, where each node is a complete trajectory and edges correspond to trajectory refinements. The process is guided by three core components: an automated archive o

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, existing safety evaluations face a fundamental trade-off: manual benchmarks are costly, while LLM-based simulators are scalable but suffer from logic hallucination. We present AutoControl Arena, an automated framework for frontier AI risk evaluation built on the principle of logic-narrative decoupling. By grounding deterministic state in executable code while delegating generative dynamics to LLMs, we mitigate hallucination while mai

The agentic web marks a structural transition from a human-centered information network to a digital environment populated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that perceive, decide, and act autonomously. As delegated action unfolds at machine speed, exceeds discrete moments of human judgment, and distributes decision-making across non-human actors, existing legal frameworks face growing strain, creating an urgent need for new mechanisms capable of sustaining legality in this emerging order. A

As autonomous agents increasingly operate in real-world digital ecosystems, understanding how they coordinate, form institutions, and accumulate shared culture becomes both a scientific and practical priority. This paper introduces TerraLingua, a persistent multi-agent ecology designed to study open-ended dynamics in such systems. Unlike prior large language model simulations with static or consequence-free environments, TerraLingua imposes resource constraints and limited lifespans for the agen

When deployed in open-ended robotic environments, Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models need to continually acquire new skills, yet suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting. We observe that this degradation is related to the deterioration of cross-modal information structure, where dependencies among visual observations, language instructions, and actions progressively diffuse during continual adaptation. But existing continual learning methods fail to preserve such cross-modal information dep

Universities are microcosms of urban ecosystems, with concentrated consumption patterns in food, transport, energy, and product usage. These environments not only contribute substantially to sustainability pressures but also provide a unique opportunity to advance sustainability education and behavioural change at scale. As in most sectors, digital sustainability initiatives within universities remain narrowly focused on carbon calculations, typically providing static feedback that limits opport

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards: smaller subsets represent simpler policies, which can be learned more reliably because their empirical gradient estimates are more accurate. Our approach allows for modeling and comparison of different policy classes, including full planning, greedy, K-step loo

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesi

Adolescents spend an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where their still-developing cognitive capacities leave them unable to recognize or resist commercial persuasion. Article 28(2) of the DSA responds to this vulnerability by prohibiting profiling-based advertising to minors. However, the regulation's narrow definition of "advertisement" excludes current advertising practices including influencer paid partnerships and brand promotional content that serve functionally equi

Recently, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems (e.g., Whisper) have achieved remarkable accuracy improvements but remain highly sensitive to real-world unseen data (data with large distribution shifts), including noisy environments and diverse accents. To address this issue, test-time adaptation (TTA) has shown great potential in improving the model adaptability at inference time without ground-truth labels, and existing TTA methods often rely on pseudo-labeling or entropy minimization. Ho

Artificial intelligence (AI) and hardware (HW) are advancing at unprecedented rates, yet their trajectories have become inseparably intertwined. The global research community lacks a cohesive, long-term vision to strategically coordinate the development of AI and HW. This fragmentation constrains progress toward holistic, sustainable, and adaptive AI systems capable of learning, reasoning, and operating efficiently across cloud, edge, and physical environments. The future of AI depends not only

Modern Earth observation relies on satellites to capture detailed surface properties. Yet, many phenomena that affect humans and ecosystems unfold in the atmosphere close to the surface. Near-ground sensors provide accurate measurements of certain environmental characteristics, such as near-surface air temperature (NSAT). However, they remain sparse and unevenly distributed, limiting their ability to provide continuous spatial measurements. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPyCer, a semi-supervi

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition is a foundational computer vision task that provides essential support for downstream applications, including person retrieval in video surveillance and intelligent retail analytics. However, existing research is frequently constrained by the ``one-model-per-dataset" paradigm and struggles to handle significant discrepancies across domains in terms of modalities, attribute definitions, and environmental scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose UniPAR, a

The smart home is a key application domain within the Society 5.0 vision for a human-centered society. As smart home ecosystems expand with heterogeneous IoT protocols, diverse devices, and evolving threats, autonomous systems must manage comfort, security, energy, and safety for residents. Such autonomous decision-making requires a trust anchor, making blockchain a preferred foundation for transparent and accountable smart home governance. However, realizing this vision requires blockchain-gove

Understanding the psychological correlates of sustainable consumption intention is essential for recognizing how individual actions influence society and the environment. Grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study examines how attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control affect sustainable consumption intention, and explores the mediating role of conscious consumerism. Using survey data from Coimbatore District in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu ( N = 430), struc

The selection of an optimal microgrid architecture is critical for advancing sustainable and resilient energy systems, particularly in remote or off-grid regions. This study introduces a novel hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework that synergistically combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for determining criterion weights with the Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method for ranking competing microgrid configurations. To effectively address the ambiguity and variability i

As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into higher education, understanding how students engage with these technologies is essential for responsible adoption. This study evaluates the Educational AI Hub, an AI-powered learning framework, implemented in undergraduate civil and environmental engineering courses at a large R1 public university. Using a mixed-methods design combining pre- and post-surveys, system usage logs, and qualitative analysis of students' AI interactions, the resear

ABSTRACT Carbon accounting is the monitoring and recording of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to mitigate and manage carbon emissions. There are numerous singular studies on carbon accounting across geographies and industries. However, there is a need for a comprehensive study discussing carbon accounting enablers, barriers, policy, and reporting landscape and strategies. This study applies a mixed‐method approach to present insights into its enablers, barriers, policy, and reporting landscape an

Rare earth elements (REEs) are 17 critical minerals used in many clean energy technologies like wind turbines and electric vehicles. Conventionally, we produce REEs from mining in a few, geopolitically restricted regions. Developing systems that utilize new technologies and unconventional feedstocks provides an opportunity to meet increasing demand while improving sustainability. Techno-economic analysis (TEA), life cycle assessment (LCA), and social LCA (sLCA) are commonly used tools to assess