Paperid: 1, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18738.pdf   GitHub
Authors:Ruichao Hou, Xingyuan Li, Tongwei Ren, Dongming Zhou, Gangshan Wu, Jinde Cao
Title: HyPSAM: Hybrid Prompt-driven Segment Anything Model for RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to identify prominent objects by integrating complementary information from RGB and thermal modalities. However, learning the precise boundaries and complete objects remains challenging due to the intrinsic insufficient feature fusion and the extrinsic limitations of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid prompt-driven segment anything model (HyPSAM), which leverages the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segment anything model (SAM) for RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic fusion network (DFNet) that generates high-quality initial saliency maps as visual prompts. DFNet employs dynamic convolution and multi-branch decoding to facilitate adaptive cross-modality interaction, overcoming the limitations of fixed-parameter kernels and enhancing multi-modal feature representation. Moreover, we propose a plug-and-play refinement network (P2RNet), which serves as a general optimization strategy to guide SAM in refining saliency maps by using hybrid prompts. The text prompt ensures reliable modality input, while the mask and box prompts enable precise salient object localization. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, HyPSAM has remarkable versatility, seamlessly integrating with different RGB-T SOD methods to achieve significant performance gains, thereby highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in this field. The code and results of our method are available at: https://github.com/milotic233/HyPSAM.
Authors:Yuhong Feng, Hongtao Chen, Qi Zhang, Jie Chen, Zhaoxi He, Mingzhe Liu, Jianghai Liao
Title: A Dual-Modulation Framework for RGB-T Crowd Counting via Spatially Modulated Attention and Adaptive Fusion
Abstract:
Accurate RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) crowd counting is crucial for public safety in challenging conditions. While recent Transformer-based methods excel at capturing global context, their inherent lack of spatial inductive bias causes attention to spread to irrelevant background regions, compromising crowd localization precision. Furthermore, effectively bridging the gap between these distinct modalities remains a major hurdle. To tackle this, we propose the Dual Modulation Framework, comprising two modules: Spatially Modulated Attention (SMA), which improves crowd localization by using a learnable Spatial Decay Mask to penalize attention between distant tokens and prevent focus from spreading to the background; and Adaptive Fusion Modulation (AFM), which implements a dynamic gating mechanism to prioritize the most reliable modality for adaptive cross-modal fusion. Extensive experiments on RGB-T crowd counting datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to previous works. Code available at https://github.com/Cht2924/RGBT-Crowd-Counting.
Authors:Seokjin Go, Joongun Park, Spandan More, Hanjiang Wu, Irene Wang, Aaron Jezghani, Tushar Krishna, Divya Mahajan
Title: Characterizing the Efficiency of Distributed Training: A Power, Performance, and Thermal Perspective
Abstract:
The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has pushed training workloads far beyond the limits of single-node analysis, demanding a deeper understanding of how these models behave across large-scale, multi-GPU systems. In this paper, we present a comprehensive characterization of LLM training across diverse real-world workloads and hardware platforms, including NVIDIA H100/H200 and AMD MI250 GPUs. We analyze dense and sparse models under various parallelism strategies -- tensor, pipeline, data, and expert -- and evaluate their effects on hardware utilization, power consumption, and thermal behavior. We further evaluate the effectiveness of optimizations such as activation recomputation and compute-communication overlap. Our findings show that performance is not determined solely by scaling hardware capacity. Scale-up systems with fewer, higher-memory GPUs can outperform scale-out systems in communication-bound regimes, but only under carefully tuned configurations; in other cases, scale-out deployments achieve superior throughput. We also show that certain parallelism combinations, such as tensor with pipeline, lead to bandwidth underutilization due to inefficient data chunking, while increasing microbatch sizes beyond a certain point induces bursty execution and peak power excursions that worsen thermal throttling. These insights reveal how training performance is shaped by complex interactions between hardware, system topology, and model execution. We conclude by offering recommendations for system and hardware design to improve the scalability and reliability of future LLM systems and workloads. The source code of this project is available at https://github.com/sitar-lab/CharLLM-PPT.
Authors:Xiaodong Guo, Tong Liu, Yike Li, Zi'ang Lin, Zhihong Deng
Title: TUNI: Real-time RGB-T Semantic Segmentation with Unified Multi-Modal Feature Extraction and Cross-Modal Feature Fusion
Abstract:
RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation improves the environmental perception of autonomous platforms in challenging conditions. Prevailing models employ encoders pre-trained on RGB images to extract features from both RGB and infrared inputs, and design additional modules to achieve cross-modal feature fusion. This results in limited thermal feature extraction and suboptimal cross-modal fusion, while the redundant encoders further compromises the model's real-time efficiency. To address the above issues, we propose TUNI, with an RGB-T encoder consisting of multiple stacked blocks that simultaneously perform multi-modal feature extraction and cross-modal fusion. By leveraging large-scale pre-training with RGB and pseudo-thermal data, the RGB-T encoder learns to integrate feature extraction and fusion in a unified manner. By slimming down the thermal branch, the encoder achieves a more compact architecture. Moreover, we introduce an RGB-T local module to strengthen the encoder's capacity for cross-modal local feature fusion. The RGB-T local module employs adaptive cosine similarity to selectively emphasize salient consistent and distinct local features across RGB-T modalities. Experimental results show that TUNI achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models on FMB, PST900 and CART, with fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Meanwhile, it achieves an inference speed of 27 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX, demonstrating its real-time capability in deployment. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/TUNI.
Authors:Zhipeng Weng, Xiaopeng Liu, Ce Liu, Xingyuan Guo, Yukai Shi, Liang Lin
Title: DroneSR: Rethinking Few-shot Thermal Image Super-Resolution from Drone-based Perspective
Abstract:
Although large scale models achieve significant improvements in performance, the overfitting challenge still frequently undermines their generalization ability. In super resolution tasks on images, diffusion models as representatives of generative models typically adopt large scale architectures. However, few-shot drone-captured infrared training data frequently induces severe overfitting in large-scale architectures. To address this key challenge, our method proposes a new Gaussian quantization representation learning method oriented to diffusion models that alleviates overfitting and enhances robustness. At the same time, an effective monitoring mechanism tracks large scale architectures during training to detect signs of overfitting. By introducing Gaussian quantization representation learning, our method effectively reduces overfitting while maintaining architecture complexity. On this basis, we construct a multi source drone-based infrared image benchmark dataset for detection and use it to emphasize overfitting issues of large scale architectures in few sample, drone-based diverse drone-based image reconstruction scenarios. To verify the efficacy of the method in mitigating overfitting, experiments are conducted on the constructed benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing super resolution approaches and significantly mitigates overfitting of large scale architectures under complex conditions. The code and DroneSR dataset will be available at: https://github.com/wengzp1/GARLSR.
Authors:Yanpeng Gong, Sishuai Li, Fei Qin, Bingbing Xu
Title: Virtual element method for thermomechanical analysis of electronic packaging structures with multi-scale features
Abstract:
This paper presents two approaches: the virtual element method (VEM) and the stabilization-free virtual element method (SFVEM) for analyzing thermomechanical behavior in electronic packaging structures with geometric multi-scale features. Since the virtual element method allows the use of arbitrary polygonal elements, the inherent mesh flexibility of VEM allows localized mesh modifications without affecting global mesh structure, making it particularly effective for the analysis of electronic packaging reliability involving complex geometries and multiple geometric scales. The approach implements a novel non-matching mesh generation strategy that strategically combines polygonal meshes for complex small-scale regions with regular quadrilateral meshes for larger domains. The VEM formulation addresses both heat conduction and thermomechanical coupling problems, with comprehensive verification through analytical benchmarks and practical electronic packaging case studies, including Through-Silicon Via (TSV), Ball Grid Array (BGA), and Plastic Ball Grid Array (PBGA) structures. Results demonstrate that the method accurately captures stress concentrations at material interfaces and provides reliable thermal and mechanical response predictions. Some MATLAB codes for the numerical examples are provided at https://github.com/yanpeng-gong/VEM-electronic-packaging and on the VEMhub website (www.vemhub.com).
Authors:Sofiane Bouaziz, Adel Hafiane, Raphael Canals, Rachid Nedjai
Title: WGAST: Weakly-Supervised Generative Network for Daily 10 m Land Surface Temperature Estimation via Spatio-Temporal Fusion
Abstract:
Urbanization, climate change, and agricultural stress are increasing the demand for precise and timely environmental monitoring. Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable in this context and is retrieved from remote sensing satellites. However, these systems face a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution. While spatio-temporal fusion methods offer promising solutions, few have addressed the estimation of daily LST at 10 m resolution. In this study, we present WGAST, a Weakly-Supervised Generative Network for Daily 10 m LST Estimation via Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Terra MODIS, Landsat 8, and Sentinel-2. WGAST is the first end-to-end deep learning framework designed for this task. It adopts a conditional generative adversarial architecture, with a generator composed of four stages: feature extraction, fusion, LST reconstruction, and noise suppression. The first stage employs a set of encoders to extract multi-level latent representations from the inputs, which are then fused in the second stage using cosine similarity, normalization, and temporal attention mechanisms. The third stage decodes the fused features into high-resolution LST, followed by a Gaussian filter to suppress high-frequency noise. Training follows a weakly supervised strategy based on physical averaging principles and reinforced by a PatchGAN discriminator. Experiments demonstrate that WGAST outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to the best-performing baseline, on average, WGAST reduces RMSE by 17.18% and improves SSIM by 11.00%. Furthermore, WGAST is robust to cloud-induced LST and effectively captures fine-scale thermal patterns, as validated against 33 ground-based sensors. The code is available at https://github.com/Sofianebouaziz1/WGAST.git.
Authors:Xiaoyang Zhang, jinjiang Li, Guodong Fan, Yakun Ju, Linwei Fan, Jun Liu, Alex C. Kot
Title: SGDFuse: SAM-Guided Diffusion for High-Fidelity Infrared and Visible Image Fusion
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to combine the thermal radiation information from infrared images with the rich texture details from visible images to enhance perceptual capabilities for downstream visual tasks. However, existing methods often fail to preserve key targets due to a lack of deep semantic understanding of the scene, while the fusion process itself can also introduce artifacts and detail loss, severely compromising both image quality and task performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes SGDFuse, a conditional diffusion model guided by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to achieve high-fidelity and semantically-aware image fusion. The core of our method is to utilize high-quality semantic masks generated by SAM as explicit priors to guide the optimization of the fusion process via a conditional diffusion model. Specifically, the framework operates in a two-stage process: it first performs a preliminary fusion of multi-modal features, and then utilizes the semantic masks from SAM jointly with the preliminary fused image as a condition to drive the diffusion model's coarse-to-fine denoising generation. This ensures the fusion process not only has explicit semantic directionality but also guarantees the high fidelity of the final result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGDFuse achieves state-of-the-art performance in both subjective and objective evaluations, as well as in its adaptability to downstream tasks, providing a powerful solution to the core challenges in image fusion. The code of SGDFuse is available at https://github.com/boshizhang123/SGDFuse.
Authors:Xiao Wang, Zikang Yan, Hao Si, Zhendong Yang, Qingquan Yang, Dengdi Sun, Wanli Lyu, Jin Tang
Title: Revisiting Heat Flux Analysis of Tungsten Monoblock Divertor on EAST using Physics-Informed Neural Network
Abstract:
Estimating heat flux in the nuclear fusion device EAST is a critically important task. Traditional scientific computing methods typically model this process using the Finite Element Method (FEM). However, FEM relies on grid-based sampling for computation, which is computationally inefficient and hard to perform real-time simulations during actual experiments. Inspired by artificial intelligence-powered scientific computing, this paper proposes a novel Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) to address this challenge, significantly accelerating the heat conduction estimation process while maintaining high accuracy. Specifically, given inputs of different materials, we first feed spatial coordinates and time stamps into the neural network, and compute boundary loss, initial condition loss, and physical loss based on the heat conduction equation. Additionally, we sample a small number of data points in a data-driven manner to better fit the specific heat conduction scenario, further enhancing the model's predictive capability. We conduct experiments under both uniform and non-uniform heating conditions on the top surface. Experimental results show that the proposed thermal conduction physics-informed neural network achieves accuracy comparable to the finite element method, while achieving $\times$40 times acceleration in computational efficiency. The dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenFusion.
Authors:Yaozong Zheng, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang, Shengping Zhang, Guorong Li, Xianxian Li, Rongrong Ji
Title: Towards Universal Modal Tracking with Online Dense Temporal Token Learning
Abstract:
We propose a universal video-level modality-awareness tracking model with online dense temporal token learning (called {\modaltracker}). It is designed to support various tracking tasks, including RGB, RGB+Thermal, RGB+Depth, and RGB+Event, utilizing the same model architecture and parameters. Specifically, our model is designed with three core goals: \textbf{Video-level Sampling}. We expand the model's inputs to a video sequence level, aiming to see a richer video context from an near-global perspective. \textbf{Video-level Association}. Furthermore, we introduce two simple yet effective online dense temporal token association mechanisms to propagate the appearance and motion trajectory information of target via a video stream manner. \textbf{Modality Scalable}. We propose two novel gated perceivers that adaptively learn cross-modal representations via a gated attention mechanism, and subsequently compress them into the same set of model parameters via a one-shot training manner for multi-task inference. This new solution brings the following benefits: (i) The purified token sequences can serve as temporal prompts for the inference in the next video frames, whereby previous information is leveraged to guide future inference. (ii) Unlike multi-modal trackers that require independent training, our one-shot training scheme not only alleviates the training burden, but also improves model representation. Extensive experiments on visible and multi-modal benchmarks show that our {\modaltracker} achieves a new \textit{SOTA} performance. The code will be available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/ODTrack.
Authors:Yongsong Huang, Tomo Miyazaki, Xiaofeng Liu, Shinichiro Omachi
Title: GPSMamba: A Global Phase and Spectral Prompt-guided Mamba for Infrared Image Super-Resolution
Abstract:
Infrared Image Super-Resolution (IRSR) is challenged by the low contrast and sparse textures of infrared data, requiring robust long-range modeling to maintain global coherence. While State-Space Models like Mamba offer proficiency in modeling long-range dependencies for this task, their inherent 1D causal scanning mechanism fragments the global context of 2D images, hindering fine-detail restoration. To address this, we propose Global Phase and Spectral Prompt-guided Mamba (GPSMamba), a framework that synergizes architectural guidance with non-causal supervision. First, our Adaptive Semantic-Frequency State Space Module (ASF-SSM) injects a fused semantic-frequency prompt directly into the Mamba block, integrating non-local context to guide reconstruction. Then, a novel Thermal-Spectral Attention and Phase Consistency Loss provides explicit, non-causal supervision to enforce global structural and spectral fidelity. By combining these two innovations, our work presents a systematic strategy to mitigate the limitations of causal modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GPSMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating our approach as a powerful new paradigm for infrared image restoration. Code is available at https://github.com/yongsongH/GPSMamba.
Authors:Kailai Zhou, Fuqiang Yang, Shixian Wang, Bihan Wen, Chongde Zi, Linsen Chen, Qiu Shen, Xun Cao
Title: M-SpecGene: Generalized Foundation Model for RGBT Multispectral Vision
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal (RGBT) multispectral vision is essential for robust perception in complex environments. Most RGBT tasks follow a case-by-case research paradigm, relying on manually customized models to learn task-oriented representations. Nevertheless, this paradigm is inherently constrained by artificial inductive bias, modality bias, and data bottleneck. To address these limitations, we make the initial attempt to build a Generalized RGBT MultiSpectral foundation model (M-SpecGene), which aims to learn modality-invariant representations from large-scale broad data in a self-supervised manner. M-SpecGene provides new insights into multispectral fusion and integrates prior case-by-case studies into a unified paradigm. Considering the unique characteristic of information imbalance in RGBT data, we introduce the Cross-Modality Structural Sparsity (CMSS) metric to quantify the information density across two modalities. Then we develop the GMM-CMSS progressive masking strategy to facilitate a flexible, easy-to-hard, and object-centric pre-training process. Comprehensive experiments validate M-SpecGene's generalizability across eleven datasets for four RGBT downstream tasks. The code will be available at https://github.com/CalayZhou/M-SpecGene.
Authors:Jifeng Shen, Haibo Zhan, Shaohua Dong, Xin Zuo, Wankou Yang, Haibin Ling
Title: Multispectral State-Space Feature Fusion: Bridging Shared and Cross-Parametric Interactions for Object Detection
Abstract:
Modern multispectral feature fusion for object detection faces two critical limitations: (1) Excessive preference for local complementary features over cross-modal shared semantics adversely affects generalization performance; and (2) The trade-off between the receptive field size and computational complexity present critical bottlenecks for scalable feature modeling. Addressing these issues, a novel Multispectral State-Space Feature Fusion framework, dubbed MS2Fusion, is proposed based on the state space model (SSM), achieving efficient and effective fusion through a dual-path parametric interaction mechanism. More specifically, the first cross-parameter interaction branch inherits the advantage of cross-attention in mining complementary information with cross-modal hidden state decoding in SSM. The second shared-parameter branch explores cross-modal alignment with joint embedding to obtain cross-modal similar semantic features and structures through parameter sharing in SSM. Finally, these two paths are jointly optimized with SSM for fusing multispectral features in a unified framework, allowing our MS2Fusion to enjoy both functional complementarity and shared semantic space. In our extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks including FLIR, M3FD and LLVIP, our MS2Fusion significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art multispectral object detection methods, evidencing its superiority. Moreover, MS2Fusion is general and applicable to other multispectral perception tasks. We show that, even without specific design, MS2Fusion achieves state-of-the-art results on RGB-T semantic segmentation and RGBT salient object detection, showing its generality. The source code will be available at https://github.com/61s61min/MS2Fusion.git.
Authors:Antonella Barisic Kulas, Andreja Jurasovic, Stjepan Bogdan
Title: Unlocking Thermal Aerial Imaging: Synthetic Enhancement of UAV Datasets
Abstract:
Thermal imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds significant potential for applications in search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and emergency response, especially under low-light or obscured conditions. However, the scarcity of large-scale, diverse thermal aerial datasets limits the advancement of deep learning models in this domain, primarily due to the high cost and logistical challenges of collecting thermal data. In this work, we introduce a novel procedural pipeline for generating synthetic thermal images from an aerial perspective. Our method integrates arbitrary object classes into existing thermal backgrounds by providing control over the position, scale, and orientation of the new objects, while aligning them with the viewpoints of the background. We enhance existing thermal datasets by introducing new object categories, specifically adding a drone class in urban environments to the HIT-UAV dataset and an animal category to the MONET dataset. In evaluating these datasets for object detection task, we showcase strong performance across both new and existing classes, validating the successful expansion into new applications. Through comparative analysis, we show that thermal detectors outperform their visible-light-trained counterparts and highlight the importance of replicating aerial viewing angles. Project page: https://github.com/larics/thermal_aerial_synthetic.
Authors:Boyue Xu, Ruichao Hou, Tongwei Ren, Gangshan Wu
Title: Visual and Memory Dual Adapter for Multi-Modal Object Tracking
Abstract:
Prompt-learning-based multi-modal trackers have achieved promising progress by employing lightweight visual adapters to incorporate auxiliary modality features into frozen foundation models. However, existing approaches often struggle to learn reliable prompts due to limited exploitation of critical cues across frequency and temporal domains. In this paper, we propose a novel visual and memory dual adapter (VMDA) to construct more robust and discriminative representations for multi-modal tracking. Specifically, we develop a simple but effective visual adapter that adaptively transfers discriminative cues from auxiliary modality to dominant modality by jointly modeling the frequency, spatial, and channel-wise features. Additionally, we design the memory adapter inspired by the human memory mechanism, which stores global temporal cues and performs dynamic update and retrieval operations to ensure the consistent propagation of reliable temporal information across video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the various multi-modal tracking tasks, including RGB-Thermal, RGB-Depth, and RGB-Event tracking. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xuboyue1999/mmtrack.git.
Authors:Xiaodong Guo, Zi'ang Lin, Luwen Hu, Zhihong Deng, Tong Liu, Wujie Zhou
Title: Cross-modal State Space Modeling for Real-time RGB-thermal Wild Scene Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
The integration of RGB and thermal data can significantly improve semantic segmentation performance in wild environments for field robots. Nevertheless, multi-source data processing (e.g. Transformer-based approaches) imposes significant computational overhead, presenting challenges for resource-constrained systems. To resolve this critical limitation, we introduced CM-SSM, an efficient RGB-thermal semantic segmentation architecture leveraging a cross-modal state space modeling (SSM) approach. Our framework comprises two key components. First, we introduced a cross-modal 2D-selective-scan (CM-SS2D) module to establish SSM between RGB and thermal modalities, which constructs cross-modal visual sequences and derives hidden state representations of one modality from the other. Second, we developed a cross-modal state space association (CM-SSA) module that effectively integrates global associations from CM-SS2D with local spatial features extracted through convolutional operations. In contrast with Transformer-based approaches, CM-SSM achieves linear computational complexity with respect to image resolution. Experimental results show that CM-SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CART dataset with fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Further experiments on the PST900 dataset demonstrate its generalizability. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/CMSSM.
Authors:Kaiyuan Chen, Zhengjie Hu, Shaolin Zhang, Yuanqing Xia, Wannian Liang, Shuo Wang
Title: Enhanced Trust Region Sequential Convex Optimization for Multi-Drone Thermal Screening Trajectory Planning in Urban Environments
Abstract:
The rapid detection of abnormal body temperatures in urban populations is essential for managing public health risks, especially during outbreaks of infectious diseases. Multi-drone thermal screening systems offer promising solutions for fast, large-scale, and non-intrusive human temperature monitoring. However, trajectory planning for multiple drones in complex urban environments poses significant challenges, including collision avoidance, coverage efficiency, and constrained flight environments. In this study, we propose an enhanced trust region sequential convex optimization (TR-SCO) algorithm for optimal trajectory planning of multiple drones performing thermal screening tasks. Our improved algorithm integrates a refined convex optimization formulation within a trust region framework, effectively balancing trajectory smoothness, obstacle avoidance, altitude constraints, and maximum screening coverage. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves trajectory optimality and computational efficiency compared to conventional convex optimization methods. This research provides critical insights and practical contributions toward deploying efficient multi-drone systems for real-time thermal screening in urban areas. For reader who are interested in our research, we release our source code at https://github.com/Cherry0302/Enhanced-TR-SCO.
Authors:Ayush Shrivastava, Andrew Owens
Title: Self-Supervised Spatial Correspondence Across Modalities
Abstract:
We present a method for finding cross-modal space-time correspondences. Given two images from different visual modalities, such as an RGB image and a depth map, our model identifies which pairs of pixels correspond to the same physical points in the scene. To solve this problem, we extend the contrastive random walk framework to simultaneously learn cycle-consistent feature representations for both cross-modal and intra-modal matching. The resulting model is simple and has no explicit photo-consistency assumptions. It can be trained entirely using unlabeled data, without the need for any spatially aligned multimodal image pairs. We evaluate our method on both geometric and semantic correspondence tasks. For geometric matching, we consider challenging tasks such as RGB-to-depth and RGB-to-thermal matching (and vice versa); for semantic matching, we evaluate on photo-sketch and cross-style image alignment. Our method achieves strong performance across all benchmarks.
Authors:Raman Jha, Adithya Lenka, Mani Ramanagopal, Aswin Sankaranarayanan, Kaushik Mitra
Title: RT-X Net: RGB-Thermal cross attention network for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Abstract:
In nighttime conditions, high noise levels and bright illumination sources degrade image quality, making low-light image enhancement challenging. Thermal images provide complementary information, offering richer textures and structural details. We propose RT-X Net, a cross-attention network that fuses RGB and thermal images for nighttime image enhancement. We leverage self-attention networks for feature extraction and a cross-attention mechanism for fusion to effectively integrate information from both modalities. To support research in this domain, we introduce the Visible-Thermal Image Enhancement Evaluation (V-TIEE) dataset, comprising 50 co-located visible and thermal images captured under diverse nighttime conditions. Extensive evaluations on the publicly available LLVIP dataset and our V-TIEE dataset demonstrate that RT-X Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in low-light image enhancement. The code and the V-TIEE can be found here https://github.com/jhakrraman/rt-xnet.
Authors:X. Feng, D. Zhang, S. Hu, X. Li, M. Wu, J. Zhang, X. Chen, K. Huang
Title: CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features
Abstract:
Effectively modeling and utilizing spatiotemporal features from RGB and other modalities (\eg, depth, thermal, and event data, denoted as X) is the core of RGB-X tracker design. Existing methods often employ two parallel branches to separately process the RGB and X input streams, requiring the model to simultaneously handle two dispersed feature spaces, which complicates both the model structure and computation process. More critically, intra-modality spatial modeling within each dispersed space incurs substantial computational overhead, limiting resources for inter-modality spatial modeling and temporal modeling. To address this, we propose a novel tracker, CSTrack, which focuses on modeling Compact Spatiotemporal features to achieve simple yet effective tracking. Specifically, we first introduce an innovative Spatial Compact Module that integrates the RGB-X dual input streams into a compact spatial feature, enabling thorough intra- and inter-modality spatial modeling. Additionally, we design an efficient Temporal Compact Module that compactly represents temporal features by constructing the refined target distribution heatmap. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our compact spatiotemporal modeling method, with CSTrack achieving new SOTA results on mainstream RGB-X benchmarks. The code and models will be released at: https://github.com/XiaokunFeng/CSTrack.
Authors:Ze Wang, Jingang Qu, Zhenyu Gao, Pascal Morin
Title: Learning-based Airflow Inertial Odometry for MAVs using Thermal Anemometers in a GPS and vision denied environment
Abstract:
This work demonstrates an airflow inertial based odometry system with multi-sensor data fusion, including thermal anemometer, IMU, ESC, and barometer. This goal is challenging because low-cost IMUs and barometers have significant bias, and anemometer measurements are very susceptible to interference from spinning propellers and ground effects. We employ a GRU-based deep neural network to estimate relative air speed from noisy and disturbed anemometer measurements, and an observer with bias model to fuse the sensor data and thus estimate the state of aerial vehicle. A complete flight data, including takeoff and landing on the ground, shows that the approach is able to decouple the downwash induced wind speed caused by propellers and the ground effect, and accurately estimate the flight speed in a wind-free indoor environment. IMU, and barometer bias are effectively estimated, which significantly reduces the position integration drift, which is only 5.7m for 203s manual random flight. The open source is available on https://github.com/SyRoCo-ISIR/Flight-Speed-Estimation-Airflow.
Authors:Xiao Wang, Yu Jin, Lan Chen, Bo Jiang, Lin Zhu, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Title: Dynamic Graph Induced Contour-aware Heat Conduction Network for Event-based Object Detection
Abstract:
Event-based Vision Sensors (EVS) have demonstrated significant advantages over traditional RGB frame-based cameras in low-light conditions, high-speed motion capture, and low latency. Consequently, object detection based on EVS has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Current event stream object detection algorithms are typically built upon Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, which either capture limited local features using convolutional filters or incur high computational costs due to the utilization of self-attention. Recently proposed vision heat conduction backbone networks have shown a good balance between efficiency and accuracy; however, these models are not specifically designed for event stream data. They exhibit weak capability in modeling object contour information and fail to exploit the benefits of multi-scale features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel dynamic graph induced contour-aware heat conduction network for event stream based object detection, termed CvHeat-DET. The proposed model effectively leverages the clear contour information inherent in event streams to predict the thermal diffusivity coefficients within the heat conduction model, and integrates hierarchical structural graph features to enhance feature learning across multiple scales. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets for event stream-based object detection fully validated the effectiveness of the proposed model. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvDET.
Authors:Xiao Ni, Carsten Kuehnel, Xiaoyi Jiang
Title: Thermal Detection of People with Mobility Restrictions for Barrier Reduction at Traffic Lights Controlled Intersections
Abstract:
Rapid advances in deep learning for computer vision have driven the adoption of RGB camera-based adaptive traffic light systems to improve traffic safety and pedestrian comfort. However, these systems often overlook the needs of people with mobility restrictions. Moreover, the use of RGB cameras presents significant challenges, including limited detection performance under adverse weather or low-visibility conditions, as well as heightened privacy concerns. To address these issues, we propose a fully automated, thermal detector-based traffic light system that dynamically adjusts signal durations for individuals with walking impairments or mobility burden and triggers the auditory signal for visually impaired individuals, thereby advancing towards barrier-free intersection for all users. To this end, we build the thermal dataset for people with mobility restrictions (TD4PWMR), designed to capture diverse pedestrian scenarios, particularly focusing on individuals with mobility aids or mobility burden under varying environmental conditions, such as different lighting, weather, and crowded urban settings. While thermal imaging offers advantages in terms of privacy and robustness to adverse conditions, it also introduces inherent hurdles for object detection due to its lack of color and fine texture details and generally lower resolution of thermal images. To overcome these limitations, we develop YOLO-Thermal, a novel variant of the YOLO architecture that integrates advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms for enhanced detection accuracy and robustness in thermal imaging. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed thermal detector outperforms existing detectors, while the proposed traffic light system effectively enhances barrier-free intersection. The source codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/leon2014dresden/YOLO-THERMAL.
Authors:Shenglan Li, Rui Yao, Yong Zhou, Hancheng Zhu, Kunyang Sun, Bing Liu, Zhiwen Shao, Jiaqi Zhao
Title: Modality-Guided Dynamic Graph Fusion and Temporal Diffusion for Self-Supervised RGB-T Tracking
Abstract:
To reduce the reliance on large-scale annotations, self-supervised RGB-T tracking approaches have garnered significant attention. However, the omission of the object region by erroneous pseudo-label or the introduction of background noise affects the efficiency of modality fusion, while pseudo-label noise triggered by similar object noise can further affect the tracking performance. In this paper, we propose GDSTrack, a novel approach that introduces dynamic graph fusion and temporal diffusion to address the above challenges in self-supervised RGB-T tracking. GDSTrack dynamically fuses the modalities of neighboring frames, treats them as distractor noise, and leverages the denoising capability of a generative model. Specifically, by constructing an adjacency matrix via an Adjacency Matrix Generator (AMG), the proposed Modality-guided Dynamic Graph Fusion (MDGF) module uses a dynamic adjacency matrix to guide graph attention, focusing on and fusing the object's coherent regions. Temporal Graph-Informed Diffusion (TGID) models MDGF features from neighboring frames as interference, and thus improving robustness against similar-object noise. Extensive experiments conducted on four public RGB-T tracking datasets demonstrate that GDSTrack outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiShenglana/GDSTrack.
Authors:Stefanos Gkikas, Raul Fernandez Rojas, Manolis Tsiknakis
Title: PainFormer: a Vision Foundation Model for Automatic Pain Assessment
Abstract:
Pain is a manifold condition that impacts a significant percentage of the population. Accurate and reliable pain evaluation for the people suffering is crucial to developing effective and advanced pain management protocols. Automatic pain assessment systems provide continuous monitoring and support decision-making processes, ultimately aiming to alleviate distress and prevent functionality decline. This study introduces PainFormer, a vision foundation model based on multi-task learning principles trained simultaneously on 14 tasks/datasets with a total of 10.9 million samples. Functioning as an embedding extractor for various input modalities, the foundation model provides feature representations to the Embedding-Mixer, a transformer-based module that performs the final pain assessment. Extensive experiments employing behavioral modalities - including RGB, synthetic thermal, and estimated depth videos - and physiological modalities such as ECG, EMG, GSR, and fNIRS revealed that PainFormer effectively extracts high-quality embeddings from diverse input modalities. The proposed framework is evaluated on two pain datasets, BioVid and AI4Pain, and directly compared to 75 different methodologies documented in the literature. Experiments conducted in unimodal and multimodal settings demonstrate state-of-the-art performances across modalities and pave the way toward general-purpose models for automatic pain assessment. The foundation model's architecture (code) and weights are available at: https://github.com/GkikasStefanos/PainFormer.
Authors:Jonas Frey, Turcan Tuna, Lanke Frank Tarimo Fu, Cedric Weibel, Katharine Patterson, Benjamin Krummenacher, Matthias Müller, Julian Nubert, Maurice Fallon, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
Title: Boxi: Design Decisions in the Context of Algorithmic Performance for Robotics
Abstract:
Achieving robust autonomy in mobile robots operating in complex and unstructured environments requires a multimodal sensor suite capable of capturing diverse and complementary information. However, designing such a sensor suite involves multiple critical design decisions, such as sensor selection, component placement, thermal and power limitations, compute requirements, networking, synchronization, and calibration. While the importance of these key aspects is widely recognized, they are often overlooked in academia or retained as proprietary knowledge within large corporations. To improve this situation, we present Boxi, a tightly integrated sensor payload that enables robust autonomy of robots in the wild. This paper discusses the impact of payload design decisions made to optimize algorithmic performance for downstream tasks, specifically focusing on state estimation and mapping. Boxi is equipped with a variety of sensors: two LiDARs, 10 RGB cameras including high-dynamic range, global shutter, and rolling shutter models, an RGB-D camera, 7 inertial measurement units (IMUs) of varying precision, and a dual antenna RTK GNSS system. Our analysis shows that time synchronization, calibration, and sensor modality have a crucial impact on the state estimation performance. We frame this analysis in the context of cost considerations and environment-specific challenges. We also present a mobile sensor suite `cookbook` to serve as a comprehensive guideline, highlighting generalizable key design considerations and lessons learned during the development of Boxi. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of Boxi being used in a variety of applications in real-world scenarios, contributing to robust autonomy. More details and code: https://github.com/leggedrobotics/grand_tour_box
Authors:Xingxing Zuo, Nikhil Ranganathan, Connor Lee, Georgia Gkioxari, Soon-Jo Chung
Title: MonoTher-Depth: Enhancing Thermal Depth Estimation via Confidence-Aware Distillation
Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation (MDE) from thermal images is a crucial technology for robotic systems operating in challenging conditions such as fog, smoke, and low light. The limited availability of labeled thermal data constrains the generalization capabilities of thermal MDE models compared to foundational RGB MDE models, which benefit from datasets of millions of images across diverse scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel pipeline that enhances thermal MDE through knowledge distillation from a versatile RGB MDE model. Our approach features a confidence-aware distillation method that utilizes the predicted confidence of the RGB MDE to selectively strengthen the thermal MDE model, capitalizing on the strengths of the RGB model while mitigating its weaknesses. Our method significantly improves the accuracy of the thermal MDE, independent of the availability of labeled depth supervision, and greatly expands its applicability to new scenarios. In our experiments on new scenarios without labeled depth, the proposed confidence-aware distillation method reduces the absolute relative error of thermal MDE by 22.88\% compared to the baseline without distillation.
Authors:Manjunath D, Aniruddh Sikdar, Prajwal Gurunath, Sumanth Udupa, Suresh Sundaram
Title: SAGA: Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation for Visible-to-Thermal Domain Adaptation across Multi-View Drone and Ground-Based Vision Systems
Abstract:
Domain-adaptive thermal object detection plays a key role in facilitating visible (RGB)-to-thermal (IR) adaptation by reducing the need for co-registered image pairs and minimizing reliance on large annotated IR datasets. However, inherent limitations of IR images, such as the lack of color and texture cues, pose challenges for RGB-trained models, leading to increased false positives and poor-quality pseudo-labels. To address this, we propose Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation (SAGA), a novel strategy for mitigating color bias and bridging the domain gap by extracting object-level features relevant to IR images. Additionally, to validate the proposed SAGA for drone imagery, we introduce the IndraEye, a multi-sensor (RGB-IR) dataset designed for diverse applications. The dataset contains 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, captured from diverse angles, altitudes, backgrounds, and times of day, offering valuable opportunities for multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to enhance the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, especially in challenging environments. Experimental results show that SAGA significantly improves RGB-to-IR adaptation for autonomous driving and IndraEye dataset, achieving consistent performance gains of +0.4% to +7.6% (mAP) when integrated with state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/airliisc/IndraEye.
Authors:Aihua Zheng, Yongqi Sun, Zi Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang
Title: Collaborative Enhancement Network for Low-quality Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification
Abstract:
The performance of multi-spectral vehicle Re-identification (ReID) is significantly degraded when some important discriminative cues in visible, near infrared and thermal infrared spectra are lost. Existing methods generate or enhance missing details in low-quality spectra data using the high-quality one, generally called the primary spectrum, but how to justify the primary spectrum is a challenging problem. In addition, when the quality of the primary spectrum is low, the enhancement effect would be greatly degraded, thus limiting the performance of multi-spectral vehicle ReID. To address these problems, we propose the Collaborative Enhancement Network (CoEN), which generates a high-quality proxy from all spectra data and leverages it to supervise the selection of primary spectrum and enhance all spectra features in a collaborative manner, for robust multi-spectral vehicle ReID. First, to integrate the rich cues from all spectra data, we design the Proxy Generator (PG) to progressively aggregate multi-spectral features. Second, we design the Dynamic Quality Sort Module (DQSM), which sorts all spectra data by measuring their correlations with the proxy, to accurately select the primary spectra with the highest correlation. Finally, we design the Collaborative Enhancement Module (CEM) to effectively compensate for missing contents of all spectra by collaborating the primary spectra and the proxy, thereby mitigating the impact of low-quality primary spectra. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets are conducted to validate the efficacy of the proposed approach against other multi-spectral vehicle ReID methods. The codes will be released at https://github.com/yongqisun/CoEN.
Authors:Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Ziyu Lu, Zijie Zhang, Haobo Zuo, Liangliang Yao
Title: AnyTSR: Any-Scale Thermal Super-Resolution for UAV
Abstract:
Thermal imaging can greatly enhance the application of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in challenging environments. However, the inherent low resolution of thermal sensors leads to insufficient details and blurred boundaries. Super-resolution (SR) offers a promising solution to address this issue, while most existing SR methods are designed for fixed-scale SR. They are computationally expensive and inflexible in practical applications. To address above issues, this work proposes a novel any-scale thermal SR method (AnyTSR) for UAV within a single model. Specifically, a new image encoder is proposed to explicitly assign specific feature code to enable more accurate and flexible representation. Additionally, by effectively embedding coordinate offset information into the local feature ensemble, an innovative any-scale upsampler is proposed to better understand spatial relationships and reduce artifacts. Moreover, a novel dataset (UAV-TSR), covering both land and water scenes, is constructed for thermal SR tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all scaling factors as well as generates more accurate and detailed high-resolution images. The code is located at https://github.com/vision4robotics/AnyTSR.
Authors:Anning Hu, Ang Li, Xirui Jin, Danping Zou
Title: ThermoStereoRT: Thermal Stereo Matching in Real Time via Knowledge Distillation and Attention-based Refinement
Abstract:
We introduce ThermoStereoRT, a real-time thermal stereo matching method designed for all-weather conditions that recovers disparity from two rectified thermal stereo images, envisioning applications such as night-time drone surveillance or under-bed cleaning robots. Leveraging a lightweight yet powerful backbone, ThermoStereoRT constructs a 3D cost volume from thermal images and employs multi-scale attention mechanisms to produce an initial disparity map. To refine this map, we design a novel channel and spatial attention module. Addressing the challenge of sparse ground truth data in thermal imagery, we utilize knowledge distillation to boost performance without increasing computational demands. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that ThermoStereoRT delivers both real-time capacity and robust accuracy, making it a promising solution for real-world deployment in various challenging environments. Our code will be released on https://github.com/SJTU-ViSYS-team/ThermoStereoRT
Authors:Shiao Wang, Xiao Wang, Bo Jiang, Lin Zhu, Guoqi Li, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang
Title: Human Activity Recognition using RGB-Event based Sensors: A Multi-modal Heat Conduction Model and A Benchmark Dataset
Abstract:
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) primarily relied on traditional RGB cameras to achieve high-performance activity recognition. However, the challenging factors in real-world scenarios, such as insufficient lighting and rapid movements, inevitably degrade the performance of RGB cameras. To address these challenges, biologically inspired event cameras offer a promising solution to overcome the limitations of traditional RGB cameras. In this work, we rethink human activity recognition by combining the RGB and event cameras. The first contribution is the proposed large-scale multi-modal RGB-Event human activity recognition benchmark dataset, termed HARDVS 2.0, which bridges the dataset gaps. It contains 300 categories of everyday real-world actions with a total of 107,646 paired videos covering various challenging scenarios. Inspired by the physics-informed heat conduction model, we propose a novel multi-modal heat conduction operation framework for effective activity recognition, termed MMHCO-HAR. More in detail, given the RGB frames and event streams, we first extract the feature embeddings using a stem network. Then, multi-modal Heat Conduction blocks are designed to fuse the dual features, the key module of which is the multi-modal Heat Conduction Operation layer. We integrate RGB and event embeddings through a multi-modal DCT-IDCT layer while adaptively incorporating the thermal conductivity coefficient via FVEs into this module. After that, we propose an adaptive fusion module based on a policy routing strategy for high-performance classification. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently performs well, validating its effectiveness and robustness. The source code and benchmark dataset will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/HARDVS/tree/HARDVSv2
Authors:Houzhang Fang, Xiaolin Wang, Zengyang Li, Lu Wang, Qingshan Li, Yi Chang, Luxin Yan
Title: Detection-Friendly Nonuniformity Correction: A Union Framework for Infrared UAVTarget Detection
Abstract:
Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images captured using thermal detectors are often affected by temperature dependent low-frequency nonuniformity, which significantly reduces the contrast of the images. Detecting UAV targets under nonuniform conditions is crucial in UAV surveillance applications. Existing methods typically treat infrared nonuniformity correction (NUC) as a preprocessing step for detection, which leads to suboptimal performance. Balancing the two tasks while enhancing detection beneficial information remains challenging. In this paper, we present a detection-friendly union framework, termed UniCD, that simultaneously addresses both infrared NUC and UAV target detection tasks in an end-to-end manner. We first model NUC as a small number of parameter estimation problem jointly driven by priors and data to generate detection-conducive images. Then, we incorporate a new auxiliary loss with target mask supervision into the backbone of the infrared UAV target detection network to strengthen target features while suppressing the background. To better balance correction and detection, we introduce a detection-guided self-supervised loss to reduce feature discrepancies between the two tasks, thereby enhancing detection robustness to varying nonuniformity levels. Additionally, we construct a new benchmark composed of 50,000 infrared images in various nonuniformity types, multi-scale UAV targets and rich backgrounds with target annotations, called IRBFD. Extensive experiments on IRBFD demonstrate that our UniCD is a robust union framework for NUC and UAV target detection while achieving real-time processing capabilities. Dataset can be available at https://github.com/IVPLaboratory/UniCD.
Authors:Jay N. Paranjape, Celso de Melo, Vishal M. Patel
Title: F-ViTA: Foundation Model Guided Visible to Thermal Translation
Abstract:
Thermal imaging is crucial for scene understanding, particularly in low-light and nighttime conditions. However, collecting large thermal datasets is costly and labor-intensive due to the specialized equipment required for infrared image capture. To address this challenge, researchers have explored visible-to-thermal image translation. Most existing methods rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Diffusion Models (DMs), treating the task as a style transfer problem. As a result, these approaches attempt to learn both the modality distribution shift and underlying physical principles from limited training data. In this paper, we propose F-ViTA, a novel approach that leverages the general world knowledge embedded in foundation models to guide the diffusion process for improved translation. Specifically, we condition an InstructPix2Pix Diffusion Model with zero-shot masks and labels from foundation models such as SAM and Grounded DINO. This allows the model to learn meaningful correlations between scene objects and their thermal signatures in infrared imagery. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that F-ViTA outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, our model generalizes well to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and can generate Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR), Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR), and Near-Infrared (NIR) translations from the same visible image. Code: https://github.com/JayParanjape/F-ViTA/tree/master.
Authors:Ukcheol Shin, Jinsun Park
Title: Deep Depth Estimation from Thermal Image: Dataset, Benchmark, and Challenges
Abstract:
Achieving robust and accurate spatial perception under adverse weather and lighting conditions is crucial for the high-level autonomy of self-driving vehicles and robots. However, existing perception algorithms relying on the visible spectrum are highly affected by weather and lighting conditions. A long-wave infrared camera (i.e., thermal imaging camera) can be a potential solution to achieve high-level robustness. However, the absence of large-scale datasets and standardized benchmarks remains a significant bottleneck to progress in active research for robust visual perception from thermal images. To this end, this manuscript provides a large-scale Multi-Spectral Stereo (MS$^2$) dataset that consists of stereo RGB, stereo NIR, stereo thermal, stereo LiDAR data, and GNSS/IMU information along with semi-dense depth ground truth. MS$^2$ dataset includes 162K synchronized multi-modal data pairs captured across diverse locations (e.g., urban city, residential area, campus, and high-way road) at different times (e.g., morning, daytime, and nighttime) and under various weather conditions (e.g., clear-sky, cloudy, and rainy). Secondly, we conduct a thorough evaluation of monocular and stereo depth estimation networks across RGB, NIR, and thermal modalities to establish standardized benchmark results on MS$^2$ depth test sets (e.g., day, night, and rainy). Lastly, we provide in-depth analyses and discuss the challenges revealed by the benchmark results, such as the performance variability for each modality under adverse conditions, domain shift between different sensor modalities, and potential research direction for thermal perception. Our dataset and source code are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/multi-spectral-stereo-dataset and https://github.com/UkcheolShin/SupDepth4Thermal.
Authors:Yu-Hsi Chen
Title: Strong Baseline: Multi-UAV Tracking via YOLOv12 with BoT-SORT-ReID
Abstract:
Detecting and tracking multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in thermal infrared video is inherently challenging due to low contrast, environmental noise, and small target sizes. This paper provides a straightforward approach to address multi-UAV tracking in thermal infrared video, leveraging recent advances in detection and tracking. Instead of relying on the well-established YOLOv5 with DeepSORT combination, we present a tracking framework built on YOLOv12 and BoT-SORT, enhanced with tailored training and inference strategies. We evaluate our approach following the 4th Anti-UAV Challenge metrics and reach competitive performance. Notably, we achieved strong results without using contrast enhancement or temporal information fusion to enrich UAV features, highlighting our approach as a "Strong Baseline" for multi-UAV tracking tasks. We provide implementation details, in-depth experimental analysis, and a discussion of potential improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/wish44165/YOLOv12-BoT-SORT-ReID .
Authors:Jiayi Zhao, Fei Teng, Kai Luo, Guoqiang Zhao, Zhiyong Li, Xu Zheng, Kailun Yang
Title: Unveiling the Potential of Segment Anything Model 2 for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation with Language Guidance
Abstract:
The perception capability of robotic systems relies on the richness of the dataset. Although Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), trained on large datasets, demonstrates strong perception potential in perception tasks, its inherent training paradigm prevents it from being suitable for RGB-T tasks. To address these challenges, we propose SHIFNet, a novel SAM2-driven Hybrid Interaction Paradigm that unlocks the potential of SAM2 with linguistic guidance for efficient RGB-Thermal perception. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) Semantic-Aware Cross-modal Fusion (SACF) module that dynamically balances modality contributions through text-guided affinity learning, overcoming SAM2's inherent RGB bias; (2) Heterogeneous Prompting Decoder (HPD) that enhances global semantic information through a semantic enhancement module and then combined with category embeddings to amplify cross-modal semantic consistency. With 32.27M trainable parameters, SHIFNet achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance on public benchmarks, reaching 89.8% on PST900 and 67.8% on FMB, respectively. The framework facilitates the adaptation of pre-trained large models to RGB-T segmentation tasks, effectively mitigating the high costs associated with data collection while endowing robotic systems with comprehensive perception capabilities. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/iAsakiT3T/SHIFNet.
Authors:Nikita Kazeev, Wei Nong, Ignat Romanov, Ruiming Zhu, Andrey Ustyuzhanin, Shuya Yamazaki, Kedar Hippalgaonkar
Title: Wyckoff Transformer: Generation of Symmetric Crystals
Abstract:
Crystal symmetry plays a fundamental role in determining its physical, chemical, and electronic properties such as electrical and thermal conductivity, optical and polarization behavior, and mechanical strength. Almost all known crystalline materials have internal symmetry. However, this is often inadequately addressed by existing generative models, making the consistent generation of stable and symmetrically valid crystal structures a significant challenge. We introduce WyFormer, a generative model that directly tackles this by formally conditioning on space group symmetry. It achieves this by using Wyckoff positions as the basis for an elegant, compressed, and discrete structure representation. To model the distribution, we develop a permutation-invariant autoregressive model based on the Transformer encoder and an absence of positional encoding. Extensive experimentation demonstrates WyFormer's compelling combination of attributes: it achieves best-in-class symmetry-conditioned generation, incorporates a physics-motivated inductive bias, produces structures with competitive stability, predicts material properties with competitive accuracy even without atomic coordinates, and exhibits unparalleled inference speed.
Authors:Mingjie Wen, Jiahe Han, Wenjuan Li, Xiaoya Chang, Qingzhao Chu, Dongping Chen
Title: A General Neural Network Potential for Energetic Materials with C, H, N, and O elements
Abstract:
The discovery and optimization of high-energy materials (HEMs) are constrained by the prohibitive computational expense and prolonged development cycles inherent in conventional approaches. In this work, we develop a general neural network potential (NNP) that efficiently predicts the structural, mechanical, and decomposition properties of HEMs composed of C, H, N, and O. Our framework leverages pre-trained NNP models, fine-tuned using transfer learning on energy and force data derived from density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This strategy enables rapid adaptation across 20 different HEM systems while maintaining DFT-level accuracy, significantly reducing computational costs. A key aspect of this work is the ability of NNP model to capture the chemical activity space of HEMs, accurately describe the key atomic interactions and reaction mechanisms during thermal decomposition. The general NNP model has been applied in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and validated with experimental data for various HEM structures. Results show that the NNP model accurately predicts the structural, mechanical, and decomposition properties of HEMs by effectively describing their chemical activity space. Compared to traditional force fields, it offers superior DFT-level accuracy and generalization across both microscopic and macroscopic properties, reducing the computational and experimental costs. This work provides an efficient strategy for the design and development of HEMs and proposes a promising framework for integrating DFT, machine learning, and experimental methods in materials research. (To facilitate further research and practical applications, we open-source our NNP model on GitHub: https://github.com/MingjieWen/General-NNP-model-for-C-H-N-O-Energetic-Materials.)
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Zirui Wang, Yang Zou, Zhixin Chen, Jun Ma, Zhiying Jiang, Long Ma, Jinyuan Liu
Title: DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution
Abstract:
Infrared imaging is essential for autonomous driving and robotic operations as a supportive modality due to its reliable performance in challenging environments. Despite its popularity, the limitations of infrared cameras, such as low spatial resolution and complex degradations, consistently challenge imaging quality and subsequent visual tasks. Hence, infrared image super-resolution (IISR) has been developed to address this challenge. While recent developments in diffusion models have greatly advanced this field, current methods to solve it either ignore the unique modal characteristics of infrared imaging or overlook the machine perception requirements. To bridge these gaps, we propose DifIISR, an infrared image super-resolution diffusion model optimized for visual quality and perceptual performance. Our approach achieves task-based guidance for diffusion by injecting gradients derived from visual and perceptual priors into the noise during the reverse process. Specifically, we introduce an infrared thermal spectrum distribution regulation to preserve visual fidelity, ensuring that the reconstructed infrared images closely align with high-resolution images by matching their frequency components. Subsequently, we incorporate various visual foundational models as the perceptual guidance for downstream visual tasks, infusing generalizable perceptual features beneficial for detection and segmentation. As a result, our approach gains superior visual results while attaining State-Of-The-Art downstream task performance. Code is available at https://github.com/zirui0625/DifIISR
Authors:Zhu Liu, Zijun Wang, Jinyuan Liu, Fanqi Meng, Long Ma, Risheng Liu
Title: DEAL: Data-Efficient Adversarial Learning for High-Quality Infrared Imaging
Abstract:
Thermal imaging is often compromised by dynamic, complex degradations caused by hardware limitations and unpredictable environmental factors. The scarcity of high-quality infrared data, coupled with the challenges of dynamic, intricate degradations, makes it difficult to recover details using existing methods. In this paper, we introduce thermal degradation simulation integrated into the training process via a mini-max optimization, by modeling these degraded factors as adversarial attacks on thermal images. The simulation is dynamic to maximize objective functions, thus capturing a broad spectrum of degraded data distributions. This approach enables training with limited data, thereby improving model performance.Additionally, we introduce a dual-interaction network that combines the benefits of spiking neural networks with scale transformation to capture degraded features with sharp spike signal intensities. This architecture ensures compact model parameters while preserving efficient feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior visual quality under diverse single and composited degradation, but also delivers a significant reduction in processing when trained on only fifty clear images, outperforming existing techniques in efficiency and accuracy. The source code will be available at https://github.com/LiuZhu-CV/DEAL.
Authors:Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, Jean Oh
Title: Bridging Spectral-wise and Multi-spectral Depth Estimation via Geometry-guided Contrastive Learning
Abstract:
Deploying depth estimation networks in the real world requires high-level robustness against various adverse conditions to ensure safe and reliable autonomy. For this purpose, many autonomous vehicles employ multi-modal sensor systems, including an RGB camera, NIR camera, thermal camera, LiDAR, or Radar. They mainly adopt two strategies to use multiple sensors: modality-wise and multi-modal fused inference. The former method is flexible but memory-inefficient, unreliable, and vulnerable. Multi-modal fusion can provide high-level reliability, yet it needs a specialized architecture. In this paper, we propose an effective solution, named align-and-fuse strategy, for the depth estimation from multi-spectral images. In the align stage, we align embedding spaces between multiple spectrum bands to learn shareable representation across multi-spectral images by minimizing contrastive loss of global and spatially aligned local features with geometry cue. After that, in the fuse stage, we train an attachable feature fusion module that can selectively aggregate the multi-spectral features for reliable and robust prediction results. Based on the proposed method, a single-depth network can achieve both spectral-invariant and multi-spectral fused depth estimation while preserving reliability, memory efficiency, and flexibility.
Authors:He Wang, Tianyang Xu, Zhangyong Tang, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler
Title: UASTrack: A Unified Adaptive Selection Framework with Modality-Customization in Single Object Tracking
Abstract:
Multi-modal tracking is essential in single-object tracking (SOT), as different sensor types contribute unique capabilities to overcome challenges caused by variations in object appearance. However, existing unified RGB-X trackers (X represents depth, event, or thermal modality) either rely on the task-specific training strategy for individual RGB-X image pairs or fail to address the critical importance of modality-adaptive perception in real-world applications. In this work, we propose UASTrack, a unified adaptive selection framework that facilitates both model and parameter unification, as well as adaptive modality discrimination across various multi-modal tracking tasks. To achieve modality-adaptive perception in joint RGB-X pairs, we design a Discriminative Auto-Selector (DAS) capable of identifying modality labels, thereby distinguishing the data distributions of auxiliary modalities. Furthermore, we propose a Task-Customized Optimization Adapter (TCOA) tailored to various modalities in the latent space. This strategy effectively filters noise redundancy and mitigates background interference based on the specific characteristics of each modality. Extensive comparisons conducted on five benchmarks including LasHeR, GTOT, RGBT234, VisEvent, and DepthTrack, covering RGB-T, RGB-E, and RGB-D tracking scenarios, demonstrate our innovative approach achieves comparative performance by introducing only additional training parameters of 1.87M and flops of 1.95G. The code will be available at https://github.com/wanghe/UASTrack.
Authors:Ahmed Sharshar, Yasser Attia, Mohammad Yaqub, Mohsen Guizani
Title: PulmoFusion: Advancing Pulmonary Health with Efficient Multi-Modal Fusion
Abstract:
Traditional remote spirometry lacks the precision required for effective pulmonary monitoring. We present a novel, non-invasive approach using multimodal predictive models that integrate RGB or thermal video data with patient metadata. Our method leverages energy-efficient Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for the regression of Peak Expiratory Flow (PEF) and classification of Forced Expiratory Volume (FEV1) and Forced Vital Capacity (FVC), using lightweight CNNs to overcome SNN limitations in regression tasks. Multimodal data integration is improved with a Multi-Head Attention Layer, and we employ K-Fold validation and ensemble learning to boost robustness. Using thermal data, our SNN models achieve 92% accuracy on a breathing-cycle basis and 99.5% patient-wise. PEF regression models attain Relative RMSEs of 0.11 (thermal) and 0.26 (RGB), with an MAE of 4.52% for FEV1/FVC predictions, establishing state-of-the-art performance. Code and dataset can be found on https://github.com/ahmed-sharshar/RespiroDynamics.git
Authors:Xie Zhang, Chenxiao Li, Chenshu Wu
Title: TAPOR: 3D Hand Pose Reconstruction with Fully Passive Thermal Sensing for Around-Device Interactions
Abstract:
This paper presents the design and implementation of TAPOR, a privacy-preserving, non-contact, and fully passive sensing system for accurate and robust 3D hand pose reconstruction for around-device interaction using a single low-cost thermal array sensor. Thermal sensing using inexpensive and miniature thermal arrays emerges with an excellent utility-privacy balance, offering an imaging resolution significantly lower than cameras but far superior to RF signals like radar or WiFi. The design of TAPOR, however, is challenging, mainly because the captured temperature maps are low-resolution and textureless. To overcome the challenges, we investigate thermo-depth and thermo-pose properties, proposing a novel physics-inspired neural network that learns effective 3D spatial representations of potential hand poses. We then formulate the 3D pose reconstruction problem as a distinct retrieval task, enabling accurate hand pose determination from the input temperature map. To deploy TAPOR on IoT devices, we introduce an effective heterogeneous knowledge distillation method, reducing computation by 377x. TAPOR is fully implemented and tested in real-world scenarios, showing remarkable performance, supported by four gesture control and finger tracking case studies. We envision TAPOR to be a ubiquitous interface for around-device control and have open-sourced it at https://github.com/aiot-lab/TAPOR.
Authors:Akash Kundu
Title: Improving thermal state preparation of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with reinforcement learning on quantum hardware
Abstract:
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, known for its strong quantum correlations and chaotic behavior, serves as a key platform for quantum gravity studies. However, variationally preparing thermal states on near-term quantum processors for large systems ($N>12$, where $N$ is the number of Majorana fermions) presents a significant challenge due to the rapid growth in the complexity of parameterized quantum circuits. This paper addresses this challenge by integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with convolutional neural networks, employing an iterative approach to optimize the quantum circuit and its parameters. The refinement process is guided by a composite reward signal derived from entropy and the expectation values of the SYK Hamiltonian. This approach reduces the number of CNOT gates by two orders of magnitude for systems $N\geq12$ compared to traditional methods like first-order Trotterization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the RL framework in both noiseless and noisy quantum hardware environments, maintaining high accuracy in thermal state preparation. This work advances a scalable, RL-based framework with applications for quantum gravity studies and out-of-time-ordered thermal correlators computation in quantum many-body systems on near-term quantum hardware. The code is available at https://github.com/Aqasch/solving_SYK_model_with_RL.
Authors:Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Guokai Shi, Jingxuan Xu, Huan Chen, Jianan Li
Title: Spectrum-oriented Point-supervised Saliency Detector for Hyperspectral Images
Abstract:
Hyperspectral salient object detection (HSOD) aims to extract targets or regions with significantly different spectra from hyperspectral images. While existing deep learning-based methods can achieve good detection results, they generally necessitate pixel-level annotations, which are notably challenging to acquire for hyperspectral images. To address this issue, we introduce point supervision into HSOD, and incorporate Spectral Saliency, derived from conventional HSOD methods, as a pivotal spectral representation within the framework. This integration leads to the development of a novel Spectrum-oriented Point-supervised Saliency Detector (SPSD). Specifically, we propose a novel pipeline, specifically designed for HSIs, to generate pseudo-labels, effectively mitigating the performance decline associated with point supervision strategy. Additionally, Spectral Saliency is employed to counteract information loss during model supervision and saliency refinement, thereby maintaining the structural integrity and edge accuracy of the detected objects. Furthermore, we introduce a Spectrum-transformed Spatial Gate to focus more precisely on salient regions while reducing feature redundancy. We have carried out comprehensive experiments on both HSOD-BIT and HS-SOD datasets to validate the efficacy of our proposed method, using mean absolute error (MAE), E-measure, F-measure, Area Under Curve, and Cross Correlation as evaluation metrics. For instance, on the HSOD-BIT dataset, our SPSD achieves a MAE of 0.031 and an F-measure of 0.878. Thorough ablation studies have substantiated the effectiveness of each individual module and provided insights into the model's working mechanism. Further evaluations on RGB-thermal salient object detection datasets highlight the versatility of our approach.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Keke Chen, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Title: Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection: A Large-scale Dataset and Progressive Correlation Network
Abstract:
Alignment-free RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) salient object detection (SOD) aims to achieve robust performance in complex scenes by directly leveraging the complementary information from unaligned visible-thermal image pairs, without requiring manual alignment. However, the labor-intensive process of collecting and annotating image pairs limits the scale of existing benchmarks, hindering the advancement of alignment-free RGB-T SOD. In this paper, we construct a large-scale and high-diversity unaligned RGB-T SOD dataset named UVT20K, comprising 20,000 image pairs, 407 scenes, and 1256 object categories. All samples are collected from real-world scenarios with various challenges, such as low illumination, image clutter, complex salient objects, and so on. To support the exploration for further research, each sample in UVT20K is annotated with a comprehensive set of ground truths, including saliency masks, scribbles, boundaries, and challenge attributes. In addition, we propose a Progressive Correlation Network (PCNet), which models inter- and intra-modal correlations on the basis of explicit alignment to achieve accurate predictions in unaligned image pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on unaligned and aligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/PCNet.
Authors:Qingyu Xu, Longguang Wang, Weidong Sheng, Yingqian Wang, Chao Xiao, Chao Ma, Wei An
Title: Heterogeneous Graph Transformer for Multiple Tiny Object Tracking in RGB-T Videos
Abstract:
Tracking multiple tiny objects is highly challenging due to their weak appearance and limited features. Existing multi-object tracking algorithms generally focus on single-modality scenes, and overlook the complementary characteristics of tiny objects captured by multiple remote sensors. To enhance tracking performance by integrating complementary information from multiple sources, we propose a novel framework called {HGT-Track (Heterogeneous Graph Transformer based Multi-Tiny-Object Tracking)}. Specifically, we first employ a Transformer-based encoder to embed images from different modalities. Subsequently, we utilize Heterogeneous Graph Transformer to aggregate spatial and temporal information from multiple modalities to generate detection and tracking features. Additionally, we introduce a target re-detection module (ReDet) to ensure tracklet continuity by maintaining consistency across different modalities. Furthermore, this paper introduces the first benchmark VT-Tiny-MOT (Visible-Thermal Tiny Multi-Object Tracking) for RGB-T fused multiple tiny object tracking. Extensive experiments are conducted on VT-Tiny-MOT, and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of MOTA (Multiple-Object Tracking Accuracy) and ID-F1 score. The code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/xuqingyu26/HGTMT.
Authors:Tao Zhang, Zhenhai Liu, Feipeng Qi, Yongjun Jiao, Tailin Wu
Title: M2PDE: Compositional Generative Multiphysics and Multi-component PDE Simulation
Abstract:
Multiphysics simulation, which models the interactions between multiple physical processes, and multi-component simulation of complex structures are critical in fields like nuclear and aerospace engineering. Previous studies use numerical solvers or ML-based surrogate models for these simulations. However, multiphysics simulations typically require integrating multiple specialized solvers-each for a specific physical process-into a coupled program, which introduces significant development challenges. Furthermore, existing numerical algorithms struggle with highly complex large-scale structures in multi-component simulations. Here we propose compositional Multiphysics and Multi-component PDE Simulation with Diffusion models (M2PDE) to overcome these challenges. During diffusion-based training, M2PDE learns energy functions modeling the conditional probability of one physical process/component conditioned on other processes/components. In inference, M2PDE generates coupled multiphysics and multi-component solutions by sampling from the joint probability distribution. We evaluate M2PDE on two multiphysics tasks-reaction-diffusion and nuclear thermal coupling-where it achieves more accurate predictions than surrogate models in challenging scenarios. We then apply it to a multi-component prismatic fuel element problem, demonstrating that M2PDE scales from single-component training to a 64-component structure and outperforms existing domain-decomposition and graph-based approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/M2PDE.
Authors:Gijs Vermariën, Serena Viti, Rahul Ravichandran, Thomas G. Bisbas
Title: 3D-PDR Orion dataset and NeuralPDR: Neural Differential Equations for Photodissociation Regions
Abstract:
We present a novel dataset of simulations of the photodissociation region (PDR) in the Orion Bar and provide benchmarks of emulators for the dataset. Numerical models of PDRs are computationally expensive since the modeling of these changing regions requires resolving the thermal balance and chemical composition along a line-of-sight into an interstellar cloud. This often makes it a bottleneck for 3D simulations of these regions. In this work, we provide a dataset of 8192 models with different initial conditions simulated with 3D-PDR. We then benchmark different architectures, focusing on Augmented Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ANODE) based models (Code be found at https://github.com/uclchem/neuralpdr). Obtaining fast and robust emulators that can be included as preconditioners of classical codes or full emulators into 3D simulations of PDRs.
Authors:Pengfei Lyu, Pak-Hei Yeung, Xiaosheng Yu, Chengdong Wu, Jagath C. Rajapakse
Title: Deep Fourier-embedded Network for RGB and Thermal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
The rapid development of deep learning has significantly improved salient object detection (SOD) combining both RGB and thermal (RGB-T) images. However, existing deep learning-based RGB-T SOD models suffer from two major limitations. First, Transformer-based models with quadratic complexity are computationally expensive and memory-intensive, limiting their application in high-resolution bi-modal feature fusion. Second, even when these models converge to an optimal solution, there remains a frequency gap between the prediction and ground-truth. To overcome these limitations, we propose a purely Fourier transform-based model, namely Deep Fourier-Embedded Network (DFENet), for accurate RGB-T SOD. To address the computational complexity when dealing with high-resolution images, we leverage the efficiency of fast Fourier transform with linear complexity to design three key components: (1) the Modal-coordinated Perception Attention, which fuses RGB and thermal modalities with enhanced multi-dimensional representation; (2) the Frequency-decomposed Edge-aware Block, which clarifies object edges by deeply decomposing and enhancing frequency components of low-level features; and (3) the Fourier Residual Channel Attention Block, which prioritizes high-frequency information while aligning channel-wise global relationships. To mitigate the frequency gap, we propose Co-focus Frequency Loss, which dynamically weights hard frequencies during edge frequency reconstruction by cross-referencing bi-modal edge information in the Fourier domain. Extensive experiments on four RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets demonstrate that DFENet outperforms fifteen existing state-of-the-art RGB-T SOD models. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the value and effectiveness of our newly proposed components. The code is available at https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/DFENet.
Authors:Wassim El Ahmar, Dhanvin Kolhatkar, Farzan Nowruzi, Robert Laganiere
Title: Enhancing Thermal MOT: A Novel Box Association Method Leveraging Thermal Identity and Motion Similarity
Abstract:
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) in thermal imaging presents unique challenges due to the lack of visual features and the complexity of motion patterns. This paper introduces an innovative approach to improve MOT in the thermal domain by developing a novel box association method that utilizes both thermal object identity and motion similarity. Our method merges thermal feature sparsity and dynamic object tracking, enabling more accurate and robust MOT performance. Additionally, we present a new dataset comprised of a large-scale collection of thermal and RGB images captured in diverse urban environments, serving as both a benchmark for our method and a new resource for thermal imaging. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, showing significant improvements in tracking accuracy and robustness under various conditions. Our findings suggest that incorporating thermal identity with motion data enhances MOT performance. The newly collected dataset and source code is available at https://github.com/wassimea/thermalMOT
Authors:Yang Zou, Zhixin Chen, Zhipeng Zhang, Xingyuan Li, Long Ma, Jinyuan Liu, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Title: Contourlet Refinement Gate Framework for Thermal Spectrum Distribution Regularized Infrared Image Super-Resolution
Abstract:
Image super-resolution (SR) is a classical yet still active low-level vision problem that aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, serving as a key technique for image enhancement. Current approaches to address SR tasks, such as transformer-based and diffusion-based methods, are either dedicated to extracting RGB image features or assuming similar degradation patterns, neglecting the inherent modal disparities between infrared and visible images. When directly applied to infrared image SR tasks, these methods inevitably distort the infrared spectral distribution, compromising the machine perception in downstream tasks. In this work, we emphasize the infrared spectral distribution fidelity and propose a Contourlet refinement gate framework to restore infrared modal-specific features while preserving spectral distribution fidelity. Our approach captures high-pass subbands from multi-scale and multi-directional infrared spectral decomposition to recover infrared-degraded information through a gate architecture. The proposed Spectral Fidelity Loss regularizes the spectral frequency distribution during reconstruction, which ensures the preservation of both high- and low-frequency components and maintains the fidelity of infrared-specific features. We propose a two-stage prompt-learning optimization to guide the model in learning infrared HR characteristics from LR degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing image SR models in both visual and perceptual tasks while notably enhancing machine perception in downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hey-it-s-me/CoRPLE.
Authors:Ismail Can Yagmur, Hasan F. Ates, Bahadir K. Gunturk
Title: XPoint: A Self-Supervised Visual-State-Space based Architecture for Multispectral Image Registration
Abstract:
Accurate multispectral image matching presents significant challenges due to non-linear intensity variations across spectral modalities, extreme viewpoint changes, and the scarcity of labeled datasets. Current state-of-the-art methods are typically specialized for a single spectral difference, such as visibleinfrared, and struggle to adapt to other modalities due to their reliance on expensive supervision, such as depth maps or camera poses. To address the need for rapid adaptation across modalities, we introduce XPoint, a self-supervised, modular image-matching framework designed for adaptive training and fine-tuning on aligned multispectral datasets, allowing users to customize key components based on their specific tasks. XPoint employs modularity and self-supervision to allow for the adjustment of elements such as the base detector, which generates pseudoground truth keypoints invariant to viewpoint and spectrum variations. The framework integrates a VMamba encoder, pretrained on segmentation tasks, for robust feature extraction, and includes three joint decoder heads: two are dedicated to interest point and descriptor extraction; and a task-specific homography regression head imposes geometric constraints for superior performance in tasks like image registration. This flexible architecture enables quick adaptation to a wide range of modalities, demonstrated by training on Optical-Thermal data and fine-tuning on settings such as visual-near infrared, visual-infrared, visual-longwave infrared, and visual-synthetic aperture radar. Experimental results show that XPoint consistently outperforms or matches state-ofthe-art methods in feature matching and image registration tasks across five distinct multispectral datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/canyagmur/XPoint.
Authors:Pengfei Lyu, Pak-Hei Yeung, Xiaosheng Yu, Xiufei Cheng, Chengdong Wu, Jagath C. Rajapakse
Title: Efficient Fourier Filtering Network with Contrastive Learning for UAV-based Unaligned Bi-modal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based bi-modal salient object detection (BSOD) aims to segment salient objects in a scene utilizing complementary cues in unaligned RGB and thermal image pairs. However, the high computational expense of existing UAV-based BSOD models limits their applicability to real-world UAV devices. To address this problem, we propose an efficient Fourier filter network with contrastive learning that achieves both real-time and accurate performance. Specifically, we first design a semantic contrastive alignment loss to align the two modalities at the semantic level, which facilitates mutual refinement in a parameter-free way. Second, inspired by the fast Fourier transform that obtains global relevance in linear complexity, we propose synchronized alignment fusion, which aligns and fuses bi-modal features in the channel and spatial dimensions by a hierarchical filtering mechanism. Our proposed model, AlignSal, reduces the number of parameters by 70.0%, decreases the floating point operations by 49.4%, and increases the inference speed by 152.5% compared to the cutting-edge BSOD model (i.e., MROS). Extensive experiments on the UAV RGB-T 2400 and seven bi-modal dense prediction datasets demonstrate that AlignSal achieves both real-time inference speed and better performance and generalizability compared to nineteen state-of-the-art models across most evaluation metrics. In addition, our ablation studies further verify AlignSal's potential in boosting the performance of existing aligned BSOD models on UAV-based unaligned data. The code is available at: https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/AlignSal.
Authors:Zhicheng Zhao, Juanjuan Gu, Chenglong Li, Chun Wang, Zhongling Huang, Jin Tang
Title: Guidance Disentanglement Network for Optics-Guided Thermal UAV Image Super-Resolution
Abstract:
Optics-guided Thermal UAV image Super-Resolution (OTUAV-SR) has attracted significant research interest due to its potential applications in security inspection, agricultural measurement, and object detection. Existing methods often employ single guidance model to generate the guidance features from optical images to assist thermal UAV images super-resolution. However, single guidance models make it difficult to generate effective guidance features under favorable and adverse conditions in UAV scenarios, thus limiting the performance of OTUAV-SR. To address this issue, we propose a novel Guidance Disentanglement network (GDNet), which disentangles the optical image representation according to typical UAV scenario attributes to form guidance features under both favorable and adverse conditions, for robust OTUAV-SR. Moreover, we design an attribute-aware fusion module to combine all attribute-based optical guidance features, which could form a more discriminative representation and fit the attribute-agnostic guidance process. To facilitate OTUAV-SR research in complex UAV scenarios, we introduce VGTSR2.0, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 3,500 aligned optical-thermal image pairs captured under diverse conditions and scenes. Extensive experiments on VGTSR2.0 demonstrate that GDNet significantly improves OTUAV-SR performance over state-of-the-art methods, especially in the challenging low-light and foggy environments commonly encountered in UAV scenarios. The dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jocelyney/GDNet.
Authors:Dong-Guw Lee, Jeongyun Kim, Younggun Cho, Ayoung Kim
Title: Thermal Chameleon: Task-Adaptive Tone-mapping for Radiometric Thermal-Infrared images
Abstract:
Thermal Infrared (TIR) imaging provides robust perception for navigating in challenging outdoor environments but faces issues with poor texture and low image contrast due to its 14/16-bit format. Conventional methods utilize various tone-mapping methods to enhance contrast and photometric consistency of TIR images, however, the choice of tone-mapping is largely dependent on knowing the task and temperature dependent priors to work well. In this paper, we present Thermal Chameleon Network (TCNet), a task-adaptive tone-mapping approach for RAW 14-bit TIR images. Given the same image, TCNet tone-maps different representations of TIR images tailored for each specific task, eliminating the heuristic image rescaling preprocessing and reliance on the extensive prior knowledge of the scene temperature or task-specific characteristics. TCNet exhibits improved generalization performance across object detection and monocular depth estimation, with minimal computational overhead and modular integration to existing architectures for various tasks. Project Page: https://github.com/donkeymouse/ThermalChameleon
Authors:Yi Liu, Chengxin Li, Shoukun Xu, Jungong Han
Title: Part-Whole Relational Fusion Towards Multi-Modal Scene Understanding
Abstract:
Multi-modal fusion has played a vital role in multi-modal scene understanding. Most existing methods focus on cross-modal fusion involving two modalities, often overlooking more complex multi-modal fusion, which is essential for real-world applications like autonomous driving, where visible, depth, event, LiDAR, etc., are used. Besides, few attempts for multi-modal fusion, \emph{e.g.}, simple concatenation, cross-modal attention, and token selection, cannot well dig into the intrinsic shared and specific details of multiple modalities. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we propose a Part-Whole Relational Fusion (PWRF) framework. For the first time, this framework treats multi-modal fusion as part-whole relational fusion. It routes multiple individual part-level modalities to a fused whole-level modality using the part-whole relational routing ability of Capsule Networks (CapsNets). Through this part-whole routing, our PWRF generates modal-shared and modal-specific semantics from the whole-level modal capsules and the routing coefficients, respectively. On top of that, modal-shared and modal-specific details can be employed to solve the issue of multi-modal scene understanding, including synthetic multi-modal segmentation and visible-depth-thermal salient object detection in this paper. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PWRF framework for multi-modal scene understanding. The source code has been released on https://github.com/liuyi1989/PWRF.
Authors:Andong Lu, Jiacong Zhao, Chenglong Li, Yun Xiao, Bin Luo
Title: Breaking Modality Gap in RGBT Tracking: Coupled Knowledge Distillation
Abstract:
Modality gap between RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) images is a crucial issue but often overlooked in existing RGBT tracking methods. It can be observed that modality gap mainly lies in the image style difference. In this work, we propose a novel Coupled Knowledge Distillation framework called CKD, which pursues common styles of different modalities to break modality gap, for high performance RGBT tracking. In particular, we introduce two student networks and employ the style distillation loss to make their style features consistent as much as possible. Through alleviating the style difference of two student networks, we can break modality gap of different modalities well. However, the distillation of style features might harm to the content representations of two modalities in student networks. To handle this issue, we take original RGB and TIR networks as the teachers, and distill their content knowledge into two student networks respectively by the style-content orthogonal feature decoupling scheme. We couple the above two distillation processes in an online optimization framework to form new feature representations of RGB and thermal modalities without modality gap. In addition, we design a masked modeling strategy and a multi-modal candidate token elimination strategy into CKD to improve tracking robustness and efficiency respectively. Extensive experiments on five standard RGBT tracking datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods while achieving the fastest tracking speed of 96.4 FPS. Code available at https://github.com/Multi-Modality-Tracking/CKD.
Authors:Yifan Gong, Yushu Wu, Zheng Zhan, Pu Zhao, Liangkai Liu, Chao Wu, Xulong Tang, Yanzhi Wang
Title: Lotus: learning-based online thermal and latency variation management for two-stage detectors on edge devices
Abstract:
Two-stage object detectors exhibit high accuracy and precise localization, especially for identifying small objects that are favorable for various edge applications. However, the high computation costs associated with two-stage detection methods cause more severe thermal issues on edge devices, incurring dynamic runtime frequency change and thus large inference latency variations. Furthermore, the dynamic number of proposals in different frames leads to various computations over time, resulting in further latency variations. The significant latency variations of detectors on edge devices can harm user experience and waste hardware resources. To avoid thermal throttling and provide stable inference speed, we propose Lotus, a novel framework that is tailored for two-stage detectors to dynamically scale CPU and GPU frequencies jointly in an online manner based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To demonstrate the effectiveness of Lotus, we implement it on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Mi 11 Lite mobile platforms. The results indicate that Lotus can consistently and significantly reduce latency variation, achieve faster inference, and maintain lower CPU and GPU temperatures under various settings.
Authors:Robin Gerster, Holger Caesar, Matthias Rapp, Alexander Wolpert, Michael Teutsch
Title: OSSA: Unsupervised One-Shot Style Adaptation
Abstract:
Despite their success in various vision tasks, deep neural network architectures often underperform in out-of-distribution scenarios due to the difference between training and target domain style. To address this limitation, we introduce One-Shot Style Adaptation (OSSA), a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for object detection that utilizes a single, unlabeled target image to approximate the target domain style. Specifically, OSSA generates diverse target styles by perturbing the style statistics derived from a single target image and then applies these styles to a labeled source dataset at the feature level using Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN). Extensive experiments show that OSSA establishes a new state-of-the-art among one-shot domain adaptation methods by a significant margin, and in some cases, even outperforms strong baselines that use thousands of unlabeled target images. By applying OSSA in various scenarios, including weather, simulated-to-real (sim2real), and visual-to-thermal adaptations, our study explores the overarching significance of the style gap in these contexts. OSSA's simplicity and efficiency allow easy integration into existing frameworks, providing a potentially viable solution for practical applications with limited data availability. Code is available at https://github.com/RobinGerster7/OSSA
Authors:Ruiqiang Xiao, Xiaohu Chen
Title: IRFusionFormer: Enhancing Pavement Crack Segmentation with RGB-T Fusion and Topological-Based Loss
Abstract:
Crack segmentation is crucial in civil engineering, particularly for assessing pavement integrity and ensuring the durability of infrastructure. While deep learning has advanced RGB-based segmentation, performance degrades under adverse conditions like low illumination or motion blur. Thermal imaging offers complementary information by capturing emitted radiation, improving crack detection in challenging environments. Combining RGB and thermal images (RGB-T) for crack segmentation shows promise in complex real-world conditions, such as adverse weather, yet research in this area remains limited. Current RGB-T segmentation methods often fail to fully exploit the complementary relationships between modalities at various levels of interaction. To address this, we propose IRFusionFormer, a novel model for crack segmentation that effectively integrates RGB and thermal data. Our Efficient RGB-T Cross Fusion Module captures multi-scale relationships and long-range dependencies between modalities without significant computational overhead. Additionally, we introduce the Interaction-Hybrid-Branch-Supervision framework, which enhances interaction between modalities by distributing fused features across branches with joint supervision. To maintain the topological structure of cracks, we introduce a novel topology-based loss function that preserves connectivity during training. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a Dice score of 90.01% and an IoU of 81.83%, significantly improving robustness and accuracy in varying environmental conditions. These advancements address key challenges in pavement crack segmentation, offering a more reliable and efficient solution. For access to the codes, data, and models from this study, visit https://github.com/sheauhuu/IRFusionFormer
Authors:Pinxue Guo, Wanyun Li, Hao Huang, Lingyi Hong, Xinyu Zhou, Zhaoyu Chen, Jinglun Li, Kaixun Jiang, Wei Zhang, Wenqiang Zhang
Title: X-Prompt: Multi-modal Visual Prompt for Video Object Segmentation
Abstract:
Multi-modal Video Object Segmentation (VOS), including RGB-Thermal, RGB-Depth, and RGB-Event, has garnered attention due to its capability to address challenging scenarios where traditional VOS methods struggle, such as extreme illumination, rapid motion, and background distraction. Existing approaches often involve designing specific additional branches and performing full-parameter fine-tuning for fusion in each task. However, this paradigm not only duplicates research efforts and hardware costs but also risks model collapse with the limited multi-modal annotated data. In this paper, we propose a universal framework named X-Prompt for all multi-modal video object segmentation tasks, designated as RGB+X. The X-Prompt framework first pre-trains a video object segmentation foundation model using RGB data, and then utilize the additional modality of the prompt to adapt it to downstream multi-modal tasks with limited data. Within the X-Prompt framework, we introduce the Multi-modal Visual Prompter (MVP), which allows prompting foundation model with the various modalities to segment objects precisely. We further propose the Multi-modal Adaptation Experts (MAEs) to adapt the foundation model with pluggable modality-specific knowledge without compromising the generalization capacity. To evaluate the effectiveness of the X-Prompt framework, we conduct extensive experiments on 3 tasks across 4 benchmarks. The proposed universal X-Prompt framework consistently outperforms the full fine-tuning paradigm and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code: https://github.com/PinxueGuo/X-Prompt.git
Authors:Xie Zhang, Chenshu Wu
Title: TADAR: Thermal Array-based Detection and Ranging for Privacy-Preserving Human Sensing
Abstract:
Human sensing has gained increasing attention in various applications. Among the available technologies, visual images offer high accuracy, while sensing on the RF spectrum preserves privacy, creating a conflict between imaging resolution and privacy preservation. In this paper, we explore thermal array sensors as an emerging modality that strikes an excellent resolution-privacy balance for ubiquitous sensing. To this end, we present TADAR, the first multi-user Thermal Array-based Detection and Ranging system that estimates the inherently missing range information, extending thermal array outputs from 2D thermal pixels to 3D depths and empowering them as a promising modality for ubiquitous privacy-preserving human sensing. We prototype TADAR using a single commodity thermal array sensor and conduct extensive experiments in different indoor environments. Our results show that TADAR achieves a mean F1 score of 88.8% for multi-user detection and a mean accuracy of 32.0 cm for multi-user ranging, which further improves to 20.1 cm for targets located within 3 m. We conduct two case studies on fall detection and occupancy estimation to showcase the potential applications of TADAR. We hope TADAR will inspire the vast community to explore new directions of thermal array sensing, beyond wireless and acoustic sensing. TADAR is open-sourced on GitHub: https://github.com/aiot-lab/TADAR.
Authors:Qian Chen, Shihao Shu, Xiangzhi Bai
Title: Thermal3D-GS: Physics-induced 3D Gaussians for Thermal Infrared Novel-view Synthesis
Abstract:
Novel-view synthesis based on visible light has been extensively studied. In comparison to visible light imaging, thermal infrared imaging offers the advantage of all-weather imaging and strong penetration, providing increased possibilities for reconstruction in nighttime and adverse weather scenarios. However, thermal infrared imaging is influenced by physical characteristics such as atmospheric transmission effects and thermal conduction, hindering the precise reconstruction of intricate details in thermal infrared scenes, manifesting as issues of floaters and indistinct edge features in synthesized images. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a physics-induced 3D Gaussian splatting method named Thermal3D-GS. Thermal3D-GS begins by modeling atmospheric transmission effects and thermal conduction in three-dimensional media using neural networks. Additionally, a temperature consistency constraint is incorporated into the optimization objective to enhance the reconstruction accuracy of thermal infrared images. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness of our method, the first large-scale benchmark dataset for this field named Thermal Infrared Novel-view Synthesis Dataset (TI-NSD) is created. This dataset comprises 20 authentic thermal infrared video scenes, covering indoor, outdoor, and UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) scenarios, totaling 6,664 frames of thermal infrared image data. Based on this dataset, this paper experimentally verifies the effectiveness of Thermal3D-GS. The results indicate that our method outperforms the baseline method with a 3.03 dB improvement in PSNR and significantly addresses the issues of floaters and indistinct edge features present in the baseline method. Our dataset and codebase will be released in \href{https://github.com/mzzcdf/Thermal3DGS}{\textcolor{red}{Thermal3DGS}}.
Authors:Ang He, Xiaobo Li, Ximei Wu, Chengyue Su, Jing Chen, Sheng Xu, Xiaobin Guo
Title: ALSS-YOLO: An Adaptive Lightweight Channel Split and Shuffling Network for TIR Wildlife Detection in UAV Imagery
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with thermal infrared (TIR) cameras play a crucial role in combating nocturnal wildlife poaching. However, TIR images often face challenges such as jitter, and wildlife overlap, necessitating UAVs to possess the capability to identify blurred and overlapping small targets. Current traditional lightweight networks deployed on UAVs struggle to extract features from blurry small targets. To address this issue, we developed ALSS-YOLO, an efficient and lightweight detector optimized for TIR aerial images. Firstly, we propose a novel Adaptive Lightweight Channel Split and Shuffling (ALSS) module. This module employs an adaptive channel split strategy to optimize feature extraction and integrates a channel shuffling mechanism to enhance information exchange between channels. This improves the extraction of blurry features, crucial for handling jitter-induced blur and overlapping targets. Secondly, we developed a Lightweight Coordinate Attention (LCA) module that employs adaptive pooling and grouped convolution to integrate feature information across dimensions. This module ensures lightweight operation while maintaining high detection precision and robustness against jitter and target overlap. Additionally, we developed a single-channel focus module to aggregate the width and height information of each channel into four-dimensional channel fusion, which improves the feature representation efficiency of infrared images. Finally, we modify the localization loss function to emphasize the loss value associated with small objects to improve localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on the BIRDSAI and ISOD TIR UAV wildlife datasets show that ALSS-YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance, Our code is openly available at https://github.com/helloworlder8/computer_vision.
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Sheng Deng, Xinrui Wang, Linbo Wang, Xianyong Fang, Bin Tang
Title: SSFam: Scribble Supervised Salient Object Detection Family
Abstract:
Scribble supervised salient object detection (SSSOD) constructs segmentation ability of attractive objects from surroundings under the supervision of sparse scribble labels. For the better segmentation, depth and thermal infrared modalities serve as the supplement to RGB images in the complex scenes. Existing methods specifically design various feature extraction and multi-modal fusion strategies for RGB, RGB-Depth, RGB-Thermal, and Visual-Depth-Thermal image input respectively, leading to similar model flood. As the recently proposed Segment Anything Model (SAM) possesses extraordinary segmentation and prompt interactive capability, we propose an SSSOD family based on SAM, named SSFam, for the combination input with different modalities. Firstly, different modal-aware modulators are designed to attain modal-specific knowledge which cooperates with modal-agnostic information extracted from the frozen SAM encoder for the better feature ensemble. Secondly, a siamese decoder is tailored to bridge the gap between the training with scribble prompt and the testing with no prompt for the stronger decoding ability. Our model demonstrates the remarkable performance among combinations of different modalities and refreshes the highest level of scribble supervised methods and comes close to the ones of fully supervised methods. https://github.com/liuzywen/SSFam
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Danying Lin, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Title: Adapting Segment Anything Model to Multi-modal Salient Object Detection with Semantic Feature Fusion Guidance
Abstract:
Although most existing multi-modal salient object detection (SOD) methods demonstrate effectiveness through training models from scratch, the limited multi-modal data hinders these methods from reaching optimality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to explore and exploit the powerful feature representation and zero-shot generalization ability of the pre-trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) for multi-modal SOD. Despite serving as a recent vision fundamental model, driving the class-agnostic SAM to comprehend and detect salient objects accurately is non-trivial, especially in challenging scenes. To this end, we develop \underline{SAM} with se\underline{m}antic f\underline{e}ature fu\underline{s}ion guidanc\underline{e} (Sammese), which incorporates multi-modal saliency-specific knowledge into SAM to adapt SAM to multi-modal SOD tasks. However, it is difficult for SAM trained on single-modal data to directly mine the complementary benefits of multi-modal inputs and comprehensively utilize them to achieve accurate saliency prediction. To address these issues, we first design a multi-modal complementary fusion module to extract robust multi-modal semantic features by integrating information from visible and thermal or depth image pairs. Then, we feed the extracted multi-modal semantic features into both the SAM image encoder and mask decoder for fine-tuning and prompting, respectively. Specifically, in the image encoder, a multi-modal adapter is proposed to adapt the single-modal SAM to multi-modal information. In the mask decoder, a semantic-geometric prompt generation strategy is proposed to produce corresponding embeddings with various saliency cues. Extensive experiments on both RGB-D and RGB-T SOD benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Angknpng/Sammese}.
Authors:Youngjoon Yu, Sangyun Chung, Byung-Kwan Lee, Yong Man Ro
Title: SPARK: Multi-Vision Sensor Perception and Reasoning Benchmark for Large-scale Vision-Language Models
Abstract:
Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced with text-aligned vision inputs. They have made remarkable progress in computer vision tasks by aligning text modality with vision inputs. There are also endeavors to incorporate multi-vision sensors beyond RGB, including thermal, depth, and medical X-ray images. However, we observe that current LVLMs view images taken from multi-vision sensors as if they were in the same RGB domain without considering the physical characteristics of multi-vision sensors. They fail to convey the fundamental multi-vision sensor information from the dataset and the corresponding contextual knowledge properly. Consequently, alignment between the information from the actual physical environment and the text is not achieved correctly, making it difficult to answer complex sensor-related questions that consider the physical environment. In this paper, we aim to establish a multi-vision Sensor Perception And Reasoning benchmarK called SPARK that can reduce the fundamental multi-vision sensor information gap between images and multi-vision sensors. We generated 6,248 vision-language test samples to investigate multi-vision sensory perception and multi-vision sensory reasoning on physical sensor knowledge proficiency across different formats, covering different types of sensor-related questions. We utilized these samples to assess ten leading LVLMs. The results showed that most models displayed deficiencies in multi-vision sensory reasoning to varying extents. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/top-yun/SPARK
Authors:Zhemin Zhang, Xun Gong
Title: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Heat Conduction Equation
Abstract:
Foundation models, such as CNNs and ViTs, have powered the development of image representation learning. However, general guidance to model architecture design is still missing. Inspired by the connection between image representation learning and heat conduction, we model images by the heat conduction equation, where the essential idea is to conceptualize image features as temperatures and model their information interaction as the diffusion of thermal energy. Based on this idea, we find that many modern model architectures, such as residual structures, SE block, and feed-forward networks, can be interpreted from the perspective of the heat conduction equation. Therefore, we leverage the heat equation to design new and more interpretable models. As an example, we propose the Heat Conduction Layer and the Refinement Approximation Layer inspired by solving the heat conduction equation using Finite Difference Method and Fourier series, respectively. The main goal of this paper is to integrate the overall architectural design of neural networks into the theoretical framework of heat conduction. Nevertheless, our Heat Conduction Network (HcNet) still shows competitive performance, e.g., HcNet-T achieves 83.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K while only requiring 28M parameters and 4.1G MACs. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ZheminZhang1/HcNet.
Authors:Xiangbo Gao, Asiegbu Miracle Kanu-Asiegbu, Xiaoxiao Du
Title: MambaST: A Plug-and-Play Cross-Spectral Spatial-Temporal Fuser for Efficient Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
This paper proposes MambaST, a plug-and-play cross-spectral spatial-temporal fusion pipeline for efficient pedestrian detection. Several challenges exist for pedestrian detection in autonomous driving applications. First, it is difficult to perform accurate detection using RGB cameras under dark or low-light conditions. Cross-spectral systems must be developed to integrate complementary information from multiple sensor modalities, such as thermal and visible cameras, to improve the robustness of the detections. Second, pedestrian detection models are latency-sensitive. Efficient and easy-to-scale detection models with fewer parameters are highly desirable for real-time applications such as autonomous driving. Third, pedestrian video data provides spatial-temporal correlations of pedestrian movement. It is beneficial to incorporate temporal as well as spatial information to enhance pedestrian detection. This work leverages recent advances in the state space model (Mamba) and proposes a novel Multi-head Hierarchical Patching and Aggregation (MHHPA) structure to extract both fine-grained and coarse-grained information from both RGB and thermal imagery. Experimental results show that the proposed MHHPA is an effective and efficient alternative to a Transformer model for cross-spectral pedestrian detection. Our proposed model also achieves superior performance on small-scale pedestrian detection. The code is available at https://github.com/XiangboGaoBarry/MambaST}{https://github.com/XiangboGaoBarry/MambaST.
Authors:Yabin Zhu, Qianwu Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Zhixiang Huang
Title: Visible-Thermal Multiple Object Tracking: Large-scale Video Dataset and Progressive Fusion Approach
Abstract:
The complementary benefits from visible and thermal infrared data are widely utilized in various computer vision task, such as visual tracking, semantic segmentation and object detection, but rarely explored in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). In this work, we contribute a large-scale Visible-Thermal video benchmark for MOT, called VT-MOT. VT-MOT has the following main advantages. 1) The data is large scale and high diversity. VT-MOT includes 582 video sequence pairs, 401k frame pairs from surveillance, drone, and handheld platforms. 2) The cross-modal alignment is highly accurate. We invite several professionals to perform both spatial and temporal alignment frame by frame. 3) The annotation is dense and high-quality. VT-MOT has 3.99 million annotation boxes annotated and double-checked by professionals, including heavy occlusion and object re-acquisition (object disappear and reappear) challenges. To provide a strong baseline, we design a simple yet effective tracking framework, which effectively fuses temporal information and complementary information of two modalities in a progressive manner, for robust visible-thermal MOT. A comprehensive experiment are conducted on VT-MOT and the results prove the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods. From the evaluation results and analysis, we specify several potential future directions for visible-thermal MOT. The project is released in https://github.com/wqw123wqw/PFTrack.
Authors:Chenhao Wang, Xiaopeng Hong, Zhiheng Ma, Yupeng Wei, Yabin Wang, Xiaopeng Fan
Title: Multi-modal Crowd Counting via Modal Emulation
Abstract:
Multi-modal crowd counting is a crucial task that uses multi-modal cues to estimate the number of people in crowded scenes. To overcome the gap between different modalities, we propose a modal emulation-based two-pass multi-modal crowd-counting framework that enables efficient modal emulation, alignment, and fusion. The framework consists of two key components: a \emph{multi-modal inference} pass and a \emph{cross-modal emulation} pass. The former utilizes a hybrid cross-modal attention module to extract global and local information and achieve efficient multi-modal fusion. The latter uses attention prompting to coordinate different modalities and enhance multi-modal alignment. We also introduce a modality alignment module that uses an efficient modal consistency loss to align the outputs of the two passes and bridge the semantic gap between modalities. Extensive experiments on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth counting datasets demonstrate its superior performance compared to previous methods. Code available at https://github.com/Mr-Monday/Multi-modal-Crowd-Counting-via-Modal-Emulation.
Authors:Zeyu Wang, Jingyu Lin, Yifei Qian, Yi Huang, Shicen Tian, Bosong Chai, Juncan Deng, Qu Yang, Lan Du, Cunjian Chen, Kejie Huang
Title: DiffX: Guide Your Layout to Cross-Modal Generative Modeling
Abstract:
Diffusion models have made significant strides in language-driven and layout-driven image generation. However, most diffusion models are limited to visible RGB image generation. In fact, human perception of the world is enriched by diverse viewpoints, such as chromatic contrast, thermal illumination, and depth information. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion model for general layout-guided cross-modal generation, called DiffX. Notably, our DiffX presents a compact and effective cross-modal generative modeling pipeline, which conducts diffusion and denoising processes in the modality-shared latent space. Moreover, we introduce the Joint-Modality Embedder (JME) to enhance the interaction between layout and text conditions by incorporating a gated attention mechanism. To facilitate the user-instructed training, we construct the cross-modal image datasets with detailed text captions by the Large-Multimodal Model (LMM) and our human-in-the-loop refinement. Through extensive experiments, our DiffX demonstrates robustness in cross-modal ''RGB+X'' image generation on FLIR, MFNet, and COME15K datasets, guided by various layout conditions. Meanwhile, it shows the strong potential for the adaptive generation of ``RGB+X+Y(+Z)'' images or more diverse modalities on FLIR, MFNet, COME15K, and MCXFace datasets. To our knowledge, DiffX is the first model for layout-guided cross-modal image generation. Our code and constructed cross-modal image datasets are available at https://github.com/zeyuwang-zju/DiffX.
Authors:Miao Yan, Ping Zhang, Haofei Zhang, Ruqian Hao, Juanxiu Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Lin Liu
Title: Coordinate-Aware Thermal Infrared Tracking Via Natural Language Modeling
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) tracking is pivotal in computer vision tasks due to its all-weather imaging capability. Traditional tracking methods predominantly rely on hand-crafted features, and while deep learning has introduced correlation filtering techniques, these are often constrained by rudimentary correlation operations. Furthermore, transformer-based approaches tend to overlook temporal and coordinate information, which is critical for TIR tracking that lacks texture and color information. In this paper, to address these issues, we apply natural language modeling to TIR tracking and propose a coordinate-aware thermal infrared tracking model called NLMTrack, which enhances the utilization of coordinate and temporal information. NLMTrack applies an encoder that unifies feature extraction and feature fusion, which simplifies the TIR tracking pipeline. To address the challenge of low detail and low contrast in TIR images, on the one hand, we design a multi-level progressive fusion module that enhances the semantic representation and incorporates multi-scale features. On the other hand, the decoder combines the TIR features and the coordinate sequence features using a causal transformer to generate the target sequence step by step. Moreover, we explore an adaptive loss aimed at elevating tracking accuracy and a simple template update strategy to accommodate the target's appearance variations. Experiments show that NLMTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. The Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ELOESZHANG/NLMTrack}.
Authors:Haoliang Meng, Xiaopeng Hong, Chenhao Wang, Miao Shang, Wangmeng Zuo
Title: Multi-modal Crowd Counting via a Broker Modality
Abstract:
Multi-modal crowd counting involves estimating crowd density from both visual and thermal/depth images. This task is challenging due to the significant gap between these distinct modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by introducing an auxiliary broker modality and on this basis frame the task as a triple-modal learning problem. We devise a fusion-based method to generate this broker modality, leveraging a non-diffusion, lightweight counterpart of modern denoising diffusion-based fusion models. Additionally, we identify and address the ghosting effect caused by direct cross-modal image fusion in multi-modal crowd counting. Through extensive experimental evaluations on popular multi-modal crowd-counting datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which introduces only 4 million additional parameters, yet achieves promising results. The code is available at https://github.com/HenryCilence/Broker-Modality-Crowd-Counting.
Authors:Xinyi Ying, Chao Xiao, Ruojing Li, Xu He, Boyang Li, Xu Cao, Zhaoxu Li, Yingqian Wang, Mingyuan Hu, Qingyu Xu, Zaiping Lin, Miao Li, Shilin Zhou, Wei An, Weidong Sheng, Li Liu
Title: Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines
Abstract:
Small object detection (SOD) has been a longstanding yet challenging task for decades, with numerous datasets and algorithms being developed. However, they mainly focus on either visible or thermal modality, while visible-thermal (RGBT) bimodality is rarely explored. Although some RGBT datasets have been developed recently, the insufficient quantity, limited category, misaligned images and large target size cannot provide an impartial benchmark to evaluate multi-category visible-thermal small object detection (RGBT SOD) algorithms. In this paper, we build the first large-scale benchmark with high diversity for RGBT SOD (namely RGBT-Tiny), including 115 paired sequences, 93K frames and 1.2M manual annotations. RGBT-Tiny contains abundant targets (7 categories) and high-diversity scenes (8 types that cover different illumination and density variations). Note that, over 81% of targets are smaller than 16x16, and we provide paired bounding box annotations with tracking ID to offer an extremely challenging benchmark with wide-range applications, such as RGBT fusion, detection and tracking. In addition, we propose a scale adaptive fitness (SAFit) measure that exhibits high robustness on both small and large targets. The proposed SAFit can provide reasonable performance evaluation and promote detection performance. Based on the proposed RGBT-Tiny dataset and SAFit measure, extensive evaluations have been conducted, including 23 recent state-of-the-art algorithms that cover four different types (i.e., visible generic detection, visible SOD, thermal SOD and RGBT object detection). Project is available at https://github.com/XinyiYing/RGBT-Tiny.
Authors:Alejandro L. Garcia, John B. Bell, Andrew Nonaka, Ishan Srivastava, Daniel Ladiges, Changho Kim
Title: An Introduction to Computational Fluctuating Hydrodynamics
Abstract:
These notes are an introduction to fluctuating hydrodynamics (FHD) and the formulation of numerical schemes for the resulting stochastic partial differential equations (PDEs). Fluctuating hydrodynamics was originally introduced by Landau and Lifshitz as a way to put thermal fluctuations into a continuum framework by including a stochastic forcing to each dissipative transport process (e.g., heat flux). While FHD has been useful in modeling transport and fluid dynamics at the mesoscopic scale, theoretical calculations have been feasible only with simplifying assumptions. As such there is great interest in numerical schemes for Computational Fluctuating Hydrodynamics (CFHD). There are a variety of algorithms (e.g., spectral, finite element, lattice Boltzmann) but in this introduction we focus on finite volume schemes. Accompanying these notes is a demonstration program in Python available on GitHub (https://github.com/AlejGarcia/IntroFHD).
Authors:Nikhil Kumar, Avinash Upadhyay, Shreya Sharma, Manoj Sharma, Pravendra Singh
Title: MWIRSTD: A MWIR Small Target Detection Dataset
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel mid-wave infrared (MWIR) small target detection dataset (MWIRSTD) comprising 14 video sequences containing approximately 1053 images with annotated targets of three distinct classes of small objects. Captured using cooled MWIR imagers, the dataset offers a unique opportunity for researchers to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art methods for small object detection in realistic MWIR scenes. Unlike existing datasets, which primarily consist of uncooled thermal images or synthetic data with targets superimposed onto the background or vice versa, MWIRSTD provides authentic MWIR data with diverse targets and environments. Extensive experiments on various traditional methods and deep learning-based techniques for small target detection are performed on the proposed dataset, providing valuable insights into their efficacy. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/avinres/MWIRSTD.
Authors:Ethan Coffman, Reagan Clark, Nhat-Tan Bui, Trong Thang Pham, Beth Kegley, Jeremy G. Powell, Jiangchao Zhao, Ngan Le
Title: CattleFace-RGBT: RGB-T Cattle Facial Landmark Benchmark
Abstract:
To address this challenge, we introduce CattleFace-RGBT, a RGB-T Cattle Facial Landmark dataset consisting of 2,300 RGB-T image pairs, a total of 4,600 images. Creating a landmark dataset is time-consuming, but AI-assisted annotation can help. However, applying AI to thermal images is challenging due to suboptimal results from direct thermal training and infeasible RGB-thermal alignment due to different camera views. Therefore, we opt to transfer models trained on RGB to thermal images and refine them using our AI-assisted annotation tool following a semi-automatic annotation approach. Accurately localizing facial key points on both RGB and thermal images enables us to not only discern the cattle's respiratory signs but also measure temperatures to assess the animal's thermal state. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset for the cattle facial landmark on RGB-T images. We conduct benchmarking of the CattleFace-RGBT dataset across various backbone architectures, with the objective of establishing baselines for future research, analysis, and comparison. The dataset and models are at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/CattleFace-RGBT-benchmark
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Chenglong Li, Cheng Zhang, Bin Luo
Title: Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD) aims to boost saliency detection performance by integrating visible sources with depth or thermal infrared ones. Existing methods generally design different fusion schemes to handle certain issues or challenges. Although these fusion schemes are effective at addressing specific issues or challenges, they may struggle to handle multiple complex challenges simultaneously. To solve this problem, we propose a novel adaptive fusion bank that makes full use of the complementary benefits from a set of basic fusion schemes to handle different challenges simultaneously for robust MSOD. We focus on handling five major challenges in MSOD, namely center bias, scale variation, image clutter, low illumination, and thermal crossover or depth ambiguity. The fusion bank proposed consists of five representative fusion schemes, which are specifically designed based on the characteristics of each challenge, respectively. The bank is scalable, and more fusion schemes could be incorporated into the bank for more challenges. To adaptively select the appropriate fusion scheme for multi-modal input, we introduce an adaptive ensemble module that forms the adaptive fusion bank, which is embedded into hierarchical layers for sufficient fusion of different source data. Moreover, we design an indirect interactive guidance module to accurately detect salient hollow objects via the skip integration of high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments on three RGBT datasets and seven RGBD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/LAFB.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Danying Lin, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Title: Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark
Abstract:
RGB and Thermal (RGBT) Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to achieve high-quality saliency prediction by exploiting the complementary information of visible and thermal image pairs, which are initially captured in an unaligned manner. However, existing methods are tailored for manually aligned image pairs, which are labor-intensive, and directly applying these methods to original unaligned image pairs could significantly degrade their performance. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address RGBT SOD for initially captured RGB and thermal image pairs without manual alignment. Specifically, we propose a Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network (SACNet) that consists of two novel components: 1) an asymmetric correlation module utilizing semantics-guided attention to model cross-modal correlations specific to unaligned salient regions; 2) an associated feature sampling module to sample relevant thermal features according to the corresponding RGB features for multi-modal feature integration. In addition, we construct a unified benchmark dataset called UVT2000, containing 2000 RGB and thermal image pairs directly captured from various real-world scenes without any alignment, to facilitate research on alignment-free RGBT SOD. Extensive experiments on both aligned and unaligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/SACNet.
Authors:Yuchen Quan, Xiaoya Zhai, Xiao-Ming Fu
Title: OpenTM: An Open-source, Single-GPU, Large-scale Thermal Microstructure Design Framework
Abstract:
Thermal microstructures are artificially engineered materials designed to manipulate and control heat flow in unconventional ways. This paper presents an educational framework, called \emph{OpenTM}, to use a single GPU for designing periodic 3D high-resolution thermal microstructures to match the predefined thermal conductivity matrices with volume fraction constraints. Specifically, we use adaptive volume fraction to make the Optimality Criteria (OC) method run stably to obtain the thermal microstructures without a large memory overhead.Practical examples with a high resolution $128 \times 128 \times 128$ run under 90 seconds per structure on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4070Ti GPU with a peak GPU memory of 355 MB. Our open-source, high-performance implementation is publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/quanyuchen2000/OPENTM}, and it is easy to install using Anaconda. Moreover, we provide a Python interface to make OpenTM well-suited for novices in C/C++.
Authors:Yuedong Tan, Zongwei Wu, Yuqian Fu, Zhuyun Zhou, Guolei Sun, Eduard Zamfi, Chao Ma, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
Title: XTrack: Multimodal Training Boosts RGB-X Video Object Trackers
Abstract:
Multimodal sensing has proven valuable for visual tracking, as different sensor types offer unique strengths in handling one specific challenging scene where object appearance varies. While a generalist model capable of leveraging all modalities would be ideal, development is hindered by data sparsity, typically in practice, only one modality is available at a time. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure and achieve that knowledge gained from multimodal sensing -- such as identifying relevant features and regions -- is effectively shared, even when certain modalities are unavailable at inference. We venture with a simple assumption: similar samples across different modalities have more knowledge to share than otherwise. To implement this, we employ a ``weak" classifier tasked with distinguishing between modalities. More specifically, if the classifier ``fails" to accurately identify the modality of the given sample, this signals an opportunity for cross-modal knowledge sharing. Intuitively, knowledge transfer is facilitated whenever a sample from one modality is sufficiently close and aligned with another. Technically, we achieve this by routing samples from one modality to the expert of the others, within a mixture-of-experts framework designed for multimodal video object tracking. During the inference, the expert of the respective modality is chosen, which we show to benefit from the multimodal knowledge available during training, thanks to the proposed method. Through the exhaustive experiments that use only paired RGB-E, RGB-D, and RGB-T during training, we showcase the benefit of the proposed method for RGB-X tracker during inference, with an average +3\% precision improvement over the current SOTA. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/supertyd/XTrack/tree/main.
Authors:Zhaozhi Wang, Yue Liu, Yunjie Tian, Yunfan Liu, Yaowei Wang, Qixiang Ye
Title: Building Vision Models upon Heat Conduction
Abstract:
Visual representation models leveraging attention mechanisms are challenged by significant computational overhead, particularly when pursuing large receptive fields. In this study, we aim to mitigate this challenge by introducing the Heat Conduction Operator (HCO) built upon the physical heat conduction principle. HCO conceptualizes image patches as heat sources and models their correlations through adaptive thermal energy diffusion, enabling robust visual representations. HCO enjoys a computational complexity of O(N^1.5), as it can be implemented using discrete cosine transformation (DCT) operations. HCO is plug-and-play, combining with deep learning backbones produces visual representation models (termed vHeat) with global receptive fields. Experiments across vision tasks demonstrate that, beyond the stronger performance, vHeat achieves up to a 3x throughput, 80% less GPU memory allocation, and 35% fewer computational FLOPs compared to the Swin-Transformer. Code is available at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/vHeat.
Authors:Xue Zhang, Si-Yuan Cao, Fang Wang, Runmin Zhang, Zhe Wu, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaokai Bai, Hui-Liang Shen
Title: Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multispectral Object Detection
Abstract:
Most recent multispectral object detectors employ a two-branch structure to extract features from RGB and thermal images. While the two-branch structure achieves better performance than a single-branch structure, it overlooks inference efficiency. This conflict is increasingly aggressive, as recent works solely pursue higher performance rather than both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we address this issue by improving the performance of efficient single-branch structures. We revisit the reasons causing the performance gap between these structures. For the first time, we reveal the information interference problem in the naive early-fusion strategy adopted by previous single-branch structures. Besides, we find that the domain gap between multispectral images, and weak feature representation of the single-branch structure are also key obstacles for performance. Focusing on these three problems, we propose corresponding solutions, including a novel shape-priority early-fusion strategy, a weakly supervised learning method, and a core knowledge distillation technique. Experiments demonstrate that single-branch networks equipped with these three contributions achieve significant performance enhancements while retaining high efficiency. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XueZ-phd/Efficient-RGB-T-Early-Fusion-Detection}.
Authors:Hyeonjae Gil, Myung-Hwan Jeon, Ayoung Kim
Title: Fieldscale: Locality-Aware Field-based Adaptive Rescaling for Thermal Infrared Image
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) cameras are emerging as promising sensors in safety-related fields due to their robustness against external illumination. However, RAW TIR image has 14 bits of pixel depth and needs to be rescaled into 8 bits for general applications. Previous works utilize a global 1D look-up table to compute pixel-wise gain solely based on its intensity, which degrades image quality by failing to consider the local nature of the heat. We propose Fieldscale, a rescaling based on locality-aware 2D fields where both the intensity value and spatial context of each pixel within an image are embedded. It can adaptively determine the pixel gain for each region and produce spatially consistent 8-bit rescaled images with minimal information loss and high visibility. Consistent performance improvement on image quality assessment and two other downstream tasks support the effectiveness and usability of Fieldscale. All the codes are publicly opened to facilitate research advancements in this field. https://github.com/hyeonjaegil/fieldscale
Authors:Chunhui Zhang, Li Liu, Hao Wen, Xi Zhou, Yanfeng Wang
Title: Awesome Multi-modal Object Tracking
Abstract:
Multi-modal object tracking (MMOT) is an emerging field that combines data from various modalities, \eg vision (RGB), depth, thermal infrared, event, language and audio, to estimate the state of an arbitrary object in a video sequence. It is of great significance for many applications such as autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance. In recent years, MMOT has received more and more attention. However, existing MMOT algorithms mainly focus on two modalities (\eg RGB+depth, RGB+thermal infrared, and RGB+language). To leverage more modalities, some recent efforts have been made to learn a unified visual object tracking model for any modality. Additionally, some large-scale multi-modal tracking benchmarks have been established by simultaneously providing more than two modalities, such as vision-language-audio (\eg WebUAV-3M) and vision-depth-language (\eg UniMod1K). To track the latest progress in MMOT, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in this report. Specifically, we first divide existing MMOT tasks into five main categories, \ie RGBL tracking, RGBE tracking, RGBD tracking, RGBT tracking, and miscellaneous (RGB+X), where X can be any modality, such as language, depth, and event. Then, we analyze and summarize each MMOT task, focusing on widely used datasets and mainstream tracking algorithms based on their technical paradigms (\eg self-supervised learning, prompt learning, knowledge distillation, generative models, and state space models). Finally, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for MMOT at https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking.
Authors:Carlos del-Castillo-Negrete, Rylan Spence, Troy Butler, Clint Dawson
Title: Sequential Maximal Updated Density Parameter Estimation for Dynamical Systems with Parameter Drift
Abstract:
We present a novel method for generating sequential parameter estimates and quantifying epistemic uncertainty in dynamical systems within a data-consistent (DC) framework. The DC framework differs from traditional Bayesian approaches due to the incorporation of the push-forward of an initial density, which performs selective regularization in parameter directions not informed by the data in the resulting updated density. This extends a previous study that included the linear Gaussian theory within the DC framework and introduced the maximal updated density (MUD) estimate as an alternative to both least squares and maximum a posterior (MAP) estimates. In this work, we introduce algorithms for operational settings of MUD estimation in real or near-real time where spatio-temporal datasets arrive in packets to provide updated estimates of parameters and identify potential parameter drift. Computational diagnostics within the DC framework prove critical for evaluating (1) the quality of the DC update and MUD estimate and (2) the detection of parameter value drift. The algorithms are applied to estimate (1) wind drag parameters in a high-fidelity storm surge model, (2) thermal diffusivity field for a heat conductivity problem, and (3) changing infection and incubation rates of an epidemiological model.
Authors:Yunfeng Li, Bo Wang, Ye Li
Title: Transformer-based RGB-T Tracking with Channel and Spatial Feature Fusion
Abstract:
The main problem in RGB-T tracking is the correct and optimal merging of the cross-modal features of visible and thermal images. Some previous methods either do not fully exploit the potential of RGB and TIR information for channel and spatial feature fusion or lack a direct interaction between the template and the search area, which limits the model's ability to fully utilize the original semantic information of both modalities. To address these limitations, we investigate how to achieve a direct fusion of cross-modal channels and spatial features in RGB-T tracking and propose CSTNet. It uses the Vision Transformer (ViT) as the backbone and adds a Joint Spatial and Channel Fusion Module (JSCFM) and Spatial Fusion Module (SFM) integrated between the transformer blocks to facilitate cross-modal feature interaction. The JSCFM module achieves joint modeling of channel and multi-level spatial features. The SFM module includes a cross-attention-like architecture for cross modeling and joint learning of RGB and TIR features. Comprehensive experiments show that CSTNet achieves state-of-the-art performance. To enhance practicality, we retrain the model without JSCFM and SFM modules and use CSNet as the pretraining weight, and propose CSTNet-small, which achieves 50% speedup with an average decrease of 1-2% in SR and PR performance. CSTNet and CSTNet-small achieve real-time speeds of 21 fps and 33 fps on the Nvidia Jetson Xavier, meeting actual deployment requirements. Code is available at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/CSTNet.
Authors:Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, Zhenhua Feng, Xuefeng Zhu, Chunyang Cheng, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler
Title: Revisiting RGBT Tracking Benchmarks from the Perspective of Modality Validity: A New Benchmark, Problem, and Solution
Abstract:
RGBT tracking draws increasing attention because its robustness in multi-modal warranting (MMW) scenarios, such as nighttime and adverse weather conditions, where relying on a single sensing modality fails to ensure stable tracking results. However, existing benchmarks predominantly contain videos collected in common scenarios where both RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) information are of sufficient quality. This weakens the representativeness of existing benchmarks in severe imaging conditions, leading to tracking failures in MMW scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a new benchmark considering the modality validity, MV-RGBT, captured specifically from MMW scenarios where either RGB (extreme illumination) or TIR (thermal truncation) modality is invalid. Hence, it is further divided into two subsets according to the valid modality, offering a new compositional perspective for evaluation and providing valuable insights for future designs. Moreover, MV-RGBT is the most diverse benchmark of its kind, featuring 36 different object categories captured across 19 distinct scenes. Furthermore, considering severe imaging conditions in MMW scenarios, a new problem is posed in RGBT tracking, named `when to fuse', to stimulate the development of fusion strategies for such scenarios. To facilitate its discussion, we propose a new solution with a mixture of experts, named MoETrack, where each expert generates independent tracking results along with a confidence score. Extensive results demonstrate the significant potential of MV-RGBT in advancing RGBT tracking and elicit the conclusion that fusion is not always beneficial, especially in MMW scenarios. Besides, MoETrack achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks, including MV-RGBT, GTOT, and LasHeR. Github: https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/MVRGBT.
Authors:Cyprien Arnold, Philippe Jouvet, Lama Seoud
Title: SwinFuSR: an image fusion-inspired model for RGB-guided thermal image super-resolution
Abstract:
Thermal imaging plays a crucial role in various applications, but the inherent low resolution of commonly available infrared (IR) cameras limits its effectiveness. Conventional super-resolution (SR) methods often struggle with thermal images due to their lack of high-frequency details. Guided SR leverages information from a high-resolution image, typically in the visible spectrum, to enhance the reconstruction of a high-res IR image from the low-res input. Inspired by SwinFusion, we propose SwinFuSR, a guided SR architecture based on Swin transformers. In real world scenarios, however, the guiding modality (e.g. RBG image) may be missing, so we propose a training method that improves the robustness of the model in this case. Our method has few parameters and outperforms state of the art models in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural SIMilarity (SSIM). In Track 2 of the PBVS 2024 Thermal Image Super-Resolution Challenge, it achieves 3rd place in the PSNR metric. Our code and pretained weights are available at https://github.com/VisionICLab/SwinFuSR.
Authors:Avinash Upadhyay, Bhipanshu Dhupar, Manoj Sharma, Ankit Shukla, Ajith Abraham
Title: LWIRPOSE: A novel LWIR Thermal Image Dataset and Benchmark
Abstract:
Human pose estimation faces hurdles in real-world applications due to factors like lighting changes, occlusions, and cluttered environments. We introduce a unique RGB-Thermal Nearly Paired and Annotated 2D Pose Dataset, comprising over 2,400 high-quality LWIR (thermal) images. Each image is meticulously annotated with 2D human poses, offering a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners. This dataset, captured from seven actors performing diverse everyday activities like sitting, eating, and walking, facilitates pose estimation on occlusion and other challenging scenarios. We benchmark state-of-the-art pose estimation methods on the dataset to showcase its potential, establishing a strong baseline for future research. Our results demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness in promoting advancements in pose estimation for various applications, including surveillance, healthcare, and sports analytics. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/avinres/LWIRPOSE
Authors:Önder Tuzcuoğlu, Aybora Köksal, Buğra Sofu, Sinan Kalkan, A. Aydın Alatan
Title: XoFTR: Cross-modal Feature Matching Transformer
Abstract:
We introduce, XoFTR, a cross-modal cross-view method for local feature matching between thermal infrared (TIR) and visible images. Unlike visible images, TIR images are less susceptible to adverse lighting and weather conditions but present difficulties in matching due to significant texture and intensity differences. Current hand-crafted and learning-based methods for visible-TIR matching fall short in handling viewpoint, scale, and texture diversities. To address this, XoFTR incorporates masked image modeling pre-training and fine-tuning with pseudo-thermal image augmentation to handle the modality differences. Additionally, we introduce a refined matching pipeline that adjusts for scale discrepancies and enhances match reliability through sub-pixel level refinement. To validate our approach, we collect a comprehensive visible-thermal dataset, and show that our method outperforms existing methods on many benchmarks.
Authors:Zifu Wan, Pingping Zhang, Yuhao Wang, Silong Yong, Simon Stepputtis, Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie
Title: Sigma: Siamese Mamba Network for Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
Multi-modal semantic segmentation significantly enhances AI agents' perception and scene understanding, especially under adverse conditions like low-light or overexposed environments. Leveraging additional modalities (X-modality) like thermal and depth alongside traditional RGB provides complementary information, enabling more robust and reliable prediction. In this work, we introduce Sigma, a Siamese Mamba network for multi-modal semantic segmentation utilizing the advanced Mamba. Unlike conventional methods that rely on CNNs, with their limited local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers (ViTs), which offer global receptive fields at the cost of quadratic complexity, our model achieves global receptive fields with linear complexity. By employing a Siamese encoder and innovating a Mamba-based fusion mechanism, we effectively select essential information from different modalities. A decoder is then developed to enhance the channel-wise modeling ability of the model. Our proposed method is rigorously evaluated on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth semantic segmentation tasks, demonstrating its superiority and marking the first successful application of State Space Models (SSMs) in multi-modal perception tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zifuwan/Sigma.
Authors:Colin Keil, Aniket Gupta, Pushyami Kaveti, Hanumant Singh
Title: Towards Long Term SLAM on Thermal Imagery
Abstract:
Visual SLAM with thermal imagery, and other low contrast visually degraded environments such as underwater, or in areas dominated by snow and ice, remain a difficult problem for many state of the art (SOTA) algorithms. In addition to challenging front-end data association, thermal imagery presents an additional difficulty for long term relocalization and map reuse. The relative temperatures of objects in thermal imagery change dramatically from day to night. Feature descriptors typically used for relocalization in SLAM are unable to maintain consistency over these diurnal changes. We show that learned feature descriptors can be used within existing Bag of Word based localization schemes to dramatically improve place recognition across large temporal gaps in thermal imagery. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our trained vocabulary, we have developed a baseline SLAM system, integrating learned features and matching into a classical SLAM algorithm. Our system demonstrates good local tracking on challenging thermal imagery, and relocalization that overcomes dramatic day to night thermal appearance changes. Our code and datasets are available here: https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/IRSLAM_Baseline
Authors:Jue Wang, Yuxiang Lin, Qi Zhao, Dong Luo, Shuaibao Chen, Wei Chen, Xiaojiang Peng
Title: Invisible Gas Detection: An RGB-Thermal Cross Attention Network and A New Benchmark
Abstract:
The widespread use of various chemical gases in industrial processes necessitates effective measures to prevent their leakage during transportation and storage, given their high toxicity. Thermal infrared-based computer vision detection techniques provide a straightforward approach to identify gas leakage areas. However, the development of high-quality algorithms has been challenging due to the low texture in thermal images and the lack of open-source datasets. In this paper, we present the RGB-Thermal Cross Attention Network (RT-CAN), which employs an RGB-assisted two-stream network architecture to integrate texture information from RGB images and gas area information from thermal images. Additionally, to facilitate the research of invisible gas detection, we introduce Gas-DB, an extensive open-source gas detection database including about 1.3K well-annotated RGB-thermal images with eight variant collection scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully leverages the advantages of both modalities, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among RGB-thermal methods, surpassing single-stream SOTA models in terms of accuracy, Intersection of Union (IoU), and F2 metrics by 4.86%, 5.65%, and 4.88%, respectively. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/logic112358/RT-CAN.
Authors:Xiaojun Hou, Jiazheng Xing, Yijie Qian, Yaowei Guo, Shuo Xin, Junhao Chen, Kai Tang, Mengmeng Wang, Zhengkai Jiang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu
Title: SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking
Abstract:
Multimodal Visual Object Tracking (VOT) has recently gained significant attention due to its robustness. Early research focused on fully fine-tuning RGB-based trackers, which was inefficient and lacked generalized representation due to the scarcity of multimodal data. Therefore, recent studies have utilized prompt tuning to transfer pre-trained RGB-based trackers to multimodal data. However, the modality gap limits pre-trained knowledge recall, and the dominance of the RGB modality persists, preventing the full utilization of information from other modalities. To address these issues, we propose a novel symmetric multimodal tracking framework called SDSTrack. We introduce lightweight adaptation for efficient fine-tuning, which directly transfers the feature extraction ability from RGB to other domains with a small number of trainable parameters and integrates multimodal features in a balanced, symmetric manner. Furthermore, we design a complementary masked patch distillation strategy to enhance the robustness of trackers in complex environments, such as extreme weather, poor imaging, and sensor failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDSTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multimodal tracking scenarios, including RGB+Depth, RGB+Thermal, and RGB+Event tracking, and exhibits impressive results in extreme conditions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hoqolo/SDSTrack.
Authors:Connor Lee, Saraswati Soedarmadji, Matthew Anderson, Anthony J. Clark, Soon-Jo Chung
Title: Semantics from Space: Satellite-Guided Thermal Semantic Segmentation Annotation for Aerial Field Robots
Abstract:
We present a new method to automatically generate semantic segmentation annotations for thermal imagery captured from an aerial vehicle by utilizing satellite-derived data products alongside onboard global positioning and attitude estimates. This new capability overcomes the challenge of developing thermal semantic perception algorithms for field robots due to the lack of annotated thermal field datasets and the time and costs of manual annotation, enabling precise and rapid annotation of thermal data from field collection efforts at a massively-parallelizable scale. By incorporating a thermal-conditioned refinement step with visual foundation models, our approach can produce highly-precise semantic segmentation labels using low-resolution satellite land cover data for little-to-no cost. It achieves 98.5% of the performance from using costly high-resolution options and demonstrates between 70-160% improvement over popular zero-shot semantic segmentation methods based on large vision-language models currently used for generating annotations for RGB imagery. Code will be available at: https://github.com/connorlee77/aerial-auto-segment.
Authors:Dinh Phat Do, Taehoon Kim, Jaemin Na, Jiwon Kim, Keonho Lee, Kyunghwan Cho, Wonjun Hwang
Title: D3T: Distinctive Dual-Domain Teacher Zigzagging Across RGB-Thermal Gap for Domain-Adaptive Object Detection
Abstract:
Domain adaptation for object detection typically entails transferring knowledge from one visible domain to another visible domain. However, there are limited studies on adapting from the visible to the thermal domain, because the domain gap between the visible and thermal domains is much larger than expected, and traditional domain adaptation can not successfully facilitate learning in this situation. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Distinctive Dual-Domain Teacher (D3T) framework that employs distinct training paradigms for each domain. Specifically, we segregate the source and target training sets for building dual-teachers and successively deploy exponential moving average to the student model to individual teachers of each domain. The framework further incorporates a zigzag learning method between dual teachers, facilitating a gradual transition from the visible to thermal domains during training. We validate the superiority of our method through newly designed experimental protocols with well-known thermal datasets, i.e., FLIR and KAIST. Source code is available at https://github.com/EdwardDo69/D3T .
Authors:Connor Lee, Matthew Anderson, Nikhil Raganathan, Xingxing Zuo, Kevin Do, Georgia Gkioxari, Soon-Jo Chung
Title: Caltech Aerial RGB-Thermal Dataset in the Wild
Abstract:
We present the first publicly-available RGB-thermal dataset designed for aerial robotics operating in natural environments. Our dataset captures a variety of terrain across the United States, including rivers, lakes, coastlines, deserts, and forests, and consists of synchronized RGB, thermal, global positioning, and inertial data. We provide semantic segmentation annotations for 10 classes commonly encountered in natural settings in order to drive the development of perception algorithms robust to adverse weather and nighttime conditions. Using this dataset, we propose new and challenging benchmarks for thermal and RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation, RGB-T image translation, and motion tracking. We present extensive results using state-of-the-art methods and highlight the challenges posed by temporal and geographical domain shifts in our data. The dataset and accompanying code is available at https://github.com/aerorobotics/caltech-aerial-rgbt-dataset.
Authors:Shoujin Huang, Guanxiong Luo, Xi Wang, Ziran Chen, Yuwan Wang, Huaishui Yang, Pheng-Ann Heng, Lingyan Zhang, Mengye Lyu
Title: Noise Level Adaptive Diffusion Model for Robust Reconstruction of Accelerated MRI
Abstract:
In general, diffusion model-based MRI reconstruction methods incrementally remove artificially added noise while imposing data consistency to reconstruct the underlying images. However, real-world MRI acquisitions already contain inherent noise due to thermal fluctuations. This phenomenon is particularly notable when using ultra-fast, high-resolution imaging sequences for advanced research, or using low-field systems favored by low- and middle-income countries. These common scenarios can lead to sub-optimal performance or complete failure of existing diffusion model-based reconstruction techniques. Specifically, as the artificially added noise is gradually removed, the inherent MRI noise becomes increasingly pronounced, making the actual noise level inconsistent with the predefined denoising schedule and consequently inaccurate image reconstruction. To tackle this problem, we propose a posterior sampling strategy with a novel NoIse Level Adaptive Data Consistency (Nila-DC) operation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public datasets and an in-house clinical dataset with field strength ranging from 0.3T to 3T, showing that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art MRI reconstruction methods, and is highly robust against various noise levels. The code for Nila is available at https://github.com/Solor-pikachu/Nila.
Authors:Zhiyu An, Xianzhong Ding, Wan Du
Title: Go Beyond Black-box Policies: Rethinking the Design of Learning Agent for Interpretable and Verifiable HVAC Control
Abstract:
Recent research has shown the potential of Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) to enhance energy efficiency of Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. However, existing methods rely on black-box thermal dynamics models and stochastic optimizers, lacking reliability guarantees and posing risks to occupant health. In this work, we overcome the reliability bottleneck by redesigning HVAC controllers using decision trees extracted from existing thermal dynamics models and historical data. Our decision tree-based policies are deterministic, verifiable, interpretable, and more energy-efficient than current MBRL methods. First, we introduce a novel verification criterion for RL agents in HVAC control based on domain knowledge. Second, we develop a policy extraction procedure that produces a verifiable decision tree policy. We found that the high dimensionality of the thermal dynamics model input hinders the efficiency of policy extraction. To tackle the dimensionality challenge, we leverage importance sampling conditioned on historical data distributions, significantly improving policy extraction efficiency. Lastly, we present an offline verification algorithm that guarantees the reliability of a control policy. Extensive experiments show that our method saves 68.4% more energy and increases human comfort gain by 14.8% compared to the state-of-the-art method, in addition to an 1127x reduction in computation overhead. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ryeii/Veri_HVAC
Authors:Shenghai Yuan, Yizhuo Yang, Thien Hoang Nguyen, Thien-Minh Nguyen, Jianfei Yang, Fen Liu, Jianping Li, Han Wang, Lihua Xie
Title: MMAUD: A Comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset for Modern Miniature Drone Threats
Abstract:
In response to the evolving challenges posed by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which possess the potential to transport harmful payloads or independently cause damage, we introduce MMAUD: a comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset. MMAUD addresses a critical gap in contemporary threat detection methodologies by focusing on drone detection, UAV-type classification, and trajectory estimation. MMAUD stands out by combining diverse sensory inputs, including stereo vision, various Lidars, Radars, and audio arrays. It offers a unique overhead aerial detection vital for addressing real-world scenarios with higher fidelity than datasets captured on specific vantage points using thermal and RGB. Additionally, MMAUD provides accurate Leica-generated ground truth data, enhancing credibility and enabling confident refinement of algorithms and models, which has never been seen in other datasets. Most existing works do not disclose their datasets, making MMAUD an invaluable resource for developing accurate and efficient solutions. Our proposed modalities are cost-effective and highly adaptable, allowing users to experiment and implement new UAV threat detection tools. Our dataset closely simulates real-world scenarios by incorporating ambient heavy machinery sounds. This approach enhances the dataset's applicability, capturing the exact challenges faced during proximate vehicular operations. It is expected that MMAUD can play a pivotal role in advancing UAV threat detection, classification, trajectory estimation capabilities, and beyond. Our dataset, codes, and designs will be available in https://github.com/ntu-aris/MMAUD.
Authors:Han Li, Yukai Ma, Yuehao Huang, Yaqing Gu, Weihua Xu, Yong Liu, Xingxing Zuo
Title: RIDERS: Radar-Infrared Depth Estimation for Robust Sensing
Abstract:
Dense depth recovery is crucial in autonomous driving, serving as a foundational element for obstacle avoidance, 3D object detection, and local path planning. Adverse weather conditions, including haze, dust, rain, snow, and darkness, introduce significant challenges to accurate dense depth estimation, thereby posing substantial safety risks in autonomous driving. These challenges are particularly pronounced for traditional depth estimation methods that rely on short electromagnetic wave sensors, such as visible spectrum cameras and near-infrared LiDAR, due to their susceptibility to diffraction noise and occlusion in such environments. To fundamentally overcome this issue, we present a novel approach for robust metric depth estimation by fusing a millimeter-wave Radar and a monocular infrared thermal camera, which are capable of penetrating atmospheric particles and unaffected by lighting conditions. Our proposed Radar-Infrared fusion method achieves highly accurate and finely detailed dense depth estimation through three stages, including monocular depth prediction with global scale alignment, quasi-dense Radar augmentation by learning Radar-pixels correspondences, and local scale refinement of dense depth using a scale map learner. Our method achieves exceptional visual quality and accurate metric estimation by addressing the challenges of ambiguity and misalignment that arise from directly fusing multi-modal long-wave features. We evaluate the performance of our approach on the NTU4DRadLM dataset and our self-collected challenging ZJU-Multispectrum dataset. Especially noteworthy is the unprecedented robustness demonstrated by our proposed method in smoky scenarios. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/MMOCKING/RIDERS}.
Authors:Thore Wietzke, Jan Gall, Knut Graichen
Title: Occupancy Prediction for Building Energy Systems with Latent Force Models
Abstract:
This paper presents a new approach to predict the occupancy for building energy systems (BES). A Gaussian Process (GP) is used to model the occupancy and is represented as a state space model that is equivalent to the full GP if Kalman filtering and smoothing is used. The combination of GPs and mechanistic models is called Latent Force Model (LFM). An LFM-based model predictive control (MPC) concept for BES is presented that benefits from the extrapolation capability of mechanistic models and the learning ability of GPs to predict the occupancy within the building. Simulations with EnergyPlus and a comparison with real-world data from the Bosch Research Campus in Renningen show that a reduced energy demand and thermal discomfort can be obtained with the LFM-based MPC scheme by accounting for the predicted stochastic occupancy.
Authors:Ying Lv, Zhi Liu, Gongyang Li
Title: Context-Aware Interaction Network for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB-T semantic segmentation is a key technique for autonomous driving scenes understanding. For the existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods, however, the effective exploration of the complementary relationship between different modalities is not implemented in the information interaction between multiple levels. To address such an issue, the Context-Aware Interaction Network (CAINet) is proposed for RGB-T semantic segmentation, which constructs interaction space to exploit auxiliary tasks and global context for explicitly guided learning. Specifically, we propose a Context-Aware Complementary Reasoning (CACR) module aimed at establishing the complementary relationship between multimodal features with the long-term context in both spatial and channel dimensions. Further, considering the importance of global contextual and detailed information, we propose the Global Context Modeling (GCM) module and Detail Aggregation (DA) module, and we introduce specific auxiliary supervision to explicitly guide the context interaction and refine the segmentation map. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets of MFNet and PST900 demonstrate that the proposed CAINet achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YingLv1106/CAINet.
Authors:Zhaisheng Ding, Haiyan Li, Ruichao Hou, Yanyu Liu, Shidong Xie
Title: X Modality Assisting RGBT Object Tracking
Abstract:
Developing robust multi-modal feature representations is crucial for enhancing object tracking performance. In pursuit of this objective, a novel X Modality Assisting Network (X-Net) is introduced, which explores the impact of the fusion paradigm by decoupling visual object tracking into three distinct levels, thereby facilitating subsequent processing. Initially, to overcome the challenges associated with feature learning due to significant discrepancies between RGB and thermal modalities, a plug-and-play pixel-level generation module (PGM) based on knowledge distillation learning is proposed. This module effectively generates the X modality, bridging the gap between the two patterns while minimizing noise interference. Subsequently, to optimize sample feature representation and promote cross-modal interactions, a feature-level interaction module (FIM) is introduced, integrating a mixed feature interaction transformer and a spatial dimensional feature translation strategy. Finally, to address random drifting caused by missing instance features, a flexible online optimization strategy called the decision-level refinement module (DRM) is proposed, which incorporates optical flow and refinement mechanisms. The efficacy of X-Net is validated through experiments on three benchmarks, demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art trackers. Notably, X-Net achieves performance gains of 0.47%/1.2% in the average of precise rate and success rate, respectively. Additionally, the research content, data, and code are pledged to be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/DZSYUNNAN/XNet.
Authors:Andong Lu, Jiacong Zhao, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Title: Modality-missing RGBT Tracking: Invertible Prompt Learning and High-quality Benchmarks
Abstract:
Current RGBT tracking research relies on the complete multi-modal input, but modal information might miss due to some factors such as thermal sensor self-calibration and data transmission error, called modality-missing challenge in this work. To address this challenge, we propose a novel invertible prompt learning approach, which integrates the content-preserving prompts into a well-trained tracking model to adapt to various modality-missing scenarios, for robust RGBT tracking. Given one modality-missing scenario, we propose to utilize the available modality to generate the prompt of the missing modality to adapt to RGBT tracking model. However, the cross-modality gap between available and missing modalities usually causes semantic distortion and information loss in prompt generation. To handle this issue, we design the invertible prompter by incorporating the full reconstruction of the input available modality from the generated prompt. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform, we construct several high-quality benchmark datasets, in which various modality-missing scenarios are considered to simulate real-world challenges. Extensive experiments on three modality-missing benchmark datasets show that our method achieves significant performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods. We have released the code and simulation datasets at: \href{https://github.com/Alexadlu/Modality-missing-RGBT-Tracking.git}{https://github.com/Alexadlu/Modality-missing-RGBT-Tracking.git}.
Authors:Andrew Jong, Mukai Yu, Devansh Dhrafani, Siva Kailas, Brady Moon, Katia Sycara, Sebastian Scherer
Title: WIT-UAS: A Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal Dataset to Detect Crew Assets From Aerial Views
Abstract:
We present the Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal (WIT-UAS) dataset for long-wave infrared sensing of crew and vehicle assets amidst prescribed wildland fire environments. While such a dataset is crucial for safety monitoring in wildland fire applications, to the authors' awareness, no such dataset focusing on assets near fire is publicly available. Presumably, this is due to the barrier to entry of collaborating with fire management personnel. We present two related data subsets: WIT-UAS-ROS consists of full ROS bag files containing sensor and robot data of UAS flight over the fire, and WIT-UAS-Image contains hand-labeled long-wave infrared (LWIR) images extracted from WIT-UAS-ROS. Our dataset is the first to focus on asset detection in a wildland fire environment. We show that thermal detection models trained without fire data frequently detect false positives by classifying fire as people. By adding our dataset to training, we show that the false positive rate is reduced significantly. Yet asset detection in wildland fire environments is still significantly more challenging than detection in urban environments, due to dense obscuring trees, greater heat variation, and overbearing thermal signal of the fire. We publicize this dataset to encourage the community to study more advanced models to tackle this challenging environment. The dataset, code and pretrained models are available at \url{https://github.com/castacks/WIT-UAS-Dataset}.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Zhengyi Liu, Bin Luo
Title: Unified-modal Salient Object Detection via Adaptive Prompt Learning
Abstract:
Existing single-modal and multi-modal salient object detection (SOD) methods focus on designing specific architectures tailored for their respective tasks. However, developing completely different models for different tasks leads to labor and time consumption, as well as high computational and practical deployment costs. In this paper, we attempt to address both single-modal and multi-modal SOD in a unified framework called UniSOD, which fully exploits the overlapping prior knowledge between different tasks. Nevertheless, assigning appropriate strategies to modality variable inputs is challenging. To this end, UniSOD learns modality-aware prompts with task-specific hints through adaptive prompt learning, which are plugged into the proposed pre-trained baseline SOD model to handle corresponding tasks, while only requiring few learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. Each modality-aware prompt is generated from a switchable prompt generation block, which adaptively performs structural switching based on single-modal and multi-modal inputs without human intervention. Through end-to-end joint training, UniSOD achieves overall performance improvement on 14 benchmark datasets for RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD, which demonstrates that our method effectively and efficiently unifies single-modal and multi-modal SOD tasks.The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/UniSOD.
Authors:Zongwei Wu, Jilai Zheng, Xiangxuan Ren, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Chao Ma, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
Title: Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking
Abstract:
In the realm of video object tracking, auxiliary modalities such as depth, thermal, or event data have emerged as valuable assets to complement the RGB trackers. In practice, most existing RGB trackers learn a single set of parameters to use them across datasets and applications. However, a similar single-model unification for multi-modality tracking presents several challenges. These challenges stem from the inherent heterogeneity of inputs -- each with modality-specific representations, the scarcity of multi-modal datasets, and the absence of all the modalities at all times. In this work, we introduce Un-Track, a Unified Tracker of a single set of parameters for any modality. To handle any modality, our method learns their common latent space through low-rank factorization and reconstruction techniques. More importantly, we use only the RGB-X pairs to learn the common latent space. This unique shared representation seamlessly binds all modalities together, enabling effective unification and accommodating any missing modality, all within a single transformer-based architecture. Our Un-Track achieves +8.1 absolute F-score gain, on the DepthTrack dataset, by introducing only +2.14 (over 21.50) GFLOPs with +6.6M (over 93M) parameters, through a simple yet efficient prompting strategy. Extensive comparisons on five benchmark datasets with different modalities show that Un-Track surpasses both SOTA unified trackers and modality-specific counterparts, validating our effectiveness and practicality. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zongwei97/UnTrack.
Authors:Sri Aditya Deevi, Connor Lee, Lu Gan, Sushruth Nagesh, Gaurav Pandey, Soon-Jo Chung
Title: RGB-X Object Detection via Scene-Specific Fusion Modules
Abstract:
Multimodal deep sensor fusion has the potential to enable autonomous vehicles to visually understand their surrounding environments in all weather conditions. However, existing deep sensor fusion methods usually employ convoluted architectures with intermingled multimodal features, requiring large coregistered multimodal datasets for training. In this work, we present an efficient and modular RGB-X fusion network that can leverage and fuse pretrained single-modal models via scene-specific fusion modules, thereby enabling joint input-adaptive network architectures to be created using small, coregistered multimodal datasets. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing works on RGB-thermal and RGB-gated datasets, performing fusion using only a small amount of additional parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/dsriaditya999/RGBXFusion.
Authors:Diogo D Carvalho, Diogo R Ferreira, Luis O Silva
Title: Learning the dynamics of a one-dimensional plasma model with graph neural networks
Abstract:
We explore the possibility of fully replacing a plasma physics kinetic simulator with a graph neural network-based simulator. We focus on this class of surrogate models given the similarity between their message-passing update mechanism and the traditional physics solver update, and the possibility of enforcing known physical priors into the graph construction and update. We show that our model learns the kinetic plasma dynamics of the one-dimensional plasma model, a predecessor of contemporary kinetic plasma simulation codes, and recovers a wide range of well-known kinetic plasma processes, including plasma thermalization, electrostatic fluctuations about thermal equilibrium, and the drag on a fast sheet and Landau damping. We compare the performance against the original plasma model in terms of run-time, conservation laws, and temporal evolution of key physical quantities. The limitations of the model are presented and possible directions for higher-dimensional surrogate models for kinetic plasmas are discussed.
Authors:Yang Wu, Shilong Wang, Hao Yang, Tian Zheng, Hongbo Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin
Title: An Early Evaluation of GPT-4V(ision)
Abstract:
In this paper, we evaluate different abilities of GPT-4V including visual understanding, language understanding, visual puzzle solving, and understanding of other modalities such as depth, thermal, video, and audio. To estimate GPT-4V's performance, we manually construct 656 test instances and carefully evaluate the results of GPT-4V. The highlights of our findings are as follows: (1) GPT-4V exhibits impressive performance on English visual-centric benchmarks but fails to recognize simple Chinese texts in the images; (2) GPT-4V shows inconsistent refusal behavior when answering questions related to sensitive traits such as gender, race, and age; (3) GPT-4V obtains worse results than GPT-4 (API) on language understanding tasks including general language understanding benchmarks and visual commonsense knowledge evaluation benchmarks; (4) Few-shot prompting can improve GPT-4V's performance on both visual understanding and language understanding; (5) GPT-4V struggles to find the nuances between two similar images and solve the easy math picture puzzles; (6) GPT-4V shows non-trivial performance on the tasks of similar modalities to image, such as video and thermal. Our experimental results reveal the ability and limitations of GPT-4V and we hope our paper can provide some insights into the application and research of GPT-4V.
Authors:Rudraksh Kapil, Seyed Mojtaba Marvasti-Zadeh, Nadir Erbilgin, Nilanjan Ray
Title: ShadowSense: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and Feature Fusion for Shadow-Agnostic Tree Crown Detection from RGB-Thermal Drone Imagery
Abstract:
Accurate detection of individual tree crowns from remote sensing data poses a significant challenge due to the dense nature of forest canopy and the presence of diverse environmental variations, e.g., overlapping canopies, occlusions, and varying lighting conditions. Additionally, the lack of data for training robust models adds another limitation in effectively studying complex forest conditions. This paper presents a novel method for detecting shadowed tree crowns and provides a challenging dataset comprising roughly 50k paired RGB-thermal images to facilitate future research for illumination-invariant detection. The proposed method (ShadowSense) is entirely self-supervised, leveraging domain adversarial training without source domain annotations for feature extraction and foreground feature alignment for feature pyramid networks to adapt domain-invariant representations by focusing on visible foreground regions, respectively. It then fuses complementary information of both modalities to effectively improve upon the predictions of an RGB-trained detector and boost the overall accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over both the baseline RGB-trained detector and state-of-the-art techniques that rely on unsupervised domain adaptation or early image fusion. Our code and data are available: https://github.com/rudrakshkapil/ShadowSense
Authors:Hanzhe Teng, Yipeng Wang, Xiaoao Song, Konstantinos Karydis
Title: Multimodal Dataset for Localization, Mapping and Crop Monitoring in Citrus Tree Farms
Abstract:
In this work we introduce the CitrusFarm dataset, a comprehensive multimodal sensory dataset collected by a wheeled mobile robot operating in agricultural fields. The dataset offers stereo RGB images with depth information, as well as monochrome, near-infrared and thermal images, presenting diverse spectral responses crucial for agricultural research. Furthermore, it provides a range of navigational sensor data encompassing wheel odometry, LiDAR, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and GNSS with Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) as the centimeter-level positioning ground truth. The dataset comprises seven sequences collected in three fields of citrus trees, featuring various tree species at different growth stages, distinctive planting patterns, as well as varying daylight conditions. It spans a total operation time of 1.7 hours, covers a distance of 7.5 km, and constitutes 1.3 TB of data. We anticipate that this dataset can facilitate the development of autonomous robot systems operating in agricultural tree environments, especially for localization, mapping and crop monitoring tasks. Moreover, the rich sensing modalities offered in this dataset can also support research in a range of robotics and computer vision tasks, such as place recognition, scene understanding, object detection and segmentation, and multimodal learning. The dataset, in conjunction with related tools and resources, is made publicly available at https://github.com/UCR-Robotics/Citrus-Farm-Dataset.
Authors:Jun Zhang, Huayang Zhuge, Yiyao Liu, Guohao Peng, Zhenyu Wu, Haoyuan Zhang, Qiyang Lyu, Heshan Li, Chunyang Zhao, Dogan Kircali, Sanat Mharolkar, Xun Yang, Su Yi, Yuanzhe Wang, Danwei Wang
Title: NTU4DRadLM: 4D Radar-centric Multi-Modal Dataset for Localization and Mapping
Abstract:
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is moving towards a robust perception age. However, LiDAR- and visual- SLAM may easily fail in adverse conditions (rain, snow, smoke and fog, etc.). In comparison, SLAM based on 4D Radar, thermal camera and IMU can work robustly. But only a few literature can be found. A major reason is the lack of related datasets, which seriously hinders the research. Even though some datasets are proposed based on 4D radar in past four years, they are mainly designed for object detection, rather than SLAM. Furthermore, they normally do not include thermal camera. Therefore, in this paper, NTU4DRadLM is presented to meet this requirement. The main characteristics are: 1) It is the only dataset that simultaneously includes all 6 sensors: 4D radar, thermal camera, IMU, 3D LiDAR, visual camera and RTK GPS. 2) Specifically designed for SLAM tasks, which provides fine-tuned ground truth odometry and intentionally formulated loop closures. 3) Considered both low-speed robot platform and fast-speed unmanned vehicle platform. 4) Covered structured, unstructured and semi-structured environments. 5) Considered both middle- and large- scale outdoor environments, i.e., the 6 trajectories range from 246m to 6.95km. 6) Comprehensively evaluated three types of SLAM algorithms. Totally, the dataset is around 17.6km, 85mins, 50GB and it will be accessible from this link: https://github.com/junzhang2016/NTU4DRadLM
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Title: ComPtr: Towards Diverse Bi-source Dense Prediction Tasks via A Simple yet General Complementary Transformer
Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) has advanced the field of dense prediction, while gradually dissolving the inherent barriers between different tasks. However, most existing works focus on designing architectures and constructing visual cues only for the specific task, which ignores the potential uniformity introduced by the DL paradigm. In this paper, we attempt to construct a novel $\underline{ComP}$lementary $\underline{tr}$ansformer, $\textbf{ComPtr}$, for diverse bi-source dense prediction tasks. Specifically, unlike existing methods that over-specialize in a single task or a subset of tasks, ComPtr starts from the more general concept of bi-source dense prediction. Based on the basic dependence on information complementarity, we propose consistency enhancement and difference awareness components with which ComPtr can evacuate and collect important visual semantic cues from different image sources for diverse tasks, respectively. ComPtr treats different inputs equally and builds an efficient dense interaction model in the form of sequence-to-sequence on top of the transformer. This task-generic design provides a smooth foundation for constructing the unified model that can simultaneously deal with various bi-source information. In extensive experiments across several representative vision tasks, i.e. remote sensing change detection, RGB-T crowd counting, RGB-D/T salient object detection, and RGB-D semantic segmentation, the proposed method consistently obtains favorable performance. The code will be available at https://github.com/lartpang/ComPtr.
Authors:Connor Lee, Jonathan Gustafsson Frennert, Lu Gan, Matthew Anderson, Soon-Jo Chung
Title: Online Self-Supervised Thermal Water Segmentation for Aerial Vehicles
Abstract:
We present a new method to adapt an RGB-trained water segmentation network to target-domain aerial thermal imagery using online self-supervision by leveraging texture and motion cues as supervisory signals. This new thermal capability enables current autonomous aerial robots operating in near-shore environments to perform tasks such as visual navigation, bathymetry, and flow tracking at night. Our method overcomes the problem of scarce and difficult-to-obtain near-shore thermal data that prevents the application of conventional supervised and unsupervised methods. In this work, we curate the first aerial thermal near-shore dataset, show that our approach outperforms fully-supervised segmentation models trained on limited target-domain thermal data, and demonstrate real-time capabilities onboard an Nvidia Jetson embedded computing platform. Code and datasets used in this work will be available at: https://github.com/connorlee77/uav-thermal-water-segmentation.
Authors:Luigi Sigillo, Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo Comminiello
Title: StawGAN: Structural-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Infrared Image Translation
Abstract:
This paper addresses the problem of translating night-time thermal infrared images, which are the most adopted image modalities to analyze night-time scenes, to daytime color images (NTIT2DC), which provide better perceptions of objects. We introduce a novel model that focuses on enhancing the quality of the target generation without merely colorizing it. The proposed structural aware (StawGAN) enables the translation of better-shaped and high-definition objects in the target domain. We test our model on aerial images of the DroneVeichle dataset containing RGB-IR paired images. The proposed approach produces a more accurate translation with respect to other state-of-the-art image translation models. The source code is available at https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/StawGAN
Authors:Zongwei Wu, Jingjing Wang, Zhuyun Zhou, Zhaochong An, Qiuping Jiang, Cédric Demonceaux, Guolei Sun, Radu Timofte
Title: Object Segmentation by Mining Cross-Modal Semantics
Abstract:
Multi-sensor clues have shown promise for object segmentation, but inherent noise in each sensor, as well as the calibration error in practice, may bias the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by mining the Cross-Modal Semantics to guide the fusion and decoding of multimodal features, with the aim of controlling the modal contribution based on relative entropy. We explore semantics among the multimodal inputs in two aspects: the modality-shared consistency and the modality-specific variation. Specifically, we propose a novel network, termed XMSNet, consisting of (1) all-round attentive fusion (AF), (2) coarse-to-fine decoder (CFD), and (3) cross-layer self-supervision. On the one hand, the AF block explicitly dissociates the shared and specific representation and learns to weight the modal contribution by adjusting the \textit{proportion, region,} and \textit{pattern}, depending upon the quality. On the other hand, our CFD initially decodes the shared feature and then refines the output through specificity-aware querying. Further, we enforce semantic consistency across the decoding layers to enable interaction across network hierarchies, improving feature discriminability. Exhaustive comparison on eleven datasets with depth or thermal clues, and on two challenging tasks, namely salient and camouflage object segmentation, validate our effectiveness in terms of both performance and robustness. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zongwei97/XMSNet.
Authors:Rohit Girdhar, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Zhuang Liu, Mannat Singh, Kalyan Vasudev Alwala, Armand Joulin, Ishan Misra
Title: ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All
Abstract:
We present ImageBind, an approach to learn a joint embedding across six different modalities - images, text, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU data. We show that all combinations of paired data are not necessary to train such a joint embedding, and only image-paired data is sufficient to bind the modalities together. ImageBind can leverage recent large scale vision-language models, and extends their zero-shot capabilities to new modalities just by using their natural pairing with images. It enables novel emergent applications 'out-of-the-box' including cross-modal retrieval, composing modalities with arithmetic, cross-modal detection and generation. The emergent capabilities improve with the strength of the image encoder and we set a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot recognition tasks across modalities, outperforming specialist supervised models. Finally, we show strong few-shot recognition results outperforming prior work, and that ImageBind serves as a new way to evaluate vision models for visual and non-visual tasks.
Authors:Zitian Tang, Wenjie Ye, Wei-Chiu Ma, Hang Zhao
Title: What Happened 3 Seconds Ago? Inferring the Past with Thermal Imaging
Abstract:
Inferring past human motion from RGB images is challenging due to the inherent uncertainty of the prediction problem. Thermal images, on the other hand, encode traces of past human-object interactions left in the environment via thermal radiation measurement. Based on this observation, we collect the first RGB-Thermal dataset for human motion analysis, dubbed Thermal-IM. Then we develop a three-stage neural network model for accurate past human pose estimation. Comprehensive experiments show that thermal cues significantly reduce the ambiguities of this task, and the proposed model achieves remarkable performance. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ZitianTang/Thermal-IM.
Authors:Noreen Anwar, Philippe Duplessis-Guindon, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Wassim Bouachir
Title: VisiTherS: Visible-thermal infrared stereo disparity estimation of human silhouette
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach for visible-thermal infrared stereoscopy, focusing on the estimation of disparities of human silhouettes. Visible-thermal infrared stereo poses several challenges, including occlusions and differently textured matching regions in both spectra. Finding matches between two spectra with varying colors, textures, and shapes adds further complexity to the task. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach where a high-resolution convolutional neural network is used to better capture relationships between the two spectra. To do so, a modified HRNet backbone is used for feature extraction. This HRNet backbone is capable of capturing fine details and textures as it extracts features at multiple scales, thereby enabling the utilization of both local and global information. For matching visible and thermal infrared regions, our method extracts features on each patch using two modified HRNet streams. Features from the two streams are then combined for predicting the disparities by concatenation and correlation. Results on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by improving the results by approximately 18 percentage points on the $\leq$ 1 pixel error, highlighting its potential for improving accuracy in this task. The code of VisiTherS is available on GitHub at the following link https://github.com/philippeDG/VisiTherS.
Authors:Junzhang Chen, Xiangzhi Bai
Title: Learning to "Segment Anything" in Thermal Infrared Images through Knowledge Distillation with a Large Scale Dataset SATIR
Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a promptable segmentation model recently introduced by Meta AI that has demonstrated its prowess across various fields beyond just image segmentation. SAM can accurately segment images across diverse fields, and generating various masks. We discovered that this ability of SAM can be leveraged to pretrain models for specific fields. Accordingly, we have proposed a framework that utilizes SAM to generate pseudo labels for pretraining thermal infrared image segmentation tasks. Our proposed framework can effectively improve the accuracy of segmentation results of specific categories beyond the SOTA ImageNet pretrained model. Our framework presents a novel approach to collaborate with models trained with large data like SAM to address problems in special fields. Also, we generated a large scale thermal infrared segmentation dataset used for pretaining, which contains over 100,000 images with pixel-annotation labels. This approach offers an effective solution for working with large models in special fields where label annotation is challenging. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenjzBUAA/SATIR
Authors:Luigi Riz, Andrea Caraffa, Matteo Bortolon, Mohamed Lamine Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, André Moura, José Antunes, André Dias, Hugo Silva, Andreas Leonidou, Christos Constantinides, Christos Keleshis, Dante Abate, Fabio Poiesi
Title: The MONET dataset: Multimodal drone thermal dataset recorded in rural scenarios
Abstract:
We present MONET, a new multimodal dataset captured using a thermal camera mounted on a drone that flew over rural areas, and recorded human and vehicle activities. We captured MONET to study the problem of object localisation and behaviour understanding of targets undergoing large-scale variations and being recorded from different and moving viewpoints. Target activities occur in two different land sites, each with unique scene structures and cluttered backgrounds. MONET consists of approximately 53K images featuring 162K manually annotated bounding boxes. Each image is timestamp-aligned with drone metadata that includes information about attitudes, speed, altitude, and GPS coordinates. MONET is different from previous thermal drone datasets because it features multimodal data, including rural scenes captured with thermal cameras containing both person and vehicle targets, along with trajectory information and metadata. We assessed the difficulty of the dataset in terms of transfer learning between the two sites and evaluated nine object detection algorithms to identify the open challenges associated with this type of data. Project page: https://github.com/fabiopoiesi/monet_dataset.
Authors:Aditya Kasliwal, Pratinav Seth, Sriya Rallabandi, Sanchit Singhal
Title: CoReFusion: Contrastive Regularized Fusion for Guided Thermal Super-Resolution
Abstract:
Thermal imaging has numerous advantages over regular visible-range imaging since it performs well in low-light circumstances. Super-Resolution approaches can broaden their usefulness by replicating accurate high-resolution thermal pictures using measurements from low-cost, low-resolution thermal sensors. Because of the spectral range mismatch between the images, Guided Super-Resolution of thermal images utilizing visible range images is difficult. However, In case of failure to capture Visible Range Images can prevent the operations of applications in critical areas. We present a novel data fusion framework and regularization technique for Guided Super Resolution of Thermal images. The proposed architecture is computationally in-expensive and lightweight with the ability to maintain performance despite missing one of the modalities, i.e., high-resolution RGB image or the lower-resolution thermal image, and is designed to be robust in the presence of missing data. The proposed method presents a promising solution to the frequently occurring problem of missing modalities in a real-world scenario. Code is available at https://github.com/Kasliwal17/CoReFusion .
Authors:Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, In So Kweon, Jean Oh
Title: Complementary Random Masking for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB-thermal semantic segmentation is one potential solution to achieve reliable semantic scene understanding in adverse weather and lighting conditions. However, the previous studies mostly focus on designing a multi-modal fusion module without consideration of the nature of multi-modality inputs. Therefore, the networks easily become over-reliant on a single modality, making it difficult to learn complementary and meaningful representations for each modality. This paper proposes 1) a complementary random masking strategy of RGB-T images and 2) self-distillation loss between clean and masked input modalities. The proposed masking strategy prevents over-reliance on a single modality. It also improves the accuracy and robustness of the neural network by forcing the network to segment and classify objects even when one modality is partially available. Also, the proposed self-distillation loss encourages the network to extract complementary and meaningful representations from a single modality or complementary masked modalities. Based on the proposed method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance over three RGB-T semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/UkcheolShin/CRM_RGBTSeg.
Authors:Mingjian Liang, Junjie Hu, Chenyu Bao, Hua Feng, Fuqin Deng, Tin Lun Lam
Title: Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks
Abstract:
Recently, RGB-Thermal based perception has shown significant advances. Thermal information provides useful clues when visual cameras suffer from poor lighting conditions, such as low light and fog. However, how to effectively fuse RGB images and thermal data remains an open challenge. Previous works involve naive fusion strategies such as merging them at the input, concatenating multi-modality features inside models, or applying attention to each data modality. These fusion strategies are straightforward yet insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion method named Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion (EAEF) that fully takes advantage of each type of data. Specifically, we consider the following cases: i) both RGB data and thermal data, ii) only one of the types of data, and iii) none of them generate discriminative features. EAEF uses one branch to enhance feature extraction for i) and iii) and the other branch to remedy insufficient representations for ii). The outputs of two branches are fused to form complementary features. As a result, the proposed fusion method outperforms state-of-the-art by 1.6\% in mIoU on semantic segmentation, 3.1\% in MAE on salient object detection, 2.3\% in mAP on object detection, and 8.1\% in MAE on crowd counting. The code is available at https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/EAEFNet.
Authors:Jiawen Zhu, Simiao Lai, Xin Chen, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu
Title: Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking
Abstract:
Visible-modal object tracking gives rise to a series of downstream multi-modal tracking tributaries. To inherit the powerful representations of the foundation model, a natural modus operandi for multi-modal tracking is full fine-tuning on the RGB-based parameters. Albeit effective, this manner is not optimal due to the scarcity of downstream data and poor transferability, etc. In this paper, inspired by the recent success of the prompt learning in language models, we develop Visual Prompt multi-modal Tracking (ViPT), which learns the modal-relevant prompts to adapt the frozen pre-trained foundation model to various downstream multimodal tracking tasks. ViPT finds a better way to stimulate the knowledge of the RGB-based model that is pre-trained at scale, meanwhile only introducing a few trainable parameters (less than 1% of model parameters). ViPT outperforms the full fine-tuning paradigm on multiple downstream tracking tasks including RGB+Depth, RGB+Thermal, and RGB+Event tracking. Extensive experiments show the potential of visual prompt learning for multi-modal tracking, and ViPT can achieve state-of-the-art performance while satisfying parameter efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/ViPT.
Authors:Nguyen Duc Thuan, Le Hai Anh, Hoang Si Hong
Title: PDIWS: Thermal Imaging Dataset for Person Detection in Intrusion Warning Systems
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a synthetic thermal imaging dataset for Person Detection in Intrusion Warning Systems (PDIWS). The dataset consists of a training set with 2000 images and a test set with 500 images. Each image is synthesized by compounding a subject (intruder) with a background using the modified Poisson image editing method. There are a total of 50 different backgrounds and nearly 1000 subjects divided into five classes according to five human poses: creeping, crawling, stooping, climbing and other. The presence of the intruder will be confirmed if the first four poses are detected. Advanced object detection algorithms have been implemented with this dataset and give relatively satisfactory results, with the highest mAP values of 95.5% and 90.9% for IoU of 0.5 and 0.75 respectively. The dataset is freely published online for research purposes at https://github.com/thuan-researcher/Intruder-Thermal-Dataset.
Authors:Yinghui Xing, Shuo Yang, Song Wang, Shizhou Zhang, Guoqiang Liang, Xiuwei Zhang, Yanning Zhang
Title: MS-DETR: Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Transformer with Loosely Coupled Fusion and Modality-Balanced Optimization
Abstract:
Multispectral pedestrian detection is an important task for many around-the-clock applications, since the visible and thermal modalities can provide complementary information especially under low light conditions. Due to the presence of two modalities, misalignment and modality imbalance are the most significant issues in multispectral pedestrian detection. In this paper, we propose M ulti S pectral pedestrian DE tection TR ansformer (MS-DETR) to fix above issues. MS-DETR consists of two modality-specific backbones and Transformer encoders, followed by a multi-modal Transformer decoder, and the visible and thermal features are fused in the multi-modal Transformer decoder. To well resist the misalignment between multi-modal images, we design a loosely coupled fusion strategy by sparsely sampling some keypoints from multi-modal features independently and fusing them with adaptively learned attention weights. Moreover, based on the insight that not only different modalities, but also different pedestrian instances tend to have different confidence scores to final detection, we further propose an instance-aware modality-balanced optimization strategy, which preserves visible and thermal decoder branches and aligns their predicted slots through an instance-wise dynamic loss. Our end-to-end MS-DETR shows superior performance on the challenging KAIST, CVC-14 and LLVIP benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/YinghuiXing/MS-DETR.
Authors:Dong-Guw Lee, Myung-Hwan Jeon, Younggun Cho, Ayoung Kim
Title: Edge-guided Multi-domain RGB-to-TIR image Translation for Training Vision Tasks with Challenging Labels
Abstract:
The insufficient number of annotated thermal infrared (TIR) image datasets not only hinders TIR image-based deep learning networks to have comparable performances to that of RGB but it also limits the supervised learning of TIR image-based tasks with challenging labels. As a remedy, we propose a modified multidomain RGB to TIR image translation model focused on edge preservation to employ annotated RGB images with challenging labels. Our proposed method not only preserves key details in the original image but also leverages the optimal TIR style code to portray accurate TIR characteristics in the translated image, when applied on both synthetic and real world RGB images. Using our translation model, we have enabled the supervised learning of deep TIR image-based optical flow estimation and object detection that ameliorated in deep TIR optical flow estimation by reduction in end point error by 56.5\% on average and the best object detection mAP of 23.9\% respectively. Our code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/rpmsnu/sRGB-TIR.
Authors:Muhammad Ali Farooq, Waseem Shariff, Faisal Khan, Peter Corcoran
Title: Development, Optimization, and Deployment of Thermal Forward Vision Systems for Advance Vehicular Applications on Edge Devices
Abstract:
In this research work, we have proposed a thermal tiny-YOLO multi-class object detection (TTYMOD) system as a smart forward sensing system that should remain effective in all weather and harsh environmental conditions using an end-to-end YOLO deep learning framework. It provides enhanced safety and improved awareness features for driver assistance. The system is trained on large-scale thermal public datasets as well as newly gathered novel open-sourced dataset comprising of more than 35,000 distinct thermal frames. For optimal training and convergence of YOLO-v5 tiny network variant on thermal data, we have employed different optimizers which include stochastic decent gradient (SGD), Adam, and its variant AdamW which has an improved implementation of weight decay. The performance of thermally tuned tiny architecture is further evaluated on the public as well as locally gathered test data in diversified and challenging weather and environmental conditions. The efficacy of a thermally tuned nano network is quantified using various qualitative metrics which include mean average precision, frames per second rate, and average inference time. Experimental outcomes show that the network achieved the best mAP of 56.4% with an average inference time/ frame of 4 milliseconds. The study further incorporates optimization of tiny network variant using the TensorFlow Lite quantization tool this is beneficial for the deployment of deep learning architectures on the edge and mobile devices. For this study, we have used a raspberry pi 4 computing board for evaluating the real-time feasibility performance of an optimized version of the thermal object detection network for the automotive sensor suite. The source code, trained and optimized models and complete validation/ testing results are publicly available at https://github.com/MAli-Farooq/Thermal-YOLO-And-Model-Optimization-Using-TensorFlowLite.
Authors:Bin Tang, Zhengyi Liu, Yacheng Tan, Qian He
Title: HRTransNet: HRFormer-Driven Two-Modality Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
The High-Resolution Transformer (HRFormer) can maintain high-resolution representation and share global receptive fields. It is friendly towards salient object detection (SOD) in which the input and output have the same resolution. However, two critical problems need to be solved for two-modality SOD. One problem is two-modality fusion. The other problem is the HRFormer output's fusion. To address the first problem, a supplementary modality is injected into the primary modality by using global optimization and an attention mechanism to select and purify the modality at the input level. To solve the second problem, a dual-direction short connection fusion module is used to optimize the output features of HRFormer, thereby enhancing the detailed representation of objects at the output level. The proposed model, named HRTransNet, first introduces an auxiliary stream for feature extraction of supplementary modality. Then, features are injected into the primary modality at the beginning of each multi-resolution branch. Next, HRFormer is applied to achieve forwarding propagation. Finally, all the output features with different resolutions are aggregated by intra-feature and inter-feature interactive transformers. Application of the proposed model results in impressive improvement for driving two-modality SOD tasks, e.g., RGB-D, RGB-T, and light field SOD.https://github.com/liuzywen/HRTransNet
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Wei Wu, Yacheng Tan, Guanghui Zhang
Title: RGB-T Multi-Modal Crowd Counting Based on Transformer
Abstract:
Crowd counting aims to estimate the number of persons in a scene. Most state-of-the-art crowd counting methods based on color images can't work well in poor illumination conditions due to invisible objects. With the widespread use of infrared cameras, crowd counting based on color and thermal images is studied. Existing methods only achieve multi-modal fusion without count objective constraint. To better excavate multi-modal information, we use count-guided multi-modal fusion and modal-guided count enhancement to achieve the impressive performance. The proposed count-guided multi-modal fusion module utilizes a multi-scale token transformer to interact two-modal information under the guidance of count information and perceive different scales from the token perspective. The proposed modal-guided count enhancement module employs multi-scale deformable transformer decoder structure to enhance one modality feature and count information by the other modality. Experiment in public RGBT-CC dataset shows that our method refreshes the state-of-the-art results. https://github.com/liuzywen/RGBTCC
Authors:DongKi Noh, Changki Sung, Teayoung Uhm, WooJu Lee, Hyungtae Lim, Jaeseok Choi, Kyuewang Lee, Dasol Hong, Daeho Um, Inseop Chung, Hochul Shin, MinJung Kim, Hyoung-Rock Kim, SeungMin Baek, Hyun Myung
Title: X-MAS: Extremely Large-Scale Multi-Modal Sensor Dataset for Outdoor Surveillance in Real Environments
Abstract:
In robotics and computer vision communities, extensive studies have been widely conducted regarding surveillance tasks, including human detection, tracking, and motion recognition with a camera. Additionally, deep learning algorithms are widely utilized in the aforementioned tasks as in other computer vision tasks. Existing public datasets are insufficient to develop learning-based methods that handle various surveillance for outdoor and extreme situations such as harsh weather and low illuminance conditions. Therefore, we introduce a new large-scale outdoor surveillance dataset named eXtremely large-scale Multi-modAl Sensor dataset (X-MAS) containing more than 500,000 image pairs and the first-person view data annotated by well-trained annotators. Moreover, a single pair contains multi-modal data (e.g. an IR image, an RGB image, a thermal image, a depth image, and a LiDAR scan). This is the first large-scale first-person view outdoor multi-modal dataset focusing on surveillance tasks to the best of our knowledge. We present an overview of the proposed dataset with statistics and present methods of exploiting our dataset with deep learning-based algorithms. The latest information on the dataset and our study are available at https://github.com/lge-robot-navi, and the dataset will be available for download through a server.
Authors:Yongsong Huang, Tomo Miyazaki, Xiaofeng Liu, Shinichiro Omachi
Title: Infrared Image Super-Resolution: Systematic Review, and Future Trends
Abstract:
Image Super-Resolution (SR) is essential for a wide range of computer vision and image processing tasks. Investigating infrared (IR) image (or thermal images) super-resolution is a continuing concern within the development of deep learning. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive perspective of IR image super-resolution, including its applications, hardware imaging system dilemmas, and taxonomy of image processing methodologies. In addition, the datasets and evaluation metrics in IR image super-resolution tasks are also discussed. Furthermore, the deficiencies in current technologies and possible promising directions for the community to explore are highlighted. To cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant excellent work at https://github.com/yongsongH/Infrared_Image_SR_Survey.
Authors:Paul J. Atzberger
Title: Incorporating Shear into Stochastic Eulerian Lagrangian Methods for Rheological Studies of Complex Fluids and Soft Materials
Abstract:
We develop computational methods that incorporate shear into fluctuating hydrodynamics methods. We are motivated by the rheological responses of complex fluids and soft materials. Our approach is based on continuum stochastic hydrodynamic equations that are subject to shear boundary conditions on the unit periodic cell in a manner similar to the Lees-Edwards conditions of molecular dynamics. Our methods take into account consistently the microstructure elastic mechanics, fluid-structure hydrodynamic coupling, and thermal fluctuations. For practical simulations, we develop numerical methods for efficient stochastic field generation that handle the sheared generalized periodic boundary conditions. We show that our numerical methods are consistent with fluctuation dissipation balance and near-equilibrium statistical mechanics. As a demonstration in practice, we present several prototype rheological response studies. These include (i) shear thinning of a polymeric fluid, (ii) complex moduli for the oscillatory responses of a polymerized lipid vesicle, and (iii) aging under shear of a gel-like material.
Authors:Neelu Madan, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Kamal Nasrollahi, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Thomas B. Moeslund, Mubarak Shah
Title: Self-Supervised Masked Convolutional Transformer Block for Anomaly Detection
Abstract:
Anomaly detection has recently gained increasing attention in the field of computer vision, likely due to its broad set of applications ranging from product fault detection on industrial production lines and impending event detection in video surveillance to finding lesions in medical scans. Regardless of the domain, anomaly detection is typically framed as a one-class classification task, where the learning is conducted on normal examples only. An entire family of successful anomaly detection methods is based on learning to reconstruct masked normal inputs (e.g. patches, future frames, etc.) and exerting the magnitude of the reconstruction error as an indicator for the abnormality level. Unlike other reconstruction-based methods, we present a novel self-supervised masked convolutional transformer block (SSMCTB) that comprises the reconstruction-based functionality at a core architectural level. The proposed self-supervised block is extremely flexible, enabling information masking at any layer of a neural network and being compatible with a wide range of neural architectures. In this work, we extend our previous self-supervised predictive convolutional attentive block (SSPCAB) with a 3D masked convolutional layer, a transformer for channel-wise attention, as well as a novel self-supervised objective based on Huber loss. Furthermore, we show that our block is applicable to a wider variety of tasks, adding anomaly detection in medical images and thermal videos to the previously considered tasks based on RGB images and surveillance videos. We exhibit the generality and flexibility of SSMCTB by integrating it into multiple state-of-the-art neural models for anomaly detection, bringing forth empirical results that confirm considerable performance improvements on five benchmarks. We release our code and data as open source at: https://github.com/ristea/ssmctb.
Authors:Shoummo Ahsan Khandoker, Jawaril Munshad Abedin, Mohamed Hibat-Allah
Title: Supplementing Recurrent Neural Networks with Annealing to Solve Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Abstract:
Combinatorial optimization problems can be solved by heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA) which aims to find the optimal solution within a large search space through thermal fluctuations. The algorithm generates new solutions through Markov-chain Monte Carlo techniques. This sampling scheme can result in severe limitations, such as slow convergence and a tendency to stay within the same local search space at small temperatures. To overcome these shortcomings, we use the variational classical annealing (VCA) framework that combines autoregressive recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with traditional annealing to sample solutions that are uncorrelated. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of using VCA as an approach to solving real-world optimization problems. We explore VCA's performance in comparison with SA at solving three popular optimization problems: the maximum cut problem (Max-Cut), the nurse scheduling problem (NSP), and the traveling salesman problem (TSP). For all three problems, we find that VCA outperforms SA on average in the asymptotic limit by one or more orders of magnitude in terms of relative error. Interestingly, we reach large system sizes of up to $256$ cities for the TSP. We also conclude that in the best case scenario, VCA can serve as a great alternative when SA fails to find the optimal solution.
Authors:Dong Huo, Jian Wang, Yiming Qian, Yee-Hong Yang
Title: Glass Segmentation with RGB-Thermal Image Pairs
Abstract:
This paper proposes a new glass segmentation method utilizing paired RGB and thermal images. Due to the large difference between the transmission property of visible light and that of the thermal energy through the glass where most glass is transparent to the visible light but opaque to thermal energy, glass regions of a scene are made more distinguishable with a pair of RGB and thermal images than solely with an RGB image. To exploit such a unique property, we propose a neural network architecture that effectively combines an RGB-thermal image pair with a new multi-modal fusion module based on attention, and integrate CNN and transformer to extract local features and non-local dependencies, respectively. As well, we have collected a new dataset containing 5551 RGB-thermal image pairs with ground-truth segmentation annotations. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on fusing RGB and thermal data for glass segmentation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Dong-Huo/RGB-T-Glass-Segmentation.
Authors:Jiashun Suo, Tianyi Wang, Xingzhou Zhang, Haiyang Chen, Wei Zhou, Weisong Shi
Title: HIT-UAV: A high-altitude infrared thermal dataset for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based object detection
Abstract:
We present the HIT-UAV dataset, a high-altitude infrared thermal dataset for object detection applications on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The dataset comprises 2,898 infrared thermal images extracted from 43,470 frames in hundreds of videos captured by UAVs in various scenarios including schools, parking lots, roads, and playgrounds. Moreover, the HIT-UAV provides essential flight data for each image, such as flight altitude, camera perspective, date, and daylight intensity. For each image, we have manually annotated object instances with bounding boxes of two types (oriented and standard) to tackle the challenge of significant overlap of object instances in aerial images. To the best of our knowledge, the HIT-UAV is the first publicly available high-altitude UAV-based infrared thermal dataset for detecting persons and vehicles. We have trained and evaluated well-established object detection algorithms on the HIT-UAV. Our results demonstrate that the detection algorithms perform exceptionally well on the HIT-UAV compared to visual light datasets since infrared thermal images do not contain significant irrelevant information about objects. We believe that the HIT-UAV will contribute to various UAV-based applications and researches. The dataset is freely available at https://github.com/suojiashun/HIT-UAV-Infrared-Thermal-Dataset.
Authors:Jiaming Zhang, Huayao Liu, Kailun Yang, Xinxin Hu, Ruiping Liu, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Title: CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers
Abstract:
Scene understanding based on image segmentation is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. Pixel-wise semantic segmentation of RGB images can be advanced by exploiting complementary features from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, covering a wide variety of sensors with a modality-agnostic model remains an unresolved problem due to variations in sensor characteristics among different modalities. Unlike previous modality-specific methods, in this work, we propose a unified fusion framework, CMX, for RGB-X semantic segmentation. To generalize well across different modalities, that often include supplements as well as uncertainties, a unified cross-modal interaction is crucial for modality fusion. Specifically, we design a Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CM-FRM) to calibrate bi-modal features by leveraging the features from one modality to rectify the features of the other modality. With rectified feature pairs, we deploy a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to perform sufficient exchange of long-range contexts before mixing. To verify CMX, for the first time, we unify five modalities complementary to RGB, i.e., depth, thermal, polarization, event, and LiDAR. Extensive experiments show that CMX generalizes well to diverse multi-modal fusion, achieving state-of-the-art performances on five RGB-Depth benchmarks, as well as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-LiDAR datasets. Besides, to investigate the generalizability to dense-sparse data fusion, we establish an RGB-Event semantic segmentation benchmark based on the EventScape dataset, on which CMX sets the new state-of-the-art. The source code of CMX is publicly available at https://github.com/huaaaliu/RGBX_Semantic_Segmentation.
Authors:Hao Xie, Linfeng Zhang, Lei Wang
Title: $m^\ast$ of two-dimensional electron gas: a neural canonical transformation study
Abstract:
The quasiparticle effective mass $m^\ast$ of interacting electrons is a fundamental quantity in the Fermi liquid theory. However, the precise value of the effective mass of uniform electron gas is still elusive after decades of research. The newly developed neural canonical transformation approach [Xie et al., J. Mach. Learn. 1, (2022)] offers a principled way to extract the effective mass of electron gas by directly calculating the thermal entropy at low temperature. The approach models a variational many-electron density matrix using two generative neural networks: an autoregressive model for momentum occupation and a normalizing flow for electron coordinates. Our calculation reveals a suppression of effective mass in the two-dimensional spin-polarized electron gas, which is more pronounced than previous reports in the low-density strong-coupling region. This prediction calls for verification in two-dimensional electron gas experiments.
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Title: CAVER: Cross-Modal View-Mixed Transformer for Bi-Modal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Most of the existing bi-modal (RGB-D and RGB-T) salient object detection methods utilize the convolution operation and construct complex interweave fusion structures to achieve cross-modal information integration. The inherent local connectivity of the convolution operation constrains the performance of the convolution-based methods to a ceiling. In this work, we rethink these tasks from the perspective of global information alignment and transformation. Specifically, the proposed \underline{c}ross-mod\underline{a}l \underline{v}iew-mixed transform\underline{er} (CAVER) cascades several cross-modal integration units to construct a top-down transformer-based information propagation path. CAVER treats the multi-scale and multi-modal feature integration as a sequence-to-sequence context propagation and update process built on a novel view-mixed attention mechanism. Besides, considering the quadratic complexity w.r.t. the number of input tokens, we design a parameter-free patch-wise token re-embedding strategy to simplify operations. Extensive experimental results on RGB-D and RGB-T SOD datasets demonstrate that such a simple two-stream encoder-decoder framework can surpass recent state-of-the-art methods when it is equipped with the proposed components. Code and pretrained models will be available at \href{https://github.com/lartpang/CAVER}{the link}.
Authors:Kento Kawaharazuka, Naoki Hiraoka, Kei Tsuzuki, Moritaka Onitsuka, Yuki Asano, Kei Okada, Koji Kawasaki, Masayuki Inaba
Title: Estimation and Control of Motor Core Temperature with Online Learning of Thermal Model Parameters: Application to Musculoskeletal Humanoids
Abstract:
The estimation and management of motor temperature are important for the continuous movements of robots. In this study, we propose an online learning method of thermal model parameters of motors for an accurate estimation of motor core temperature. Also, we propose a management method of motor core temperature using the updated model and anomaly detection method of motors. Finally, we apply this method to the muscles of the musculoskeletal humanoid and verify the ability of continuous movements.
Authors:Xiao Yang, Haixing Dai, Zihao Wu, Ramesh Bist, Sachin Subedi, Jin Sun, Guoyu Lu, Changying Li, Tianming Liu, Lilong Chai
Title: SAM for Poultry Science
Abstract:
In recent years, the agricultural industry has witnessed significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly with the development of large-scale foundational models. Among these foundation models, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), introduced by Meta AI Research, stands out as a groundbreaking solution for object segmentation tasks. While SAM has shown success in various agricultural applications, its potential in the poultry industry, specifically in the context of cage-free hens, remains relatively unexplored. This study aims to assess the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM on representative chicken segmentation tasks, including part-based segmentation and the use of infrared thermal images, and to explore chicken-tracking tasks by using SAM as a segmentation tool. The results demonstrate SAM's superior performance compared to SegFormer and SETR in both whole and part-based chicken segmentation. SAM-based object tracking also provides valuable data on the behavior and movement patterns of broiler birds. The findings of this study contribute to a better understanding of SAM's potential in poultry science and lay the foundation for future advancements in chicken segmentation and tracking.
Authors:Meet Udeshi, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Hammond Pearce, Ramesh Karri, Farshad Khorrami
Title: REMaQE: Reverse Engineering Math Equations from Executables
Abstract:
Cybersecurity attacks on embedded devices for industrial control systems and cyber-physical systems may cause catastrophic physical damage as well as economic loss. This could be achieved by infecting device binaries with malware that modifies the physical characteristics of the system operation. Mitigating such attacks benefits from reverse engineering tools that recover sufficient semantic knowledge in terms of mathematical equations of the implemented algorithm. Conventional reverse engineering tools can decompile binaries to low-level code, but offer little semantic insight. This paper proposes the REMaQE automated framework for reverse engineering of math equations from binary executables. Improving over state-of-the-art, REMaQE handles equation parameters accessed via registers, the stack, global memory, or pointers, and can reverse engineer object-oriented implementations such as C++ classes. Using REMaQE, we discovered a bug in the Linux kernel thermal monitoring tool "tmon". To evaluate REMaQE, we generate a dataset of 25,096 binaries with math equations implemented in C and Simulink. REMaQE successfully recovers a semantically matching equation for all 25,096 binaries. REMaQE executes in 0.48 seconds on average and in up to 2 seconds for complex equations. Real-time execution enables integration in an interactive math-oriented reverse engineering workflow.
Authors:Zihan Qin, Jialei Xu, Wenbo Zhao, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu
Title: Adaptive Stereo Depth Estimation with Multi-Spectral Images Across All Lighting Conditions
Abstract:
Depth estimation under adverse conditions remains a significant challenge. Recently, multi-spectral depth estimation, which integrates both visible light and thermal images, has shown promise in addressing this issue. However, existing algorithms struggle with precise pixel-level feature matching, limiting their ability to fully exploit geometric constraints across different spectra. To address this, we propose a novel framework incorporating stereo depth estimation to enforce accurate geometric constraints. In particular, we treat the visible light and thermal images as a stereo pair and utilize a Cross-modal Feature Matching (CFM) Module to construct a cost volume for pixel-level matching. To mitigate the effects of poor lighting on stereo matching, we introduce Degradation Masking, which leverages robust monocular thermal depth estimation in degraded regions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Multi-Spectral Stereo (MS2) dataset, with qualitative evaluations demonstrating high-quality depth maps under varying lighting conditions.
Authors:Bozhen Hu, Bin Gao, Cheng Tan, Tongle Wu, Stan Z. Li
Title: Segment Anything in Defect Detection
Abstract:
Defect detection plays a crucial role in infrared non-destructive testing systems, offering non-contact, safe, and efficient inspection capabilities. However, challenges such as low resolution, high noise, and uneven heating in infrared thermal images hinder comprehensive and accurate defect detection. In this study, we propose DefectSAM, a novel approach for segmenting defects on highly noisy thermal images based on the widely adopted model, Segment Anything (SAM)\cite{kirillov2023segany}. Harnessing the power of a meticulously curated dataset generated through labor-intensive lab experiments and valuable prompts from experienced experts, DefectSAM surpasses existing state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms and achieves significant improvements in defect detection rates. Notably, DefectSAM excels in detecting weaker and smaller defects on complex and irregular surfaces, reducing the occurrence of missed detections and providing more accurate defect size estimations. Experimental studies conducted on various materials have validated the effectiveness of our solutions in defect detection, which hold significant potential to expedite the evolution of defect detection tools, enabling enhanced inspection capabilities and accuracy in defect identification.
Authors:Andong Lu, Mai Wen, Jinhu Wang, Yuanzhi Guo, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Title: Towards General Multimodal Visual Tracking
Abstract:
Existing multimodal tracking studies focus on bi-modal scenarios such as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, and RGB-Language. Although promising tracking performance is achieved through leveraging complementary cues from different sources, it remains challenging in complex scenes due to the limitations of bi-modal scenarios. In this work, we introduce a general multimodal visual tracking task that fully exploits the advantages of four modalities, including RGB, thermal infrared, event, and language, for robust tracking under challenging conditions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform for general multimodal visual tracking, we construct QuadTrack600, a large-scale, high-quality benchmark comprising 600 video sequences (totaling 384.7K high-resolution (640x480) frame groups). In each frame group, all four modalities are spatially aligned and meticulously annotated with bounding boxes, while 21 sequence-level challenge attributes are provided for detailed performance analysis. Despite quad-modal data provides richer information, the differences in information quantity among modalities and the computational burden from four modalities are two challenging issues in fusing four modalities. To handle these issues, we propose a novel approach called QuadFusion, which incorporates an efficient Multiscale Fusion Mamba with four different scanning scales to achieve sufficient interactions of the four modalities while overcoming the exponential computational burden, for general multimodal visual tracking. Extensive experiments on the QuadTrack600 dataset and three bi-modal tracking datasets, including LasHeR, VisEvent, and TNL2K, validate the effectiveness of our QuadFusion.
Authors:Yifei Deng, Chenglong Li, Zhenyu Chen, Zihen Xu, Jin Tang
Title: Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark
Abstract:
The performance of traditional text-image person retrieval task is easily affected by lighting variations due to imaging limitations of visible spectrum sensors. In recent years, cross-modal information fusion has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance retrieval robustness. By integrating complementary information from different spectral modalities, it becomes possible to achieve more stable person recognition and matching under complex real-world conditions. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel task: Text-RGBT Person Retrieval, which incorporates cross-spectrum information fusion by combining the complementary cues from visible and thermal modalities for robust person retrieval in challenging environments. The key challenge of Text-RGBT person retrieval lies in aligning text with multi-modal visual features. However, the inherent heterogeneity between visible and thermal modalities may interfere with the alignment between vision and language. To handle this problem, we propose a Decoupled Cross-modal Alignment network (DCAlign), which sufficiently mines the relationships between modality-specific and modality-collaborative visual with the text, for Text-RGBT person retrieval. To promote the research and development of this field, we create a high-quality Text-RGBT person retrieval dataset, RGBT-PEDES. RGBT-PEDES contains 1,822 identities from different age groups and genders with 4,723 pairs of calibrated RGB and T images, and covers high-diverse scenes from both daytime and nighttime with a various of challenges such as occlusion, weak alignment and adverse lighting conditions. Additionally, we carefully annotate 7,987 fine-grained textual descriptions for all RGBT person image pairs. Extensive experiments on RGBT-PEDES demonstrate that our method outperforms existing text-image person retrieval methods.
Authors:Chenglong Li, Tao Wang, Zhaodong Ding, Yun Xiao, Jin Tang
Title: Dynamic Disentangled Fusion Network for RGBT Tracking
Abstract:
RGBT tracking usually suffers from various challenging factors of low resolution, similar appearance, extreme illumination, thermal crossover and occlusion, to name a few. Existing works often study complex fusion models to handle challenging scenarios, but can not well adapt to various challenges, which might limit tracking performance. To handle this problem, we propose a novel Dynamic Disentangled Fusion Network called DDFNet, which disentangles the fusion process into several dynamic fusion models via the challenge attributes to adapt to various challenging scenarios, for robust RGBT tracking. In particular, we design six attribute-based fusion models to integrate RGB and thermal features under the six challenging scenarios respectively.Since each fusion model is to deal with the corresponding challenges, such disentangled fusion scheme could increase the fusion capacity without the dependence on large-scale training data. Considering that every challenging scenario also has different levels of difficulty, we propose to optimize the combination of multiple fusion units to form each attribute-based fusion model in a dynamic manner, which could well adapt to the difficulty of the corresponding challenging scenario. To address the issue that which fusion models should be activated in the tracking process, we design an adaptive aggregation fusion module to integrate all features from attribute-based fusion models in an adaptive manner with a three-stage training algorithm. In addition, we design an enhancement fusion module to further strengthen the aggregated feature and modality-specific features. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our DDFNet against other state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Andong Lu, Wanyu Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Title: RGBT Tracking via All-layer Multimodal Interactions with Progressive Fusion Mamba
Abstract:
Existing RGBT tracking methods often design various interaction models to perform cross-modal fusion of each layer, but can not execute the feature interactions among all layers, which plays a critical role in robust multimodal representation, due to large computational burden. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel All-layer multimodal Interaction Network, named AINet, which performs efficient and effective feature interactions of all modalities and layers in a progressive fusion Mamba, for robust RGBT tracking. Even though modality features in different layers are known to contain different cues, it is always challenging to build multimodal interactions in each layer due to struggling in balancing interaction capabilities and efficiency. Meanwhile, considering that the feature discrepancy between RGB and thermal modalities reflects their complementary information to some extent, we design a Difference-based Fusion Mamba (DFM) to achieve enhanced fusion of different modalities with linear complexity. When interacting with features from all layers, a huge number of token sequences (3840 tokens in this work) are involved and the computational burden is thus large. To handle this problem, we design an Order-dynamic Fusion Mamba (OFM) to execute efficient and effective feature interactions of all layers by dynamically adjusting the scan order of different layers in Mamba. Extensive experiments on four public RGBT tracking datasets show that AINet achieves leading performance against existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Aihua Zheng, Ziling He, Zi Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang
Title: Dynamic Enhancement Network for Partial Multi-modality Person Re-identification
Abstract:
Many existing multi-modality studies are based on the assumption of modality integrity. However, the problem of missing arbitrary modalities is very common in real life, and this problem is less studied, but actually important in the task of multi-modality person re-identification (Re-ID). To this end, we design a novel dynamic enhancement network (DENet), which allows missing arbitrary modalities while maintaining the representation ability of multiple modalities, for partial multi-modality person Re-ID. To be specific, the multi-modal representation of the RGB, near-infrared (NIR) and thermal-infrared (TIR) images is learned by three branches, in which the information of missing modalities is recovered by the feature transformation module. Since the missing state might be changeable, we design a dynamic enhancement module, which dynamically enhances modality features according to the missing state in an adaptive manner, to improve the multi-modality representation. Extensive experiments on multi-modality person Re-ID dataset RGBNT201 and vehicle Re-ID dataset RGBNT100 comparing to the state-of-the-art methods verify the effectiveness of our method in complex and changeable environments.
Authors:Ce Zhang, Zifu Wan, Simon Stepputtis, Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie
Title: Spectral-Aware Global Fusion for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation relying solely on RGB data often struggles in challenging conditions such as low illumination and obscured views, limiting its reliability in critical applications like autonomous driving. To address this, integrating additional thermal radiation data with RGB images demonstrates enhanced performance and robustness. However, how to effectively reconcile the modality discrepancies and fuse the RGB and thermal features remains a well-known challenge. In this work, we address this challenge from a novel spectral perspective. We observe that the multi-modal features can be categorized into two spectral components: low-frequency features that provide broad scene context, including color variations and smooth areas, and high-frequency features that capture modality-specific details such as edges and textures. Inspired by this, we propose the Spectral-aware Global Fusion Network (SGFNet) to effectively enhance and fuse the multi-modal features by explicitly modeling the interactions between the high-frequency, modality-specific features. Our experimental results demonstrate that SGFNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the MFNet and PST900 datasets.
Authors:Sajad Salavatidezfouli, Giovanni Stabile, Gianluigi Rozza
Title: Deep Reinforcement Learning for the Heat Transfer Control of Pulsating Impinging Jets
Abstract:
This research study explores the applicability of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for thermal control based on Computational Fluid Dynamics. To accomplish that, the forced convection on a hot plate prone to a pulsating cooling jet with variable velocity has been investigated. We begin with evaluating the efficiency and viability of a vanilla Deep Q-Network (DQN) method for thermal control. Subsequently, a comprehensive comparison between different variants of DRL is conducted. Soft Double and Duel DQN achieved better thermal control performance among all the variants due to their efficient learning and action prioritization capabilities. Results demonstrate that the soft Double DQN outperforms the hard Double DQN. Moreover, soft Double and Duel can maintain the temperature in the desired threshold for more than 98% of the control cycle. These findings demonstrate the promising potential of DRL in effectively addressing thermal control systems.
Authors:Hao Wang, Xiwen Chen, Natan Vital, Edward. Duffy, Abolfazl Razi
Title: Energy Optimization for HVAC Systems in Multi-VAV Open Offices: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Abstract:
With more than 32% of the global energy used by commercial and residential buildings, there is an urgent need to revisit traditional approaches to Building Energy Management (BEM). With HVAC systems accounting for about 40% of the total energy cost in the commercial sector, we propose a low-complexity DRL-based model with multi-input multi-output architecture for the HVAC energy optimization of open-plan offices, which uses only a handful of controllable and accessible factors. The efficacy of our solution is evaluated through extensive analysis of the overall energy consumption and thermal comfort levels compared to a baseline system based on the existing HVAC schedule in a real building. This comparison shows that our method achieves 37% savings in energy consumption with minimum violation (<1%) of the desired temperature range during work hours. It takes only a total of 40 minutes for 5 epochs (about 7.75 minutes per epoch) to train a network with superior performance and covering diverse conditions for its low-complexity architecture; therefore, it easily adapts to changes in the building setups, weather conditions, occupancy rate, etc. Moreover, by enforcing smoothness on the control strategy, we suppress the frequent and unpleasant on/off transitions on HVAC units to avoid occupant discomfort and potential damage to the system. The generalizability of our model is verified by applying it to different building models and under various weather conditions.
Authors:Alessandro Ottaviano, Robert Balas, Giovanni Bambini, Antonio del Vecchio, Maicol Ciani, Davide Rossi, Luca Benini, Andrea Bartolini
Title: ControlPULP: A RISC-V On-Chip Parallel Power Controller for Many-Core HPC Processors with FPGA-Based Hardware-In-The-Loop Power and Thermal Emulation
Abstract:
High-Performance Computing (HPC) processors are nowadays integrated Cyber-Physical Systems demanding complex and high-bandwidth closed-loop power and thermal control strategies. To efficiently satisfy real-time multi-input multi-output (MIMO) optimal power requirements, high-end processors integrate an on-die power controller system (PCS). While traditional PCSs are based on a simple microcontroller (MCU)-class core, more scalable and flexible PCS architectures are required to support advanced MIMO control algorithms for managing the ever-increasing number of cores, power states, and process, voltage, and temperature variability. This paper presents ControlPULP, an open-source, HW/SW RISC-V parallel PCS platform consisting of a single-core MCU with fast interrupt handling coupled with a scalable multi-core programmable cluster accelerator and a specialized DMA engine for the parallel acceleration of real-time power management policies. ControlPULP relies on FreeRTOS to schedule a reactive power control firmware (PCF) application layer. We demonstrate ControlPULP in a power management use-case targeting a next-generation 72-core HPC processor. We first show that the multi-core cluster accelerates the PCF, achieving 4.9x speedup compared to single-core execution, enabling more advanced power management algorithms within the control hyper-period at a shallow area overhead, about 0.1% the area of a modern HPC CPU die. We then assess the PCS and PCF by designing an FPGA-based, closed-loop emulation framework that leverages the heterogeneous SoCs paradigm, achieving DVFS tracking with a mean deviation within 3% the plant's thermal design power (TDP) against a software-equivalent model-in-the-loop approach. Finally, we show that the proposed PCF compares favorably with an industry-grade control algorithm under computational-intensive workloads.
Authors:Wen Yin, Jian Lou, Pan Zhou, Yulai Xie, Dan Feng, Yuhua Sun, Tailai Zhang, Lichao Sun
Title: Physical Backdoor: Towards Temperature-based Backdoor Attacks in the Physical World
Abstract:
Backdoor attacks have been well-studied in visible light object detection (VLOD) in recent years. However, VLOD can not effectively work in dark and temperature-sensitive scenarios. Instead, thermal infrared object detection (TIOD) is the most accessible and practical in such environments. In this paper, our team is the first to investigate the security vulnerabilities associated with TIOD in the context of backdoor attacks, spanning both the digital and physical realms. We introduce two novel types of backdoor attacks on TIOD, each offering unique capabilities: Object-affecting Attack and Range-affecting Attack. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of key factors influencing trigger design, which include temperature, size, material, and concealment. These factors, especially temperature, significantly impact the efficacy of backdoor attacks on TIOD. A thorough understanding of these factors will serve as a foundation for designing physical triggers and temperature controlling experiments. Our study includes extensive experiments conducted in both digital and physical environments. In the digital realm, we evaluate our approach using benchmark datasets for TIOD, achieving an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of up to 98.21%. In the physical realm, we test our approach in two real-world settings: a traffic intersection and a parking lot, using a thermal infrared camera. Here, we attain an ASR of up to 98.38%.
Authors:Chen Zhou, Peng Cheng, Junfeng Fang, Yifan Zhang, Yibo Yan, Xiaojun Jia, Yanyan Xu, Kun Wang, Xiaochun Cao
Title: Optimizing Multispectral Object Detection: A Bag of Tricks and Comprehensive Benchmarks
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.
Authors:Peiran Peng, Tingfa Xu, Liqiang Song, Mengqi Zhu, Yuqiang Fang, Jianan Li
Title: COXNet: Cross-Layer Fusion with Adaptive Alignment and Scale Integration for RGBT Tiny Object Detection
Abstract:
Detecting tiny objects in multimodal Red-Green-Blue-Thermal (RGBT) imagery is a critical challenge in computer vision, particularly in surveillance, search and rescue, and autonomous navigation. Drone-based scenarios exacerbate these challenges due to spatial misalignment, low-light conditions, occlusion, and cluttered backgrounds. Current methods struggle to leverage the complementary information between visible and thermal modalities effectively. We propose COXNet, a novel framework for RGBT tiny object detection, addressing these issues through three core innovations: i) the Cross-Layer Fusion Module, fusing high-level visible and low-level thermal features for enhanced semantic and spatial accuracy; ii) the Dynamic Alignment and Scale Refinement module, correcting cross-modal spatial misalignments and preserving multi-scale features; and iii) an optimized label assignment strategy using the GeoShape Similarity Measure for better localization. COXNet achieves a 3.32\% mAP$_{50}$ improvement on the RGBTDronePerson dataset over state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness for robust detection in complex environments.
Authors:Meng Yu, Te Cui, Qitong Chu, Wenjie Song, Yi Yang, Yufeng Yue
Title: TASeg: Text-aware RGB-T Semantic Segmentation based on Fine-tuning Vision Foundation Models
Abstract:
Reliable semantic segmentation of open environments is essential for intelligent systems, yet significant problems remain: 1) Existing RGB-T semantic segmentation models mainly rely on low-level visual features and lack high-level textual information, which struggle with accurate segmentation when categories share similar visual characteristics. 2) While SAM excels in instance-level segmentation, integrating it with thermal images and text is hindered by modality heterogeneity and computational inefficiency. To address these, we propose TASeg, a text-aware RGB-T segmentation framework by using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning technology to adapt vision foundation models. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Feature Fusion Module (DFFM) in the image encoder, which effectively merges features from multiple visual modalities while freezing SAM's original transformer blocks. Additionally, we incorporate CLIP-generated text embeddings in the mask decoder to enable semantic alignment, which further rectifies the classification error and improves the semantic understanding accuracy. Experimental results across diverse datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in challenging scenarios with fewer trainable parameters.
Authors:Mohammadreza Baharani, Ghazal Alinezhad Noghre, Armin Danesh Pazho, Gabriel Maldonado, Hamed Tabkhi
Title: MoFM: A Large-Scale Human Motion Foundation Model
Abstract:
Foundation Models (FM) have increasingly drawn the attention of researchers due to their scalability and generalization across diverse tasks. Inspired by the success of FMs and the principles that have driven advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce MoFM as a novel Motion Foundation Model. MoFM is designed for the semantic understanding of complex human motions in both time and space. To facilitate large-scale training, MotionBook, a comprehensive human motion dictionary of discretized motions is designed and employed. MotionBook utilizes Thermal Cubes to capture spatio-temporal motion heatmaps, applying principles from discrete variational models to encode human movements into discrete units for a more efficient and scalable representation. MoFM, trained on a large corpus of motion data, provides a foundational backbone adaptable to diverse downstream tasks, supporting paradigms such as one-shot, unsupervised, and supervised tasks. This versatility makes MoFM well-suited for a wide range of motion-based applications.
Authors:Meng Yu, Luojie Yang, Xunjie He, Yi Yang, Yufeng Yue
Title: Open-RGBT: Open-vocabulary RGB-T Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation in Open-world Environments
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is a critical technique for effective scene understanding. Traditional RGB-T semantic segmentation models often struggle to generalize across diverse scenarios due to their reliance on pretrained models and predefined categories. Recent advancements in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have facilitated a shift from closed-set to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods. However, these models face challenges in dealing with intricate scenes, primarily due to the heterogeneity between RGB and thermal modalities. To address this gap, we present Open-RGBT, a novel open-vocabulary RGB-T semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we obtain instance-level detection proposals by incorporating visual prompts to enhance category understanding. Additionally, we employ the CLIP model to assess image-text similarity, which helps correct semantic consistency and mitigates ambiguities in category identification. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Open-RGBT achieves superior performance in diverse and challenging real-world scenarios, even in the wild, significantly advancing the field of RGB-T semantic segmentation.
Authors:Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xu Zheng, Dahun Kim, Lin Wang
Title: OmniBind: Teach to Build Unequal-Scale Modality Interaction for Omni-Bind of All
Abstract:
Research on multi-modal learning dominantly aligns the modalities in a unified space at training, and only a single one is taken for prediction at inference. However, for a real machine, e.g., a robot, sensors could be added or removed at any time. Thus, it is crucial to enable the machine to tackle the mismatch and unequal-scale problems of modality combinations between training and inference. In this paper, we tackle these problems from a new perspective: "Modalities Help Modalities". Intuitively, we present OmniBind, a novel two-stage learning framework that can achieve any modality combinations and interaction. It involves teaching data-constrained, a.k.a, student, modalities to be aligned with the well-trained data-abundant, a.k.a, teacher, modalities. This subtly enables the adaptive fusion of any modalities to build a unified representation space for any combinations. Specifically, we propose Cross-modal Alignment Distillation (CAD) to address the unequal-scale problem between student and teacher modalities and effectively align student modalities into the teacher modalities' representation space in stage one. We then propose an Adaptive Fusion (AF) module to fuse any modality combinations and learn a unified representation space in stage two. To address the mismatch problem, we aggregate existing datasets and combine samples from different modalities by the same semantics. This way, we build the first dataset for training and evaluation that consists of teacher (image, text) and student (touch, thermal, event, point cloud, audio) modalities and enables omni-bind for any of them. Extensive experiments on the recognition task show performance gains over prior arts by an average of 4.05 % on the arbitrary modality combination setting. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance for a single modality, e.g., touch, with a 4.34 % gain.
Authors:Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xu Zheng, Jiazhou Zhou, Lin Wang
Title: UniBind: LLM-Augmented Unified and Balanced Representation Space to Bind Them All
Abstract:
We present UniBind, a flexible and efficient approach that learns a unified representation space for seven diverse modalities -- images, text, audio, point cloud, thermal, video, and event data. Existing works, eg., ImageBind, treat the image as the central modality and build an image-centered representation space; however, the space may be sub-optimal as it leads to an unbalanced representation space among all modalities. Moreover, the category names are directly used to extract text embeddings for the downstream tasks, making it hardly possible to represent the semantics of multi-modal data. The 'out-of-the-box' insight of our UniBind is to make the alignment center modality-agnostic and further learn a unified and balanced representation space, empowered by the large language models (LLMs). UniBind is superior in its flexible application to all CLIP-style models and delivers remarkable performance boosts. To make this possible, we 1) construct a knowledge base of text embeddings with the help of LLMs and multi-modal LLMs; 2) adaptively build LLM-augmented class-wise embedding center on top of the knowledge base and encoded visual embeddings; 3) align all the embeddings to the LLM-augmented embedding center via contrastive learning to achieve a unified and balanced representation space. UniBind shows strong zero-shot recognition performance gains over prior arts by an average of 6.36%. Finally, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance, eg., a 6.75% gain on ImageNet, on the multi-modal fine-tuning setting while reducing 90% of the learnable parameters.
Authors:Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xu Zheng, Lin Wang
Title: Image Anything: Towards Reasoning-coherent and Training-free Multi-modal Image Generation
Abstract:
The multifaceted nature of human perception and comprehension indicates that, when we think, our body can naturally take any combination of senses, a.k.a., modalities and form a beautiful picture in our brain. For example, when we see a cattery and simultaneously perceive the cat's purring sound, our brain can construct a picture of a cat in the cattery. Intuitively, generative AI models should hold the versatility of humans and be capable of generating images from any combination of modalities efficiently and collaboratively. This paper presents ImgAny, a novel end-to-end multi-modal generative model that can mimic human reasoning and generate high-quality images. Our method serves as the first attempt in its capacity of efficiently and flexibly taking any combination of seven modalities, ranging from language, audio to vision modalities, including image, point cloud, thermal, depth, and event data. Our key idea is inspired by human-level cognitive processes and involves the integration and harmonization of multiple input modalities at both the entity and attribute levels without specific tuning across modalities. Accordingly, our method brings two novel training-free technical branches: 1) Entity Fusion Branch ensures the coherence between inputs and outputs. It extracts entity features from the multi-modal representations powered by our specially constructed entity knowledge graph; 2) Attribute Fusion Branch adeptly preserves and processes the attributes. It efficiently amalgamates distinct attributes from diverse input modalities via our proposed attribute knowledge graph. Lastly, the entity and attribute features are adaptively fused as the conditional inputs to the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model for image generation. Extensive experiments under diverse modality combinations demonstrate its exceptional capability for visual content creation.
Authors:Jinhao Li, Zijian Chen, Lirong Deng, Changbo Wang, Guangtao Zhai
Title: MMReID-Bench: Unleashing the Power of MLLMs for Effective and Versatile Person Re-identification
Abstract:
Person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve the images of an interested person in the gallery images, with wide applications in medical rehabilitation, abnormal behavior detection, and public security. However, traditional person ReID models suffer from uni-modal capability, leading to poor generalization ability in multi-modal data, such as RGB, thermal, infrared, sketch images, textual descriptions, etc. Recently, the emergence of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) shows a promising avenue for addressing this problem. Despite this potential, existing methods merely regard MLLMs as feature extractors or caption generators, which do not fully unleash their reasoning, instruction-following, and cross-modal understanding capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMReID-Bench, the first multi-task multi-modal benchmark specifically designed for person ReID. The MMReID-Bench includes 20,710 multi-modal queries and gallery images covering 10 different person ReID tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of MLLMs in delivering effective and versatile person ReID. Nevertheless, they also have limitations in handling a few modalities, particularly thermal and infrared data. We hope MMReID-Bench can facilitate the community to develop more robust and generalizable multimodal foundation models for person ReID.
Authors:Ziming Liu, Yizhou Liu, Jeff Gore, Max Tegmark
Title: Neural Thermodynamic Laws for Large Language Model Training
Abstract:
Beyond neural scaling laws, little is known about the laws underlying large language models (LLMs). We introduce Neural Thermodynamic Laws (NTL) -- a new framework that offers fresh insights into LLM training dynamics. On the theoretical side, we demonstrate that key thermodynamic quantities (e.g., temperature, entropy, heat capacity, thermal conduction) and classical thermodynamic principles (e.g., the three laws of thermodynamics and the equipartition theorem) naturally emerge under river-valley loss landscape assumptions. On the practical side, this scientific perspective yields intuitive guidelines for designing learning rate schedules.
Authors:Xin Chen, Ben Kang, Wanting Geng, Jiawen Zhu, Yi Liu, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu
Title: SUTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Single Object Tracking
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a simple yet unified single object tracking (SOT) framework, dubbed SUTrack. It consolidates five SOT tasks (RGB-based, RGB-Depth, RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, RGB-Language Tracking) into a unified model trained in a single session. Due to the distinct nature of the data, current methods typically design individual architectures and train separate models for each task. This fragmentation results in redundant training processes, repetitive technological innovations, and limited cross-modal knowledge sharing. In contrast, SUTrack demonstrates that a single model with a unified input representation can effectively handle various common SOT tasks, eliminating the need for task-specific designs and separate training sessions. Additionally, we introduce a task-recognition auxiliary training strategy and a soft token type embedding to further enhance SUTrack's performance with minimal overhead. Experiments show that SUTrack outperforms previous task-specific counterparts across 11 datasets spanning five SOT tasks. Moreover, we provide a range of models catering edge devices as well as high-performance GPUs, striking a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. We hope SUTrack could serve as a strong foundation for further compelling research into unified tracking models. Code and models are available at github.com/chenxin-dlut/SUTrack.
Authors:Tianxiang Zhu, Qipan Wang, Yibo Lin, Runsheng Wang, Ru Huang
Title: MORE-Stress: Model Order Reduction based Efficient Numerical Algorithm for Thermal Stress Simulation of TSV Arrays in 2.5D/3D IC
Abstract:
Thermomechanical stress induced by through-silicon vias (TSVs) plays an important role in the performance and reliability analysis of 2.5D/3D ICs. While the finite element method (FEM) adopted by commercial software can provide accurate simulation results, it is very time- and memory-consuming for large-scale analysis. Over the past decade, the linear superposition method has been utilized to perform fast thermal stress estimations of TSV arrays, but it suffers from a lack of accuracy. In this paper, we propose MORE-Stress, a novel strict numerical algorithm for efficient thermal stress simulation of TSV arrays based on model order reduction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can realize a 153-504 times reduction in computational time and a 39-115 times reduction in memory usage compared with the commercial software ANSYS, with negligible errors less than 1%. Our algorithm is as efficient as the linear superposition method, with an order of magnitude smaller errors and fast convergence.
Authors:Simiao Lai, Chang Liu, Jiawen Zhu, Ben Kang, Yang Liu, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu
Title: MambaVT: Spatio-Temporal Contextual Modeling for robust RGB-T Tracking
Abstract:
Existing RGB-T tracking algorithms have made remarkable progress by leveraging the global interaction capability and extensive pre-trained models of the Transformer architecture. Nonetheless, these methods mainly adopt imagepair appearance matching and face challenges of the intrinsic high quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism, resulting in constrained exploitation of temporal information. Inspired by the recently emerged State Space Model Mamba, renowned for its impressive long sequence modeling capabilities and linear computational complexity, this work innovatively proposes a pure Mamba-based framework (MambaVT) to fully exploit spatio-temporal contextual modeling for robust visible-thermal tracking. Specifically, we devise the long-range cross-frame integration component to globally adapt to target appearance variations, and introduce short-term historical trajectory prompts to predict the subsequent target states based on local temporal location clues. Extensive experiments show the significant potential of vision Mamba for RGB-T tracking, with MambaVT achieving state-of-the-art performance on four mainstream benchmarks while requiring lower computational costs. We aim for this work to serve as a simple yet strong baseline, stimulating future research in this field. The code and pre-trained models will be made available.
Authors:Penelope Brown, Julie Stephany Berrio Perez, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall
Title: Multi-Modal Camera-Based Detection of Vulnerable Road Users
Abstract:
Vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists represent more than half of global traffic deaths, yet their detection remains challenging in poor lighting, adverse weather, and unbalanced data sets. This paper presents a multimodal detection framework that integrates RGB and thermal infrared imaging with a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model. Training leveraged KITTI, BDD100K, and Teledyne FLIR datasets, with class re-weighting and light augmentations to improve minority-class performance and robustness, experiments show that 640-pixel resolution and partial backbone freezing optimise accuracy and efficiency, while class-weighted losses enhance recall for rare VRUs. Results highlight that thermal models achieve the highest precision, and RGB-to-thermal augmentation boosts recall, demonstrating the potential of multimodal detection to improve VRU safety at intersections.
Authors:Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, Xuefeng Zhu, Hui Li, Shaochuan Zhao, Tao Zhou, Chunyang Cheng, Xiaojun Wu, Josef Kittler
Title: Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking
Abstract:
The development of smart cities has led to the generation of massive amounts of multi-modal data in the context of a range of tasks that enable a comprehensive monitoring of the smart city infrastructure and services. This paper surveys one of the most critical tasks, multi-modal visual object tracking (MMVOT), from the perspective of multimodality analysis. Generally, MMVOT differs from single-modal tracking in four key aspects, data collection, modality alignment and annotation, model designing, and evaluation. Accordingly, we begin with an introduction to the relevant data modalities, laying the groundwork for their integration. This naturally leads to a discussion of challenges of multi-modal data collection, alignment, and annotation. Subsequently, existing MMVOT methods are categorised, based on different ways to deal with visible (RGB) and X modalities: programming the auxiliary X branch with replicated or non-replicated experimental configurations from the RGB branch. Here X can be thermal infrared (T), depth (D), event (E), near infrared (NIR), language (L), or sonar (S). The final part of the paper addresses evaluation and benchmarking. In summary, we undertake an omni survey of all aspects of multi-modal visual object tracking (VOT), covering six MMVOT tasks and featuring 338 references in total. In addition, we discuss the fundamental rhetorical question: Is multi-modal tracking always guaranteed to provide a superior solution to unimodal tracking with the help of information fusion, and if not, in what circumstances its application is beneficial. Furthermore, for the first time in this field, we analyse the distributions of the object categories in the existing MMVOT datasets, revealing their pronounced long-tail nature and a noticeable lack of animal categories when compared with RGB datasets.
Authors:Muhammad Haris Khan, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dmitrii Iarchuk, Yara Mahmoud, Daria Trinitatova, Issatay Tokmurziyev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Title: HapticVLM: VLM-Driven Texture Recognition Aimed at Intelligent Haptic Interaction
Abstract:
This paper introduces HapticVLM, a novel multimodal system that integrates vision-language reasoning with deep convolutional networks to enable real-time haptic feedback. HapticVLM leverages a ConvNeXt-based material recognition module to generate robust visual embeddings for accurate identification of object materials, while a state-of-the-art Vision-Language Model (Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct) infers ambient temperature from environmental cues. The system synthesizes tactile sensations by delivering vibrotactile feedback through speakers and thermal cues via a Peltier module, thereby bridging the gap between visual perception and tactile experience. Experimental evaluations demonstrate an average recognition accuracy of 84.67% across five distinct auditory-tactile patterns and a temperature estimation accuracy of 86.7% based on a tolerance-based evaluation method with an 8°C margin of error across 15 scenarios. Although promising, the current study is limited by the use of a small set of prominent patterns and a modest participant pool. Future work will focus on expanding the range of tactile patterns and increasing user studies to further refine and validate the system's performance. Overall, HapticVLM presents a significant step toward context-aware, multimodal haptic interaction with potential applications in virtual reality, and assistive technologies.
Authors:Shentong Mo, Russ Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency, Paul Pu Liang
Title: IoT-LM: Large Multisensory Language Models for the Internet of Things
Abstract:
The Internet of Things (IoT) network integrating billions of smart physical devices embedded with sensors, software, and communication technologies is a critical and rapidly expanding component of our modern world. The IoT ecosystem provides a rich source of real-world modalities such as motion, thermal, geolocation, imaging, depth, sensors, and audio to recognize the states of humans and physical objects. Machine learning presents a rich opportunity to automatically process IoT data at scale, enabling efficient inference for understanding human wellbeing, controlling physical devices, and interconnecting smart cities. To realize this potential, we introduce IoT-LM, an open-source large multisensory language model tailored for the IoT ecosystem. IoT-LM is enabled by two technical contributions: the first is MultiIoT, the most expansive unified IoT dataset to date, encompassing over 1.15 million samples from 12 modalities and 8 tasks prepared for multisensory pre-training and instruction-tuning. The second is a new multisensory multitask adapter layer to condition pre-trained large language models on multisensory IoT data. Not only does IoT-LM yield substantial improvements on 8 supervised IoT classification tasks, but it also demonstrates new interactive question-answering, reasoning, and dialog capabilities conditioned on IoT sensors. We release IoT-LM's data sources and new multisensory language modeling framework.
Authors:Baris Kavas, Efe C. Balta, Michael R. Tucker, Raamadaas Krishnadas, Alisa Rupenyan, John Lygeros, Markus Bambach
Title: In-situ Controller Autotuning by Bayesian Optimization for Closed-loop Feedback Control of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Process
Abstract:
Open-loop control of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM) has enabled the production of complex, high-criticality parts for various industries. This method relies on static parameter sets from extensive experimentation and simulations, hoping they remain stable and defect-free in production. Closed-loop control of LPBF can further enhance process stability and reduce defects despite complex thermal histories, process noise, hardware drift, and unexpected perturbations. Controller performance depends on parameter tuning, traditionally a manual, expertise-driven process with no guarantee of optimal performance and limited transferability between systems. This study proposes Bayesian Optimization (BO) to automate in-layer controller tuning by leveraging LPBF's layer-to-layer repetitive nature. Two approaches are introduced: online tuning, adjusting parameters iteratively during the process, and offline tuning, conducted in a setup such as laser exposures on a bare metal plate. These methods are experimentally implemented on an in-layer PI controller, and the performance is investigated on two wedge geometries prone to overheating. Results show that BO effectively tunes controllers using either method, significantly reducing overheating in controlled wedge specimens compared to uncontrolled ones. This study presents the first printed parts controlled by an in-layer controller subjected to microstructural analysis. Findings reveal partial presence of lack-of-fusion porosities due to insufficient laser power assigned by the controller, highlighting a significant challenge for utilizing laser power controllers. In summary, BO presents a promising method for automatic in-layer controller tuning in LPBF, enhancing control precision and mitigating overheating in production parts.
Authors:Shentong Mo, Louis-Philippe Morency, Russ Salakhutdinov, Paul Pu Liang
Title: MultiIoT: Benchmarking Machine Learning for the Internet of Things
Abstract:
The next generation of machine learning systems must be adept at perceiving and interacting with the physical world through a diverse array of sensory channels. Commonly referred to as the `Internet of Things (IoT)' ecosystem, sensory data from motion, thermal, geolocation, depth, wireless signals, video, and audio are increasingly used to model the states of physical environments and the humans inside them. Despite the potential for understanding human wellbeing, controlling physical devices, and interconnecting smart cities, the community has seen limited benchmarks for building machine learning systems for IoT. Existing efforts are often specialized to a single sensory modality or prediction task, which makes it difficult to study and train large-scale models across many IoT sensors and tasks. To accelerate the development of new machine learning technologies for IoT, this paper proposes MultiIoT, the most expansive and unified IoT benchmark to date, encompassing over 1.15 million samples from 12 modalities and 8 real-world tasks. MultiIoT introduces unique challenges involving (1) generalizable learning from many sensory modalities, (2) multimodal interactions across long temporal ranges, (3) extreme heterogeneity due to unique structure and noise topologies in real-world sensors, and (4) complexity during training and inference. We evaluate a comprehensive set of models on MultiIoT, including modality and task-specific methods, multisensory and multitask supervised models, and large multisensory foundation models. Our results highlight opportunities for ML to make a significant impact in IoT, but many challenges in scalable learning from heterogeneous, long-range, and imperfect sensory modalities still persist. We release all code and data to accelerate future research in machine learning for IoT.
Authors:Hao Wang, Hongkui Zheng, Kai He, Abolfazl Razi
Title: AtomDiffuser: Time-Aware Degradation Modeling for Drift and Beam Damage in STEM Imaging
Abstract:
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) plays a critical role in modern materials science, enabling direct imaging of atomic structures and their evolution under external interferences. However, interpreting time-resolved STEM data remains challenging due to two entangled degradation effects: spatial drift caused by mechanical and thermal instabilities, and beam-induced signal loss resulting from radiation damage. These factors distort both geometry and intensity in complex, temporally correlated ways, making it difficult for existing methods to explicitly separate their effects or model material dynamics at atomic resolution. In this work, we present AtomDiffuser, a time-aware degradation modeling framework that disentangles sample drift and radiometric attenuation by predicting an affine transformation and a spatially varying decay map between any two STEM frames. Unlike traditional denoising or registration pipelines, our method leverages degradation as a physically heuristic, temporally conditioned process, enabling interpretable structural evolutions across time. Trained on synthetic degradation processes, AtomDiffuser also generalizes well to real-world cryo-STEM data. It further supports high-resolution degradation inference and drift alignment, offering tools for visualizing and quantifying degradation patterns that correlate with radiation-induced atomic instabilities.
Authors:Arunkumar Rathinam, Leo Pauly, Abd El Rahman Shabayek, Wassim Rharbaoui, Anis Kacem, Vincent Gaudillière, Djamila Aouada
Title: Hybrid Attention for Robust RGB-T Pedestrian Detection in Real-World Conditions
Abstract:
Multispectral pedestrian detection has gained significant attention in recent years, particularly in autonomous driving applications. To address the challenges posed by adversarial illumination conditions, the combination of thermal and visible images has demonstrated its advantages. However, existing fusion methods rely on the critical assumption that the RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) image pairs are fully overlapping. These assumptions often do not hold in real-world applications, where only partial overlap between images can occur due to sensors configuration. Moreover, sensor failure can cause loss of information in one modality. In this paper, we propose a novel module called the Hybrid Attention (HA) mechanism as our main contribution to mitigate performance degradation caused by partial overlap and sensor failure, i.e. when at least part of the scene is acquired by only one sensor. We propose an improved RGB-T fusion algorithm, robust against partial overlap and sensor failure encountered during inference in real-world applications. We also leverage a mobile-friendly backbone to cope with resource constraints in embedded systems. We conducted experiments by simulating various partial overlap and sensor failure scenarios to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its superiority in handling real-world challenges.
Authors:Pierfrancesco Siena, Paquale Claudio Africa, Michele Girfoglio, Gianluigi Rozza
Title: On the accuracy and efficiency of reduced order models: towards real-world applications
Abstract:
This chapter provides an extended overview about Reduced Order Models (ROMs), with a focus on their features in terms of efficiency and accuracy. In particular, the aim is to browse the more common ROM frameworks, considering both intrusive and data-driven approaches. We present the validation of such techniques against several test cases. The first one is an academic benchmark, the thermal block problem, where a Poisson equation is considered. Here a classic intrusive ROM framework based on a Galerkin projection scheme is employed. The second and third test cases come from real-world applications, the one related to the investigation of the blood flow patterns in a patient specific coronary arteries configuration where the Navier Stokes equations are addressed and the other one concerning the granulation process within pharmaceutical industry where a fluid-particle system is considered. Here we employ two data-driven ROM approaches showing a very relevant trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. In the last part of the contribution, two novel technological platforms, ARGOS and ATLAS, are presented. They are designed to provide a user-friendly access to data-driven models for real-time predictions for complex biomedical and industrial problems.
Authors:Nicola Clinco, Michele Girfoglio, Annalisa Quaini, Gianluigi Rozza
Title: Computational study of numerical flux schemes for mesoscale atmospheric flows in a Finite Volume framework
Abstract:
We develop, and implement in a Finite Volume environment, a density-based approach for the Euler equations written in conservative form using density, momentum, and total energy as variables. Under simplifying assumptions, these equations are used to describe non-hydrostatic atmospheric flow. The well-balancing of the approach is ensured by a local hydrostatic reconstruction updated in runtime during the simulation to keep the numerical error under control. To approximate the solution of the Riemann problem, we consider four methods: Roe-Pike, HLLC, AUSM+-up and HLLC-AUSM. We assess our density-based approach and compare the accuracy of these four approximated Riemann solvers using two two classical benchmarks, namely the smooth rising thermal bubble and the density current.
Authors:Shoubin Yu, Jaehong Yoon, Mohit Bansal
Title: CREMA: Generalizable and Efficient Video-Language Reasoning via Multimodal Modular Fusion
Abstract:
Despite impressive advancements in recent multimodal reasoning approaches, they are still limited in flexibility and efficiency, as these models typically process only a few fixed modality inputs and require updates to numerous parameters. This paper tackles these critical challenges and proposes CREMA, a generalizable, highly efficient, and modular modality-fusion framework that can incorporate any new modality to enhance video reasoning. We first augment multiple informative modalities (such as optical flow, 3D point cloud, audio, thermal heatmap, and touch map) from given videos without extra human annotation by leveraging sensors or existing pre-trained models. Next, we introduce a query transformer with multiple parameter-efficient modules associated with each accessible modality. It projects diverse modality features to the LLM token embedding space, allowing the model to integrate different data types for response generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel progressive multimodal fusion design supported by a lightweight fusion module and modality-sequential training strategy. It helps compress information across various assisting modalities, maintaining computational efficiency in the LLM while improving performance. We validate our method on 7 video-language reasoning tasks assisted by diverse modalities, including conventional VideoQA and Video-Audio/3D/Touch/Thermal QA, and achieve better/equivalent performance against strong multimodal LLMs, including OneLLM, BLIP-2, and SeViLA while reducing over 90% trainable parameters. We provide extensive analyses of CREMA, including the impact of each modality on reasoning domains, the design of the fusion module, and example visualizations.
Authors:Yunqi Shi, Chengrui Gao, Wanqi Ren, Siyuan Xu, Ke Xue, Mingxuan Yuan, Chao Qian, Zhi-Hua Zhou
Title: Open3DBench: Open-Source Benchmark for 3D-IC Backend Implementation and PPA Evaluation
Abstract:
This work introduces Open3DBench, an open-source 3D-IC backend implementation benchmark built upon the OpenROAD-flow-scripts framework, enabling comprehensive evaluation of power, performance, area, and thermal metrics. Our proposed flow supports modular integration of 3D partitioning, placement, 3D routing, RC extraction, and thermal simulation, aligning with advanced 3D flows that rely on commercial tools and in-house scripts. We present two foundational 3D placement algorithms: Open3D-Tiling, which emphasizes regular macro placement, and Open3D-DMP, which enhances wirelength optimization through cross-die co-placement with analytical placer DREAMPlace. Experimental results show significant improvements in area (51.19%), wirelength (24.06%), timing (30.84%), and power (5.72%) compared to 2D flows. The results also highlight that better wirelength does not necessarily lead to PPA gain, emphasizing the need of developing PPA-driven methods. Open3DBench offers a standardized, reproducible platform for evaluating 3D EDA methods, effectively bridging the gap between open-source tools and commercial solutions in 3D-IC design.
Authors:Cheng-Hau Yang, Guglielmo Scovazzi, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian
Title: A Shifted Boundary Method for Thermal Flows
Abstract:
This paper presents an incomplete Octree mesh implementation of the Shifted Boundary Method (Octree-SBM) for multiphysics simulations of coupled flow and heat transfer. Specifically, a semi-implicit formulation of the thermal Navier-Stokes equations is used to accelerate the simulations while maintaining accuracy. The SBM enables precise enforcement of field and derivative boundary conditions on cut (intercepted) elements, allowing for accurate flux calculations near complex geometries, when using non-boundary fitted meshes. Both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are implemented within the SBM framework, with results demonstrating that the SBM ensures precise enforcement of Neumann boundary conditions on Octree-based meshes. We illustrate this approach by simulating flows across different regimes, spanning several orders of magnitude in both the Rayleigh number ($Ra \sim 10^3$--$10^9$) and the Reynolds number ($Re \sim 10^0$--$10^4$), and covering the laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow regimes. Coupled thermal-flow phenomena and their statistics across all these regimes are accurately captured without any additional numerical treatments, beyond a Residual-based Variational Multiscale formulation (RB-VMS). This approach offers a reliable and efficient solution for complex geometries, boundary conditions and flow regimes in computational multiphysics simulations.
Authors:María Teresa García-Ordás, Héctor Alaiz-Moretón, José-Luis Casteleiro-Roca, Esteban Jove, José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Isaías García-Rodríguez, Héctor Quintián, José Luis Calvo-Rolle
Title: Clustering Techniques Selection for a Hybrid Regression Model: A Case Study Based on a Solar Thermal System
Abstract:
This work addresses the performance comparison between four clustering techniques with the objective of achieving strong hybrid models in supervised learning tasks. A real dataset from a bio-climatic house named Sotavento placed on experimental wind farm and located in Xermade (Lugo) in Galicia (Spain) has been collected. Authors have chosen the thermal solar generation system in order to study how works applying several cluster methods followed by a regression technique to predict the output temperature of the system. With the objective of defining the quality of each clustering method two possible solutions have been implemented. The first one is based on three unsupervised learning metrics (Silhouette, Calinski-Harabasz and Davies-Bouldin) while the second one, employs the most common error measurements for a regression algorithm such as Multi Layer Perceptron.
Authors:Ruolin Xing, Mengwei Xu, Ao Zhou, Qing Li, Yiran Zhang, Feng Qian, Shangguang Wang
Title: Deciphering the Enigma of Satellite Computing with COTS Devices: Measurement and Analysis
Abstract:
In the wake of the rapid deployment of large-scale low-Earth orbit satellite constellations, exploiting the full computing potential of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices in these environments has become a pressing issue. However, understanding this problem is far from straightforward due to the inherent differences between the terrestrial infrastructure and the satellite platform in space. In this paper, we take an important step towards closing this knowledge gap by presenting the first measurement study on the thermal control, power management, and performance of COTS computing devices on satellites. Our measurements reveal that the satellite platform and COTS computing devices significantly interplay in terms of the temperature and energy, forming the main constraints on satellite computing. Further, we analyze the critical factors that shape the characteristics of onboard COTS computing devices. We provide guidelines for future research on optimizing the use of such devices for computing purposes. Finally, we have released the datasets to facilitate further study in satellite computing.
Authors:Guang Yang, Jie Li, Hanxiao Lei, Xinbo Gao
Title: A Multi-scale Information Integration Framework for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion aims at generating a fused image containing the intensity and detail information of source images, and the key issue is effectively measuring and integrating the complementary information of multi-modality images from the same scene. Existing methods mostly adopt a simple weight in the loss function to decide the information retention of each modality rather than adaptively measuring complementary information for different image pairs. In this study, we propose a multi-scale dual attention (MDA) framework for infrared and visible image fusion, which is designed to measure and integrate complementary information in both structure and loss function at the image and patch level. In our method, the residual downsample block decomposes source images into three scales first. Then, dual attention fusion block integrates complementary information and generates a spatial and channel attention map at each scale for feature fusion. Finally, the output image is reconstructed by the residual reconstruction block. Loss function consists of image-level, feature-level and patch-level three parts, of which the calculation of the image-level and patch-level two parts are based on the weights generated by the complementary information measurement. Indeed, to constrain the pixel intensity distribution between the output and infrared image, a style loss is added. Our fusion results perform robust and informative across different scenarios. Qualitative and quantitative results on two datasets illustrate that our method is able to preserve both thermal radiation and detailed information from two modalities and achieve comparable results compared with the other state-of-the-art methods. Ablation experiments show the effectiveness of our information integration architecture and adaptively measure complementary information retention in the loss function.
Authors:Dhruv Gamdha, Kumar Saurabh, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Adarsh Krishnamurthy
Title: High-Resolution Thermal Simulation Framework for Extrusion-based Additive Manufacturing of Complex Geometries
Abstract:
Accurate simulation of the printing process is essential for improving print quality, reducing waste, and optimizing the printing parameters of extrusion-based additive manufacturing. Traditional additive manufacturing simulations are very compute-intensive and are not scalable to simulate even moderately sized geometries. In this paper, we propose a general framework for creating a digital twin of the dynamic printing process by performing physics simulations with the intermediate print geometries. Our framework takes a general extrusion-based additive manufacturing G-code, generates an analysis-suitable voxelized geometry representation from the print schedule, and performs physics-based (transient thermal) simulations of the printing process. Our approach leverages adaptive octree meshes for both geometry representation as well as for fast simulations to address real-time predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by simulating the printing of complex geometries at high voxel resolutions with both sparse and dense infills. Our results show that this approach scales to high voxel resolutions and can predict the transient heat distribution as the print progresses. Because the simulation runs faster than real print time, the same engine could, in principle, feed thermal predictions back to the machine controller (e.g., to adjust fan speed or extrusion rate). The present study establishes the computational foundations for a real-time digital twin, which can be used for closed control loop control in the future.
Authors:Mengmeng Wang, Teli Ma, Shuo Xin, Xiaojun Hou, Jiazheng Xing, Guang Dai, Jingdong Wang, Yong Liu
Title: Visual Object Tracking across Diverse Data Modalities: A Review
Abstract:
Visual Object Tracking (VOT) is an attractive and significant research area in computer vision, which aims to recognize and track specific targets in video sequences where the target objects are arbitrary and class-agnostic. The VOT technology could be applied in various scenarios, processing data of diverse modalities such as RGB, thermal infrared and point cloud. Besides, since no one sensor could handle all the dynamic and varying environments, multi-modal VOT is also investigated. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent progress of both single-modal and multi-modal VOT, especially the deep learning methods. Specifically, we first review three types of mainstream single-modal VOT, including RGB, thermal infrared and point cloud tracking. In particular, we conclude four widely-used single-modal frameworks, abstracting their schemas and categorizing the existing inheritors. Then we summarize four kinds of multi-modal VOT, including RGB-Depth, RGB-Thermal, RGB-LiDAR and RGB-Language. Moreover, the comparison results in plenty of VOT benchmarks of the discussed modalities are presented. Finally, we provide recommendations and insightful observations, inspiring the future development of this fast-growing literature.
Authors:Jianxin Huang, Jiahang Li, Ning Jia, Yuxiang Sun, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Title: RoadFormer+: Delivering RGB-X Scene Parsing through Scale-Aware Information Decoupling and Advanced Heterogeneous Feature Fusion
Abstract:
Task-specific data-fusion networks have marked considerable achievements in urban scene parsing. Among these networks, our recently proposed RoadFormer successfully extracts heterogeneous features from RGB images and surface normal maps and fuses these features through attention mechanisms, demonstrating compelling efficacy in RGB-Normal road scene parsing. However, its performance significantly deteriorates when handling other types/sources of data or performing more universal, all-category scene parsing tasks. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces RoadFormer+, an efficient, robust, and adaptable model capable of effectively fusing RGB-X data, where ``X'', represents additional types/modalities of data such as depth, thermal, surface normal, and polarization. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid feature decoupling encoder to extract heterogeneous features and decouple them into global and local components. These decoupled features are then fused through a dual-branch multi-scale heterogeneous feature fusion block, which employs parallel Transformer attentions and convolutional neural network modules to merge multi-scale features across different scales and receptive fields. The fused features are subsequently fed into a decoder to generate the final semantic predictions. Notably, our proposed RoadFormer+ ranks first on the KITTI Road benchmark and achieves state-of-the-art performance in mean intersection over union on the Cityscapes, MFNet, FMB, and ZJU datasets. Moreover, it reduces the number of learnable parameters by 65\% compared to RoadFormer. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/RoadFormerPlus.
Authors:Mathias Viborg Andersen, Ross Greer, Andreas Møgelmose, Mohan Trivedi
Title: Learning to Find Missing Video Frames with Synthetic Data Augmentation: A General Framework and Application in Generating Thermal Images Using RGB Cameras
Abstract:
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in intelligent vehicles rely on accurate driver perception within the vehicle cabin, often leveraging a combination of sensing modalities. However, these modalities operate at varying rates, posing challenges for real-time, comprehensive driver state monitoring. This paper addresses the issue of missing data due to sensor frame rate mismatches, introducing a generative model approach to create synthetic yet realistic thermal imagery. We propose using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs), specifically comparing the pix2pix and CycleGAN architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that pix2pix outperforms CycleGAN, and utilizing multi-view input styles, especially stacked views, enhances the accuracy of thermal image generation. Moreover, the study evaluates the model's generalizability across different subjects, revealing the importance of individualized training for optimal performance. The findings suggest the potential of generative models in addressing missing frames, advancing driver state monitoring for intelligent vehicles, and underscoring the need for continued research in model generalization and customization.
Authors:Xue-Feng Zhu, Tianyang Xu, Jian Zhao, Jia-Wei Liu, Kai Wang, Gang Wang, Jianan Li, Qiang Wang, Lei Jin, Zheng Zhu, Junliang Xing, Xiao-Jun Wu
Title: Evidential Detection and Tracking Collaboration: New Problem, Benchmark and Algorithm for Robust Anti-UAV System
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many areas, including transportation, surveillance, and military. However, their potential for safety and privacy violations is an increasing issue and highly limits their broader applications, underscoring the critical importance of UAV perception and defense (anti-UAV). Still, previous works have simplified such an anti-UAV task as a tracking problem, where the prior information of UAVs is always provided; such a scheme fails in real-world anti-UAV tasks (i.e. complex scenes, indeterminate-appear and -reappear UAVs, and real-time UAV surveillance). In this paper, we first formulate a new and practical anti-UAV problem featuring the UAVs perception in complex scenes without prior UAVs information. To benchmark such a challenging task, we propose the largest UAV dataset dubbed AntiUAV600 and a new evaluation metric. The AntiUAV600 comprises 600 video sequences of challenging scenes with random, fast, and small-scale UAVs, with over 723K thermal infrared frames densely annotated with bounding boxes. Finally, we develop a novel anti-UAV approach via an evidential collaboration of global UAVs detection and local UAVs tracking, which effectively tackles the proposed problem and can serve as a strong baseline for future research. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms SOTA approaches and validate the ability of AntiUAV600 to enhance UAV perception performance due to its large scale and complexity. Our dataset, pretrained models, and source codes will be released publically.
Authors:Lyubomyr Demkiv, Massimiliano Ruffo, Giuseppe Silano, Jan Bednar, Martin Saska
Title: An Application of Stereo Thermal Vision for Preliminary Inspection of Electrical Power Lines by MAVs
Abstract:
An application of stereo thermal vision to perform preliminary inspection operations of electrical power lines by a particular class of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), aka Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), is presented in this paper. The proposed hardware and software setup allows the detection of overheated power equipment, one of the major causes of power outages. The stereo vision complements the GPS information by finely detecting the potential source of damage while also providing a measure of the harm extension. The reduced sizes and the light weight of the vehicle enable to survey areas otherwise difficult to access with standard UAVs. Gazebo simulations and real flight experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed setup.
Authors:Yan Zhang, Wen Yang, Chang Xu, Qian Hu, Fang Xu, Gui-Song Xia
Title: Mitigating the Impact of Prominent Position Shift in Drone-based RGBT Object Detection
Abstract:
Drone-based RGBT object detection plays a crucial role in many around-the-clock applications. However, real-world drone-viewed RGBT data suffers from the prominent position shift problem, i.e., the position of a tiny object differs greatly in different modalities. For instance, a slight deviation of a tiny object in the thermal modality will induce it to drift from the main body of itself in the RGB modality. Considering RGBT data are usually labeled on one modality (reference), this will cause the unlabeled modality (sensed) to lack accurate supervision signals and prevent the detector from learning a good representation. Moreover, the mismatch of the corresponding feature point between the modalities will make the fused features confusing for the detection head. In this paper, we propose to cast the cross-modality box shift issue as the label noise problem and address it on the fly via a novel Mean Teacher-based Cross-modality Box Correction head ensemble (CBC). In this way, the network can learn more informative representations for both modalities. Furthermore, to alleviate the feature map mismatch problem in RGBT fusion, we devise a Shifted Window-Based Cascaded Alignment (SWCA) module. SWCA mines long-range dependencies between the spatially unaligned features inside shifted windows and cascaded aligns the sensed features with the reference ones. Extensive experiments on two drone-based RGBT object detection datasets demonstrate that the correction results are both visually and quantitatively favorable, thereby improving the detection performance. In particular, our CBC module boosts the precision of the sensed modality ground truth by 25.52 aSim points. Overall, the proposed detector achieves an mAP_50 of 43.55 points on RGBTDronePerson and surpasses a state-of-the-art method by 8.6 mAP50 on a shift subset of DroneVehicle dataset. The code and data will be made publicly available.
Authors:Jiahang Li, Peng Yun, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Title: HAPNet: Toward Superior RGB-Thermal Scene Parsing via Hybrid, Asymmetric, and Progressive Heterogeneous Feature Fusion
Abstract:
Data-fusion networks have shown significant promise for RGB-thermal scene parsing. However, the majority of existing studies have relied on symmetric duplex encoders for heterogeneous feature extraction and fusion, paying inadequate attention to the inherent differences between RGB and thermal modalities. Recent progress in vision foundation models (VFMs) trained through self-supervision on vast amounts of unlabeled data has proven their ability to extract informative, general-purpose features. However, this potential has yet to be fully leveraged in the domain. In this study, we take one step toward this new research area by exploring a feasible strategy to fully exploit VFM features for RGB-thermal scene parsing. Specifically, we delve deeper into the unique characteristics of RGB and thermal modalities, thereby designing a hybrid, asymmetric encoder that incorporates both a VFM and a convolutional neural network. This design allows for more effective extraction of complementary heterogeneous features, which are subsequently fused in a dual-path, progressive manner. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary task to further enrich the local semantics of the fused features, thereby improving the overall performance of RGB-thermal scene parsing. Our proposed HAPNet, equipped with all these components, demonstrates superior performance compared to all other state-of-the-art RGB-thermal scene parsing networks, achieving top ranks across three widely used public RGB-thermal scene parsing datasets. We believe this new paradigm has opened up new opportunities for future developments in data-fusion scene parsing approaches.
Authors:Tianxiang Chen, Zhentao Tan, Qi Chu, Yue Wu, Bin Liu, Nenghai Yu
Title: TCI-Former: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer for Infrared Small Target Detection
Abstract:
Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is critical to national security and has been extensively applied in military areas. ISTD aims to segment small target pixels from background. Most ISTD networks focus on designing feature extraction blocks or feature fusion modules, but rarely describe the ISTD process from the feature map evolution perspective. In the ISTD process, the network attention gradually shifts towards target areas. We abstract this process as the directional movement of feature map pixels to target areas through convolution, pooling and interactions with surrounding pixels, which can be analogous to the movement of thermal particles constrained by surrounding variables and particles. In light of this analogy, we propose Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer (TCI-Former) based on the theoretical principles of thermal conduction. According to thermal conduction differential equation in heat dynamics, we derive the pixel movement differential equation (PMDE) in the image domain and further develop two modules: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Attention (TCIA) and Thermal Conduction Boundary Module (TCBM). TCIA incorporates finite difference method with PMDE to reach a numerical approximation so that target body features can be extracted. To further remove errors in boundary areas, TCBM is designed and supervised by boundary masks to refine target body features with fine boundary details. Experiments on IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Authors:Kun Li, Zhichun Li, Yuetao Chen, Zixuan Wang, Yiwei Zhang, Liang Yuan, Haipeng Jia, Yunquan Zhang, Ting Cao, Mao Yang
Title: Gamify Stencil Dwarf on Cloud for Democratizing Scientific Computing
Abstract:
Stencil computation is one of the most important kernels in various scientific computing. Nowadays, most Stencil-driven scientific computing still relies heavily on supercomputers, suffering from expensive access, poor scalability, and duplicated optimizations. This paper proposes Tetris, the first system for high-performance Stencil on heterogeneous CPU+GPU, towards democratizing Stencil-driven scientific computing on Cloud. In Tetris, polymorphic tiling tetrominoes are first proposed to bridge different hardware architectures and various application contexts with a perfect spatial and temporal tessellation automatically. Tetris is contributed by three main components: (1) Underlying hardware characteristics are first captured to achieve a sophisticated Pattern Mapping by register-level tetrominoes; (2) An efficient Locality Enhancer is first presented for data reuse on spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously by cache/SMEM-level tetrominoes; (3) A novel Concurrent Scheduler is first designed to exploit the full potential of on-cloud memory and computing power by memory-level tetrominoes. Tetris is orthogonal to (and complements) the optimizations or deployments for a wide variety of emerging and legacy scientific computing applications. Results of thermal diffusion simulation demonstrate that the performance is improved by 29.6x, reducing time cost from day to hour, while preserving the original accuracy.
Authors:Jiahuan Long, Wen Yao, Tingsong Jiang, Chao Ma
Title: CDUPatch: Color-Driven Universal Adversarial Patch Attack for Dual-Modal Visible-Infrared Detectors
Abstract:
Adversarial patches are widely used to evaluate the robustness of object detection systems in real-world scenarios. These patches were initially designed to deceive single-modal detectors (e.g., visible or infrared) and have recently been extended to target visible-infrared dual-modal detectors. However, existing dual-modal adversarial patch attacks have limited attack effectiveness across diverse physical scenarios. To address this, we propose CDUPatch, a universal cross-modal patch attack against visible-infrared object detectors across scales, views, and scenarios. Specifically, we observe that color variations lead to different levels of thermal absorption, resulting in temperature differences in infrared imaging. Leveraging this property, we propose an RGB-to-infrared adapter that maps RGB patches to infrared patches, enabling unified optimization of cross-modal patches. By learning an optimal color distribution on the adversarial patch, we can manipulate its thermal response and generate an adversarial infrared texture. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale clipping strategy and construct a new visible-infrared dataset, MSDrone, which contains aerial vehicle images in varying scales and perspectives. These data augmentation strategies enhance the robustness of our patch in real-world conditions. Experiments on four benchmark datasets (e.g., DroneVehicle, LLVIP, VisDrone, MSDrone) show that our method outperforms existing patch attacks in the digital domain. Extensive physical tests further confirm strong transferability across scales, views, and scenarios.
Authors:Noman Bashir, Yasra Chandio, David Irwin, Fatima M. Anwar, Jeremy Gummeson, Prashant Shenoy
Title: Jointly Managing Electrical and Thermal Energy in Solar- and Battery-powered Computer Systems
Abstract:
Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded systems without access to external power sources, it is also increasingly important in designing sustainable larger-scale systems for edge applications. For sustained operations, such systems must consider not only the electrical energy but also the thermal energy available in the environment in their design and operation. Unfortunately, prior work generally ignores the impact of thermal effects, and instead implicitly assumes ideal temperatures. To address the problem, we develop a thermodynamic model that captures the interplay of electrical and thermal energy in environmentally-powered computer systems. The model captures the effect of environmental conditions, the system's physical properties, and workload scheduling on performance. In evaluating our model, we distill the thermal effects that impact these systems using a small-scale prototype and a programmable incubator. We then leverage our model to show how considering these thermal effects in designing and operating environmentally-powered computer systems of varying scales can improve their energy-efficiency, performance, and availability.
Authors:Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi, Tingsong Jiang, Wen Yao, Ling Tian, Xiaoqian Chen
Title: Adversarial Infrared Blocks: A Multi-view Black-box Attack to Thermal Infrared Detectors in Physical World
Abstract:
Infrared imaging systems have a vast array of potential applications in pedestrian detection and autonomous driving, and their safety performance is of great concern. However, few studies have explored the safety of infrared imaging systems in real-world settings. Previous research has used physical perturbations such as small bulbs and thermal "QR codes" to attack infrared imaging detectors, but such methods are highly visible and lack stealthiness. Other researchers have used hot and cold blocks to deceive infrared imaging detectors, but this method is limited in its ability to execute attacks from various angles. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel physical attack called adversarial infrared blocks (AdvIB). By optimizing the physical parameters of the adversarial infrared blocks, this method can execute a stealthy black-box attack on thermal imaging system from various angles. We evaluate the proposed method based on its effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness. Our physical tests show that the proposed method achieves a success rate of over 80% under most distance and angle conditions, validating its effectiveness. For stealthiness, our method involves attaching the adversarial infrared block to the inside of clothing, enhancing its stealthiness. Additionally, we test the proposed method on advanced detectors, and experimental results demonstrate an average attack success rate of 51.2%, proving its robustness. Overall, our proposed AdvIB method offers a promising avenue for conducting stealthy, effective and robust black-box attacks on thermal imaging system, with potential implications for real-world safety and security applications.
Authors:Minghui Lin, Shu Wang, Xiang Wang, Jianhua Tang, Longbin Fu, Zhengrong Zuo, Nong Sang
Title: DMPT: Decoupled Modality-aware Prompt Tuning for Multi-modal Object Re-identification
Abstract:
Current multi-modal object re-identification approaches based on large-scale pre-trained backbones (i.e., ViT) have displayed remarkable progress and achieved excellent performance. However, these methods usually adopt the standard full fine-tuning paradigm, which requires the optimization of considerable backbone parameters, causing extensive computational and storage requirements. In this work, we propose an efficient prompt-tuning framework tailored for multi-modal object re-identification, dubbed DMPT, which freezes the main backbone and only optimizes several newly added decoupled modality-aware parameters. Specifically, we explicitly decouple the visual prompts into modality-specific prompts which leverage prior modality knowledge from a powerful text encoder and modality-independent semantic prompts which extract semantic information from multi-modal inputs, such as visible, near-infrared, and thermal-infrared. Built upon the extracted features, we further design a Prompt Inverse Bind (PromptIBind) strategy that employs bind prompts as a medium to connect the semantic prompt tokens of different modalities and facilitates the exchange of complementary multi-modal information, boosting final re-identification results. Experimental results on multiple common benchmarks demonstrate that our DMPT can achieve competitive results to existing state-of-the-art methods while requiring only 6.5% fine-tuning of the backbone parameters.
Authors:Huthaifa I. Ashqar, Ahmed Jaber, Taqwa I. Alhadidi, Mohammed Elhenawy
Title: Advancing Object Detection in Transportation with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Review and Empirical Testing
Abstract:
This study aims to comprehensively review and empirically evaluate the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and Large Vision Models (VLMs) in object detection for transportation systems. In the first fold, we provide a background about the potential benefits of MLLMs in transportation applications and conduct a comprehensive review of current MLLM technologies in previous studies. We highlight their effectiveness and limitations in object detection within various transportation scenarios. The second fold involves providing an overview of the taxonomy of end-to-end object detection in transportation applications and future directions. Building on this, we proposed empirical analysis for testing MLLMs on three real-world transportation problems that include object detection tasks namely, road safety attributes extraction, safety-critical event detection, and visual reasoning of thermal images. Our findings provide a detailed assessment of MLLM performance, uncovering both strengths and areas for improvement. Finally, we discuss practical limitations and challenges of MLLMs in enhancing object detection in transportation, thereby offering a roadmap for future research and development in this critical area.
Authors:Olaf Borsboom, Arnab Bhadra, Mauro Salazar, Theo Hofman
Title: Geometric Scaling Laws for Axial Flux Permanent Magnet Motors in In-Wheel Powertrain Topologies
Abstract:
In this paper, we present geometric scaling models for axial flux motors (AFMs) to be used for in-wheel powertrain design optimization purposes. We first present a vehicle and powertrain model, with emphasis on the electric motor model. We construct the latter by formulating the analytical scaling laws for AFMs, based on the scaling concept of RFMs from the literature, specifically deriving the model of the main loss component in electric motors: the copper losses. We further present separate scaling models of motor parameters, losses and thermal models, as well as the torque limits and cost, as a function of the design variables. Second, we validate these scaling laws with several experiments leveraging high-fidelity finite-element simulations. Finally, we define an optimization problem that minimizes the energy consumption over a drive cycle, optimizing the motor size and transmission ratio for a wide range of electric vehicle powertrain topologies. In our study, we observe that the all-wheel drive topology equipped with in-wheel AFMs is the most efficient, but also generates the highest material cost.
Authors:Huthaifa I. Ashqar, Taqwa I. Alhadidi, Mohammed Elhenawy, Nour O. Khanfar
Title: The Use of Multimodal Large Language Models to Detect Objects from Thermal Images: Transportation Applications
Abstract:
The integration of thermal imaging data with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes an exciting opportunity for improving the safety and functionality of autonomous driving systems and many Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. This study investigates whether MLLMs can understand complex images from RGB and thermal cameras and detect objects directly. Our goals were to 1) assess the ability of the MLLM to learn from information from various sets, 2) detect objects and identify elements in thermal cameras, 3) determine whether two independent modality images show the same scene, and 4) learn all objects using different modalities. The findings showed that both GPT-4 and Gemini were effective in detecting and classifying objects in thermal images. Similarly, the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for pedestrian classification was 70.39% and 81.48%, respectively. Moreover, the MAPE for bike, car, and motorcycle detection were 78.4%, 55.81%, and 96.15%, respectively. Gemini produced MAPE of 66.53%, 59.35% and 78.18% respectively. This finding further demonstrates that MLLM can identify thermal images and can be employed in advanced imaging automation technologies for ITS applications.
Authors:Giovanni Bambini, Alessandro Ottaviano, Christian Conficoni, Andrea Tilli, Luca Benini, Andrea Bartolini
Title: Modeling and Controlling Many-Core HPC Processors: an Alternative to PID and Moving Average Algorithms
Abstract:
The race towards performance increase and computing power has led to chips with heterogeneous and complex designs, integrating an ever-growing number of cores on the same monolithic chip or chiplet silicon die. Higher integration density, compounded with the slowdown of technology-driven power reduction, implies that power and thermal management become increasingly relevant. Unfortunately, existing research lacks a detailed analysis and modeling of thermal, power, and electrical coupling effects and how they have to be jointly considered to perform dynamic control of complex and heterogeneous Multi-Processor System on Chips (MPSoCs). To close the gap, in this work, we first provide a detailed thermal and power model targeting a modern High Performance Computing (HPC) MPSoC. We consider real-world coupling effects such as actuators' non-idealities and the exponential relation between the dissipated power, the temperature state, and the voltage level in a single processing element. We analyze how these factors affect the control algorithm behavior and the type of challenges that they pose. Based on the analysis, we propose a thermal capping strategy inspired by Fuzzy control theory to replace the state-of-the-art PID controller, as well as a root-finding iterative method to optimally choose the shared voltage value among cores grouped in the same voltage domain. We evaluate the proposed controller with model-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop co-simulations. We show an improvement over state-of-the-art methods of up to 5x the maximum exceeded temperature while providing an average of 3.56% faster application execution runtime across all the evaluation scenarios.
Authors:Jeongyun Kim, Myung-Hwan Jeon, Sangwoo Jung, Wooseong Yang, Minwoo Jung, Jaeho Shin, Ayoung Kim
Title: TRansPose: Large-Scale Multispectral Dataset for Transparent Object
Abstract:
Transparent objects are encountered frequently in our daily lives, yet recognizing them poses challenges for conventional vision sensors due to their unique material properties, not being well perceived from RGB or depth cameras. Overcoming this limitation, thermal infrared cameras have emerged as a solution, offering improved visibility and shape information for transparent objects. In this paper, we present TRansPose, the first large-scale multispectral dataset that combines stereo RGB-D, thermal infrared (TIR) images, and object poses to promote transparent object research. The dataset includes 99 transparent objects, encompassing 43 household items, 27 recyclable trashes, 29 chemical laboratory equivalents, and 12 non-transparent objects. It comprises a vast collection of 333,819 images and 4,000,056 annotations, providing instance-level segmentation masks, ground-truth poses, and completed depth information. The data was acquired using a FLIR A65 thermal infrared (TIR) camera, two Intel RealSense L515 RGB-D cameras, and a Franka Emika Panda robot manipulator. Spanning 87 sequences, TRansPose covers various challenging real-life scenarios, including objects filled with water, diverse lighting conditions, heavy clutter, non-transparent or translucent containers, objects in plastic bags, and multi-stacked objects. TRansPose dataset can be accessed from the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/transpose-dataset
Authors:Jorn van Kampen, Thomas Herrmann, Theo Hofman, Mauro Salazar
Title: Optimal Endurance Race Strategies for a Fully Electric Race Car under Thermal Constraints
Abstract:
This paper presents a bi-level optimization framework to compute the maximum-distance race strategies for a fully electric endurance race car, whilst accounting for the low-level vehicle dynamics and the thermal limitations of the powertrain components. Thereby, the lower level computes the minimum-stint-time for a given charge time and stint length, whilst the upper level leverages that information to jointly optimize the stint length, charge time and number of pit stops, in order to maximize the driven distance in the course of a fixed-time endurance race. Specifically, we first extend a convex lap time optimization framework to capture low-level vehicle dynamics and thermal models, and use it to create a map linking the charge time and stint length to the achievable stint time. Second, we leverage the map to frame the maximum-race-distance problem as a mixed-integer second order conic program that can be efficiently solved in a few seconds to the global optimum with off-the-shelf optimization algorithms. Finally, we showcase our framework for a simulated 6h race around the Zandvoort circuit. Our results show that the optimal race strategy can involve partially charging the battery, and that, compared to the case where the stints are optimized for a fixed number of pit stops, jointly optimizing the stints and number of pit stops can significantly increase the driven distance and hence race performance by several laps.
Authors:Xiaolei Zhu, Xiaofei Jin, Ziyang Kang, Chonghui Sun, Junjie Feng, Dingwen Hu, Zengyi Wang, Hanyue Zhuang, Qian Zheng, Huajin Tang, Shi Gu, Xin Du, De Ma, Gang Pan
Title: DarwinWafer: A Wafer-Scale Neuromorphic Chip
Abstract:
Neuromorphic computing promises brain-like efficiency, yet today's multi-chip systems scale over PCBs and incur orders-of-magnitude penalties in bandwidth, latency, and energy, undermining biological algorithms and system efficiency. We present DarwinWafer, a hyperscale system-on-wafer that replaces off-chip interconnects with wafer-scale, high-density integration of 64 Darwin3 chiplets on a 300 mm silicon interposer. A GALS NoC within each chiplet and an AER-based asynchronous wafer fabric with hierarchical time-step synchronization provide low-latency, coherent operation across the wafer. Each chiplet implements 2.35 M neurons and 0.1 B synapses, yielding 0.15 B neurons and 6.4 B synapses per wafer.At 333 MHz and 0.8 V, DarwinWafer consumes ~100 W and achieves 4.9 pJ/SOP, with 64 TSOPS peak throughput (0.64 TSOPS/W). Realization is enabled by a holistic chiplet-interposer co-design flow (including an in-house interposer-bump planner with early SI/PI and electro-thermal closure) and a warpage-tolerant assembly that fans out I/O via PCBlets and compliant pogo-pin connections, enabling robust, demountable wafer-to-board integration. Measurements confirm 10 mV supply droop and a uniform thermal profile (34-36 °C) under ~100 W. Application studies demonstrate whole-brain simulations: two zebrafish brains per chiplet with high connectivity fidelity (Spearman r = 0.896) and a mouse brain mapped across 32 chiplets (r = 0.645). To our knowledge, DarwinWafer represents a pioneering demonstration of wafer-scale neuromorphic computing, establishing a viable and scalable path toward large-scale, brain-like computation on silicon by replacing PCB-level interconnects with high-density, on-wafer integration.
Authors:Zhehu Yuan, Jinyang Liu, Guanqun Song, Ting Zhu
Title: Heat: Satellite's meat is GPU's poison
Abstract:
In satellite applications, managing thermal conditions is a significant challenge due to the extreme fluctuations in temperature during orbital cycles. One of the solutions is to heat the satellite when it is not exposed to sunlight, which could protect the satellites from extremely low temperatures. However, heat dissipation is necessary for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to operate properly and efficiently. In this way, this paper investigates the use of GPU as a means of passive heating in low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Our approach uses GPUs to generate heat during the eclipse phase of satellite orbits, substituting traditional heating systems, while the GPUs are also cooled down during this process. The results highlight the potential advantages and limitations of this method, including the cost implications, operational restrictions, and the technical complexity involved. Also, this paper explores the thermal behavior of GPUs under different computational loads, specifically focusing on execution-dominated and FLOP-dominated workloads. Moreover, this paper discusses future directions for improving GPU-based heating solutions, including further cost analysis, system optimization, and practical testing in real satellite missions.
Authors:Khemraj Shukla, Zongren Zou, Chi Hin Chan, Additi Pandey, Zhicheng Wang, George Em Karniadakis
Title: NeuroSEM: A hybrid framework for simulating multiphysics problems by coupling PINNs and spectral elements
Abstract:
Multiphysics problems that are characterized by complex interactions among fluid dynamics, heat transfer, structural mechanics, and electromagnetics, are inherently challenging due to their coupled nature. While experimental data on certain state variables may be available, integrating these data with numerical solvers remains a significant challenge. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown promising results in various engineering disciplines, particularly in handling noisy data and solving inverse problems in partial differential equations (PDEs). However, their effectiveness in forecasting nonlinear phenomena in multiphysics regimes, particularly involving turbulence, is yet to be fully established. This study introduces NeuroSEM, a hybrid framework integrating PINNs with the high-fidelity Spectral Element Method (SEM) solver, Nektar++. NeuroSEM leverages the strengths of both PINNs and SEM, providing robust solutions for multiphysics problems. PINNs are trained to assimilate data and model physical phenomena in specific subdomains, which are then integrated into the Nektar++ solver. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of NeuroSEM for thermal convection in cavity flow and flow past a cylinder. We applied NeuroSEM to the Rayleigh-Bénard convection system, including cases with missing thermal boundary conditions and noisy datasets, and to real particle image velocimetry (PIV) data to capture flow patterns characterized by horseshoe vortical structures. The framework's plug-and-play nature facilitates its extension to other multiphysics or multiscale problems. Furthermore, NeuroSEM is optimized for efficient execution on emerging integrated GPU-CPU architectures. This hybrid approach enhances the accuracy and efficiency of simulations, making it a powerful tool for tackling complex engineering challenges in various scientific domains.
Authors:Prithwish Basu Roy, Mudit Bhargava, Chia-Yun Chang, Ellen Hui, Nikhil Gupta, Ramesh Karri, Hammond Pearce
Title: A survey of Digital Manufacturing Hardware and Software Trojans
Abstract:
Digital Manufacturing (DM) refers to the on-going adoption of smarter, more agile manufacturing processes and cyber-physical systems. This includes modern techniques and technologies such as Additive Manufacturing (AM)/3D printing, as well as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the broader trend toward Industry 4.0. However, this adoption is not without risks: with a growing complexity and connectivity, so too grows the cyber-physical attack surface. Here, malicious actors might seek to steal sensitive information or sabotage products or production lines, causing financial and reputational loss. Of particular concern are where such malicious attacks may enter the complex supply chains of DM systems as Trojans -- malicious modifications that may trigger their payloads at later times or stages of the product lifecycle. In this work, we thus present a comprehensive overview of the threats posed by Trojans in Digital Manufacturing. We cover both hardware and software Trojans which may exist in products or their production and supply lines. From this, we produce a novel taxonomy for classifying and analyzing these threats, and elaborate on how different side channels (e.g. visual, thermal, acoustic, power, and magnetic) may be used to either enhance the impact of a given Trojan or utilized as part of a defensive strategy. Other defenses are also presented -- including hardware, web-, and software-related. To conclude, we discuss seven different case studies and elaborate how they fit into our taxonomy. Overall, this paper presents a detailed survey of the Trojan landscape for Digital Manufacturing: threats, defenses, and the importance of implementing secure practices.
Authors:Taimeng Fu, Huai Yu, Wen Yang, Yaoyu Hu, Sebastian Scherer
Title: Targetless Extrinsic Calibration of Stereo Cameras, Thermal Cameras, and Laser Sensors in the Wild
Abstract:
The fusion of multi-modal sensors has become increasingly popular in autonomous driving and intelligent robots since it can provide richer information than any single sensor, enhance reliability in complex environments. Multi-sensor extrinsic calibration is one of the key factors of sensor fusion. However, such calibration is difficult due to the variety of sensor modalities and the requirement of calibration targets and human labor. In this paper, we demonstrate a new targetless cross-modal calibration framework by focusing on the extrinsic transformations among stereo cameras, thermal cameras, and laser sensors. Specifically, the calibration between stereo and laser is conducted in 3D space by minimizing the registration error, while the thermal extrinsic to the other two sensors is estimated by optimizing the alignment of the edge features. Our method requires no dedicated targets and performs the multi-sensor calibration in a single shot without human interaction. Experimental results show that the calibration framework is accurate and applicable in general scenes.
Authors:Xiaoqian Chen, Zhiqiang Gong, Xiaoyu Zhao, Weien Zhou, Wen Yao
Title: A Machine Learning Surrogate Modeling Benchmark for Temperature Field Reconstruction of Heat-Source Systems
Abstract:
Temperature field reconstruction of heat source systems (TFR-HSS) with limited monitoring sensors occurred in thermal management plays an important role in real time health detection system of electronic equipment in engineering. However, prior methods with common interpolations usually cannot provide accurate reconstruction performance as required. In addition, there exists no public dataset for widely research of reconstruction methods to further boost the reconstruction performance and engineering applications. To overcome this problem, this work develops a machine learning modelling benchmark for TFR-HSS task. First, the TFR-HSS task is mathematically modelled from real-world engineering problem and four types of numerically modellings have been constructed to transform the problem into discrete mapping forms. Then, this work proposes a set of machine learning modelling methods, including the general machine learning methods and the deep learning methods, to advance the state-of-the-art methods over temperature field reconstruction. More importantly, this work develops a novel benchmark dataset, namely Temperature Field Reconstruction Dataset (TFRD), to evaluate these machine learning modelling methods for the TFR-HSS task. Finally, a performance analysis of typical methods is given on TFRD, which can be served as the baseline results on this benchmark.
Authors:Yuepeng Zhang, Yu Chen, Yuda Li, Shaoyuan Li, Xiang Yin
Title: Online Synthesis of Control Barrier Functions with Local Occupancy Grid Maps for Safe Navigation in Unknown Environments
Abstract:
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as an effective and non-invasive safety filter for ensuring the safety of autonomous systems in dynamic environments with formal guarantees. However, most existing works on CBF synthesis focus on fully known settings. Synthesizing CBFs online based on perception data in unknown environments poses particular challenges. Specifically, this requires the construction of CBFs from high-dimensional data efficiently in real time. This paper proposes a new approach for online synthesis of CBFs directly from local Occupancy Grid Maps (OGMs). Inspired by steady-state thermal fields, we show that the smoothness requirement of CBFs corresponds to the solution of the steady-state heat conduction equation with suitably chosen boundary conditions. By leveraging the sparsity of the coefficient matrix in Laplace's equation, our approach allows for efficient computation of safety values for each grid cell in the map. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, the results show that our CBFs can be synthesized in an average of milliseconds on a 200 * 200 grid map, highlighting its real-time applicability.
Authors:Avisek Naug, Antonio Guillen, Ricardo Luna Gutiérrez, Vineet Gundecha, Dejan Markovikj, Lekhapriya Dheeraj Kashyap, Lorenz Krause, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Sajad Mousavi, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Soumyendu Sarkar
Title: PyDCM: Custom Data Center Models with Reinforcement Learning for Sustainability
Abstract:
The increasing global emphasis on sustainability and reducing carbon emissions is pushing governments and corporations to rethink their approach to data center design and operation. Given their high energy consumption and exponentially large computational workloads, data centers are prime candidates for optimizing power consumption, especially in areas such as cooling and IT energy usage. A significant challenge in this pursuit is the lack of a configurable and scalable thermal data center model that offers an end-to-end pipeline. Data centers consist of multiple IT components whose geometric configuration and heat dissipation make thermal modeling difficult. This paper presents PyDCM, a customizable Data Center Model implemented in Python, that allows users to create unique configurations of IT equipment with custom server specifications and geometric arrangements of IT cabinets. The use of vectorized thermal calculations makes PyDCM orders of magnitude faster (30 times) than current Energy Plus modeling implementations and scales sublinearly with the number of CPUs. Also, PyDCM enables the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning via the Gymnasium wrapper to optimize data center cooling and offers a user-friendly platform for testing various data center design prototypes.
Authors:Kazuma Kobayashi, Jaewan Park, Qibang Liu, Seid Koric, Diab Abueidda, Syed Bahauddin Alam
Title: When Network Architecture Meets Physics: Deep Operator Learning for Coupled Multiphysics
Abstract:
Scientific applications increasingly demand real-time surrogate models that can capture the behavior of strongly coupled multiphysics systems driven by multiple input functions, such as in thermo-mechanical and electro-thermal processes. While neural operator frameworks, such as Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets), have shown considerable success in single-physics settings, their extension to multiphysics problems remains poorly understood. In particular, the challenge of learning nonlinear interactions between tightly coupled physical fields has received little systematic attention. This study addresses a foundational question: should the architectural design of a neural operator reflect the strength of physical coupling it aims to model? To answer this, we present the first comprehensive, architecture-aware evaluation of DeepONet variants across three regimes: single-physics, weakly coupled, and strongly coupled multiphysics systems. We consider a reaction-diffusion equation with dual spatial inputs, a nonlinear thermo-electrical problem with bidirectional coupling through temperature-dependent conductivity, and a viscoplastic thermo-mechanical model of steel solidification governed by transient phase-driven interactions. Two operator-learning frameworks, the classical DeepONet and its sequential GRU-based extension, S-DeepONet, are benchmarked using both single-branch and multi-branch (MIONet-style) architectures. Our results demonstrate that architectural alignment with physical coupling is crucial: single-branch networks significantly outperform multi-branch counterparts in strongly coupled settings, whereas multi-branch encodings offer advantages for decoupled or single-physics problems. Once trained, these surrogates achieve full-field predictions up to 1.8e4 times faster than high-fidelity finite-element solvers, without compromising solution accuracy.
Authors:Alfreds Lapkovskis, Boris Sedlak, Sindri Magnússon, Schahram Dustdar, Praveen Kumar Donta
Title: Benchmarking Dynamic SLO Compliance in Distributed Computing Continuum Systems
Abstract:
Ensuring Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in large-scale architectures, such as Distributed Computing Continuum Systems (DCCS), is challenging due to their heterogeneous nature and varying service requirements across different devices and applications. Additionally, unpredictable workloads and resource limitations lead to fluctuating performance and violated SLOs. To improve SLO compliance in DCCS, one possibility is to apply machine learning; however, the design choices are often left to the developer. To that extent, we provide a benchmark of Active Inference -- an emerging method from neuroscience -- against three established reinforcement learning algorithms (Deep Q-Network, Advantage Actor-Critic, and Proximal Policy Optimization). We consider a realistic DCCS use case: an edge device running a video conferencing application alongside a WebSocket server streaming videos. Using one of the respective algorithms, we continuously monitor key performance metrics, such as latency and bandwidth usage, to dynamically adjust parameters -- including the number of streams, frame rate, and resolution -- to optimize service quality and user experience. To test algorithms' adaptability to constant system changes, we simulate dynamically changing SLOs and both instant and gradual data-shift scenarios, such as network bandwidth limitations and fluctuating device thermal states. Although the evaluated algorithms all showed advantages and limitations, our findings demonstrate that Active Inference is a promising approach for ensuring SLO compliance in DCCS, offering lower memory usage, stable CPU utilization, and fast convergence.
Authors:Qibang Liu, Pengfei Cai, Diab Abueidda, Sagar Vyas, Seid Koric, Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, Philippe Geubelle
Title: Univariate Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Morphogenic Patterns Design in Frontal Polymerization-Based Manufacturing
Abstract:
Under some initial and boundary conditions, the rapid reaction-thermal diffusion process taking place during frontal polymerization (FP) destabilizes the planar mode of front propagation, leading to spatially varying, complex hierarchical patterns in thermoset polymeric materials. Although modern reaction-diffusion models can predict the patterns resulting from unstable FP, the inverse design of patterns, which aims to retrieve process conditions that produce a desired pattern, remains an open challenge due to the non-unique and non-intuitive mapping between process conditions and manufactured patterns. In this work, we propose a probabilistic generative model named univariate conditional variational autoencoder (UcVAE) for the inverse design of hierarchical patterns in FP-based manufacturing. Unlike the cVAE, which encodes both the design space and the design target, the UcVAE encodes only the design space. In the encoder of the UcVAE, the number of training parameters is significantly reduced compared to the cVAE, resulting in a shorter training time while maintaining comparable performance. Given desired pattern images, the trained UcVAE can generate multiple process condition solutions that produce high-fidelity hierarchical patterns.
Authors:Raisa Bentay Hossain, Farid Ahmed, Kazuma Kobayashi, Seid Koric, Diab Abueidda, Syed Bahauddin Alam
Title: Virtual Sensing-Enabled Digital Twin Framework for Real-Time Monitoring of Nuclear Systems Leveraging Deep Neural Operators
Abstract:
Effective real-time monitoring is a foundation of digital twin technology, crucial for detecting material degradation and maintaining the structural integrity of nuclear systems to ensure both safety and operational efficiency. Traditional physical sensor systems face limitations such as installation challenges, high costs, and difficulty measuring critical parameters in hard-to-reach or harsh environments, often resulting in incomplete data coverage. Machine learning-driven virtual sensors, integrated within a digital twin framework, offer a transformative solution by enhancing physical sensor capabilities to monitor critical degradation indicators like pressure, velocity, and turbulence. However, conventional machine learning models struggle with real-time monitoring due to the high-dimensional nature of reactor data and the need for frequent retraining. This paper introduces the use of Deep Operator Networks (DeepONet) as a core component of a digital twin framework to predict key thermal-hydraulic parameters in the hot leg of an AP-1000 Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). DeepONet serves as a dynamic and scalable virtual sensor by accurately mapping the interplay between operational input parameters and spatially distributed system behaviors. In this study, DeepONet is trained with different operational conditions, which relaxes the requirement of continuous retraining, making it suitable for online and real-time prediction components for digital twin. Our results show that DeepONet achieves accurate predictions with low mean squared error and relative L2 error and can make predictions on unknown data 1400 times faster than traditional CFD simulations. This speed and accuracy enable DeepONet to synchronize with the physical system in real-time, functioning as a dynamic virtual sensor that tracks degradation-contributing conditions.
Authors:Aniket Datar, Anuj Pokhrel, Mohammad Nazeri, Madhan B. Rao, Chenhui Pan, Yufan Zhang, Andre Harrison, Maggie Wigness, Philip R. Osteen, Jinwei Ye, Xuesu Xiao
Title: M2P2: A Multi-Modal Passive Perception Dataset for Off-Road Mobility in Extreme Low-Light Conditions
Abstract:
Long-duration, off-road, autonomous missions require robots to continuously perceive their surroundings regardless of the ambient lighting conditions. Most existing autonomy systems heavily rely on active sensing, e.g., LiDAR, RADAR, and Time-of-Flight sensors, or use (stereo) visible light imaging sensors, e.g., color cameras, to perceive environment geometry and semantics. In scenarios where fully passive perception is required and lighting conditions are degraded to an extent that visible light cameras fail to perceive, most downstream mobility tasks such as obstacle avoidance become impossible. To address such a challenge, this paper presents a Multi-Modal Passive Perception dataset, M2P2, to enable off-road mobility in low-light to no-light conditions. We design a multi-modal sensor suite including thermal, event, and stereo RGB cameras, GPS, two Inertia Measurement Units (IMUs), as well as a high-resolution LiDAR for ground truth, with a novel multi-sensor calibration procedure that can efficiently transform multi-modal perceptual streams into a common coordinate system. Our 10-hour, 32 km dataset also includes mobility data such as robot odometry and actions and covers well-lit, low-light, and no-light conditions, along with paved, on-trail, and off-trail terrain. Our results demonstrate that off-road mobility is possible through only passive perception in extreme low-light conditions using end-to-end learning and classical planning. The project website can be found at https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/M2P2/
Authors:Changqing Ye, Shubin Fu, Eric T. Chung
Title: A fast cosine transformation accelerated method for predicting effective thermal conductivity
Abstract:
Predicting effective thermal conductivity by solving a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) defined on a high-resolution Representative Volume Element (RVE) is a computationally intensive task. In this paper, we tackle the task by proposing an efficient and implementation-friendly computational method that can fully leverage the computing power offered by hardware accelerators, namely, graphical processing units (GPUs). We first employ the Two-Point Flux-Approximation scheme to discretize the PDE and then utilize the preconditioned conjugate gradient method to solve the resulting algebraic linear system. The construction of the preconditioner originates from FFT-based homogenization methods, and an engineered linear programming technique is utilized to determine the homogeneous reference parameters. The fundamental observation presented in this paper is that the preconditioner system can be effectively solved using multiple Fast Cosine Transformations (FCT) and parallel tridiagonal matrix solvers. Regarding the fact that default multiple FCTs are unavailable on the CUDA platform, we detail how to derive FCTs from FFTs with nearly optimal memory usage. Numerical experiments including the stability comparison with standard preconditioners are conducted for 3D RVEs. Our performance reports indicate that the proposed method can achieve a $5$-fold acceleration on the GPU platform over the pure CPU platform and solve the problems with $512^3$ degrees of freedom and reasonable contrast ratios in less than $30$ seconds.
Authors:Shashank Kushwaha, Jaewan Park, Seid Koric, Junyan He, Iwona Jasiuk, Diab Abueidda
Title: Advanced Deep Operator Networks to Predict Multiphysics Solution Fields in Materials Processing and Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
Unlike classical artificial neural networks, which require retraining for each new set of parametric inputs, the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), a lately introduced deep learning framework, approximates linear and nonlinear solution operators by taking parametric functions (infinite-dimensional objects) as inputs and mapping them to complete solution fields. In this paper, two newly devised DeepONet formulations with sequential learning and Residual U-Net (ResUNet) architectures are trained for the first time to simultaneously predict complete thermal and mechanical solution fields under variable loading, loading histories, process parameters, and even variable geometries. Two real-world applications are demonstrated: 1- coupled thermo-mechanical analysis of steel continuous casting with multiple visco-plastic constitutive laws and 2- sequentially coupled direct energy deposition for additive manufacturing. Despite highly challenging spatially variable target stress distributions, DeepONets can infer reasonably accurate full-field temperature and stress solutions several orders of magnitude faster than traditional and highly optimized finite-element analysis (FEA), even when FEA simulations are run on the latest high-performance computing platforms. The proposed DeepONet model's ability to provide field predictions almost instantly for unseen input parameters opens the door for future preliminary evaluation and design optimization of these vital industrial processes.
Authors:Tianxiang Ye, Qi Wu, Junyuan Deng, Guoqing Liu, Liu Liu, Songpengcheng Xia, Liang Pang, Wenxian Yu, Ling Pei
Title: Thermal-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from an Infrared Camera
Abstract:
In recent years, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated significant potential in encoding highly-detailed 3D geometry and environmental appearance, positioning themselves as a promising alternative to traditional explicit representation for 3D scene reconstruction. However, the predominant reliance on RGB imaging presupposes ideal lighting conditions: a premise frequently unmet in robotic applications plagued by poor lighting or visual obstructions. This limitation overlooks the capabilities of infrared (IR) cameras, which excel in low-light detection and present a robust alternative under such adverse scenarios. To tackle these issues, we introduce Thermal-NeRF, the first method that estimates a volumetric scene representation in the form of a NeRF solely from IR imaging. By leveraging a thermal mapping and structural thermal constraint derived from the thermal characteristics of IR imaging, our method showcasing unparalleled proficiency in recovering NeRFs in visually degraded scenes where RGB-based methods fall short. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that Thermal-NeRF can achieve superior quality compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we contribute a dataset for IR-based NeRF applications, paving the way for future research in IR NeRF reconstruction.
Authors:Yining Hong, Zishuo Zheng, Peihao Chen, Yian Wang, Junyan Li, Chuang Gan
Title: MultiPLY: A Multisensory Object-Centric Embodied Large Language Model in 3D World
Abstract:
Human beings possess the capability to multiply a melange of multisensory cues while actively exploring and interacting with the 3D world. Current multi-modal large language models, however, passively absorb sensory data as inputs, lacking the capacity to actively interact with the objects in the 3D environment and dynamically collect their multisensory information. To usher in the study of this area, we propose MultiPLY, a multisensory embodied large language model that could incorporate multisensory interactive data, including visual, audio, tactile, and thermal information into large language models, thereby establishing the correlation among words, actions, and percepts. To this end, we first collect Multisensory Universe, a large-scale multisensory interaction dataset comprising 500k data by deploying an LLM-powered embodied agent to engage with the 3D environment. To perform instruction tuning with pre-trained LLM on such generated data, we first encode the 3D scene as abstracted object-centric representations and then introduce action tokens denoting that the embodied agent takes certain actions within the environment, as well as state tokens that represent the multisensory state observations of the agent at each time step. In the inference time, MultiPLY could generate action tokens, instructing the agent to take the action in the environment and obtain the next multisensory state observation. The observation is then appended back to the LLM via state tokens to generate subsequent text or action tokens. We demonstrate that MultiPLY outperforms baselines by a large margin through a diverse set of embodied tasks involving object retrieval, tool use, multisensory captioning, and task decomposition.
Authors:Febin Sunny, Amin Shafiee, Benoit Charbonnier, Mahdi Nikdast, Sudeep Pasricha
Title: COMET: A Cross-Layer Optimized Optical Phase Change Main Memory Architecture
Abstract:
Traditional DRAM-based main memory systems face several challenges with memory refresh overhead, high latency, and low throughput as the industry moves towards smaller DRAM cells. These issues have been exacerbated by the emergence of data-intensive applications in recent years. Memories based on phase change materials (PCMs) offer promising solutions to these challenges. PCMs store data in the material's phase, which can shift between amorphous and crystalline states when external thermal energy is supplied. This is often achieved using electrical pulses. Alternatively, using laser pulses and integration with silicon photonics offers a unique opportunity to realize high-bandwidth and low-latency photonic memories. Such a memory system may in turn open the possibility of realizing fully photonic computing systems. But to realize photonic memories, several challenges that are unique to the photonic domain such as crosstalk, optical loss management, and laser power overhead have to be addressed. In this work, we present COMET, the first cross-layer optimized optical main memory architecture that uses PCMs. In architecting COMET, we explore how to use silicon photonics and PCMs together to design a large-scale main memory system while addressing associated challenges. We explore challenges and propose solutions at the PCM cell, photonic memory circuit, and memory architecture levels. Based on our evaluations, COMET offers 7.1x better bandwidth, 15.1x lower EPB, and 3x lower latencies than the best-known prior work on photonic main memory architecture design.
Authors:Shibo Zhao, Yuanjun Gao, Tianhao Wu, Damanpreet Singh, Rushan Jiang, Haoxiang Sun, Mansi Sarawata, Yuheng Qiu, Warren Whittaker, Ian Higgins, Yi Du, Shaoshu Su, Can Xu, John Keller, Jay Karhade, Lucas Nogueira, Sourojit Saha, Ji Zhang, Wenshan Wang, Chen Wang, Sebastian Scherer
Title: SubT-MRS Dataset: Pushing SLAM Towards All-weather Environments
Abstract:
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental task for numerous applications such as autonomous navigation and exploration. Despite many SLAM datasets have been released, current SLAM solutions still struggle to have sustained and resilient performance. One major issue is the absence of high-quality datasets including diverse all-weather conditions and a reliable metric for assessing robustness. This limitation significantly restricts the scalability and generalizability of SLAM technologies, impacting their development, validation, and deployment. To address this problem, we present SubT-MRS, an extremely challenging real-world dataset designed to push SLAM towards all-weather environments to pursue the most robust SLAM performance. It contains multi-degraded environments including over 30 diverse scenes such as structureless corridors, varying lighting conditions, and perceptual obscurants like smoke and dust; multimodal sensors such as LiDAR, fisheye camera, IMU, and thermal camera; and multiple locomotions like aerial, legged, and wheeled robots. We develop accuracy and robustness evaluation tracks for SLAM and introduced novel robustness metrics. Comprehensive studies are performed, revealing new observations, challenges, and opportunities for future research.
Authors:Ruoshi Liu, Carl Vondrick
Title: Humans as Light Bulbs: 3D Human Reconstruction from Thermal Reflection
Abstract:
The relatively hot temperature of the human body causes people to turn into long-wave infrared light sources. Since this emitted light has a larger wavelength than visible light, many surfaces in typical scenes act as infrared mirrors with strong specular reflections. We exploit the thermal reflections of a person onto objects in order to locate their position and reconstruct their pose, even if they are not visible to a normal camera. We propose an analysis-by-synthesis framework that jointly models the objects, people, and their thermal reflections, which allows us to combine generative models with differentiable rendering of reflections. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show our approach works in highly challenging cases, such as with curved mirrors or when the person is completely unseen by a normal camera.
Authors:Lanhu Wu, Zilin Gao, Hao Fei, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu
Title: LEAF-Mamba: Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion State Space Model for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify the most conspicuous objects in a scene with the incorporation of depth cues. Existing methods mainly rely on CNNs, limited by the local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers that suffer from the cost of quadratic complexity, posing a challenge in balancing performance and computational efficiency. Recently, state space models (SSM), Mamba, have shown great potential for modeling long-range dependency with linear complexity. However, directly applying SSM to RGB-D SOD may lead to deficient local semantics as well as the inadequate cross-modality fusion. To address these issues, we propose a Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion state space model (LEAF-Mamba) that contains two novel components: 1) a local emphatic state space module (LE-SSM) to capture multi-scale local dependencies for both modalities. 2) an SSM-based adaptive fusion module (AFM) for complementary cross-modality interaction and reliable cross-modality integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LEAF-Mamba consistently outperforms 16 state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD methods in both efficacy and efficiency. Moreover, our method can achieve excellent performance on the RGB-T SOD task, proving a powerful generalization ability.
Authors:Jialun Pei, Diandian Guo, Donghui Yang, Zhixi Li, Yuxin Feng, Long Ma, Bo Du, Pheng-Ann Heng
Title: Benchmarking Laparoscopic Surgical Image Restoration and Beyond
Abstract:
In laparoscopic surgery, a clear and high-quality visual field is critical for surgeons to make accurate intraoperative decisions. However, persistent visual degradation, including smoke generated by energy devices, lens fogging from thermal gradients, and lens contamination due to blood or tissue fluid splashes during surgical procedures, severely impair visual clarity. These degenerations can seriously hinder surgical workflow and pose risks to patient safety. To systematically investigate and address various forms of surgical scene degradation, we introduce a real-world open-source surgical image restoration dataset covering laparoscopic environments, called SurgClean, which involves multi-type image restoration tasks, e.g., desmoking, defogging, and desplashing. SurgClean comprises 1,020 images with diverse degradation types and corresponding paired reference labels. Based on SurgClean, we establish a standardized evaluation benchmark and provide performance for 22 representative generic task-specific image restoration approaches, including 12 generic and 10 task-specific image restoration approaches. Experimental results reveal substantial performance gaps relative to clinical requirements, highlighting a critical opportunity for algorithm advancements in intelligent surgical restoration. Furthermore, we explore the degradation discrepancies between surgical and natural scenes from structural perception and semantic understanding perspectives, providing fundamental insights for domain-specific image restoration research. Our work aims to empower the capabilities of restoration algorithms to increase surgical environments and improve the efficiency of clinical procedures.
Authors:Ge Meng, Zhongnan Cai, Jingyan Tu, Yingying Wang, Chenxin Li, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding
Title: PCMamba: Physics-Informed Cross-Modal State Space Model for Dual-Camera Compressive Hyperspectral Imaging
Abstract:
Panchromatic (PAN) -assisted Dual-Camera Compressive Hyperspectral Imaging (DCCHI) is a key technology in snapshot hyperspectral imaging. Existing research primarily focuses on exploring spectral information from 2D compressive measurements and spatial information from PAN images in an explicit manner, leading to a bottleneck in HSI reconstruction. Various physical factors, such as temperature, emissivity, and multiple reflections between objects, play a critical role in the process of a sensor acquiring hyperspectral thermal signals. Inspired by this, we attempt to investigate the interrelationships between physical properties to provide deeper theoretical insights for HSI reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a Physics-Informed Cross-Modal State Space Model Network (PCMamba) for DCCHI, which incorporates the forward physical imaging process of HSI into the linear complexity of Mamba to facilitate lightweight and high-quality HSI reconstruction. Specifically, we analyze the imaging process of hyperspectral thermal signals to enable the network to disentangle the three key physical properties-temperature, emissivity, and texture. By fully exploiting the potential information embedded in 2D measurements and PAN images, the HSIs are reconstructed through a physics-driven synthesis process. Furthermore, we design a Cross-Modal Scanning Mamba Block (CSMB) that introduces inter-modal pixel-wise interaction with positional inductive bias by cross-scanning the backbone features and PAN features. Extensive experiments conducted on both real and simulated datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods in both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Authors:Rupak Bose, Chinedu Innocent Nwoye, Jorge Lazo, Joël Lukas Lavanchy, Nicolas Padoy
Title: Feature Mixing Approach for Detecting Intraoperative Adverse Events in Laparoscopic Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass Surgery
Abstract:
Intraoperative adverse events (IAEs), such as bleeding or thermal injury, can lead to severe postoperative complications if undetected. However, their rarity results in highly imbalanced datasets, posing challenges for AI-based detection and severity quantification. We propose BetaMixer, a novel deep learning model that addresses these challenges through a Beta distribution-based mixing approach, converting discrete IAE severity scores into continuous values for precise severity regression (0-5 scale). BetaMixer employs Beta distribution-based sampling to enhance underrepresented classes and regularizes intermediate embeddings to maintain a structured feature space. A generative approach aligns the feature space with sampled IAE severity, enabling robust classification and severity regression via a transformer. Evaluated on the MultiBypass140 dataset, which we extended with IAE labels, BetaMixer achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.76, recall of 0.81, PPV of 0.73, and NPV of 0.84, demonstrating strong performance on imbalanced data. By integrating Beta distribution-based sampling, feature mixing, and generative modeling, BetaMixer offers a robust solution for IAE detection and quantification in clinical settings.
Authors:Masaki Adachi, Siu Lun Chau, Wenjie Xu, Anurag Singh, Michael A. Osborne, Krikamol Muandet
Title: Bayesian Optimization for Building Social-Influence-Free Consensus
Abstract:
We introduce Social Bayesian Optimization (SBO), a vote-efficient algorithm for consensus-building in collective decision-making. In contrast to single-agent scenarios, collective decision-making encompasses group dynamics that may distort agents' preference feedback, thereby impeding their capacity to achieve a social-influence-free consensus -- the most preferable decision based on the aggregated agent utilities. We demonstrate that under mild rationality axioms, reaching social-influence-free consensus using noisy feedback alone is impossible. To address this, SBO employs a dual voting system: cheap but noisy public votes (e.g., show of hands in a meeting), and more accurate, though expensive, private votes (e.g., one-to-one interview). We model social influence using an unknown social graph and leverage the dual voting system to efficiently learn this graph. Our theoretical findigns show that social graph estimation converges faster than the black-box estimation of agents' utilities, allowing us to reduce reliance on costly private votes early in the process. This enables efficient consensus-building primarily through noisy public votes, which are debiased based on the estimated social graph to infer social-influence-free feedback. We validate the efficacy of SBO across multiple real-world applications, including thermal comfort, team building, travel negotiation, and energy trading collaboration.
Authors:Israt Zarin Era, Fan Zhou, Ahmed Shoyeb Raihan, Imtiaz Ahmed, Alan Abul-Haj, James Craig, Srinjoy Das, Zhichao Liu
Title: In-Situ Melt Pool Characterization via Thermal Imaging for Defect Detection in Directed Energy Deposition Using Vision Transformers
Abstract:
Directed Energy Deposition (DED) offers significant potential for manufacturing complex and multi-material parts. However, internal defects such as porosity and cracks can compromise mechanical properties and overall performance. This study focuses on in-situ monitoring and characterization of melt pools associated with porosity, aiming to improve defect detection and quality control in DED-printed parts. Traditional machine learning approaches for defect identification rely on extensive labeled datasets, often scarce and expensive to generate in real-world manufacturing. To address this, our framework employs self-supervised learning on unlabeled melt pool data using a Vision Transformer-based Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to produce highly representative embeddings. These fine-tuned embeddings are leveraged via transfer learning to train classifiers on a limited labeled dataset, enabling the effective identification of melt pool anomalies. We evaluate two classifiers: (1) a Vision Transformer (ViT) classifier utilizing the fine-tuned MAE Encoder's parameters and (2) the fine-tuned MAE Encoder combined with an MLP classifier head. Our framework achieves overall accuracy ranging from 95.44% to 99.17% and an average F1 score exceeding 80%, with the ViT Classifier slightly outperforming the MAE Encoder Classifier. This demonstrates the scalability and cost-effectiveness of our approach for automated quality control in DED, effectively detecting defects with minimal labeled data.
Authors:Samarth Chopra, Fernando Cladera, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar
Title: AgriNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Agriculture in Challenging Lighting Conditions
Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have shown significant promise in 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. In agricultural settings, NeRFs can serve as digital twins, providing critical information about fruit detection for yield estimation and other important metrics for farmers. However, traditional NeRFs are not robust to challenging lighting conditions, such as low-light, extreme bright light and varying lighting. To address these issues, this work leverages three different sensors: an RGB camera, an event camera and a thermal camera. Our RGB scene reconstruction shows an improvement in PSNR and SSIM by +2.06 dB and +8.3% respectively. Our cross-spectral scene reconstruction enhances downstream fruit detection by +43.0% in mAP50 and +61.1% increase in mAP50-95. The integration of additional sensors leads to a more robust and informative NeRF. We demonstrate that our multi-modal system yields high quality photo-realistic reconstructions under various tree canopy covers and at different times of the day. This work results in the development of a resilient NeRF, capable of performing well in visibly degraded scenarios, as well as a learnt cross-spectral representation, that is used for automated fruit detection.
Authors:Junjie Yao, Yuxiao Yi, Liangkai Hang, Weinan E, Weizong Wang, Yaoyu Zhang, Tianhan Zhang, Zhi-Qin John Xu
Title: Solving multiscale dynamical systems by deep learning
Abstract:
Multiscale dynamical systems, modeled by high-dimensional stiff ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with wide-ranging characteristic timescales, arise across diverse fields of science and engineering, but their numerical solvers often encounter severe efficiency bottlenecks. This paper introduces a novel DeePODE method, which consists of an Evolutionary Monte Carlo Sampling method (EMCS) and an efficient end-to-end deep neural network (DNN) to predict multiscale dynamical systems. We validate this finding across dynamical systems from ecological systems to reactive flows, including a predator-prey model, a power system oscillation, a battery electrolyte thermal runaway, and turbulent reaction-diffusion systems with complex chemical kinetics. The method demonstrates robust generalization capabilities, allowing pre-trained DNN models to accurately predict the behavior in previously unseen scenarios, largely due to the delicately constructed dataset. While theoretical guarantees remain to be established, empirical evidence shows that DeePODE achieves the accuracy of implicit numerical schemes while maintaining the computational efficiency of explicit schemes. This work underscores the crucial relationship between training data distribution and neural network generalization performance. This work demonstrates the potential of deep learning approaches in modeling complex dynamical systems across scientific and engineering domains.
Authors:Manuel Lage Cañellas, Constantino Álvarez Casado, Le Nguyen, Miguel Bordallo López
Title: Estimating exercise-induced fatigue from thermal facial images
Abstract:
Exercise-induced fatigue resulting from physical activity can be an early indicator of overtraining, illness, or other health issues. In this article, we present an automated method for estimating exercise-induced fatigue levels through the use of thermal imaging and facial analysis techniques utilizing deep learning models. Leveraging a novel dataset comprising over 400,000 thermal facial images of rested and fatigued users, our results suggest that exercise-induced fatigue levels could be predicted with only one static thermal frame with an average error smaller than 15\%. The results emphasize the viability of using thermal imaging in conjunction with deep learning for reliable exercise-induced fatigue estimation.
Authors:Jianqiang Xia, DianXi Shi, Ke Song, Linna Song, XiaoLei Wang, Songchang Jin, Li Zhou, Yu Cheng, Lei Jin, Zheng Zhu, Jianan Li, Gang Wang, Junliang Xing, Jian Zhao
Title: Unified Single-Stage Transformer Network for Efficient RGB-T Tracking
Abstract:
Most existing RGB-T tracking networks extract modality features in a separate manner, which lacks interaction and mutual guidance between modalities. This limits the network's ability to adapt to the diverse dual-modality appearances of targets and the dynamic relationships between the modalities. Additionally, the three-stage fusion tracking paradigm followed by these networks significantly restricts the tracking speed. To overcome these problems, we propose a unified single-stage Transformer RGB-T tracking network, namely USTrack, which unifies the above three stages into a single ViT (Vision Transformer) backbone with a dual embedding layer through self-attention mechanism. With this structure, the network can extract fusion features of the template and search region under the mutual interaction of modalities. Simultaneously, relation modeling is performed between these features, efficiently obtaining the search region fusion features with better target-background discriminability for prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a novel feature selection mechanism based on modality reliability to mitigate the influence of invalid modalities for prediction, further improving the tracking performance. Extensive experiments on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the fastest inference speed 84.2FPS. In particular, MPR/MSR on the short-term and long-term subsets of VTUAV dataset increased by 11.1$\%$/11.7$\%$ and 11.3$\%$/9.7$\%$.
Authors:Elham Kiyani, Khemraj Shukla, George Em Karniadakis, Mikko Karttunen
Title: A Framework Based on Symbolic Regression Coupled with eXtended Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Gray-Box Learning of Equations of Motion from Data
Abstract:
We propose a framework and an algorithm to uncover the unknown parts of nonlinear equations directly from data. The framework is based on eXtended Physics-Informed Neural Networks (X-PINNs), domain decomposition in space-time, but we augment the original X-PINN method by imposing flux continuity across the domain interfaces. The well-known Allen-Cahn equation is used to demonstrate the approach. The Frobenius matrix norm is used to evaluate the accuracy of the X-PINN predictions and the results show excellent performance. In addition, symbolic regression is employed to determine the closed form of the unknown part of the equation from the data, and the results confirm the accuracy of the X-PINNs based approach. To test the framework in a situation resembling real-world data, random noise is added to the datasets to mimic scenarios such as the presence of thermal noise or instrument errors. The results show that the framework is stable against significant amount of noise. As the final part, we determine the minimal amount of data required for training the neural network. The framework is able to predict the correct form and coefficients of the underlying dynamical equation when at least 50\% data is used for training.
Authors:Adithya Ramachandran, Satyaki Chatterjee, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier, Thorkil Flensmark
Title: Heat Demand Forecasting with Multi-Resolutional Representation of Heterogeneous Temporal Ensemble
Abstract:
One of the primal challenges faced by utility companies is ensuring efficient supply with minimal greenhouse gas emissions. The advent of smart meters and smart grids provide an unprecedented advantage in realizing an optimised supply of thermal energies through proactive techniques such as load forecasting. In this paper, we propose a forecasting framework for heat demand based on neural networks where the time series are encoded as scalograms equipped with the capacity of embedding exogenous variables such as weather, and holiday/non-holiday. Subsequently, CNNs are utilized to predict the heat load multi-step ahead. Finally, the proposed framework is compared with other state-of-the-art methods, such as SARIMAX and LSTM. The quantitative results from retrospective experiments show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline method with real-world data acquired from Denmark. A minimal mean error of 7.54% for MAPE and 417kW for RMSE is achieved with the proposed framework in comparison to all other methods.
Authors:Ting Cao, Mohammad Ali Armin, Simon Denman, Lars Petersson, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal
Title: In-Bed Human Pose Estimation from Unseen and Privacy-Preserving Image Domains
Abstract:
Medical applications have benefited greatly from the rapid advancement in computer vision. Considering patient monitoring in particular, in-bed human posture estimation offers important health-related metrics with potential value in medical condition assessments. Despite great progress in this domain, it remains challenging due to substantial ambiguity during occlusions, and the lack of large corpora of manually labeled data for model training, particularly with domains such as thermal infrared imaging which are privacy-preserving, and thus of great interest. Motivated by the effectiveness of self-supervised methods in learning features directly from data, we propose a multi-modal conditional variational autoencoder (MC-VAE) capable of reconstructing features from missing modalities seen during training. This approach is used with HRNet to enable single modality inference for in-bed pose estimation. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that body positions can be effectively recognized from the available modality, achieving on par results with baseline models that are highly dependent on having access to multiple modes at inference time. The proposed framework supports future research towards self-supervised learning that generates a robust model from a single source, and expects it to generalize over many unknown distributions in clinical environments.
Authors:Hongtao Yang, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang, Zhiruo Zhu, Yaozong Zheng, Ning Li
Title: Robust RGB-T Tracking via Learnable Visual Fourier Prompt Fine-tuning and Modality Fusion Prompt Generation
Abstract:
Recently, visual prompt tuning is introduced to RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) tracking as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method. However, these PEFT-based RGB-T tracking methods typically rely solely on spatial domain information as prompts for feature extraction. As a result, they often fail to achieve optimal performance by overlooking the crucial role of frequency-domain information in prompt learning. To address this issue, we propose an efficient Visual Fourier Prompt Tracking (named VFPTrack) method to learn modality-related prompts via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Our method consists of symmetric feature extraction encoder with shared parameters, visual fourier prompts, and Modality Fusion Prompt Generator that generates bidirectional interaction prompts through multi-modal feature fusion. Specifically, we first use a frozen feature extraction encoder to extract RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) modality features. Then, we combine the visual prompts in the spatial domain with the frequency domain prompts obtained from the FFT, which allows for the full extraction and understanding of modality features from different domain information. Finally, unlike previous fusion methods, the modality fusion prompt generation module we use combines features from different modalities to generate a fused modality prompt. This modality prompt is interacted with each individual modality to fully enable feature interaction across different modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that our method demonstrates outstanding performance.
Authors:Jiaqi Zhu, Bikramjit Das, Yong Xie, Nikolaos Pappas, Howard H. Yang
Title: Rethinking Federated Learning Over the Air: The Blessing of Scaling Up
Abstract:
Federated learning facilitates collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy. However, its performance is often constrained by limited communication resources, particularly in systems supporting a large number of clients. To address this challenge, integrating over-the-air computations into the training process has emerged as a promising solution to alleviate communication bottlenecks. The system significantly increases the number of clients it can support in each communication round by transmitting intermediate parameters via analog signals rather than digital ones. This improvement, however, comes at the cost of channel-induced distortions, such as fading and noise, which affect the aggregated global parameters. To elucidate these effects, this paper develops a theoretical framework to analyze the performance of over-the-air federated learning in large-scale client scenarios. Our analysis reveals three key advantages of scaling up the number of participating clients: (1) Enhanced Privacy: The mutual information between a client's local gradient and the server's aggregated gradient diminishes, effectively reducing privacy leakage. (2) Mitigation of Channel Fading: The channel hardening effect eliminates the impact of small-scale fading in the noisy global gradient. (3) Improved Convergence: Reduced thermal noise and gradient estimation errors benefit the convergence rate. These findings solidify over-the-air model training as a viable approach for federated learning in networks with a large number of clients. The theoretical insights are further substantiated through extensive experimental evaluations.
Authors:Alish Kanani, Lukas Pfromm, Harsh Sharma, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Partha Pratim Pande, Umit Y. Ogras
Title: THERMOS: Thermally-Aware Multi-Objective Scheduling of AI Workloads on Heterogeneous Multi-Chiplet PIM Architectures
Abstract:
Chiplet-based integration enables large-scale systems that combine diverse technologies, enabling higher yield, lower costs, and scalability, making them well-suited to AI workloads. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) has emerged as a promising solution for AI inference, leveraging technologies such as ReRAM, SRAM, and FeFET, each offering unique advantages and trade-offs. A heterogeneous chiplet-based PIM architecture can harness the complementary strengths of these technologies to enable higher performance and energy efficiency. However, scheduling AI workloads across such a heterogeneous system is challenging due to competing performance objectives, dynamic workload characteristics, and power and thermal constraints. To address this need, we propose THERMOS, a thermally-aware, multi-objective scheduling framework for AI workloads on heterogeneous multi-chiplet PIM architectures. THERMOS trains a single multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) policy that is capable of achieving Pareto-optimal execution time, energy, or a balanced objective at runtime, depending on the target preferences. Comprehensive evaluations show that THERMOS achieves up to 89% faster average execution time and 57% lower average energy consumption than baseline AI workload scheduling algorithms with only 0.14% runtime and 0.022% energy overhead.
Authors:Harsh Sharma, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Umit Y. Ogras, Partha Pratim Pande
Title: Designing High-Performance and Thermally Feasible Multi-Chiplet Architectures enabled by Non-bendable Glass Interposer
Abstract:
Multi-chiplet architectures enabled by glass interposer offer superior electrical performance, enable higher bus widths due to reduced crosstalk, and have lower capacitance in the redistribution layer than current silicon interposer-based systems. These advantages result in lower energy per bit, higher communication frequencies, and extended interconnect range. However, deformation of the package (warpage) in glass interposer-based systems becomes a critical challenge as system size increases, leading to severe mechanical stress and reliability concerns. Beyond a certain size, conventional packaging techniques fail to manage warpage effectively, necessitating new approaches to mitigate warpage induced bending with scalable performance for glass interposer based multi-chiplet systems. To address these inter-twined challenges, we propose a thermal-, warpage-, and performance-aware design framework that employs architecture and packaging co-optimization. The proposed framework disintegrates the surface and embedded chiplets to balance conflicting design objectives, ensuring optimal trade-offs between performance, power, and structural reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that optimized multi-chiplet architectures from our design framework achieve up to 64.7% performance improvement and 40% power reduction compared to traditional 2.5D systems to execute deep neural network workloads with lower fabrication costs.
Authors:Jinming Liu, Mingtong Chen, Zhengbao Yang
Title: Nd3+ Doping-induced Leakage Currents Suppression in High-temperature 0.7BiFeO3-0.3BaTiO3 Lead-free Piezoceramics
Abstract:
BiFeO3 has attracted much attention as a potential candidate for replacing conventional, lead based piezoelectric materials due to its remarkable spontaneous polarization and high Curie temperature. However, its inherent high leakage currents, which lead to low piezoelectric response and poor temperature stability, have severely limited its practical applications. In this study, lead free piezoelectric ceramics of the 0.7BiFeO3-0.3BaTiO3 (BF-BT) system were prepared, and their microstructures along with high-temperature electrical performance were modulated by introducing Nd3+. The results indicate that moderate Nd doping improves lattice symmetry and reduces oxygen vacancy-related defect dipoles, thereby effectively suppressing leakage currents at temperatures above 75°C. The Nddoped samples exhibit significantly lower leakage current densities, reduced by over 99% compared to the undoped ceramics, reaching values as low as 10-5Acm-2. They also show higher resistivity under elevated temperatures and electric fields, offering notable improvements in thermal stability over the undoped counterparts. In addition, the Nd-doped samples achieved piezoelectric coefficients as high as 172 pC N -1 at room temperature while still maintaining high dielectric and piezoelectric responses at elevated temperatures. This work not only provides an effective way to solve the leakage current problem of BF-BT ceramics in high temperature applications but also indicates a new design strategy for optimizing the high temperature stability of lead free piezoelectric materials, which shows a broad application prospect in the field of high-temperature sensors and actuators.
Authors:Shuai Lu, Zeyin Hou, Wei Gu, Yijun Xu
Title: Integrating Building Thermal Flexibility Into Distribution System: A Privacy-Preserved Dispatch Approach
Abstract:
The inherent thermal storage capacity of buildings brings considerable thermal flexibility to the heating/cooling loads, which are promising demand response resources for power systems. It is widely believed that integrating the thermal flexibility of buildings into the distribution system can improve the operating economy and reliability of the system. However, the private information of the buildings needs to be transferred to the distribution system operator (DSO) to achieve a coordinated optimization, bringing serious privacy concerns to users. Given this issue, we propose a novel privacy-preserved optimal dispatch approach for the distribution system incorporating buildings. Using it, the DSO can exploit the thermal flexibility of buildings without accessing their private information, such as model parameters and indoor temperature profiles. Specifically, we first develop an optimal dispatch model for the distribution system integrating buildings, which can be extended to other storage-like flexibility resources. Second, we reveal that the privacy-preserved integration of buildings is a joint privacy preservation problem for both parameters and state variables and then design a privacy-preserved algorithm based on transformation-based encryption, constraint relaxation, and constraint extension techniques. Besides, we implement a detailed privacy analysis for the proposed method, considering both semi-honest adversaries and external eavesdroppers. Case studies demonstrate the accuracy, privacy-preserved performance, and computational efficiency of the proposed method.
Authors:Xinling Yu, Ziyue Liu, Hai Li, Yixing Li, Xin Ai, Zhiyu Zeng, Ian Young, Zheng Zhang
Title: DeepOHeat-v1: Efficient Operator Learning for Fast and Trustworthy Thermal Simulation and Optimization in 3D-IC Design
Abstract:
Thermal analysis is crucial in three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) design due to increased power density and complex heat dissipation paths. Although operator learning frameworks such as DeepOHeat have demonstrated promising preliminary results in accelerating thermal simulation, they face critical limitations in prediction capability for multi-scale thermal patterns, training efficiency, and trustworthiness of results during design optimization. This paper presents DeepOHeat-v1, an enhanced physics-informed operator learning framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations. First, we integrate Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks with learnable activation functions as trunk networks, enabling an adaptive representation of multi-scale thermal patterns. This approach achieves a $1.25\times$ and $6.29\times$ reduction in error in two representative test cases. Second, we introduce a separable training method that decomposes the basis function along the coordinate axes, achieving $62\times$ training speedup and $31\times$ GPU memory reduction in our baseline case, and enabling thermal analysis at resolutions previously infeasible due to GPU memory constraints. Third, we propose a confidence score to evaluate the trustworthiness of the predicted results, and further develop a hybrid optimization workflow that combines operator learning with finite difference (FD) using Generalized Minimal Residual (GMRES) method for incremental solution refinement, enabling efficient and trustworthy thermal optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepOHeat-v1 achieves accuracy comparable to optimization using high-fidelity finite difference solvers, while speeding up the entire optimization process by $70.6\times$ in our test cases, effectively minimizing the peak temperature through optimal placement of heat-generating components.
Authors:Jiaxin Xu, Gang Liu, Ruilan Guo, Meng Jiang, Tengfei Luo
Title: POINT$^{2}$: A Polymer Informatics Training and Testing Database
Abstract:
The advancement of polymer informatics has been significantly propelled by the integration of machine learning (ML) techniques, enabling the rapid prediction of polymer properties and expediting the discovery of high-performance polymeric materials. However, the field lacks a standardized workflow that encompasses prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, ML interpretability, and polymer synthesizability. In this study, we introduce POINT$^{2}$ (POlymer INformatics Training and Testing), a comprehensive benchmark database and protocol designed to address these critical challenges. Leveraging the existing labeled datasets and the unlabeled PI1M dataset, a collection of approximately one million virtual polymers generated via a recurrent neural network trained on the realistic polymers, we develop an ensemble of ML models, including Quantile Random Forests, Multilayer Perceptrons with dropout, Graph Neural Networks, and pretrained large language models. These models are coupled with diverse polymer representations such as Morgan, MACCS, RDKit, Topological, Atom Pair fingerprints, and graph-based descriptors to achieve property predictions, uncertainty estimations, model interpretability, and template-based polymerization synthesizability across a spectrum of properties, including gas permeability, thermal conductivity, glass transition temperature, melting temperature, fractional free volume, and density. The POINT$^{2}$ database can serve as a valuable resource for the polymer informatics community for polymer discovery and optimization.
Authors:Hao Tang, Zechao Li, Dong Zhang, Shengfeng He, Jinhui Tang
Title: Divide-and-Conquer: Confluent Triple-Flow Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection aims to pinpoint prominent objects within aligned pairs of visible and thermal infrared images. Traditional encoder-decoder architectures, while designed for cross-modality feature interactions, may not have adequately considered the robustness against noise originating from defective modalities. Inspired by hierarchical human visual systems, we propose the ConTriNet, a robust Confluent Triple-Flow Network employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy. Specifically, ConTriNet comprises three flows: two modality-specific flows explore cues from RGB and Thermal modalities, and a third modality-complementary flow integrates cues from both modalities. ConTriNet presents several notable advantages. It incorporates a Modality-induced Feature Modulator in the modality-shared union encoder to minimize inter-modality discrepancies and mitigate the impact of defective samples. Additionally, a foundational Residual Atrous Spatial Pyramid Module in the separated flows enlarges the receptive field, allowing for the capture of multi-scale contextual information. Furthermore, a Modality-aware Dynamic Aggregation Module in the modality-complementary flow dynamically aggregates saliency-related cues from both modality-specific flows. Leveraging the proposed parallel triple-flow framework, we further refine saliency maps derived from different flows through a flow-cooperative fusion strategy, yielding a high-quality, full-resolution saliency map for the final prediction. To evaluate the robustness and stability of our approach, we collect a comprehensive RGB-T SOD benchmark, VT-IMAG, covering various real-world challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and our VT-IMAG dataset demonstrate that ConTriNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both common and challenging scenarios.
Authors:Daniel Barros, Paula Fraga-Lamas, Tiago M. Fernandez-Carames, Sergio Ivan Lopes
Title: A Cost-Effective Thermal Imaging Safety Sensor for Industry 5.0 and Collaborative Robotics
Abstract:
The Industry 5.0 paradigm focuses on industrial operator well-being and sustainable manufacturing practices, where humans play a central role, not only during the repetitive and collaborative tasks of the manufacturing process, but also in the management of the factory floor assets. Human factors, such as ergonomics, safety, and well-being, push the human-centric smart factory to efficiently adopt novel technologies while minimizing environmental and social impact. As operations at the factory floor increasingly rely on collaborative robots (CoBots) and flexible manufacturing systems, there is a growing demand for redundant safety mechanisms (i.e., automatic human detection in the proximity of machinery that is under operation). Fostering enhanced process safety for human proximity detection allows for the protection against possible incidents or accidents with the deployed industrial devices and machinery. This paper introduces the design and implementation of a cost-effective thermal imaging Safety Sensor that can be used in the scope of Industry 5.0 to trigger distinct safe mode states in manufacturing processes that rely on collaborative robotics. The proposed Safety Sensor uses a hybrid detection approach and has been evaluated under controlled environmental conditions. The obtained results show a 97% accuracy at low computational cost when using the developed hybrid method to detect the presence of humans in thermal images.
Authors:Lukas Pfromm, Alish Kanani, Harsh Sharma, Parth Solanki, Eric Tervo, Jaehyun Park, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Partha Pratim Pande, Umit Y. Ogras
Title: MFIT: Multi-Fidelity Thermal Modeling for 2.5D and 3D Multi-Chiplet Architectures
Abstract:
Rapidly evolving artificial intelligence and machine learning applications require ever-increasing computational capabilities, while monolithic 2D design technologies approach their limits. Heterogeneous integration of smaller chiplets using a 2.5D silicon interposer and 3D packaging has emerged as a promising paradigm to address this limit and meet performance demands. These approaches offer a significant cost reduction and higher manufacturing yield than monolithic 2D integrated circuits. However, the compact arrangement and high compute density exacerbate the thermal management challenges, potentially compromising performance. Addressing these thermal modeling challenges is critical, especially as system sizes grow and different design stages require varying levels of accuracy and speed. Since no single thermal modeling technique meets all these needs, this paper introduces MFIT, a range of multi-fidelity thermal models that effectively balance accuracy and speed. These multi-fidelity models can enable efficient design space exploration and runtime thermal management. Our extensive testing on systems with 16, 36, and 64 2.5D integrated chiplets and 16x3 3D integrated chiplets demonstrates that these models can reduce execution times from days to mere seconds and milliseconds with negligible loss in accuracy.
Authors:Danilo Amigo, Felipe Lepe, Enrique Otarola, Gonzalo Rivera
Title: A virtual element method for a convective Brinkman-Forchheimer problem coupled with a heat equation
Abstract:
We develop a virtual element method to solve a convective Brinkman-Forchheimer problem coupled with a heat equation. This coupled model may allow for thermal diffusion and viscosity as a function of temperature. Under standard discretization assumptions, we prove the well posedness of the proposed numerical scheme. We also derive optimal error estimates under appropriate regularity assumptions for the solution. We conclude with a series of numerical tests performed with different mesh families that complement our theoretical findings.
Authors:Pratyush Dhingra, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Partha Pratim Pande
Title: HeTraX: Energy Efficient 3D Heterogeneous Manycore Architecture for Transformer Acceleration
Abstract:
Transformers have revolutionized deep learning and generative modeling to enable unprecedented advancements in natural language processing tasks and beyond. However, designing hardware accelerators for executing transformer models is challenging due to the wide variety of computing kernels involved in the transformer architecture. Existing accelerators are either inadequate to accelerate end-to-end transformer models or suffer notable thermal limitations. In this paper, we propose the design of a three-dimensional heterogeneous architecture referred to as HeTraX specifically optimized to accelerate end-to-end transformer models. HeTraX employs hardware resources aligned with the computational kernels of transformers and optimizes both performance and energy. Experimental results show that HeTraX outperforms existing state-of-the-art by up to 5.6x in speedup and improves EDP by 14.5x while ensuring thermally feasibility.
Authors:Hao Tu, Xinfan Lin, Yebin Wang, Huazhen Fang
Title: System Identification for Lithium-Ion Batteries with Nonlinear Coupled Electro-Thermal Dynamics via Bayesian Optimization
Abstract:
Essential to various practical applications of lithium-ion batteries is the availability of accurate equivalent circuit models. This paper presents a new coupled electro-thermal model for batteries and studies how to extract it from data. We consider the problem of maximum likelihood parameter estimation, which, however, is nontrivial to solve as the model is nonlinear in both its dynamics and measurement. We propose to leverage the Bayesian optimization approach, owing to its machine learning-driven capability in handling complex optimization problems and searching for global optima. To enhance the parameter search efficiency, we dynamically narrow and refine the search space in Bayesian optimization. The proposed system identification approach can efficiently determine the parameters of the coupled electro-thermal model. It is amenable to practical implementation, with few requirements on the experiment, data types, and optimization setups, and well applicable to many other battery models.
Authors:Yusuke Yamazaki, Ali Harandi, Mayu Muramatsu, Alexandre Viardin, Markus Apel, Tim Brepols, Stefanie Reese, Shahed Rezaei
Title: A finite element-based physics-informed operator learning framework for spatiotemporal partial differential equations on arbitrary domains
Abstract:
We propose a novel finite element-based physics-informed operator learning framework that allows for predicting spatiotemporal dynamics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The proposed framework employs a loss function inspired by the finite element method (FEM) with the implicit Euler time integration scheme. A transient thermal conduction problem is considered to benchmark the performance. The proposed operator learning framework takes a temperature field at the current time step as input and predicts a temperature field at the next time step. The Galerkin discretized weak formulation of the heat equation is employed to incorporate physics into the loss function, which is coined finite operator learning (FOL). Upon training, the networks successfully predict the temperature evolution over time for any initial temperature field at high accuracy compared to the FEM solution. The framework is also confirmed to be applicable to a heterogeneous thermal conductivity and arbitrary geometry. The advantages of FOL can be summarized as follows: First, the training is performed in an unsupervised manner, avoiding the need for a large data set prepared from costly simulations or experiments. Instead, random temperature patterns generated by the Gaussian random process and the Fourier series, combined with constant temperature fields, are used as training data to cover possible temperature cases. Second, shape functions and backward difference approximation are exploited for the domain discretization, resulting in a purely algebraic equation. This enhances training efficiency, as one avoids time-consuming automatic differentiation when optimizing weights and biases while accepting possible discretization errors. Finally, thanks to the interpolation power of FEM, any arbitrary geometry can be handled with FOL, which is crucial to addressing various engineering application scenarios.
Authors:Shaoshuai Chu, Michael Herty, Alexander Kurganov
Title: Novel Local Characteristic Decomposition Based Path-Conservative Central-Upwind Schemes
Abstract:
We introduce local characteristic decomposition based path-conservative central-upwind schemes for (nonconservative) hyperbolic systems of balance laws. The proposed schemes are made to be well-balanced via a flux globalization approach, in which source terms are incorporated into the fluxes: This helps to enforce the well-balanced property when the resulting quasi-conservative system is solved using the local characteristic decomposition based central-upwind scheme recently introduced in [{\sc A. Chertock, S. Chu, M. Herty, A. Kurganov, and M. Lukáčová-Medvi{\softd}ová}, J. Comput. Phys., 473 (2023), Paper No. 111718]. Nonconservative product terms are also incorporated into the global fluxes using a path-conservative technique. We illustrate the performance of the developed schemes by applying them to one- and two-dimensional compressible multifluid systems and thermal rotating shallow water equations.
Authors:Hao Tu, Manashita Borah, Scott Moura, Yebin Wang, Huazhen Fang
Title: Remaining Discharge Energy Prediction for Lithium-Ion Batteries Over Broad Current Ranges: A Machine Learning Approach
Abstract:
Lithium-ion batteries have found their way into myriad sectors of industry to drive electrification, decarbonization, and sustainability. A crucial aspect in ensuring their safe and optimal performance is monitoring their energy levels. In this paper, we present the first study on predicting the remaining energy of a battery cell undergoing discharge over wide current ranges from low to high C-rates. The complexity of the challenge arises from the cell's C-rate-dependent energy availability as well as its intricate electro-thermal dynamics especially at high C-rates. To address this, we introduce a new definition of remaining discharge energy and then undertake a systematic effort in harnessing the power of machine learning to enable its prediction. Our effort includes two parts in cascade. First, we develop an accurate dynamic model based on integration of physics with machine learning to capture a battery's voltage and temperature behaviors. Second, based on the model, we propose a machine learning approach to predict the remaining discharge energy under arbitrary C-rates and pre-specified cut-off limits in voltage and temperature. The experimental validation shows that the proposed approach can predict the remaining discharge energy with a relative error of less than 3% when the current varies between 0~8 C for an NCA cell and 0~15 C for an LFP cell. The approach, by design, is amenable to training and computation.
Authors:Zehui Lu, Hao Tu, Huazhen Fang, Yebin Wang, Shaoshuai Mou
Title: Integrated Optimal Fast Charging and Active Thermal Management of Lithium-Ion Batteries in Extreme Ambient Temperatures
Abstract:
This paper presents an integrated control strategy for optimal fast charging and active thermal management of Lithium-ion batteries in extreme ambient temperatures, striking a balance between charging speed and battery health. A control-oriented thermal-NDC (nonlinear double-capacitor) battery model is proposed to describe the electrical and thermal dynamics, incorporating the effects of both an active thermal source and ambient temperature. A state-feedback model predictive control algorithm is then developed for optimal fast charging and active thermal management. Numerical experiments validate the algorithm under extreme temperatures, showing that the proposed algorithm can energy-efficiently adjust the battery temperature, thereby balancing charging speed and battery health. Additionally, an output-feedback model predictive control algorithm with an extended Kalman filter is proposed for battery charging when states are partially measurable. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness under extreme temperatures.
Authors:Wenjie Xu, Wenbin Wang, Yuning Jiang, Bratislav Svetozarevic, Colin N. Jones
Title: Principled Preferential Bayesian Optimization
Abstract:
We study the problem of preferential Bayesian optimization (BO), where we aim to optimize a black-box function with only preference feedback over a pair of candidate solutions. Inspired by the likelihood ratio idea, we construct a confidence set of the black-box function using only the preference feedback. An optimistic algorithm with an efficient computational method is then developed to solve the problem, which enjoys an information-theoretic bound on the total cumulative regret, a first-of-its-kind for preferential BO. This bound further allows us to design a scheme to report an estimated best solution, with a guaranteed convergence rate. Experimental results on sampled instances from Gaussian processes, standard test functions, and a thermal comfort optimization problem all show that our method stably achieves better or competitive performance as compared to the existing state-of-the-art heuristics, which, however, do not have theoretical guarantees on regret bounds or convergence.
Authors:Zeyin Hou, Shuai Lu, Yijun Xu, Haifeng Qiu, Wei Gu, Zhaoyang Dong, Shixing Ding
Title: Privacy-Preserved Aggregate Thermal Dynamic Model of Buildings
Abstract:
The thermal inertia of buildings brings considerable flexibility to the heating and cooling load, which is known to be a promising demand response resource. The aggregate model that can describe the thermal dynamics of the building cluster is an important interference for energy systems to exploit its intrinsic thermal inertia. However, the private information of users, such as the indoor temperature and heating/cooling power, needs to be collected in the parameter estimation procedure to obtain the aggregate model, causing severe privacy concerns. In light of this, we propose a novel privacy-preserved parameter estimation approach to infer the aggregate model for the thermal dynamics of the building cluster for the first time. Using it, the parameters of the aggregate thermal dynamic model (ATDM) can be obtained by the load aggregator without accessing the individual's privacy information. More specifically, this method not only exploits the block coordinate descent (BCD) method to resolve its non-convexity in the estimation but investigates the transformation-based encryption (TE) associated with its secure aggregation protocol (SAP) techniques to realize privacy-preserved computation. Its capability of preserving privacy is also theoretically proven. Finally, simulation results using real-world data demonstrate the accuracy and privacy-preserved performance of our proposed method.
Authors:Giovanni Catania, Aurélien Decelle, Beatriz Seoane
Title: The Copycat Perceptron: Smashing Barriers Through Collective Learning
Abstract:
We characterize the equilibrium properties of a model of $y$ coupled binary perceptrons in the teacher-student scenario, subject to a suitable cost function, with an explicit ferromagnetic coupling proportional to the Hamming distance between the students' weights. In contrast to recent works, we analyze a more general setting in which thermal noise is present that affects each student's generalization performance. In the nonzero temperature regime, we find that the coupling of replicas leads to a bend of the phase diagram towards smaller values of $α$: This suggests that the free entropy landscape gets smoother around the solution with perfect generalization (i.e., the teacher) at a fixed fraction of examples, allowing standard thermal updating algorithms such as Simulated Annealing to easily reach the teacher solution and avoid getting trapped in metastable states as it happens in the unreplicated case, even in the computationally \textit{easy} regime of the inference phase diagram. These results provide additional analytic and numerical evidence for the recently conjectured Bayes-optimal property of Replicated Simulated Annealing (RSA) for a sufficient number of replicas. From a learning perspective, these results also suggest that multiple students working together (in this case reviewing the same data) are able to learn the same rule both significantly faster and with fewer examples, a property that could be exploited in the context of cooperative and federated learning.
Authors:Muhammad Ali Farooq, Waseem Shariff, Mehdi Sefidgar Dilmaghani, Wang Yao, Moazam Soomro, Peter Corcoran
Title: Decisive Data using Multi-Modality Optical Sensors for Advanced Vehicular Systems
Abstract:
Optical sensors have played a pivotal role in acquiring real world data for critical applications. This data, when integrated with advanced machine learning algorithms provides meaningful information thus enhancing human vision. This paper focuses on various optical technologies for design and development of state-of-the-art out-cabin forward vision systems and in-cabin driver monitoring systems. The focused optical sensors include Longwave Thermal Imaging (LWIR) cameras, Near Infrared (NIR), Neuromorphic/ event cameras, Visible CMOS cameras and Depth cameras. Further the paper discusses different potential applications which can be employed using the unique strengths of each these optical modalities in real time environment.
Authors:Izzet Sahin, Christian Moya, Amirhossein Mollaali, Guang Lin, Guillermo Paniagua
Title: Deep Operator Learning-based Surrogate Models with Uncertainty Quantification for Optimizing Internal Cooling Channel Rib Profiles
Abstract:
This paper designs surrogate models with uncertainty quantification capabilities to improve the thermal performance of rib-turbulated internal cooling channels effectively. To construct the surrogate, we use the deep operator network (DeepONet) framework, a novel class of neural networks designed to approximate mappings between infinite-dimensional spaces using relatively small datasets. The proposed DeepONet takes an arbitrary continuous rib geometry with control points as input and outputs continuous detailed information about the distribution of pressure and heat transfer around the profiled ribs. The datasets needed to train and test the proposed DeepONet framework were obtained by simulating a 2D rib-roughened internal cooling channel. To accomplish this, we continuously modified the input rib geometry by adjusting the control points according to a simple random distribution with constraints, rather than following a predefined path or sampling method. The studied channel has a hydraulic diameter, Dh, of 66.7 mm, and a length-to-hydraulic diameter ratio, L/Dh, of 10. The ratio of rib center height to hydraulic diameter (e/Dh), which was not changed during the rib profile update, was maintained at a constant value of 0.048. The ribs were placed in the channel with a pitch-to-height ratio (P/e) of 10. In addition, we provide the proposed surrogates with effective uncertainty quantification capabilities. This is achieved by converting the DeepONet framework into a Bayesian DeepONet (B-DeepONet). B-DeepONet samples from the posterior distribution of DeepONet parameters using the novel framework of stochastic gradient replica-exchange MCMC.
Authors:Siqi Fan, Zhe Wang, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu
Title: SpiderMesh: Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
For semantic segmentation in urban scene understanding, RGB cameras alone often fail to capture a clear holistic topology in challenging lighting conditions. Thermal signal is an informative additional channel that can bring to light the contour and fine-grained texture of blurred regions in low-quality RGB image. Aiming at practical RGB-T (thermal) segmentation, we systematically propose a Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing (SpiderMesh) framework that: 1) proactively compensates inadequate contextual semantics in optically-impaired regions via a demand-guided target masking algorithm; 2) refines multimodal semantic features with recursive meshing to improve pixel-level semantic analysis performance. We further introduce an asymmetric data augmentation technique M-CutOut, and enable semi-supervised learning to fully utilize RGB-T labels only sparsely available in practical use. Extensive experiments on MFNet and PST900 datasets demonstrate that SpiderMesh achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard RGB-T segmentation benchmarks.
Authors:Ziyue Liu, Yixing Li, Jing Hu, Xinling Yu, Shinyu Shiau, Xin Ai, Zhiyu Zeng, Zheng Zhang
Title: DeepOHeat: Operator Learning-based Ultra-fast Thermal Simulation in 3D-IC Design
Abstract:
Thermal issue is a major concern in 3D integrated circuit (IC) design. Thermal optimization of 3D IC often requires massive expensive PDE simulations. Neural network-based thermal prediction models can perform real-time prediction for many unseen new designs. However, existing works either solve 2D temperature fields only or do not generalize well to new designs with unseen design configurations (e.g., heat sources and boundary conditions). In this paper, for the first time, we propose DeepOHeat, a physics-aware operator learning framework to predict the temperature field of a family of heat equations with multiple parametric or non-parametric design configurations. This framework learns a functional map from the function space of multiple key PDE configurations (e.g., boundary conditions, power maps, heat transfer coefficients) to the function space of the corresponding solution (i.e., temperature fields), enabling fast thermal analysis and optimization by changing key design configurations (rather than just some parameters). We test DeepOHeat on some industrial design cases and compare it against Celsius 3D from Cadence Design Systems. Our results show that, for the unseen testing cases, a well-trained DeepOHeat can produce accurate results with $1000\times$ to $300000\times$ speedup.
Authors:Qingchao Li, Mohammed El-Hajjar, Ibrahim Hemadeh, Deepa Jagyasi, Arman Shojaeifard, Lajos Hanzo
Title: Performance Analysis of Active RIS-aided Systems in the Face of Imperfect CSI and Phase Shift Noise
Abstract:
The linear minimal mean square error (LMMSE) estimator for active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless systems is formulated. Furthermore, based on the moment-matching method, we employ the Gamma distribution to approximate the distribution of the instantaneous received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and then derive the closed-form outage probability and ergodic channel capacity in the presence of realistic channel estimation errors, the thermal noise of RIS amplifiers and the RIS phase shift noise. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the introduction of RIS amplifiers is equivalent to increasing of the transmit power, and also present the performance degradation resulting from the channel estimation error and the RIS phase noise.
Authors:Muhammad Ali Farooq, Waseem Shariff, Peter Corcoran
Title: Evaluation of Thermal Imaging on Embedded GPU Platforms for Application in Vehicular Assistance Systems
Abstract:
This study is focused on evaluating the real-time performance of thermal object detection for smart and safe vehicular systems by deploying the trained networks on GPU & single-board EDGE-GPU computing platforms for onboard automotive sensor suite testing. A novel large-scale thermal dataset comprising of > 35,000 distinct frames is acquired, processed, and open-sourced in challenging weather and environmental scenarios. The dataset is a recorded from lost-cost yet effective uncooled LWIR thermal camera, mounted stand-alone and on an electric vehicle to minimize mechanical vibrations. State-of-the-art YOLO-V5 networks variants are trained using four different public datasets as well newly acquired local dataset for optimal generalization of DNN by employing SGD optimizer. The effectiveness of trained networks is validated on extensive test data using various quantitative metrics which include precision, recall curve, mean average precision, and frames per second. The smaller network variant of YOLO is further optimized using TensorRT inference accelerator to explicitly boost the frames per second rate. Optimized network engine increases the frames per second rate by 3.5 times when testing on low power edge devices thus achieving 11 fps on Nvidia Jetson Nano and 60 fps on Nvidia Xavier NX development boards.
Authors:Mehdi Elahi, Mohamed R. Elshamy, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy, Ahmad Patooghy
Title: On the Thermal Vulnerability of 3D-Stacked High-Bandwidth Memory Architectures
Abstract:
3D-stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) architectures provide high-performance memory interactions to address the well-known performance challenge, namely the memory wall. However, these architectures are susceptible to thermal vulnerabilities due to the inherent vertical adjacency that occurs during the manufacturing process of HBM architectures. We anticipate that adversaries may exploit the intense vertical and lateral adjacency to design and develop thermal performance degradation attacks on the memory banks that host data/instructions from victim applications. In such attacks, the adversary manages to inject short and intense heat pulses from vertically and/or laterally adjacent memory banks, creating a convergent thermal wave that maximizes impact and delays the victim application from accessing its data/instructions. As the attacking application does not access any out-of-range memory locations, it can bypass both design-time security tests and the operating system's memory management policies. In other words, since the attack mimics legitimate workloads, it will be challenging to detect.
Authors:Md Mazharul Islam, Diego Ferrer, Shamiul Alam, Juan P. Mendez, Denis Mamaluy, Wei Pan, Ahmedullah Aziz
Title: Reimagining Voltage-Controlled Cryogenic Boolean Logic Paradigm with Quantum-Enhanced Josephson Junction FETs
Abstract:
The growing demand for ultra low power computing and the emergence of quantum technologies have intensified interest in cryogenic electronics, particularly superconducting devices. Despite their promise, current controlled superconducting components face fundamental challenges in cascadability, limiting their effectiveness in complex logic architectures. To overcome this, recent efforts have focused on developing gate tunable superconducting devices, such as Josephson junction field effect transistors (JJFETs). However, achieving robust control and sufficient supercurrent gain, both critical for transistor-like performance in logic circuits remains a key challenge. A recent advancement in JJFET design, based on InAs and GaSb heterostructures, demonstrates enhanced gain and favorable device characteristics suitable for circuit integration. Building on this innovation, we propose and analyze fundamental voltage controlled logic topologies using the quantum enhanced JJFET. We develop a Verilog A based circuit compatible compact model of the quantum enhanced JJFET which accurately captures the experimentally observed device characteristics. To ensure cascadability, our logic circuits incorporate the multilayered Heater Nanocryotron (nTron), a superconducting nanowire-based thermal switch. Through simulation based analysis, we demonstrate the successful implementation of fundamental logic gates, including NOT, NAND, and NOR. Furthermore, we design a 3 input majority gate, which plays a pivotal role in quantum and reversible computing due to its universality. Finally, to demonstrate the cascadability of our proposed logic topology, we demonstrate the operation of a 2 input XOR gate based on our designed JJFET based NOT, NAND, and NOR gate.
Authors:Akash Mahajan, Shivam Chaturvedi, Srijita Das, Wencong Su, Van-Hai Bui
Title: Optimal Parameter Design for Power Electronic Converters Using a Probabilistic Learning-Based Stochastic Surrogate Model
Abstract:
The selection of optimal design for power electronic converter parameters involves balancing efficiency and thermal constraints to ensure high performance without compromising safety. This paper introduces a probabilistic-learning-based stochastic surrogate modeling framework to address this challenge and significantly reduce the time required during the design phase. The approach begins with a neural network classifier that evaluates the feasibility of parameter configurations, effectively filtering out unsafe and/or impractical inputs. Subsequently, a probabilistic prediction model estimates the converter's efficiency and temperature while quantifying prediction uncertainty, providing both performance insights and reliability metrics. Finally, a heuristic optimization-based model is employed to optimize a multi-objective function that maximizes efficiency while adhering to thermal constraints. The optimization process incorporates penalty terms to discourage solutions that violate practical thresholds, ensuring actionable and realistic recommendations. An advanced heuristic optimization method is used to find the optimal solution and is compared with several well-known search algorithms, including Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Simulated Annealing (SA), Tabu-Search (TS), and Stochastic Hill Climbing (SHC). The results demonstrate significant improvements in predictive accuracy and optimization outcomes, offering a robust solution for advancing power electronics design.
Authors:Valeria Zitz, Michael Küttner, Jonas Hummel, Michael T. Knierim, Michael Beigl, Tobias Röddiger
Title: Heatables: Effects of Infrared-LED-Induced Ear Heating on Thermal Perception, Comfort, and Cognitive Performance
Abstract:
Maintaining thermal comfort in shared indoor environments remains challenging, as centralized HVAC systems are slow to adapt and standardized to group norms. Cold exposure not only reduces subjective comfort but can impair cognitive performance, particularly under moderate to severe cold stress. Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) have shown promise by providing localized heating, yet many designs target distal body parts with low thermosensitivity and often lack portability. In this work, we investigate whether targeted thermal stimulation using in-ear worn devices can manipulate thermal perception and enhance thermal comfort. We present Heatables, a novel in-ear wearable that emits Near-Infrared (NIR) and Infrared (IR) radiation via integrated LEDs to deliver localized optical heating. This approach leverages NIR-IR's ability to penetrate deeper tissues, offering advantages over traditional resistive heating limited to surface warming. In a placebo-controlled study with 24 participants, each exposed for 150 minutes in a cool office environment (approximately 17.5 degrees Celsius) to simulate sustained cold stress during typical sedentary office activities, Heatables significantly increased the perceived ambient temperature by around 1.5 degrees Celsius and delayed cold discomfort. Importantly, thermal benefits extended beyond the ear region, improving both whole-body comfort and thermal acceptability. These findings position in-ear NIR-IR-LED-based stimulation as a promising modality for unobtrusive thermal comfort enhancement in everyday contexts.
Authors:Mohamed R. Elshamy, Mehdi Elahi, Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy
Title: CPINN-ABPI: Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Accurate Power Estimation in MPSoCs
Abstract:
Efficient thermal and power management in modern multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) demands accurate power consumption estimation. One of the state-of-the-art approaches, Alternative Blind Power Identification (ABPI), theoretically eliminates the dependence on steady-state temperatures, addressing a major shortcoming of previous approaches. However, ABPI performance has remained unverified in actual hardware implementations. In this study, we conduct the first empirical validation of ABPI on commercial hardware using the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX platform. Our findings reveal that, while ABPI provides computational efficiency and independence from steady-state temperature, it exhibits considerable accuracy deficiencies in real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that integrates Custom Physics-Informed Neural Networks (CPINNs) with the underlying thermal model of ABPI. Our approach employs a specialized loss function that harmonizes physical principles with data-driven learning, complemented by multi-objective genetic algorithm optimization to balance estimation accuracy and computational cost. In experimental validation, CPINN-ABPI achieves a reduction of 84.7\% CPU and 73.9\% GPU in the mean absolute error (MAE) relative to ABPI, with the weighted mean absolute percentage error (WMAPE) improving from 47\%--81\% to $\sim$12\%. The method maintains real-time performance with 195.3~$μ$s of inference time, with similar 85\%--99\% accuracy gains across heterogeneous SoCs.
Authors:Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel
Title: xEdgeFace: Efficient Cross-Spectral Face Recognition for Edge Devices
Abstract:
Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) addresses the challenge of matching face images across different sensing modalities, such as thermal to visible or near-infrared to visible, expanding the applicability of face recognition systems in real-world, unconstrained environments. While recent HFR methods have shown promising results, many rely on computation-intensive architectures, limiting their practicality for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this work, we present a lightweight yet effective HFR framework by adapting a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture originally designed for face recognition. Our approach enables efficient end-to-end training with minimal paired heterogeneous data while preserving strong performance on standard RGB face recognition tasks. This makes it a compelling solution for both homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple challenging HFR and face recognition benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while maintaining a low computational overhead.
Authors:Luca Colagrande, Jayanth Jonnalagadda, Luca Benini
Title: Late Breaking Results: A RISC-V ISA Extension for Chaining in Scalar Processors
Abstract:
Modern general-purpose accelerators integrate a large number of programmable area- and energy-efficient processing elements (PEs), to deliver high performance while meeting stringent power delivery and thermal dissipation constraints. In this context, PEs are often implemented by scalar in-order cores, which are highly sensitive to pipeline stalls. Traditional software techniques, such as loop unrolling, mitigate the issue at the cost of increased register pressure, limiting flexibility. We propose scalar chaining, a novel hardware-software solution, to address this issue without incurring the drawbacks of traditional software-only techniques. We demonstrate our solution on register-limited stencil codes, achieving >93% FPU utilizations and a 4% speedup and 10% higher energy efficiency, on average, over highly-optimized baselines. Our implementation is fully open source and performance experiments are reproducible using free software.
Authors:Fuyang Liu, Shun Lu, Jilin Mei, Yu Hu
Title: MASTER: Multimodal Segmentation with Text Prompts
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal fusion is a potential solution for various weather and light conditions in challenging scenarios. However, plenty of studies focus on designing complex modules to fuse different modalities. With the widespread application of large language models (LLMs), valuable information can be more effectively extracted from natural language. Therefore, we aim to leverage the advantages of large language models to design a structurally simple and highly adaptable multimodal fusion model architecture. We proposed MultimodAl Segmentation with TExt PRompts (MASTER) architecture, which integrates LLM into the fusion of RGB-Thermal multimodal data and allows complex query text to participate in the fusion process. Our model utilizes a dual-path structure to extract information from different modalities of images. Additionally, we employ LLM as the core module for multimodal fusion, enabling the model to generate learnable codebook tokens from RGB, thermal images, and textual information. A lightweight image decoder is used to obtain semantic segmentation results. The proposed MASTER performs exceptionally well in benchmark tests across various automated driving scenarios, yielding promising results.
Authors:Sota Iwabuchi, Ryoya Onishi, Shun Suzuki, Takaaki Kamigaki, Yasutoshi Makino, Hiroyuki Shinoda
Title: Simultaneous Presentation of Thermal and Mechanical Stimulation Using High-Intensity Airborne Ultrasound
Abstract:
In this study, we propose a non-contact thermal presentation method using airborne ultrasound. We generate strong sound field directly on the human skin and present a perceivable temperature rise. The proposed method enables simultaneous presentation of mechanical and thermal stimuli. In preliminary experiments, we confirmed that temperature increase of 5.4 ${}^\circ$C occurs at the palm after 5.0 s.
Authors:Mohamed R. Elshamy, Mehdi Elahi, Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy
Title: Fine-Grained Clustering-Based Power Identification for Multicores
Abstract:
Fine-grained power estimation in multicore Systems on Chips (SoCs) is crucial for efficient thermal management. BPI (Blind Power Identification) is a recent approach that determines the power consumption of different cores and the thermal model of the chip using only thermal sensor measurements and total power consumption. BPI relies on steady-state thermal data along with a naive initialization in its Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) process, which negatively impacts the power estimation accuracy of BPI. This paper proposes a two-fold approach to reduce these impacts on BPI. First, this paper introduces an innovative approach for NMF initializing, i.e., density-oriented spatial clustering to identify centroid data points of active cores as initial values. This enhances BPI accuracy by focusing on dense regions in the dataset and excluding outlier data points. Second, it proposes the utilization of steady-state temperature data points to enhance the power estimation accuracy by leveraging the physical relationship between temperature and power consumption. Our extensive simulations of real-world cases demonstrate that our approach enhances BPI accuracy in estimating the power per core with no performance cost. For instance, in a four-core processor, the proposed approach reduces the error rate by 76% compared to BPI and by 24% compared to the state of the art in the literature, namely, Blind Power Identification Steady State (BPISS). The results underline the potential of integrating advanced clustering techniques in thermal model identification, paving the way for more accurate and reliable thermal management in multicores and SoCs.
Authors:Mohamed R. Elshamy, Mehdi Elahi, Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy
Title: Cluster-BPI: Efficient Fine-Grain Blind Power Identification for Defending against Hardware Thermal Trojans in Multicore SoCs
Abstract:
Modern multicore System-on-Chips (SoCs) feature hardware monitoring mechanisms that measure total power consumption. However, these aggregate measurements are often insufficient for fine-grained thermal and power management. This paper presents an enhanced Clustering Blind Power Identification (ICBPI) approach, designed to improve the sensitivity and robustness of the traditional Blind Power Identification (BPI) method. BPI estimates the power consumption of individual cores and models the thermal behavior of an SoC using only thermal sensor data and total power measurements. The proposed ICBPI approach refines BPI's initialization process, particularly improving the non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) step, which is critical to the accuracy of BPI. ICBPI introduces density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) to better align temperature and power consumption data, thereby providing more accurate power consumption estimates. We validate the ICBPI method through two key tasks. The first task evaluates power estimation accuracy across four different multicore architectures, including a heterogeneous processor. Results show that ICBPI significantly enhances accuracy, reducing error rates by 77.56% compared to the original BPI and by 68.44% compared to the state-of-the-art BPISS method. The second task focuses on improving the detection and localization of malicious thermal sensor attacks in heterogeneous processors. The results demonstrate that ICBPI enhances the security and robustness of multicore SoCs against such attacks.
Authors:Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel
Title: Heterogeneous Face Recognition Using Domain Invariant Units
Abstract:
Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) aims to expand the applicability of Face Recognition (FR) systems to challenging scenarios, enabling the matching of face images across different domains, such as matching thermal images to visible spectra. However, the development of HFR systems is challenging because of the significant domain gap between modalities and the lack of availability of large-scale paired multi-channel data. In this work, we leverage a pretrained face recognition model as a teacher network to learn domaininvariant network layers called Domain-Invariant Units (DIU) to reduce the domain gap. The proposed DIU can be trained effectively even with a limited amount of paired training data, in a contrastive distillation framework. This proposed approach has the potential to enhance pretrained models, making them more adaptable to a wider range of variations in data. We extensively evaluate our approach on multiple challenging benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel
Title: From Modalities to Styles: Rethinking the Domain Gap in Heterogeneous Face Recognition
Abstract:
Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) focuses on matching faces from different domains, for instance, thermal to visible images, making Face Recognition (FR) systems more versatile for challenging scenarios. However, the domain gap between these domains and the limited large-scale datasets in the target HFR modalities make it challenging to develop robust HFR models from scratch. In our work, we view different modalities as distinct styles and propose a method to modulate feature maps of the target modality to address the domain gap. We present a new Conditional Adaptive Instance Modulation (CAIM ) module that seamlessly fits into existing FR networks, turning them into HFR-ready systems. The CAIM block modulates intermediate feature maps, efficiently adapting to the style of the source modality and bridging the domain gap. Our method enables end-to-end training using a small set of paired samples. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach on various challenging HFR benchmarks, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code and protocols for reproducing the findings will be made publicly available
Authors:Tobias Würth, Niklas Freymuth, Clemens Zimmerling, Gerhard Neumann, Luise Kärger
Title: Physics-informed MeshGraphNets (PI-MGNs): Neural finite element solvers for non-stationary and nonlinear simulations on arbitrary meshes
Abstract:
Engineering components must meet increasing technological demands in ever shorter development cycles. To face these challenges, a holistic approach is essential that allows for the concurrent development of part design, material system and manufacturing process. Current approaches employ numerical simulations, which however quickly becomes computation-intensive, especially for iterative optimization. Data-driven machine learning methods can be used to replace time- and resource-intensive numerical simulations. In particular, MeshGraphNets (MGNs) have shown promising results. They enable fast and accurate predictions on unseen mesh geometries while being fully differentiable for optimization. However, these models rely on large amounts of expensive training data, such as numerical simulations. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer an opportunity to train neural networks with partial differential equations instead of labeled data, but have not been extended yet to handle time-dependent simulations of arbitrary meshes. This work introduces PI-MGNs, a hybrid approach that combines PINNs and MGNs to quickly and accurately solve non-stationary and nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) on arbitrary meshes. The method is exemplified for thermal process simulations of unseen parts with inhomogeneous material distribution. Further results show that the model scales well to large and complex meshes, although it is trained on small generic meshes only.
Authors:Nian Liu, Ziyang Luo, Ni Zhang, Junwei Han
Title: VST++: Efficient and Stronger Visual Saliency Transformer
Abstract:
While previous CNN-based models have exhibited promising results for salient object detection (SOD), their ability to explore global long-range dependencies is restricted. Our previous work, the Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), addressed this constraint from a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence perspective, to unify RGB and RGB-D SOD. In VST, we developed a multi-task transformer decoder that concurrently predicts saliency and boundary outcomes in a pure transformer architecture. Moreover, we introduced a novel token upsampling method called reverse T2T for predicting a high-resolution saliency map effortlessly within transformer-based structures. Building upon the VST model, we further propose an efficient and stronger VST version in this work, i.e. VST++. To mitigate the computational costs of the VST model, we propose a Select-Integrate Attention (SIA) module, partitioning foreground into fine-grained segments and aggregating background information into a single coarse-grained token. To incorporate 3D depth information with low cost, we design a novel depth position encoding method tailored for depth maps. Furthermore, we introduce a token-supervised prediction loss to provide straightforward guidance for the task-related tokens. We evaluate our VST++ model across various transformer-based backbones on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods while achieving a 25% reduction in computational costs without significant performance compromise. The demonstrated strong ability for generalization, enhanced performance, and heightened efficiency of our VST++ model highlight its potential.
Authors:Simon Schrodi, Ferdinand Briegel, Max Argus, Andreas Christen, Thomas Brox
Title: Climate-sensitive Urban Planning through Optimization of Tree Placements
Abstract:
Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of many extreme weather events, including heatwaves, which results in increased thermal discomfort and mortality rates. While global mitigation action is undoubtedly necessary, so is climate adaptation, e.g., through climate-sensitive urban planning. Among the most promising strategies is harnessing the benefits of urban trees in shading and cooling pedestrian-level environments. Our work investigates the challenge of optimal placement of such trees. Physical simulations can estimate the radiative and thermal impact of trees on human thermal comfort but induce high computational costs. This rules out optimization of tree placements over large areas and considering effects over longer time scales. Hence, we employ neural networks to simulate the point-wise mean radiant temperatures--a driving factor of outdoor human thermal comfort--across various time scales, spanning from daily variations to extended time scales of heatwave events and even decades. To optimize tree placements, we harness the innate local effect of trees within the iterated local search framework with tailored adaptations. We show the efficacy of our approach across a wide spectrum of study areas and time scales. We believe that our approach is a step towards empowering decision-makers, urban designers and planners to proactively and effectively assess the potential of urban trees to mitigate heat stress.
Authors:Ross Greer, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Sumega Mandadi, Pujitha Gunaratne, Mohan M. Trivedi, Thomas D. Marcotte
Title: Vision-based Analysis of Driver Activity and Driving Performance Under the Influence of Alcohol
Abstract:
About 30% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers, making the prevention of drunk driving paramount to vehicle safety in the US and other locations which have a high prevalence of driving while under the influence of alcohol. Driving impairment can be monitored through active use of sensors (when drivers are asked to engage in providing breath samples to a vehicle instrument or when pulled over by a police officer), but a more passive and robust mechanism of sensing may allow for wider adoption and benefit of intelligent systems that reduce drunk driving accidents. This could assist in identifying impaired drivers before they drive, or early in the driving process (before a crash or detection by law enforcement). In this research, we introduce a study which adopts a multi-modal ensemble of visual, thermal, audio, and chemical sensors to (1) examine the impact of acute alcohol administration on driving performance in a driving simulator, and (2) identify data-driven methods for detecting driving under the influence of alcohol. We describe computer vision and machine learning models for analyzing the driver's face in thermal imagery, and introduce a pipeline for training models on data collected from drivers with a range of breath-alcohol content levels, including discussion of relevant machine learning phenomena which can help in future experiment design for related studies.
Authors:Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel
Title: Bridging the Gap: Heterogeneous Face Recognition with Conditional Adaptive Instance Modulation
Abstract:
Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) aims to match face images across different domains, such as thermal and visible spectra, expanding the applicability of Face Recognition (FR) systems to challenging scenarios. However, the domain gap and limited availability of large-scale datasets in the target domain make training robust and invariant HFR models from scratch difficult. In this work, we treat different modalities as distinct styles and propose a framework to adapt feature maps, bridging the domain gap. We introduce a novel Conditional Adaptive Instance Modulation (CAIM) module that can be integrated into pre-trained FR networks, transforming them into HFR networks. The CAIM block modulates intermediate feature maps, to adapt the style of the target modality effectively bridging the domain gap. Our proposed method allows for end-to-end training with a minimal number of paired samples. We extensively evaluate our approach on multiple challenging benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source code and protocols for reproducing the findings will be made publicly available.
Authors:Yexin Liu, Weiming Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jinjing Zhu, Athanasios Vasilakos, Lin Wang
Title: Test-Time Adaptation for Nighttime Color-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
The ability to scene understanding in adverse visual conditions, e.g., nighttime, has sparked active research for RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation. However, it is essentially hampered by two critical problems: 1) the day-night gap of RGB images is larger than that of thermal images, and 2) the class-wise performance of RGB images at night is not consistently higher or lower than that of thermal images. we propose the first test-time adaptation (TTA) framework, dubbed Night-TTA, to address the problems for nighttime RGBT semantic segmentation without access to the source (daytime) data during adaptation. Our method enjoys three key technical parts. Firstly, as one modality (e.g., RGB) suffers from a larger domain gap than that of the other (e.g., thermal), Imaging Heterogeneity Refinement (IHR) employs an interaction branch on the basis of RGB and thermal branches to prevent cross-modal discrepancy and performance degradation. Then, Class Aware Refinement (CAR) is introduced to obtain reliable ensemble logits based on pixel-level distribution aggregation of the three branches. In addition, we also design a specific learning scheme for our TTA framework, which enables the ensemble logits and three student logits to collaboratively learn to improve the quality of predictions during the testing phase of our Night TTA. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance with a 13.07% boost in mIoU.
Authors:Mark Colley, Sebastian Hartwig, Albin Zeqiri, Timo Ropinski, Enrico Rukzio
Title: AutoTherm: A Dataset and Benchmark for Thermal Comfort Estimation Indoors and in Vehicles
Abstract:
Thermal comfort inside buildings is a well-studied field where human judgment for thermal comfort is collected and may be used for automatic thermal comfort estimation. However, indoor scenarios are rather static in terms of thermal state changes and, thus, cannot be applied to dynamic conditions, e.g., inside a vehicle. In this work, we present our findings of a gap between building and in-vehicle scenarios regarding thermal comfort estimation. We provide evidence by comparing deep neural classifiers for thermal comfort estimation for indoor and in-vehicle conditions. Further, we introduce a temporal dataset for indoor predictions incorporating 31 input signals and self-labeled user ratings by 18 subjects in a self-built climatic chamber. For in-vehicle scenarios, we acquired a second dataset featuring human judgments from 20 subjects in a BMW 3 Series. Our experimental results indicate superior performance for estimations from time series data over single vector input. Leveraging modern machine learning architectures enables us to recognize human thermal comfort states and estimate future states automatically. We provide details on training a recurrent network-based classifier and perform an initial performance benchmark of the proposed dataset. Ultimately, we compare our collected dataset to publicly available thermal comfort datasets.
Authors:Huajun Zhou, Bo Qiao, Lingxiao Yang, Jianhuang Lai, Xiaohua Xie
Title: Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Deep Learning-based Unsupervised Salient Object Detection (USOD) mainly relies on the noisy saliency pseudo labels that have been generated from traditional handcraft methods or pre-trained networks. To cope with the noisy labels problem, a class of methods focus on only easy samples with reliable labels but ignore valuable knowledge in hard samples. In this paper, we propose a novel USOD method to mine rich and accurate saliency knowledge from both easy and hard samples. First, we propose a Confidence-aware Saliency Distilling (CSD) strategy that scores samples conditioned on samples' confidences, which guides the model to distill saliency knowledge from easy samples to hard samples progressively. Second, we propose a Boundary-aware Texture Matching (BTM) strategy to refine the boundaries of noisy labels by matching the textures around the predicted boundary. Extensive experiments on RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, and video SOD benchmarks prove that our method achieves state-of-the-art USOD performance.
Authors:Zhiwei Cao, Minghao Li, Feng Lin, Jimin Jia, Yonggang Wen, Jianxiong Yin, Simon See
Title: Transforming Future Data Center Operations and Management via Physical AI
Abstract:
Data centers (DCs) as mission-critical infrastructures are pivotal in powering the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital economy. The evolution from Internet DC to AI DC has introduced new challenges in operating and managing data centers for improved business resilience and reduced total cost of ownership. As a result, new paradigms, beyond the traditional approaches based on best practices, must be in order for future data centers. In this research, we propose and develop a novel Physical AI (PhyAI) framework for advancing DC operations and management. Our system leverages the emerging capabilities of state-of-the-art industrial products and our in-house research and development. Specifically, it presents three core modules, namely: 1) an industry-grade in-house simulation engine to simulate DC operations in a highly accurate manner, 2) an AI engine built upon NVIDIA PhysicsNemo for the training and evaluation of physics-informed machine learning (PIML) models, and 3) a digital twin platform built upon NVIDIA Omniverse for our proposed 5-tier digital twin framework. This system presents a scalable and adaptable solution to digitalize, optimize, and automate future data center operations and management, by enabling real-time digital twins for future data centers. To illustrate its effectiveness, we present a compelling case study on building a surrogate model for predicting the thermal and airflow profiles of a large-scale DC in a real-time manner. Our results demonstrate its superior performance over traditional time-consuming Computational Fluid Dynamics/Heat Transfer (CFD/HT) simulation, with a median absolute temperature prediction error of 0.18 °C. This emerging approach would open doors to several potential research directions for advancing Physical AI in future DC operations.
Authors:Etienne Chassaing, Florent Forest, Olga Fink, Malcolm Mielle
Title: Thermoxels: a voxel-based method to generate simulation-ready 3D thermal models
Abstract:
In the European Union, buildings account for 42% of energy use and 35% of greenhouse gas emissions. Since most existing buildings will still be in use by 2050, retrofitting is crucial for emissions reduction. However, current building assessment methods rely mainly on qualitative thermal imaging, which limits data-driven decisions for energy savings. On the other hand, quantitative assessments using finite element analysis (FEA) offer precise insights but require manual CAD design, which is tedious and error-prone. Recent advances in 3D reconstruction, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting, enable precise 3D modeling from sparse images but lack clearly defined volumes and the interfaces between them needed for FEA. We propose Thermoxels, a novel voxel-based method able to generate FEA-compatible models, including both geometry and temperature, from a sparse set of RGB and thermal images. Using pairs of RGB and thermal images as input, Thermoxels represents a scene's geometry as a set of voxels comprising color and temperature information. After optimization, a simple process is used to transform Thermoxels' models into tetrahedral meshes compatible with FEA. We demonstrate Thermoxels' capability to generate RGB+Thermal meshes of 3D scenes, surpassing other state-of-the-art methods. To showcase the practical applications of Thermoxels' models, we conduct a simple heat conduction simulation using FEA, achieving convergence from an initial state defined by Thermoxels' thermal reconstruction. Additionally, we compare Thermoxels' image synthesis abilities with current state-of-the-art methods, showing competitive results, and discuss the limitations of existing metrics in assessing mesh quality.
Authors:Tatsuro Sakai, Kanji Tanaka, Yuki Minase, Jonathan Tay Yu Liang, Muhammad Adil Luqman, Daiki Iwata
Title: Dynamic-Dark SLAM: RGB-Thermal Cooperative Robot Vision Strategy for Multi-Person Tracking in Both Well-Lit and Low-Light Scenes
Abstract:
In robot vision, thermal cameras hold great potential for recognizing humans even in complete darkness. However, their application to multi-person tracking (MPT) has been limited due to data scarcity and the inherent difficulty of distinguishing individuals. In this study, we propose a cooperative MPT system that utilizes co-located RGB and thermal cameras, where pseudo-annotations (bounding boxes and person IDs) are used to train both RGB and thermal trackers. Evaluation experiments demonstrate that the thermal tracker performs robustly in both bright and dark environments. Moreover, the results suggest that a tracker-switching strategy -- guided by a binary brightness classifier -- is more effective for information integration than a tracker-fusion approach. As an application example, we present an image change pattern recognition (ICPR) method, the ``human-as-landmark,'' which combines two key properties: the thermal recognizability of humans in dark environments and the rich landmark characteristics -- appearance, geometry, and semantics -- of static objects (occluders). Whereas conventional SLAM focuses on mapping static landmarks in well-lit environments, the present study takes a first step toward a new Human-Only SLAM paradigm, ``Dynamic-Dark SLAM,'' which aims to map even dynamic landmarks in complete darkness. Additionally, this study demonstrates that knowledge transfer between thermal and depth modalities enables reliable person tracking using low-resolution 3D LiDAR data without RGB input, contributing an important advance toward cross-robot SLAM systems.
Authors:Wei-Lun Chen, Chia-Yeh Hsieh, Yu-Hsiang Kao, Kai-Chun Liu, Sheng-Yu Peng, Yu Tsao
Title: Transfer Learning for Keypoint Detection in Low-Resolution Thermal TUG Test Images
Abstract:
This study presents a novel approach to human keypoint detection in low-resolution thermal images using transfer learning techniques. We introduce the first application of the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test in thermal image computer vision, establishing a new paradigm for mobility assessment. Our method leverages a MobileNetV3-Small encoder and a ViTPose decoder, trained using a composite loss function that balances latent representation alignment and heatmap accuracy. The model was evaluated using the Object Keypoint Similarity (OKS) metric from the COCO Keypoint Detection Challenge. The proposed model achieves better performance with AP, AP50, and AP75 scores of 0.861, 0.942, and 0.887 respectively, outperforming traditional supervised learning approaches like Mask R-CNN and ViTPose-Base. Moreover, our model demonstrates superior computational efficiency in terms of parameter count and FLOPS. This research lays a solid foundation for future clinical applications of thermal imaging in mobility assessment and rehabilitation monitoring.
Authors:Ke Li, Di Wang, Zhangyuan Hu, Shaofeng Li, Weiping Ni, Lin Zhao, Quan Wang
Title: FD2-Net: Frequency-Driven Feature Decomposition Network for Infrared-Visible Object Detection
Abstract:
Infrared-visible object detection (IVOD) seeks to harness the complementary information in infrared and visible images, thereby enhancing the performance of detectors in complex environments. However, existing methods often neglect the frequency characteristics of complementary information, such as the abundant high-frequency details in visible images and the valuable low-frequency thermal information in infrared images, thus constraining detection performance. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel Frequency-Driven Feature Decomposition Network for IVOD, called FD2-Net, which effectively captures the unique frequency representations of complementary information across multimodal visual spaces. Specifically, we propose a feature decomposition encoder, wherein the high-frequency unit (HFU) utilizes discrete cosine transform to capture representative high-frequency features, while the low-frequency unit (LFU) employs dynamic receptive fields to model the multi-scale context of diverse objects. Next, we adopt a parameter-free complementary strengths strategy to enhance multimodal features through seamless inter-frequency recoupling. Furthermore, we innovatively design a multimodal reconstruction mechanism that recovers image details lost during feature extraction, further leveraging the complementary information from infrared and visible images to enhance overall representational capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FD2-Net outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across various IVOD benchmarks, i.e. LLVIP (96.2% mAP), FLIR (82.9% mAP), and M3FD (83.5% mAP).
Authors:Kazuma Kobayashi, Farid Ahmed, Syed Bahauddin Alam
Title: Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations \& Unmeasurable Parameters
Abstract:
Real-time monitoring of critical parameters is essential for energy systems' safe and efficient operation. However, traditional sensors often fail and degrade in harsh environments where physical sensors cannot be placed (inaccessible locations). In addition, there are important parameters that cannot be directly measured by sensors. We need machine learning (ML)-based real-time monitoring in those remote locations to ensure system operations. However, traditional ML models struggle to process continuous sensor profile data to fit model requirements, leading to the loss of spatial relationships. Another challenge for real-time monitoring is ``dataset shift" and the need for frequent retraining under varying conditions, where extensive retraining prohibits real-time inference. To resolve these challenges, this study addressed the limitations of real-time monitoring methods by enabling monitoring in locations where physical sensors are impractical to deploy. Our proposed approach, utilizing Multi-Input Operator Network virtual sensors, leverages deep learning to seamlessly integrate diverse data sources and accurately predict key parameters in real-time without the need for additional physical sensors. The approach's effectiveness is demonstrated through thermal-hydraulic monitoring in a nuclear reactor subchannel, achieving remarkable accuracy.
Authors:Jingchao Peng, Thomas Bashford-Rogers, Zhuang Shao, Haitao Zhao, Aru Ranjan Singh, Abhishek Goswami, Kurt Debattista
Title: CapHDR2IR: Caption-Driven Transfer from Visible Light to Infrared Domain
Abstract:
Infrared (IR) imaging offers advantages in several fields due to its unique ability of capturing content in extreme light conditions. However, the demanding hardware requirements of high-resolution IR sensors limit its widespread application. As an alternative, visible light can be used to synthesize IR images but this causes a loss of fidelity in image details and introduces inconsistencies due to lack of contextual awareness of the scene. This stems from a combination of using visible light with a standard dynamic range, especially under extreme lighting, and a lack of contextual awareness can result in pseudo-thermal-crossover artifacts. This occurs when multiple objects with similar temperatures appear indistinguishable in the training data, further exacerbating the loss of fidelity. To solve this challenge, this paper proposes CapHDR2IR, a novel framework incorporating vision-language models using high dynamic range (HDR) images as inputs to generate IR images. HDR images capture a wider range of luminance variations, ensuring reliable IR image generation in different light conditions. Additionally, a dense caption branch integrates semantic understanding, resulting in more meaningful and discernible IR outputs. Extensive experiments on the HDRT dataset show that the proposed CapHDR2IR achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing general domain transfer methods and those tailored for visible-to-infrared image translation.
Authors:Giacomo Acciarini, Francesco Biscani, Dario Izzo
Title: EclipseNETs: a differentiable description of irregular eclipse conditions
Abstract:
In the field of spaceflight mechanics and astrodynamics, determining eclipse regions is a frequent and critical challenge. This determination impacts various factors, including the acceleration induced by solar radiation pressure, the spacecraft power input, and its thermal state all of which must be accounted for in various phases of the mission design. This study leverages recent advances in neural image processing to develop fully differentiable models of eclipse regions for highly irregular celestial bodies. By utilizing test cases involving Solar System bodies previously visited by spacecraft, such as 433 Eros, 25143 Itokawa, 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko, and 101955 Bennu, we propose and study an implicit neural architecture defining the shape of the eclipse cone based on the Sun's direction. Employing periodic activation functions, we achieve high precision in modeling eclipse conditions. Furthermore, we discuss the potential applications of these differentiable models in spaceflight mechanics computations.
Authors:Jingchao Peng, Thomas Bashford-Rogers, Francesco Banterle, Haitao Zhao, Kurt Debattista
Title: HDRT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Infrared-Guided HDR Imaging
Abstract:
Capturing images with enough details to solve imaging tasks is a long-standing challenge in imaging, particularly due to the limitations of standard dynamic range (SDR) images which often lose details in underexposed or overexposed regions. Traditional high dynamic range (HDR) methods, like multi-exposure fusion or inverse tone mapping, struggle with ghosting and incomplete data reconstruction. Infrared (IR) imaging offers a unique advantage by being less affected by lighting conditions, providing consistent detail capture regardless of visible light intensity. In this paper, we introduce the HDRT dataset, the first comprehensive dataset that consists of HDR and thermal IR images. The HDRT dataset comprises 50,000 images captured across three seasons over six months in eight cities, providing a diverse range of lighting conditions and environmental contexts. Leveraging this dataset, we propose HDRTNet, a novel deep neural method that fuses IR and SDR content to generate HDR images. Extensive experiments validate HDRTNet against the state-of-the-art, showing substantial quantitative and qualitative quality improvements. The HDRT dataset not only advances IR-guided HDR imaging but also offers significant potential for broader research in HDR imaging, multi-modal fusion, domain transfer, and beyond. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jingchao-peng/HDRTDataset.
Authors:Mariam Hassan, Florent Forest, Olga Fink, Malcolm Mielle
Title: ThermoNeRF: Joint RGB and Thermal Novel View Synthesis for Building Facades using Multimodal Neural Radiance Fields
Abstract:
Thermal scene reconstruction holds great potential for various applications, such as analyzing building energy consumption and performing non-destructive infrastructure testing. However, existing methods typically require dense scene measurements and often rely on RGB images for 3D geometry reconstruction, projecting thermal information post-reconstruction. This can lead to inconsistencies between the reconstructed geometry and temperature data and their actual values. To address this challenge, we propose ThermoNeRF, a novel multimodal approach based on Neural Radiance Fields that jointly renders new RGB and thermal views of a scene, and ThermoScenes, a dataset of paired RGB+thermal images comprising 8 scenes of building facades and 8 scenes of everyday objects. To address the lack of texture in thermal images, ThermoNeRF uses paired RGB and thermal images to learn scene density, while separate networks estimate color and temperature data. Unlike comparable studies, our focus is on temperature reconstruction and experimental results demonstrate that ThermoNeRF achieves an average mean absolute error of 1.13C and 0.41C for temperature estimation in buildings and other scenes, respectively, representing an improvement of over 50% compared to using concatenated RGB+thermal data as input to a standard NeRF. Code and dataset are available online.
Authors:Peng Gao, Shi-Min Li, Feng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan, Hamido Fujita
Title: In Defense and Revival of Bayesian Filtering for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking
Abstract:
Deep learning-based methods monopolize the latest research in the field of thermal infrared (TIR) object tracking. However, relying solely on deep learning models to obtain better tracking results requires carefully selecting feature information that is beneficial to representing the target object and designing a reasonable template update strategy, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of model design. Thus, recent TIR tracking methods face many challenges in complex scenarios. This paper introduces a novel Deep Bayesian Filtering (DBF) method to enhance TIR tracking in these challenging situations. DBF is distinctive in its dual-model structure: the system and observation models. The system model leverages motion data to estimate the potential positions of the target object based on two-dimensional Brownian motion, thus generating a prior probability. Following this, the observation model comes into play upon capturing the TIR image. It serves as a classifier and employs infrared information to ascertain the likelihood of these estimated positions, creating a likelihood probability. According to the guidance of the two models, the position of the target object can be determined, and the template can be dynamically updated. Experimental analysis across several benchmark datasets reveals that DBF achieves competitive performance, surpassing most existing TIR tracking methods in complex scenarios.
Authors:Wen-Jia Tang, Xiao Liu, Peng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan
Title: Searching a Lightweight Network Architecture for Thermal Infrared Pedestrian Tracking
Abstract:
Manually-designed network architectures for thermal infrared pedestrian tracking (TIR-PT) require substantial effort from human experts. AlexNet and ResNet are widely used as backbone networks in TIR-PT applications. However, these architectures were originally designed for image classification and object detection tasks, which are less complex than the challenges presented by TIR-PT. This paper makes an early attempt to search an optimal network architecture for TIR-PT automatically, employing single-bottom and dual-bottom cells as basic search units and incorporating eight operation candidates within the search space. To expedite the search process, a random channel selection strategy is employed prior to assessing operation candidates. Classification, batch hard triplet, and center loss are jointly used to retrain the searched architecture. The outcome is a high-performance network architecture that is both parameter- and computation-efficient. Extensive experiments proved the effectiveness of the automated method.
Authors:Muhammad Asif Khan, Hamid Menouar, Ridha Hamila
Title: Multimodal Crowd Counting with Pix2Pix GANs
Abstract:
Most state-of-the-art crowd counting methods use color (RGB) images to learn the density map of the crowd. However, these methods often struggle to achieve higher accuracy in densely crowded scenes with poor illumination. Recently, some studies have reported improvement in the accuracy of crowd counting models using a combination of RGB and thermal images. Although multimodal data can lead to better predictions, multimodal data might not be always available beforehand. In this paper, we propose the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to automatically generate thermal infrared (TIR) images from color (RGB) images and use both to train crowd counting models to achieve higher accuracy. We use a Pix2Pix GAN network first to translate RGB images to TIR images. Our experiments on several state-of-the-art crowd counting models and benchmark crowd datasets report significant improvement in accuracy.
Authors:Fabio Pavirani, Gargya Gokhale, Bert Claessens, Chris Develder
Title: Demand response for residential building heating: Effective Monte Carlo Tree Search control based on physics-informed neural networks
Abstract:
To reduce global carbon emissions and limit climate change, controlling energy consumption in buildings is an important piece of the puzzle. Here, we specifically focus on using a demand response (DR) algorithm to limit the energy consumption of a residential building's heating system while respecting user's thermal comfort. In that domain, Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been shown to be quite effective. One such RL method is Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which has achieved impressive success in playing board games (go, chess). A particular advantage of MCTS is that its decision tree structure naturally allows to integrate exogenous constraints (e.g., by trimming branches that violate them), while conventional RL solutions need more elaborate techniques (e.g., indirectly by adding penalties in the cost/reward function, or through a backup controller that corrects constraint-violating actions). The main aim of this paper is to study the adoption of MCTS for building control, since this (to the best of our knowledge) has remained largely unexplored. A specific property of MCTS is that it needs a simulator component that can predict subsequent system states, based on actions taken. A straightforward data-driven solution is to use black-box neural networks (NNs). We will however extend a Physics-informed Neural Network (PiNN) model to deliver multi-timestep predictions, and show the benefit it offers in terms of lower prediction errors ($-$32\% MAE) as well as better MCTS performance ($-$4\% energy cost, $+$7\% thermal comfort) compared to a black-box NN. A second contribution will be to extend a vanilla MCTS version to adopt the ideas applied in AlphaZero (i.e., using learned prior and value functions and an action selection heuristic) to obtain lower computational costs while maintaining control performance.
Authors:Gaëtan Frusque, Ismail Nejjar, Majid Nabavi, Olga Fink
Title: Semi-Supervised Health Index Monitoring with Feature Generation and Fusion
Abstract:
The Health Index (HI) is crucial for evaluating system health and is important for tasks like anomaly detection and Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction of safety-critical systems. Real-time, meticulous monitoring of system conditions is essential, especially in manufacturing high-quality and safety-critical components such as spray coatings. However, acquiring accurate health status information (HI labels) in real scenarios can be difficult or costly because it requires continuous, precise measurements that fully capture the system's health. As a result, using datasets from systems run-to-failure, which provide limited HI labels only at the healthy and end-of-life phases, becomes a practical approach. We employ Deep Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection (DeepSAD) embeddings to tackle the challenge of extracting features associated with the system's health state. Additionally, we introduce a diversity loss to further enrich the DeepSAD embeddings. We also propose applying an alternating projection algorithm with isotonic constraints to transform the embedding into a normalized HI with an increasing trend. Validation on the PHME2010 milling dataset, a recognized benchmark with ground truth HIs, confirms the efficacy of our proposed HI estimations. Our methodology is further applied to monitor the wear states of thermal spray coatings using high-frequency voltage. These contributions facilitate more accessible and reliable HI estimation, particularly in scenarios where obtaining ground truth HI labels is impossible.
Authors:Samuel Duffield, Maxwell Aifer, Gavin Crooks, Thomas Ahle, Patrick J. Coles
Title: Thermodynamic Matrix Exponentials and Thermodynamic Parallelism
Abstract:
Thermodynamic computing exploits fluctuations and dissipation in physical systems to efficiently solve various mathematical problems. For example, it was recently shown that certain linear algebra problems can be solved thermodynamically, leading to an asymptotic speedup scaling with the matrix dimension. The origin of this "thermodynamic advantage" has not yet been fully explained, and it is not clear what other problems might benefit from it. Here we provide a new thermodynamic algorithm for exponentiating a real matrix, with applications in simulating linear dynamical systems. We describe a simple electrical circuit involving coupled oscillators, whose thermal equilibration can implement our algorithm. We also show that this algorithm also provides an asymptotic speedup that is linear in the dimension. Finally, we introduce the concept of thermodynamic parallelism to explain this speedup, stating that thermodynamic noise provides a resource leading to effective parallelization of computations, and we hypothesize this as a mechanism to explain thermodynamic advantage more generally.
Authors:Aihua Zheng, Zhiqi Ma, Zi Wang, Chenglong Li
Title: Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network for Multi-spectral Vehicle Re-identification
Abstract:
Multi-spectral vehicle re-identification aims to address the challenge of identifying vehicles in complex lighting conditions by incorporating complementary visible and infrared information. However, in harsh environments, the discriminative cues in RGB and NIR modalities are often lost due to strong flares from vehicle lamps or sunlight, and existing multi-modal fusion methods are limited in their ability to recover these important cues. To address this problem, we propose a Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement Network that adaptively restores flare-corrupted RGB and NIR features with guidance from the flare-immunized thermal infrared spectrum. First, to reduce the influence of locally degraded appearance due to intense flare, we propose a Mutual Flare Mask Prediction module to jointly obtain flare-corrupted masks in RGB and NIR modalities in a self-supervised manner. Second, to use the flare-immunized TI information to enhance the masked RGB and NIR, we propose a Flare-Aware Cross-modal Enhancement module that adaptively guides feature extraction of masked RGB and NIR spectra with prior flare-immunized knowledge from the TI spectrum. Third, to extract common informative semantic information from RGB and NIR, we propose an Inter-modality Consistency loss that enforces semantic consistency between the two modalities. Finally, to evaluate the proposed FACENet in handling intense flare, we introduce a new multi-spectral vehicle re-ID dataset, called WMVEID863, with additional challenges such as motion blur, significant background changes, and particularly intense flare degradation. Comprehensive experiments on both the newly collected dataset and public benchmark multi-spectral vehicle re-ID datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed FACENet compared to state-of-the-art methods, especially in handling strong flares. The code and dataset will be released at this link.
Authors:Lequn Chen, Xiling Yao, Kui Liu, Chaolin Tan, Seung Ki Moon
Title: Multisensor fusion-based digital twin in additive manufacturing for in-situ quality monitoring and defect correction
Abstract:
Early detection and correction of defects are critical in additive manufacturing (AM) to avoid build failures. In this paper, we present a multisensor fusion-based digital twin for in-situ quality monitoring and defect correction in a robotic laser direct energy deposition process. Multisensor fusion sources consist of an acoustic sensor, an infrared thermal camera, a coaxial vision camera, and a laser line scanner. The key novelty and contribution of this work are to develop a spatiotemporal data fusion method that synchronizes and registers the multisensor features within the part's 3D volume. The fused dataset can be used to predict location-specific quality using machine learning. On-the-fly identification of regions requiring material addition or removal is feasible. Robot toolpath and auto-tuned process parameters are generated for defecting correction. In contrast to traditional single-sensor-based monitoring, multisensor fusion allows for a more in-depth understanding of underlying process physics, such as pore formation and laser-material interactions. The proposed methods pave the way for self-adaptation AM with higher efficiency, less waste, and cleaner production.
Authors:Philipp A. Guth, Vesa Kaarnioja, Frances Y. Kuo, Claudia Schillings, Ian H. Sloan
Title: Parabolic PDE-constrained optimal control under uncertainty with entropic risk measure using quasi-Monte Carlo integration
Abstract:
We study the application of a tailored quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method to a class of optimal control problems subject to parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) constraints under uncertainty: the state in our setting is the solution of a parabolic PDE with a random thermal diffusion coefficient, steered by a control function. To account for the presence of uncertainty in the optimal control problem, the objective function is composed with a risk measure. We focus on two risk measures, both involving high-dimensional integrals over the stochastic variables: the expected value and the (nonlinear) entropic risk measure. The high-dimensional integrals are computed numerically using specially designed QMC methods and, under moderate assumptions on the input random field, the error rate is shown to be essentially linear, independently of the stochastic dimension of the problem -- and thereby superior to ordinary Monte Carlo methods. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Jingchao Peng, Haitao Zhao, Zhengwei Hu
Title: Dynamic Fusion Network for RGBT Tracking
Abstract:
For both visible and infrared images have their own advantages and disadvantages, RGBT tracking has attracted more and more attention. The key points of RGBT tracking lie in feature extraction and feature fusion of visible and infrared images. Current RGBT tracking methods mostly pay attention to both individual features (features extracted from images of a single camera) and common features (features extracted and fused from an RGB camera and a thermal camera), while pay less attention to the different and dynamic contributions of individual features and common features for different sequences of registered image pairs. This paper proposes a novel RGBT tracking method, called Dynamic Fusion Network (DFNet), which adopts a two-stream structure, in which two non-shared convolution kernels are employed in each layer to extract individual features. Besides, DFNet has shared convolution kernels for each layer to extract common features. Non-shared convolution kernels and shared convolution kernels are adaptively weighted and summed according to different image pairs, so that DFNet can deal with different contributions for different sequences. DFNet has a fast speed, which is 28.658 FPS. The experimental results show that when DFNet only increases the Mult-Adds of 0.02% than the non-shared-convolution-kernel-based fusion method, Precision Rate (PR) and Success Rate (SR) reach 88.1% and 71.9% respectively.
Authors:Xiaopei Zhu, Xiao Li, Jianmin Li, Zheyao Wang, Xiaolin Hu
Title: Fooling thermal infrared pedestrian detectors in real world using small bulbs
Abstract:
Thermal infrared detection systems play an important role in many areas such as night security, autonomous driving, and body temperature detection. They have the unique advantages of passive imaging, temperature sensitivity and penetration. But the security of these systems themselves has not been fully explored, which poses risks in applying these systems. We propose a physical attack method with small bulbs on a board against the state of-the-art pedestrian detectors. Our goal is to make infrared pedestrian detectors unable to detect real-world pedestrians. Towards this goal, we first showed that it is possible to use two kinds of patches to attack the infrared pedestrian detector based on YOLOv3. The average precision (AP) dropped by 64.12% in the digital world, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 29.69% only. After that, we designed and manufactured a physical board and successfully attacked YOLOv3 in the real world. In recorded videos, the physical board caused AP of the target detector to drop by 34.48%, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 14.91% only. With the ensemble attack techniques, the designed physical board had good transferability to unseen detectors. We also proposed the first physical multispectral (infrared and visible) attack. By using a combination method, we successfully hide from the visible light and infrared object detection systems at the same time.
Authors:Rudra Biswas, Jiahui Duan, Shan Deng, Xuezhong Niu, Yixin Qin, Prapti Panigrahi, Varun Parekh, Rajiv Joshi, Kai Ni, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
Title: Single-Cell Universal Logic-in-Memory Using 2T-nC FeRAM: An Area and Energy-Efficient Approach for Bulk Bitwise Computation
Abstract:
This work presents a novel approach to configure 2T-nC ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) for performing single cell logic-in-memory operations, highlighting its advantages in energy-efficient computation over conventional DRAM-based approaches. Unlike conventional 1T-1C dynamic RAM (DRAM), which incurs refresh overhead, 2T-nC FeRAM offers a promising alternative as a non-volatile memory solution with low energy consumption. Our key findings include the potential of quasi-nondestructive readout (QNRO) sensing in 2T-nC FeRAM for logic-in-memory (LiM) applications, demonstrating its inherent capability to perform inverting logic without requiring external modifications, a feature absent in traditional 1T-1C DRAM. We successfully implement the MINORITY function within a single cell of 2T-nC FeRAM, enabling universal NAND and NOR logic, validated through SPICE simulations and experimental data. Additionally, the research investigates the feasibility of 3D integration with 2T-nC FeRAM, showing substantial improvements in storage and computational density, facilitating bulk-bitwise computation. Our evaluation of eight real-world, data-intensive applications reveals that 2T-nC FeRAM achieves 2x higher performance and 2.5x lower energy consumption compared to DRAM. Furthermore, the thermal stability of stacked 2T-nC FeRAM is validated, confirming its reliable operation when integrated on a compute die. These findings emphasize the advantages of 2T-nC FeRAM for LiM, offering superior performance and energy efficiency over conventional DRAM.
Authors:Jian Xiao, Ji Wang, Ming Zeng, Hongbo Xu, Xingwang Li, Arumugam Nallanathan
Title: Channel Estimation for Rydberg Atomic Quantum Receivers
Abstract:
The advent of Rydberg atomic quantum receivers (RAQRs) offers a new solution for the evolution of wireless transceiver architecture, promising unprecedented sensitivity and immunity to thermal noise. However, RAQRs introduce a unique non-linear signal model based on biased phase retrieval, which complicates fundamental channel estimation tasks. Traditional iterative algorithms often struggle in low signal-to-noise regimes and fail to capture complex and non-ideal system characteristics. To address this, we propose a novel model-driven deep learning framework for channel estimation in RAQRs. Specifically, we propose a Transformer-based unrolling architecture, termed URformer, which is derived by unrolling a stabilized variant of the expectation-maximization Gerchberg-Saxton (EM-GS) algorithm. Specifically, each layer of the proposed URformer incorporates three trainable modules: 1) a learnable filter implemented by a neural network that replaces the fixed Bessel function ratio in the classic EM-GS algorithm; 2) a trainable gating mechanism that adaptively combines classic and model-based updates to ensure training stability; and 3) a efficient channel Transformer block that learns to correct residual errors by capturing non-local dependencies across the channel matrix. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed URformer significantly outperforms classic iterative algorithms and conventional black-box neural networks with less pilot overhead.
Authors:Lukas Meyer, Josef Grün, Maximilian Weiherer, Bernhard Egger, Marc Stamminger, Linus Franke
Title: Multi-Spectral Gaussian Splatting with Neural Color Representation
Abstract:
We present MS-Splatting -- a multi-spectral 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework that is able to generate multi-view consistent novel views from images of multiple, independent cameras with different spectral domains. In contrast to previous approaches, our method does not require cross-modal camera calibration and is versatile enough to model a variety of different spectra, including thermal and near-infra red, without any algorithmic changes. Unlike existing 3DGS-based frameworks that treat each modality separately (by optimizing per-channel spherical harmonics) and therefore fail to exploit the underlying spectral and spatial correlations, our method leverages a novel neural color representation that encodes multi-spectral information into a learned, compact, per-splat feature embedding. A shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) then decodes this embedding to obtain spectral color values, enabling joint learning of all bands within a unified representation. Our experiments show that this simple yet effective strategy is able to improve multi-spectral rendering quality, while also leading to improved per-spectra rendering quality over state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new technique in agricultural applications to render vegetation indices, such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI).
Authors:Nikolaos Anastasiou, Spyros Kondylatos, Ioannis Papoutsis
Title: Wildfire spread forecasting with Deep Learning
Abstract:
Accurate prediction of wildfire spread is crucial for effective risk management, emergency response, and strategic resource allocation. In this study, we present a deep learning (DL)-based framework for forecasting the final extent of burned areas, using data available at the time of ignition. We leverage a spatio-temporal dataset that covers the Mediterranean region from 2006 to 2022, incorporating remote sensing data, meteorological observations, vegetation maps, land cover classifications, anthropogenic factors, topography data, and thermal anomalies. To evaluate the influence of temporal context, we conduct an ablation study examining how the inclusion of pre- and post-ignition data affects model performance, benchmarking the temporal-aware DL models against a baseline trained exclusively on ignition-day inputs. Our results indicate that multi-day observational data substantially improve predictive accuracy. Particularly, the best-performing model, incorporating a temporal window of four days before to five days after ignition, improves both the F1 score and the Intersection over Union by almost 5% in comparison to the baseline on the test dataset. We publicly release our dataset and models to enhance research into data-driven approaches for wildfire modeling and response.
Authors:Marcella Astrid, Abdelrahman Shabayek, Djamila Aouada
Title: Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in Battery Thermal Images Using Visual Question Answering with Prior Knowledge
Abstract:
Batteries are essential for various applications, including electric vehicles and renewable energy storage, making safety and efficiency critical concerns. Anomaly detection in battery thermal images helps identify failures early, but traditional deep learning methods require extensive labeled data, which is difficult to obtain, especially for anomalies due to safety risks and high data collection costs. To overcome this, we explore zero-shot anomaly detection using Visual Question Answering (VQA) models, which leverage pretrained knowledge and textbased prompts to generalize across vision tasks. By incorporating prior knowledge of normal battery thermal behavior, we design prompts to detect anomalies without battery-specific training data. We evaluate three VQA models (ChatGPT-4o, LLaVa-13b, and BLIP-2) analyzing their robustness to prompt variations, repeated trials, and qualitative outputs. Despite the lack of finetuning on battery data, our approach demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art models that are trained with the battery data. Our findings highlight the potential of VQA-based zero-shot learning for battery anomaly detection and suggest future directions for improving its effectiveness.
Authors:Shiyu Xuan, Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang
Title: Diff-MM: Exploring Pre-trained Text-to-Image Generation Model for Unified Multi-modal Object Tracking
Abstract:
Multi-modal object tracking integrates auxiliary modalities such as depth, thermal infrared, event flow, and language to provide additional information beyond RGB images, showing great potential in improving tracking stabilization in complex scenarios. Existing methods typically start from an RGB-based tracker and learn to understand auxiliary modalities only from training data. Constrained by the limited multi-modal training data, the performance of these methods is unsatisfactory. To alleviate this limitation, this work proposes a unified multi-modal tracker Diff-MM by exploiting the multi-modal understanding capability of the pre-trained text-to-image generation model. Diff-MM leverages the UNet of pre-trained Stable Diffusion as a tracking feature extractor through the proposed parallel feature extraction pipeline, which enables pairwise image inputs for object tracking. We further introduce a multi-modal sub-module tuning method that learns to gain complementary information between different modalities. By harnessing the extensive prior knowledge in the generation model, we achieve a unified tracker with uniform parameters for RGB-N/D/T/E tracking. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method compared with recently proposed trackers, e.g., its AUC outperforms OneTracker by 8.3% on TNL2K.
Authors:Wolfgang Rannetbauer, Simon Hubmer, Carina Hambrock, Ronny Ramlau
Title: Leveraging Real-Time Data Analysis and Multiple Kernel Learning for Manufacturing of Innovative Steels
Abstract:
The implementation of thermally sprayed components in steel manufacturing presents challenges for production and plant maintenance. While enhancing performance through specialized surface properties, these components may encounter difficulties in meeting modified requirements due to standardization in the refurbishment process. This article proposes updating the established coating process for thermally spray coated components for steel manufacturing (TCCSM) by integrating real-time data analytics and predictive quality management. Two essential components--the data aggregator and the quality predictor--are designed through continuous process monitoring and the application of data-driven methodologies to meet the dynamic demands of the evolving steel landscape. The quality predictor is powered by the simple and effective multiple kernel learning strategy with the goal of realizing predictive quality. The data aggregator, designed with sensors, flow meters, and intelligent data processing for the thermal spray coating process, is proposed to facilitate real-time analytics. The performance of this combination was verified using small-scale tests that enabled not only the accurate prediction of coating quality based on the collected data but also proactive notification to the operator as soon as significant deviations are identified.
Authors:Siyang Jiang, Bufang Yang, Lilin Xu, Mu Yuan, Yeerzhati Abudunuer, Kaiwei Liu, Liekang Zeng, Hongkai Chen, Zhenyu Yan, Xiaofan Jiang, Guoliang Xing
Title: An LLM-Empowered Low-Resolution Vision System for On-Device Human Behavior Understanding
Abstract:
The rapid advancements in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) offer the potential to surpass conventional labeling by generating richer, more detailed descriptions of on-device human behavior understanding (HBU) in low-resolution vision systems, such as depth, thermal, and infrared. However, existing large vision language model (LVLM) approaches are unable to understand low-resolution data well as they are primarily designed for high-resolution data, such as RGB images. A quick fixing approach is to caption a large amount of low-resolution data, but it requires a significant amount of labor-intensive annotation efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel, labor-saving system, Llambda, designed to support low-resolution HBU. The core idea is to leverage limited labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to guide LLMs in generating informative captions, which can be combined with raw data to effectively fine-tune LVLM models for understanding low-resolution videos in HBU. First, we propose a Contrastive-Oriented Data Labeler, which can capture behavior-relevant information from long, low-resolution videos and generate high-quality pseudo labels for unlabeled data via contrastive learning. Second, we propose a Physical-Knowledge Guided Captioner, which utilizes spatial and temporal consistency checks to mitigate errors in pseudo labels. Therefore, it can improve LLMs' understanding of sequential data and then generate high-quality video captions. Finally, to ensure on-device deployability, we employ LoRA-based efficient fine-tuning to adapt LVLMs for low-resolution data. We evaluate Llambda using a region-scale real-world testbed and three distinct low-resolution datasets, and the experiments show that Llambda outperforms several state-of-the-art LVLM systems up to $40.03\%$ on average Bert-Score.
Authors:Varun Darshana Parekh, Zachary Wyatt Hazenstab, Srivatsa Rangachar Srinivasa, Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Kai Ni, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
Title: STAMP-2.5D: Structural and Thermal Aware Methodology for Placement in 2.5D Integration
Abstract:
Chiplet-based architectures and advanced packaging has emerged as transformative approaches in semiconductor design. While conventional physical design for 2.5D heterogeneous systems typically prioritizes wirelength reduction through tight chiplet packing, this strategy creates thermal bottlenecks and intensifies coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatches, compromising long-term reliability. Addressing these challenges requires holistic consideration of thermal performance, mechanical stress, and interconnect efficiency. We introduce STAMP-2.5D, the first automated floorplanning methodology that simultaneously optimizes these critical factors. Our approach employs finite element analysis to simulate temperature distributions and stress profiles across chiplet configurations while minimizing interconnect wirelength. Experimental results demonstrate that our thermal structural aware automated floorplanning approach reduces overall stress by 11% while maintaining excellent thermal performance with a negligible 0.5% temperature increase and simultaneously reducing total wirelength by 11% compared to temperature-only optimization. Additionally, we conduct an exploratory study on the effects of temperature gradients on structural integrity, providing crucial insights for reliability-conscious chiplet design. STAMP-2.5D establishes a robust platform for navigating critical trade-offs in advanced semiconductor packaging.
Authors:Yun Li, Jicheng Shi, Colin N. Jones, Neil Yorke-Smith, Tamas Keviczky
Title: Model Predictive Building Climate Control for Mitigating Heat Pump Noise Pollution (Extended Version)
Abstract:
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.
Authors:Clayton Miller, Yun Xuan Chua, Matias Quintana, Binyu Lei, Filip Biljecki, Mario Frei
Title: Make yourself comfortable: Nudging urban heat and noise mitigation with smartwatch-based Just-in-time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI)
Abstract:
Humans can play a more active role in improving their comfort in the built environment if given the right information at the right place and time. This paper outlines the use of Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI) implemented in the context of the built environment to provide information that helps humans minimize the impact of heat and noise on their daily lives. This framework is based on the open-source Cozie iOS smartwatch platform. It includes data collection through micro-surveys and intervention messages triggered by environmental, contextual, and personal history conditions. An eight-month deployment of the method was completed in Singapore with 103 participants who submitted more than 12,000 micro-surveys and had more than 3,600 JITAI intervention messages delivered to them. A weekly survey conducted during two deployment phases revealed an overall increase in perceived usefulness ranging from 8-19% over the first three weeks of data collection. For noise-related interventions, participants showed an overall increase in location changes ranging from 4-11% and a 2-17% increase in earphone use to mitigate noise distractions. For thermal comfort-related interventions, participants demonstrated a 3-13\% increase in adjustments to their location or thermostat to feel more comfortable. The analysis found evidence that personality traits (such as conscientiousness), gender, and environmental preferences could be factors in determining the perceived helpfulness of JITAIs and influencing behavior change. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring intervention strategies to individual traits and environmental conditions, setting the stage for future research to refine the delivery, timing, and content of intervention messages.
Authors:Haotian Ji, Dong Wu, Chi Zhang, Xiangyu Hu
Title: Heat transfer simulation of window frames with SPHinXsys
Abstract:
Maintaining a comfortable temperature inside a building requires appropriate thermal insulation of windows, which can be optimised iteratively with numerical simulation. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics(SPH) is a fully Lagrangian method widely used for simulating multi-physics applications with high computational efficiency and accuracy. It is advantageous in physically coupled problems such as heat-fluid-solid or any other type of physically coupled simulations. The focus of this study is to simulate the heat transfer process in various window frames under convective boundary conditions according to ISO10077-2:2012. This paper demonstrates the accuracy and compatibility of SPH when dealing with heat transfer problems, which ensures further development of thermal coupling with other physical fields. The results and methods used in this paper provide some guidance on how to properly handle heat transfer simulations using SPH, which can be extended to multi-physics coupled simulations in the future.
Authors:Jovan Stojkovic, Chaojie Zhang, Íñigo Goiri, Esha Choukse, Haoran Qiu, Rodrigo Fonseca, Josep Torrellas, Ricardo Bianchini
Title: TAPAS: Thermal- and Power-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference in Cloud Platforms
Abstract:
The rising demand for generative large language models (LLMs) poses challenges for thermal and power management in cloud datacenters. Traditional techniques often are inadequate for LLM inference due to the fine-grained, millisecond-scale execution phases, each with distinct performance, thermal, and power profiles. Additionally, LLM inference workloads are sensitive to various configuration parameters (e.g., model parallelism, size, and quantization) that involve trade-offs between performance, temperature, power, and output quality. Moreover, clouds often co-locate SaaS and IaaS workloads, each with different levels of visibility and flexibility. We propose TAPAS, a thermal- and power-aware framework designed for LLM inference clusters in the cloud. TAPAS enhances cooling and power oversubscription capabilities, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) while effectively handling emergencies (e.g., cooling and power failures). The system leverages historical temperature and power data, along with the adaptability of SaaS workloads, to: (1) efficiently place new GPU workload VMs within cooling and power constraints, (2) route LLM inference requests across SaaS VMs, and (3) reconfigure SaaS VMs to manage load spikes and emergency situations. Our evaluation on a large GPU cluster demonstrates significant reductions in thermal and power throttling events, boosting system efficiency.
Authors:Yang Li, Jiankai Gao, Yuanzheng Li, Chen Chen, Sen Li, Mohammad Shahidehpour, Zhe Chen
Title: Physical Informed-Inspired Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Bi-Level Programming for Microgrid Scheduling
Abstract:
To coordinate the interests of operator and users in a microgrid under complex and changeable operating conditions, this paper proposes a microgrid scheduling model considering the thermal flexibility of thermostatically controlled loads and demand response by leveraging physical informed-inspired deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based bi-level programming. To overcome the non-convex limitations of karush-kuhn-tucker (KKT)-based methods, a novel optimization solution method based on DRL theory is proposed to handle the bi-level programming through alternate iterations between levels. Specifically, by combining a DRL algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and automated machine learning-prioritized experience replay (AutoML-PER) strategy to improve the generalization performance of A3C to address the above problems, an improved A3C algorithm, called AutoML-PER-A3C, is designed to solve the upper-level problem; while the DOCPLEX optimizer is adopted to address the lower-level problem. In this solution process, AutoML is used to automatically optimize hyperparameters and PER improves learning efficiency and quality by extracting the most valuable samples. The test results demonstrate that the presented approach manages to reconcile the interests between multiple stakeholders in MG by fully exploiting various flexibility resources. Furthermore, in terms of economic viability and computational efficiency, the proposal vastly exceeds other advanced reinforcement learning methods.
Authors:Yunpeng Gong, Qingyuan Zeng, Dejun Xu, Zhenzhong Wang, Min Jiang
Title: Cross-Modality Attack Boosted by Gradient-Evolutionary Multiform Optimization
Abstract:
In recent years, despite significant advancements in adversarial attack research, the security challenges in cross-modal scenarios, such as the transferability of adversarial attacks between infrared, thermal, and RGB images, have been overlooked. These heterogeneous image modalities collected by different hardware devices are widely prevalent in practical applications, and the substantial differences between modalities pose significant challenges to attack transferability. In this work, we explore a novel cross-modal adversarial attack strategy, termed multiform attack. We propose a dual-layer optimization framework based on gradient-evolution, facilitating efficient perturbation transfer between modalities. In the first layer of optimization, the framework utilizes image gradients to learn universal perturbations within each modality and employs evolutionary algorithms to search for shared perturbations with transferability across different modalities through secondary optimization. Through extensive testing on multiple heterogeneous datasets, we demonstrate the superiority and robustness of Multiform Attack compared to existing techniques. This work not only enhances the transferability of cross-modal adversarial attacks but also provides a new perspective for understanding security vulnerabilities in cross-modal systems.
Authors:Devansh Dhrafani, Yifei Liu, Andrew Jong, Ukcheol Shin, Yao He, Tyler Harp, Yaoyu Hu, Jean Oh, Sebastian Scherer
Title: FIReStereo: Forest InfraRed Stereo Dataset for UAS Depth Perception in Visually Degraded Environments
Abstract:
Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset, the use of thermal cameras for unmanned aerial system (UAS) depth perception has remained largely unexplored. This paper presents a stereo thermal depth perception dataset for autonomous aerial perception applications. The dataset consists of stereo thermal images, LiDAR, IMU and ground truth depth maps captured in urban and forest settings under diverse conditions like day, night, rain, and smoke. We benchmark representative stereo depth estimation algorithms, offering insights into their performance in degraded conditions. Models trained on our dataset generalize well to unseen smoky conditions, highlighting the robustness of stereo thermal imaging for depth perception. We aim for this work to enhance robotic perception in disaster scenarios, allowing for exploration and operations in previously unreachable areas. The dataset and source code are available at https://firestereo.github.io.
Authors:Yuming Huang, Yuhu Guo, Renbo Su, Xingjian Han, Junhao Ding, Tianyu Zhang, Tao Liu, Weiming Wang, Guoxin Fang, Xu Song, Emily Whiting, Charlie C. L. Wang
Title: Learning Based Toolpath Planner on Diverse Graphs for 3D Printing
Abstract:
This paper presents a learning based planner for computing optimized 3D printing toolpaths on prescribed graphs, the challenges of which include the varying graph structures on different models and the large scale of nodes & edges on a graph. We adopt an on-the-fly strategy to tackle these challenges, formulating the planner as a Deep Q-Network (DQN) based optimizer to decide the next `best' node to visit. We construct the state spaces by the Local Search Graph (LSG) centered at different nodes on a graph, which is encoded by a carefully designed algorithm so that LSGs in similar configurations can be identified to re-use the earlier learned DQN priors for accelerating the computation of toolpath planning. Our method can cover different 3D printing applications by defining their corresponding reward functions. Toolpath planning problems in wire-frame printing, continuous fiber printing, and metallic printing are selected to demonstrate its generality. The performance of our planner has been verified by testing the resultant toolpaths in physical experiments. By using our planner, wire-frame models with up to 4.2k struts can be successfully printed, up to 93.3% of sharp turns on continuous fiber toolpaths can be avoided, and the thermal distortion in metallic printing can be reduced by 24.9%.
Authors:Aoran Xiao, Weihao Xuan, Heli Qi, Yun Xing, Naoto Yokoya, Shijian Lu
Title: Segment Anything with Multiple Modalities
Abstract:
Robust and accurate segmentation of scenes has become one core functionality in various visual recognition and navigation tasks. This has inspired the recent development of Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model for general mask segmentation. However, SAM is largely tailored for single-modal RGB images, limiting its applicability to multi-modal data captured with widely-adopted sensor suites, such as LiDAR plus RGB, depth plus RGB, thermal plus RGB, etc. We develop MM-SAM, an extension and expansion of SAM that supports cross-modal and multi-modal processing for robust and enhanced segmentation with different sensor suites. MM-SAM features two key designs, namely, unsupervised cross-modal transfer and weakly-supervised multi-modal fusion, enabling label-efficient and parameter-efficient adaptation toward various sensor modalities. It addresses three main challenges: 1) adaptation toward diverse non-RGB sensors for single-modal processing, 2) synergistic processing of multi-modal data via sensor fusion, and 3) mask-free training for different downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that MM-SAM consistently outperforms SAM by large margins, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness across various sensors and data modalities.
Authors:Bernard J. Giron Castro, Christophe Peucheret, Francesco Da Ros
Title: Memory Capacity Analysis of Time-delay Reservoir Computing Based on Silicon Microring Resonator Nonlinearities
Abstract:
Silicon microring resonators (MRRs) have shown strong potential in acting as the nonlinear nodes of photonic reservoir computing (RC) schemes. By using nonlinearities within a silicon MRR, such as the ones caused by free-carrier dispersion (FCD) and thermo-optic (TO) effects, it is possible to map the input data of the RC to a higher dimensional space. Furthermore, by adding an external waveguide between the through and add ports of the MRR, it is possible to implement a time-delay RC (TDRC) with enhanced memory. The input from the through port is fed back into the add port of the ring with the delay applied by the external waveguide effectively adding memory. In a TDRC, the nodes are multiplexed in time, and their respective time evolutions are detected at the drop port. The performance of MRR-based TDRC is highly dependent on the amount of nonlinearity in the MRR. The nonlinear effects, in turn, are dependent on the physical properties of the MRR as they determine the lifetime of the effects. Another factor to take into account is the stability of the MRR response, as strong time-domain discontinuities at the drop port are known to emerge from FCD nonlinearities due to self-pulsing (high nonlinear behaviour). However, quantifying the right amount of nonlinearity that RC needs for a certain task in order to achieve optimum performance is challenging. Therefore, further analysis is required to fully understand the nonlinear dynamics of this TDRC setup. Here, we quantify the nonlinear and linear memory capacity of the previously described microring-based TDRC scheme, as a function of the time constants of the generated carriers and the thermal of the TO effects. We analyze the properties of the TDRC dynamics that generate the parameter space, in terms of input signal power and frequency detuning range, over which conventional RC tasks can be satisfactorily performed by the TDRC scheme.
Authors:Andrew Adamatzky, Nic Roberts, Raphael Fortulan, Noushin Raeisi Kheirabadi, Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Michail-Antisthenis Tsompanas, Genaro J. Martinez, Georgios Ch. Sirakoulis, Alessandro Chiolerio
Title: On complexity of colloid cellular automata
Abstract:
The colloid cellular automata do not imitate the physical structure of colloids but are governed by logical functions derived from the colloids. We analyse the space-time complexity of Boolean circuits derived from the electrical responses of colloids: ZnO (zinc oxide, an inorganic compound also known as calamine or zinc white, which naturally occurs as the mineral zincite), proteinoids (microspheres and crystals of thermal abiotic proteins), and combinations thereof to electrical stimulation. To extract Boolean circuits from colloids, we send all possible configurations of two-, four-, and eight-bit binary strings, encoded as electrical potential values, to the colloids, record their responses, and thereby infer the Boolean functions they implement. We map the discovered functions onto the cell-state transition rules of cellular automata (arrays of binary state machines that update their states synchronously according to the same rule) -- the colloid cellular automata. We then analyse the phenomenology of the space-time configurations of the automata and evaluate their complexity using measures such as compressibility, Shannon entropy, Simpson diversity, and expressivity. A hierarchy of phenomenological and measurable space-time complexity is constructed.
Authors:Xuehua Li, Yingjie Pei, Xinwei Yue, Yuanwei Liu, Zhiguo Ding
Title: Secure Communication of Active RIS Assisted NOMA Networks
Abstract:
As a revolutionary technology, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been deemed as an indispensable part of the 6th generation communications due to its inherent ability to regulate the wireless channels. However, passive RIS (PRIS) still suffers from some pressing issues, one of which is that the fading of the entire reflection link is proportional to the product of the distances from the base station to the PRIS and from the PRIS to the users, i.e., the productive attenuation. To tackle this problem, active RIS (ARIS) has been proposed to reconfigure the wireless propagation condition and alleviate the productive attenuation. In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security of the ARIS assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks with the attendance of external and internal eavesdroppers. To be specific, the closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) and secrecy system throughput are derived by invoking both imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC) and perfect SIC. The secrecy diversity orders of legitimate users are obtained at high signal-to-noise ratios. Numerical results are presented to verify the accuracy of the theoretical expressions and indicate that: i) The SOP of ARIS assisted NOMA networks exceeds that of PRIS-NOMA, ARIS/PRIS-assisted orthogonal multiple access (OMA); ii) Due to the balance between the thermal noise and residual interference, introducing excess reconfigurable elements at ARIS is not helpful to reduce the SOP; and iii) The secrecy throughput performance of ARIS-NOMA networks outperforms that of PRIS-NOMA and ARIS/PRIS-OMA networks.
Authors:Sebastian D. Proell, Julian Brotz, Martin Kronbichler, Wolfgang A. Wall, Christoph Meier
Title: A highly efficient computational approach for part-scale microstructure predictions in Ti-6Al-4V additive manufacturing
Abstract:
Fast and efficient simulations of metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes are highly relevant to exploring the full potential of this promising manufacturing technique. The microstructure composition plays an important role in characterizing the part quality and deriving mechanical properties. When complete parts are simulated, one often needs to resort to strong simplifications such as layer-wise heating due to the large number of simulated time steps compared to the small time step sizes. This article proposes a scan-resolved approach to the coupled thermo-microstructural problem. Building on a highly efficient thermal model, we discuss the implementation of a phenomenological microstructure model for the evolution of the three main constituents of Ti-6Al-4V: stable $α_s$-phase, martensite $α_m$-phase and $β$-phase. The implementation is tailored to modern hardware features using vectorization and fast approximations of transcendental functions. A performance model and numerical examples verify the high degree of optimization. We demonstrate the applicability and predictive power of the approach and the influence of scan strategy and geometry. Depending on the specific example, results can be obtained with moderate computational resources in a few hours to days. The numerical examples include a prediction of the microstructure on the full NIST AM Benchmark cantilever specimen.
Authors:Nils Much, Magdalena Schreter-Fleischhacker, Peter Munch, Martin Kronbichler, Wolfgang A. Wall, Christoph Meier
Title: Improved accuracy of continuum surface flux models for metal additive manufacturing melt pool simulations
Abstract:
Computational modeling of the melt pool dynamics in laser-based powder bed fusion metal additive manufacturing (PBF-LB/M) promises to shed light on fundamental mechanisms of defect generation. These processes are accompanied by rapid evaporation so that the evaporation-induced recoil pressure and cooling arise as major driving forces for fluid dynamics and temperature evolution. The magnitude of these interface fluxes depends exponentially on the melt pool surface temperature, which, therefore, has to be predicted with high accuracy. The present work utilizes a diffuse interface finite element model based on a continuum surface flux (CSF) description of interface fluxes to study dimensionally reduced thermal two-phase problems representative for PBF-LB/M in a finite element framework. It is demonstrated that the extreme temperature gradients combined with the high ratios of material properties between metal and ambient gas lead to significant errors in the interface temperatures and fluxes when classical CSF approaches, along with typical interface thicknesses and discretizations, are applied. It is expected that this finding is also relevant for other types of diffuse interface PBF-LB/M melt pool models. A novel parameter-scaled CSF approach is proposed, which is constructed to yield a smoother temperature field in the diffuse interface region, significantly increasing the solution accuracy. The interface thickness required to predict the temperature field with a given level of accuracy is less restrictive by at least one order of magnitude for the proposed parameter-scaled approach compared to classical CSF, drastically reducing computational costs. Finally, we showcase the general applicability of the parameter-scaled CSF to a 3D simulation of stationary laser melting of PBF-LB/M considering the fully coupled thermo-hydrodynamic multi-phase problem, including phase change.
Authors:Magdalena Schreter-Fleischhacker, Peter Munch, Nils Much, Martin Kronbichler, Wolfgang A. Wall, Christoph Meier
Title: A consistent diffuse-interface model for two-phase flow problems with rapid evaporation
Abstract:
We present accurate and mathematically consistent formulations of a diffuse-interface model for two-phase flow problems involving rapid evaporation. The model addresses challenges including discontinuities in the density field by several orders of magnitude, leading to high velocity and pressure jumps across the liquid-vapor interface, along with dynamically changing interface topologies. To this end, we integrate an incompressible Navier-Stokes solver combined with a conservative level-set formulation and a regularized, i.e., diffuse, representation of discontinuities into a matrix-free adaptive finite element framework. The achievements are three-fold: First, we propose mathematically consistent definitions for the level-set transport velocity in the diffuse interface region by extrapolating the velocity from the liquid or gas phase. They exhibit superior prediction accuracy for the evaporated mass and the resulting interface dynamics compared to a local velocity evaluation, especially for strongly curved interfaces. Second, we show that accurate prediction of the evaporation-induced pressure jump requires a consistent, namely a reciprocal, density interpolation across the interface, which satisfies local mass conservation. Third, the combination of diffuse interface models for evaporation with standard Stokes-type constitutive relations for viscous flows leads to significant pressure artifacts in the diffuse interface region. To mitigate these, we propose to introduce a correction term for such constitutive model types. Through selected analytical and numerical examples, the aforementioned properties are validated. The presented model promises new insights in simulation-based prediction of melt-vapor interactions in thermal multiphase flows such as in laser-based powder bed fusion of metals.
Authors:Raphael Fortulan, Noushin Raeisi Kheirabadi, Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Alessandro Chiolerio, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Reservoir Computing with Colloidal Mixtures of ZnO and Proteinoids
Abstract:
Liquid computers use incompressible fluids for computational processes. Here we present experimental laboratory prototypes of liquid computers using colloids composed of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles and microspheres containing thermal proteins (proteinoids). The choice of proteinoids is based on their distinctive neuron-like electrical behaviour and their similarity to protocells. In addition, ZnO nanoparticles are chosen for their non-trivial electrical properties. Our research demonstrates the successful extraction of 2-, 4- and 8-bit logic functions in ZnO proteinoid colloids. Our analysis shows that each material has a distinct set of logic functions, and that the complexity of the expressions is directly related to each material present in a mixture. These findings provide a basis for the development of future hybris liquid devices capable of general purpose computing.
Authors:Shaohua Dong, Yunhe Feng, Qing Yang, Yan Huang, Dongfang Liu, Heng Fan
Title: Efficient Multimodal Semantic Segmentation via Dual-Prompt Learning
Abstract:
Multimodal (e.g., RGB-Depth/RGB-Thermal) fusion has shown great potential for improving semantic segmentation in complex scenes (e.g., indoor/low-light conditions). Existing approaches often fully fine-tune a dual-branch encoder-decoder framework with a complicated feature fusion strategy for achieving multimodal semantic segmentation, which is training-costly due to the massive parameter updates in feature extraction and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a surprisingly simple yet effective dual-prompt learning network (dubbed DPLNet) for training-efficient multimodal (e.g., RGB-D/T) semantic segmentation. The core of DPLNet is to directly adapt a frozen pre-trained RGB model to multimodal semantic segmentation, reducing parameter updates. For this purpose, we present two prompt learning modules, comprising multimodal prompt generator (MPG) and multimodal feature adapter (MFA). MPG works to fuse the features from different modalities in a compact manner and is inserted from shadow to deep stages to generate the multi-level multimodal prompts that are injected into the frozen backbone, while MPG adapts prompted multimodal features in the frozen backbone for better multimodal semantic segmentation. Since both the MPG and MFA are lightweight, only a few trainable parameters (3.88M, 4.4% of the pre-trained backbone parameters) are introduced for multimodal feature fusion and learning. Using a simple decoder (3.27M parameters), DPLNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance or is on a par with other complex approaches on four RGB-D/T semantic segmentation datasets while satisfying parameter efficiency. Moreover, we show that DPLNet is general and applicable to other multimodal tasks such as salient object detection and video semantic segmentation. Without special design, DPLNet outperforms many complicated models. Our code will be available at github.com/ShaohuaDong2021/DPLNet.
Authors:Antonio Liguori, Matias Quintana, Chun Fu, Clayton Miller, Jérôme Frisch, Christoph van Treeck
Title: Opening the Black Box: Towards inherently interpretable energy data imputation models using building physics insight
Abstract:
Missing data are frequently observed by practitioners and researchers in the building energy modeling community. In this regard, advanced data-driven solutions, such as Deep Learning methods, are typically required to reflect the non-linear behavior of these anomalies. As an ongoing research question related to Deep Learning, a model's applicability to limited data settings can be explored by introducing prior knowledge in the network. This same strategy can also lead to more interpretable predictions, hence facilitating the field application of the approach. For that purpose, the aim of this paper is to propose the use of Physics-informed Denoising Autoencoders (PI-DAE) for missing data imputation in commercial buildings. In particular, the presented method enforces physics-inspired soft constraints to the loss function of a Denoising Autoencoder (DAE). In order to quantify the benefits of the physical component, an ablation study between different DAE configurations is conducted. First, three univariate DAEs are optimized separately on indoor air temperature, heating, and cooling data. Then, two multivariate DAEs are derived from the previous configurations. Eventually, a building thermal balance equation is coupled to the last multivariate configuration to obtain PI-DAE. Additionally, two commonly used benchmarks are employed to support the findings. It is shown how introducing physical knowledge in a multivariate Denoising Autoencoder can enhance the inherent model interpretability through the optimized physics-based coefficients. While no significant improvement is observed in terms of reconstruction error with the proposed PI-DAE, its enhanced robustness to varying rates of missing data and the valuable insights derived from the physics-based coefficients create opportunities for wider applications within building systems and the built environment.
Authors:Bo Zhang, Chi Zhang, Xiangyu Hu
Title: Target-driven splitting SPH optimization of thermal conductivity distribution
Abstract:
Efficiently enhancing heat conduction through optimized distribution of a limited quantity of high thermal conductivity material is paramount in cooling electronic devices and numerous other applications. This paper introduces a target-driven all-at-once approach for PDE-constrained optimization and derives a splitting smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method for optimizing the distribution of thermal conductivity in heat conduction problems. In this method, the optimization iteration of the system is split into several easily addressed steps. A targeting step is employed to progressively enforce the direct target, which potentially leads to increased PDE residuals. Then, these residuals are recovered through an evolution step of the design variable. After this, a PDE solution step is carried out to further decrease the PDE residuals, and the system is ready for the next iteration. Unlike the simulation-based approaches, the present method does not rely on the adjoint state equation and converged state variable field in each iteration, and the optimization process is significantly simplified and accelerated. With the utilization of an implicit SPH splitting operator and a general numerical regularization formulation, the information propagation is further accelerated and the numerical stability is greatly enhanced. Typical examples of heat conduction optimization demonstrate that the current method yields optimal results comparable to previous methods and exhibits considerable computational efficiency. Moreover, the optimal results feature more moderate extreme values, which offers distinct advantages for the easier selection of appropriate material with high thermal conductivity.
Authors:Wolfgang Rannetbauer, Simon Hubmer, Carina Hambrock, Ronny Ramlau
Title: Predictive Modelling of Critical Variables for Improving HVOF Coating using Gamma Regression Models
Abstract:
Thermal spray coating is a critical process in many industries, involving the application of coatings to surfaces to enhance their functionality. This paper proposes a framework for modelling and predicting critical target variables in thermal spray coating processes, based on the application of statistical design of experiments (DoE) and the modelling of the data using generalized linear models (GLMs) with a particular emphasis on gamma regression. Experimental data obtained from thermal spray coating trials are used to validate the presented approach, demonstrating that it is able to accurately model and predict critical target variables. As such, the framework has significant potential for the optimization of thermal spray coating processes, and can contribute to the development of more efficient and effective coating technologies in various industries.
Authors:Zikun Zhou, Shukun Wu, Guoqing Zhu, Hongpeng Wang, Zhenyu He
Title: Channel and Spatial Relation-Propagation Network for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation has shown great potential in handling low-light conditions where RGB-based segmentation is hindered by poor RGB imaging quality. The key to RGB-T semantic segmentation is to effectively leverage the complementarity nature of RGB and thermal images. Most existing algorithms fuse RGB and thermal information in feature space via concatenation, element-wise summation, or attention operations in either unidirectional enhancement or bidirectional aggregation manners. However, they usually overlook the modality gap between RGB and thermal images during feature fusion, resulting in modality-specific information from one modality contaminating the other. In this paper, we propose a Channel and Spatial Relation-Propagation Network (CSRPNet) for RGB-T semantic segmentation, which propagates only modality-shared information across different modalities and alleviates the modality-specific information contamination issue. Our CSRPNet first performs relation-propagation in channel and spatial dimensions to capture the modality-shared features from the RGB and thermal features. CSRPNet then aggregates the modality-shared features captured from one modality with the input feature from the other modality to enhance the input feature without the contamination issue. While being fused together, the enhanced RGB and thermal features will be also fed into the subsequent RGB or thermal feature extraction layers for interactive feature fusion, respectively. We also introduce a dual-path cascaded feature refinement module that aggregates multi-layer features to produce two refined features for semantic and boundary prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CSRPNet performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms.
Authors:Chao Tian, Zikun Zhou, Yuqing Huang, Gaojun Li, Zhenyu He
Title: Cross-Modality Proposal-guided Feature Mining for Unregistered RGB-Thermal Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) pedestrian detection aims to locate the pedestrians in RGB-T image pairs to exploit the complementation between the two modalities for improving detection robustness in extreme conditions. Most existing algorithms assume that the RGB-T image pairs are well registered, while in the real world they are not aligned ideally due to parallax or different field-of-view of the cameras. The pedestrians in misaligned image pairs may locate at different positions in two images, which results in two challenges: 1) how to achieve inter-modality complementation using spatially misaligned RGB-T pedestrian patches, and 2) how to recognize the unpaired pedestrians at the boundary. To deal with these issues, we propose a new paradigm for unregistered RGB-T pedestrian detection, which predicts two separate pedestrian locations in the RGB and thermal images, respectively. Specifically, we propose a cross-modality proposal-guided feature mining (CPFM) mechanism to extract the two precise fusion features for representing the pedestrian in the two modalities, even if the RGB-T image pair is unaligned. It enables us to effectively exploit the complementation between the two modalities. With the CPFM mechanism, we build a two-stream dense detector; it predicts the two pedestrian locations in the two modalities based on the corresponding fusion feature mined by the CPFM mechanism. Besides, we design a data augmentation method, named Homography, to simulate the discrepancy in scales and views between images. We also investigate two non-maximum suppression (NMS) methods for post-processing. Favorable experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in dealing with unregistered pedestrians with different shifts.
Authors:Andrii Kurkin, Jonas Hegemann, Mo Kordzanganeh, Alexey Melnikov
Title: Forecasting steam mass flow in power plants using the parallel hybrid network
Abstract:
Efficient and sustainable power generation is a crucial concern in the energy sector. In particular, thermal power plants grapple with accurately predicting steam mass flow, which is crucial for operational efficiency and cost reduction. In this study, we use a parallel hybrid neural network architecture that combines a parametrized quantum circuit and a conventional feed-forward neural network specifically designed for time-series prediction in industrial settings to enhance predictions of steam mass flow 15 minutes into the future. Our results show that the parallel hybrid model outperforms standalone classical and quantum models, achieving more than 5.7 and 4.9 times lower mean squared error loss on the test set after training compared to pure classical and pure quantum networks, respectively. Furthermore, the hybrid model demonstrates smaller relative errors between the ground truth and the model predictions on the test set, up to 2 times better than the pure classical model. These findings contribute to the broader scientific understanding of how integrating quantum and classical machine learning techniques can be applied to real-world challenges faced by the energy sector, ultimately leading to optimized power plant operations. To our knowledge, this study constitutes the first parallel hybrid quantum-classical architecture deployed on a real-world power-plant dataset, illustrating how near-term quantum resources can already augment classical analytics in the energy sector.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Learning in ensembles of proteinoid microspheres
Abstract:
Proteinoids are thermal proteins which form microspheres in water in presence of salt. Ensembles of proteinoid microspheres exhibit passive non-linear electrical properties and active neuron-like spiking of electrical potential. We propose that various neuromorphic computing architectures can be prototyped from the proteinoid microspheres. A key feature of a neuromorphic system is a learning. Through the use of optical and resistance measurements, we study mechanisms of learning in ensembles of proteinoid microspheres. We anlyse 16 types of proteinoids, study their intrinsic morphology and electrical properties. We demonstrate that proteinoids can learn, memorize, and habituate, making them a promising candidate for novel computing.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Proteinoid microspheres as proto-neural networks
Abstract:
Proteinoids, also known as thermal proteins, possess a fascinating ability to generate microspheres that exhibit electrical spikes resembling the action potentials of neurons. These spiking microspheres, referred to as protoneurons, hold the potential to assemble into proto-nano-brains. In our study, we investigate the feasibility of utilizing a promising electrochemical technique called differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) to interface with proteinoid nano-brains. We evaluate DPV's suitability by examining critical parameters such as selectivity, sensitivity, and linearity of the electrochemical responses. The research systematically explores the influence of various operational factors, including pulse width, pulse amplitude, scan rate, and scan time. Encouragingly, our findings indicate that DPV exhibits significant potential as an efficient electrochemical interface for proteinoid nano-brains. This technology opens up new avenues for developing artificial neural networks with broad applications across diverse fields of research.
Authors:Yixuan Su, Tian Lan, Huayang Li, Jialu Xu, Yan Wang, Deng Cai
Title: PandaGPT: One Model To Instruction-Follow Them All
Abstract:
We present PandaGPT, an approach to emPower large lANguage moDels with visual and Auditory instruction-following capabilities. Our pilot experiments show that PandaGPT can perform complex tasks such as detailed image description generation, writing stories inspired by videos, and answering questions about audios. More interestingly, PandaGPT can take multimodal inputs simultaneously and compose their semantics naturally. For example, PandaGPT can connect how objects look in an image/video and how they sound in an audio. To do so, PandaGPT combines the multimodal encoders from ImageBind and the large language models from Vicuna. Notably, only aligned image-text pairs are required for the training of PandaGPT. Thanks to the strong capability of ImageBind in embedding data from different modalities into the same space, PandaGPT displays emergent, i.e. zero-shot, cross-modal behaviors for data other than image and text (e.g., video, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU). We hope that PandaGPT serves as an initial step toward building AGI that can perceive and understand inputs in different modalities holistically, as we humans do. Our project page is at https://panda-gpt.github.io/.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Spiking frequency modulation of proteinoids with light and realisation of Boolean gates
Abstract:
This paper examines the modulation of proteinoid spiking frequency in response to light. Proteinoids are proteins formed through thermal condensation of amino acids and have been found to exhibit spiking behaviour in response to various stimuli. It has been demonstrated that their properties can be modulated by light, with the frequency of spikes changing in response to varying light intensity and wavelength. This paper explores the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon, including how light affects the proteinoid's structure and its effect on the spiking frequency. We also discuss the potential implications of this modulation for future research and applications. Our research findings suggest that light could be used as a tool to regulate the spiking frequency of proteinoids, opening up a new range of possibilities for unconventional computing research.
Authors:Jiaqi Jiang, Guanqun Cao, Jiankang Deng, Thanh-Toan Do, Shan Luo
Title: Robotic Perception of Transparent Objects: A Review
Abstract:
Transparent object perception is a rapidly developing research problem in artificial intelligence. The ability to perceive transparent objects enables robots to achieve higher levels of autonomy, unlocking new applications in various industries such as healthcare, services and manufacturing. Despite numerous datasets and perception methods being proposed in recent years, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of these methods and the challenges in this field. To address this gap, this article provides a comprehensive survey of the platforms and recent advances for robotic perception of transparent objects. We highlight the main challenges and propose future directions of various transparent object perception tasks, i.e., segmentation, reconstruction, and pose estimation. We also discuss the limitations of existing datasets in diversity and complexity, and the benefits of employing multi-modal sensors, such as RGB-D cameras, thermal cameras, and polarised imaging, for transparent object perception. Furthermore, we identify perception challenges in complex and dynamic environments, as well as for objects with changeable geometries. Finally, we provide an interactive online platform to navigate each reference: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/transperception}.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Light induced spiking of proteinoids
Abstract:
Proteinoids, or thermal proteins, are produced by heating amino acids to their melting point and initiation of polymerisation to produce polymeric chains. In aqueous solutions proteinoids swell into hollow microspheres. These microspheres produce endogenous burst of electrical potential spikes and change patterns of their electrical activity in response to illumination. We report results of detailed investigation on the effects of white cold light on the spiking of proteinoids. We study how different types and intensities of light determine proteinoids' spiking amplitude, period, and pattern. The results of this study will be utilised to evaluate proteinoids for their potential as optical sensors and their application in unconventional computing.
Authors:Josefa Díaz Álvarez, José L. Risco-Martín, J. Manuel Colmenar
Title: Evolutionary Design of the Memory Subsystem
Abstract:
The memory hierarchy has a high impact on the performance and power consumption in the system. Moreover, current embedded systems, included in mobile devices, are specifically designed to run multimedia applications, which are memory intensive. This increases the pressure on the memory subsystem and affects the performance and energy consumption. In this regard, the thermal problems, performance degradation and high energy consumption, can cause irreversible damage to the devices. We address the optimization of the whole memory subsystem with three approaches integrated as a single methodology. Firstly, the thermal impact of register file is analyzed and optimized. Secondly, the cache memory is addressed by optimizing cache configuration according to running applications and improving both performance and power consumption. Finally, we simplify the design and evaluation process of general-purpose and customized dynamic memory manager, in the main memory. To this aim, we apply different evolutionary algorithms in combination with memory simulators and profiling tools. This way, we are able to evaluate the quality of each candidate solution and take advantage of the exploration of solutions given by the optimization algorithm.We also provide an experimental experience where our proposal is assessed using well-known benchmark applications.
Authors:Ignacio Arnaldo, Alfredo Cuesta-Infante, J. Manuel Colmenar, José L. Risco-Martín, José L. Ayala
Title: Boosting the 3D thermal-aware floorplanning problem through a master-worker parallel MOEA
Abstract:
The increasing transistor scale integration poses, among others, the thermal-aware floorplanning problem; consisting of how to place the hardware components in order to reduce overheating by dissipation. Due to the huge amount of feasible floorplans, most of the solutions found in the literature include an evolutionary algorithm for, either partially or completely, carrying out the task of floorplanning. Evolutionary algorithms usually have a bottleneck in the fitness evaluation. In the problem of thermal-aware floorplanning, the layout evaluation by the thermal model takes 99.5\% of the computational time for the best floorplanning algorithm proposed so far.The contribution of this paper is to present a parallelization of this evaluation phase in a master$-$worker model to achieve a dramatic speed-up of the thermal-aware floorplanning process. Exhaustive experimentation was done over three dimensional integrated circuits, with 48 and 128 cores, outperforming previous published works.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Low frequency electrical waves in ensembles of proteinoid microspheres
Abstract:
Proteinoids (thermal proteins) are produced by heating amino acids to their melting point and initiation of polymerisation to produce polymeric chains. Amino acid-like molecules, or proteinoids, can condense at high temperatures to create aggregation structures called proteinoid microspheres, which have been reported to exhibit strong electrical oscillations. When the amino acids L-Glutamic acid (L-Glu) and L-Aspartic acid (L-Asp) were combined with electric fields of varying frequencies and intensities, electrical activity resulted. We recorded electrical activity of the proteinoid microspheres' ensembles via a pair of differential electrodes. This is analogous to extracellular recording in physiology or EEG in neuroscience but at micro-level. We discovered that the ensembles produce spikes of electrical potential, an average duration of each spike is 26 min and average amplitude is 1 mV. The spikes are typically grouped in trains of two spikes. The electrical activity of the ensembles can be tuned by external stimulation because ensembles of proteinoid microspheres can generate and propagate electrical activity when exposed to electric fields.
Authors:Panagiotis Mougkogiannis, Neil Phillips, Andrew Adamatzky
Title: Transfer Functions of Proteinoid Microspheres
Abstract:
Proteinoids, or thermal proteins, are inorganic entities formed by heating amino acids to their melting point and commencing polymerisation to form polymeric chains. Typically, their diameters range from 10 to 100 micron. Some amino acids incorporated into proteinoid chains are more hydrophobic than others, leading proteinoids to cluster together when they are present in aqueous solutions at specific concentrations, allowing them to grow into microspheres. The peculiar structure of proteinoids composed of linked amino acids endows them with unique properties, including action-potential like spiking of electrical potential. These unique properties make ensembles of proteinoid microspheres a promising substrate for designing future artificial brains and unconventional computing devices. To evaluate a potential of proteinoid microspheres for unconventional electronic devices we measure and analyse the data-transfer capacities of proteinoid microspheres. In experimental laboratory conditions we demonstrate that the transfer function of proteinoids microspheres is a nontrivial phenomenon, which might be due to the wide range of proteinoid shapes, sizes, and structures.
Authors:Sebastian D. Proell, Peter Munch, Martin Kronbichler, Wolfgang A. Wall, Christoph Meier
Title: A highly efficient computational framework for fast scan-resolved simulations of metal additive manufacturing processes on the scale of real parts
Abstract:
This article proposes a novel high-performance computing approach for the prediction of the temperature field in powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing processes. In contrast to many existing approaches to part-scale simulations, the underlying computational model consistently resolves physical scan tracks without additional heat source scaling, agglomeration strategies or any other heuristic modeling assumptions. A growing, adaptively refined mesh accurately captures all details of the laser beam motion. Critically, the fine spatial resolution required for resolved scan tracks in combination with the high scan velocities underlying these processes mandates the use of comparatively small time steps to resolve the underlying physics. Explicit time integration schemes are well-suited for this setting, while unconditionally stable implicit time integration schemes are employed for the interlayer cool down phase governed by significantly larger time scales. These two schemes are combined and implemented in an efficient fast operator evaluation framework providing significant performance gains and optimization opportunities. The capabilities of the novel framework are demonstrated through realistic AM examples on the centimeter scale including the first scan-resolved simulation of the entire NIST AM Benchmark cantilever specimen, with a computation time of less than one day. Apart from physical insights gained through these simulation examples, also numerical aspects are thoroughly studied on basis of weak and strong parallel scaling tests. As potential applications, the proposed thermal PBF simulation framework can serve as a basis for microstructure and thermo-mechanical predictions on the part-scale, but also to assess the influence of scan pattern and part geometry on melt pool shape and temperature, which are important indicators for well-known process instabilities.
Authors:Xianzhong Ding, Alberto Cerpa, Wan Du
Title: Multi-zone HVAC Control with Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
In this paper, we conduct a set of experiments to analyze the limitations of current MBRL-based HVAC control methods, in terms of model uncertainty and controller effectiveness. Using the lessons learned, we develop MB2C, a novel MBRL-based HVAC control system that can achieve high control performance with excellent sample efficiency. MB2C learns the building dynamics by employing an ensemble of environment-conditioned neural networks. It then applies a new control method, Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI), for HVAC control. It produces candidate action sequences by using an importance sampling weighted algorithm that scales better to high state and action dimensions of multi-zone buildings. We evaluate MB2C using EnergyPlus simulations in a five-zone office building. The results show that MB2C can achieve 8.23% more energy savings compared to the state-of-the-art MBRL solution while maintaining similar thermal comfort. MB2C can reduce the training data set by an order of magnitude (10.52x) while achieving comparable performance to MFRL approaches.
Authors:Tobias Lindroth, Axel Svensson, Niklas Åkerblom, Mitra Pourabdollah, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani
Title: Online Learning Models for Vehicle Usage Prediction During COVID-19
Abstract:
Today, there is an ongoing transition to more sustainable transportation, for which an essential part is the switch from combustion engine vehicles to battery electric vehicles (BEVs). BEVs have many advantages from a sustainability perspective, but issues such as limited driving range and long recharge times slow down the transition from combustion engines. One way to mitigate these issues is by performing battery thermal preconditioning, which increases the energy efficiency of the battery. However, to optimally perform battery thermal preconditioning, the vehicle usage pattern needs to be known, i.e., how and when the vehicle will be used. This study attempts to predict the departure time and distance of the first drive each day using online machine learning models. The online machine learning models are trained and evaluated on historical driving data collected from a fleet of BEVs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the prediction models are extended to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions, which can be used to decide whether the prediction should be used or dismissed. Based on our results, the best-performing prediction models yield an aggregated mean absolute error of 2.75 hours when predicting departure time and 13.37 km when predicting trip distance.
Authors:Mohammad Rajabdorri, Behzad Kazemtabrizi, Matthias Troffaes, Lukas Sigrist, Enrique Lobato
Title: Inclusion of Frequency Nadir constraint in the Unit Commitment Problem of Small Power Systems Using Machine Learning
Abstract:
As the intention is to reduce the amount of thermal generation and to increase the share of clean energy, power systems are increasingly becoming susceptible to frequency instability after outages due to reduced levels of inertia. To address this issue frequency constraints are being included in the scheduling process, which ensure a tolerable frequency deviation in case of any contingencies. In this paper, a method is proposed to integrate the non-linear frequency nadir constraint into the unit commitment problem, using machine learning. First a synthetic training dataset is generated. Then two of the available classic machine learning methods, namely logistic regression and support vector machine, are proposed to predict the frequency nadir. To be able to compare the machine learning methods to traditional frequency constrained unit commitment approaches, simulations on the power system of La Palma island are carried out for both proposed methods as well as an analytical linearized formulation of the frequency nadir. Our results show that the unit commitment problem with a machine learning based frequency nadir constraint is solved considerably faster than with the analytical formulation, while still achieving an acceptable frequency response quality after outages.
Authors:Clayton Miller, Renee Christensen, Jin Kai Leong, Mahmoud Abdelrahman, Federico Tartarini, Matias Quintana, Andre Matthias Müller, Mario Frei
Title: Smartwatch-based ecological momentary assessments for occupant wellness and privacy in buildings
Abstract:
This paper describes the adaptation of an open-source ecological momentary assessment smart-watch platform with three sets of micro-survey wellness-related questions focused on i) infectious disease (COVID-19) risk perception, ii) privacy and distraction in an office context, and iii) triggers of various movement-related behaviors in buildings. This platform was previously used to collect data for thermal comfort, and this work extends its use to other domains. Several research participants took part in a proof-of-concept experiment by wearing a smartwatch to collect their micro-survey question preferences and perception responses for two of the question sets. Participants were also asked to install an indoor localization app on their phone to detect where precisely in the building they completed the survey. The experiment identified occupant information such as the tendencies for the research participants to prefer privacy in certain spaces and the difference between infectious disease risk perception in naturally versus mechanically ventilated spaces.
Authors:Md Umar Hashmi, Arpan Koirala, Hakan Ergun, Dirk Van Hertem
Title: Perspectives on distribution network flexible and curtailable resource activation and needs assessment
Abstract:
{A curtailable and flexible resource activation framework for solving distribution network (DN) voltage and thermal congestions is used to quantify three important aspects with respect to modelling low voltage networks.} This framework utilizes the network states in the absence of such flexible or curtailable resources as the input for calculating flexibility activation signal (FAS). The FAS has some similarities with optimal power flow duals {associated with power balance constraint}. FAS due to drooping design, {incentivize corrective flexibility activation} prior to any network limit violations. {The nonlinear resource dispatch optimal power flow (RDOPF) utilizes FAS for the activation of flexible and curtailable resources. Solving the OPF problem for a large system is computationally intensive, and second-order cone (SOC) relaxation is often applied in the literature.} {First,} we highlight the multi-objective nature of SOC relaxed RDOPF. A Pareto front tuning mechanism {is proposed for choosing loss penalty factor} while reducing the optimality gap of the SOC relaxed RDOPF. {Secondly, we} present a methodology for evaluating temporal and locational flexibility needs assessment of a DN, which DSO's can utilize for flexibility planning {in operational timescales and procurement in the flexibility market}. {Lastly, we} quantify the impact of reactive power flexibility for a DN with varying load power factors. {Numerical simulations indicate that the presence of reactive flexibility reduces the active power flexibility needs by 50\% for the test feeder with 0.8 aggregated load power factor.}
Authors:Philip Arm, Oliver Fischer, Joseph Church, Adrian Fuhrer, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Marco Hutter
Title: Efficient Learning-Based Control of a Legged Robot in Lunar Gravity
Abstract:
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal budgets are highly restricted, these robots need energy-efficient control approaches that easily transfer to multiple gravity environments. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based control approach for legged robots with gravity-scaled power-optimized reward functions. We use our approach to develop and validate a locomotion controller and a base pose controller in gravity environments from lunar gravity (1.62 m/s2) to a hypothetical super-Earth (19.62 m/s2). Our approach successfully scales across these gravity levels for locomotion and base pose control with the gravity-scaled reward functions. The power-optimized locomotion controller reached a power consumption for locomotion of 23.4 W in Earth gravity on a 15.65 kg robot at 0.4 m/s, a 23 % improvement over the baseline policy. Additionally, we designed a constant-force spring offload system that allowed us to conduct real-world experiments on legged locomotion in lunar gravity. In lunar gravity, the power-optimized control policy reached 12.2 W, 36 % less than a baseline controller which is not optimized for power efficiency. Our method provides a scalable approach to developing power-efficient locomotion controllers for legged robots across multiple gravity levels.
Authors:Soumyoraj Mallick, Sanchita Ghosh, Tanushree Roy
Title: KAN-Therm: A Lightweight Battery Thermal Model Using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network
Abstract:
Battery management systems (BMSs) rely on real-time estimation of battery temperature distribution in battery cells to ensure safe and optimal operation of Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, physical BMS often suffers from memory and computational resource limitations required by highfidelity models. Temperature prediction using physics-based models becomes challenging due to their higher computational time. In contrast, machine learning based approaches offer faster predictions but demand larger memory overhead. In this work, we develop a lightweight and efficient Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KAN) based thermal model, KAN-Therm, to predict the core temperature of a cylindrical battery. We have compared the memory overhead and computation costs of our method with Multi-layer perceptron (MLP), recurrent neural network (RNN), and long shortterm memory (LSTM) network. Our results show that the proposed KAN-Therm model exhibit the best prediction accuracy with the least memory overhead and computation time.
Authors:Alexandros Gkillas, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Nikos Piperigkos, Dimitris Tsiktsiris, Theofilos Christodoulou, Theofanis Siamatras, Dimitrios Triantafyllou, Christos Basdekis, Theoktisti Marinopoulou, Panagiotis Lepentsiotis, Elefterios Blitsis, Aggeliki Zacharaki, Nearchos Stylianidis, Leonidas Katelaris, Lamberto Salvan, Aris S. Lalos, Christos Laoudias, Antonios Lalas, Konstantinos Votis
Title: A holistic perception system of internal and external monitoring for ground autonomous vehicles: AutoTRUST paradigm
Abstract:
This paper introduces a holistic perception system for internal and external monitoring of autonomous vehicles, with the aim of demonstrating a novel AI-leveraged self-adaptive framework of advanced vehicle technologies and solutions that optimize perception and experience on-board. Internal monitoring system relies on a multi-camera setup designed for predicting and identifying driver and occupant behavior through facial recognition, exploiting in addition a large language model as virtual assistant. Moreover, the in-cabin monitoring system includes AI-empowered smart sensors that measure air-quality and perform thermal comfort analysis for efficient on and off-boarding. On the other hand, external monitoring system perceives the surrounding environment of vehicle, through a LiDAR-based cost-efficient semantic segmentation approach, that performs highly accurate and efficient super-resolution on low-quality raw 3D point clouds. The holistic perception framework is developed in the context of EU's Horizon Europe programm AutoTRUST, and has been integrated and deployed on a real electric vehicle provided by ALKE. Experimental validation and evaluation at the integration site of Joint Research Centre at Ispra, Italy, highlights increased performance and efficiency of the modular blocks of the proposed perception architecture.
Authors:Anton Belichenko, Daria Trinitatova, Aigul Nasibullina, Lev Yakovlev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Title: EEG Study of the Influence of Imagined Temperature Sensations on Neuronal Activity in the Sensorimotor Cortex
Abstract:
Understanding the neural correlates of sensory imagery is crucial for advancing cognitive neuroscience and developing novel Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) paradigms. This study investigated the influence of imagined temperature sensations (ITS) on neural activity within the sensorimotor cortex. The experimental study involved the evaluation of neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG) during both real thermal stimulation (TS: 40°C Hot, 20°C Cold) applied to the participants' hand, and the mental temperature imagination (ITS) of the corresponding hot and cold sensations. The analysis focused on quantifying the event-related desynchronization (ERD) of the sensorimotor mu-rhythm (8-13 Hz). The experimental results revealed a characteristic mu-ERD localized over central scalp regions (e.g., C3) during both TS and ITS conditions. Although the magnitude of mu-ERD during ITS was slightly lower than during TS, this difference was not statistically significant (p>.05). However, ERD during both ITS and TS was statistically significantly different from the resting baseline (p<.001). These findings demonstrate that imagining temperature sensations engages sensorimotor cortical mechanisms in a manner comparable to actual thermal perception. This insight expands our understanding of the neurophysiological basis of sensory imagery and suggests the potential utility of ITS for non-motor BCI control and neurorehabilitation technologies.
Authors:Zeinab Salehi, Yijun Chen, Ian R. Petersen, Guodong Shi, Duncan S. Callaway, Elizabeth L. Ratnam
Title: Peer-to-Peer Energy Markets With Uniform Pricing: A Dynamic Operating Envelope Approach
Abstract:
The recent widespread adoption of rooftop solar backed by battery storage is enabling energy customers to both produce and consume electricity (i.e., prosumers of electricity). To facilitate prosumer participation in the electric grid, new market mechanisms are required. In this paper, we design peer-to-peer energy markets where prosumers trade their excess energy with peers to gain profit while satisfying the overall balance in electricity supply and demand. We first consider a market structure, considering the case where voltage and/or thermal constraints are binding. When such grid constraints are binding, market clearing prices can vary across locations. However, heterogeneous prices may be considered by regulators to lack fairness. To ensure uniform pricing, we design two peer-to-peer energy markets with dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs). DOEs enable us to decompose global voltage and thermal constraints across the power grid into local constraints for each prosumer, resulting in uniform prices across the grid. By means of numerical simulations on an IEEE 13-node feeder, we benchmark the proposed market-based approaches in the presence of binding voltage constraints.
Authors:Francesco Malandrino, Olga Chukhno, Alessandro Catania, Antonella Molinaro, Carla Fabiana Chiasserini
Title: XR Offloading Across Multiple Time Scales: The Roles of Power, Temperature, and Energy
Abstract:
Extended reality (XR) devices, commonly known as wearables, must handle significant computational loads under tight latency constraints. To meet these demands, they rely on a combination of on-device processing and edge offloading. This letter focuses on offloading strategies for wearables by considering their impact across three time scales: instantaneous power consumption, short-term temperature fluctuations, and long-term battery duration. We introduce a comprehensive system model that captures these temporal dynamics, and propose a stochastic and stationary offloading strategy, called TAO (for temperature-aware offloading), designed to minimize the offloading cost while adhering to power, thermal, and energy constraints. Our performance evaluation, leveraging COMSOL models of real-world wearables, confirms that TAO reduces offloading cost by over 35% compared to state-of-the-art approaches, without violating the wearable operational limits.
Authors:Ozan Baris Mulayim, Pengrui Quan, Liying Han, Xiaomin Ouyang, Dezhi Hong, Mario Bergés, Mani Srivastava
Title: Can Time-Series Foundation Models Perform Building Energy Management Tasks?
Abstract:
Building energy management (BEM) tasks require processing and learning from a variety of time-series data. Existing solutions rely on bespoke task- and data-specific models to perform these tasks, limiting their broader applicability. Inspired by the transformative success of Large Language Models (LLMs), Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), trained on diverse datasets, have the potential to change this. Were TSFMs to achieve a level of generalizability across tasks and contexts akin to LLMs, they could fundamentally address the scalability challenges pervasive in BEM. To understand where they stand today, we evaluate TSFMs across four dimensions: (1) generalizability in zero-shot univariate forecasting, (2) forecasting with covariates for thermal behavior modeling, (3) zero-shot representation learning for classification tasks, and (4) robustness to performance metrics and varying operational conditions. Our results reveal that TSFMs exhibit \emph{limited} generalizability, performing only marginally better than statistical models on unseen datasets and modalities for univariate forecasting. Similarly, inclusion of covariates in TSFMs does not yield performance improvements, and their performance remains inferior to conventional models that utilize covariates. While TSFMs generate effective zero-shot representations for downstream classification tasks, they may remain inferior to statistical models in forecasting when statistical models perform test-time fitting. Moreover, TSFMs forecasting performance is sensitive to evaluation metrics, and they struggle in more complex building environments compared to statistical models. These findings underscore the need for targeted advancements in TSFM design, particularly their handling of covariates and incorporating context and temporal dynamics into prediction mechanisms, to develop more adaptable and scalable solutions for BEM.
Authors:Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Niloufar Mehrabi, Fatemeh Afghah, Connor Peter McGrath, Danish Bhatkar, Mithilesh Anil Biradar, Abolfazl Razi
Title: Eyes on the Environment: AI-Driven Analysis for Fire and Smoke Classification, Segmentation, and Detection
Abstract:
Fire and smoke phenomena pose a significant threat to the natural environment, ecosystems, and global economy, as well as human lives and wildlife. In this particular circumstance, there is a demand for more sophisticated and advanced technologies to implement an effective strategy for early detection, real-time monitoring, and minimizing the overall impacts of fires on ecological balance and public safety. Recently, the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) frameworks has substantially revolutionized the momentum for developing efficient fire management systems. However, these systems extensively rely on the availability of adequate and high-quality fire and smoke data to create proficient Machine Learning (ML) methods for various tasks, such as detection and monitoring. Although fire and smoke datasets play a critical role in training, evaluating, and testing advanced Deep Learning (DL) models, a comprehensive review of the existing datasets is still unexplored. For this purpose, we provide an in-depth review to systematically analyze and evaluate fire and smoke datasets collected over the past 20 years. We investigate the characteristics of each dataset, including type, size, format, collection methods, and geographical diversities. We also review and highlight the unique features of each dataset, such as imaging modalities (RGB, thermal, infrared) and their applicability for different fire management tasks (classification, segmentation, detection). Furthermore, we summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each dataset and discuss their potential for advancing research and technology in fire management. Ultimately, we conduct extensive experimental analyses across different datasets using several state-of-the-art algorithms, such as ResNet-50, DeepLab-V3, and YoloV8.
Authors:Arslan Mazitov, Filippo Bigi, Matthias Kellner, Paolo Pegolo, Davide Tisi, Guillaume Fraux, Sergey Pozdnyakov, Philip Loche, Michele Ceriotti
Title: PET-MAD, a lightweight universal interatomic potential for advanced materials modeling
Abstract:
Machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have greatly extended the reach of atomic-scale simulations, offering the accuracy of first-principles calculations at a fraction of the cost. Leveraging large quantum mechanical databases and expressive architectures, recent ''universal'' models deliver qualitative accuracy across the periodic table but are often biased toward low-energy configurations. We introduce PET-MAD, a generally applicable MLIP trained on a dataset combining stable inorganic and organic solids, systematically modified to enhance atomic diversity. Using a moderate but highly-consistent level of electronic-structure theory, we assess PET-MAD's accuracy on established benchmarks and advanced simulations of six materials. Despite the small training set and lightweight architecture, PET-MAD is competitive with state-of-the-art MLIPs for inorganic solids, while also being reliable for molecules, organic materials, and surfaces. It is stable and fast, enabling the near-quantitative study of thermal and quantum mechanical fluctuations, functional properties, and phase transitions out of the box. It can be efficiently fine-tuned to deliver full quantum mechanical accuracy with a minimal number of targeted calculations.
Authors:Kun Yang, Yuxiang Liu, Zeyu Cui, Yu Liu, Maojun Zhang, Shen Yan, Qing Wang
Title: NTR-Gaussian: Nighttime Dynamic Thermal Reconstruction with 4D Gaussian Splatting Based on Thermodynamics
Abstract:
Thermal infrared imaging offers the advantage of all-weather capability, enabling non-intrusive measurement of an object's surface temperature. Consequently, thermal infrared images are employed to reconstruct 3D models that accurately reflect the temperature distribution of a scene, aiding in applications such as building monitoring and energy management. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on static 3D reconstruction for a single time period, overlooking the impact of environmental factors on thermal radiation and failing to predict or analyze temperature variations over time. To address these challenges, we propose the NTR-Gaussian method, which treats temperature as a form of thermal radiation, incorporating elements like convective heat transfer and radiative heat dissipation. Our approach utilizes neural networks to predict thermodynamic parameters such as emissivity, convective heat transfer coefficient, and heat capacity. By integrating these predictions, we can accurately forecast thermal temperatures at various times throughout a nighttime scene. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic dataset specifically for nighttime thermal imagery. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that NTR-Gaussian significantly outperforms comparison methods in thermal reconstruction, achieving a predicted temperature error within 1 degree Celsius.
Authors:Michele Grimaldi, Patryk Cieslak, Eduardo Ochoa, Vibhav Bharti, Hayat Rajani, Ignacio Carlucho, Maria Koskinopoulou, Yvan R. Petillot, Nuno Gracias
Title: Stonefish: Supporting Machine Learning Research in Marine Robotics
Abstract:
Simulations are highly valuable in marine robotics, offering a cost-effective and controlled environment for testing in the challenging conditions of underwater and surface operations. Given the high costs and logistical difficulties of real-world trials, simulators capable of capturing the operational conditions of subsea environments have become key in developing and refining algorithms for remotely-operated and autonomous underwater vehicles. This paper highlights recent enhancements to the Stonefish simulator, an advanced open-source platform supporting development and testing of marine robotics solutions. Key updates include a suite of additional sensors, such as an event-based camera, a thermal camera, and an optical flow camera, as well as, visual light communication, support for tethered operations, improved thruster modelling, more flexible hydrodynamics, and enhanced sonar accuracy. These developments and an automated annotation tool significantly bolster Stonefish's role in marine robotics research, especially in the field of machine learning, where training data with a known ground truth is hard or impossible to collect.
Authors:Mathis Bode, Damian Alvarez, Paul Fischer, Christos E. Frouzakis, Jens Henrik Göbbert, Joseph A. Insley, Yu-Hsiang Lan, Victor A. Mateevitsi, Misun Min, Michael E. Papka, Silvio Rizzi, Roshan J. Samuel, Jörg Schumacher
Title: Deciphering boundary layer dynamics in high-Rayleigh-number convection using 3360 GPUs and a high-scaling in-situ workflow
Abstract:
Turbulent heat and momentum transfer processes due to thermal convection cover many scales and are of great importance for several natural and technical flows. One consequence is that a fully resolved three-dimensional analysis of these turbulent transfers at high Rayleigh numbers, which includes the boundary layers, is possible only using supercomputers. The visualization of these dynamics poses an additional hurdle since the thermal and viscous boundary layers in thermal convection fluctuate strongly. In order to track these fluctuations continuously, data must be tapped at high frequency for visualization, which is difficult to achieve using conventional methods. This paper makes two main contributions in this context. First, it discusses the simulations of turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection up to Rayleigh numbers of $Ra=10^{12}$ computed with NekRS on GPUs. The largest simulation was run on 840 nodes with 3360 GPU on the JUWELS Booster supercomputer. Secondly, an in-situ workflow using ASCENT is presented, which was successfully used to visualize the high-frequency turbulent fluctuations.
Authors:Sheng Zhang, Yunhao Fan, Kotaro Shimizu, Gia-Wei Chern
Title: Machine Learning Force-Field Approach for Itinerant Electron Magnets
Abstract:
We review the recent development of machine-learning (ML) force-field frameworks for Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) dynamics simulations of itinerant electron magnets, focusing on the general theory and implementations of symmetry-invariant representations of spin configurations. The crucial properties that such magnetic descriptors must satisfy are differentiability with respect to spin rotations and invariance to both lattice point-group symmetry and internal spin rotation symmetry. We propose an efficient implementation based on the concept of reference irreducible representations, modified from the group-theoretical power-spectrum and bispectrum methods. The ML framework is demonstrated using the s-d models, which are widely applied in spintronics research. We show that LLG simulations based on local fields predicted by the trained ML models successfully reproduce representative non-collinear spin structures, including 120$^\circ$, tetrahedral, and skyrmion crystal orders of the triangular-lattice s-d models. Large-scale thermal quench simulations enabled by ML models further reveal intriguing freezing dynamics and glassy stripe states consisting of skyrmions and bi-merons. Our work highlights the utility of ML force-field approach to dynamical modeling of complex spin orders in itinerant electron magnets.
Authors:Sanchita Ghosh, Soumyoraj Mallick, Tanushree Roy
Title: Koopman Mode-Based Detection of Internal Short Circuits in Lithium-ion Battery Pack
Abstract:
Monitoring of internal short circuit (ISC) in Lithium-ion battery packs is imperative to safe operations, optimal performance, and extension of pack life. Since ISC in one of the modules inside a battery pack can eventually lead to thermal runaway, it is crucial to detect its early onset. However, the inaccuracy and aging variability of battery models and the unavailability of adequate ISC datasets pose several challenges for both model-based and data-driven approaches. Thus, in this paper, we proposed a model-free Koopman Mode-based module-level ISC detection algorithm for battery packs. The algorithm adopts two parallel Koopman mode generation schemes with the Arnoldi algorithm to capture the Kullback-Leibler divergence-based distributional deviations in Koopman mode statistics in the presence of ISC. Our proposed algorithm utilizes module-level voltage measurements to accurately identify the shorted battery module of the pack without using specific battery models or pre-training with historical battery data. Furthermore, we presented two case studies on shorted battery module detection under both resting and charging conditions. The simulation results illustrated the sensitivity of the proposed algorithm toward ISC and the robustness against measurement noise.
Authors:S. A. N. Nouwens, M. M. Paulides, W. P. M. H. Heemels
Title: Accelerating soft-constrained MPC for linear systems through online constraint removal
Abstract:
Optimization-based controllers, such as Model Predictive Control (MPC), have attracted significant research interest due to their intuitive concept, constraint handling capabilities, and natural application to multi-input multi-output systems. However, the computational complexity of solving a receding horizon problem at each time step remains a challenge for the deployment of MPC. This is particularly the case for systems constrained by many inequalities. Recently, we introduced the concept of constraint-adaptive MPC (ca-MPC) to address this challenge for linear systems with hard constraints. In ca-MPC, at each time step, a subset of the constraints is removed from the optimization problem, thereby accelerating the optimization procedure, while resulting in identical closed-loop behavior. The present paper extends this framework to soft-constrained MPC by detecting and removing constraints based on sub-optimal predicted input sequences, which is rather easy for soft-constrained MPC due to the receding horizon principle and the inclusion of slack variables. We will translate these new ideas explicitly to an offset-free output tracking problem. The effectiveness of these ideas is demonstrated on a two-dimensional thermal transport model, showing a three order of magnitude improvement in online computational time of the MPC scheme.
Authors:Niraj Aryal, Sheng Zhang, Weiguo Yin, Gia-Wei Chern
Title: Machine learning approach for vibronically renormalized electronic band structures
Abstract:
We present a machine learning (ML) method for efficient computation of vibrational thermal expectation values of physical properties from first principles. Our approach is based on the non-perturbative frozen phonon formulation in which stochastic Monte Carlo algorithm is employed to sample configurations of nuclei in a supercell at finite temperatures based on a first-principles phonon model. A deep-learning neural network is trained to accurately predict physical properties associated with sampled phonon configurations, thus bypassing the time-consuming {\em ab initio} calculations. To incorporate the point-group symmetry of the electronic system into the ML model, group-theoretical methods are used to develop a symmetry-invariant descriptor for phonon configurations in the supercell. We apply our ML approach to compute the temperature dependent electronic energy gap of silicon based on density functional theory (DFT). We show that, with less than a hundred DFT calculations for training the neural network model, an order of magnitude larger number of sampling can be achieved for the computation of the vibrational thermal expectation values. Our work highlights the promising potential of ML techniques for finite temperature first-principles electronic structure methods.
Authors:Stefanos Gkikas, Manolis Tsiknakis
Title: Synthetic Thermal and RGB Videos for Automatic Pain Assessment utilizing a Vision-MLP Architecture
Abstract:
Pain assessment is essential in developing optimal pain management protocols to alleviate suffering and prevent functional decline in patients. Consequently, reliable and accurate automatic pain assessment systems are essential for continuous and effective patient monitoring. This study presents synthetic thermal videos generated by Generative Adversarial Networks integrated into the pain recognition pipeline and evaluates their efficacy. A framework consisting of a Vision-MLP and a Transformer-based module is utilized, employing RGB and synthetic thermal videos in unimodal and multimodal settings. Experiments conducted on facial videos from the BioVid database demonstrate the effectiveness of synthetic thermal videos and underline the potential advantages of it.
Authors:Dirk Reinhardt, Wenqi Cai, Sebastien Gros
Title: Data-Driven Domestic Flexible Demand: Observations from experiments in cold climate
Abstract:
In this chapter, we report on our experience with domestic flexible electric energy demand based on a regular commercial (HVAC)-based heating system in a house. Our focus is on investigating the predictability of the energy demand of the heating system and of the thermal response when varying the heating system settings. Being able to form such predictions is crucial for most flexible demand algorithms. We will compare several methods for predicting the thermal and energy response, which either gave good results or which are currently promoted in the literature for controlling buildings. We will report that the stochasticity of a house response is -- in our experience -- the main difficulty in providing domestic flexible demand from heating. The experiments were carried out on a regular house in Norway, equipped with four air-to-air Mitsubishi heat pumps and a high-efficiency balanced ventilation system. The house was equipped with multiple IoT-based climate sensors, real-time power measurement, and the possibility to drive the HVAC system via the IoT. The house is operating on the spot market (Nord Pool NO3) and is exposed to a peak energy demand penalty. Over a period of three years, we have collected data on the house (temperatures, humidity, air quality), real-time power and hourly energy consumption, while applying various flexible demand algorithms responding to the local energy costs. This has produced large variations in the settings of the heating system and energy demand, resulting in rich data for investigating the house response. This chapter aims at providing important insights on providing flexible demand from houses in cold climates.
Authors:Juan Diego Toscano, Theo Käufer, Zhibo Wang, Martin Maxey, Christian Cierpka, George Em Karniadakis
Title: Inferring turbulent velocity and temperature fields and their statistics from Lagrangian velocity measurements using physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Abstract:
We propose the Artificial Intelligence Velocimetry-Thermometry (AIVT) method to infer hidden temperature fields from experimental turbulent velocity data. This physics-informed machine learning method enables us to infer continuous temperature fields using only sparse velocity data, hence eliminating the need for direct temperature measurements. Specifically, AIVT is based on physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (not neural networks) and is trained by optimizing a combined loss function that minimizes the residuals of the velocity data, boundary conditions, and the governing equations. We apply AIVT to a unique set of experimental volumetric and simultaneous temperature and velocity data of Rayleigh-Bénard convection (RBC) that we acquired by combining Particle Image Thermometry and Lagrangian Particle Tracking. This allows us to compare AIVT predictions and measurements directly. We demonstrate that we can reconstruct and infer continuous and instantaneous velocity and temperature fields from sparse experimental data at a fidelity comparable to direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulence. This, in turn, enables us to compute important quantities for quantifying turbulence, such as fluctuations, viscous and thermal dissipation, and QR distribution. This paradigm shift in processing experimental data using AIVT to infer turbulent fields at DNS-level fidelity is a promising avenue in breaking the current deadlock of quantitative understanding of turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, where DNS is computationally infeasible.
Authors:Supriyo Ghosh, Sheng Zhang, Chen Cheng, Gia-Wei Chern
Title: Kinetics of orbital ordering in cooperative Jahn-Teller models: Machine-learning enabled large-scale simulations
Abstract:
We present a scalable machine learning (ML) force-field model for the adiabatic dynamics of cooperative Jahn-Teller (JT) systems. Large scale dynamical simulations of the JT model also shed light on the orbital ordering dynamics in colossal magnetoresistance manganites. The JT effect in these materials describes the distortion of local oxygen octahedra driven by a coupling to the orbital degrees of freedom of $e_g$ electrons. An effective electron-mediated interaction between the local JT modes leads to a structural transition and the emergence of long-range orbital order at low temperatures. Assuming the principle of locality, a deep-learning neural-network model is developed to accurately and efficiently predict the electron-induced forces that drive the dynamical evolution of JT phonons. A group-theoretical method is utilized to develop a descriptor that incorporates the combined orbital and lattice symmetry into the ML model. Large-scale Langevin dynamics simulations, enabled by the ML force-field models, are performed to investigate the coarsening dynamics of the composite JT distortion and orbital order after a thermal quench. The late-stage coarsening of orbital domains exhibits pronounced freezing behaviors which are likely related to the unusual morphology of the domain structures. Our work highlights a promising avenue for multi-scale dynamical modeling of correlated electron systems.
Authors:Francis Ogoke, Peter Myung-Won Pak, Alexander Myers, Guadalupe Quirarte, Jack Beuth, Jonathan Malen, Amir Barati Farimani
Title: Deep Learning for Melt Pool Depth Contour Prediction From Surface Thermal Images via Vision Transformers
Abstract:
Insufficient overlap between the melt pools produced during Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) can lead to lack-of-fusion defects and deteriorated mechanical and fatigue performance. In-situ monitoring of the melt pool subsurface morphology requires specialized equipment that may not be readily accessible or scalable. Therefore, we introduce a machine learning framework to correlate in-situ two-color thermal images observed via high-speed color imaging to the two-dimensional profile of the melt pool cross-section. Specifically, we employ a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture to establish a correlation between single bead off-axis thermal image sequences and melt pool cross-section contours measured via optical microscopy. In this architecture, a ResNet model embeds the spatial information contained within the thermal images to a latent vector, while a Transformer model correlates the sequence of embedded vectors to extract temporal information. Our framework is able to model the curvature of the subsurface melt pool structure, with improved performance in high energy density regimes compared to analytical melt pool models. The performance of this model is evaluated through dimensional and geometric comparisons to the corresponding experimental melt pool observations.
Authors:Jyri Maanpää, Julius Pesonen, Heikki Hyyti, Iaroslav Melekhov, Juho Kannala, Petri Manninen, Antero Kukko, Juha Hyyppä
Title: Dense Road Surface Grip Map Prediction from Multimodal Image Data
Abstract:
Slippery road weather conditions are prevalent in many regions and cause a regular risk for traffic. Still, there has been less research on how autonomous vehicles could detect slippery driving conditions on the road to drive safely. In this work, we propose a method to predict a dense grip map from the area in front of the car, based on postprocessed multimodal sensor data. We trained a convolutional neural network to predict pixelwise grip values from fused RGB camera, thermal camera, and LiDAR reflectance images, based on weakly supervised ground truth from an optical road weather sensor. The experiments show that it is possible to predict dense grip values with good accuracy from the used data modalities as the produced grip map follows both ground truth measurements and local weather conditions, such as snowy areas on the road. The model using only the RGB camera or LiDAR reflectance modality provided good baseline results for grip prediction accuracy while using models fusing the RGB camera, thermal camera, and LiDAR modalities improved the grip predictions significantly.
Authors:Peter Myung-Won Pak, Francis Ogoke, Andrew Polonsky, Anthony Garland, Dan S. Bolintineanu, Dan R. Moser, Michael J. Heiden, Amir Barati Farimani
Title: ThermoPore: Predicting Part Porosity Based on Thermal Images Using Deep Learning
Abstract:
We present a deep learning approach for quantifying and localizing ex-situ porosity within Laser Powder Bed Fusion fabricated samples utilizing in-situ thermal image monitoring data. Our goal is to build the real time porosity map of parts based on thermal images acquired during the build. The quantification task builds upon the established Convolutional Neural Network model architecture to predict pore count and the localization task leverages the spatial and temporal attention mechanisms of the novel Video Vision Transformer model to indicate areas of expected porosity. Our model for porosity quantification achieved a $R^2$ score of 0.57 and our model for porosity localization produced an average IoU score of 0.32 and a maximum of 1.0. This work is setting the foundations of part porosity "Digital Twins" based on additive manufacturing monitoring data and can be applied downstream to reduce time-intensive post-inspection and testing activities during part qualification and certification. In addition, we seek to accelerate the acquisition of crucial insights normally only available through ex-situ part evaluation by means of machine learning analysis of in-situ process monitoring data.
Authors:Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu, Ankur Moitra, Ewin Tang
Title: High-Temperature Gibbs States are Unentangled and Efficiently Preparable
Abstract:
We show that thermal states of local Hamiltonians are separable above a constant temperature. Specifically, for a local Hamiltonian $H$ on a graph with degree $\mathfrak{d}$, its Gibbs state at inverse temperature $β$, denoted by $ρ= e^{-βH}/ \operatorname{tr}(e^{-βH})$, is a classical distribution over product states for all $β< 1/(c\mathfrak{d})$, where $c$ is a constant. This proof of sudden death of thermal entanglement resolves the fundamental question of whether many-body systems can exhibit entanglement at high temperature. Moreover, we show that we can efficiently sample from the distribution over product states. In particular, for any $β< 1/( c \mathfrak{d}^2)$, we can prepare a state $\varepsilon$-close to $ρ$ in trace distance with a depth-one quantum circuit and $\operatorname{poly}(n, 1/\varepsilon)$ classical overhead.
Authors:Mert Özer, Maximilian Weiherer, Martin Hundhausen, Bernhard Egger
Title: Exploring Multi-modal Neural Scene Representations With Applications on Thermal Imaging
Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) quickly evolved as the new de-facto standard for the task of novel view synthesis when trained on a set of RGB images. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of neural scene representations, such as NeRFs, in the context of multi-modal learning. Specifically, we present four different strategies of how to incorporate a second modality, other than RGB, into NeRFs: (1) training from scratch independently on both modalities; (2) pre-training on RGB and fine-tuning on the second modality; (3) adding a second branch; and (4) adding a separate component to predict (color) values of the additional modality. We chose thermal imaging as second modality since it strongly differs from RGB in terms of radiosity, making it challenging to integrate into neural scene representations. For the evaluation of the proposed strategies, we captured a new publicly available multi-view dataset, ThermalMix, consisting of six common objects and about 360 RGB and thermal images in total. We employ cross-modality calibration prior to data capturing, leading to high-quality alignments between RGB and thermal images. Our findings reveal that adding a second branch to NeRF performs best for novel view synthesis on thermal images while also yielding compelling results on RGB. Finally, we also show that our analysis generalizes to other modalities, including near-infrared images and depth maps. Project page: https://mert-o.github.io/ThermalNeRF/.
Authors:Yunhao Fan, Sheng Zhang, Gia-Wei Chern
Title: Coarsening of chiral domains in itinerant electron magnets: A machine learning force field approach
Abstract:
Frustrated itinerant magnets often exhibit complex noncollinear or noncoplanar magnetic orders which support topological electronic structures. A canonical example is the anomalous quantum Hall state with a chiral spin order stabilized by electron-spin interactions on a triangular lattice. While a long-range magnetic order cannot survive thermal fluctuations in two dimensions, the chiral order which results from the breaking of a discrete Ising symmetry persists even at finite temperatures. We present a scalable machine learning (ML) framework to model the complex electron-mediated spin-spin interactions that stabilize the chiral magnetic domains in a triangular lattice. Large-scale dynamical simulations, enabled by the ML force-field models, are performed to investigate the coarsening of chiral domains after a thermal quench. While the chiral phase is described by a broken $Z_2$ Ising-type symmetry, we find that the characteristic size of chiral domains increases linearly with time, in stark contrast to the expected Allen-Cahn domain growth law for a non-conserved Ising order parameter field. The linear growth of the chiral domains is attributed to the orientational anisotropy of domain boundaries. Our work also demonstrates the promising potential of ML models for large-scale spin dynamics of itinerant magnets.
Authors:Yuexin Bian, Xiaohan Fu, Rajesh K. Gupta, Yuanyuan Shi
Title: Ventilation and Temperature Control for Energy-efficient and Healthy Buildings: A Differentiable PDE Approach
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for building learning and control, focusing on ventilation and thermal management to enhance energy efficiency. We validate the performance of the proposed framework in system model learning via two case studies: a synthetic study focusing on the joint learning of temperature and CO2 fields, and an application to a real-world dataset for CO2 field learning. For building control, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can optimize the control actions and significantly reduce the energy cost while maintaining a comfort and healthy indoor environment. When compared to existing traditional methods, an optimization-based method with ODE models and reinforcement learning, our approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption while guarantees all the safety-critical air quality and control constraints. Promising future research directions involve validating and improving the proposed PDE models through accurate estimation of airflow fields within indoor environments. Additionally, incorporating uncertainty modeling into the PDE framework for HVAC control presents an opportunity to enhance the efficiency and reliability of building HVAC system management.
Authors:Spencer Carmichael, Austin Buchan, Mani Ramanagopal, Radhika Ravi, Ram Vasudevan, Katherine A. Skinner
Title: Dataset and Benchmark: Novel Sensors for Autonomous Vehicle Perception
Abstract:
Conventional cameras employed in autonomous vehicle (AV) systems support many perception tasks, but are challenged by low-light or high dynamic range scenes, adverse weather, and fast motion. Novel sensors, such as event and thermal cameras, offer capabilities with the potential to address these scenarios, but they remain to be fully exploited. This paper introduces the Novel Sensors for Autonomous Vehicle Perception (NSAVP) dataset to facilitate future research on this topic. The dataset was captured with a platform including stereo event, thermal, monochrome, and RGB cameras as well as a high precision navigation system providing ground truth poses. The data was collected by repeatedly driving two ~8 km routes and includes varied lighting conditions and opposing viewpoint perspectives. We provide benchmarking experiments on the task of place recognition to demonstrate challenges and opportunities for novel sensors to enhance critical AV perception tasks. To our knowledge, the NSAVP dataset is the first to include stereo thermal cameras together with stereo event and monochrome cameras. The dataset and supporting software suite is available at: https://umautobots.github.io/nsavp
Authors:Victor A. Mateevitsi, Mathis Bode, Nicola Ferrier, Paul Fischer, Jens Henrik Göbbert, Joseph A. Insley, Yu-Hsiang Lan, Misun Min, Michael E. Papka, Saumil Patel, Silvio Rizzi, Jonathan Windgassen
Title: Scaling Computational Fluid Dynamics: In Situ Visualization of NekRS using SENSEI
Abstract:
In the realm of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the demand for memory and computation resources is extreme, necessitating the use of leadership-scale computing platforms for practical domain sizes. This intensive requirement renders traditional checkpointing methods ineffective due to the significant slowdown in simulations while saving state data to disk. As we progress towards exascale and GPU-driven High-Performance Computing (HPC) and confront larger problem sizes, the choice becomes increasingly stark: to compromise data fidelity or to reduce resolution. To navigate this challenge, this study advocates for the use of in situ analysis and visualization techniques. These allow more frequent data "snapshots" to be taken directly from memory, thus avoiding the need for disruptive checkpointing. We detail our approach of instrumenting NekRS, a GPU-focused thermal-fluid simulation code employing the spectral element method (SEM), and describe varied in situ and in transit strategies for data rendering. Additionally, we provide concrete scientific use-cases and report on runs performed on Polaris, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility's (ALCF) 44 Petaflop supercomputer and Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science (JUWELS) Booster, Jülich Supercomputing Centre's (JSC) 71 Petaflop High Performance Computing (HPC) system, offering practical insight into the implications of our methodology.
Authors:Amin Rezaeizadeh, Gioele Zardini, Emilio Frazzoli, Silvia Mastellone
Title: Reliability-aware Control of Power Converters in Mobility Applications
Abstract:
This paper introduces an automatic control method designed to enhance the operation of electric vehicles, besides the speed tracking objectives, by including reliability and lifetime requirements. The research considers an automotive power converter which supplies electric power to a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM). The primary control objective is to mitigate the thermal stress on the power electronic Insulate Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs), while simultaneously ensuring effective speed tracking performance. To achieve these goals, we propose an extended H-inf design framework, which includes reliability models. The method is tested in two distinct scenarios: reliability-aware, and reliability-free cases. Furthermore, the paper conducts a lifetime analysis of the IGBTs, leveraging the Rainflow algorithm and temperature data.
Authors:Vasilis Michalakopoulos, Sotiris Pelekis, Giorgos Kormpakis, Vagelis Karakolis, Spiros Mouzakitis, Dimitris Askounis
Title: Data-driven building energy efficiency prediction using physics-informed neural networks
Abstract:
The analytical prediction of building energy performance in residential buildings based on the heat losses of its individual envelope components is a challenging task. It is worth noting that this field is still in its infancy, with relatively limited research conducted in this specific area to date, especially when it comes for data-driven approaches. In this paper we introduce a novel physics-informed neural network model for addressing this problem. Through the employment of unexposed datasets that encompass general building information, audited characteristics, and heating energy consumption, we feed the deep learning model with general building information, while the model's output consists of the structural components and several thermal properties that are in fact the basic elements of an energy performance certificate (EPC). On top of this neural network, a function, based on physics equations, calculates the energy consumption of the building based on heat losses and enhances the loss function of the deep learning model. This methodology is tested on a real case study for 256 buildings located in Riga, Latvia. Our investigation comes up with promising results in terms of prediction accuracy, paving the way for automated, and data-driven energy efficiency performance prediction based on basic properties of the building, contrary to exhaustive energy efficiency audits led by humans, which are the current status quo.
Authors:Yafei Sun, Qimin Xu, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan
Title: Resilient Clock Synchronization Architecture for Industrial Time-Sensitive Networking
Abstract:
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a promising industrial Internet of Things technology. Clock synchronization provides unified time reference, which is critical to the deterministic communication of TSN. However, changes in internal network status and external work environments of devices both degrade practical synchronization performance. This paper proposes a temperature-resilient architecture considering delay asymmetry (TACD) to enhance the timing accuracy under the impacts of internal delay and external thermal changes. In TACD, an anti-delay-asymmetry method is developed, which employs a partial variational Bayesian algorithm to promote adaptability to non-stationary delay variation. An optimized skew estimator is further proposed, fusing the temperature skew model for ambiance perception with the traditional linear clock model to compensate for nonlinear error caused by temperature changes. Theoretical derivation of skew estimation lower bound proves the promotion of optimal accuracy after the fusion of clock models. Evaluations based on measured delay data demonstrate accuracy advantages regardless of internal or external influences.
Authors:Xinze Li, Josep Pou, Jiaxin Dong, Fanfan Lin, Changyun Wen, Suvajit Mukherjee, Xin Zhang
Title: Data-Driven Modeling with Experimental Augmentation for the Modulation Strategy of the Dual-Active-Bridge Converter
Abstract:
For the performance modeling of power converters, the mainstream approaches are essentially knowledge-based, suffering from heavy manpower burden and low modeling accuracy. Recent emerging data-driven techniques greatly relieve human reliance by automatic modeling from simulation data. However, model discrepancy may occur due to unmodeled parasitics, deficient thermal and magnetic models, unpredictable ambient conditions, etc. These inaccurate data-driven models based on pure simulation cannot represent the practical performance in physical world, hindering their applications in power converter modeling. To alleviate model discrepancy and improve accuracy in practice, this paper proposes a novel data-driven modeling with experimental augmentation (D2EA), leveraging both simulation data and experimental data. In D2EA, simulation data aims to establish basic functional landscape, and experimental data focuses on matching actual performance in real world. The D2EA approach is instantiated for the efficiency optimization of a hybrid modulation for neutral-point-clamped dual-active-bridge (NPC-DAB) converter. The proposed D2EA approach realizes 99.92% efficiency modeling accuracy, and its feasibility is comprehensively validated in 2-kW hardware experiments, where the peak efficiency of 98.45% is attained. Overall, D2EA is data-light and can achieve highly accurate and highly practical data-driven models in one shot, and it is scalable to other applications, effortlessly.
Authors:Ping Li, Junjie Chen, Binbin Lin, Xianghua Xu
Title: Residual Spatial Fusion Network for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation plays an important role in widespread applications such as autonomous driving and robotic sensing. Traditional methods mostly use RGB images which are heavily affected by lighting conditions, \eg, darkness. Recent studies show thermal images are robust to the night scenario as a compensating modality for segmentation. However, existing works either simply fuse RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) images or adopt the encoder with the same structure for both the RGB stream and the thermal stream, which neglects the modality difference in segmentation under varying lighting conditions. Therefore, this work proposes a Residual Spatial Fusion Network (RSFNet) for RGB-T semantic segmentation. Specifically, we employ an asymmetric encoder to learn the compensating features of the RGB and the thermal images. To effectively fuse the dual-modality features, we generate the pseudo-labels by saliency detection to supervise the feature learning, and develop the Residual Spatial Fusion (RSF) module with structural re-parameterization to learn more promising features by spatially fusing the cross-modality features. RSF employs a hierarchical feature fusion to aggregate multi-level features, and applies the spatial weights with the residual connection to adaptively control the multi-spectral feature fusion by the confidence gate. Extensive experiments were carried out on two benchmarks, \ie, MFNet database and PST900 database. The results have shown the state-of-the-art segmentation performance of our method, which achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed.
Authors:Yunyang Zhang, Zhiqiang Gong, Weien Zhou, Xiaoyu Zhao, Xiaohu Zheng, Wen Yao
Title: Multi-fidelity surrogate modeling for temperature field prediction using deep convolution neural network
Abstract:
Temperature field prediction is of great importance in the thermal design of systems engineering, and building the surrogate model is an effective way for the task. Generally, large amounts of labeled data are required to guarantee a good prediction performance of the surrogate model, especially the deep learning model, which have more parameters and better representational ability. However, labeled data, especially high-fidelity labeled data, are usually expensive to obtain and sometimes even impossible. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a pithy deep multi-fidelity model (DMFM) for temperature field prediction, which takes advantage of low-fidelity data to boost the performance with less high-fidelity data. First, a pre-train and fine-tune paradigm are developed in DMFM to train the low-fidelity and high-fidelity data, which significantly reduces the complexity of the deep surrogate model. Then, a self-supervised learning method for training the physics-driven deep multi-fidelity model (PD-DMFM) is proposed, which fully utilizes the physics characteristics of the engineering systems and reduces the dependence on large amounts of labeled low-fidelity data in the training process. Two diverse temperature field prediction problems are constructed to validate the effectiveness of DMFM and PD-DMFM, and the result shows that the proposed method can greatly reduce the dependence of the model on high-fidelity data.
Authors:Tze Ho Elden Tse, Zhongqun Zhang, Kwang In Kim, Ales Leonardis, Feng Zheng, Hyung Jin Chang
Title: S$^2$Contact: Graph-based Network for 3D Hand-Object Contact Estimation with Semi-Supervised Learning
Abstract:
Despite the recent efforts in accurate 3D annotations in hand and object datasets, there still exist gaps in 3D hand and object reconstructions. Existing works leverage contact maps to refine inaccurate hand-object pose estimations and generate grasps given object models. However, they require explicit 3D supervision which is seldom available and therefore, are limited to constrained settings, e.g., where thermal cameras observe residual heat left on manipulated objects. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework that allows us to learn contact from monocular images. Specifically, we leverage visual and geometric consistency constraints in large-scale datasets for generating pseudo-labels in semi-supervised learning and propose an efficient graph-based network to infer contact. Our semi-supervised learning framework achieves a favourable improvement over the existing supervised learning methods trained on data with `limited' annotations. Notably, our proposed model is able to achieve superior results with less than half the network parameters and memory access cost when compared with the commonly-used PointNet-based approach. We show benefits from using a contact map that rules hand-object interactions to produce more accurate reconstructions. We further demonstrate that training with pseudo-labels can extend contact map estimations to out-of-domain objects and generalise better across multiple datasets.
Authors:AmirPouya Hemmasian, Francis Ogoke, Parand Akbari, Jonathan Malen, Jack Beuth, Amir Barati Farimani
Title: Surrogate Modeling of Melt Pool Thermal Field using Deep Learning
Abstract:
Powder-based additive manufacturing has transformed the manufacturing industry over the last decade. In Laser Powder Bed Fusion, a specific part is built in an iterative manner in which two-dimensional cross-sections are formed on top of each other by melting and fusing the proper areas of the powder bed. In this process, the behavior of the melt pool and its thermal field has a very important role in predicting the quality of the manufactured part and its possible defects. However, the simulation of such a complex phenomenon is usually very time-consuming and requires huge computational resources. Flow-3D is one of the software packages capable of executing such simulations using iterative numerical solvers. In this work, we create three datasets of single-trail processes using Flow-3D and use them to train a convolutional neural network capable of predicting the behavior of the three-dimensional thermal field of the melt pool solely by taking three parameters as input: laser power, laser velocity, and time step. The CNN achieves a relative Root Mean Squared Error of 2% to 3% for the temperature field and an average Intersection over Union score of 80% to 90% in predicting the melt pool area. Moreover, since time is included as one of the inputs of the model, the thermal field can be instantly obtained for any arbitrary time step without the need to iterate and compute all the steps
Authors:Fabian Raisch, Max Langtry, Felix Koch, Ruchi Choudhary, Christoph Goebel, Benjamin Tischler
Title: Adapting to Change: A Comparison of Continual and Transfer Learning for Modeling Building Thermal Dynamics under Concept Drifts
Abstract:
Transfer Learning (TL) is currently the most effective approach for modeling building thermal dynamics when only limited data are available. TL uses a pretrained model that is fine-tuned to a specific target building. However, it remains unclear how to proceed after initial fine-tuning, as more operational measurement data are collected over time. This challenge becomes even more complex when the dynamics of the building change, for example, after a retrofit or a change in occupancy. In Machine Learning literature, Continual Learning (CL) methods are used to update models of changing systems. TL approaches can also address this challenge by reusing the pretrained model at each update step and fine-tuning it with new measurement data. A comprehensive study on how to incorporate new measurement data over time to improve prediction accuracy and address the challenges of concept drifts (changes in dynamics) for building thermal dynamics is still missing. Therefore, this study compares several CL and TL strategies, as well as a model trained from scratch, for thermal dynamics modeling during building operation. The methods are evaluated using 5--7 years of simulated data representative of single-family houses in Central Europe, including scenarios with concept drifts from retrofits and changes in occupancy. We propose a CL strategy (Seasonal Memory Learning) that provides greater accuracy improvements than existing CL and TL methods, while maintaining low computational effort. SML outperformed the benchmark of initial fine-tuning by 28.1\% without concept drifts and 34.9\% with concept drifts.
Authors:Fabian Raisch, Max Langtry, Felix Koch, Ruchi Choudhary, Christoph Goebel, Benjamin Tischler
Title: Adapting to Change: A Comparison of Continual and Transfer Learning for Modeling Building Thermal Dynamics under Concept Drifts
Abstract:
Transfer Learning (TL) is currently the most effective approach for modeling building thermal dynamics when only limited data are available. TL uses a pretrained model that is fine-tuned to a specific target building. However, it remains unclear how to proceed after initial fine-tuning, as more operational measurement data are collected over time. This challenge becomes even more complex when the dynamics of the building change, for example, after a retrofit or a change in occupancy. In Machine Learning literature, Continual Learning (CL) methods are used to update models of changing systems. TL approaches can also address this challenge by reusing the pretrained model at each update step and fine-tuning it with new measurement data. A comprehensive study on how to incorporate new measurement data over time to improve prediction accuracy and address the challenges of concept drifts (changes in dynamics) for building thermal dynamics is still missing. Therefore, this study compares several CL and TL strategies, as well as a model trained from scratch, for thermal dynamics modeling during building operation. The methods are evaluated using 5--7 years of simulated data representative of single-family houses in Central Europe, including scenarios with concept drifts from retrofits and changes in occupancy. We propose a CL strategy (Seasonal Memory Learning) that provides greater accuracy improvements than existing CL and TL methods, while maintaining low computational effort. SML outperformed the benchmark of initial fine-tuning by 28.1\% without concept drifts and 34.9\% with concept drifts.
Authors:Ziqi Zhang, Shiheng Chen, Runze Yang, Zhisheng Wei, Wei Zhang, Lei Wang, Zhanzhi Liu, Fengshan Zhang, Jing Wu, Xiaoyong Pan, Hongbin Shen, Longbing Cao, Zhaohong Deng
Title: Modeling enzyme temperature stability from sequence segment perspective
Abstract:
Developing enzymes with desired thermal properties is crucial for a wide range of industrial and research applications, and determining temperature stability is an essential step in this process. Experimental determination of thermal parameters is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. Moreover, existing computational approaches are often hindered by limited data availability and imbalanced distributions. To address these challenges, we introduce a curated temperature stability dataset designed for model development and benchmarking in enzyme thermal modeling. Leveraging this dataset, we present the \textit{Segment Transformer}, a novel deep learning framework that enables efficient and accurate prediction of enzyme temperature stability. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance with an RMSE of 24.03, MAE of 18.09, and Pearson and Spearman correlations of 0.33, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating segment-level representations, grounded in the biological observation that different regions of a protein sequence contribute unequally to thermal behavior. As a proof of concept, we applied the Segment Transformer to guide the engineering of a cutinase enzyme. Experimental validation demonstrated a 1.64-fold improvement in relative activity following heat treatment, achieved through only 17 mutations and without compromising catalytic function.
Authors:Weihong Tang, Yun Li, Shalika Walker, Tamas Keviczky
Title: Model Predictive Control for Unlocking Energy Flexibility of Heat Pump and Thermal Energy Storage Systems: Experimental Results
Abstract:
Increasing penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) and electrification of energy systems necessitates the engagement of demand-side management (DSM) to help alleviate congestion in electricity grid. Heat pump and thermal energy storage (HPTES) systems, being energy efficient solutions, are becoming popular in modern buildings and are promising to contribute to demand-side management (DSM) due to their significant share in household electricity consumption. For typical HPTES systems, this paper presents a systematic design framework covering a control-oriented modeling process and energy-flexible model predictive control (MPC) design. The proposed MPC-based DSM strategy offers an innovative solution for efficient DSM by following a two-step DSM framework. In the first step, flexibility assessment is performed to quantitatively evaluate the flexibility potential of the HPTES system by solving a mixed-integer economic MPC problem. In the second step, flexibility exploitation is achieved through reacting to feasible demand response (DR) requests while respecting system constraints. Both numerical simulations and real-world experiments are performed based on a real HPTES installation to showcase the viability and effectiveness of the proposed design.
Authors:Aurelio Venditti, Walter Gubinelli, Enise F. Altin, Luca Colombo, Pietro Simeoni, Benyamin Davaji, Matteo Rinaldi
Title: Plasmonically Enhanced Flexural-Mode AlScN Nanoplate Resonator as Uncooled and Ultrafast IR Detector with High Responsivity
Abstract:
This letter introduces a novel class of miniaturized, uncooled, and ultra-fast infrared (IR) resonant thermal detectors (RTDs) based on 30%-doped Aluminum Scandium Nitride (AlScN) nanoplates. Exploiting high electromechanical coupling, good thermal properties, and enhanced and selective IR absorption, the presented device aims to demonstrate significant advancements over the state-of-the-art IR RTDs. This single pixel combines compact footprint, high spectral selectivity and responsivity, reduced noise, and fast thermal response, allowing for the potential development of innovative IR thermal imagers through multi-pixel integration. The flexural nature of the actuated resonance mode eventually enables an interferometric optical readout, paving the way towards achieving extremely low Noise Equivalent Power levels. These results demonstrate a high IR responsivity of around 130 ppt/pW, a thermal time constant of around 330 us, and a large out-of-plane displacement. This work represents the first experimental integration on a resonating platform of plasmonic absorbers that utilize AlScN as dielectric layer.
Authors:Luca Spagnuolo, Gabriel Giribaldi, Filippo Perli, Alberto Corigliano, Luca Colombo, Matteo Rinaldi
Title: Power Handling Improvement in Cross-Sectional Lame Mode Resonators Operating in the Ku-band
Abstract:
This study presents power handling improvements in cross-sectional Lame-Mode Resonators (CLMRs) designed for operation in the Ku-band. Previously fabricated CLMR devices failed at approximately 8 dBm of input power, primarily due to electromigration in the aluminum interdigitated electrodes (IDTs). To better understand this mechanism in CLMRs, a data driven thermal model is developed to analyze localized heating effects within the resonator body, which are known to accelerate electromigration. Based on insights from this model, Aluminum Silicon Copper (AlSiCu) was selected for the IDTs due to its superior thermal stability and resistance to electromigration. Devices fabricated with AlSiCu exhibited no signs of performance degradation, with the best-performing resonator achieving a mechanical quality factor (Qm) of 360, a maximum Bode quality factor (QBode) of 500, and an electromechanical coupling coefficient (kt2) of 6.3%. Moreover, the use of AlSiCu significantly increased the maximum input power the device can withstand, showing an improvement of up to 6 dBm over previous devices. These improvements in power handling make the devices strong candidates for high-power Ku-band filtering applications.
Authors:Alex C. Newkirk, Jared Fernandez, Jonathan Koomey, Imran Latif, Emma Strubell, Arman Shehabi, Constantine Samaras
Title: Empirically-Calibrated H100 Node Power Models for Reducing Uncertainty in AI Training Energy Estimation
Abstract:
As AI's energy demand continues to grow, it is critical to enhance the understanding of characteristics of this demand, to improve grid infrastructure planning and environmental assessment. By combining empirical measurements from Brookhaven National Laboratory during AI training on 8-GPU H100 systems with open-source benchmarking data, we develop statistical models relating computational intensity to node-level power consumption. We measure the gap between manufacturer-rated thermal design power (TDP) and actual power demand during AI training. Our analysis reveals that even computationally intensive workloads operate at only 76% of the 10.2 kW TDP rating. Our architecture-specific model, calibrated to floating-point operations, predicts energy consumption with 11.4% mean absolute percentage error, significantly outperforming TDP-based approaches (27-37% error). We identified distinct power signatures between transformer and CNN architectures, with transformers showing characteristic fluctuations that may impact grid stability.
Authors:Mia Thomas, Trevor Ablett, Jonathan Kelly
Title: Learning Cross-Spectral Point Features with Task-Oriented Training
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable operations in remote and hazardous environments, yet the visible-spectrum, camera-based navigation systems often relied upon by UAVs struggle in low-visibility conditions. Thermal cameras, which capture long-wave infrared radiation, are able to function effectively in darkness and smoke, where visible-light cameras fail. This work explores learned cross-spectral (thermal-visible) point features as a means to integrate thermal imagery into established camera-based navigation systems. Existing methods typically train a feature network's detection and description outputs directly, which often focuses training on image regions where thermal and visible-spectrum images exhibit similar appearance. Aiming to more fully utilize the available data, we propose a method to train the feature network on the tasks of matching and registration. We run our feature network on thermal-visible image pairs, then feed the network response into a differentiable registration pipeline. Losses are applied to the matching and registration estimates of this pipeline. Our selected model, trained on the task of matching, achieves a registration error (corner error) below 10 pixels for more than 75% of estimates on the MultiPoint dataset. We further demonstrate that our model can also be used with a classical pipeline for matching and registration.
Authors:Junjie Yu, John S. Schreck, David John Gagne, Keith W. Oleson, Jie Li, Yongtu Liang, Qi Liao, Mingfei Sun, David O. Topping, Zhonghua Zheng
Title: Reinforcement Learning (RL) Meets Urban Climate Modeling: Investigating the Efficacy and Impacts of RL-Based HVAC Control
Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control has emerged as a promising technology for reducing building energy consumption while maintaining indoor thermal comfort. However, the efficacy of such strategies is influenced by the background climate and their implementation may potentially alter both the indoor climate and local urban climate. This study proposes an integrated framework combining RL with an urban climate model that incorporates a building energy model, aiming to evaluate the efficacy of RL-based HVAC control across different background climates, impacts of RL strategies on indoor climate and local urban climate, and the transferability of RL strategies across cities. Our findings reveal that the reward (defined as a weighted combination of energy consumption and thermal comfort) and the impacts of RL strategies on indoor climate and local urban climate exhibit marked variability across cities with different background climates. The sensitivity of reward weights and the transferability of RL strategies are also strongly influenced by the background climate. Cities in hot climates tend to achieve higher rewards across most reward weight configurations that balance energy consumption and thermal comfort, and those cities with more varying atmospheric temperatures demonstrate greater RL strategy transferability. These findings underscore the importance of thoroughly evaluating RL-based HVAC control strategies in diverse climatic contexts. This study also provides a new insight that city-to-city learning will potentially aid the deployment of RL-based HVAC control.
Authors:Yury Zabegaev, Inga Berre, Eirik Keilegavlen
Title: A block preconditioner for thermo-poromechanics with frictional deformation of fractures
Abstract:
The numerical modeling of fracture contact thermo-poromechanics is crucial for advancing subsurface engineering applications, including CO2 sequestration, production of geo-energy resources, energy storage and wastewater disposal operations. Accurately modeling this problem presents substantial challenges due to the complex physics involved in strongly coupled thermo-poromechanical processes and the frictional contact mechanics of fractures. To resolve process couplings in the resulting mathematical model, it is common to apply fully implicit time stepping. This necessitates the use of an iterative linear solver to run the model. The solver's efficiency primarily depends on a robust preconditioner, which is particularly challenging to develop because it must handle the mutual couplings between linearized contact mechanics and energy, momentum, and mass balance. In this work, we introduce a preconditioner for the problem based on the nested approximations of Schur complements. To decouple the momentum balance, we utilize the fixed-stress approximation, extended to account for both the porous media and fracture subdomains. The singularity of the contact mechanics submatrix is resolved by a linear transformation. Two variations of the algorithm are proposed to address the coupled mass and energy balance submatrix: either the Constrained Pressure Residual or the System-AMG approach. The preconditioner is evaluated through numerical experiments of fluid injection into fractured porous media, which causes thermal contraction and subsequent sliding and opening of fractures. The experiments show that the preconditioner performs robustly for a wide range of simulation regimes governed by various fracture states, friction coefficients and Peclet number. The grid refinement experiments demonstrate that the preconditioner scales well in terms of GMRES iterations, in both two and three dimensions.
Authors:Shang Zhang, Huanbin Zhang, Dali Feng, Yujie Cui, Ruoyan Xiong, Cen He
Title: SMMT: Siamese Motion Mamba with Self-attention for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) object tracking often suffers from challenges such as target occlusion, motion blur, and background clutter, which significantly degrade the performance of trackers. To address these issues, this paper pro-poses a novel Siamese Motion Mamba Tracker (SMMT), which integrates a bidirectional state-space model and a self-attention mechanism. Specifically, we introduce the Motion Mamba module into the Siamese architecture to ex-tract motion features and recover overlooked edge details using bidirectional modeling and self-attention. We propose a Siamese parameter-sharing strate-gy that allows certain convolutional layers to share weights. This approach reduces computational redundancy while preserving strong feature represen-tation. In addition, we design a motion edge-aware regression loss to improve tracking accuracy, especially for motion-blurred targets. Extensive experi-ments are conducted on four TIR tracking benchmarks, including LSOTB-TIR, PTB-TIR, VOT-TIR2015, and VOT-TIR 2017. The results show that SMMT achieves superior performance in TIR target tracking.
Authors:Shang Zhang, HuiPan Guan, XiaoBo Ding, Ruoyan Xiong, Yue Zhang
Title: SMTT: Novel Structured Multi-task Tracking with Graph-Regularized Sparse Representation for Robust Thermal Infrared Target Tracking
Abstract:
Thermal infrared target tracking is crucial in applications such as surveillance, autonomous driving, and military operations. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker, SMTT, which effectively addresses common challenges in thermal infrared imagery, such as noise, occlusion, and rapid target motion, by leveraging multi-task learning, joint sparse representation, and adaptive graph regularization. By reformulating the tracking task as a multi-task learning problem, the SMTT tracker independently optimizes the representation of each particle while dynamically capturing spatial and feature-level similarities using a weighted mixed-norm regularization strategy. To ensure real-time performance, we incorporate the Accelerated Proximal Gradient method for efficient optimization. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets - including VOT-TIR, PTB-TIR, and LSOTB-TIR - demonstrate that SMTT achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. These results highlight SMTT as a reliable and high-performance solution for thermal infrared target tracking in complex environments.
Authors:Shang Zhang, Xiaobo Ding, Huanbin Zhang, Ruoyan Xiong, Yue Zhang
Title: STARS: Sparse Learning Correlation Filter with Spatio-temporal Regularization and Super-resolution Reconstruction for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) target tracking methods often adopt the correlation filter (CF) framework due to its computational efficiency. However, the low resolution of TIR images, along with tracking interference, significantly limits the perfor-mance of TIR trackers. To address these challenges, we introduce STARS, a novel sparse learning-based CF tracker that incorporates spatio-temporal regulari-zation and super-resolution reconstruction. First, we apply adaptive sparse filter-ing and temporal domain filtering to extract key features of the target while reduc-ing interference from background clutter and noise. Next, we introduce an edge-preserving sparse regularization method to stabilize target features and prevent excessive blurring. This regularization integrates multiple terms and employs the alternating direction method of multipliers to optimize the solution. Finally, we propose a gradient-enhanced super-resolution method to extract fine-grained TIR target features and improve the resolution of TIR images, addressing performance degradation in tracking caused by low-resolution sequences. To the best of our knowledge, STARS is the first to integrate super-resolution methods within a sparse learning-based CF framework. Extensive experiments on the LSOTB-TIR, PTB-TIR, VOT-TIR2015, and VOT-TIR2017 benchmarks demonstrate that STARS outperforms state-of-the-art trackers in terms of robustness.
Authors:Ruoyan Xiong, Yuke Hou, Princess Retor Torboh, Hui He, Huanbin Zhang, Yue Zhang, Yanpin Wang, Huipan Guan, Shang Zhang
Title: DCFG: Diverse Cross-Channel Fine-Grained Feature Learning and Progressive Fusion Siamese Tracker for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking
Abstract:
To address the challenge of capturing highly discriminative features in ther-mal infrared (TIR) tracking, we propose a novel Siamese tracker based on cross-channel fine-grained feature learning and progressive fusion. First, we introduce a cross-channel fine-grained feature learning network that employs masks and suppression coefficients to suppress dominant target features, en-abling the tracker to capture more detailed and subtle information. The net-work employs a channel rearrangement mechanism to enhance efficient in-formation flow, coupled with channel equalization to reduce parameter count. Additionally, we incorporate layer-by-layer combination units for ef-fective feature extraction and fusion, thereby minimizing parameter redun-dancy and computational complexity. The network further employs feature redirection and channel shuffling strategies to better integrate fine-grained details. Second, we propose a specialized cross-channel fine-grained loss function designed to guide feature groups toward distinct discriminative re-gions of the target, thus improving overall target representation. This loss function includes an inter-channel loss term that promotes orthogonality be-tween channels, maximizing feature diversity and facilitating finer detail capture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed tracker achieves the highest accuracy, scoring 0.81 on the VOT-TIR 2015 and 0.78 on the VOT-TIR 2017 benchmark, while also outperforming other methods across all evaluation metrics on the LSOTB-TIR and PTB-TIR benchmarks.
Authors:Ruoyan Xiong, Huanbin Zhang, Shentao Wang, Hui He, Yuke Hou, Yue Zhang, Yujie Cui, Huipan Guan, Shang Zhang
Title: FGSGT: Saliency-Guided Siamese Network Tracker Based on Key Fine-Grained Feature Information for Thermal Infrared Target Tracking
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) images typically lack detailed features and have low contrast, making it challenging for conventional feature extraction models to capture discriminative target characteristics. As a result, trackers are often affected by interference from visually similar objects and are susceptible to tracking drift. To address these challenges, we propose a novel saliency-guided Siamese network tracker based on key fine-grained feature infor-mation. First, we introduce a fine-grained feature parallel learning convolu-tional block with a dual-stream architecture and convolutional kernels of varying sizes. This design captures essential global features from shallow layers, enhances feature diversity, and minimizes the loss of fine-grained in-formation typically encountered in residual connections. In addition, we propose a multi-layer fine-grained feature fusion module that uses bilinear matrix multiplication to effectively integrate features across both deep and shallow layers. Next, we introduce a Siamese residual refinement block that corrects saliency map prediction errors using residual learning. Combined with deep supervision, this mechanism progressively refines predictions, ap-plying supervision at each recursive step to ensure consistent improvements in accuracy. Finally, we present a saliency loss function to constrain the sali-ency predictions, directing the network to focus on highly discriminative fi-ne-grained features. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the pro-posed tracker achieves the highest precision and success rates on the PTB-TIR and LSOTB-TIR benchmarks. It also achieves a top accuracy of 0.78 on the VOT-TIR 2015 benchmark and 0.75 on the VOT-TIR 2017 benchmark.
Authors:Shang Zhang, Yuke Hou, Guoqiang Gong, Ruoyan Xiong, Yue Zhang
Title: RAMCT: Novel Region-adaptive Multi-channel Tracker with Iterative Tikhonov Regularization for Thermal Infrared Tracking
Abstract:
Correlation filter (CF)-based trackers have gained significant attention for their computational efficiency in thermal infrared (TIR) target tracking. However, ex-isting methods struggle with challenges such as low-resolution imagery, occlu-sion, background clutter, and target deformation, which severely impact tracking performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose RAMCT, a region-adaptive sparse correlation filter tracker that integrates multi-channel feature opti-mization with an adaptive regularization strategy. Firstly, we refine the CF learn-ing process by introducing a spatially adaptive binary mask, which enforces spar-sity in the target region while dynamically suppressing background interference. Secondly, we introduce generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) and propose a novel GSVD-based region-adaptive iterative Tikhonov regularization method. This enables flexible and robust optimization across multiple feature channels, improving resilience to occlusion and background variations. Thirdly, we propose an online optimization strategy with dynamic discrepancy-based pa-rameter adjustment. This mechanism facilitates real time adaptation to target and background variations, thereby improving tracking accuracy and robustness. Ex-tensive experiments on LSOTB-TIR, PTB-TIR, VOT-TIR2015, and VOT-TIR2017 benchmarks demonstrate that RAMCT outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Authors:Qishun Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Chenglong Li, Bo Jiang
Title: Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph Learning for Alignment-free RGBT Video Object Detection
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) can address the limitation of traditional RGB-based VOD in challenging lighting conditions, making it more practical and effective in many applications. However, similar to most RGBT fusion tasks, it still mainly relies on manually aligned multimodal image pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph learning Network (MSGNet) for alignment-free RGBT VOD problem by leveraging the robust graph representation learning model. Specifically, we first design an Adaptive Partitioning Layer (APL) to estimate the corresponding regions of the Thermal image within the RGB image (high-resolution), achieving a preliminary inexact alignment. Then, we introduce the Spatial Sparse Graph Learning Module (S-SGLM) which employs a sparse information passing mechanism on the estimated inexact alignment to achieve reliable information interaction between different modalities. Moreover, to fully exploit the temporal cues for RGBT VOD problem, we introduce Hybrid Structured Temporal Modeling (HSTM), which involves a Temporal Sparse Graph Learning Module (T-SGLM) and Temporal Star Block (TSB). T-SGLM aims to filter out some redundant information between adjacent frames by employing the sparse aggregation mechanism on the temporal graph. Meanwhile, TSB is dedicated to achieving the complementary learning of local spatial relationships. Extensive comparative experiments conducted on both the aligned dataset VT-VOD50 and the unaligned dataset UVT-VOD2024 demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. Our project will be made available on our website for free public access.
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Ruichao Hou, Tongwei Ren, Gangshan Wu
Title: KAN-SAM: Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Guided Segment Anything Model for RGB-T Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Existing RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) methods aim to identify visually significant objects by leveraging both RGB and thermal modalities to enable robust performance in complex scenarios, but they often suffer from limited generalization due to the constrained diversity of available datasets and the inefficiencies in constructing multi-modal representations. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning-based RGB-T SOD method, named KAN-SAM, which reveals the potential of visual foundational models for RGB-T SOD tasks. Specifically, we extend Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for RGB-T SOD by introducing thermal features as guiding prompts through efficient and accurate Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) adapters, which effectively enhance RGB representations and improve robustness. Furthermore, we introduce a mutually exclusive random masking strategy to reduce reliance on RGB data and improve generalization. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Silas Weinert, Jonas Bundschuh, Yvonne Späck-Leigsnering, Herbert De Gersem
Title: Magneto-thermally Coupled Field Simulation of Homogenized Foil Winding Models
Abstract:
Foil windings have, due to their layered structure, different properties than conventional wire windings, which make them advantageous for high frequency applications. Both electromagnetic and thermal analyses are relevant for foil windings. These two physical areas are coupled through Joule losses and temperature dependent material properties. For an efficient simulation of foil windings, homogenization techniques are used to avoid resolving the single turns. Therefore, this paper comprises a coupled magneto-thermal simulation that uses a homogenization method in the electromagnetic and thermal part. A weak coupling with different time step sizes for both parts is presented. The method is validated on a simple geometry and showcased for a pot transformer that uses a foil and a wire winding.
Authors:Jinchang Zhang, Zijun Li, Guoyu Lu
Title: Language-Depth Navigated Thermal and Visible Image Fusion
Abstract:
Depth-guided multimodal fusion combines depth information from visible and infrared images, significantly enhancing the performance of 3D reconstruction and robotics applications. Existing thermal-visible image fusion mainly focuses on detection tasks, ignoring other critical information such as depth. By addressing the limitations of single modalities in low-light and complex environments, the depth information from fused images not only generates more accurate point cloud data, improving the completeness and precision of 3D reconstruction, but also provides comprehensive scene understanding for robot navigation, localization, and environmental perception. This supports precise recognition and efficient operations in applications such as autonomous driving and rescue missions. We introduce a text-guided and depth-driven infrared and visible image fusion network. The model consists of an image fusion branch for extracting multi-channel complementary information through a diffusion model, equipped with a text-guided module, and two auxiliary depth estimation branches. The fusion branch uses CLIP to extract semantic information and parameters from depth-enriched image descriptions to guide the diffusion model in extracting multi-channel features and generating fused images. These fused images are then input into the depth estimation branches to calculate depth-driven loss, optimizing the image fusion network. This framework aims to integrate vision-language and depth to directly generate color-fused images from multimodal inputs.
Authors:Faaiq Waqar, Jungyoun Kwak, Junmo Lee, Minji Shon, Mohammadhosein Gholamrezaei, Kevin Skadron, Shimeng Yu
Title: Optimization and Benchmarking of Monolithically Stackable Gain Cell Memory for Last-Level Cache
Abstract:
The Last Level Cache (LLC) is the processor's critical bridge between on-chip and off-chip memory levels - optimized for high density, high bandwidth, and low operation energy. To date, high-density (HD) SRAM has been the conventional device of choice; however, with the slowing of transistor scaling, as reflected in the industry's almost identical HD SRAM cell size from 5 nm to 3 nm, alternative solutions such as 3D stacking with advanced packaging like hybrid bonding are pursued (as demonstrated in AMD's V-cache). Escalating data demands necessitate ultra-large on-chip caches to decrease costly off-chip memory movement, pushing the exploration of device technology toward monolithic 3D (M3D) integration where transistors can be stacked in the back-end-of-line (BEOL) at the interconnect level. M3D integration requires fabrication techniques compatible with a low thermal budget (<400 degC). Among promising BEOL device candidates are amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) transistors, particularly desirable for their ultra-low leakage (seconds) when used in a gain-cell configuration. This paper examines device, circuit, and system-level tradeoffs when optimizing BEOL-compatible AOS-based 2-transistor gain cell (2T-GC) for LLC. A cache early-exploration tool, NS-Cache, is developed to model caches in advanced 7 and 3 nm nodes and is integrated with the Gem5 simulator to systematically benchmark the impact of the newfound density/performance when compared to HD-SRAM, MRAM, and 1T1C eDRAM alternatives for LLC.
Authors:Xiang Fu, Brandon M. Wood, Luis Barroso-Luque, Daniel S. Levine, Meng Gao, Misko Dzamba, C. Lawrence Zitnick
Title: Learning Smooth and Expressive Interatomic Potentials for Physical Property Prediction
Abstract:
Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become increasingly effective at approximating quantum mechanical calculations at a fraction of the computational cost. However, lower errors on held out test sets do not always translate to improved results on downstream physical property prediction tasks. In this paper, we propose testing MLIPs on their practical ability to conserve energy during molecular dynamic simulations. If passed, improved correlations are found between test errors and their performance on physical property prediction tasks. We identify choices which may lead to models failing this test, and use these observations to improve upon highly-expressive models. The resulting model, eSEN, provides state-of-the-art results on a range of physical property prediction tasks, including materials stability prediction, thermal conductivity prediction, and phonon calculations.
Authors:Leon Blumrich, Christian Bergfried, Armin Galetzka, Herbert De Gersem, Roland Seebacher, Annette Mütze, Yvonne Späck-Leigsnering
Title: Thermal Model Calibration of a Squirrel-Cage Induction Machine
Abstract:
Accurate and efficient thermal simulations of induction machines are indispensable for detecting thermal hot spots and hence avoiding potential material failure in an early design stage. A goal is the better utilization of the machines with reduced safety margins due to a better knowledge of the critical conditions. In this work, the parameters of a two-dimensional induction machine model are calibrated according to evidence from measurements, by solving an inverse field problem. The set of parameters comprise material parameters as well as parameters that model three-dimensional effects. This allows a consideration of physical effects without explicit knowledge of its quantities. First, the accuracy of the approach is studied using an academic example in combination with synthetic data. Afterwards, it is successfully applied to a realistic induction machine model.
Authors:Lena Baumann, Lukas Einkemmer, Christian Klingenberg, Jonas Kusch
Title: An energy stable and conservative multiplicative dynamical low-rank discretization for the Su-Olson problem
Abstract:
Computing numerical solutions of the thermal radiative transfer equations on a finely resolved grid can be costly due to high computational and memory requirements. A numerical reduced order method that has recently been applied to a wide variety of kinetic partial differential equations is the concept of dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA). In this paper, we consider the thermal radiative transfer equations with Su-Olson closure, leading to a linearized kinetic model. For the conducted theoretical and practical considerations we use a multiplicative splitting of the distribution function that poses additional challenges in finding an energy stable discretization and deriving a hyperbolic Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition. We propose such an energy stable DLRA scheme that makes use of the augmented basis update & Galerkin integrator. This integrator allows for additional basis augmentations, enabling us to give a mathematically rigorous proof of energy stability and local mass conservation. Numerical examples confirm the derived properties and show the computational advantages of the DLRA scheme compared to a numerical solution of the full system of equations.
Authors:Daniel Menges, Florian Stadtmann, Henrik Jordheim, Adil Rasheed
Title: Predictive Digital Twin for Condition Monitoring Using Thermal Imaging
Abstract:
This paper explores the development and practical application of a predictive digital twin specifically designed for condition monitoring, using advanced mathematical models and thermal imaging techniques. Our work presents a comprehensive approach to integrating Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), and Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) to establish a robust predictive digital twin framework. We employ these methods in a real-time experimental setup involving a heated plate monitored through thermal imaging. This system effectively demonstrates the digital twin's capabilities in real-time predictions, condition monitoring, and anomaly detection. Additionally, we introduce the use of a human-machine interface that includes virtual reality, enhancing user interaction and system understanding. The primary contributions of our research lie in the demonstration of these advanced techniques in a tangible setup, showcasing the potential of digital twins to transform industry practices by enabling more proactive and strategic asset management.
Authors:Dhrumil Patel, Mark M. Wilde
Title: Natural gradient and parameter estimation for quantum Boltzmann machines
Abstract:
Thermal states play a fundamental role in various areas of physics, and they are becoming increasingly important in quantum information science, with applications related to semi-definite programming, quantum Boltzmann machine learning, Hamiltonian learning, and the related task of estimating the parameters of a Hamiltonian. Here we establish formulas underlying the basic geometry of parameterized thermal states, and we delineate quantum algorithms for estimating the values of these formulas. More specifically, we prove formulas for the Fisher--Bures and Kubo--Mori information matrices of parameterized thermal states, and our quantum algorithms for estimating their matrix elements involve a combination of classical sampling, Hamiltonian simulation, and the Hadamard test. These results have applications in developing a natural gradient descent algorithm for quantum Boltzmann machine learning, which takes into account the geometry of thermal states, and in establishing fundamental limitations on the ability to estimate the parameters of a Hamiltonian, when given access to thermal-state samples. For the latter task, and for the special case of estimating a single parameter, we sketch an algorithm that realizes a measurement that is asymptotically optimal for the estimation task. We finally stress that the natural gradient descent algorithm developed here can be used for any machine learning problem that employs the quantum Boltzmann machine ansatz.
Authors:Christian Bergfried, Samaneh Abdi Qezeljeh, Ilia V. Roisman, Herbert De Gersem, Jeanette Hussong, Yvonne Späck-Leigsnering
Title: Thermal Finite-Element Model of an Electric Machine Cooled by a Spray
Abstract:
The need for higher power density in electrical machines require better cooling strategies. Spray cooling is a very promising and relatively simple technology to apply, but involves extremely complicated physics. In this paper, a quasi-3D thermal finite-element model of a stator winding is created, by extrusion of a 2D cross-sectional finite-element model along the winding direction. The possible effects of spray cooling are simulated as a heat flux using an impedance boundary condition at the surface of the winding overhang. The results confirm the beneficial performance of spray cooling. The model indicates that spray cooling may allow a ten times larger power density than for standard air- or water-cooled machines.
Authors:Dhrumil Patel, Daniel Koch, Saahil Patel, Mark M. Wilde
Title: Quantum Boltzmann machine learning of ground-state energies
Abstract:
Estimating the ground-state energy of Hamiltonians is a fundamental task for which it is believed that quantum computers can be helpful. Several approaches have been proposed toward this goal, including algorithms based on quantum phase estimation and hybrid quantum-classical optimizers involving parameterized quantum circuits, the latter falling under the umbrella of the variational quantum eigensolver. Here, we analyze the performance of quantum Boltzmann machines for this task, which is a less explored ansatz based on parameterized thermal states and which is not known to suffer from the barren-plateau problem. We delineate a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for this task and rigorously prove that it converges to an $\varepsilon$-approximate stationary point of the energy function optimized over parameter space, while using a number of parameterized-thermal-state samples that is polynomial in $\varepsilon^{-1}$, the number of parameters, and the norm of the Hamiltonian being optimized. Our algorithm estimates the gradient of the energy function efficiently by means of a novel quantum circuit construction that combines classical sampling, Hamiltonian simulation, and the Hadamard test, thus overcoming a key obstacle to quantum Boltzmann machine learning that has been left open since [Amin et al., Phys. Rev. X 8, 021050 (2018)]. Additionally supporting our main claims are calculations of the gradient and Hessian of the energy function, as well as an upper bound on the matrix elements of the latter that is used in the convergence analysis.
Authors:Qishun Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Kunpeng Wang, Le Gu, Chuanwang Guo
Title: Mixture of Scale Experts for Alignment-free RGBT Video Object Detection and A Unified Benchmark
Abstract:
Existing RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) methods predominantly rely on the manual alignment of image pairs, that is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. This dependency significantly restricts the scalability and practical applicability of these methods in real-world scenarios. To address this critical limitation, we propose a novel framework termed the Mixture of Scale Experts Network (MSENet). MSENet integrates multiple experts trained at different perceptual scales, enabling the capture of scale discrepancies between RGB and thermal image pairs without the need for explicit alignment. Specifically, to address the issue of unaligned scales, MSENet introduces a set of experts designed to perceive the correlation between RGBT image pairs across various scales. These experts are capable of identifying and quantifying the scale differences inherent in the image pairs. Subsequently, a dynamic routing mechanism is incorporated to assign adaptive weights to each expert, allowing the network to dynamically select the most appropriate experts based on the specific characteristics of the input data. Furthermore, to address the issue of weakly unaligned positions, we integrate deformable convolution into the network. Deformable convolution is employed to learn position displacements between the RGB and thermal modalities, thereby mitigating the impact of spatial misalignment. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform for alignment-free RGBT VOD, we introduce a new benchmark dataset. This dataset includes eleven common object categories, with a total of 60,988 images and 271,835 object instances. The dataset encompasses a wide range of scenes from both daily life and natural environments, ensuring high content diversity and complexity.
Authors:Xingwei Zhong, Kui Cai, Guanghui Song
Title: Union Bound Analysis for Spin-Torque Transfer Magnetic Random Access Memory (STT-MRAM) With Channel Quantization
Abstract:
As an emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technology, spin-torque transfer magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) has received great attention in recent years since it combines the features of low switching energy, fast write/read speed, and high scalability. However, process variation and thermal fluctuation severely affect the data integrity of STT-MRAM, resulting in both write errors and read errors. Therefore, effective error correction codes (ECCs) are necessary for correcting memory cell errors. Meanwhile, the design of channel quantizer plays a critical role in supporting error correction coding for STT-MRAM. In this work, we propose a union bound analysis which can accurately predict the word error rates (WERs) of ECCs with maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding over the quantized STT-MRAM channel. The derived bound provides a theoretical tool for comparing the performance of ECCs with different quantization schemes at very low error rate levels without resorting to lengthy computer simulations. Moreover, we also propose a new criterion to design the channel quantizer by minimizing the WERs of ECC decoding that are obtained from the union bound analysis. Numerical results show that the proposed union-bound-optimized (UBO) quantizer can achieve better error rate performance than the state-of-art quantizers for STT-MRAM.
Authors:Yichen Guo, Paul Fischer, Misun Min
Title: Spectral Element Simulation of Liquid Metal Magnetohydrodynamics
Abstract:
A spectral-element-based formulation of incompressible MHD is presented in the context of the open-source fluid-thermal code, Nek5000/RS. The formulation supports magnetic fields in a solid domain that surrounds the fluid domain. Several steady-state and time-transient model problems are presented as part of the code verification process. Nek5000/RS is designed for large-scale turbulence simulations, which will be the next step with this new MHD capability.
Authors:Max Langtry, Chaoqun Zhuang, Rebecca Ward, Nikolas Makasis, Monika J. Kreitmair, Zack Xuereb Conti, Domenic Di Francesco, Ruchi Choudhary
Title: Rationalising data collection for supporting decision making in building energy systems using Value of Information analysis
Abstract:
The use of data collection to support decision making through the reduction of uncertainty is ubiquitous in the management, operation, and design of building energy systems. However, no existing studies in the building energy systems literature have quantified the economic benefits of data collection strategies to determine whether they are worth their cost. This work demonstrates that Value of Information analysis (VoI), a Bayesian Decision Analysis framework, provides a suitable methodology for quantifying the benefits of data collection. Three example decision problems in building energy systems are studied: air-source heat pump maintenance scheduling, ventilation scheduling for indoor air quality, and ground-source heat pump system design. Smart meters, occupancy monitoring systems, and ground thermal tests are shown to be economically beneficial for supporting these decisions respectively. It is proposed that further study of VoI in building energy systems would allow expenditure on data collection to be economised and prioritised, avoiding wastage.
Authors:Ziang Yin, Nicholas Gangi, Meng Zhang, Jeff Zhang, Rena Huang, Jiaqi Gu
Title: SCATTER: Algorithm-Circuit Co-Sparse Photonic Accelerator with Thermal-Tolerant, Power-Efficient In-situ Light Redistribution
Abstract:
Photonic computing has emerged as a promising solution for accelerating computation-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. However, limited reconfigurability, high electrical-optical conversion cost, and thermal sensitivity limit the deployment of current optical analog computing engines to support power-restricted, performance-sensitive AI workloads at scale. Sparsity provides a great opportunity for hardware-efficient AI accelerators. However, current dense photonic accelerators fail to fully exploit the power-saving potential of algorithmic sparsity. It requires sparsity-aware hardware specialization with a fundamental re-design of photonic tensor core topology and cross-layer device-circuit-architecture-algorithm co-optimization aware of hardware non-ideality and power bottleneck. To trim down the redundant power consumption while maximizing robustness to thermal variations, we propose SCATTER, a novel algorithm-circuit co-sparse photonic accelerator featuring dynamically reconfigurable signal path via thermal-tolerant, power-efficient in-situ light redistribution and power gating. A power-optimized, crosstalk-aware dynamic sparse training framework is introduced to explore row-column structured sparsity and ensure marginal accuracy loss and maximum power efficiency. The extensive evaluation shows that our cross-stacked optimized accelerator SCATTER achieves a 511X area reduction and 12.4X power saving with superior crosstalk tolerance that enables unprecedented circuit layout compactness and on-chip power efficiency.
Authors:Luca Barco, Angelica Urbanelli, Claudio Rossi
Title: Rapid Wildfire Hotspot Detection Using Self-Supervised Learning on Temporal Remote Sensing Data
Abstract:
Rapid detection and well-timed intervention are essential to mitigate the impacts of wildfires. Leveraging remote sensed data from satellite networks and advanced AI models to automatically detect hotspots (i.e., thermal anomalies caused by active fires) is an effective way to build wildfire monitoring systems. In this work, we propose a novel dataset containing time series of remotely sensed data related to European fire events and a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL)-based model able to analyse multi-temporal data and identify hotspots in potentially near real time. We train and evaluate the performance of our model using our dataset and Thraws, a dataset of thermal anomalies including several fire events, obtaining an F1 score of 63.58.
Authors:Daniel Menges, Adil Rasheed
Title: Computationally and Memory-Efficient Robust Predictive Analytics Using Big Data
Abstract:
In the current data-intensive era, big data has become a significant asset for Artificial Intelligence (AI), serving as a foundation for developing data-driven models and providing insight into various unknown fields. This study navigates through the challenges of data uncertainties, storage limitations, and predictive data-driven modeling using big data. We utilize Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) for effective noise reduction and outlier elimination, and Optimal Sensor Placement (OSP) for efficient data compression and storage. The proposed OSP technique enables data compression without substantial information loss while simultaneously reducing storage needs. While RPCA offers an enhanced alternative to traditional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for high-dimensional data management, the scope of this work extends its utilization, focusing on robust, data-driven modeling applicable to huge data sets in real-time. For that purpose, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network, are applied to model and predict data based on a low-dimensional subset obtained from OSP, leading to a crucial acceleration of the training phase. LSTMs are feasible for capturing long-term dependencies in time series data, making them particularly suited for predicting the future states of physical systems on historical data. All the presented algorithms are not only theorized but also simulated and validated using real thermal imaging data mapping a ship's engine.
Authors:David Cuesta, José L. Risco-Martín, José L. Ayala, J. Ignacio Hidalgo
Title: Thermal-Aware Floorplanner for 3D IC, including TSVs, Liquid Microchannels and Thermal Domains Optimization
Abstract:
3D stacked technology has emerged as an effective mechanism to overcome physical limits and communication delays found in 2D integration. However, 3D technology also presents several drawbacks that prevent its smooth application. Two of the major concerns are heat reduction and power density distribution. In our work, we propose a novel 3D thermal-aware floorplanner that includes: (1) an effective thermal-aware process with 3 different evolutionary algorithms that aim to solve the soft computing problem of optimizing the placement of functional units and through silicon vias, as well as the smooth inclusion of active cooling systems and new design strategies,(2) an approximated thermal model inside the optimization loop, (3) an optimizer for active cooling (liquid channels), and (4) a novel technique based on air channel placement designed to isolate thermal domains have been also proposed. The experimental work is conducted for a realistic many-core single-chip architecture based on the Niagara design. Results show promising improvements of the thermal and reliability metrics, and also show optimal scaling capabilities to target future-trend many-core systems.
Authors:Weihong Tang, Yun Li, Shalika Walker, Tamas Keviczky
Title: Model Predictive Control Design for Unlocking the Energy Flexibility of Heat Pump and Thermal Energy Storage Systems
Abstract:
Heat pump and thermal energy storage (HPTES) systems, which are widely utilized in modern buildings for providing domestic hot water, contribute to a large share of household electricity consumption. With the increasing integration of renewable energy sources (RES) into modern power grids, demand-side management (DSM) becomes crucial for balancing power generation and consumption by adjusting end users' power consumption. This paper explores an energy flexible Model Predictive Control (MPC) design for a class of HPTES systems to facilitate demand-side management. The proposed DSM strategy comprises two key components: i) flexibility assessment, and ii) flexibility exploitation. Firstly, for flexibility assessment, a tailored MPC formulation, supplemented by a set of auxiliary linear constraints, is developed to quantitatively assess the flexibility potential inherent in HPTES systems. Subsequently, in flexibility exploitation, the energy flexibility is effectively harnessed in response to feasible demand response (DR) requests, which can be formulated as a standard mixed-integer MPC problem. Numerical experiments, based on a real-world HPTES installation, are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design.
Authors:Pilar Marqués-Sánchez, Cristina Liébana-Presa, José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Raquel Gundín-Gallego, Lorena Álvarez-Barrio, Pablo Rodríguez-Gonzálvez
Title: Thermal Infrared Imaging to Evaluate Emotional Competences in Nursing Students: A First Approach through a Case Study
Abstract:
During nursing studies, it is crucial to develop emotional skills for both academic success and quality patient care. Utilizing technologies like thermography can be instrumental in nursing education to assess and enhance these skills. The study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of thermography in monitoring and improving the emotional skills of nursing students through a case study approach. The case study involved exposing a student to various emotional stimuli, including videos and music, and measuring facial temperature changes. These changes were recorded using a FLIR E6 camera across three phases: acclimatization, stimulus, and response. Environmental factors such as temperature and humidity were also recorded. Distinct thermal responses were observed for different emotions. For instance, during the acclimatization phase with video stimuli, forehead temperatures varied between positive emotions (joy: 34.5\textdegree C to 34.5\textdegree C) and negative emotions (anger: 36.1\textdegree C to 35.1\textdegree C). However, there was a uniform change in temperature during both stimulus (joy: 34.7\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C, anger: 35.0\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C) and response phases (joy: 35.0\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C, anger: 34.8\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C). Music stimuli also induced varying thermal patterns (joy: 34.2\textdegree C to 33.9\textdegree C to 33.4\textdegree C, anger: 33.8\textdegree C to 33.4\textdegree C to 33.8\textdegree C).Thermography revealed consistent thermal patterns in response to emotional stimuli, with the exception of the nose area, suggesting its suitability as a non-invasive, quantifiable, and accessible method for emotional skill training in nursing education.
Authors:F. Xavier Gaya-Morey, Cristina Manresa-Yee, Jose M. Buades-Rubio
Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision based Activity Recognition and Fall Detection of the Elderly: a Systematic Review
Abstract:
As the percentage of elderly people in developed countries increases worldwide, the healthcare of this collective is a worrying matter, especially if it includes the preservation of their autonomy. In this direction, many studies are being published on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems, which help to reduce the preoccupations raised by the independent living of the elderly. In this study, a systematic review of the literature is presented on fall detection and Human Activity Recognition (HAR) for the elderly, as the two main tasks to solve to guarantee the safety of elderly people living alone. To address the current tendency to perform these two tasks, the review focuses on the use of Deep Learning (DL) based approaches on computer vision data. In addition, different collections of data like DL models, datasets or hardware (e.g. depth or thermal cameras) are gathered from the reviewed studies and provided for reference in future studies. Strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches are also discussed and, based on them, our recommendations for future works are provided.
Authors:Patricia Arroba, José L. Risco-Martín, José M. Moya, José L. Ayala
Title: Heuristics and Metaheuristics for Dynamic Management of Computing and Cooling Energy in Cloud Data Centers
Abstract:
Data centers handle impressive high figures in terms of energy consumption, and the growing popularity of Cloud applications is intensifying their computational demand. Moreover, the cooling needed to keep the servers within reliable thermal operating conditions also has an impact on the thermal distribution of the data room, thus affecting to servers' power leakage. Optimizing the energy consumption of these infrastructures is a major challenge to place data centers on a more scalable scenario. Thus, understanding the relationship between power, temperature, consolidation and performance is crucial to enable an energy-efficient management at the data center level. In this research, we propose novel power and thermal-aware strategies and models to provide joint cooling and computing optimizations from a local perspective based on the global energy consumption of metaheuristic-based optimizations. Our results show that the combined awareness from both metaheuristic and best fit decreasing algorithms allow us to describe the global energy into faster and lighter optimization strategies that may be used during runtime. This approach allows us to improve the energy efficiency of the data center, considering both computing and cooling infrastructures, in up to a 21.74\% while maintaining quality of service.
Authors:Yun Li, Neil Yorke-Smith, Tamas Keviczky
Title: Unlocking Energy Flexibility From Thermal Inertia of Buildings: A Robust Optimization Approach
Abstract:
Towards integrating renewable electricity generation sources into the grid, an important facilitator is the energy flexibility provided by buildings' thermal inertia. Most of the existing research follows a single-step price- or incentive-based scheme for unlocking the flexibility potential of buildings. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel two-step design approach for better harnessing buildings' energy flexibility. In a first step, a robust optimization model is formulated for assessing the energy flexibility of buildings in the presence of uncertain predictions of external conditions, such as ambient temperature, solar irradiation, etc. In a second step, energy flexibility is activated in response to a feasible demand response (DR) request from grid operators without violating indoor temperature constraints, even in the presence of uncertain external conditions. The proposed approach is tested on a high-fidelity Modelica simulator to evaluate its effectiveness. Simulation results show that, compared with price-based demand-side management, the proposed approach achieves greater energy reduction during peak hours.
Authors:Yifan Tang, M. Rahmani Dehaghani, Pouyan Sajadi, Shahriar Bakrani Balani, Akshay Dhalpe, Suraj Panicker, Di Wu, Eric Coatanea, G. Gary Wang
Title: Online Two-stage Thermal History Prediction Method for Metal Additive Manufacturing of Thin Walls
Abstract:
This paper aims to propose an online two-stage thermal history prediction method, which could be integrated into a metal AM process for performance control. Based on the similarity of temperature curves (curve segments of a temperature profile of one point) between any two successive layers, the first stage of the proposed method designs a layer-to-layer prediction model to estimate the temperature curves of the yet-to-print layer from measured temperatures of certain points on the previously printed layer. With measured/predicted temperature profiles of several points on the same layer, the second stage proposes a reduced order model (ROM) (intra-layer prediction model) to decompose and construct the temperature profiles of all points on the same layer, which could be used to build the temperature field of the entire layer. The training of ROM is performed with an extreme learning machine (ELM) for computational efficiency. Fifteen wire arc AM experiments and nine simulations are designed for thin walls with a fixed length and unidirectional printing of each layer. The test results indicate that the proposed prediction method could construct the thermal history of a yet-to-print layer within 0.1 seconds on a low-cost desktop computer. Meanwhile, the method has acceptable generalization capability in most cases from lower layers to higher layers in the same simulation, as well as from one simulation to a new simulation on different AM process parameters. More importantly, after fine-tuning the proposed method with limited experimental data, the relative errors of all predicted temperature profiles on a new experiment are smaller than 0.09, which demonstrates the applicability and generalization of the proposed two-stage thermal history prediction method in online applications for metal AM.
Authors:Fu-Ya Luo, Shu-Lin Liu, Yi-Jun Cao, Kai-Fu Yang, Chang-Yong Xie, Yong Liu, Yong-Jie Li
Title: Nighttime Thermal Infrared Image Colorization with Feedback-based Object Appearance Learning
Abstract:
Stable imaging in adverse environments (e.g., total darkness) makes thermal infrared (TIR) cameras a prevalent option for night scene perception. However, the low contrast and lack of chromaticity of TIR images are detrimental to human interpretation and subsequent deployment of RGB-based vision algorithms. Therefore, it makes sense to colorize the nighttime TIR images by translating them into the corresponding daytime color images (NTIR2DC). Despite the impressive progress made in the NTIR2DC task, how to improve the translation performance of small object classes is under-explored. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial network incorporating feedback-based object appearance learning (FoalGAN). Specifically, an occlusion-aware mixup module and corresponding appearance consistency loss are proposed to reduce the context dependence of object translation. As a representative example of small objects in nighttime street scenes, we illustrate how to enhance the realism of traffic light by designing a traffic light appearance loss. To further improve the appearance learning of small objects, we devise a dual feedback learning strategy to selectively adjust the learning frequency of different samples. In addition, we provide pixel-level annotation for a subset of the Brno dataset, which can facilitate the research of NTIR image understanding under multiple weather conditions. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed FoalGAN is not only effective for appearance learning of small objects, but also outperforms other image translation methods in terms of semantic preservation and edge consistency for the NTIR2DC task.
Authors:Catherine Ordun, Alexandra Cha, Edward Raff, Sanjay Purushotham, Karen Kwok, Mason Rule, James Gulley
Title: A Generative Approach for Image Registration of Visible-Thermal (VT) Cancer Faces
Abstract:
Since thermal imagery offers a unique modality to investigate pain, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has collected a large and diverse set of cancer patient facial thermograms for AI-based pain research. However, differing angles from camera capture between thermal and visible sensors has led to misalignment between Visible-Thermal (VT) images. We modernize the classic computer vision task of image registration by applying and modifying a generative alignment algorithm to register VT cancer faces, without the need for a reference or alignment parameters. By registering VT faces, we demonstrate that the quality of thermal images produced in the generative AI downstream task of Visible-to-Thermal (V2T) image translation significantly improves up to 52.5\%, than without registration. Images in this paper have been approved by the NIH NCI for public dissemination.
Authors:Angelica Urbanelli, Luca Barco, Edoardo Arnaudo, Claudio Rossi
Title: A Multimodal Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Satellite-based Wildfire Identification in Europe
Abstract:
The increasing frequency of catastrophic natural events, such as wildfires, calls for the development of rapid and automated wildfire detection systems. In this paper, we propose a wildfire identification solution to improve the accuracy of automated satellite-based hotspot detection systems by leveraging multiple information sources. We cross-reference the thermal anomalies detected by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) hotspot services with the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) database to construct a large-scale hotspot dataset for wildfire-related studies in Europe. Then, we propose a novel multimodal supervised machine learning approach to disambiguate hotspot detections, distinguishing between wildfires and other events. Our methodology includes the use of multimodal data sources, such as the ERSI annual Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and the Copernicus Sentinel-3 data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the task of wildfire identification.
Authors:Zhengzheng Tu, Qishun Wang, Hongshun Wang, Kunpeng Wang, Chenglong Li
Title: Erasure-based Interaction Network for RGBT Video Object Detection and A Unified Benchmark
Abstract:
Recently, many breakthroughs are made in the field of Video Object Detection (VOD), but the performance is still limited due to the imaging limitations of RGB sensors in adverse illumination conditions. To alleviate this issue, this work introduces a new computer vision task called RGB-thermal (RGBT) VOD by introducing the thermal modality that is insensitive to adverse illumination conditions. To promote the research and development of RGBT VOD, we design a novel Erasure-based Interaction Network (EINet) and establish a comprehensive benchmark dataset (VT-VOD50) for this task. Traditional VOD methods often leverage temporal information by using many auxiliary frames, and thus have large computational burden. Considering that thermal images exhibit less noise than RGB ones, we develop a negative activation function that is used to erase the noise of RGB features with the help of thermal image features. Furthermore, with the benefits from thermal images, we rely only on a small temporal window to model the spatio-temporal information to greatly improve efficiency while maintaining detection accuracy. VT-VOD50 dataset consists of 50 pairs of challenging RGBT video sequences with complex backgrounds, various objects and different illuminations, which are collected in real traffic scenarios. Extensive experiments on VT-VOD50 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method against existing mainstream VOD methods. The code of EINet and the dataset will be released to the public for free academic usage.
Authors:Lena Baumann, Lukas Einkemmer, Christian Klingenberg, Jonas Kusch
Title: Energy stable and conservative dynamical low-rank approximation for the Su-Olson problem
Abstract:
Computational methods for thermal radiative transfer problems exhibit high computational costs and a prohibitive memory footprint when the spatial and directional domains are finely resolved. A strategy to reduce such computational costs is dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA), which represents and evolves the solution on a low-rank manifold, thereby significantly decreasing computational and memory requirements. Efficient discretizations for the DLRA evolution equations need to be carefully constructed to guarantee stability while enabling mass conservation. In this work, we focus on the Su-Olson closure leading to a linearized internal energy model and derive a stable discretization through an implicit coupling of internal energy and particle density. Moreover, we propose a rank-adaptive strategy to preserve local mass conservation. Numerical results are presented which showcase the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed low-rank method compared to the solution of the full system.
Authors:Catherine Ordun, Edward Raff, Sanjay Purushotham
Title: Vista-Morph: Unsupervised Image Registration of Visible-Thermal Facial Pairs
Abstract:
For a variety of biometric cross-spectral tasks, Visible-Thermal (VT) facial pairs are used. However, due to a lack of calibration in the lab, photographic capture between two different sensors leads to severely misaligned pairs that can lead to poor results for person re-identification and generative AI. To solve this problem, we introduce our approach for VT image registration called Vista Morph. Unlike existing VT facial registration that requires manual, hand-crafted features for pixel matching and/or a supervised thermal reference, Vista Morph is completely unsupervised without the need for a reference. By learning the affine matrix through a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based Spatial Transformer Network (STN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Vista Morph successfully aligns facial and non-facial VT images. Our approach learns warps in Hard, No, and Low-light visual settings and is robust to geometric perturbations and erasure at test time. We conduct a downstream generative AI task to show that registering training data with Vista Morph improves subject identity of generated thermal faces when performing V2T image translation.
Authors:Varsha Behrunani, Francesco Micheli, Jonas Mehr, Philipp Heer, John Lygeros
Title: Stochastic MPC for energy hubs using data driven demand forecasting
Abstract:
Energy hubs convert and distribute energy resources by combining different energy inputs through multiple conversion and storage components. The optimal operation of the energy hub exploits its flexibility to increase the energy efficiency and reduce the operational costs. However, uncertainties in the demand present challenges to energy hub optimization. In this paper, we propose a stochastic MPC controller to minimize energy costs using chance constraints for the uncertain electricity and thermal demands. Historical data is used to build a demand prediction model based on Gaussian processes to generate a forecast of the future electricity and heat demands. The stochastic optimization problem is solved via the Scenario Approach by sampling multi-step demand trajectories from the derived prediction model. The performance of the proposed predictor and of the stochastic controller is verified on a simulated energy hub model and demand data from a real building.
Authors:Sichao Li, Sean Banerjee, Natasha Kholgade Banerjee, Soumyabrata Dey
Title: Simultaneous prediction of hand gestures, handedness, and hand keypoints using thermal images
Abstract:
Hand gesture detection is a well-explored area in computer vision with applications in various forms of Human-Computer Interactions. In this work, we propose a technique for simultaneous hand gesture classification, handedness detection, and hand keypoints localization using thermal data captured by an infrared camera. Our method uses a novel deep multi-task learning architecture that includes shared encoderdecoder layers followed by three branches dedicated for each mentioned task. We performed extensive experimental validation of our model on an in-house dataset consisting of 24 users data. The results confirm higher than 98 percent accuracy for gesture classification, handedness detection, and fingertips localization, and more than 91 percent accuracy for wrist points localization.
Authors:Akash Dutta, Jee Choi, Ali Jannesari
Title: Power Constrained Autotuning using Graph Neural Networks
Abstract:
Recent advances in multi and many-core processors have led to significant improvements in the performance of scientific computing applications. However, the addition of a large number of complex cores have also increased the overall power consumption, and power has become a first-order design constraint in modern processors. While we can limit power consumption by simply applying software-based power constraints, applying them blindly will lead to non-trivial performance degradation. To address the challenge of improving the performance, power, and energy efficiency of scientific applications on modern multi-core processors, we propose a novel Graph Neural Network based auto-tuning approach that (i) optimizes runtime performance at pre-defined power constraints, and (ii) simultaneously optimizes for runtime performance and energy efficiency by minimizing the energy-delay product. The key idea behind this approach lies in modeling parallel code regions as flow-aware code graphs to capture both semantic and structural code features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by conducting an extensive evaluation on $30$ benchmarks and proxy-/mini-applications with $68$ OpenMP code regions. Our approach identifies OpenMP configurations at different power constraints that yield a geometric mean performance improvement of more than $25\%$ and $13\%$ over the default OpenMP configuration on a 32-core Skylake and a $16$-core Haswell processor respectively. In addition, when we optimize for the energy-delay product, the OpenMP configurations selected by our auto-tuner demonstrate both performance improvement of $21\%$ and $11\%$ and energy reduction of $29\%$ and $18\%$ over the default OpenMP configuration at Thermal Design Power for the same Skylake and Haswell processors, respectively.
Authors:Catherine Ordun, Edward Raff, Sanjay Purushotham
Title: When Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN Beats Conditional Diffusion
Abstract:
Thermal facial imagery offers valuable insight into physiological states such as inflammation and stress by detecting emitted radiation in the infrared spectrum, which is unseen in the visible spectra. Telemedicine applications could benefit from thermal imagery, but conventional computers are reliant on RGB cameras and lack thermal sensors. As a result, we propose the Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN (VTF-GAN) that is specifically designed to generate high-resolution thermal faces by learning both the spatial and frequency domains of facial regions, across spectra. We compare VTF-GAN against several popular GAN baselines and the first conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) for VT face translation (VTF-Diff). Results show that VTF-GAN achieves high quality, crisp, and perceptually realistic thermal faces using a combined set of patch, temperature, perceptual, and Fourier Transform losses, compared to all baselines including diffusion.
Authors:Yiwei Qiu, Buxiang Zhou, Tianlei Zang, Yi Zhou, Shi Chen, Ruomei Qi, Jiarong Li, Jin Lin
Title: Extended Load Flexibility of Utility-Scale P2H Plants: Optimal Production Scheduling Considering Dynamic Thermal and HTO Impurity Effects
Abstract:
In the conversion toward a clear and sustainable energy system, the flexibility of power-to-hydrogen (P2H) production enables the admittance of volatile renewable energies on a utility scale and provides the connected electrical power system with ancillary services. To extend the load flexibility and thus improve the profitability of green hydrogen production, this paper presents an optimal production scheduling approach for utility-scale P2H plants composed of multiple alkaline electrolyzers. Unlike existing works, this work discards the conservative constant steady-state constraints and first leverages the dynamic thermal and hydrogen-to-oxygen (HTO) impurity crossover processes of electrolyzers. Doing this optimizes their effects on the loading range and energy conversion efficiency, therefore improving the load flexibility of P2H production. The proposed multiphysics-aware scheduling model is formulated as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). It coordinates the electrolyzers' operation state transitions and load allocation subject to comprehensive thermodynamic and mass transfer constraints. A decomposition-based solution method, SDM-GS-ALM, is followingly adopted to address the scalability issue for scheduling large-scale P2H plants composed of tens of electrolyzers. With an experiment-verified dynamic electrolyzer model, case studies up to 22 electrolyzers show that the proposed method remarkably improves the hydrogen output and profit of P2H production powered by either solar or wind energy compared to the existing scheduling approach.
Authors:Kenneth Lai, Vlad Shmerko, Svetlana Yanushkevich
Title: Fairness on Synthetic Visual and Thermal Mask Images
Abstract:
In this paper, we study performance and fairness on visual and thermal images and expand the assessment to masked synthetic images. Using the SpeakingFace and Thermal-Mask dataset, we propose a process to assess fairness on real images and show how the same process can be applied to synthetic images. The resulting process shows a demographic parity difference of 1.59 for random guessing and increases to 5.0 when the recognition performance increases to a precision and recall rate of 99.99\%. We indicate that inherently biased datasets can deeply impact the fairness of any biometric system. A primary cause of a biased dataset is the class imbalance due to the data collection process. To address imbalanced datasets, the classes with fewer samples can be augmented with synthetic images to generate a more balanced dataset resulting in less bias when training a machine learning system. For biometric-enabled systems, fairness is of critical importance, while the related concept of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is well suited for the generalization of fairness in biometrics, in this paper, we focus on the 3 most common demographic groups age, gender, and ethnicity.
Authors:Harsh G. Kamath, Manmeet Singh, Neetiraj Malviya, Alberto Martilli, Liu He, Daniel Aliaga, Cenlin He, Fei Chen, Lori A. Magruder, Zong-Liang Yang, Dev Niyogi
Title: GLObal Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS) for city- and street- scale urban simulations: Development and first applications
Abstract:
We introduce University of Texas - Global Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS), a dataset providing building heights and urban canopy parameters (UCPs) for more than 1200 cities or locales worldwide. UT-GLOBUS combines open-source spaceborne altimetry (ICESat-2 and GEDI) and coarse-resolution urban canopy elevation data with a machine-learning model to estimate building-level information. Validation using LiDAR data from six US cities showed UT-GLOBUS-derived building heights had a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 9.1 meters. Validation of mean building heights within 1-km^2 grid cells, including data from Hamburg and Sydney, resulted in an RMSE of 7.8 meters. Testing the UCPs in the urban Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-Urban) model resulted in a significant improvement (55% in RMSE) in intra-urban air temperature representation compared to the existing table-based local climate zone approach in Houston, TX. Additionally, we demonstrated the dataset's utility for simulating heat mitigation strategies and building energy consumption using WRF-Urban, with test cases in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. Street-scale mean radiant temperature simulations using the Solar and LongWave Environmental Irradiance Geometry (SOLWEIG) model, incorporating UT-GLOBUS and LiDAR-derived building heights, confirmed the dataset's effectiveness in modeling human thermal comfort in Baltimore, MD (daytime RMSE = 2.85 C). Thus, UT-GLOBUS can be used for modeling urban hazards with significant socioeconomic and biometeorological risks, enabling finer scale urban climate simulations and overcoming previous limitations due to the lack of building information.
Authors:Thomas Daniel, Fabien Casenave, Nissrine Akkari, David Ryckelynck, Christian Rey
Title: Uncertainty quantification for industrial design using dictionaries of reduced order models
Abstract:
We consider the dictionary-based ROM-net (Reduced Order Model) framework [T. Daniel, F. Casenave, N. Akkari, D. Ryckelynck, Model order reduction assisted by deep neural networks (ROM-net), Advanced modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7 (16), 2020] and summarize the underlying methodologies and their recent improvements. The main contribution of this work is the application of the complete workflow to a real-life industrial model of an elastoviscoplastic high-pressure turbine blade subjected to thermal, centrifugal and pressure loadings, for the quantification of the uncertainty on dual quantities (such as the accumulated plastic strain and the stress tensor), generated by the uncertainty on the temperature loading field. The dictionary-based ROM-net computes predictions of dual quantities of interest for 1008 Monte Carlo draws of the temperature loading field in 2 hours and 48 minutes, which corresponds to a speedup greater than 600 with respect to a reference parallel solver using domain decomposition, with a relative error in the order of 2%. Another contribution of this work consists in the derivation of a meta-model to reconstruct the dual quantities of interest over the complete mesh from their values on the reduced integration points.
Authors:Catherine Ordun, Edward Raff, Sanjay Purushotham
Title: Generating Thermal Human Faces for Physiological Assessment Using Thermal Sensor Auxiliary Labels
Abstract:
Thermal images reveal medically important physiological information about human stress, signs of inflammation, and emotional mood that cannot be seen on visible images. Providing a method to generate thermal faces from visible images would be highly valuable for the telemedicine community in order to show this medical information. To the best of our knowledge, there are limited works on visible-to-thermal (VT) face translation, and many current works go the opposite direction to generate visible faces from thermal surveillance images (TV) for law enforcement applications. As a result, we introduce favtGAN, a VT GAN which uses the pix2pix image translation model with an auxiliary sensor label prediction network for generating thermal faces from visible images. Since most TV methods are trained on only one data source drawn from one thermal sensor, we combine datasets from faces and cityscapes. These combined data are captured from similar sensors in order to bootstrap the training and transfer learning task, especially valuable because visible-thermal face datasets are limited. Experiments on these combined datasets show that favtGAN demonstrates an increase in SSIM and PSNR scores of generated thermal faces, compared to training on a single face dataset alone.
Authors:Catherine Ordun, Edward Raff, Sanjay Purushotham
Title: The Use of AI for Thermal Emotion Recognition: A Review of Problems and Limitations in Standard Design and Data
Abstract:
With the increased attention on thermal imagery for Covid-19 screening, the public sector may believe there are new opportunities to exploit thermal as a modality for computer vision and AI. Thermal physiology research has been ongoing since the late nineties. This research lies at the intersections of medicine, psychology, machine learning, optics, and affective computing. We will review the known factors of thermal vs. RGB imaging for facial emotion recognition. But we also propose that thermal imagery may provide a semi-anonymous modality for computer vision, over RGB, which has been plagued by misuse in facial recognition. However, the transition to adopting thermal imagery as a source for any human-centered AI task is not easy and relies on the availability of high fidelity data sources across multiple demographics and thorough validation. This paper takes the reader on a short review of machine learning in thermal FER and the limitations of collecting and developing thermal FER data for AI training. Our motivation is to provide an introductory overview into recent advances for thermal FER and stimulate conversation about the limitations in current datasets.
Authors:Ramona Rubini, Siavash Khodakarami, Aniruddha Bora, George Em Karniadakis, Michele Dassisti
Title: Process-Informed Forecasting of Complex Thermal Dynamics in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Abstract:
Accurate time-series forecasting for complex physical systems is the backbone of modern industrial monitoring and control. While deep learning models excel at capturing complex dynamics, currently, their deployment is limited due to physical inconsistency and robustness, hence constraining their reliability in regulated environments. We introduce process-informed forecasting (PIF) models for temperature in pharmaceutical lyophilization. We investigate a wide range of models, from classical ones such as Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average Model (ARIMA) and Exponential Smoothing Model (ETS), to modern deep learning architectures, including Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). We compare three different loss function formulations that integrate a process-informed trajectory prior: a fixed-weight loss, a dynamic uncertainty-based loss, and a Residual-Based Attention (RBA) mechanism. We evaluate all models not only for accuracy and physical consistency but also for robustness to sensor noise. Furthermore, we test the practical generalizability of the best model in a transfer learning scenario on a new process. Our results show that PIF models outperform their data-driven counterparts in terms of accuracy, physical plausibility and noise resilience. This work provides a roadmap for developing reliable and generalizable forecasting solutions for critical applications in the pharmaceutical manufacturing landscape.
Authors:Jordi Grau-Haro, Ruben Ribes-Serrano, Javier Naranjo-Alcazar, Marta Garcia-Ballesteros, Pedro Zuccarello
Title: Comprehensive Evaluation of CNN-Based Audio Tagging Models on Resource-Constrained Devices
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in audio tagging tasks. However, deploying these models on resource-constrained devices like the Raspberry Pi poses challenges related to computational efficiency and thermal management. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation of multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for audio tagging on the Raspberry Pi is conducted, encompassing all 1D and 2D models from the Pretrained Audio Neural Networks (PANNs) framework, a ConvNeXt-based model adapted for audio classification, as well as MobileNetV3 architectures. In addition, two PANNs-derived networks, CNN9 and CNN13, recently proposed, are also evaluated. To enhance deployment efficiency and portability across diverse hardware platforms, all models are converted to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format. Unlike previous works that focus on a single model, our analysis encompasses a broader range of architectures and involves continuous 24-hour inference sessions to assess performance stability. Our experiments reveal that, with appropriate model selection and optimization, it is possible to maintain consistent inference latency and manage thermal behavior effectively over extended periods. These findings provide valuable insights for deploying audio tagging models in real-world edge computing scenarios.
Authors:Yukai Chen, Massimiliano Di Todaro, Bjorn Vermeersch, Herman Oprins, Daniele Jahier Pagliari, Julien Ryckaert, Dwaipayan Biswas, James Myers
Title: Thermal Implications of Non-Uniform Power in BSPDN-Enabled 2.5D/3D Chiplet-based Systems-in-Package using Nanosheet Technology
Abstract:
Advances in nanosheet technologies have significantly increased power densities, exacerbating thermal management challenges in 2.5D/3D chiplet-based Systems-in-Package (SiP). While traditional thermal analyses often employ uniform power maps to simplify computational complexity, this practice neglects localized heating effects, leading to inaccuracies in thermal estimations, especially when comparing power delivery networks (PDN) in 3D integration. This work examines the thermal impact of non-uniform power distributions on SiPs utilizing frontside (FSPDN) and backside (BSPDN) power delivery approaches. Using high-resolution thermal simulations with non-uniform power maps at resolutions down to 5 micrometers, we demonstrate that uniform power assumptions substantially underestimate peak temperatures and fail to reveal critical thermal differences between BSPDN and FSPDN configurations in 3D scenarios. Our results highlight that BSPDN configurations in 3D, although beneficial in simplified uniform scenarios, exhibit pronounced thermal penalties under realistic, localized workloads due to limited lateral heat spreading. These findings emphasize the necessity of adopting fine-grained, workload-aware power maps in early-stage thermal modeling to enable accurate PDN assessment and informed thermal-aware design decisions in advanced nanosheet-based 3D SiP.
Authors:Sofiane Bouaziz, Adel Hafiane, Raphael Canals, Rachid Nedjai
Title: FuseTen: A Generative Model for Daily 10 m Land Surface Temperature Estimation from Spatio-Temporal Satellite Observations
Abstract:
Urban heatwaves, droughts, and land degradation are pressing and growing challenges in the context of climate change. A valuable approach to studying them requires accurate spatio-temporal information on land surface conditions. One of the most important variables for assessing and understanding these phenomena is Land Surface Temperature (LST), which is derived from satellites and provides essential information about the thermal state of the Earth's surface. However, satellite platforms inherently face a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions. To bridge this gap, we propose FuseTen, a novel generative framework that produces daily LST observations at a fine 10 m spatial resolution by fusing spatio-temporal observations derived from Sentinel-2, Landsat 8, and Terra MODIS. FuseTen employs a generative architecture trained using an averaging-based supervision strategy grounded in physical principles. It incorporates attention and normalization modules within the fusion process and uses a PatchGAN discriminator to enforce realism. Experiments across multiple dates show that FuseTen outperforms linear baselines, with an average 32.06% improvement in quantitative metrics and 31.42% in visual fidelity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first non-linear method to generate daily LST estimates at such fine spatial resolution.
Authors:Aidan Furlong, Xingang Zhao, Robert Salko, Xu Wu
Title: Development and Deployment of Hybrid ML Models for Critical Heat Flux Prediction in Annulus Geometries
Abstract:
Accurate prediction of critical heat flux (CHF) is an essential component of safety analysis in pressurized and boiling water reactors. To support reliable prediction of this quantity, several empirical correlations and lookup tables have been constructed from physical experiments over the past several decades. With the onset of accessible machine learning (ML) frameworks, multiple initiatives have been established with the goal of predicting CHF more accurately than these traditional methods. While purely data-driven surrogate modeling has been extensively investigated, these approaches lack interpretability, lack resilience to data scarcity, and have been developed mostly using data from tube experiments. As a result, bias-correction hybrid approaches have become increasingly popular, which correct initial "low-fidelity" estimates provided by deterministic base models by using ML-predicted residuals. This body of work has mostly considered round tube geometries; annular geometry-specific ML models have not yet been deployed in thermal hydraulic codes. This study developed, deployed, and validated four ML models to predict CHF in annular geometries using the CTF subchannel code. Three empirical correlation models, Biasi, Bowring, and Katto, were used as base models for comparison. The ML models were trained and tested using 577 experimental annulus data points from four datasets: Becker, Beus, Janssen, and Mortimore. Baseline CHF predictions were obtained from the empirical correlations, with mean relative errors above 26%. The ML-driven models achieved mean relative errors below 3.5%, with no more than one point exceeding the 10% error envelope. In all cases, the hybrid ML models significantly outperformed their empirical counterparts.
Authors:Mehdi Elahi, Mohamed R. Elshamy, Abdel-Hameed Badawy, Ahmad Patooghy
Title: iThermTroj: Exploiting Intermittent Thermal Trojans in Multi-Processor System-on-Chips
Abstract:
Thermal Trojan attacks present a pressing concern for the security and reliability of System-on-Chips (SoCs), especially in mobile applications. The situation becomes more complicated when such attacks are more evasive and operate sporadically to stay hidden from detection mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce Intermittent Thermal Trojans (iThermTroj) that exploit the chips' thermal information in a random time-triggered manner. According to our experiments, iThermTroj attack can easily bypass available threshold-based thermal Trojan detection solutions. We investigate SoC vulnerabilities to variations of iThermTroj through an in-depth analysis of Trojan activation and duration scenarios. We also propose a set of tiny Machine Learning classifiers for run-time anomaly detection to protect SoCs against such intermittent thermal Trojan attacks. Compared to existing methods, our approach improves the attack detection rate by 29.4\%, 17.2\%, and 14.3\% in scenarios where iThermTroj manipulates up to 80\%, 60\%, and 40\% of SoC's thermal data, respectively. Additionally, our method increases the full protection resolution to 0.8 degrees Celsius, meaning that any temperature manipulations exceeding $\pm 0.8$ degrees will be detected with 100\% accuracy.
Authors:Javier Penuela, Sahar Moghimian Hoosh, Ilia Kamyshev, Aldo Bischi, Henni Ouerdane
Title: Indoor thermal comfort management: A Bayesian machine-learning approach to data denoising and dynamics prediction of HVAC systems
Abstract:
The optimal management of a building's microclimate to satisfy the occupants' needs and objectives in terms of comfort, energy efficiency, and costs is particularly challenging. This complexity arises from the non-linear, time-dependent interactions among all the variables of the control problem and the changing internal and external constraints. Focusing on the accurate modeling of the indoor temperature, we propose a data-driven approach to address this challenge. We account for thermal inertia, non-linear effects, small perturbations of the indoor climate dynamics caused by ventilation and weather variations, as well as for the stochastic nature of the control system due to the observed noise in the input signal. Since the prohibitive cost of quality data acquisition and processing limits the implementation of data-driven approaches for real-life problems, we applied a method that merges several Bayesian machine learning and deep learning architectures that are suitable for predicting complex system dynamics, while relaxing the dataset quality requirements. Our framework includes a built-in deep Kalman filter, which makes it deployable even with low-accuracy temperature sensors. It achieves state-of-the-art performance, best performing with a 150-minute prediction horizon with an RMSE of 0.2455, an MAE of 0.162, and an $R^2$ of 0.926. The model's performance remains consistent even when exposed to highly noisy data. Finally, we show how our approach can be extended to other applications including demand response event duration prediction and equipment failure detection.
Authors:Sangwon Kang, Hao Tu, Huazhen Fang
Title: BattBee: Equivalent Circuit Modeling and Early Detection of Thermal Runaway Triggered by Internal Short Circuits for Lithium-Ion Batteries
Abstract:
Lithium-ion batteries are the enabling power source for transportation electrification. However, in real-world applications, they remain vulnerable to internal short circuits (ISCs) and the consequential risk of thermal runaway (TR). Toward addressing the challenge of ISCs and TR, we undertake a systematic study that extends from dynamic modeling to fault detection in this paper. First, we develop {\em BattBee}, the first equivalent circuit model to specifically describe the onset of ISCs and the evolution of subsequently induced TR. Drawing upon electrochemical modeling, the model can simulate ISCs at different severity levels and predict their impact on the initiation and progression of TR events. With the physics-inspired design, this model offers strong physical interpretability and predictive accuracy, while maintaining structural simplicity to allow fast computation. Then, building upon the BattBee model, we develop fault detection observers and derive detection criteria together with decision-making logics to identify the occurrence and emergence of ISC and TR events. This detection approach is principled in design and fast in computation, lending itself to practical applications. Validation based on simulations and experimental data demonstrates the effectiveness of both the BattBee model and the ISC/TR detection approach. The research outcomes underscore this study's potential for real-world battery safety risk management.
Authors:Sri Krishna Vadlamani, Kfir Sulimany, Zhihui Gao, Tingjun Chen, Dirk Englund
Title: Machine Intelligence on Wireless Edge Networks
Abstract:
Machine intelligence on edge devices enables low-latency processing and improved privacy, but is often limited by the energy and delay of moving and converting data. Current systems frequently avoid local model storage by sending queries to a server, incurring uplink cost, network latency, and privacy risk. We present the opposite approach: broadcasting model weights to clients that perform inference locally using in-physics computation inside the radio receive chain. A base station transmits weights as radio frequency (RF) waveforms; the client encodes activations onto the waveform and computes the result using existing mixer and filter stages, RF components already present in billions of edge devices such as cellphones, eliminating repeated signal conversions and extra hardware. Analysis shows that thermal noise and nonlinearity create an optimal energy window for accurate analog inner products. Hardware-tailored training through a differentiable RF chain preserves accuracy within this regime. Circuit-informed simulations, consistent with a companion experiment, demonstrate reduced memory and conversion overhead while maintaining high accuracy in realistic wireless edge scenarios.
Authors:Ahmed Aboudonia, Johannes Estermann, Keith Moffat, Manfred Morari, John Lygeros
Title: A Data-driven Predictive Control Architecture for Train Thermal Energy Management
Abstract:
We aim to improve the energy efficiency of train climate control architectures, with a focus on a specific class of regional trains operating throughout Switzerland, especially in Zurich and Geneva. Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems represent the second largest energy consumer in these trains after traction. The current architecture comprises a high-level rule-based controller and a low-level tracking controller. To improve train energy efficiency, we propose adding a middle data-driven predictive control layer aimed at minimizing HVAC energy consumption while maintaining passenger comfort. The scheme incorporates a multistep prediction model developed using real-world data collected from a limited number of train coaches. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we conduct multiple experiments on a separate set of train coaches; our results suggest energy savings between 10% and 35% with respect to the current architecture.
Authors:Aidan Furlong, Xingang Zhao, Robert Salko, Xu Wu
Title: Deployment of Traditional and Hybrid Machine Learning for Critical Heat Flux Prediction in the CTF Thermal Hydraulics Code
Abstract:
Critical heat flux (CHF) marks the transition from nucleate to film boiling, where heat transfer to the working fluid can rapidly deteriorate. Accurate CHF prediction is essential for efficiency, safety, and preventing equipment damage, particularly in nuclear reactors. Although widely used, empirical correlations frequently exhibit discrepancies in comparison with experimental data, limiting their reliability in diverse operational conditions. Traditional machine learning (ML) approaches have demonstrated the potential for CHF prediction but have often suffered from limited interpretability, data scarcity, and insufficient knowledge of physical principles. Hybrid model approaches, which combine data-driven ML with physics-based models, mitigate these concerns by incorporating prior knowledge of the domain. This study integrated a purely data-driven ML model and two hybrid models (using the Biasi and Bowring CHF correlations) within the CTF subchannel code via a custom Fortran framework. Performance was evaluated using two validation cases: a subset of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission CHF database and the Bennett dryout experiments. In both cases, the hybrid models exhibited significantly lower error metrics in comparison with conventional empirical correlations. The pure ML model remained competitive with the hybrid models. Trend analysis of error parity indicates that ML-based models reduce the tendency for CHF overprediction, improving overall accuracy. These results demonstrate that ML-based CHF models can be effectively integrated into subchannel codes and can potentially increase performance in comparison with conventional methods.
Authors:Liu Ziyin, Yizhou Xu, Isaac Chuang
Title: Neural Thermodynamics I: Entropic Forces in Deep and Universal Representation Learning
Abstract:
With the rapid discovery of emergent phenomena in deep learning and large language models, explaining and understanding their cause has become an urgent need. Here, we propose a rigorous entropic-force theory for understanding the learning dynamics of neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Building on the theory of parameter symmetries and an entropic loss landscape, we show that representation learning is crucially governed by emergent entropic forces arising from stochasticity and discrete-time updates. These forces systematically break continuous parameter symmetries and preserve discrete ones, leading to a series of gradient balance phenomena that resemble the equipartition property of thermal systems. These phenomena, in turn, (a) explain the universal alignment of neural representations between AI models and lead to a proof of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, and (b) reconcile the seemingly contradictory observations of sharpness- and flatness-seeking behavior of deep learning optimization. Our theory and experiments demonstrate that a combination of entropic forces and symmetry breaking is key to understanding emergent phenomena in deep learning.
Authors:Simon Baeuerle, Ian F. Mendonca, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Ralf Mikut, Andreas Steimer
Title: Rapid AI-based generation of coverage paths for dispensing applications
Abstract:
Coverage Path Planning of Thermal Interface Materials (TIM) plays a crucial role in the design of power electronics and electronic control units. Up to now, this is done manually by experts or by using optimization approaches with a high computational effort. We propose a novel AI-based approach to generate dispense paths for TIM and similar dispensing applications. It is a drop-in replacement for optimization-based approaches. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) receives the target cooling area as input and directly outputs the dispense path. Our proposed setup does not require labels and we show its feasibility on multiple target areas. The resulting dispense paths can be directly transferred to automated manufacturing equipment and do not exhibit air entrapments. The approach of using an ANN to predict process parameters for a desired target state in real-time could potentially be transferred to other manufacturing processes.
Authors:M-Mahdi Naddaf-Sh, Andrew Lee, Kin Yen, Eemon Amini, Iman Soltani
Title: Low-Cost Infrared Vision Systems for Improved Safety of Emergency Vehicle Operations Under Low-Visibility Conditions
Abstract:
This study investigates the potential of infrared (IR) camera technology to enhance driver safety for emergency vehicles operating in low-visibility conditions, particularly at night and in dense fog. Such environments significantly increase the risk of collisions, especially for tow trucks and snowplows that must remain operational in challenging conditions. Conventional driver assistance systems often struggle under these conditions due to limited visibility. In contrast, IR cameras, which detect the thermal signatures of obstacles, offer a promising alternative. The evaluation combines controlled laboratory experiments, real-world field tests, and surveys of emergency vehicle operators. In addition to assessing detection performance, the study examines the feasibility of retrofitting existing Department of Transportation (DoT) fleets with cost-effective IR-based driver assistance systems. Results underscore the utility of IR technology in enhancing driver awareness and provide data-driven recommendations for scalable deployment across legacy emergency vehicle fleets.
Authors:Jinho Yang, Hyeongtaek Lee, Junil Choi
Title: Robust Transmission Design for Active RIS-Aided Systems
Abstract:
Different from conventional passive reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), incident signals and thermal noise can be amplified at active RISs. By exploiting the amplifying capability of active RISs, noticeable performance improvement can be expected when precise channel state information (CSI) is available. Since obtaining perfect CSI related to an RIS is difficult in practice, a robust transmission design is proposed in this paper to tackle the channel uncertainty issue, which will be more severe for active RIS-aided systems. To account for the worst-case scenario, the minimum achievable rate of each user is derived under a statistical CSI error model. Subsequently, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the sum of the minimum achievable rate. Since the objective function is non-concave, the formulated problem is transformed into a tractable lower bound maximization problem, which is solved using an alternating optimization method. Numerical results show that the proposed robust design outperforms a baseline scheme that only exploits estimated CSI.
Authors:Xiaolei Bian, Changfu Zou, Björn Fridholm, Christian Sundvall, Torsten Wik
Title: Smart Sensing Breaks the Accuracy Barrier in Battery State Monitoring
Abstract:
Accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation is essential for optimizing battery performance, ensuring safety, and maximizing economic value. Conventional current and voltage measurements, however, have inherent limitations in fully inferring the multiphysics-resolved dynamics inside battery cells. This creates an accuracy barrier that constrains battery usage and reduces cost-competitiveness and sustainability across industries dependent on battery technology. In this work, we introduce an integrated sensor framework that combines novel mechanical, thermal, gas, optical, and electrical sensors with traditional measurements to break through this barrier. We generate three unique datasets with eleven measurement types and propose an explainable machine-learning approach for SOC estimation. This approach renders the measured signals and the predictive result of machine learning physically interpretable with respect to battery SOC, offering fundamental insights into the time-varying importance of different signals. Our experimental results reveal a marked increase in SOC estimation accuracy--enhanced from 46.1% to 74.5%--compared to conventional methods. This approach not only advances SOC monitoring precision but also establishes a foundation for monitoring additional battery states to further improve safety, extend lifespan, and facilitate fast charging.
Authors:Haozhen Cheng, Jan Stock, André Xhonneux, Hüseyin K. Çakmak, Veit Hagenmeyer
Title: Construction and Control of Validated Highly Configurable Multi-Physics Building Models for Multi-Energy System Analysis in a Co-Simulation Setup
Abstract:
Improving energy efficiency by monitoring system behavior and predicting future energy scenarios in light of increased penetration of renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly important, especially for energy systems that distribute and provide heat. On this background, digital twins of cities become paramount in advancing urban energy system planning and infrastructure management. The use of recorded energy data from sensors in district digital twins in collaborative co-simulation platforms is a promising way to analyze detailed system behavior and estimate future scenarios. However, the development and coupling of multi-physics energy system models need to be validated before they can be used for further in-depth analyses. In the present paper, a new multi-physics/-modal and highly configurable building model is presented. Its accuracy and reliability are validated by comparison with data from the TABULA project, ensuring its relevance and applicability to real-world scenarios. The modularity and flexibility with regard to the system configurability of the developed building model is evaluated on various real building types. In addition, the applicability of the building model in a multi-energy system is highlighted by implementing the model in a collaborative co-simulation setup and by coupling it to a district heating grid model in yearly co-simulations. The simulation results for the proposed multi-physical/-modal building modeling concept show a very high level of agreement compared to published reference building data and can therefore be used individually as flexible and modular building models including both thermal and electrical systems for future sector-coupled energy system analyses in view of sustainability.
Authors:Zhangdi Liu, Ling An, Mengke Song, Zhuohang Yu, Shan Wang, Kezhen Qi, Zhenyu Zhang, Chichun Zhou
Title: Inorganic Catalyst Efficiency Prediction Based on EAPCR Model: A Deep Learning Solution for Multi-Source Heterogeneous Data
Abstract:
The design of inorganic catalysts and the prediction of their catalytic efficiency are fundamental challenges in chemistry and materials science. Traditional catalyst evaluation methods primarily rely on machine learning techniques; however, these methods often struggle to process multi-source heterogeneous data, limiting both predictive accuracy and generalization. To address these limitations, this study introduces the Embedding-Attention-Permutated CNN-Residual (EAPCR) deep learning model. EAPCR constructs a feature association matrix using embedding and attention mechanisms and enhances predictive performance through permutated CNN architectures and residual connections. This approach enables the model to accurately capture complex feature interactions across various catalytic conditions, leading to precise efficiency predictions. EAPCR serves as a powerful tool for computational researchers while also assisting domain experts in optimizing catalyst design, effectively bridging the gap between data-driven modeling and experimental applications. We evaluate EAPCR on datasets from TiO2 photocatalysis, thermal catalysis, and electrocatalysis, demonstrating its superiority over traditional machine learning methods (e.g., linear regression, random forest) as well as conventional deep learning models (e.g., ANN, NNs). Across multiple evaluation metrics (MAE, MSE, R2, and RMSE), EAPCR consistently outperforms existing approaches. These findings highlight the strong potential of EAPCR in inorganic catalytic efficiency prediction. As a versatile deep learning framework, EAPCR not only improves predictive accuracy but also establishes a solid foundation for future large-scale model development in inorganic catalysis.
Authors:Jorge García-Torres, Øyvind Meinich-Bache, Sara Brunner, Siren Rettedal, Vilde Kolstad, Kjersti Engan
Title: Two-Stream Thermal Imaging Fusion for Enhanced Time of Birth Detection in Neonatal Care
Abstract:
Around 10% of newborns require some help to initiate breathing, and 5\% need ventilation assistance. Accurate Time of Birth (ToB) documentation is essential for optimizing neonatal care, as timely interventions are vital for proper resuscitation. However, current clinical methods for recording ToB often rely on manual processes, which can be prone to inaccuracies. In this study, we present a novel two-stream fusion system that combines the power of image and video analysis to accurately detect the ToB from thermal recordings in the delivery room and operating theater. By integrating static and dynamic streams, our approach captures richer birth-related spatiotemporal features, leading to more robust and precise ToB estimation. We demonstrate that this synergy between data modalities enhances performance over single-stream approaches. Our system achieves 95.7% precision and 84.8% recall in detecting birth within short video clips. Additionally, with the help of a score aggregation module, it successfully identifies ToB in 100% of test cases, with a median absolute error of 2 seconds and an absolute mean deviation of 4.5 seconds compared to manual annotations.
Authors:Yangfan Xu, Qu Hao, Lilian Zhang, Jun Mao, Xiaofeng He, Wenqi Wu, Changhao Chen
Title: SLAM in the Dark: Self-Supervised Learning of Pose, Depth and Loop-Closure from Thermal Images
Abstract:
Visual SLAM is essential for mobile robots, drone navigation, and VR/AR, but traditional RGB camera systems struggle in low-light conditions, driving interest in thermal SLAM, which excels in such environments. However, thermal imaging faces challenges like low contrast, high noise, and limited large-scale annotated datasets, restricting the use of deep learning in outdoor scenarios. We present DarkSLAM, a noval deep learning-based monocular thermal SLAM system designed for large-scale localization and reconstruction in complex lighting conditions.Our approach incorporates the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism in visual odometry and the Selective Kernel Attention (SKA) mechanism in depth estimation to enhance pose accuracy and mitigate thermal depth degradation. Additionally, the system includes thermal depth-based loop closure detection and pose optimization, ensuring robust performance in low-texture thermal scenes. Extensive outdoor experiments demonstrate that DarkSLAM significantly outperforms existing methods like SC-Sfm-Learner and Shin et al., delivering precise localization and 3D dense mapping even in challenging nighttime environments.
Authors:Wenjing Gong, Xinyue Ye, Keshu Wu, Suphanut Jamonnak, Wenyu Zhang, Yifan Yang, Xiao Huang
Title: Integrating Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer into Digital Twins for High-Resolution Heat Stress Forecasting in Campus Environments
Abstract:
Extreme heat events, exacerbated by climate change, pose significant challenges to urban resilience and planning. This study introduces a climate-responsive digital twin framework integrating the Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer (ST-ViT) model to enhance heat stress forecasting and decision-making. Using a Texas campus as a testbed, we synthesized high-resolution physical model simulations with spatial and meteorological data to develop fine-scale human thermal predictions. The ST-ViT-powered digital twin enables efficient, data-driven insights for planners and stakeholders, supporting targeted heat mitigation strategies and advancing climate-adaptive urban design. This campus-scale demonstration offers a foundation for future applications across broader and more diverse urban contexts.
Authors:Leon Nissen, Philipp Zagar, Vishnu Ravi, Aydin Zahedivash, Lara Marie Reimer, Stephan Jonas, Oliver Aalami, Paul Schmiedmayer
Title: Medicine on the Edge: Comparative Performance Analysis of On-Device LLMs for Clinical Reasoning
Abstract:
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLM) on mobile devices offers significant potential for medical applications, enhancing privacy, security, and cost-efficiency by eliminating reliance on cloud-based services and keeping sensitive health data local. However, the performance and accuracy of on-device LLMs in real-world medical contexts remain underexplored. In this study, we benchmark publicly available on-device LLMs using the AMEGA dataset, evaluating accuracy, computational efficiency, and thermal limitation across various mobile devices. Our results indicate that compact general-purpose models like Phi-3 Mini achieve a strong balance between speed and accuracy, while medically fine-tuned models such as Med42 and Aloe attain the highest accuracy. Notably, deploying LLMs on older devices remains feasible, with memory constraints posing a greater challenge than raw processing power. Our study underscores the potential of on-device LLMs for healthcare while emphasizing the need for more efficient inference and models tailored to real-world clinical reasoning.
Authors:Aidan Furlong, Xingang Zhao, Bob Salko, Xu Wu
Title: Native Fortran Implementation of TensorFlow-Trained Deep and Bayesian Neural Networks
Abstract:
Over the past decade, the investigation of machine learning (ML) within the field of nuclear engineering has grown significantly. With many approaches reaching maturity, the next phase of investigation will determine the feasibility and usefulness of ML model implementation in a production setting. Several of the codes used for reactor design and assessment are primarily written in the Fortran language, which is not immediately compatible with TensorFlow-trained ML models. This study presents a framework for implementing deep neural networks (DNNs) and Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) in Fortran, allowing for native execution without TensorFlow's C API, Python runtime, or ONNX conversion. Designed for ease of use and computational efficiency, the framework can be implemented in any Fortran code, supporting iterative solvers and UQ via ensembles or BNNs. Verification was performed using a two-input, one-output test case composed of a noisy sinusoid to compare Fortran-based predictions to those from TensorFlow. The DNN predictions showed negligible differences and achieved a 19.6x speedup, whereas the BNN predictions exhibited minor disagreement, plausibly due to differences in random number generation. An 8.0x speedup was noted for BNN inference. The approach was then further verified on a nuclear-relevant problem predicting critical heat flux (CHF), which demonstrated similar behavior along with significant computational gains. Discussion regarding the framework's successful integration into the CTF thermal-hydraulics code is also included, outlining its practical usefulness. Overall, this framework was shown to be effective at implementing both DNN and BNN model inference within Fortran, allowing for the continued study of ML-based methods in real-world nuclear applications.
Authors:Jorge García-Torres, Øyvind Meinich-Bache, Siren Rettedal, Kjersti Engan
Title: AI-Based Thermal Video Analysis in Privacy-Preserving Healthcare: A Case Study on Detecting Time of Birth
Abstract:
Approximately 10% of newborns need some assistance to start breathing and 5\% proper ventilation. It is crucial that interventions are initiated as soon as possible after birth. Accurate documentation of Time of Birth (ToB) is thereby essential for documenting and improving newborn resuscitation performance. However, current clinical practices rely on manual recording of ToB, typically with minute precision. In this study, we present an AI-driven, video-based system for automated ToB detection using thermal imaging, designed to preserve the privacy of healthcare providers and mothers by avoiding the use of identifiable visual data. Our approach achieves 91.4% precision and 97.4% recall in detecting ToB within thermal video clips during performance evaluation. Additionally, our system successfully identifies ToB in 96% of test cases with an absolute median deviation of 1 second compared to manual annotations. This method offers a reliable solution for improving ToB documentation and enhancing newborn resuscitation outcomes.
Authors:Jiuhong Xiao, Giuseppe Loianno
Title: UASTHN: Uncertainty-Aware Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Satellite-Thermal Geo-localization
Abstract:
Geo-localization is an essential component of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation systems to ensure precise absolute self-localization in outdoor environments. To address the challenges of GPS signal interruptions or low illumination, Thermal Geo-localization (TG) employs aerial thermal imagery to align with reference satellite maps to accurately determine the UAV's location. However, existing TG methods lack uncertainty measurement in their outputs, compromising system robustness in the presence of textureless or corrupted thermal images, self-similar or outdated satellite maps, geometric noises, or thermal images exceeding satellite maps. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents UASTHN, a novel approach for Uncertainty Estimation (UE) in Deep Homography Estimation (DHE) tasks for TG applications. Specifically, we introduce a novel Crop-based Test-Time Augmentation (CropTTA) strategy, which leverages the homography consensus of cropped image views to effectively measure data uncertainty. This approach is complemented by Deep Ensembles (DE) employed for model uncertainty, offering comparable performance with improved efficiency and seamless integration with any DHE model. Extensive experiments across multiple DHE models demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CropTTA in TG applications. Analysis of detected failure cases underscores the improved reliability of CropTTA under challenging conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the capability of combining CropTTA and DE for a comprehensive assessment of both data and model uncertainty. Our research provides profound insights into the broader intersection of localization and uncertainty estimation. The code and models are publicly available.
Authors:Erik Schnaubelt, Andrea Vitrano, Mariusz Wozniak, Emmanuele Ravaioli, Arjan Verweij, Sebastian Schöps
Title: Transient Finite Element Simulation of Accelerator Magnets Using Thermal Thin Shell Approximation
Abstract:
Thermal transient responses of superconducting magnets can be simulated using the finite element (FE) method. Some accelerator magnets use cables whose electric insulation is significantly thinner than the bare electric conductor. The FE discretisation of such geometries with high-quality meshes leads to many degrees of freedom. This increases the computational time, particularly since non-linear material properties are involved. In this work, we propose to use a thermal thin-shell approximation (TSA) to improve the computational efficiency when solving the heat diffusion equation in two dimensions. We apply the method to compute the thermal transient response of superconducting accelerator magnets used for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and High-Luminosity LHC. The TSA collapses thin electrical insulation layers into lines while accurately representing the thermal gradient across the insulation's thickness. The TSA is implemented in the multipole module of the open-source Finite Element Quench Simulator (FiQuS), which can generate the multipole magnet models programmatically from input text files. First, the TSA approach is verified by comparison to classical FE simulations with meshed surface insulation regions for a simple block of four cables and a detailed model of the MBH dipole. The results show that the TSA approach reduces the computational time significantly while preserving the accuracy of the solution. Second, the quench heater (QH) delay computed with the TSA method is compared to measurements for the MBH magnet. To this end, the thermal transient simulation is coupled to a magnetostatic solution to account for magneto-resistive effects. Third, the TSA's full capabilities are showcased in non-linear magneto-thermal simulations of several LHC and HL-LHC superconducting magnet models. The full source code, including all input files, is publicly available.
Authors:Tun-Chieh Lou, Chung-Che Wang, Jyh-Shing Roger Jang, Henian Li, Lang Lin, Norman Chang
Title: Improving Location-based Thermal Emission Side-Channel Analysis Using Iterative Transfer Learning
Abstract:
This paper proposes the use of iterative transfer learning applied to deep learning models for side-channel attacks. Currently, most of the side-channel attack methods train a model for each individual byte, without considering the correlation between bytes. However, since the models' parameters for attacking different bytes may be similar, we can leverage transfer learning, meaning that we first train the model for one of the key bytes, then use the trained model as a pretrained model for the remaining bytes. This technique can be applied iteratively, a process known as iterative transfer learning. Experimental results show that when using thermal or power consumption map images as input, and multilayer perceptron or convolutional neural network as the model, our method improves average performance, especially when the amount of data is insufficient.
Authors:Mehdi Elahi, Mohamed R. Elshamy, Abdel-Hameed Badawy, Mahdi Fazeli, Ahmad Patooghy
Title: MATTER: Multi-stage Adaptive Thermal Trojan for Efficiency & Resilience degradation
Abstract:
As mobile systems become more advanced, the security of System-on-Chips (SoCs) is increasingly threatened by thermal attacks. This research introduces a new attack method called the Multi-stage Adaptive Thermal Trojan for Efficiency and Resilience Degradation (MATTER). MATTER takes advantage of weaknesses in Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) systems by manipulating temperature sensor interfaces, which leads to incorrect thermal sensing and disrupts the SoC's ability to manage heat effectively. Our experiments show that this attack can degrade DTM performance by as much as 73%, highlighting serious vulnerabilities in modern mobile devices. By exploiting the trust placed in temperature sensors, MATTER causes DTM systems to make poor decisions i.e., failing to activate cooling when needed. This not only affects how well the system works but also threatens the lifespan of the hardware. This paper provides a thorough analysis of how MATTER works and emphasizes the need for stronger thermal management systems in SoCs.
Authors:Mariusz Wozniak, Erik Schnaubelt, Sina Atalay, Bernardo Bordini, Julien Dular, Tim Mulder, Emmanuele Ravaioli, Arjan Verweij
Title: Influence of Critical Current Distribution on Operation, Quench Detection and Protection of HTS Pancake Coils
Abstract:
High-temperature superconductor (HTS) coated conductors (CC) are often wound into pancake coils with electrical insulation in-between the turns. The copper terminals are used for current injection and conduction cooling. An inherent variation of the critical current along the CC length results from its manufacturing process. This variation causes non-uniform heat generation, particularly when the coil is operated at a high fraction of the nominal critical current or when large critical current defects are present. The temperature distribution resulting from the balance between cooling and heating, in combination with the magnetic field and critical current distributions, determines whether a thermal runaway occurs. Accurately predicting the level of critical current defects that can be tolerated during conduction-cooled operation is difficult and requires a 3D coupled electromagnetic and thermal simulation. This paper presents the results of simulations that are performed with the open-source Finite Element Quench Simulator (FiQuS) tool developed at CERN as part of the STEAM framework. The 3D coupled magnetodynamic-thermal simulations are based on the H-phi formulation and use thin shell approximations, a CC homogenization and conduction-cooling. The critical current (Ic) is varied along the CC length. The effect of a single defect specified as a reduction of Ic along the CC length is investigated in terms of the coil's ability to reach and maintain the operating conditions. The Ic and length of the defect that results in a thermal runaway are analyzed in terms of defect location. In addition, a classical 1D scenario with a quench heater is studied. Both the local defect and the heater cases are compared in terms of the voltage signal available for quench detection. These cases result in very different requirements for quench detection, and their implications are discussed.
Authors:Taeheon Kim, Sangyun Chung, Youngjoon Yu, Yong Man Ro
Title: Revisiting Misalignment in Multispectral Pedestrian Detection: A Language-Driven Approach for Cross-modal Alignment Fusion
Abstract:
Multispectral pedestrian detection is a crucial component in various critical applications. However, a significant challenge arises due to the misalignment between these modalities, particularly under real-world conditions where data often appear heavily misaligned. Conventional methods developed on well-aligned or minimally misaligned datasets fail to address these discrepancies adequately. This paper introduces a new framework for multispectral pedestrian detection designed specifically to handle heavily misaligned datasets without the need for costly and complex traditional pre-processing calibration. By leveraging Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLM) for cross-modal semantic alignment, our approach seeks to enhance detection accuracy by aligning semantic information across the RGB and thermal domains. This method not only simplifies the operational requirements but also extends the practical usability of multispectral detection technologies in practical applications.
Authors:Jorge García-Torres, Øyvind Meinich-Bache, Anders Johannessen, Siren Rettedal, Vilde Kolstad, Kjersti Engan
Title: Advancing Newborn Care: Precise Birth Time Detection Using AI-Driven Thermal Imaging with Adaptive Normalization
Abstract:
Around 5-10\% of newborns need assistance to start breathing. Currently, there is a lack of evidence-based research, objective data collection, and opportunities for learning from real newborn resuscitation emergency events. Generating and evaluating automated newborn resuscitation algorithm activity timelines relative to the Time of Birth (ToB) offers a promising opportunity to enhance newborn care practices. Given the importance of prompt resuscitation interventions within the "golden minute" after birth, having an accurate ToB with second precision is essential for effective subsequent analysis of newborn resuscitation episodes. Instead, ToB is generally registered manually, often with minute precision, making the process inefficient and susceptible to error and imprecision. In this work, we explore the fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and thermal imaging to develop the first AI-driven ToB detector. The use of temperature information offers a promising alternative to detect the newborn while respecting the privacy of healthcare providers and mothers. However, the frequent inconsistencies in thermal measurements, especially in a multi-camera setup, make normalization strategies critical. Our methodology involves a three-step process: first, we propose an adaptive normalization method based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to mitigate issues related to temperature variations; second, we implement and deploy an AI model to detect the presence of the newborn within the thermal video frames; and third, we evaluate and post-process the model's predictions to estimate the ToB. A precision of 88.1\% and a recall of 89.3\% are reported in the detection of the newborn within thermal frames during performance evaluation. Our approach achieves an absolute median deviation of 2.7 seconds in estimating the ToB relative to the manual annotations.
Authors:Juno Nam, Sulin Liu, Gavin Winter, KyuJung Jun, Soojung Yang, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
Title: Flow Matching for Accelerated Simulation of Atomic Transport in Materials
Abstract:
We introduce LiFlow, a generative framework to accelerate molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for crystalline materials that formulates the task as conditional generation of atomic displacements. The model uses flow matching, with a Propagator submodel to generate atomic displacements and a Corrector to locally correct unphysical geometries, and incorporates an adaptive prior based on the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution to account for chemical and thermal conditions. We benchmark LiFlow on a dataset comprising 25-ps trajectories of lithium diffusion across 4,186 solid-state electrolyte (SSE) candidates at four temperatures. The model obtains a consistent Spearman rank correlation of 0.7-0.8 for lithium mean squared displacement (MSD) predictions on unseen compositions. Furthermore, LiFlow generalizes from short training trajectories to larger supercells and longer simulations while maintaining high accuracy. With speed-ups of up to 600,000$\times$ compared to first-principles methods, LiFlow enables scalable simulations at significantly larger length and time scales.
Authors:Bach Do, Sina Jafari Ghalekohneh, Taiwo Adebiyi, Bo Zhao, Ruda Zhang
Title: Automated design of nonreciprocal thermal emitters via Bayesian optimization
Abstract:
Nonreciprocal thermal emitters that break Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation promise exciting applications for thermal and energy applications. The design of the bandwidth and angular range of the nonreciprocal effect, which directly affects the performance of nonreciprocal emitters, typically relies on physical intuition. In this study, we present a general numerical approach to maximize the nonreciprocal effect. We choose doped magneto-optic materials and magnetic Weyl semimetal materials as model materials and focus on pattern-free multilayer structures. The optimization randomly starts from a less effective structure and incrementally improves the broadband nonreciprocity through the combination of Bayesian optimization and reparameterization. Optimization results show that the proposed approach can discover structures that can achieve broadband nonreciprocal emission at wavelengths from 5 to 40 micrometers using only a fewer layers, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art designs based on intuition in terms of both performance and simplicity.
Authors:Godwin K. Peprah, Yicun Huang, Torsten Wik, Faisal Altaf, Changfu Zou
Title: Thermal Modelling of Battery Cells for Optimal Tab and Surface Cooling Control
Abstract:
Optimal cooling that minimises thermal gradients and the average temperature is essential for enhanced battery safety and health. This work presents a new modelling approach for battery cells of different shapes by integrating Chebyshev spectral-Galerkin method and model component decomposition. As a result, a library of reduced-order computationally efficient battery thermal models is obtained, characterised by different numbers of states. These models are validated against a high-fidelity finite element model and are compared with a thermal equivalent circuit (TEC) model under real-world vehicle driving and battery cooling scenarios. Illustrative results demonstrate that the proposed model with four states can faithfully capture the two-dimensional thermal dynamics, while the model with only one state significantly outperforms the widely-used two-state TEC model in both accuracy and computational efficiency, reducing computation time by 28.7%. Furthermore, our developed models allow for independent control of tab and surface cooling channels, enabling effective thermal performance optimisation. Additionally, the proposed model's versatility and effectiveness are demonstrated through various applications, including the evaluation of different cooling scenarios, closed-loop temperature control, and cell design optimisation.
Authors:Zhanyue Zhao, Yiwei Jiang, Charles Bales, Yang Wang, Gregory Fischer
Title: Development of Advanced FEM Simulation Technology for Pre-Operative Surgical Planning
Abstract:
Intracorporeal needle-based therapeutic ultrasound (NBTU) offers a minimally invasive approach for the thermal ablation of malignant brain tumors, including both primary and metastatic cancers. NBTU utilizes a high-frequency alternating electric field to excite a piezoelectric transducer, generating acoustic waves that cause localized heating and tumor cell ablation, and it provides a more precise ablation by delivering lower acoustic power doses directly to targeted tumors while sparing surrounding healthy tissue. Building on our previous work, this study introduces a database for optimizing pre-operative surgical planning by simulating ablation effects in varied tissue environments and develops an extended simulation model incorporating various tumor types and sizes to evaluate thermal damage under trans-tissue conditions. A comprehensive database is created from these simulations, detailing critical parameters such as CEM43 isodose maps, temperature changes, thermal dose areas, and maximum ablation distances for four directional probes. This database serves as a valuable resource for future studies, aiding in complex trajectory planning and parameter optimization for NBTU procedures. Moreover, a novel probe selection method is proposed to enhance pre-surgical planning, providing a strategic approach to selecting probes that maximize therapeutic efficiency and minimize ablation time. By avoiding unnecessary thermal propagation and optimizing probe angles, this method has the potential to improve patient outcomes and streamline surgical procedures. Overall, the findings of this study contribute significantly to the field of NBTU, offering a robust framework for enhancing treatment precision and efficacy in clinical settings.
Authors:Zhanyue Zhao, Benjamin Szewczyk, Matthew Tarasek, Charles Bales, Yang Wang, Ming Liu, Yiwei Jiang, Chitresh Bhushan, Eric Fiveland, Zahabiya Campwala, Rachel Trowbridge, Phillip M. Johansen, Zachary Olmsted, Goutam Ghoshal, Tamas Heffter, Katie Gandomi, Farid Tavakkolmoghaddam, Christopher Nycz, Erin Jeannotte, Shweta Mane, Julia Nalwalk, E. Clif Burdette, Jiang Qian, Desmond Yeo, Julie Pilitsis, Gregory S. Fischer
Title: Deep Brain Ultrasound Ablation Thermal Dose Modeling with in Vivo Experimental Validation
Abstract:
Intracorporeal needle-based therapeutic ultrasound (NBTU) is a minimally invasive option for intervening in malignant brain tumors, commonly used in thermal ablation procedures. This technique is suitable for both primary and metastatic cancers, utilizing a high-frequency alternating electric field (up to 10 MHz) to excite a piezoelectric transducer. The resulting rapid deformation of the transducer produces an acoustic wave that propagates through tissue, leading to localized high-temperature heating at the target tumor site and inducing rapid cell death. To optimize the design of NBTU transducers for thermal dose delivery during treatment, numerical modeling of the acoustic pressure field generated by the deforming piezoelectric transducer is frequently employed. The bioheat transfer process generated by the input pressure field is used to track the thermal propagation of the applicator over time. Magnetic resonance thermal imaging (MRTI) can be used to experimentally validate these models. Validation results using MRTI demonstrated the feasibility of this model, showing a consistent thermal propagation pattern. However, a thermal damage isodose map is more advantageous for evaluating therapeutic efficacy. To achieve a more accurate simulation based on the actual brain tissue environment, a new finite element method (FEM) simulation with enhanced damage evaluation capabilities was conducted. The results showed that the highest temperature and ablated volume differed between experimental and simulation results by 2.1884°C (3.71%) and 0.0631 cm$^3$ (5.74%), respectively. The lowest Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) for peak temperature was 0.7117, and the lowest Dice coefficient for the ablated area was 0.7021, indicating a good agreement in accuracy between simulation and experiment.
Authors:Bhaskar Gaur, Travis S. Humble, Himanshu Thapliyal
Title: Noise-Resilient and Reduced Depth Approximate Adders for NISQ Quantum Computing
Abstract:
The "Noisy intermediate-scale quantum" NISQ machine era primarily focuses on mitigating noise, controlling errors, and executing high-fidelity operations, hence requiring shallow circuit depth and noise robustness. Approximate computing is a novel computing paradigm that produces imprecise results by relaxing the need for fully precise output for error-tolerant applications including multimedia, data mining, and image processing. We investigate how approximate computing can improve the noise resilience of quantum adder circuits in NISQ quantum computing. We propose five designs of approximate quantum adders to reduce depth while making them noise-resilient, in which three designs are with carryout, while two are without carryout. We have used novel design approaches that include approximating the Sum only from the inputs (pass-through designs) and having zero depth, as they need no quantum gates. The second design style uses a single CNOT gate to approximate the SUM with a constant depth of O(1). We performed our experimentation on IBM Qiskit on noise models including thermal, depolarizing, amplitude damping, phase damping, and bitflip: (i) Compared to exact quantum ripple carry adder without carryout the proposed approximate adders without carryout have improved fidelity ranging from 8.34% to 219.22%, and (ii) Compared to exact quantum ripple carry adder with carryout the proposed approximate adders with carryout have improved fidelity ranging from 8.23% to 371%. Further, the proposed approximate quantum adders are evaluated in terms of various error metrics.
Authors:Jiuhong Xiao, Ning Zhang, Daniel Tortei, Giuseppe Loianno
Title: STHN: Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Thermal Geo-localization with Satellite Imagery
Abstract:
Accurate geo-localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for outdoor applications including search and rescue operations, power line inspections, and environmental monitoring. The vulnerability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals to interference and spoofing necessitates the development of additional robust localization methods for autonomous navigation. Visual Geo-localization (VG), leveraging onboard cameras and reference satellite maps, offers a promising solution for absolute localization. Specifically, Thermal Geo-localization (TG), which relies on image-based matching between thermal imagery with satellite databases, stands out by utilizing infrared cameras for effective nighttime localization. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of current TG approaches, are hindered by dense sampling on satellite maps and geometric noises in thermal query images. To overcome these challenges, we introduce STHN, a novel UAV thermal geo-localization approach that employs a coarse-to-fine deep homography estimation method. This method attains reliable thermal geo-localization within a 512-meter radius of the UAV's last known location even with a challenging 11\% size ratio between thermal and satellite images, despite the presence of indistinct textures and self-similar patterns. We further show how our research significantly enhances UAV thermal geo-localization performance and robustness against geometric noises under low-visibility conditions in the wild. The code is made publicly available.
Authors:Simon Baeuerle, Andreas Steimer, Ralf Mikut
Title: Coverage Path Planning for Thermal Interface Materials
Abstract:
Thermal management of power electronics and Electronic Control Units is crucial in times of increasing power densities and limited assembly space. Electric and autonomous vehicles are a prominent application field. Thermal Interface Materials are used to transfer heat from a semiconductor to a heatsink. They are applied along a dispense path onto the semiconductor and spread over its entire surface once the heatsink is joined. To plan this application path, design engineers typically perform an iterative trial-and-error procedure of elaborate simulations and manual experiments. We propose a fully automated optimization approach, which clearly outperforms the current manual path planning and respects all relevant manufacturing constraints. An optimum dispense path increases the reliability of the thermal interface and makes the manufacturing more sustainable by reducing material waste. We show results on multiple real products from automotive series production, including an experimental validation on actual series manufacturing equipment.
Authors:Bailey Miller, Rohan Sawhney, Keenan Crane, Ioannis Gkioulekas
Title: Differential Walk on Spheres
Abstract:
We introduce a Monte Carlo method for computing derivatives of the solution to a partial differential equation (PDE) with respect to problem parameters (such as domain geometry or boundary conditions). Derivatives can be evaluated at arbitrary points, without performing a global solve or constructing a volumetric grid or mesh. The method is hence well suited to inverse problems with complex geometry, such as PDE-constrained shape optimization. Like other walk on spheres (WoS) algorithms, our method is trivial to parallelize, and is agnostic to boundary representation (meshes, splines, implicit surfaces, etc.), supporting large topological changes. We focus in particular on screened Poisson equations, which model diverse problems from scientific and geometric computing. As in differentiable rendering, we jointly estimate derivatives with respect to all parameters -- hence, cost does not grow significantly with parameter count. In practice, even noisy derivative estimates exhibit fast, stable convergence for stochastic gradient-based optimization, as we show through examples from thermal design, shape from diffusion, and computer graphics.
Authors:Yingjie Pei, Wanli Ni, Jin Xu, Xinwei Yue, Xiaofeng Tao, Dusit Niyato
Title: Secrecy Performance Analysis of Multi-Functional RIS-Assisted NOMA Networks
Abstract:
Although reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can improve the secrecy communication performance of wireless users, it still faces challenges such as limited coverage and double-fading effect. To address these issues, in this paper, we utilize a novel multi-functional RIS (MF-RIS) to enhance the secrecy performance of wireless users, and investigate the physical layer secrecy problem in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. Specifically, we derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and secrecy throughput expressions of users in MF-RIS-assisted NOMA networks with external and internal eavesdroppers. The asymptotic expressions for SOP and secrecy diversity order are also analyzed under high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Additionally, we examine the impact of receiver hardware limitations and error transmission-induced imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) on the secrecy performance. Numerical results indicate that: i) under the same power budget, the secrecy performance achieved by MF-RIS significantly outperforms active RIS and simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS; ii) with increasing power budget, residual interference caused by imperfect SIC surpasses thermal noise as the primary factor affecting secrecy capacity; and iii) deploying additional elements at the MF-RIS brings significant secrecy enhancements for the external eavesdropping scenario, in contrast to the internal eavesdropping case.
Authors:Liuxin Bao, Xiaofei Zhou, Xiankai Lu, Yaoqi Sun, Haibing Yin, Zhenghui Hu, Jiyong Zhang, Chenggang Yan
Title: Quality-aware Selective Fusion Network for V-D-T Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Depth images and thermal images contain the spatial geometry information and surface temperature information, which can act as complementary information for the RGB modality. However, the quality of the depth and thermal images is often unreliable in some challenging scenarios, which will result in the performance degradation of the two-modal based salient object detection (SOD). Meanwhile, some researchers pay attention to the triple-modal SOD task, where they attempt to explore the complementarity of the RGB image, the depth image, and the thermal image. However, existing triple-modal SOD methods fail to perceive the quality of depth maps and thermal images, which leads to performance degradation when dealing with scenes with low-quality depth and thermal images. Therefore, we propose a quality-aware selective fusion network (QSF-Net) to conduct VDT salient object detection, which contains three subnets including the initial feature extraction subnet, the quality-aware region selection subnet, and the region-guided selective fusion subnet. Firstly, except for extracting features, the initial feature extraction subnet can generate a preliminary prediction map from each modality via a shrinkage pyramid architecture. Then, we design the weakly-supervised quality-aware region selection subnet to generate the quality-aware maps. Concretely, we first find the high-quality and low-quality regions by using the preliminary predictions, which further constitute the pseudo label that can be used to train this subnet. Finally, the region-guided selective fusion subnet purifies the initial features under the guidance of the quality-aware maps, and then fuses the triple-modal features and refines the edge details of prediction maps through the intra-modality and inter-modality attention (IIA) module and the edge refinement (ER) module, respectively. Extensive experiments are performed on VDT-2048
Authors:Issa Saba, Eishi Arima, Dai Liu, Martin Schulz
Title: Orchestrated Co-scheduling, Resource Partitioning, and Power Capping on CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Systems via Machine Learning
Abstract:
CPU-GPU heterogeneous architectures are now commonly used in a wide variety of computing systems from mobile devices to supercomputers. Maximizing the throughput for multi-programmed workloads on such systems is indispensable as one single program typically cannot fully exploit all available resources. At the same time, power consumption is a key issue and often requires optimizing power allocations to the CPU and GPU while enforcing a total power constraint, in particular when the power/thermal requirements are strict. The result is a system-wide optimization problem with several knobs. In particular we focus on (1) co-scheduling decisions, i.e., selecting programs to co-locate in a space sharing manner; (2) resource partitioning on both CPUs and GPUs; and (3) power capping on both CPUs and GPUs. We solve this problem using predictive performance modeling using machine learning in order to coordinately optimize the above knob setups. Our experiential results using a real system show that our approach achieves up to 67% of speedup compared to a time-sharing-based scheduling with a naive power capping that evenly distributes power budgets across components.
Authors:Zhangjie Peng, Jianchen Zhu, Cunhua Pan, Zaichen Zhang, Daniel Benevides da Costa, Maged Elkashlan, George K. Karagiannidis
Title: Active RIS-Aided Massive MIMO With Imperfect CSI and Phase Noise
Abstract:
Active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has attracted significant attention as a recently proposed RIS architecture. Owing to its capability to amplify the incident signals, active RIS can mitigate the multiplicative fading effect inherent in the passive RIS-aided system. In this paper, we consider an active RIS-aided uplink multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in the presence of phase noise at the active RIS. Specifically, we employ a two-timescale scheme, where the beamforming at the base station (BS) is adjusted based on the instantaneous aggregated channel state information (CSI) and the statistical CSI serves as the basis for designing the phase shifts at the active RIS, so that the feedback overhead and computational complexity can be significantly reduced. The aggregated channel composed of the cascaded and direct channels is estimated by utilizing the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) technique. Based on the estimated channel, we derive the analytical closed-form expression of a lower bound of the achievable rate. The power scaling laws in the active RIS-aided system are investigated based on the theoretical expressions. When the transmit power of each user is scaled down by the number of BS antennas M or reflecting elements N, we find that the thermal noise will cause the lower bound of the achievable rate to approach zero, as the number of M or N increases to infinity. Moreover, an optimization approach based on genetic algorithms (GA) is introduced to tackle the phase shift optimization problem. Numerical results reveal that the active RIS can greatly enhance the performance of the considered system under various settings.
Authors:Robert Hahn, Erik Schnaubelt, Mariusz Wozniak, Christophe Geuzaine, Sebastian Schöps
Title: Mortar Thin Shell Approximation for Analysis of Superconducting Accelerator Magnets
Abstract:
Thin layers can lead to unfavorable meshes in a finite element (FE) analysis. Thin shell approximations (TSAs) avoid this issue by removing the need for a mesh of the thin layer while approximating the physics across the layer by an interface condition. Typically, a TSA requires the mesh of both sides of the TSA interface to be conforming. To alleviate this requirement, we propose to combine mortar methods and TSAs for solving the heat equation. The mortar TSA method's formulation is derived and enables an independent discretization of the subdomains on the two sides of the TSA depending on their accuracy requirements. The method is verified by comparison with a reference FE solution of a thermal model problem of a simplified superconducting accelerator magnet.
Authors:Saeed Azad, Ziraddin Gulumjanli, Daniel R. Herber
Title: A general framework for supporting economic feasibility of generator and storage energy systems through capacity and dispatch optimization
Abstract:
Integration of various electricity-generating technologies (such as natural gas, wind, nuclear, etc.) with storage systems (such as thermal, battery electric, hydrogen, etc.) has the potential to improve the economic competitiveness of modern energy systems. Driven by the need to efficiently assess the economic feasibility of various energy system configurations in early system concept development, this work outlines a versatile computational framework for assessing the net present value of various integrated storage technologies. The subsystems' fundamental dynamics are defined, with a particular emphasis on balancing critical physical and economic domains to enable optimal decision-making in the context of capacity and dispatch optimization. In its presented form, the framework formulates a linear, convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved using a direct transcription approach in the open-source software DTQP. Three case studies demonstrate and validate the framework's capabilities, highlighting its value and computational efficiency in facilitating the economic assessment of various energy system configurations. In particular, natural gas with thermal storage and carbon capture, wind energy with battery storage, and nuclear with hydrogen are demonstrated.
Authors:Erik Schnaubelt, Mariusz Wozniak, Julien Dular, Idoia Cortes Garcia, Arjan Verweij, Sebastian Schöps
Title: Parallel-in-Time Integration of Transient Phenomena in No-Insulation Superconducting Coils Using Parareal
Abstract:
High-temperature superconductors (HTS) have the potential to enable magnetic fields beyond the current limits of low-temperature superconductors in applications like accelerator magnets. However, the design of HTS-based magnets requires computationally demanding transient multi-physics simulations with highly non-linear material properties. To reduce the solution time, we propose using Parareal (PR) for parallel-in-time magneto-thermal simulation of magnets based on HTS, particularly, no-insulation coils without turn-to-turn insulation. We propose extending the classical PR method to automatically find a time partitioning using a first coarse adaptive propagator. The proposed PR method is shown to reduce the computing time when fine engineering tolerances are required despite the highly nonlinear character of the problem. The full software stack used is open-source.
Authors:Hanqing Yang, Marie Siew, Carlee Joe-Wong
Title: An LLM-Based Digital Twin for Optimizing Human-in-the Loop Systems
Abstract:
The increasing prevalence of Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CPS-IoT) applications and Foundation Models are enabling new applications that leverage real-time control of the environment. For example, real-time control of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems can reduce its usage when not needed for the comfort of human occupants, hence reducing energy consumption. Collecting real-time feedback on human preferences in such human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems, however, is difficult in practice. We propose the use of large language models (LLMs) to deal with the challenges of dynamic environments and difficult-to-obtain data in CPS optimization. In this paper, we present a case study that employs LLM agents to mimic the behaviors and thermal preferences of various population groups (e.g. young families, the elderly) in a shopping mall. The aggregated thermal preferences are integrated into an agent-in-the-loop based reinforcement learning algorithm AitL-RL, which employs the LLM as a dynamic simulation of the physical environment to learn how to balance between energy savings and occupant comfort. Our results show that LLMs are capable of simulating complex population movements within large open spaces. Besides, AitL-RL demonstrates superior performance compared to the popular existing policy of set point control, suggesting that adaptive and personalized decision-making is critical for efficient optimization in CPS-IoT applications. Through this case study, we demonstrate the potential of integrating advanced Foundation Models like LLMs into CPS-IoT to enhance system adaptability and efficiency. The project's code can be found on our GitHub repository.
Authors:Taeheon Kim, Sangyun Chung, Damin Yeom, Youngjoon Yu, Hak Gu Kim, Yong Man Ro
Title: MSCoTDet: Language-driven Multi-modal Fusion for Improved Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
Multispectral pedestrian detection is attractive for around-the-clock applications due to the complementary information between RGB and thermal modalities. However, current models often fail to detect pedestrians in certain cases (e.g., thermal-obscured pedestrians), particularly due to the modality bias learned from statistically biased datasets. In this paper, we investigate how to mitigate modality bias in multispectral pedestrian detection using Large Language Models (LLMs). Accordingly, we design a Multispectral Chain-of-Thought (MSCoT) prompting strategy, which prompts the LLM to perform multispectral pedestrian detection. Moreover, we propose a novel Multispectral Chain-of-Thought Detection (MSCoTDet) framework that integrates MSCoT prompting into multispectral pedestrian detection. To this end, we design a Language-driven Multi-modal Fusion (LMF) strategy that enables fusing the outputs of MSCoT prompting with the detection results of vision-based multispectral pedestrian detection models. Extensive experiments validate that MSCoTDet effectively mitigates modality biases and improves multispectral pedestrian detection.
Authors:Jiacong Xu, Mingqian Liao, K Ram Prabhakar, Vishal M. Patel
Title: Leveraging Thermal Modality to Enhance Reconstruction in Low-Light Conditions
Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) accomplishes photo-realistic novel view synthesis by learning the implicit volumetric representation of a scene from multi-view images, which faithfully convey the colorimetric information. However, sensor noises will contaminate low-value pixel signals, and the lossy camera image signal processor will further remove near-zero intensities in extremely dark situations, deteriorating the synthesis performance. Existing approaches reconstruct low-light scenes from raw images but struggle to recover texture and boundary details in dark regions. Additionally, they are unsuitable for high-speed models relying on explicit representations. To address these issues, we present Thermal-NeRF, which takes thermal and visible raw images as inputs, considering the thermal camera is robust to the illumination variation and raw images preserve any possible clues in the dark, to accomplish visible and thermal view synthesis simultaneously. Also, the first multi-view thermal and visible dataset (MVTV) is established to support the research on multimodal NeRF. Thermal-NeRF achieves the best trade-off between detail preservation and noise smoothing and provides better synthesis performance than previous work. Finally, we demonstrate that both modalities are beneficial to each other in 3D reconstruction.
Authors:Taeheon Kim, Sebin Shin, Youngjoon Yu, Hak Gu Kim, Yong Man Ro
Title: Causal Mode Multiplexer: A Novel Framework for Unbiased Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
RGBT multispectral pedestrian detection has emerged as a promising solution for safety-critical applications that require day/night operations. However, the modality bias problem remains unsolved as multispectral pedestrian detectors learn the statistical bias in datasets. Specifically, datasets in multispectral pedestrian detection mainly distribute between ROTO (day) and RXTO (night) data; the majority of the pedestrian labels statistically co-occur with their thermal features. As a result, multispectral pedestrian detectors show poor generalization ability on examples beyond this statistical correlation, such as ROTX data. To address this problem, we propose a novel Causal Mode Multiplexer (CMM) framework that effectively learns the causalities between multispectral inputs and predictions. Moreover, we construct a new dataset (ROTX-MP) to evaluate modality bias in multispectral pedestrian detection. ROTX-MP mainly includes ROTX examples not presented in previous datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed CMM framework generalizes well on existing datasets (KAIST, CVC-14, FLIR) and the new ROTX-MP. We will release our new dataset to the public for future research.
Authors:Tianyi Zhao, Maoxun Yuan, Feng Jiang, Nan Wang, Xingxing Wei
Title: Removal then Selection: A Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Perspective for RGB-Infrared Object Detection
Abstract:
In recent years, object detection utilizing both visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (IR) imagery has garnered extensive attention and has been widely implemented across a diverse array of fields. By leveraging the complementary properties between RGB and IR images, the object detection task can achieve reliable and robust object localization across a variety of lighting conditions, from daytime to nighttime environments. Most existing multi-modal object detection methods directly input the RGB and IR images into deep neural networks, resulting in inferior detection performance. We believe that this issue arises not only from the challenges associated with effectively integrating multimodal information but also from the presence of redundant features in both the RGB and IR modalities. The redundant information of each modality will exacerbates the fusion imprecision problems during propagation. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the human brain's mechanism for processing multimodal information and propose a novel coarse-to-fine perspective to purify and fuse features from both modalities. Specifically, following this perspective, we design a Redundant Spectrum Removal module to remove interfering information within each modality coarsely and a Dynamic Feature Selection module to finely select the desired features for feature fusion. To verify the effectiveness of the coarse-to-fine fusion strategy, we construct a new object detector called the Removal then Selection Detector (RSDet). Extensive experiments on three RGB-IR object detection datasets verify the superior performance of our method.
Authors:Jialin Zheng, Zhengming Zhao, Han Xu, Weicheng Liu, Yangbin Zeng
Title: Accurate Time-segmented Loss Model for SiC MOSFETs in Electro-thermal Multi-Rate Simulation
Abstract:
Compared with silicon (Si) power devices, Silicon carbide (SiC) devices have the advantages of fast switching speed and low on-resistance. However, the effects of non-ideal characteristics of SiC MOSFETs and stray parameters (especially parasitic inductance) on switching losses need to be further evaluated. In this paper, a transient loss model based on SiC MOSFET and SiC Schottky barrier diode (SBD) switching pairs is proposed. The transient process analysis is simplified by time segmentation of the transient process of power switching devices. The electro-thermal simulation calculates the junction temperature and updates the temperature-related parameters with the proposed loss model and the thermal network model. A multi-rate data exchange strategy is proposed to solve the problem of disparity in timescales between circuit simulation and thermal network simulation. The CREE CMF20120D SiC MOSFET device is used for the experimental verification. The experimental results verify the accuracy of the model which provides guidance for the circuit design of SiC MOSFETs. All the parameters of the loss model can be extracted from the datasheet, which is practical in power electronics design.
Authors:Kieran Ricardo, Kenneth Duru, David Lee
Title: An entropy stable discontinuous Galerkin method for the spherical thermal shallow water equations
Abstract:
We present a novel discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for numerical simulations of the rotating thermal shallow water equations in complex geometries using curvilinear meshes, with arbitrary accuracy. We derive an entropy functional which is convex, and which must be preserved in order to preserve model stability at the discrete level. The numerical method is provably entropy stable and conserves mass, buoyancy, vorticity, and energy. This is achieved by using novel entropy stable numerical fluxes, summation-by-parts principle, and splitting the pressure and convection operators so that we can circumvent the use of chain rule at the discrete level. Numerical simulations on a cubed sphere mesh are presented to verify the theoretical results. The numerical experiments demonstrate the robustness of the method for a regime of well developed turbulence, where it can be run stably without any dissipation. The entropy stable fluxes are sufficient to control the grid scale noise generated by geostrophic turbulence, eliminating the need for artificial stabilisation.
Authors:Yi Xiao, Harshit Sharma, Zhongyang Zhang, Dessa Bergen-Cico, Tauhidur Rahman, Asif Salekin
Title: "Reading Between the Heat": Co-Teaching Body Thermal Signatures for Non-intrusive Stress Detection
Abstract:
Stress impacts our physical and mental health as well as our social life. A passive and contactless indoor stress monitoring system can unlock numerous important applications such as workplace productivity assessment, smart homes, and personalized mental health monitoring. While the thermal signatures from a user's body captured by a thermal camera can provide important information about the "fight-flight" response of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, relying solely on thermal imaging for training a stress prediction model often lead to overfitting and consequently a suboptimal performance. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing ThermaStrain, a novel co-teaching framework that achieves high-stress prediction performance by transferring knowledge from the wearable modality to the contactless thermal modality. During training, ThermaStrain incorporates a wearable electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor to generate stress-indicative representations from thermal videos, emulating stress-indicative representations from a wearable EDA sensor. During testing, only thermal sensing is used, and stress-indicative patterns from thermal data and emulated EDA representations are extracted to improve stress assessment. The study collected a comprehensive dataset with thermal video and EDA data under various stress conditions and distances. ThermaStrain achieves an F1 score of 0.8293 in binary stress classification, outperforming the thermal-only baseline approach by over 9%. Extensive evaluations highlight ThermaStrain's effectiveness in recognizing stress-indicative attributes, its adaptability across distances and stress scenarios, real-time executability on edge platforms, its applicability to multi-individual sensing, ability to function on limited visibility and unfamiliar conditions, and the advantages of its co-teaching approach.
Authors:Yutian Lei, Jun Liu, Dong Huang
Title: MAC: ModAlity Calibration for Object Detection
Abstract:
The flourishing success of Deep Neural Networks(DNNs) on RGB-input perception tasks has opened unbounded possibilities for non-RGB-input perception tasks, such as object detection from wireless signals, lidar scans, and infrared images. Compared to the matured development pipeline of RGB-input (source modality) models, developing non-RGB-input (target-modality) models from scratch poses excessive challenges in the modality-specific network design/training tricks and labor in the target-modality annotation. In this paper, we propose ModAlity Calibration (MAC), an efficient pipeline for calibrating target-modality inputs to the DNN object detection models developed on the RGB (source) modality. We compose a target-modality-input model by adding a small calibrator module ahead of a source-modality model and introduce MAC training techniques to impose dense supervision on the calibrator. By leveraging (1) prior knowledge synthesized from the source-modality model and (2) paired {target, source} data with zero manual annotations, our target-modality models reach comparable or better metrics than baseline models that require 100% manual annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MAC by composing the WiFi-input, Lidar-input, and Thermal-Infrared-input models upon the pre-trained RGB-input models respectively.
Authors:Erik Schnaubelt, Sina Atalay, Mariusz Wozniak, Julien Dular, Christophe Geuzaine, Benoît Vanderheyden, Nicolas Marsic, Arjan Verweij, Sebastian Schöps
Title: Magneto-Thermal Thin Shell Approximation for 3D Finite Element Analysis of No-Insulation Coils
Abstract:
For finite element (FE) analysis of no-insulation (NI) high-temperature superconducting (HTS) pancake coils, the high aspect ratio of the turn-to-turn contact layer (T2TCL) leads to meshing difficulties which result in either poor quality mesh elements resulting in a decrease of the solution accuracy or a high number of degrees of freedom. We proposed to mitigate this issue by collapsing the T2TCL volume into a surface and using a so-called thin shell approximation (TSA). Previously, two TSA have been introduced, one to solve the heat equation and the other for an $\vec{H}-ϕ$ magnetodynamic formulation. In this work, we propose to combine the magnetodynamic and thermal TSA to create a coupled magneto-thermal TSA for three-dimensional FE analysis. Particular attention is paid to the detailed derivation of the coupling terms. In the context of NI HTS pancake coils, the TSA represents the electric and thermal contact resistance of the T2TCL. For the HTS coated conductor (CC) itself, an anisotropic homogenization is used which represents its multi-layered structure. In axial and azimuthal direction, it resolves the current sharing between the HTS and other layers of the CC. The coupled TSA formulation is verified against a reference model with volumetric T2TCL. The coupled TSA is shown to significantly reduce the solution time as well as the manual effort required for high-quality meshes of the T2TCL. The implementation is open-source and a reference implementation is made publicly available.
Authors:Wenjie Xu, Bratislav Svetozarevic, Loris Di Natale, Philipp Heer, Colin N Jones
Title: Data-driven adaptive building thermal controller tuning with constraints: A primal-dual contextual Bayesian optimization approach
Abstract:
We study the problem of tuning the parameters of a room temperature controller to minimize its energy consumption, subject to the constraint that the daily cumulative thermal discomfort of the occupants is below a given threshold. We formulate it as an online constrained black-box optimization problem where, on each day, we observe some relevant environmental context and adaptively select the controller parameters. In this paper, we propose to use a data-driven Primal-Dual Contextual Bayesian Optimization (PDCBO) approach to solve this problem. In a simulation case study on a single room, we apply our algorithm to tune the parameters of a Proportional Integral (PI) heating controller and the pre-heating time. Our results show that PDCBO can save up to 4.7% energy consumption compared to other state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization-based methods while keeping the daily thermal discomfort below the given tolerable threshold on average. Additionally, PDCBO can automatically track time-varying tolerable thresholds while existing methods fail to do so. We then study an alternative constrained tuning problem where we aim to minimize the thermal discomfort with a given energy budget. With this formulation, PDCBO reduces the average discomfort by up to 63% compared to state-of-the-art safe optimization methods while keeping the average daily energy consumption below the required threshold.
Authors:Chi-Fang Chen, Hsin-Yuan Huang, John Preskill, Leo Zhou
Title: Local minima in quantum systems
Abstract:
Finding ground states of quantum many-body systems is known to be hard for both classical and quantum computers. As a result, when Nature cools a quantum system in a low-temperature thermal bath, the ground state cannot always be found efficiently. Instead, Nature finds a local minimum of the energy. In this work, we study the problem of finding local minima in quantum systems under thermal perturbations. While local minima are much easier to find than ground states, we show that finding a local minimum is computationally hard for classical computers, even when the task is to output a single-qubit observable at any local minimum. In contrast, we prove that a quantum computer can always find a local minimum efficiently using a thermal gradient descent algorithm that mimics the cooling process in Nature. To establish the classical hardness of finding local minima, we consider a family of two-dimensional Hamiltonians such that any problem solvable by polynomial-time quantum algorithms can be reduced to finding ground states of these Hamiltonians. We prove that for such Hamiltonians, all local minima are global minima. Therefore, assuming quantum computation is more powerful than classical computation, finding local minima is classically hard and quantumly easy.
Authors:Ngan Dao Hoang, Dat Tran-Anh, Manh Luong, Cong Tran, Cuong Pham
Title: Federated Few-shot Learning for Cough Classification with Edge Devices
Abstract:
Automatically classifying cough sounds is one of the most critical tasks for the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. However, collecting a huge amount of labeled cough dataset is challenging mainly due to high laborious expenses, data scarcity, and privacy concerns. In this work, our aim is to develop a framework that can effectively perform cough classification even in situations when enormous cough data is not available, while also addressing privacy concerns. Specifically, we formulate a new problem to tackle these challenges and adopt few-shot learning and federated learning to design a novel framework, termed F2LCough, for solving the newly formulated problem. We illustrate the superiority of our method compared with other approaches on COVID-19 Thermal Face & Cough dataset, in which F2LCough achieves an average F1-Score of 86%. Our results show the feasibility of few-shot learning combined with federated learning to build a classification model of cough sounds. This new methodology is able to classify cough sounds in data-scarce situations and maintain privacy properties. The outcomes of this work can be a fundamental framework for building support systems for the detection and diagnosis of cough-related diseases.
Authors:Prakitr Srisuma, George Barbastathis, Richard D. Braatz
Title: Mechanistic Modeling and Analysis of Thermal Radiation in Conventional, Microwave-assisted, and Hybrid Freeze Drying for Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing
Abstract:
In freeze drying, thermal radiation has a significant effect on the drying process of vials located near the corner and edge of the trays, resulting in non-uniformity of the products. Understanding and being able to predict the impact of thermal radiation are therefore critical to accurate determination of the drying process endpoint given the variation in heat transfer of each vial. This article presents a new mechanistic model that describes complex thermal radiation during primary drying in conventional, microwave-assisted, and hybrid freeze drying. Modeling of thermal radiation employs the diffuse gray surface model and radiation network approach, which systematically and accurately incorporates simultaneous radiation exchange between every surface including the chamber wall and vials, allowing the framework to be seamlessly applied for analyzing various freeze-dryer designs. Model validation with data from the literature shows accurate prediction of the drying times for all vials, including inner, edge, and corner vials. The validated model is demonstrated for thermal radiation analysis and parametric studies to guide the design and optimization of freeze dryers.
Authors:Erbin Qiu, Yuan-Hang Zhang, Massimiliano Di Ventra, Ivan K. Schuller
Title: Reconfigurable cascaded thermal neuristors for neuromorphic computing
Abstract:
While the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology is the mainstream for the hardware implementation of neural networks, we explore an alternative route based on a new class of spiking oscillators we call thermal neuristors, which operate and interact solely via thermal processes. Utilizing the insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide, we demonstrate a wide variety of reconfigurable electrical dynamics mirroring biological neurons. Notably, inhibitory functionality is achieved just in a single oxide device, and cascaded information flow is realized exclusively through thermal interactions. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms of the neuristors, a detailed theoretical model is developed, which accurately reflects the experimental results. This study establishes the foundation for scalable and energy-efficient thermal neural networks, fostering progress in brain-inspired computing.
Authors:Jiuhong Xiao, Daniel Tortei, Eloy Roura, Giuseppe Loianno
Title: Long-range UAV Thermal Geo-localization with Satellite Imagery
Abstract:
Onboard sensors, such as cameras and thermal sensors, have emerged as effective alternatives to Global Positioning System (GPS) for geo-localization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Since GPS can suffer from signal loss and spoofing problems, researchers have explored camera-based techniques such as Visual Geo-localization (VG) using satellite RGB imagery. Additionally, thermal geo-localization (TG) has become crucial for long-range UAV flights in low-illumination environments. This paper proposes a novel thermal geo-localization framework using satellite RGB imagery, which includes multiple domain adaptation methods to address the limited availability of paired thermal and satellite images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving reliable thermal geo-localization performance, even in thermal images with indistinct self-similar features. We evaluate our approach on real data collected onboard a UAV. We also release the code and \textit{Boson-nighttime}, a dataset of paired satellite-thermal and unpaired satellite images for thermal geo-localization with satellite imagery. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose a thermal geo-localization method using satellite RGB imagery in long-range flights.
Authors:Kieran Ricardo, David Lee, Kenneth Duru
Title: Entropy and energy conservation for thermal atmospheric dynamics using mixed compatible finite elements
Abstract:
Atmospheric systems incorporating thermal dynamics must be stable with respect to both energy and entropy. While energy conservation can be enforced via the preservation of the skew-symmetric structure of the Hamiltonian form of the equations of motion, entropy conservation is typically derived as an additional invariant of the Hamiltonian system, and satisfied via the exact preservation of the chain rule. This is particularly challenging since the function spaces used to represent the thermodynamic variables in compatible finite element discretisations are typically discontinuous at element boundaries. In the present work we negate this problem by constructing our equations of motion via weighted averages of skew-symmetric formulations using both flux form and material form advection of thermodynamic variables, which allow for the necessary cancellations required to conserve entropy without the chain rule. We show that such formulations allow for stable simulations of both the thermal shallow water and 3D compressible Euler equations on the sphere using mixed compatible finite elements without entropy damping.
Authors:Theodoros Trochatos, Anthony Etim, Jakub Szefer
Title: Security Evaluation of Thermal Covert-channels on SmartSSDs
Abstract:
Continued expansion of cloud computing offerings now includes SmartSSDs. A SmartSSD is a solid-state disk (SSD) augmented with an FPGA. Through public cloud providers, it is now possible to rent on-demand virtual machines enabled with SmartSSDs. Because of the FPGA component of the SmartSSD, cloud users who access the SmartSSD can instantiate custom circuits within the FPGA. This includes possibly malicious circuits for measurement of power and temperature. Normally, cloud users have no remote access to power and temperature data, but with SmartSSDs they could abuse the FPGA component to learn this information. This paper shows for the first time that heat generated by a cloud user accessing the SSD component of the SmartSSD and the resulting temperature increase, can be measured by a different cloud user accessing the FPGA component of the same SmartSSD by using the ring oscillators circuits to measure temperature. The thermal state remains elevated for a few minutes after the SSD is heated up and can be measured from the FPGA side by a subsequent user for up to a few minutes after the SSD heating is done. Further, in a future multi-tenant SmartSSD setting, the thermal changes can be measured in parallel if one user controls the SSD and the other the FPGA. Based on this temporal thermal state of the SmartSSD, a novel thermal communication channel is demonstrated for the first time.
Authors:Aniket Dashpute, Vishwanath Saragadam, Emma Alexander, Florian Willomitzer, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Oliver Cossairt
Title: Thermal Spread Functions (TSF): Physics-guided Material Classification
Abstract:
Robust and non-destructive material classification is a challenging but crucial first-step in numerous vision applications. We propose a physics-guided material classification framework that relies on thermal properties of the object. Our key observation is that the rate of heating and cooling of an object depends on the unique intrinsic properties of the material, namely the emissivity and diffusivity. We leverage this observation by gently heating the objects in the scene with a low-power laser for a fixed duration and then turning it off, while a thermal camera captures measurements during the heating and cooling process. We then take this spatial and temporal "thermal spread function" (TSF) to solve an inverse heat equation using the finite-differences approach, resulting in a spatially varying estimate of diffusivity and emissivity. These tuples are then used to train a classifier that produces a fine-grained material label at each spatial pixel. Our approach is extremely simple requiring only a small light source (low power laser) and a thermal camera, and produces robust classification results with 86% accuracy over 16 classes.
Authors:Shoukun Sun, Fei Xu, Lu Cai, Daniele Salvato, Fidelma Dilemma, Luca Capriotti, Min Xian, Tiankai Yao
Title: An Efficient Instance Segmentation Approach for Extracting Fission Gas Bubbles on U-10Zr Annular Fuel
Abstract:
U-10Zr-based nuclear fuel is pursued as a primary candidate for next-generation sodium-cooled fast reactors. However, more advanced characterization and analysis are needed to form a fundamental understating of the fuel performance, and make U-10Zr fuel qualify for commercial use. The movement of lanthanides across the fuel section from the hot fuel center to the cool cladding surface is one of the key factors to affect fuel performance. In the advanced annular U-10Zr fuel, the lanthanides present as fission gas bubbles. Due to a lack of annotated data, existing literature utilized a multiple-threshold method to separate the bubbles and calculate bubble statistics on an annular fuel. However, the multiple-threshold method cannot achieve robust performance on images with different qualities and contrasts, and cannot distinguish different bubbles. This paper proposes a hybrid framework for efficient bubble segmentation. We develop a bubble annotation tool and generate the first fission gas bubble dataset with more than 3000 bubbles from 24 images. A multi-task deep learning network integrating U-Net and ResNet is designed to accomplish instance-level bubble segmentation. Combining the segmentation results and image processing step achieves the best recall ratio of more than 90% with very limited annotated data. Our model shows outstanding improvement by comparing the previously proposed thresholding method. The proposed method has promising to generate a more accurate quantitative analysis of fission gas bubbles on U-10Zr annular fuels. The results will contribute to identifying the bubbles with lanthanides and finally build the relationship between the thermal gradation and lanthanides movements of U-10Zr annular fuels. Mover, the deep learning model is applicable to other similar material micro-structure segmentation tasks.
Authors:Luke Haliburton, Svenja Yvonne Schött, Linda Hirsch, Robin Welsch, Albrecht Schmidt
Title: Feeling the Temperature of the Room: Unobtrusive Thermal Display of Engagement during Group Communication
Abstract:
Thermal signals have been explored in HCI for emotion-elicitation and enhancing two-person communication, showing that temperature invokes social and emotional signals in individuals. Yet, extending these findings to group communication is missing. We investigated how thermal signals can be used to communicate group affective states in a hybrid meeting scenario to help people feel connected over a distance. We conducted a lab study (N=20 participants) and explored wrist-worn thermal feedback to communicate audience emotions. Our results show that thermal feedback is an effective method of conveying audience engagement without increasing workload and can help a presenter feel more in tune with the audience. We outline design implications for real-world wearable social thermal feedback systems for both virtual and in-person communication that support group affect communication and social connectedness. Thermal feedback has the potential to connect people across distances and facilitate more effective and dynamic communication in multiple contexts.
Authors:Simon Baeuerle, Marius Gebhardt, Jonas Barth, Andreas Steimer, Ralf Mikut
Title: Rapid Flow Behavior Modeling of Thermal Interface Materials Using Deep Neural Networks
Abstract:
Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs) are widely used in electronic packaging. Increasing power density and limited assembly space pose high demands on thermal management. Large cooling surfaces need to be covered efficiently. When joining the heatsink, previously dispensed TIM spreads over the cooling surface. Recommendations on the dispensing pattern exist only for simple surface geometries such as rectangles. For more complex geometries, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are used in combination with manual experiments. While CFD simulations offer a high accuracy, they involve simulation experts and are rather expensive to set up. We propose a lightweight heuristic to model the spreading behavior of TIM. We further speed up the calculation by training an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) on data from this model. This offers rapid computation times and further supplies gradient information. This ANN can not only be used to aid manual pattern design of TIM, but also enables an automated pattern optimization. We compare this approach against the state-of-the-art and use real product samples for validation.
Authors:Donato Francesco Falcone, Stephan Menzel, Tommaso Stecconi, Matteo Galetta, Antonio La Porta, Bert Jan Offrein, Valeria Bragaglia
Title: Analytical Modelling of the Transport in Analog Filamentary Conductive-Metal-Oxide/HfOx ReRAM Devices
Abstract:
The recent co-optimization of memristive technologies and programming algorithms enabled neural networks training with in-memory computing systems. In this context, novel analog filamentary conductive-metal-oxide (CMO)/HfOx redox-based resistive switching memory (ReRAM) represents a key technology. Despite device performance enhancements reported in literature, the underlying mechanism behind resistive switching is not fully understood. This work presents the first physics-based analytical model of the current transport and of the resistive switching in these devices. As a case study, analog TaOx/HfOx ReRAM devices are considered. The current transport is explained by a trap-to-trap tunneling process, and the resistive switching by a modulation of the defect density within the sub-band of the TaOx that behaves as electric field and temperature confinement layer. The local temperature and electric field distributions are derived from the solution of the electric and heat transport equations in a 3D finite element ReRAM model. The intermediate resistive states are described as a gradual modulation of the TaOx defect density, which results in a variation of its electrical conductivity. The drift-dynamics of ions during the resistive switching is analytically described, allowing the estimation of defect migration energies in the TaOx layer. Moreover, the role of the electro-thermal properties of the CMO layer is unveiled. The proposed analytical model accurately describes the experimental switching characteristic of analog TaOx/HfOx ReRAM devices, increasing the physical understanding and providing the equations necessary for circuit simulations incorporating this technology.
Authors:Alicia Tierz, Jad Mounayer, Beatriz Moya, Francisco Chinesta
Title: Variational Rank Reduction Autoencoders for Generative Thermal Design
Abstract:
Generative thermal design for complex geometries is fundamental in many areas of engineering, yet it faces two main challenges: the high computational cost of high-fidelity simulations and the limitations of conventional generative models. Approaches such as autoencoders (AEs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) often produce unstructured latent spaces with discontinuities, which restricts their capacity to explore designs and generate physically consistent solutions. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid framework that combines Variational Rank-Reduction Autoencoders (VRRAEs) with Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets). The VRRAE introduces a truncated SVD within the latent space, leading to continuous, interpretable, and well-structured representations that mitigate posterior collapse and improve geometric reconstruction. The DeepONet then exploits this compact latent encoding in its branch network, together with spatial coordinates in the trunk network, to predict temperature gradients efficiently and accurately. This hybrid approach not only enhances the quality of generated geometries and the accuracy of gradient prediction, but also provides a substantial advantage in inference efficiency compared to traditional numerical solvers. Overall, the study underscores the importance of structured latent representations for operator learning and highlights the potential of combining generative models and operator networks in thermal design and broader engineering applications.
Authors:Haoshuo Zhang, Yufei Bo, Meixia Tao
Title: ProMSC-MIS: Prompt-based Multimodal Semantic Communication for Multi-Spectral Image Segmentation
Abstract:
Multimodal semantic communication has great potential to enhance downstream task performance by integrating complementary information across modalities. This paper introduces ProMSC-MIS, a novel Prompt-based Multimodal Semantic Communication framework for Multi-Spectral Image Segmentation. It enables efficient task-oriented transmission of spatially aligned RGB and thermal images over band-limited channels. Our framework has two main design novelties. First, by leveraging prompt learning and contrastive learning, unimodal semantic encoders are pre-trained to learn diverse and complementary semantic representations by using features from one modality as prompts for another. Second, a semantic fusion module that combines cross-attention mechanism and squeeze-and-excitation (SE) networks is designed to effectively fuse cross-modal features. Experimental results demonstrate that ProMSC-MIS substantially outperforms conventional image transmission combined with state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Notably, it reduces the required channel bandwidth by 50%--70% at the same segmentation performance, while also decreasing the storage overhead and computational complexity by 26% and 37%, respectively. Ablation studies also validate the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training and semantic fusion strategies. Our scheme is highly suitable for applications such as autonomous driving and nighttime surveillance.
Authors:David Atienza, Kai Zhu, Darong Huang, Luis Costero
Title: A 20-Year Retrospective on Power and Thermal Modeling and Management
Abstract:
As processor performance advances, increasing power densities and complex thermal behaviors threaten both energy efficiency and system reliability. This survey covers more than two decades of research on power and thermal modeling and management in modern processors. We start by comparing analytical, regression-based, and neural network-based techniques for power estimation, then review thermal modeling methods, including finite element, finite difference, and data-driven approaches. Next, we categorize dynamic runtime management strategies that balance performance, power consumption, and reliability. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of emerging challenges and promising research directions.
Authors:N. Marrani, T. Hageman, E. Martínez-Pañeda
Title: A neural network machine-learning approach for characterising hydrogen trapping parameters from TDS experiments
Abstract:
The hydrogen trapping behaviour of metallic alloys is generally characterised using Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy (TDS). However, as an indirect method, extracting key parameters (trap binding energies and densities) remains a significant challenge. To address these limitations, this work introduces a machine learning-based scheme for parameter identification from TDS spectra. A multi-Neural Network (NN) model is developed and trained exclusively on synthetic data to predict trapping parameters directly from experimental data. The model comprises two multi-layer, fully connected, feed-forward NNs trained with backpropagation. The first network (classification model) predicts the number of distinct trap types. The second network (regression model) then predicts the corresponding trap densities and binding energies. The NN architectures, hyperparameters, and data pre-processing were optimised to minimise the amount of training data. The proposed model demonstrated strong predictive capabilities when applied to three tempered martensitic steels of different compositions. The code developed is freely provided.
Authors:Bin Xie, Congxuan Zhang, Fagan Wang, Peng Liu, Feng Lu, Zhen Chen, Weiming Hu
Title: CST Anti-UAV: A Thermal Infrared Benchmark for Tiny UAV Tracking in Complex Scenes
Abstract:
The widespread application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has raised serious public safety and privacy concerns, making UAV perception crucial for anti-UAV tasks. However, existing UAV tracking datasets predominantly feature conspicuous objects and lack diversity in scene complexity and attribute representation, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we present the CST Anti-UAV, a new thermal infrared dataset specifically designed for Single Object Tracking (SOT) in Complex Scenes with Tiny UAVs (CST). It contains 220 video sequences with over 240k high-quality bounding box annotations, highlighting two key properties: a significant number of tiny-sized UAV targets and the diverse and complex scenes. To the best of our knowledge, CST Anti-UAV is the first dataset to incorporate complete manual frame-level attribute annotations, enabling precise evaluations under varied challenges. To conduct an in-depth performance analysis for CST Anti-UAV, we evaluate 20 existing SOT methods on the proposed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that tracking tiny UAVs in complex environments remains a challenge, as the state-of-the-art method achieves only 35.92% state accuracy, much lower than the 67.69% observed on the Anti-UAV410 dataset. These findings underscore the limitations of existing benchmarks and the need for further advancements in UAV tracking research. The CST Anti-UAV benchmark is about to be publicly released, which not only fosters the development of more robust SOT methods but also drives innovation in anti-UAV systems.
Authors:Mouyang Cheng, Weiliang Luo, Hao Tang, Bowen Yu, Yongqiang Cheng, Weiwei Xie, Ju Li, Heather J. Kulik, Mingda Li
Title: Enhancing Materials Discovery with Valence Constrained Design in Generative Modeling
Abstract:
Diffusion-based deep generative models have emerged as powerful tools for inverse materials design. Yet, many existing approaches overlook essential chemical constraints such as oxidation state balance, which can lead to chemically invalid structures. Here we introduce CrysVCD (Crystal generator with Valence-Constrained Design), a modular framework that integrates chemical rules directly into the generative process. CrysVCD first employs a transformer-based elemental language model to generate valence-balanced compositions, followed by a diffusion model to generate crystal structures. The valence constraint enables orders-of-magnitude more efficient chemical valence checking, compared to pure data-driven approaches with post-screening. When fine-tuned on stability metrics, CrysVCD achieves 85% thermodynamic stability and 68% phonon stability. Moreover, CrysVCD supports conditional generation of functional materials, enabling discovery of candidates such as high thermal conductivity semiconductors and high-$κ$ dielectric compounds. Designed as a general-purpose plugin, CrysVCD can be integrated into diverse generative pipeline to promote chemical validity, offering a reliable, scientifically grounded path for materials discovery.
Authors:Imran Latif, Muhammad Ali Shafique, Hayat Ullah, Alex C. Newkirk, Xi Yu, Arslan Munir
Title: Cooling Matters: Benchmarking Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models on Liquid-Cooled Versus Air-Cooled H100 GPU Systems
Abstract:
The unprecedented growth in artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, recently dominated by large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), has intensified power and cooling demands in data centers. This study benchmarks LLMs and VLMs on two HGX nodes, each with 8x NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), using liquid and air cooling. Leveraging GPU Burn, Weights and Biases, and IPMItool, we collect detailed thermal, power, and computation data. Results show that the liquid-cooled systems maintain GPU temperatures between 41-50 degrees Celsius, while the air-cooled counterparts fluctuate between 54-72 degrees Celsius under load. This thermal stability of liquid-cooled systems yields 17 percent higher performance (54 TFLOPs per GPU vs. 46 TFLOPs per GPU), improved performance per watt, reduced energy overhead, and greater system efficiency than the air-cooled counterparts. These findings underscore the energy and sustainability benefits of liquid cooling, offering a compelling path forward for hyperscale data centers s
Authors:Mohammad Jahanbakht, Alex Olsen, Ross Marchant, Emilie Fillols, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Title: Advancements in Weed Mapping: A Systematic Review
Abstract:
Weed mapping plays a critical role in precision management by providing accurate and timely data on weed distribution, enabling targeted control and reduced herbicide use. This minimizes environmental impacts, supports sustainable land management, and improves outcomes across agricultural and natural environments. Recent advances in weed mapping leverage ground-vehicle Red Green Blue (RGB) cameras, satellite and drone-based remote sensing combined with sensors such as spectral, Near Infra-Red (NIR), and thermal cameras. The resulting data are processed using advanced techniques including big data analytics and machine learning, significantly improving the spatial and temporal resolution of weed maps and enabling site-specific management decisions. Despite a growing body of research in this domain, there is a lack of comprehensive literature reviews specifically focused on weed mapping. In particular, the absence of a structured analysis spanning the entire mapping pipeline, from data acquisition to processing techniques and mapping tools, limits progress in the field. This review addresses these gaps by systematically examining state-of-the-art methods in data acquisition (sensor and platform technologies), data processing (including annotation and modelling), and mapping techniques (such as spatiotemporal analysis and decision support tools). Following PRISMA guidelines, we critically evaluate and synthesize key findings from the literature to provide a holistic understanding of the weed mapping landscape. This review serves as a foundational reference to guide future research and support the development of efficient, scalable, and sustainable weed management systems.
Authors:Shruti Bansal, Wenshan Wang, Yifei Liu, Parv Maheshwari
Title: ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigation
Abstract:
Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.
Authors:Tingting Liu, Yuan Liu, Jinhui Tang, Liyin Yuan, Chengyu Liu, Chunlai Li, Xiubao Sui, Qian Chen
Title: MTSIC: Multi-stage Transformer-based GAN for Spectral Infrared Image Colorization
Abstract:
Thermal infrared (TIR) images, acquired through thermal radiation imaging, are unaffected by variations in lighting conditions and atmospheric haze. However, TIR images inherently lack color and texture information, limiting downstream tasks and potentially causing visual fatigue. Existing colorization methods primarily rely on single-band images with limited spectral information and insufficient feature extraction capabilities, which often result in image distortion and semantic ambiguity. In contrast, multiband infrared imagery provides richer spectral data, facilitating the preservation of finer details and enhancing semantic accuracy. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based framework designed to integrate spectral information to enhance the colorization of infrared images. The framework employs a multi-stage spectral self-attention Transformer network (MTSIC) as the generator. Each spectral feature is treated as a token for self-attention computation, and a multi-head self-attention mechanism forms a spatial-spectral attention residual block (SARB), achieving multi-band feature mapping and reducing semantic confusion. Multiple SARB units are integrated into a Transformer-based single-stage network (STformer), which uses a U-shaped architecture to extract contextual information, combined with multi-scale wavelet blocks (MSWB) to align semantic information in the spatial-frequency dual domain. Multiple STformer modules are cascaded to form MTSIC, progressively optimizing the reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional techniques and effectively enhances the visual quality of infrared images.
Authors:Tianci Miao, Qihang Zheng, Yangyang Hu, Xiaoyu Cheng, Jie Liang, Liang Chen, Aiying Guo, Jingjing Liu, Kailin Ren, Jianhua Zhang
Title: A Novel Thermal Network Model and Electro-Thermal Coupling Study for NSFETs and CFETs Considering Thermal Crosstalk
Abstract:
As the technology node continues to shrink, nanosheet field effect transistors (NSFETs) and complementary FETs (CFETs) become valid candidates for the 3nm and sub-nanometre nodes. However, due to the shrinking device size, self-heating and inter-device thermal crosstalk of NSFETs and CFETs become more severe. It is important to accurately calculate the self-heating and thermal crosstalk of devices and to study the electrical and thermal characteristics of logic gates, etc. In this work, a thermal network model considering the thermal crosstalk of neighboring devices is proposed, which can accurately calculate the self-heating and thermal crosstalk. The electrical and thermal characteristics of NSFETs and CFETs are compared, and it is found that CFETs have more severe self-heating and thermal crosstalk. The electro-thermal characteristics of inverters, logic gates and ring oscillators composed of NSFETs and CFETs are further investigated. Compared with NSFETs, logic gates and ring oscillators composed of CFETs are more seriously affected by self-heating and should be given extra attention. The thermal network model proposed in this paper can be further used to study the thermal optimization strategy of devices and circuits to enhance the electrical performance, achieving the design technology co-optimizations (DTCO).
Authors:Jiawen Li, Jiang Guo, Yuanzhe Li, Zetian Mao, Jiaxing Shen, Tashi Xu, Diptesh Das, Jinming He, Run Hu, Yaerim Lee, Koji Tsuda, Junichiro Shiomi
Title: Inverse Design of Metamaterials with Manufacturing-Guiding Spectrum-to-Structure Conditional Diffusion Model
Abstract:
Metamaterials are artificially engineered structures that manipulate electromagnetic waves, having optical properties absent in natural materials. Recently, machine learning for the inverse design of metamaterials has drawn attention. However, the highly nonlinear relationship between the metamaterial structures and optical behaviour, coupled with fabrication difficulties, poses challenges for using machine learning to design and manufacture complex metamaterials. Herein, we propose a general framework that implements customised spectrum-to-shape and size parameters to address one-to-many metamaterial inverse design problems using conditional diffusion models. Our method exhibits superior spectral prediction accuracy, generates a diverse range of patterns compared to other typical generative models, and offers valuable prior knowledge for manufacturing through the subsequent analysis of the diverse generated results, thereby facilitating the experimental fabrication of metamaterial designs. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by successfully designing and fabricating a free-form metamaterial with a tailored selective emission spectrum for thermal camouflage applications.
Authors:Piotr Białas, Piotr Korcyl, Tomasz Stebel, Dawid Zapolski
Title: Estimation of the reduced density matrix and entanglement entropies using autoregressive networks
Abstract:
We present an application of autoregressive neural networks to Monte Carlo simulations of quantum spin chains using the correspondence with classical two-dimensional spin systems. We use a hierarchy of neural networks capable of estimating conditional probabilities of consecutive spins to evaluate elements of reduced density matrices directly. Using the Ising chain as an example, we calculate the continuum limit of the ground state's von Neumann and Rényi bipartite entanglement entropies of an interval built of up to 5 spins. We demonstrate that our architecture is able to estimate all the needed matrix elements with just a single training for a fixed time discretization and lattice volume. Our method can be applied to other types of spin chains, possibly with defects, as well as to estimating entanglement entropies of thermal states at non-zero temperature.
Authors:Jiadong He, Liang Yu, Zhiqiang Chen, Dawei Qiu, Dong Yue, Goran Strbac, Meng Zhang, Yujian Ye, Yi Wang
Title: HMPC-assisted Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Smart Home Energy Management
Abstract:
This letter proposes an Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (AIRL)-based energy management method for a smart home, which incorporates an implicit thermal dynamics model. In the proposed method, historical optimal decisions are first generated using a neural network-assisted Hierarchical Model Predictive Control (HMPC) framework. These decisions are then used as expert demonstrations in the AIRL module, which aims to train a discriminator to distinguish expert demonstrations from transitions generated by a reinforcement learning agent policy, while simultaneously updating the agent policy that can produce transitions to confuse the discriminator. The proposed HMPC-AIRL method eliminates the need for explicit thermal dynamics models, prior or predictive knowledge of uncertain parameters, or manually designed reward functions. Simulation results based on real-world traces demonstrate the effectiveness and data efficiency of the proposed method.
Authors:Jitesh Joshi, Youngjun Cho
Title: Efficient and Robust Multidimensional Attention in Remote Physiological Sensing through Target Signal Constrained Factorization
Abstract:
Remote physiological sensing using camera-based technologies offers transformative potential for non-invasive vital sign monitoring across healthcare and human-computer interaction domains. Although deep learning approaches have advanced the extraction of physiological signals from video data, existing methods have not been sufficiently assessed for their robustness to domain shifts. These shifts in remote physiological sensing include variations in ambient conditions, camera specifications, head movements, facial poses, and physiological states which often impact real-world performance significantly. Cross-dataset evaluation provides an objective measure to assess generalization capabilities across these domain shifts. We introduce Target Signal Constrained Factorization module (TSFM), a novel multidimensional attention mechanism that explicitly incorporates physiological signal characteristics as factorization constraints, allowing more precise feature extraction. Building on this innovation, we present MMRPhys, an efficient dual-branch 3D-CNN architecture designed for simultaneous multitask estimation of photoplethysmography (rPPG) and respiratory (rRSP) signals from multimodal RGB and thermal video inputs. Through comprehensive cross-dataset evaluation on five benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that MMRPhys with TSFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generalization across domain shifts for rPPG and rRSP estimation, while maintaining a minimal inference latency suitable for real-time applications. Our approach establishes new benchmarks for robust multitask and multimodal physiological sensing and offers a computationally efficient framework for practical deployment in unconstrained environments. The web browser-based application featuring on-device real-time inference of MMRPhys model is available at https://physiologicailab.github.io/mmrphys-live
Authors:Lukas Schichler, Karin Festl, Selim Solmaz, Daniel Watzenig
Title: Thermal-LiDAR Fusion for Robust Tunnel Localization in GNSS-Denied and Low-Visibility Conditions
Abstract:
Despite significant progress in autonomous navigation, a critical gap remains in ensuring reliable localization in hazardous environments such as tunnels, urban disaster zones, and underground structures. Tunnels present a uniquely difficult scenario: they are not only prone to GNSS signal loss, but also provide little features for visual localization due to their repetitive walls and poor lighting. These conditions degrade conventional vision-based and LiDAR-based systems, which rely on distinguishable environmental features. To address this, we propose a novel sensor fusion framework that integrates a thermal camera with a LiDAR to enable robust localization in tunnels and other perceptually degraded environments. The thermal camera provides resilience in low-light or smoke conditions, while the LiDAR delivers precise depth perception and structural awareness. By combining these sensors, our framework ensures continuous and accurate localization across diverse and dynamic environments. We use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to fuse multi-sensor inputs, and leverages visual odometry and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) techniques to process the sensor data, enabling robust motion estimation and mapping even in GNSS-denied environments. This fusion of sensor modalities not only enhances system resilience but also provides a scalable solution for cyber-physical systems in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To validate the framework, we conduct tests in a tunnel environment, simulating sensor degradation and visibility challenges. The results demonstrate that our method sustains accurate localization where standard approaches deteriorate due to the tunnels featureless geometry. The frameworks versatility makes it a promising solution for autonomous vehicles, inspection robots, and other cyber-physical systems operating in constrained, perceptually poor environments.
Authors:Tarik Sahin, Jacopo Bonari, Sebastian Brandstaeter, Alexander Popp
Title: Data-Driven Surrogate Modeling Techniques to Predict the Effective Contact Area of Rough Surface Contact Problems
Abstract:
The effective contact area in rough surface contact plays a critical role in multi-physics phenomena such as wear, sealing, and thermal or electrical conduction. Although accurate numerical methods, like the Boundary Element Method (BEM), are available to compute this quantity, their high computational cost limits their applicability in multi-query contexts, such as uncertainty quantification, parameter identification, and multi-scale algorithms, where many repeated evaluations are required. This study proposes a surrogate modeling framework for predicting the effective contact area using fast-to-evaluate data-driven techniques. Various machine learning algorithms are trained on a precomputed dataset, where the inputs are the imposed load and statistical roughness parameters, and the output is the corresponding effective contact area. All models undergo hyperparameter optimization to enable fair comparisons in terms of predictive accuracy and computational efficiency, evaluated using established quantitative metrics. Among the models, the Kernel Ridge Regressor demonstrates the best trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, achieving high predictive accuracy, low prediction time, and minimal training overhead-making it a strong candidate for general-purpose surrogate modeling. The Gaussian Process Regressor provides an attractive alternative when uncertainty quantification is required, although it incurs additional computational cost due to variance estimation. The generalization capability of the Kernel Ridge model is validated on an unseen simulation scenario, confirming its ability to transfer to new configurations. Database generation constitutes the dominant cost in the surrogate modeling process. Nevertheless, the approach proves practical and efficient for multi-query tasks, even when accounting for this initial expense.
Authors:Alexander Winkler, Pranav Shah, Katrin Baumgärtner, Vasu Sharma, David Gordon, Jakob Andert
Title: Incorporating a Deep Neural Network into Moving Horizon Estimation for Embedded Thermal Torque Derating of an Electric Machine
Abstract:
This study presents a novel state estimation approach integrating Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) into Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE). This is a shift from using traditional physics-based models within MHE towards data-driven techniques. Specifically, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based DNN is trained using synthetic data derived from a high-fidelity thermal model of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM), applied within a thermal derating torque control strategy for battery electric vehicles. The trained DNN is directly embedded within an MHE formulation, forming a discrete-time nonlinear optimal control problem (OCP) solved via the acados optimization framework. Model-in-the-Loop simulations demonstrate accurate temperature estimation even under noisy sensor conditions and simulated sensor failures. Real-time implementation on embedded hardware confirms practical feasibility, achieving computational performance exceeding real-time requirements threefold. By integrating the learned LSTM-based dynamics directly into MHE, this work achieves state estimation accuracy, robustness, and adaptability while reducing modeling efforts and complexity. Overall, the results highlight the effectiveness of combining model-based and data-driven methods in safety-critical automotive control systems.
Authors:Qinqin Zhang, Xiaoyu Liang, Ning Xu, Yu Chen
Title: Fast Thermal-Aware Chiplet Placement Assisted by Surrogate
Abstract:
With the advent of the post-Moore era, the 2.5-D advanced package is a promising solution to sustain the development of very large-scale integrated circuits. However, the thermal placement of chiplet, due to the high complexity of thermal simulation, is very challenging. In this paper, a surrogate-assisted simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to simultaneously minimize both the wirelength and the maximum temperature of integrated chips. To alleviate the computational cost of thermal simulation, a radial basis function network is introduced to approximate the thermal field, assisted by which the simulated annealing algorithm converges to the better placement in less time. Numerical results demonstrate that the surrogate-assisted simulated annealing algorithm is competitive to the state-of-the-art thermal placement algorithms of chiplet, suggesting its potential application in the agile design of 2.5D package chip.
Authors:Stefano Riva, Andrea Missaglia, Carolina Introini, In Cheol Bang, Antonio Cammi
Title: A Comparison of Parametric Dynamic Mode Decomposition Algorithms for Thermal-Hydraulics Applications
Abstract:
In recent years, algorithms aiming at learning models from available data have become quite popular due to two factors: 1) the significant developments in Artificial Intelligence techniques and 2) the availability of large amounts of data. Nevertheless, this topic has already been addressed by methodologies belonging to the Reduced Order Modelling framework, of which perhaps the most famous equation-free technique is Dynamic Mode Decomposition. This algorithm aims to learn the best linear model that represents the physical phenomena described by a time series dataset: its output is a best state operator of the underlying dynamical system that can be used, in principle, to advance the original dataset in time even beyond its span. However, in its standard formulation, this technique cannot deal with parametric time series, meaning that a different linear model has to be derived for each parameter realization. Research on this is ongoing, and some versions of a parametric Dynamic Mode Decomposition already exist. This work contributes to this research field by comparing the different algorithms presently deployed and assessing their advantages and shortcomings compared to each other. To this aim, three different thermal-hydraulics problems are considered: two benchmark 'flow over cylinder' test cases at diverse Reynolds numbers, whose datasets are, respectively, obtained with the FEniCS finite element solver and retrieved from the CFDbench dataset, and the DYNASTY experimental facility operating at Politecnico di Milano, which studies the natural circulation established by internally heated fluids for Generation IV nuclear applications, whose dataset was generated using the RELAP5 nodal solver.
Authors:Jie Tian, Martin Taylor Sobczak, Dhanush Patil, Jixin Hou, Lin Pang, Arunachalam Ramanathan, Libin Yang, Xianyan Chen, Yuval Golan, Xiaoming Zhai, Hongyue Sun, Kenan Song, Xianqiao Wang
Title: A Multi-Agent Framework Integrating Large Language Models and Generative AI for Accelerated Metamaterial Design
Abstract:
Metamaterials, renowned for their exceptional mechanical, electromagnetic, and thermal properties, hold transformative potential across diverse applications, yet their design remains constrained by labor-intensive trial-and-error methods and limited data interoperability. Here, we introduce CrossMatAgent -- a novel multi-agent framework that synergistically integrates large language models with state-of-the-art generative AI to revolutionize metamaterial design. By orchestrating a hierarchical team of agents -- each specializing in tasks such as pattern analysis, architectural synthesis, prompt engineering, and supervisory feedback -- our system leverages the multimodal reasoning of GPT-4o alongside the generative precision of DALL-E 3 and a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion XL model. This integrated approach automates data augmentation, enhances design fidelity, and produces simulation- and 3D printing-ready metamaterial patterns. Comprehensive evaluations, including CLIP-based alignment, SHAP interpretability analyses, and mechanical simulations under varied load conditions, demonstrate the framework's ability to generate diverse, reproducible, and application-ready designs. CrossMatAgent thus establishes a scalable, AI-driven paradigm that bridges the gap between conceptual innovation and practical realization, paving the way for accelerated metamaterial development.
Authors:Yorick Estievenart, Sukanya Patra, Souhaib Ben Taieb
Title: Risk-Based Thresholding for Reliable Anomaly Detection in Concentrated Solar Power Plants
Abstract:
Efficient and reliable operation of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants is essential for meeting the growing demand for sustainable energy. However, high-temperature solar receivers face severe operational risks, such as freezing, deformation, and corrosion, resulting in costly downtime and maintenance. To monitor CSP plants, cameras mounted on solar receivers record infrared images at irregular intervals ranging from one to five minutes throughout the day. Anomalous images can be detected by thresholding an anomaly score, where the threshold is chosen to optimize metrics such as the F1-score on a validation set. This work proposes a framework, using risk control, for generating more reliable decision thresholds with finite-sample coverage guarantees on any chosen risk function. Our framework also incorporates an abstention mechanism, allowing high-risk predictions to be deferred to domain experts. Second, we propose a density forecasting method to estimate the likelihood of an observed image given a sequence of previously observed images, using this likelihood as its anomaly score. Third, we analyze the deployment results of our framework across multiple training scenarios over several months for two CSP plants. This analysis provides valuable insights to our industry partner for optimizing maintenance operations. Finally, given the confidential nature of our dataset, we provide an extended simulated dataset, leveraging recent advancements in generative modeling to create diverse thermal images that simulate multiple CSP plants. Our code is publicly available.
Authors:Stefano Riva, Carolina Introini, J. Nathan Kutz, Antonio Cammi
Title: Towards Efficient Parametric State Estimation in Circulating Fuel Reactors with Shallow Recurrent Decoder Networks
Abstract:
The recent developments in data-driven methods have paved the way to new methodologies to provide accurate state reconstruction of engineering systems; nuclear reactors represent particularly challenging applications for this task due to the complexity of the strongly coupled physics involved and the extremely harsh and hostile environments, especially for new technologies such as Generation-IV reactors. Data-driven techniques can combine different sources of information, including computational proxy models and local noisy measurements on the system, to robustly estimate the state. This work leverages the novel Shallow Recurrent Decoder architecture to infer the entire state vector (including neutron fluxes, precursors concentrations, temperature, pressure and velocity) of a reactor from three out-of-core time-series neutron flux measurements alone. In particular, this work extends the standard architecture to treat parametric time-series data, ensuring the possibility of investigating different accidental scenarios and showing the capabilities of this approach to provide an accurate state estimation in various operating conditions. This paper considers as a test case the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR), a Generation-IV reactor concept, characterised by strong coupling between the neutronics and the thermal hydraulics due to the liquid nature of the fuel. The promising results of this work are further strengthened by the possibility of quantifying the uncertainty associated with the state estimation, due to the considerably low training cost. The accurate reconstruction of every characteristic field in real-time makes this approach suitable for monitoring and control purposes in the framework of a reactor digital twin.
Authors:Isaac Corley, Conor Wallace, Sourav Agrawal, Burton Putrah, Jonathan Lwowski
Title: Aerial Infrared Health Monitoring of Solar Photovoltaic Farms at Scale
Abstract:
Solar photovoltaic (PV) farms represent a major source of global renewable energy generation, yet their true operational efficiency often remains unknown at scale. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, data-driven framework for large-scale airborne infrared inspection of North American solar installations. Leveraging high-resolution thermal imagery, we construct and curate a geographically diverse dataset encompassing thousands of PV sites, enabling machine learning-based detection and localization of defects that are not detectable in the visible spectrum. Our pipeline integrates advanced image processing, georeferencing, and airborne thermal infrared anomaly detection to provide rigorous estimates of performance losses. We highlight practical considerations in aerial data collection, annotation methodologies, and model deployment across a wide range of environmental and operational conditions. Our work delivers new insights into the reliability of large-scale solar assets and serves as a foundation for ongoing research on performance trends, predictive maintenance, and scalable analytics in the renewable energy sector.
Authors:Saeed Asadi, Mohsen Mohammadagha, Hajar Kazemi Naeini
Title: Comprehensive Review of Analytical and Numerical Approaches in Earth-to-Air Heat Exchangers and Exergoeconomic Evaluations
Abstract:
In recent decades, Earth-to-Air Heat Exchangers (EAHEs), also known as underground air ducts, have garnered significant attention for their ability to provide energy-efficient cooling and heating solutions while maintaining a minimal environmental footprint. These systems leverage the relatively stable underground temperature to regulate indoor climates, reducing reliance on conventional heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. This review systematically categorizes and synthesizes research on EAHEs into three primary areas: analytical, numerical, and exergoeconomic studies. Analytical approaches focus on developing theoretical models to predict thermal performance, while numerical simulations provide insights into system optimization and real-world applications. Exergoeconomic analyses, integrating thermodynamic efficiency with economic considerations, offer valuable perspectives on cost-effectiveness and long-term viability. By consolidating existing contributions across these domains, this study serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers, engineers, and policymakers seeking to enhance the design, implementation, and performance of EAHE systems. The findings emphasize the pivotal role of EAHEs in reducing energy consumption, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, and improving economic sustainability. Additionally, this review identifies key challenges, including soil thermal conductivity variations, moisture effects, and system integration with renewable energy sources, which require further investigation. By addressing these challenges, EAHEs can be further optimized to serve as a cornerstone in sustainable energy management, contributing to global efforts toward energy-efficient building solutions and climate change mitigation.
Authors:Sirui Li, Federica Bragone, Matthieu Barreau, Tor Laneryd, Kateryna Morozovska
Title: Optimal Sensor Placement in Power Transformers Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Abstract:
Our work aims at simulating and predicting the temperature conditions inside a power transformer using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). The predictions obtained are then used to determine the optimal placement for temperature sensors inside the transformer under the constraint of a limited number of sensors, enabling efficient performance monitoring. The method consists of combining PINNs with Mixed Integer Optimization Programming to obtain the optimal temperature reconstruction inside the transformer. First, we extend our PINN model for the thermal modeling of power transformers to solve the heat diffusion equation from 1D to 2D space. Finally, we construct an optimal sensor placement model inside the transformer that can be applied to problems in 1D and 2D.
Authors:Julian Bedei, Lucas Koch, Kevin Badalian, Alexander Winkler, Patrick Schaber, Jakob Andert
Title: Safe Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Engine Control
Abstract:
This work introduces a toolchain for applying Reinforcement Learning (RL), specifically the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm, in safety-critical real-world environments. As an exemplary application, transient load control is demonstrated on a single-cylinder internal combustion engine testbench in Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) mode, that offers high thermal efficiency and low emissions. However, HCCI poses challenges for traditional control methods due to its nonlinear, autoregressive, and stochastic nature. RL provides a viable solution, however, safety concerns, such as excessive pressure rise rates, must be addressed when applying to HCCI. A single unsuitable control input can severely damage the engine or cause misfiring and shut down. Additionally, operating limits are not known a priori and must be determined experimentally. To mitigate these risks, real-time safety monitoring based on the k-nearest neighbor algorithm is implemented, enabling safe interaction with the testbench. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated as the RL agent learns a control policy through interaction with the testbench. A root mean square error of 0.1374 bar is achieved for the indicated mean effective pressure, comparable to neural network-based controllers from the literature. The toolchain's flexibility is further demonstrated by adapting the agent's policy to increase ethanol energy shares, promoting renewable fuel use while maintaining safety. This RL approach addresses the longstanding challenge of applying RL to safety-critical real-world environments. The developed toolchain, with its adaptability and safety mechanisms, paves the way for future applicability of RL in engine testbenches and other safety-critical settings.
Authors:Yang Yang, Mingjiao Yan, Zongliang Zhang, Dengmiao Hao, Xuedong Chen, Weixiong Chen
Title: Steady-state and transient thermal stress analysis using a polygonal finite element method
Abstract:
This work develops a polygonal finite element method (PFEM) for the analysis of steady-state and transient thermal stresses in two dimensional continua. The method employs Wachspress rational basis functions to construct conforming interpolations over arbitrary convex polygonal meshes, providing enhanced geometric flexibility and accuracy in capturing complex boundary conditions and heterogeneous material behavior. A quadtree-based acceleration strategy is introduced to significantly reduce computational cost through the reuse of precomputed stiffness and mass matrices. The PFEM is implemented in ABAQUS via a user-defined element (UEL) framework. Comprehensive benchmark problems, including multi-scale and non-matching mesh scenarios, are conducted to verify the accuracy, convergence properties, and computational efficiency of the method. Results indicate that the proposed PFEM offers notable advantages over conventional FEM in terms of mesh adaptability, solution quality, and runtime performance. The method shows strong potential for large-scale simulations involving thermal-mechanical coupling, complex geometries, and multi-resolution modeling.
Authors:Felipe Galarce, Diego Rivera, Douglas Pacheco, Alfonso Caiazzo, Ernesto Castillo
Title: A fast food-freezing temperature estimation framework using optimally located sensors
Abstract:
This article presents and assesses a framework for estimating temperature fields in real time for food-freezing applications, significantly reducing computational load while ensuring accurate temperature monitoring, which represents a promising technological tool for optimizing and controlling food engineering processes. The strategy is based on (i) a mathematical model of a convection-dominated problem coupling thermal convection and turbulence, and (ii) a least-squares approach for solving the inverse data assimilation problem, regularized by projecting the governing dynamics onto a reduced-order model (ROM). The unsteady freezing process considers a salmon slice in a freezer cabinet, modeled with temperature-dependent thermophysical properties. The forward problem is approximated using a third-order WENO finite volume solver, including an optimized second-order backward scheme for time discretization. We employ our data assimilation framework to reconstruct the temperature field based on a limited number of sensors and to estimate temperature distributions within frozen food. Sensor placement is optimized using a novel greedy algorithm, which maximizes the observability of the reduced-order dynamics for a fixed set of sensors. The proposed approach allows efficient extrapolation from external sensor measurements to the internal temperature of the food under realistic turbulent flow conditions, which is crucial for maintaining food quality.
Authors:Armin Gooran-Shoorakchaly, Sarah Sharif, Yaser Banad
Title: Investigating the Effect of Electrical and Thermal Transport Properties on Oxide-Based Memristors Performance and Reliability
Abstract:
Achieving reliable resistive switching in oxide-based memristive devices requires precise control over conductive filament (CF) formation and behavior, yet the fundamental relationship between oxide material properties and switching uniformity remains incompletely understood. Here, we develop a comprehensive physical model to investigate how electrical and thermal conductivities influence CF dynamics in TaOx-based memristors. Our simulations reveal that higher electrical conductivity promotes oxygen vacancy generation and reduces forming voltage, while higher thermal conductivity enhances heat dissipation, leading to increased forming voltage. The uniformity of resistive switching is strongly dependent on the interplay between these transport properties. We identify two distinct pathways for achieving optimal High Resistance State (HRS) uniformity with standard deviation-to-mean ratios as low as 0.045, each governed by different balances of electrical and thermal transport mechanisms. For the Low Resistance State (LRS), high uniformity (0.009) can be maintained when either electrical or thermal conductivity is low. The resistance ratio between HRS and LRS shows a strong dependence on these conductivities, with higher ratios observed at lower conductivity values. These findings provide essential guidelines for material selection in RRAM devices, particularly for applications demanding high reliability and uniform switching characteristics.
Authors:Temitayo N. Adeyeye, Sidra Gibeault, Daniel P. Lathrop, Matthew W. Daniels, Mark D. Stiles, Jabez J. McClelland, William A. Borders, Jason T. Ryan, Philippe Talatchian, Ursula Ebels, Advait Madhavan
Title: Sampling from exponential distributions in the time domain with superparamagnetic tunnel junctions
Abstract:
In the superparamagnetic regime, magnetic tunnel junctions switch between two resistance states due to random thermal fluctuations. The dwell time distribution in each state is exponential. We sample this distribution using a temporal encoding scheme, in which information is encoded in the time at which the device switches between its resistance states. We then develop a circuit element known as a probabilistic delay cell that applies an electrical current step to a superparamagnetic tunnel junction and a temporal measurement circuit that measures the timing of the first switching event. Repeated experiments confirm that these times are exponentially distributed. Temporal processing methods then allow us to digitally compute with these exponentially distributed probabilistic delay cells. We describe how to use these circuits in a Metropolis-Hastings stepper and in a weighted random sampler, both of which are computationally intensive applications that benefit from the efficient generation of exponentially distributed random numbers.
Authors:Neil He, Ming-Cheng Cheng, Yu Liu
Title: PyPOD-GP: Using PyTorch for Accelerated Chip-Level Thermal Simulation of the GPU
Abstract:
The rising demand for high-performance computing (HPC) has made full-chip dynamic thermal simulation in many-core GPUs critical for optimizing performance and extending device lifespans. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with Galerkin projection (GP) has shown to offer high accuracy and massive runtime improvements over direct numerical simulation (DNS). However, previous implementations of POD-GP use MPI-based libraries like PETSc and FEniCS and face significant runtime bottlenecks. We propose a $\textbf{Py}$Torch-based $\textbf{POD-GP}$ library (PyPOD-GP), a GPU-optimized library for chip-level thermal simulation. PyPOD-GP achieves over $23.4\times$ speedup in training and over $10\times$ speedup in inference on a GPU with over 13,000 cores, with just $1.2\%$ error over the device layer.
Authors:Difei Zhang, Frank Schäfer, Julian Arnold
Title: Machine learning the Ising transition: A comparison between discriminative and generative approaches
Abstract:
The detection of phase transitions is a central task in many-body physics. To automate this process, the task can be phrased as a classification problem. Classification problems can be approached in two fundamentally distinct ways: through either a discriminative or a generative method. In general, it is unclear which of these two approaches is most suitable for a given problem. The choice is expected to depend on factors such as the availability of system knowledge, dataset size, desired accuracy, computational resources, and other considerations. In this work, we answer the question of how one should approach the solution of phase-classification problems by performing a numerical case study on the thermal phase transition in the classical two-dimensional square-lattice ferromagnetic Ising model.
Authors:Weiming Xu, Peng Zhang
Title: Steam Turbine Anomaly Detection: An Unsupervised Learning Approach Using Enhanced Long Short-Term Memory Variational Autoencoder
Abstract:
As core thermal power generation equipment, steam turbines incur significant expenses and adverse effects on operation when facing interruptions like downtime, maintenance, and damage. Accurate anomaly detection is the prerequisite for ensuring the safe and stable operation of steam turbines. However, challenges in steam turbine anomaly detection, including inherent anomalies, lack of temporal information analysis, and high-dimensional data complexity, limit the effectiveness of existing methods. To address these challenges, we proposed an Enhanced Long Short-Term Memory Variational Autoencoder using Deep Advanced Features and Gaussian Mixture Model (ELSTMVAE-DAF-GMM) for precise unsupervised anomaly detection in unlabeled datasets. Specifically, LSTMVAE, integrating LSTM with VAE, was used to project high-dimensional time-series data to a low-dimensional phase space. The Deep Autoencoder-Local Outlier Factor (DAE-LOF) sample selection mechanism was used to eliminate inherent anomalies during training, further improving the model's precision and reliability. The novel deep advanced features (DAF) hybridize latent embeddings and reconstruction discrepancies from the LSTMVAE model and provide a more comprehensive data representation within a continuous and structured phase space, significantly enhancing anomaly detection by synergizing temporal dynamics with data pattern variations. These DAF were incorporated into GMM to ensure robust and effective unsupervised anomaly detection. We utilized real operating data from industry steam turbines and conducted both comparison and ablation experiments, demonstrating superior anomaly detection outcomes characterized by high accuracy and minimal false alarm rates compared with existing methods.
Authors:Stefan Henneking, Jacob Grosek, Leszek Demkowicz
Title: A Vectorial Envelope Maxwell Formulation for Electromagnetic Waveguides with Application to Nonlinear Fiber Optics
Abstract:
This article presents an ultraweak discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) formulation of the time-harmonic Maxwell equations for the vectorial envelope of the electromagnetic field in a weakly-guiding multi-mode fiber waveguide. This formulation is derived using an envelope ansatz for the vector-valued electric and magnetic field components, factoring out an oscillatory term of $exp(-i \mathsf{k}z)$ with a user-defined wavenumber $\mathsf{k}$, where $z$ is the longitudinal fiber axis and field propagation direction. The resulting formulation is a modified system of the time-harmonic Maxwell equations for the vectorial envelope of the propagating field. This envelope is less oscillatory in the $z$-direction than the original field, so that it can be more efficiently discretized and computed, enabling solution of the vectorial DPG Maxwell system for $1000\times$ longer fibers than previously possible. Different approaches for incorporating a perfectly matched layer for absorbing the outgoing wave modes at the fiber end are derived and compared numerically. The resulting formulation is used to solve a 3D Maxwell model of an ytterbium-doped active gain fiber amplifier, coupled with the heat equation for including thermal effects. The nonlinear model is then used to simulate thermally-induced transverse mode instability (TMI). The numerical experiments demonstrate that it is computationally feasible to perform simulations and analysis of real-length optical fiber laser amplifiers using discretizations of the full vectorial time-harmonic Maxwell equations. The approach promises a new high-fidelity methodology for analyzing TMI in high-power fiber laser systems and is extendable to including other nonlinearities.
Authors:Aditya Kasliwal, Ishaan Gakhar, Aryan Kamani, Pratinav Seth, Ujjwal Verma
Title: LapGSR: Laplacian Reconstructive Network for Guided Thermal Super-Resolution
Abstract:
In the last few years, the fusion of multi-modal data has been widely studied for various applications such as robotics, gesture recognition, and autonomous navigation. Indeed, high-quality visual sensors are expensive, and consumer-grade sensors produce low-resolution images. Researchers have developed methods to combine RGB color images with non-visual data, such as thermal, to overcome this limitation to improve resolution. Fusing multiple modalities to produce visually appealing, high-resolution images often requires dense models with millions of parameters and a heavy computational load, which is commonly attributed to the intricate architecture of the model. We propose LapGSR, a multimodal, lightweight, generative model incorporating Laplacian image pyramids for guided thermal super-resolution. This approach uses a Laplacian Pyramid on RGB color images to extract vital edge information, which is then used to bypass heavy feature map computation in the higher layers of the model in tandem with a combined pixel and adversarial loss. LapGSR preserves the spatial and structural details of the image while also being efficient and compact. This results in a model with significantly fewer parameters than other SOTA models while demonstrating excellent results on two cross-domain datasets viz. ULB17-VT and VGTSR datasets.
Authors:Dongjun Li, Qiuhao Hu, Weiran Jiang, Haoxuan Dong, Ziyou Song
Title: Integrated Power and Thermal Management for Enhancing Energy Efficiency and Battery Life in Connected and Automated Electric Vehicles
Abstract:
Effective power and thermal management are essential for ensuring battery efficiency, safety, and longevity in Connected and Automated Electric Vehicles (CAEVs). However, real-time implementation is challenging due to the multi-timescale dynamics and complex trade-offs between energy consumption, battery degradation, traffic efficiency, and thermal regulation. This paper proposes a novel integrated power and thermal management strategy based on the Multi-Horizon Model Predictive Control (MH-MPC) framework to enhance energy efficiency, optimize battery temperature, ensure traffic safety and efficiency, and reduce battery degradation for CAEVs. The proposed strategy is formulated with a focus on the aging term, allowing it to more effectively manage the trade-offs between energy consumption, battery degradation, and temperature regulation. Moreover, the proposed strategy leverages multi-horizon optimization to achieve substantial improvements, reducing computation time by 7.18%, cooling energy by 14.22%, traction energy by 8.26%, battery degradation loss by over 22%, and battery degradation inconsistency by 36.57% compared to the benchmark strategy. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses of key parameters, including weighting factors, sampling time, and prediction horizons, demonstrate the robustness of the strategy and underscore its potential for practical applications in extending battery lifespan while ensuring safety and efficiency.
Authors:Takato Ito, Takeshi Tanabe, Shoichi Hasegawa, Naoto Ienaga, Yoshihiro Kuroda
Title: HeatFlicker: A Virtual Campfire System Utilizing Flickering Thermal Illusions by Asymmetric Vibrations
Abstract:
In recent years, thermal feedback has emerged as a significant sensory modality in virtual reality. However, the concept of conveying the sensation of thermal movement remains largely unexplored. We propose HeatFlicker, a virtual campfire device that recreates the flickering of fire by using a thermal illusion of moving heat identified in preliminary experiments. This device creates the illusion of heat moving from a fixed heat source. In our demonstration, we provide a novel thermal experience by simulating the flickering of a real fire.
Authors:Souta Mizuno, Jiayi Xu, Shoichi Hasegawa, Naoto Ienaga, Yoshihiro Kuroda
Title: DynaPain: Moving Flame Beetle with Dynamic Pain Illusion Adapting Apparent Movement to Thermal Grill Illusion
Abstract:
Pain sensation presentation with movable sensory position is important to imitate the pain caused by objects in motion and the pain corresponding to a person's movements. We aimed at proposing a novel dynamic pain sensation experience, called DynaPain. DynaPain was achieved by the non-contact thermal grill illusion and the apparent movement. The demonstration provided the dynamic heat and pain experience through interaction with a flame beetle moving on the arm.
Authors:Jiayi Xu, Kazuma Nakamura, Yoshihiro Kuroda, Masahiko Inami
Title: MoHeat: A Modular Platform for High-Responsive Non-Contact Thermal Feedback Interactions
Abstract:
MoHeat is a modular hardware and software platform designed for rapid prototyping of highly responsive, non-contact thermal feedback interactions. In our previous work, we developed an intensity-adjustable, highly responsive, non-contact thermal feedback system by integrating the vortex effect and thermal radiation. In this study, we further enhanced the system by developing an authoring tool that allows users to freely adjust the intensity of thermal stimuli, the duration of stimuli, the delay time before stimuli, and the interval between alternating hot and cold stimuli. This modular approach enables countless combinations of non-contact thermal feedback experiences.
Authors:Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Title: l0-Regularized Sparse Coding-based Interpretable Network for Multi-Modal Image Fusion
Abstract:
Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) enhances the information content of the fused image by combining the unique as well as common features obtained from different modality sensor images, improving visualization, object detection, and many more tasks. In this work, we introduce an interpretable network for the MMIF task, named FNet, based on an l0-regularized multi-modal convolutional sparse coding (MCSC) model. Specifically, for solving the l0-regularized CSC problem, we develop an algorithm unrolling-based l0-regularized sparse coding (LZSC) block. Given different modality source images, FNet first separates the unique and common features from them using the LZSC block and then these features are combined to generate the final fused image. Additionally, we propose an l0-regularized MCSC model for the inverse fusion process. Based on this model, we introduce an interpretable inverse fusion network named IFNet, which is utilized during FNet's training. Extensive experiments show that FNet achieves high-quality fusion results across five different MMIF tasks. Furthermore, we show that FNet enhances downstream object detection in visible-thermal image pairs. We have also visualized the intermediate results of FNet, which demonstrates the good interpretability of our network.
Authors:Luca Fehlings, Md Hanif Ali, Paolo Gibertini, Egidio A. Gallicchio, Udayan Ganguly, Veeresh Deshpande, Erika Covi
Title: Heracles: A HfO2 Ferroelectric Capacitor Compact Model for Efficient Circuit Simulations
Abstract:
The growing use of ferroelectric-based technology, extending beyond conventional memory storage applications, necessitates the development of compact models that can be easily integrated into circuit simulation environments. These models assist circuit designers in the design and the early assessment of the performance of their systems. The Heracles model is a physics-based compact model for circuit simulations in a SPICE environment for HfO2-based ferroelectric capacitors (FeCaps). The model has been calibrated based on experimental data obtained from HfO2-based FeCaps. A thermal model with an accurate description of the device parasitics is included to derive precise device characteristics based on first principles. The incorporation of statistical device data enables Monte Carlo analysis based on realistic distributions, thereby rendering the model particularly well-suited for design-technology co-optimization (DTCO). The model's efficacy is further demonstrated in circuit simulations using an integrated circuit with current programming, wherein partial switching of the ferroelectric polarization is observed. Finally, the model was benchmarked in an array simulation, reaching convergence in 1.8 s with an array size of 100 kb.
Authors:Stefano Riva, Carolina Introini, Antonio Cammi, J. Nathan Kutz
Title: Robust State Estimation from Partial Out-Core Measurements with Shallow Recurrent Decoder for Nuclear Reactors
Abstract:
Reliable, real-time state estimation in nuclear reactors is of critical importance for monitoring, control and safety. It further empowers the development of digital twins that are sufficiently accurate for real-world deployment. As nuclear engineering systems are typically characterised by extreme environments, their in-core sensing is a challenging task, even more so in Generation-IV reactor concepts, which feature molten salt or liquid metals as thermal carriers. The emergence of data-driven methods allows for new techniques for accurate and robust estimation of the full state space vector characterising the reactor (mainly composed by neutron fluxes and the thermal-hydraulics fields). These techniques can combine different sources of information, including computational proxy models and local noisy measurements on the system, in order to robustly estimate the state. This work leverages the Shallow Recurrent Decoder (SHRED) architecture to estimate the entire state vector of a reactor from three, out-of-core time-series neutron flux measurements alone. Specifically, the Molten Salt Fast Reactor, in the EVOL geometry (Evaluation and Viability of Liquid Fuel Fast Reactor System project), is demonstrated as a test case, with neutron flux measurements alone allowing for reconstruction of the 20 coupled field variables of the dynamics. This approach can further quantify the uncertainty associated with the state estimation due to its considerably low training cost on compressed data. The accurate reconstruction of every characteristic field in real-time makes this approach suitable for monitoring and control purposes in the framework of a reactor digital twin.
Authors:Paul Fergus, Carl Chalmers, Steve Longmore, Serge Wich
Title: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Wildlife Conservation
Abstract:
The rapid decline in global biodiversity demands innovative conservation strategies. This paper examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in wildlife conservation, focusing on the Conservation AI platform. Leveraging machine learning and computer vision, Conservation AI detects and classifies animals, humans, and poaching-related objects using visual spectrum and thermal infrared cameras. The platform processes this data with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer architectures to monitor species, including those which are critically endangered. Real-time detection provides the immediate responses required for time-critical situations (e.g. poaching), while non-real-time analysis supports long-term wildlife monitoring and habitat health assessment. Case studies from Europe, North America, Africa, and Southeast Asia highlight the platform's success in species identification, biodiversity monitoring, and poaching prevention. The paper also discusses challenges related to data quality, model accuracy, and logistical constraints, while outlining future directions involving technological advancements, expansion into new geographical regions, and deeper collaboration with local communities and policymakers. Conservation AI represents a significant step forward in addressing the urgent challenges of wildlife conservation, offering a scalable and adaptable solution that can be implemented globally.
Authors:Yosuke Ueno, Satoshi Imamura, Yuna Tomida, Teruo Tanimoto, Masamitsu Tanaka, Yutaka Tabuchi, Koji Inoue, Hiroshi Nakamura
Title: C3-VQA: Cryogenic Counter-based Co-processor for Variational Quantum Algorithms
Abstract:
Cryogenic quantum computers play a leading role in demonstrating quantum advantage. Given the severe constraints on the cooling capacity in cryogenic environments, thermal design is crucial for the scalability of these computers. The sources of heat dissipation include passive inflow via inter-temperature wires and the power consumption of components located in the cryostat, such as wire amplifiers and quantum-classical interfaces. Thus, a critical challenge is to reduce the number of wires by reducing the required inter-temperature bandwidth while maintaining minimal additional power consumption in the cryostat. One solution to address this challenge is near-data processing using ultra-low-power computational logic within the cryostat. Based on the workload analysis and domain-specific system design focused on Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs), we propose the Cryogenic Counter-based Co-processor for VQAs (C3-VQA) to enhance the design scalability of cryogenic quantum computers under the thermal constraint. The C3-VQA utilizes single-flux-quantum logic, which is an ultra-low-power superconducting digital circuit that operates at the 4 K environment. The C3-VQA precomputes a part of the expectation value calculations for VQAs and buffers intermediate values using simple bit operation units and counters in the cryostat, thereby reducing the required inter-temperature bandwidth with small additional power consumption. Consequently, the C3-VQA reduces the number of wires, leading to a reduction in the total heat dissipation in the cryostat. Our evaluation shows that the C3-VQA reduces the total heat dissipation at the 4 K stage by 30% and 81% under sequential-shot and parallel-shot execution scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, a case study in quantum chemistry shows that the C3-VQA reduces total heat dissipation by 87% with a 10,000-qubit system.
Authors:Rongfeng Lu, Hangyu Chen, Zunjie Zhu, Yuhang Qin, Ming Lu, Le Zhang, Chenggang Yan, Anke Xue
Title: ThermalGaussian: Thermal 3D Gaussian Splatting
Abstract:
Thermography is especially valuable for the military and other users of surveillance cameras. Some recent methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are proposed to reconstruct the thermal scenes in 3D from a set of thermal and RGB images. However, unlike NeRF, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) prevails due to its rapid training and real-time rendering. In this work, we propose ThermalGaussian, the first thermal 3DGS approach capable of rendering high-quality images in RGB and thermal modalities. We first calibrate the RGB camera and the thermal camera to ensure that both modalities are accurately aligned. Subsequently, we use the registered images to learn the multimodal 3D Gaussians. To prevent the overfitting of any single modality, we introduce several multimodal regularization constraints. We also develop smoothing constraints tailored to the physical characteristics of the thermal modality. Besides, we contribute a real-world dataset named RGBT-Scenes, captured by a hand-hold thermal-infrared camera, facilitating future research on thermal scene reconstruction. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that ThermalGaussian achieves photorealistic rendering of thermal images and improves the rendering quality of RGB images. With the proposed multimodal regularization constraints, we also reduced the model's storage cost by 90%. Our project page is at https://thermalgaussian.github.io/.
Authors:Jingwei Zhu, Olaf Wysocki, Christoph Holst, Thomas H. Kolbe
Title: Enriching thermal point clouds of buildings using semantic 3D building models
Abstract:
Thermal point clouds integrate thermal radiation and laser point clouds effectively. However, the semantic information for the interpretation of building thermal point clouds can hardly be precisely inferred. Transferring the semantics encapsulated in 3D building models at LoD3 has a potential to fill this gap. In this work, we propose a workflow enriching thermal point clouds with the geo-position and semantics of LoD3 building models, which utilizes features of both modalities: The proposed method can automatically co-register the point clouds from different sources and enrich the thermal point cloud in facade-detailed semantics. The enriched thermal point cloud supports thermal analysis and can facilitate the development of currently scarce deep learning models operating directly on thermal point clouds.
Authors:Yvette Y. Lin, Xin-Yi Pan, Sara Fridovich-Keil, Gordon Wetzstein
Title: ThermalNeRF: Thermal Radiance Fields
Abstract:
Thermal imaging has a variety of applications, from agricultural monitoring to building inspection to imaging under poor visibility, such as in low light, fog, and rain. However, reconstructing thermal scenes in 3D presents several challenges due to the comparatively lower resolution and limited features present in long-wave infrared (LWIR) images. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified framework for scene reconstruction from a set of LWIR and RGB images, using a multispectral radiance field to represent a scene viewed by both visible and infrared cameras, thus leveraging information across both spectra. We calibrate the RGB and infrared cameras with respect to each other, as a preprocessing step using a simple calibration target. We demonstrate our method on real-world sets of RGB and LWIR photographs captured from a handheld thermal camera, showing the effectiveness of our method at scene representation across the visible and infrared spectra. We show that our method is capable of thermal super-resolution, as well as visually removing obstacles to reveal objects that are occluded in either the RGB or thermal channels. Please see https://yvette256.github.io/thermalnerf for video results as well as our code and dataset release.
Authors:Kai Del Regno, Alexander Vilesov, Adnan Armouti, Anirudh Bindiganavale Harish, Selim Emir Can, Ashley Kita, Achuta Kadambi
Title: Thermal Imaging and Radar for Remote Sleep Monitoring of Breathing and Apnea
Abstract:
Polysomnography (PSG), the current gold standard method for monitoring and detecting sleep disorders, is cumbersome and costly. At-home testing solutions, known as home sleep apnea testing (HSAT), exist. However, they are contact-based, a feature which limits the ability of some patient populations to tolerate testing and discourages widespread deployment. Previous work on non-contact sleep monitoring for sleep apnea detection either estimates respiratory effort using radar or nasal airflow using a thermal camera, but has not compared the two or used them together. We conducted a study on 10 participants, ages 34 - 78, with suspected sleep disorders using a hardware setup with a synchronized radar and thermal camera. We show the first comparison of radar and thermal imaging for sleep monitoring, and find that our thermal imaging method outperforms radar significantly. Our thermal imaging method detects apneas with an accuracy of 0.99, a precision of 0.68, a recall of 0.74, an F1 score of 0.71, and an intra-class correlation of 0.70; our radar method detects apneas with an accuracy of 0.83, a precision of 0.13, a recall of 0.86, an F1 score of 0.22, and an intra-class correlation of 0.13. We also present a novel proposal for classifying obstructive and central sleep apnea by leveraging a multimodal setup. This method could be used accurately detect and classify apneas during sleep with non-contact sensors, thereby improving diagnostic capacities in patient populations unable to tolerate current technology.
Authors:Shuang Hao, Chunlin Zhong, He Tang
Title: CoLA: Conditional Dropout and Language-driven Robust Dual-modal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
The depth/thermal information is beneficial for detecting salient object with conventional RGB images. However, in dual-modal salient object detection (SOD) model, the robustness against noisy inputs and modality missing is crucial but rarely studied. To tackle this problem, we introduce \textbf{Co}nditional Dropout and \textbf{LA}nguage-driven(\textbf{CoLA}) framework comprising two core components. 1) Language-driven Quality Assessment (LQA): Leveraging a pretrained vision-language model with a prompt learner, the LQA recalibrates image contributions without requiring additional quality annotations. This approach effectively mitigates the impact of noisy inputs. 2) Conditional Dropout (CD): A learning method to strengthen the model's adaptability in scenarios with missing modalities, while preserving its performance under complete modalities. The CD serves as a plug-in training scheme that treats modality-missing as conditions, strengthening the overall robustness of various dual-modal SOD models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art dual-modal SOD models, under both modality-complete and modality-missing conditions. We will release source code upon acceptance.
Authors:Di Wang, Chengsong Hu, Shuangyu Xie, Joe Johnson, Hojun Ji, Yingtao Jiang, Muthukumar Bagavathiannan, Dezhen Song
Title: Toward Precise Robotic Weed Flaming Using a Mobile Manipulator with a Flamethrower
Abstract:
Robotic weed flaming is a new and environmentally friendly approach to weed removal in the agricultural field. Using a mobile manipulator equipped with a flamethrower, we design a new system and algorithm to enable effective weed flaming, which requires robotic manipulation with a soft and deformable end effector, as the thermal coverage of the flame is affected by dynamic or unknown environmental factors such as gravity, wind, atmospheric pressure, fuel tank pressure, and pose of the nozzle. System development includes overall design, hardware integration, and software pipeline. To enable precise weed removal, the greatest challenge is to detect and predict dynamic flame coverage in real time before motion planning, which is quite different from a conventional rigid gripper in grasping or a spray gun in painting. Based on the images from two onboard infrared cameras and the pose information of the flamethrower nozzle on a mobile manipulator, we propose a new dynamic flame coverage model. The flame model uses a center-arc curve with a Gaussian cross-section model to describe the flame coverage in real time. The experiments have demonstrated the working system and shown that our model and algorithm can achieve a mean average precision (mAP) of more than 76\% in the reprojected images during online prediction.
Authors:Russel Demos, Rashmi Dubey, Ricardo Ruiz-Baier, Segundo Villa-Fuentes
Title: Numerical analysis of a porous natural convection system with vorticity and viscous dissipation
Abstract:
In this paper we propose and analyse a new formulation and pointwise divergence-free mixed finite element methods for the numerical approximation of Darcy--Brinkman equations in vorticity--velocity--pressure form, coupled with a transport equation for thermal energy with viscous dissipative effect and mixed Navier-type boundary conditions. The solvability analysis of the continuous and discrete problems is significantly more involved than usual as it hinges on Banach spaces needed to properly control the advective and dissipative terms in the non-isothermal energy balance equation. We proceed by decoupling the set of equations and use the Banach fixed-point theorem in combination with the abstract theory for perturbed saddle-point problems. Some of the necessary estimates are straightforward modifications of well-known results, while other technical tools require a more elaborated analysis. The velocity is approximated by Raviart--Thomas elements, the vorticity uses Nédélec spaces of the first kind, the pressure is approximated by piecewise polynomials, and the temperature by continuous and piecewise polynomials of one degree higher than pressure. Special care is needed to establish discrete inf-sup conditions since the curl of the discrete vorticity is not necessarily contained in the discrete velocity space, therefore suggesting to use two different Raviart--Thomas interpolants. A discrete fixed-point argument is used to show well-posedness of the Galerkin scheme. Error estimates in appropriate norms are derived, and a few representative numerical examples in 2D and 3D and with mixed boundary conditions are provided.
Authors:Sukanya Patra, Nicolas Sournac, Souhaib Ben Taieb
Title: Detecting Abnormal Operations in Concentrated Solar Power Plants from Irregular Sequences of Thermal Images
Abstract:
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants store energy by heating a storage medium with an array of mirrors that focus sunlight onto solar receivers atop a central tower. Operating at high temperatures these receivers face risks such as freezing, deformation, and corrosion, leading to operational failures, downtime, or costly equipment damage. We study the problem of anomaly detection (AD) in sequences of thermal images collected over a year from an operational CSP plant. These images are captured at irregular intervals ranging from one to five minutes throughout the day by infrared cameras mounted on solar receivers. Our goal is to develop a method to extract useful representations from high-dimensional thermal images for AD. It should be able to handle temporal features of the data, which include irregularity, temporal dependency between images and non-stationarity due to a strong daily seasonal pattern. The co-occurrence of low-temperature anomalies that resemble normal images from the start and the end of the operational cycle with high-temperature anomalies poses an additional challenge. We first evaluate state-of-the-art deep image-based AD methods, which have been shown to be effective in deriving meaningful image representations for the detection of anomalies. Then, we introduce a forecasting-based AD method that predicts future thermal images from past sequences and timestamps via a deep sequence model. This method effectively captures specific temporal data features and distinguishes between difficult-to-detect temperature-based anomalies. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to multiple SOTA baselines across multiple evaluation metrics. We have also successfully deployed our solution on five months of unseen data, providing critical insights for the maintenance of the CSP plant. Our code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/ForecastAD
Authors:Rahul Kumar Padhy, Krishnan Suresh, Aaditya Chandrasekhar
Title: VoroTO: Multiscale Topology Optimization of Voronoi Structures using Surrogate Neural Networks
Abstract:
Cellular structures found in nature exhibit remarkable properties such as high strength, high energy absorption, excellent thermal/acoustic insulation, and fluid transfusion. Many of these structures are Voronoi-like; therefore researchers have proposed Voronoi multi-scale designs for a wide variety of engineering applications. However, designing such structures can be computationally prohibitive due to the multi-scale nature of the underlying analysis and optimization. In this work, we propose the use of a neural network (NN) to carry out efficient topology optimization (TO) of multi-scale Voronoi structures. The NN is first trained using Voronoi parameters (cell site locations, thickness, orientation, and anisotropy) to predict the homogenized constitutive properties. This network is then integrated into a conventional TO framework to minimize structural compliance subject to a volume constraint. Special considerations are given for ensuring positive definiteness of the constitutive matrix and promoting macroscale connectivity. Several numerical examples are provided to showcase the proposed method.
Authors:Anthony Dowling, Ming-Cheng Cheng, Yu Liu
Title: Improving TAS Adaptability with a Variable Temperature Threshold
Abstract:
Thermal-Aware Scheduling (TAS) provides methods to manage the thermal dissipation of a computing chip during task execution. These methods aim to avoid issues such as accelerated aging of the device, premature failure and degraded chip performance. In this work, we implement a new TAS algorithm, VTF-TAS, which makes use of a variable temperature threshold to control task execution and thermal dissipation. To enable adequate execution of the tasks to reach their deadlines, this threshold is managed based on the theory of fluid scheduling. Using an evaluation methodology as described in POD-TAS, we evaluate VTF-TAS using a set of 4 benchmarks from the COMBS benchmark suite to examine its ability to minimize chip temperature throughout schedule execution. Through our evaluation, we demonstrate that this new algorithm is able to adaptively manage the temperature threshold such that the peak temperature during schedule execution is lower than POD-TAS, with no requirement for an expensive search procedure to obtain an optimal threshold for scheduling.
Authors:Lin Jian, Yu Liu, Ming-Cheng Cheng
Title: Predicting Accurate Hot Spots in a More Than Ten-Thousand-Core GPU with a Million-Time Speedup over FEM Enabled by a Physics-based Learning Algorithm
Abstract:
The classical proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with the Galerkin projection (GP) has been revised for chip-level thermal simulation of microprocessors with a large number of cores. An ensemble POD-GP methodology (EnPOD-GP) is introduced to significantly improve the training effectiveness and prediction accuracy by dividing a large number of heat sources into heat source blocks (HSBs) each of which may contains one or a very small number of heat sources. Although very accurate, efficient and robust to any power map, EnPOD-GP suffers from intensive training for microprocessors with an enormous number of cores. A local-domain EnPOD-GP model (LEnPOD-GP) is thus proposed to further minimize the training burden. LEnPOD-GP utilizes the concepts of local domain truncation and generic building blocks to reduce the massive training data. LEnPOD-GP has been demonstrated on thermal simulation of NVIDIA Tesla Volta GV100, a GPU with more than 13,000 cores including FP32, FP64, INT32, and Tensor Cores. Due to the domain truncation for LEnPOD-GP, the least square error (LSE) is degraded but is still as small as 1.6% over the entire space and below 1.4% in the device layer when using 4 modes per HSB. When only the maximum temperature of the entire GPU is of interest, LEnPOD-GP offers a computing speed 1.1 million times faster than the FEM with a maximum error near 1.2 degrees over the entire simulation time.
Authors:Hossein Rajoli, Sahand Khoshdel, Fatemeh Afghah, Xiaolong Ma
Title: FlameFinder: Illuminating Obscured Fire through Smoke with Attentive Deep Metric Learning
Abstract:
FlameFinder is a deep metric learning (DML) framework designed to accurately detect flames, even when obscured by smoke, using thermal images from firefighter drones during wildfire monitoring. Traditional RGB cameras struggle in such conditions, but thermal cameras can capture smoke-obscured flame features. However, they lack absolute thermal reference points, leading to false positives.To address this issue, FlameFinder utilizes paired thermal-RGB images for training. By learning latent flame features from smoke-free samples, the model becomes less biased towards relative thermal gradients. In testing, it identifies flames in smoky patches by analyzing their equivalent thermal-domain distribution. This method improves performance using both supervised and distance-based clustering metrics.The framework incorporates a flame segmentation method and a DML-aided detection framework. This includes utilizing center loss (CL), triplet center loss (TCL), and triplet cosine center loss (TCCL) to identify optimal cluster representatives for classification. However, the dominance of center loss over the other losses leads to the model missing features sensitive to them. To address this limitation, an attention mechanism is proposed. This mechanism allows for non-uniform feature contribution, amplifying the critical role of cosine and triplet loss in the DML framework. Additionally, it improves interpretability, class discrimination, and decreases intra-class variance. As a result, the proposed model surpasses the baseline by 4.4% in the FLAME2 dataset and 7% in the FLAME3 dataset for unobscured flame detection accuracy. Moreover, it demonstrates enhanced class separation in obscured scenarios compared to VGG19, ResNet18, and three backbone models tailored for flame detection.
Authors:Ninad Gaikwad, Shishir Lamichhane, Anamika Dubey
Title: Model Predictive Control based Energy Management System for Home Energy Resiliency
Abstract:
As the occurrence of extreme weather events is increasing so are the outages caused by them. During such unplanned outages, a house needs to be provided with an energy supply to maintain habitable conditions by maintaining thermal comfort and servicing at least critical loads. An energy system consisting of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels along with battery storage is an excellent carbon-free choice to provide energy resiliency to houses against extreme weather-related outages. However, to provide habitable conditions this energy system has to provide not only for the non-air-conditioning (non-AC) load demand but also for the turning on of the AC system which has a considerably higher startup power requirement as compared to its rated power. Hence, an intelligent automated decision-making controller is needed which can manage the trade-off between competing requirements. In this paper, we propose such an intelligent controller based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). We compare its performance with a Baseline controller which is unintelligent, and a Rule-Based controller which has some intelligence, based on three resiliency metrics that we have developed. We perform extensive simulations for numerous scenarios involving different energy system sizes and AC startup power requirements. Every simulation is one week long and is carried out for a single-family detached house located in Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in 2017. The simulation results show that the MPC controller performs better than the other controllers in the more energy-constrained scenarios (smaller PV-battery size, larger AC startup power requirement) in providing both thermal comfort and servicing non-AC loads in a balanced manner.
Authors:Sanghyun Woo, Kwanyong Park, Inkyu Shin, Myungchul Kim, In So Kweon
Title: MTMMC: A Large-Scale Real-World Multi-Modal Camera Tracking Benchmark
Abstract:
Multi-target multi-camera tracking is a crucial task that involves identifying and tracking individuals over time using video streams from multiple cameras. This task has practical applications in various fields, such as visual surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, and anomaly detection. However, due to the difficulty and cost of collecting and labeling data, existing datasets for this task are either synthetically generated or artificially constructed within a controlled camera network setting, which limits their ability to model real-world dynamics and generalize to diverse camera configurations. To address this issue, we present MTMMC, a real-world, large-scale dataset that includes long video sequences captured by 16 multi-modal cameras in two different environments - campus and factory - across various time, weather, and season conditions. This dataset provides a challenging test-bed for studying multi-camera tracking under diverse real-world complexities and includes an additional input modality of spatially aligned and temporally synchronized RGB and thermal cameras, which enhances the accuracy of multi-camera tracking. MTMMC is a super-set of existing datasets, benefiting independent fields such as person detection, re-identification, and multiple object tracking. We provide baselines and new learning setups on this dataset and set the reference scores for future studies. The datasets, models, and test server will be made publicly available.
Authors:Elio Faddoul, Yuan Guo, Christodoulos Skouroumounis, Ioannis Krikidis
Title: A Novel Temperature-based Model for SWIPT
Abstract:
In this letter, a novel communication paradigm for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is proposed, which leverages the thermal characteristics of electromagnetic signals. In particular, the proposed scheme exploits the inherent thermal dynamics of electromagnetic signals, enabling the seamless integration of information decoding and energy harvesting (EH). As a consequence, in contrast to conventional SWIPT techniques, the proposed model eliminates the need to divide the received signal into orthogonal components. By exploiting the thermal correlation between consecutive time slots, the communication channel is converted to a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with memory. We evaluate the achievable rate of the proposed temperature-modulated channel for uniform and exponential input distributions and assess its performance in terms of harvested energy through a non-linear harvesting model. Our numerical results reveal that the exponential distribution outperforms the uniform distribution in rate and harvested energy at low input power levels, while the uniform distribution achieves a better EH performance at high input power levels.
Authors:Fangqiang Ding, Yunzhou Zhu, Xiangyu Wen, Gaowen Liu, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Title: ThermoHands: A Benchmark for 3D Hand Pose Estimation from Egocentric Thermal Images
Abstract:
Designing egocentric 3D hand pose estimation systems that can perform reliably in complex, real-world scenarios is crucial for downstream applications. Previous approaches using RGB or NIR imagery struggle in challenging conditions: RGB methods are susceptible to lighting variations and obstructions like handwear, while NIR techniques can be disrupted by sunlight or interference from other NIR-equipped devices. To address these limitations, we present ThermoHands, the first benchmark focused on thermal image-based egocentric 3D hand pose estimation, demonstrating the potential of thermal imaging to achieve robust performance under these conditions. The benchmark includes a multi-view and multi-spectral dataset collected from 28 subjects performing hand-object and hand-virtual interactions under diverse scenarios, accurately annotated with 3D hand poses through an automated process. We introduce a new baseline method, TherFormer, utilizing dual transformer modules for effective egocentric 3D hand pose estimation in thermal imagery. Our experimental results highlight TherFormer's leading performance and affirm thermal imaging's effectiveness in enabling robust 3D hand pose estimation in adverse conditions.
Authors:Zhenming Yu, Stephan Menzel, John Paul Strachan, Emre Neftci
Title: Integration of Physics-Derived Memristor Models with Machine Learning Frameworks
Abstract:
Simulation frameworks such MemTorch, DNN+NeuroSim, and aihwkit are commonly used to facilitate the end-to-end co-design of memristive machine learning (ML) accelerators. These simulators can take device nonidealities into account and are integrated with modern ML frameworks. However, memristors in these simulators are modeled with either lookup tables or simple analytic models with basic nonlinearities. These simple models are unable to capture certain performance-critical aspects of device nonidealities. For example, they ignore the physical cause of switching, which induces errors in switching timings and thus incorrect estimations of conductance states. This work aims at bringing physical dynamics into consideration to model nonidealities while being compatible with GPU accelerators. We focus on Valence Change Memory (VCM) cells, where the switching nonlinearity and SET/RESET asymmetry relate tightly with the thermal resistance, ion mobility, Schottky barrier height, parasitic resistance, and other effects. The resulting dynamics require solving an ODE that captures changes in oxygen vacancies. We modified a physics-derived SPICE-level VCM model, integrated it with the aihwkit simulator and tested the performance with the MNIST dataset. Results show that noise that disrupts the SET/RESET matching affects network performance the most. This work serves as a tool for evaluating how physical dynamics in memristive devices affect neural network accuracy and can be used to guide the development of future integrated devices.
Authors:David Lee, Alberto F. Martín, Kieran Ricardo
Title: Helmholtz preconditioning for the compressible Euler equations using mixed finite elements with Lorenz staggering
Abstract:
Implicit solvers for atmospheric models are often accelerated via the solution of a preconditioned system. For block preconditioners this typically involves the factorisation of the (approximate) Jacobian resulting from linearization of the coupled system into a Helmholtz equation for some function of the pressure. Here we present a preconditioner for the compressible Euler equations with a flux form representation of the potential temperature on the Lorenz grid using mixed finite elements. This formulation allows for spatial discretisations that conserve both energy and potential temperature variance. By introducing the dry thermodynamic entropy as an auxiliary variable for the solution of the algebraic system, the resulting preconditioner is shown to have a similar block structure to an existing preconditioner for the material form transport of potential temperature on the Charney-Phillips grid. This new formulation is also shown to be more efficient and stable than both the material form transport of potential temperature on the Charney-Phillips grid, and a previous Helmholtz preconditioner for the flux form transport of density weighted potential temperature on the Lorenz grid for a 1D thermal bubble configuration. The new preconditioner is further verified against standard two dimensional test cases in a vertical slice geometry.
Authors:Hossein Rajoli, Pouya Afshin, Fatemeh Afghah
Title: Thermal Image Calibration and Correction using Unpaired Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a flexible and cost-effective solution for wildfire monitoring. However, their widespread deployment during wildfires has been hindered by a lack of operational guidelines and concerns about potential interference with aircraft systems. Consequently, the progress in developing deep-learning models for wildfire detection and characterization using aerial images is constrained by the limited availability, size, and quality of existing datasets. This paper introduces a solution aimed at enhancing the quality of current aerial wildfire datasets to align with advancements in camera technology. The proposed approach offers a solution to create a comprehensive, standardized large-scale image dataset. This paper presents a pipeline based on CycleGAN to enhance wildfire datasets and a novel fusion method that integrates paired RGB images as attribute conditioning in the generators of both directions, improving the accuracy of the generated images.
Authors:Tommaso Buvoli, Ben S. Southworth
Title: A New Class of Runge-Kutta Methods for Nonlinearly Partitioned Systems
Abstract:
This work introduces a new class of Runge-Kutta methods for solving nonlinearly partitioned initial value problems. These new methods, named nonlinearly partitioned Runge-Kutta (NPRK), generalize existing additive and component-partitioned Runge-Kutta methods, and allow one to distribute different types of implicitness within nonlinear terms. The paper introduces the NPRK framework and discusses order conditions, linear stability, and the derivation of implicit-explicit and implicit-implicit NPRK integrators. The paper concludes with numerical experiments that demonstrate the utility of NPRK methods for solving viscous Burger's and the gray thermal radiation transport equations.
Authors:Ben S. Southworth, Samuel S. Olivier, HyeongKae Park, Tommaso Buvoli
Title: One-sweep moment-based semi-implicit-explicit integration for gray thermal radiation transport
Abstract:
Thermal radiation transport (TRT) is a time dependent, high dimensional partial integro-differential equation. In practical applications such as inertial confinement fusion, TRT is coupled to other physics such as hydrodynamics, plasmas, etc., and the timescales one is interested in capturing are often much slower than the radiation timescale. As a result, TRT is treated implicitly, and due to its stiffness and high dimensionality, is often a dominant computational cost in multiphysics simulations. Here we develop a new approach for implicit-explicit (IMEX) integration of gray TRT in the deterministic S$_N$ setting, which requires only one sweep per stage, with the simplest first-order method requiring only one sweep per time step. The partitioning of equations is done via a moment-based high-order low-order formulation of TRT, where the streaming operator and first two moments are used to capture the asymptotic stiff regimes of the streaming limit and diffusion limit. Absorption-reemission is treated explicitly, and although stiff, is sufficiently damped by the implicit solve that we achieve stable accurate time integration without incorporating the coupling of the high order and low order equations implicitly. Due to nonlinear coupling of the high-order and low-order equations through temperature-dependent opacities, to facilitate IMEX partitioning and higher-order methods, we use a semi-implicit integration approach amenable to nonlinear partitions. Results are demonstrated on thick Marshak and crooked pipe benchmark problems, demonstrating orders of magnitude improvement in accuracy and wallclock compared with the standard first-order implicit integration typically used.
Authors:Shahed Rezaei, Ahmad Moeineddin, Michael Kaliske, Markus Apel
Title: Integration of physics-informed operator learning and finite element method for parametric learning of partial differential equations
Abstract:
We present a method that employs physics-informed deep learning techniques for parametrically solving partial differential equations. The focus is on the steady-state heat equations within heterogeneous solids exhibiting significant phase contrast. Similar equations manifest in diverse applications like chemical diffusion, electrostatics, and Darcy flow. The neural network aims to establish the link between the complex thermal conductivity profiles and temperature distributions, as well as heat flux components within the microstructure, under fixed boundary conditions. A distinctive aspect is our independence from classical solvers like finite element methods for data. A noteworthy contribution lies in our novel approach to defining the loss function, based on the discretized weak form of the governing equation. This not only reduces the required order of derivatives but also eliminates the need for automatic differentiation in the construction of loss terms, accepting potential numerical errors from the chosen discretization method. As a result, the loss function in this work is an algebraic equation that significantly enhances training efficiency. We benchmark our methodology against the standard finite element method, demonstrating accurate yet faster predictions using the trained neural network for temperature and flux profiles. We also show higher accuracy by using the proposed method compared to purely data-driven approaches for unforeseen scenarios.
Authors:Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Title: LATIS: Lambda Abstraction-based Thermal Image Super-resolution
Abstract:
Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an effective technique to improve the quality of low-resolution thermal images. Recently, transformer-based methods have achieved significant performance in SISR. However, in the SR task, only a small number of pixels are involved in the transformers self-attention (SA) mechanism due to the computational complexity of the attention mechanism. The lambda abstraction is a promising alternative to SA in modeling long-range interactions while being computationally more efficient. This paper presents lambda abstraction-based thermal image super-resolution (LATIS), a novel lightweight architecture for SISR of thermal images. LATIS sequentially captures local and global information using the local and global feature block (LGFB). In LGFB, we introduce a global feature extraction (GFE) module based on the lambda abstraction mechanism, channel-shuffle and convolution (CSConv) layer to encode local context. Besides, to improve the performance further, we propose a differentiable patch-wise histogram-based loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that our LATIS, with the least model parameters and complexity, achieves better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.
Authors:Cristina Luna, Jorge Barrientos-Díez, Manuel Esquer, Alba Guerra, Marina López-Seoane, Iñaki Colmenarejo, Fernando Gandía, Steven Kay, Angus Cameron, Carmen Camañes, Íñigo Sard, Danel Juárez, Alessandro Orlandi, Federica Angeletti, Vassilios Papantoniou, Ares Papantoniou, Spiros Makris, Bernhard rebele, Armin Wedler, Jennifer Reynolds, Markus Landgraf
Title: Modularity for lunar exploration: European Moon Rover System Pre-Phase A Design and Field Test Campaign Results
Abstract:
The European Moon Rover System (EMRS) Pre-Phase A activity is part of the European Exploration Envelope Programme (E3P) that seeks to develop a versatile surface mobility solution for future lunar missions. These missions include: the Polar Explorer (PE), In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and Astrophysics Lunar Observatory (ALO) and Lunar Geological Exploration Mission (LGEM). Therefore, designing a multipurpose rover that can serve these missions is crucial. The rover needs to be compatible with three different mission scenarios, each with an independent payload, making flexibility the key driver. This study focuses on modularity in the rover's locomotion solution and autonomous on-board system. Moreover, the proposed EMRS solution has been tested at an analogue facility to prove the modular mobility concept. The tests involved the rover's mobility in a lunar soil simulant testbed and different locomotion modes in a rocky and uneven terrain, as well as robustness against obstacles and excavation of lunar regolith. As a result, the EMRS project has developed a multipurpose modular rover concept, with power, thermal control, insulation, and dust protection systems designed for further phases. This paper highlights the potential of the EMRS system for lunar exploration and the importance of modularity in rover design.
Authors:Stefan Denkovski, Shehroz S. Khan, Alex Mihailidis
Title: Temporal Shift -- Multi-Objective Loss Function for Improved Anomaly Fall Detection
Abstract:
Falls are a major cause of injuries and deaths among older adults worldwide. Accurate fall detection can help reduce potential injuries and additional health complications. Different types of video modalities can be used in a home setting to detect falls, including RGB, Infrared, and Thermal cameras. Anomaly detection frameworks using autoencoders and their variants can be used for fall detection due to the data imbalance that arises from the rarity and diversity of falls. However, the use of reconstruction error in autoencoders can limit the application of networks' structures that propagate information. In this paper, we propose a new multi-objective loss function called Temporal Shift, which aims to predict both future and reconstructed frames within a window of sequential frames. The proposed loss function is evaluated on a semi-naturalistic fall detection dataset containing multiple camera modalities. The autoencoders were trained on normal activities of daily living (ADL) performed by older adults and tested on ADLs and falls performed by young adults. Temporal shift shows significant improvement to a baseline 3D Convolutional autoencoder, an attention U-Net CAE, and a multi-modal neural network. The greatest improvement was observed in an attention U-Net model improving by 0.20 AUC ROC for a single camera when compared to reconstruction alone. With significant improvement across different models, this approach has the potential to be widely adopted and improve anomaly detection capabilities in other settings besides fall detection.
Authors:Jiayi Xu, Yoshihiro Kuroda, Shunsuke Yoshimoto, Osamu Oshiro
Title: Non-contact Cold Thermal Display by Controlling Low-temperature Air Flow Generated with Vortex Tube
Abstract:
In recent years, thermal display has been studied intensively in order to represent a more realistic tactile quality of the object. Since human feels the temperature of the air without touching other objects, it is necessary to present thermal sensation in a non-contact manner. Studies on non-contact heat display have been explored; however, few studies have reported on a device that can display cold in a non-contact manner. In this study, we propose a non-contact cold thermal display using a low-temperature heat source-vortex tube, which can generate ultra-low air temperature when supplied with compressed air. We developed a cooling model that relates the flow velocity of cold air with the absorbed heat from skin; we implemented a prototype system that can control the flow velocity of the generated air; and we conducted an experiment to examine the cold sensation that the system can present. Our results revealed that various cold sensations can be generated so that the faster the flow velocity, the colder a user would feel.
Authors:Jiayi Xu, Shoichi Hasegawa, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Naoto Ienaga, Yoshihiro Kuroda
Title: Integration of Independent Heat Transfer Mechanisms for Non-Contact Cold Sensation Presentation With Low Residual Heat
Abstract:
Thermal sensation is crucial to enhancing our comprehension of the world and enhancing our ability to interact with it. Therefore, the development of thermal sensation presentation technologies holds significant potential, providing a novel method of interaction. Traditional technologies often leave residual heat in the system or the skin, affecting subsequent presentations. Our study focuses on presenting thermal sensations with low residual heat, especially cold sensations. To mitigate the impact of residual heat in the presentation system, we opted for a non-contact method, and to address the influence of residual heat on the skin, we present thermal sensations without significantly altering skin temperature. Specifically, we integrated two highly responsive and independent heat transfer mechanisms: convection via cold air and radiation via visible light, providing non-contact thermal stimuli. By rapidly alternating between perceptible decreases and imperceptible increases in temperature on the same skin area, we maintained near-constant skin temperature while presenting continuous cold sensations. In our experiments involving 15 participants, we observed that when the cooling rate was -0.2 to -0.24 degree celsius per second and the cooling time ratio was 30 to 50 %, more than 86.67 % of the participants perceived only persistent cold without any warmth.
Authors:Peter Burgholzer, Johannes Bauer-Marschallinger, Mike Hettich, Markus Haltmeier
Title: Breaking the Resolution limit in Photoacoustic Imaging using Positivity and Sparsity
Abstract:
In this tutorial, we aim to directly recreate some of our "aha" moments when exploring the impact of heat diffusion on the spatial resolution limit of photothermal imaging. Our objective is also to communicate how this physical limit can nevertheless be overcome and include some concrete technological applications. Describing diffusion as a random walk, one insight is that such a stochastic process involves not only a Gaussian spread of the mean values in space, with the variance proportional to the diffusion time, but also temporal and spatial fluctuations around these mean values. All these fluctuations strongly influence the image reconstruction immediately after the short heating pulse. The Gaussian spread of the mean values in space increases the entropy, while the fluctuations lead to a loss of information that blurs the reconstruction of the initial temperature distribution and can be described mathematically by a spatial convolution with a Gaussian thermal point-spread-function (PSF). The information loss turns out to be equal to the mean entropy increase and limits the spatial resolution proportional to the depth of the imaged subsurface structures. This principal resolution limit can only be overcome by including additional information such as sparsity or positivity. Prior information can be also included by using a deep neural network with a finite degrees of freedom and trained on a specific class of image examples for image reconstruction
Authors:Peter Burgholzer, Günther Mayr, Gregor Thummerer, Markus Haltmeier
Title: Heat diffusion blurs photothermal images with increasing depth
Abstract:
In this tutorial, we aim to directly recreate some of our "aha" moments when exploring the impact of heat diffusion on the spatial resolution limit of photothermal imaging. Our objective is also to communicate how this physical limit can nevertheless be overcome and include some concrete technological applications. Describing diffusion as a random walk, one insight is that such a stochastic process involves not only a Gaussian spread of the mean values in space, with the variance proportional to the diffusion time, but also temporal and spatial fluctuations around these mean values. All these fluctuations strongly influence the image reconstruction immediately after the short heating pulse. The Gaussian spread of the mean values in space increases the entropy, while the fluctuations lead to a loss of information that blurs the reconstruction of the initial temperature distribution and can be described mathematically by a spatial convolution with a Gaussian thermal point-spread-function (PSF). The information loss turns out to be equal to the mean entropy increase and limits the spatial resolution proportional to the depth of the imaged subsurface structures. This principal resolution limit can only be overcome by including additional information such as sparsity or positivity. Prior information can be also included by using a deep neural network with a finite degrees of freedom and trained on a specific class of image examples for image reconstruction.
Authors:Paweł Maczuga, Maciej Sikora, Maciej Skoczeń, Przemysław Rożnawski, Filip Tłuszcz, Marcin Szubert, Marcin Łoś, Witold Dzwinel, Keshav Pingali, Maciej Paszyński
Title: Physics Informed Neural Network Code for 2D Transient Problems (PINN-2DT) Compatible with Google Colab
Abstract:
We present an open-source Physics Informed Neural Network environment for simulations of transient phenomena on two-dimensional rectangular domains, with the following features: (1) it is compatible with Google Colab which allows automatic execution on cloud environment; (2) it supports two dimensional time-dependent PDEs; (3) it provides simple interface for definition of the residual loss, boundary condition and initial loss, together with their weights; (4) it support Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions; (5) it allows for customizing the number of layers and neurons per layer, as well as for arbitrary activation function; (6) the learning rate and number of epochs are available as parameters; (7) it automatically differentiates PINN with respect to spatial and temporal variables; (8) it provides routines for plotting the convergence (with running average), initial conditions learnt, 2D and 3D snapshots from the simulation and movies (9) it includes a library of problems: (a) non-stationary heat transfer; (b) wave equation modeling a tsunami; (c) atmospheric simulations including thermal inversion; (d) tumor growth simulations.
Authors:Joseph M. Coale, Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: A Variable Eddington Factor Model for Thermal Radiative Transfer with Closure based on Data-Driven Shape Function
Abstract:
A new variable Eddington factor (VEF) model is presented for nonlinear problems of thermal radiative transfer (TRT). The VEF model is a data-driven one that acts on known (a-priori) radiation-diffusion solutions for material temperatures in the TRT problem. A linear auxiliary problem is constructed for the radiative transfer equation (RTE) with opacities and emission source evaluated at the known material temperatures. The solution to this RTE approximates the specific intensity distribution for the problem in all phase-space and time. It is applied as a shape function to define the Eddington tensor for the presented VEF model. The shape function computed via the auxiliary RTE problem will capture some degree of transport effects within the TRT problem. The VEF moment equations closed with this approximate Eddington tensor will thus carry with them these captured transport effects. In this study, the temperature data comes from multigroup $P_1$, $P_{1/3}$, and flux-limited diffusion radiative transfer (RT) models. The proposed VEF model can be interpreted as a transport-corrected diffusion reduced-order model. Numerical results are presented on the Fleck-Cummings test problem which models a supersonic wavefront of radiation. The presented VEF model is shown to reliably improve accuracy by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to the considered radiation-diffusion model solutions to the TRT problem.
Authors:Anthony Dowling, Lin Jiang, Ming-Cheng Cheng, Yu Liu
Title: Regulating CPU Temperature With Thermal-Aware Scheduling Using a Reduced Order Learning Thermal Model
Abstract:
Modern real-time systems utilize considerable amounts of power while executing computation-intensive tasks. The execution of these tasks leads to significant power dissipation and heating of the device. It therefore results in severe thermal issues like temperature escalation, high thermal gradients, and excessive hot spot formation, which may result in degrading chip performance, accelerating device aging, and premature failure. Thermal-Aware Scheduling (TAS) enables optimization of thermal dissipation to maintain a safe thermal state. In this work, we implement a new TAS algorithm, POD-TAS, which manages the thermal behavior of a multi-core CPU based on a defined set of states and their transitions. We compare the performances of a dynamic RC thermal circuit simulator (HotSpot) and a reduced order Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD)-based thermal model and we select the latter for use in our POD-TAS algorithm. We implement a novel simulation-based evaluation methodology to compare TAS algorithms. This methodology is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed POD-TAS algorithm. Additionally, we compare the performance of a state of the art TAS algorithm, RT-TAS, to our proposed POD-TAS algorithm. Furthermore, we utilize the COMBS benchmark suite to provide CPU workloads for task scheduling. Our experimental results on a multi-core processor using a set of 4 benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed POD-TAS method can improve thermal performance by decreasing the peak thermal variance by 53.0% and the peak chip temperature of 29.01%. Using a set of 8 benchmarks, the comparison of the two algorithms shows a decrease of 29.57% in the peak spatial variance of the chip temperature and 26.26% in the peak chip temperature. We also identify several potential future research directions.
Authors:Laura Bégon-Lours, Mattia Halter, Diana Dávila Pineda, Youri Popoff, Valeria Bragaglia, Antonio La Porta, Daniel Jubin, Jean Fompeyrine, Bert Jan Offrein
Title: A BEOL Compatible, 2-Terminals, Ferroelectric Analog Non-Volatile Memory
Abstract:
A Ferroelectric Analog Non-Volatile Memory based on a WOx electrode and ferroelectric HfZrO$_4$ layer is fabricated at a low thermal budget (~375$^\circ$C), enabling BEOL processes and CMOS integration. The devices show suitable properties for integration in crossbar arrays and neural network inference: analog potentiation/depression with constant field or constant pulse width schemes, cycle to cycle and device to device variation <10%, ON/OFF ratio up to 10 and good linearity. The physical mechanisms behind the resistive switching and conduction mechanisms are discussed.
Authors:Laura Bégon-Lours, Mattia Halter, Diana Dávila Pineda, Valeria Bragaglia, Youri Popoff, Antonio La Porta, Daniel Jubin, Jean Fompeyrine, Bert Jan Offrein
Title: A Back-End-Of-Line Compatible, Ferroelectric Analog Non-Volatile Memory
Abstract:
A Ferroelectric Analog Non-Volatile Memory based on a WOx electrode and ferroelectric HfZrO4 layer is fabricated at a low thermal budget (~375C), enabling BEOL processes and CMOS integration. The devices show suitable properties for integration in crossbar arrays and neural network inference: analog potentiation/depression with constant field or constant pulse width schemes, cycle to cycle and device to device variation <10%, ON/OFF ratio up to 10 and good linearity. The physical mechanisms behind the resistive switching and conduction mechanisms are discussed.
Authors:Guangyu Ren, Jitesh Joshi, Youngjun Cho
Title: Multi-Modal Hybrid Learning and Sequential Training for RGB-T Saliency Detection
Abstract:
RGB-T saliency detection has emerged as an important computer vision task, identifying conspicuous objects in challenging scenes such as dark environments. However, existing methods neglect the characteristics of cross-modal features and rely solely on network structures to fuse RGB and thermal features. To address this, we first propose a Multi-Modal Hybrid loss (MMHL) that comprises supervised and self-supervised loss functions. The supervised loss component of MMHL distinctly utilizes semantic features from different modalities, while the self-supervised loss component reduces the distance between RGB and thermal features. We further consider both spatial and channel information during feature fusion and propose the Hybrid Fusion Module to effectively fuse RGB and thermal features. Lastly, instead of jointly training the network with cross-modal features, we implement a sequential training strategy which performs training only on RGB images in the first stage and then learns cross-modal features in the second stage. This training strategy improves saliency detection performance without computational overhead. Results from performance evaluation and ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance achieved by the proposed method compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Zhipeng Yu, Jin Lin, Feng Liu, Jiarong Li, Yingtian Chi, Yonghua Song, Zhengwei Ren
Title: Multi-Stage Expansion Planning for Decarbonizing Thermal Generation Supported Renewable Power Systems Using Hydrogen and Ammonia Storage
Abstract:
Large-scale centralized development of wind and solar energy and peer-to-grid transmission of renewable energy source (RES) via high voltage direct current (HVDC) has been regarded as one of the most promising ways to achieve goals of peak carbon and carbon neutrality in China. Traditionally, large-scale thermal generation is needed to economically support the load demand of HVDC with a given profile, which in turn raises concerns about carbon emissions. To address the issues above, hydrogen energy storage system (HESS) and ammonia energy storage system (AESS) are introduced to gradually replace thermal generation, which is represented as a multi-stage expansion planning (MSEP) problem. Specifically, first, HESS and AESS are established in the MSEP model with carbon emission reduction constraints, and yearly data with hourly time resolution are utilized for each stage to well describe the intermittence of RES. Then, a combined Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition (DWD) and column generation (CG) solution approach is proposed to efficiently solve the large-scale MSEP model. Finally, a real-life system in China is studied. The results indicate that HESS and AESS have the potential to handle the intermittence of RES, as well as the monthly imbalance between RES and load demand. Especially under the goal of carbon neutrality, the contribution of HESS and AESS in reducing levelized cost of energy (LCOE) reaches 12.28% and 14.59%, respectively, which finally leads to a LCOE of 0.4324 RMB/kWh.
Authors:Joseph M. Coale, Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: A Reduced-Order Model for Nonlinear Radiative Transfer Problems Based on Moment Equations and POD-Petrov-Galerkin Projection of the Normalized Boltzmann Transport Equation
Abstract:
A data-driven projection-based reduced-order model (ROM) for nonlinear thermal radiative transfer (TRT) problems is presented. The TRT ROM is formulated by (i) a hierarchy of low-order quasidiffusion (aka variable Eddington factor) equations for moments of the radiation intensity and (ii) the normalized Boltzmann transport equation (BTE). The multilevel system of moment equations is derived by projection of the BTE onto a sequence of subspaces which represent elements of the phase space of the problem. Exact closure for the moment equations is provided by the Eddington tensor. A Petrov-Galerkin (PG) projection of the normalized BTE is formulated using a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) basis representing the normalized radiation intensity over the whole phase space and time. The Eddington tensor linearly depends on the solution of the normalized BTE. By linear superposition of the POD basis functions, a low-rank expansion of the Eddington tensor is constructed with coefficients defined by the PG projected normalized BTE. The material energy balance (MEB) equation is coupled with the effective grey low-order equations which exist on the same dimensional scale as the MEB equation. The resulting TRT ROM is structure and asymptotic preserving. A detailed analysis of the ROM is performed on the classical Fleck-Cummings (F-C) TRT multigroup test problem in 2D geometry. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the ROM's effectiveness in the simulation of radiation wave phenomena. The ROM is shown to produce solutions with sufficiently high accuracy while using low-rank approximation of the normalized BTE solution. Essential physical characteristics of supersonic radiation wave are preserved in the ROM solutions.
Authors:Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang
Title: ThermRad: A Multi-modal Dataset for Robust 3D Object Detection under Challenging Conditions
Abstract:
Robust 3D object detection in extreme weather and illumination conditions is a challenging task. While radars and thermal cameras are known for their resilience to these conditions, few studies have been conducted on radar-thermal fusion due to the lack of corresponding datasets. To address this gap, we first present a new multi-modal dataset called ThermRad, which includes a 3D LiDAR, a 4D radar, an RGB camera and a thermal camera. This dataset is unique because it includes data from all four sensors in extreme weather conditions, providing a valuable resource for future research in this area. To validate the robustness of 4D radars and thermal cameras for 3D object detection in challenging weather conditions, we propose a new multi-modal fusion method called RTDF-RCNN, which leverages the complementary strengths of 4D radars and thermal cameras to boost object detection performance. To further prove the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we re-implement state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D detectors on our dataset as benchmarks for evaluation. Our method achieves significant enhancements in detecting cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, with improvements of over 7.98%, 24.27%, and 27.15%, respectively, while achieving comparable results to LiDAR-based approaches. Our contributions in both the ThermRad dataset and the new multi-modal fusion method provide a new approach to robust 3D object detection in adverse weather and illumination conditions. The ThermRad dataset will be released.
Authors:Pablo Arrighi, Gilles Dowek, Amélia Durbec
Title: Time arrow without past hypothesis: a toy model explanation
Abstract:
The laws of Physics are time-reversible, making no qualitative distinction between the past and the future -- yet we can only go towards the future. This apparent contradiction is known as the "arrow of time problem". Its current resolution states that the future is the direction of increasing entropy. But entropy can only increase towards the future if it was low in the past, and past low entropy is a very strong assumption to make, because low entropy states are rather improbable, non-generic. Recent works from the Physics literature suggest, however, we may do away with this so-called "past hypothesis", in the presence of reversible dynamical laws featuring expansion. We prove that this can be the case in principle, within a toy model. It consists in graphs upon which particles circulate and interact according to local reversible rules. Some rules locally shrink or expand the graph. We prove that almost all states expand; entropy always increases as a consequence of expansion -- thereby providing a local explanation for the rise of an entropic arrow of time without the need for a past hypothesis. The discrete setting of this toy model allows us to deploy the full rigour of theoretical Computer Science proof techniques. It also allows for the numerical exploration of several physically-motivated variants: a time-symmetric variant; two inflationary variants; and a damping variant -- which slows down thermal death. The fact that all of these models exhibit similar behaviours suggests that local reversible expansion mechanisms constitute a robust recipe for a time arrow without past hypothesis. In this qualitative sense, the explanation may therefore also be relevant at the cosmological level.
Authors:Manuel Bernardino del Pino, Tomás Chacón Rebollo, Macarena Gómez Mármol
Title: A boundary-oriented reduced Schwarz domain decomposition technique for parametric advection-diffusion problems
Abstract:
We present in this paper the results of a research motivated by the need of a very fast solution of thermal flow in solar receivers. These receivers are composed by a large number of parallel pipes with the same geometry. We have introduced a reduced Schwarz algorithm that skips the computation in a large part of the pipes. The computation of the temperature in the skep domain is replaced by a reduced mapping that provides the transmission conditions. This reduced mapping is computed in an off-line stage. We have performed an error analysis of the reduced Schwarz algorithm, proving that the error is bounded in terms of the linearly decreasing error of the standard Schwarz algorithm, plus the error stemming from the reduction of the trace mapping. The last error is asymptotically dominant in the Schwarz iterative process. We obtain $L^2$ errors below $2\%$ with relatively small overlapping lengths.
Authors:Joseph M. Coale, Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: Multilevel Method for Thermal Radiative Transfer Problems with Method of Long Characteristics for the Boltzmann Transport Equation
Abstract:
In this paper analysis is performed on a computational method for thermal radiative transfer (TRT) problems based on the multilevel quasidiffusion (variable Eddington factor) method with the method of long characteristics (ray tracing) for the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE). The method is formulated with a multilevel set of moment equations of the BTE which are coupled to the material energy balance (MEB). The moment equations are exactly closed via the Eddington tensor defined by the BTE solution. Two discrete spatial meshes are defined: a material grid on which the MEB and low-order moment equations are discretized, and a grid of characteristics for solving the BTE. Numerical testing of the method is completed on the well-known Fleck-Cummings test problem which models a supersonic radiation wave propagation. Mesh refinement studies are performed on each of the two spatial grids independently, holding one mesh width constant while refining the other. We also present the data on convergence of iterations.
Authors:Joseph M. Coale, Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: A Nonlinear Projection-Based Iteration Scheme with Cycles over Multiple Time Steps for Solving Thermal Radiative Transfer Problems
Abstract:
In this paper we present a multilevel projection-based iterative scheme for solving thermal radiative transfer problems that performs iteration cycles on the high-order Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) and low-order moment equations. Fully implicit temporal discretization based on the backward Euler time-integration method is used for all equations. The multilevel iterative scheme is designed to perform iteration cycles over collections of multiple time steps, each of which can be interpreted as a coarse time interval with a subgrid of time steps. This treatment is demonstrated to transform implicit temporal integrators to diagonally-implicit multi-step schemes on the coarse time grid formed with the amalgamated time intervals. A multilevel set of moment equations are formulated by the nonlinear projective approach. The Eddington tensor defined with the BTE solution provides exact closure for the moment equations. During each iteration, a number of chronological time steps are solved with the BTE alone, after which the same collection of time steps is solved with the moment equations and material energy balance. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this iterative scheme for simulating evolving radiation and heat waves in 2D geometry.
Authors:Olga Movilla Miangolarra, Amirhossein Taghvaei, Tryphon T. Georgiou
Title: A matching principle for power transfer in Stochastic Thermodynamics
Abstract:
Gradients in temperature and particle concentration fuel many processes in the physical and biological world. In the present work we study a thermodynamic engine powered by anisotropic thermal excitation (that may be due to e.g., a temperature gradient), and draw parallels with the well-known principle of impedance matching in circuit theory, where for maximal power transfer, the load voltage needs to be half of that of the supplying power source. We maximize power output of the thermodynamic engine at steady-state and show that the optimal reactive force is precise half of that supplied by the anisotropy.
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Xiaoshen Huang, Guanghui Zhang, Xianyong Fang, Linbo Wang, Bin Tang
Title: Scribble-Supervised RGB-T Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Salient object detection segments attractive objects in scenes. RGB and thermal modalities provide complementary information and scribble annotations alleviate large amounts of human labor. Based on the above facts, we propose a scribble-supervised RGB-T salient object detection model. By a four-step solution (expansion, prediction, aggregation, and supervision), label-sparse challenge of scribble-supervised method is solved. To expand scribble annotations, we collect the superpixels that foreground scribbles pass through in RGB and thermal images, respectively. The expanded multi-modal labels provide the coarse object boundary. To further polish the expanded labels, we propose a prediction module to alleviate the sharpness of boundary. To play the complementary roles of two modalities, we combine the two into aggregated pseudo labels. Supervised by scribble annotations and pseudo labels, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the relabeled RGBT-S dataset. Furthermore, the model is applied to RGB-D and video scribble-supervised applications, achieving consistently excellent performance.
Authors:Guillaume Berger, Manik Dhingra, Antoine Mercier, Yashesh Savani, Sunny Panchal, Fatih Porikli
Title: QuickSRNet: Plain Single-Image Super-Resolution Architecture for Faster Inference on Mobile Platforms
Abstract:
In this work, we present QuickSRNet, an efficient super-resolution architecture for real-time applications on mobile platforms. Super-resolution clarifies, sharpens, and upscales an image to higher resolution. Applications such as gaming and video playback along with the ever-improving display capabilities of TVs, smartphones, and VR headsets are driving the need for efficient upscaling solutions. While existing deep learning-based super-resolution approaches achieve impressive results in terms of visual quality, enabling real-time DL-based super-resolution on mobile devices with compute, thermal, and power constraints is challenging. To address these challenges, we propose QuickSRNet, a simple yet effective architecture that provides better accuracy-to-latency trade-offs than existing neural architectures for single-image super resolution. We present training tricks to speed up existing residual-based super-resolution architectures while maintaining robustness to quantization. Our proposed architecture produces 1080p outputs via 2x upscaling in 2.2 ms on a modern smartphone, making it ideal for high-fps real-time applications.
Authors:Qurrat-Ul-Ain Nadeem, Anas Chaaban
Title: Performance Analysis of Zero-Forcing Precoding in Multi-Cell One-Bit Massive MIMO Downlink
Abstract:
This work investigates the downlink performance of a multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system that employs one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) in the receiving and transmitting radio frequency (RF) chains at each base station (BS) in order to reduce the power consumption. We utilize Bussgang decomposition to derive the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) channel estimates at each BS based on the quantized received uplink training signals, and the asymptotic closed-form expressions of the achievable downlink rates under one-bit quantized zero-forcing (ZF) precoding implemented using the estimated channels. The derived expressions explicitly show the impact of quantization noise, thermal noise, pilot contamination, and interference, and are utilized to study the number of additional antennas needed at each BS of the one-bit MIMO system to perform as well as the conventional MIMO system. Numerical results verify our analysis, and reveal that despite needing more antennas to achieve the same sum average rate, the one-bit massive MIMO system is more energy-efficient than the conventional system, especially at high sampling frequencies.
Authors:Walter A. Simson, Magdalini Paschali, Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa, Nassir Navab, Jeremy J. Dahl
Title: Investigating Pulse-Echo Sound Speed Estimation in Breast Ultrasound with Deep Learning
Abstract:
Ultrasound is an adjunct tool to mammography that can quickly and safely aid physicians with diagnosing breast abnormalities. Clinical ultrasound often assumes a constant sound speed to form B-mode images for diagnosis. However, the various types of breast tissue, such as glandular, fat, and lesions, differ in sound speed. These differences can degrade the image reconstruction process. Alternatively, sound speed can be a powerful tool for identifying disease. To this end, we propose a deep-learning approach for sound speed estimation from in-phase and quadrature ultrasound signals. First, we develop a large-scale simulated ultrasound dataset that generates quasi-realistic breast tissue by modeling breast gland, skin, and lesions with varying echogenicity and sound speed. We developed a fully convolutional neural network architecture trained on a simulated dataset to produce an estimated sound speed map from inputting three complex-value in-phase and quadrature ultrasound images formed from plane-wave transmissions at separate angles. Furthermore, thermal noise augmentation is used during model optimization to enhance generalizability to real ultrasound data. We evaluate the model on simulated, phantom, and in-vivo breast ultrasound data, demonstrating its ability to accurately estimate sound speeds consistent with previously reported values in the literature. Our simulated dataset and model will be publicly available to provide a step towards accurate and generalizable sound speed estimation for pulse-echo ultrasound imaging.
Authors:Chaofan Wang, Weiwei Jiang, Kangning Yang, Zhanna Sarsenbayeva, Benjamin Tag, Tilman Dingler, Jorge Goncalves, Vassilis Kostakos
Title: Using Thermal Imaging to Measure Hand Hygiene Quality
Abstract:
Hand hygiene has long been promoted as the most effective way to prevent the transmission of infection. However, due to the low compliance and quality of hand hygiene reported in previous studies, constant monitoring of healthcare workers' hand hygiene compliance and quality is crucial. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of using a thermal camera together with an RGB camera to detect hand coverage of alcohol-based formulation, thereby monitoring handrub quality. The system yields promising results in terms of accuracy (93.5%) and Dice coefficient (87.1%) when observations take place 10 seconds after performing handrub. In addition, we also examine the system performance change over a 60-second observation period, and the accuracy and Dice coefficient still remain at about 92.4% and 85.7% when observation happens at the 60-second time point. Given these encouraging results, thermal imaging shows its potential feasibility in providing accurate, constant, and systematic hand hygiene quality monitoring.
Authors:Loris Di Natale, Bratislav Svetozarevic, Philipp Heer, Colin Neil Jones
Title: Towards Scalable Physically Consistent Neural Networks: an Application to Data-driven Multi-zone Thermal Building Models
Abstract:
With more and more data being collected, data-driven modeling methods have been gaining in popularity in recent years. While physically sound, classical gray-box models are often cumbersome to identify and scale, and their accuracy might be hindered by their limited expressiveness. On the other hand, classical black-box methods, typically relying on Neural Networks (NNs) nowadays, often achieve impressive performance, even at scale, by deriving statistical patterns from data. However, they remain completely oblivious to the underlying physical laws, which may lead to potentially catastrophic failures if decisions for real-world physical systems are based on them. Physically Consistent Neural Networks (PCNNs) were recently developed to address these aforementioned issues, ensuring physical consistency while still leveraging NNs to attain state-of-the-art accuracy. In this work, we scale PCNNs to model building temperature dynamics and propose a thorough comparison with classical gray-box and black-box methods. More precisely, we design three distinct PCNN extensions, thereby exemplifying the modularity and flexibility of the architecture, and formally prove their physical consistency. In the presented case study, PCNNs are shown to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, even outperforming classical NN-based models despite their constrained structure. Our investigations furthermore provide a clear illustration of NNs achieving seemingly good performance while remaining completely physics-agnostic, which can be misleading in practice. While this performance comes at the cost of computational complexity, PCNNs on the other hand show accuracy improvements of 17-35% compared to all other physically consistent methods, paving the way for scalable physically consistent models with state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Eric J. Ching, Ryan F. Johnson, Andrew D. Kercher
Title: Positivity-preserving and entropy-bounded discontinuous Galerkin method for the chemically reacting, compressible Euler equations. Part I: The one-dimensional case
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop a fully conservative, positivity-preserving, and entropy-bounded discontinuous Galerkin scheme for simulating the chemically reacting, compressible Euler equations with complex thermodynamics. The proposed formulation is an extension of the conservative, high-order numerical method previously developed by Johnson and Kercher [J. Comput. Phys., 423 (2020), 109826] that maintains pressure equilibrium between adjacent elements. In this first part of our two-part paper, we focus on the one-dimensional case. Our methodology is rooted in the minimum entropy principle satisfied by entropy solutions to the multicomponent, compressible Euler equations, which was proved by Gouasmi et al. [ESAIM: Math. Model. Numer. Anal., 54 (2020), 373--389] for nonreacting flows. We first show that the minimum entropy principle holds in the reacting case as well. Next, we introduce the ingredients required for the solution to have nonnegative species concentrations, positive density, positive pressure, and bounded entropy. We also discuss how to retain the aforementioned ability to preserve pressure equilibrium between elements. Operator splitting is employed to handle stiff chemical reactions. To guarantee satisfaction of the minimum entropy principle in the reaction step, we develop an entropy-stable discontinuous Galerkin method based on diagonal-norm summation-by-parts operators for solving ordinary differential equations. The developed formulation is used to compute canonical one-dimensional test cases, namely thermal-bubble advection, multicomponent shock-tube flow, and a moving hydrogen-oxygen detonation wave with detailed chemistry. We find that the enforcement of an entropy bound can considerably reduce the large-scale nonlinear instabilities that emerge when only the positivity property is enforced, to an even greater extent than in the monocomponent, calorically perfect case.
Authors:Heng Zhou, Chunna Tian, Zhenxi Zhang, Chengyang Li, Yuxuan Ding, Yongqiang Xie, Zhongbo Li
Title: Position-Aware Relation Learning for RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal salient object detection (SOD) combines two spectra to segment visually conspicuous regions in images. Most existing methods use boundary maps to learn the sharp boundary. These methods ignore the interactions between isolated boundary pixels and other confident pixels, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem,we propose a position-aware relation learning network (PRLNet) for RGB-T SOD based on swin transformer. PRLNet explores the distance and direction relationships between pixels to strengthen intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, generating salient object masks with clear boundaries and homogeneous regions. Specifically, we develop a novel signed distance map auxiliary module (SDMAM) to improve encoder feature representation, which takes into account the distance relation of different pixels in boundary neighborhoods. Then, we design a feature refinement approach with directional field (FRDF), which rectifies features of boundary neighborhood by exploiting the features inside salient objects. FRDF utilizes the directional information between object pixels to effectively enhance the intra-class compactness of salient regions. In addition, we constitute a pure transformer encoder-decoder network to enhance multispectral feature representation for RGB-T SOD. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three public benchmark datasets.The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Tanushree Roy, Ashley Knichel, Satadru Dey
Title: An Input-to-State Safety Approach Towards Safe Control of a Class of Parabolic PDEs Under Disturbances
Abstract:
Distributed Parameter Systems (DPSs), modelled by partial differential equations (PDEs), are increasingly vulnerable to disturbances arising from various sources. Although detection of disturbances in PDE systems have received considerable attention in existing literature, safety control of PDEs under disturbances remains significantly under-explored. In this context, we explore a practical input-to-state safety (pISSf) based control design approach for a class of DPSs modelled by linear Parabolic PDEs. Specifically, we develop a control design framework for this class of system with both safety and stability guarantees based on control Lyapunov functional and control barrier functional. To illustrate our methodology, we apply our strategy to design a thermal control system for battery modules under disturbance. Several simulation studies are done to show the efficacy of our method.
Authors:Weiwei Jiang, Chaofan Wang, Zhanna Sarsenbayeva, Andrew Irlitti, Jarrod Knibbe, Tilman Dingler, Jorge Goncalves, Vassilis Kostakos
Title: InfoPrint: Embedding Information into 3D Printed Objects
Abstract:
We present a technique to embed information invisible to the eye inside 3D printed objects. The information is integrated in the object model, and then fabricated using off-the-shelf dual-head FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) 3D printers. Our process does not require human intervention during or after printing with the integrated model. The information can be arbitrary symbols, such as icons, text,binary, or handwriting. To retrieve the information, we evaluate two different infrared-based imaging devices that are readily available-thermal cameras and near-infrared scanners. Based on our results, we propose design guidelines for a range of use cases to embed and extract hidden information. We demonstrate how our method can be used for different applications, such as interactive thermal displays, hidden board game tokens, tagging functional printed objects, and autographing non-fungible fabrication work.
Authors:Xiaofeng Xu, Lian Zhang, Yin Shi, Long-Qing Chen, Jinchao Xu
Title: Integral boundary conditions in phase field models
Abstract:
Modeling the chemical, electric, and thermal transport as well as phase transitions and the accompanying mesoscale microstructure evolution within a material in an electronic device setting involves the solution of partial differential equations often with integral boundary conditions. Employing the familiar Poisson equation describing the electric potential evolution in a material exhibiting insulator-to-metal transitions, we exploit a special property of such an integral boundary condition, and we properly formulate the variational problem and establish its well-posedness. We then compare our method with the commonly-used Lagrange multiplier method that can also handle such boundary conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our new method achieves an optimal convergence rate in contrast to the conventional Lagrange multiplier method. Furthermore, the linear system derived from our method is symmetric positive definite, and can be efficiently solved by Conjugate Gradient method with algebraic multigrid preconditioning.
Authors:Joseph M. Coale, Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: Reduced order models for nonlinear radiative transfer based on moment equations and POD/DMD of Eddington tensor
Abstract:
A new group of reduced-order models (ROMs) for nonlinear thermal radiative transfer (TRT) problems is presented. They are formulated by means of the nonlinear projective approach and data compression techniques. The nonlinear projection is applied to the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) to derive a hierarchy of low-order moment equations. The Eddington (quasidiffusion) tensor that provides exact closure for the system of moment equations is approximated via one of several data-based methods of model-order reduction. These methods are the (i) proper orthogonal decomposition, (ii) dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), (iii) an equilibrium-subtracted DMD variant. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of these ROMs for the simulation of evolving radiation and heat waves. Results show these models to be accurate even with very low-rank representations of the Eddington tensor. As the rank of the approximation is increased, the errors of solutions generated by the ROMs gradually decreases.
Authors:Austin L. Nash, Herschel C. Pangborn, Neera Jain
Title: Robust Control Co-Design with Receding-Horizon MPC
Abstract:
Control co-design (CCD) is a technique for improving the closed-loop performance of systems through the coordinated design of both plant parameters and an optimal control policy. While model predictive control (MPC) is an attractive control strategy for many systems, embedding it within a CCD algorithm presents challenges because obtaining a closed-form solution for this receding-horizon optimization strategy is often not feasible. This paper meets that challenge by including a robust MPC formulation within the inner loop of a CCD algorithm. As exemplified by application to an aircraft thermal management system, the proposed algorithm closely matches the plant design of an open-loop benchmark. However, unlike the open-loop approach, the proposed algorithm can leverage MPC control variables designed a priori to achieve robust online operation under disturbance profiles that differ from those used for design.
Authors:Anirban Chaudhuri, Boris Kramer, Matthew Norton, Johannes O. Royset, Karen Willcox
Title: Certifiable Risk-Based Engineering Design Optimization
Abstract:
Reliable, risk-averse design of complex engineering systems with optimized performance requires dealing with uncertainties. A conventional approach is to add safety margins to a design that was obtained from deterministic optimization. Safer engineering designs require appropriate cost and constraint function definitions that capture the \textit{risk} associated with unwanted system behavior in the presence of uncertainties. The paper proposes two notions of certifiability. The first is based on accounting for the magnitude of failure to ensure data-informed conservativeness. The second is the ability to provide optimization convergence guarantees by preserving convexity. Satisfying these notions leads to \textit{certifiable} risk-based design optimization (CRiBDO). In the context of CRiBDO, risk measures based on superquantile (a.k.a.\ conditional value-at-risk) and buffered probability of failure are analyzed. CRiBDO is contrasted with reliability-based design optimization (RBDO), where uncertainties are accounted for via the probability of failure, through a structural and a thermal design problem. A reformulation of the short column structural design problem leading to a convex CRiBDO problem is presented. The CRiBDO formulations capture more information about the problem to assign the appropriate conservativeness, exhibit superior optimization convergence by preserving properties of underlying functions, and alleviate the adverse effects of choosing hard failure thresholds required in RBDO.
Authors:Samim Ahmadi, Jan Christian Hauffen, Linh Kästner, Peter Jung, Giuseppe Caire, Mathias Ziegler
Title: Learned Block Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm for Photothermal Super Resolution Imaging
Abstract:
Block-sparse regularization is already well-known in active thermal imaging and is used for multiple measurement based inverse problems. The main bottleneck of this method is the choice of regularization parameters which differs for each experiment. To avoid time-consuming manually selected regularization parameter, we propose a learned block-sparse optimization approach using an iterative algorithm unfolded into a deep neural network. More precisely, we show the benefits of using a learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm that is able to learn the choice of regularization parameters. In addition, this algorithm enables the determination of a suitable weight matrix to solve the underlying inverse problem. Therefore, in this paper we present the algorithm and compare it with state of the art block iterative shrinkage thresholding using synthetically generated test data and experimental test data from active thermography for defect reconstruction. Our results show that the use of the learned block-sparse optimization approach provides smaller normalized mean square errors for a small fixed number of iterations than without learning. Thus, this new approach allows to improve the convergence speed and only needs a few iterations to generate accurate defect reconstruction in photothermal super resolution imaging.
Authors:Roman Chapko, Leonidas Mindrinos
Title: On the Non-Linear Integral Equation Approach for an Inverse Boundary Value Problem for the Heat Equation
Abstract:
We consider the inverse problem of reconstructing the interior boundary curve of a doubly connected domain from the knowledge of the temperature and the thermal flux on the exterior boundary curve. The use of the Laguerre transform in time leads to a sequence of stationary inverse problems. Then, the application of the modified single-layer ansatz, reduces the problem to a sequence of systems of non-linear boundary integral equations. An iterative algorithm is developed for the numerical solution of the obtained integral equations. We find the Fréchet derivative of the corresponding integral operator and we show the unique solvability of the linearized equation. Full discretization is realized by a trigonometric quadrature method. Due to the inherited ill-possedness of the derived system of linear equations we apply the Tikhonov regularization. The numerical results show that the proposed method produces accurate and stable reconstructions.
Authors:Hadi Nemati, Pedro Sánchez-Martín, Álvaro Ortega, Lukas Sigrist, Luis Rouco
Title: Integration of Concentrated Solar Power Plants in Renewable-Only VPP with Electrical and Thermal Demands: A Two-Stage Robust Bidding Approach
Abstract:
This paper proposes the integration of Concentrated Solar Power Plant (CSP) in the Renewable-only virtual power plant (RVPP) for bidding in the electricity day-ahead and secondary reserve markets, as well as trading thermal energy through a heat purchase agreement. A reformulated two-stage robust optimization approach is introduced to account for multiple uncertainties, including electricity prices, non-dispatchable renewable energy sources electrical production, CSP thermal production, and uncertainties in electrical and thermal demand consumption. The provision of energy and reserve by the thermal storage of CSP is modeled using an adjustable approach, which allocates a share of energy for up and down reserves based on the profitability of the RVPP. Simulations are conducted for several case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed approach under different RVPP operator decisions against uncertain parameters and various trading strategies for electricity and thermal energy. The simulation results show that integrating CSP into RVPP enhances RVPP flexibility for both electrical and thermal trading. Furthermore, the results indicate that the profitability of the RVPP increases when all trading options are considered, across different levels of conservatism adopted by the RVPP operator in response to uncertain parameters.
Authors:Neham Jain, Andrew Jong, Sebastian Scherer, Ioannis Gkioulekas
Title: SmokeSeer: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Smoke Removal and Scene Reconstruction
Abstract:
Smoke in real-world scenes can severely degrade the quality of images and hamper visibility. Recent methods for image restoration either rely on data-driven priors that are susceptible to hallucinations, or are limited to static low-density smoke. We introduce SmokeSeer, a method for simultaneous 3D scene reconstruction and smoke removal from a video capturing multiple views of a scene. Our method uses thermal and RGB images, leveraging the fact that the reduced scattering in thermal images enables us to see through the smoke. We build upon 3D Gaussian splatting to fuse information from the two image modalities, and decompose the scene explicitly into smoke and non-smoke components. Unlike prior approaches, SmokeSeer handles a broad range of smoke densities and can adapt to temporally varying smoke. We validate our approach on synthetic data and introduce a real-world multi-view smoke dataset with RGB and thermal images. We provide open-source code and data at the project website.
Authors:Alex Keilmann, Claudia Redenbach, Francois Willot
Title: Increasing Inter-Fiber Contact in the Altendorf-Jeulin Model
Abstract:
In fields such as material design or biomedicine, fiber materials play an important role. Fiber simulations, also called digital twins, provide a basis for testing and optimizing the material's physical behavior digitally. Inter-fiber contacts can influence the thermal and mechanical behavior of a fiber system; to our knowledge, however, there exist no parametric fiber models allowing for explicit modeling of the number of inter-fiber contacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an extension of the iterative force-biased fiber packing by Altendorf \& Jeulin. In this extension, we model the inter-fiber contacts explicitly and add another force to the force-biased packing to increase the number of contacts. We successfully validate the packing with respect to its parameter accuracy. Moreover, we show that the extension indeed increases the number of contacts, even exceeding theoretical values. Hence, this packing scheme has the potential to achieve higher accuracy in physical simulations.
Authors:Johannes van Randenborgh, Moritz Schulze Darup
Title: MPC for Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage Systems Using ARX Models
Abstract:
An aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) can mitigate CO2 emissions of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for buildings. In application, an ATES keeps large quantities of thermal energy in groundwater-saturated aquifers. Normally, an ATES system comprises two (one for heat and one for cold) storages and supports the heating and cooling efforts of simultaneously present HVAC system components. This way, the operation and emissions of installed and, usually, fossil fuel-based components are reduced. The control of ATES systems is challenging, and various control schemes, including model predictive control (MPC), have been proposed. In this context, we present a lightweight input-output-data-based autoregressive with exogenous input (ARX) model of the hybrid ATES system dynamics. The ARX model allows the design of an output-based MPC scheme, resulting in an easy-to-solve quadratic program and avoiding challenging state estimations of ground temperatures. A numerical study discusses the accuracy of the ARX predictor and controller performance.
Authors:Steve Chien, Itai Zilberstein, Alberto Candela, David Rijlaarsdam, Tom Hendrix, Aubrey Dunne, Aragon Oriol, Miquel Juan Puig
Title: Flight of Dynamic Targeting on the CogniSAT-6 Spacecraft
Abstract:
Dynamic targeting (DT) is a spacecraft autonomy concept in which sensor data is acquired and rapidly analyzed and used to drive subsequent observation. We describe the low Earth orbit application of this approach in which lookahead imagery is analyzed to detect clouds, thermal anomalies, or land use cases to drive higher quality near nadir imaging. Use cases for such a capability include: cloud avoidance, storm hunting, search for planetary boundary layer events, plume study, and beyond. The DT concept requires a lookahead sensor or agility to use a primary sensor in such a mode, edge computing to analyze images rapidly onboard, and a primary followup sensor. Additionally, an inter-satellite or low latency communications link can be leveraged for cross platform tasking. We describe implementation in progress to fly DT in early 2025 on the CogniSAT-6 (Ubotica/Open Cosmos) spacecraft that launched in March 2024 on the SpaceX Transporter-10 launch.
Authors:Serhii Svystun, Pavlo Radiuk, Oleksandr Melnychenko, Oleg Savenko, Anatoliy Sachenko
Title: YOLO Ensemble for UAV-based Multispectral Defect Detection in Wind Turbine Components
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with advanced sensors have opened up new opportunities for monitoring wind power plants, including blades, towers, and other critical components. However, reliable defect detection requires high-resolution data and efficient methods to process multispectral imagery. In this research, we aim to enhance defect detection accuracy through the development of an ensemble of YOLO-based deep learning models that integrate both visible and thermal channels. We propose an ensemble approach that integrates a general-purpose YOLOv8 model with a specialized thermal model, using a sophisticated bounding box fusion algorithm to combine their predictions. Our experiments show this approach achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@.5) of 0.93 and an F1-score of 0.90, outperforming a standalone YOLOv8 model, which scored an mAP@.5 of 0.91. These findings demonstrate that combining multiple YOLO architectures with fused multispectral data provides a more reliable solution, improving the detection of both visual and thermal defects.
Authors:Yuqi Han, Songqian Zhang, Weijian Su, Ke Li, Jiayu Yang, Jinli Suo, Qiang Zhang
Title: UTA-Sign: Unsupervised Thermal Video Augmentation via Event-Assisted Traffic Signage Sketching
Abstract:
The thermal camera excels at perceiving outdoor environments under low-light conditions, making it ideal for applications such as nighttime autonomous driving and unmanned navigation. However, thermal cameras encounter challenges when capturing signage from objects made of similar materials, which can pose safety risks for accurately understanding semantics in autonomous driving systems. In contrast, the neuromorphic vision camera, also known as an event camera, detects changes in light intensity asynchronously and has proven effective in high-speed, low-light traffic environments. Recognizing the complementary characteristics of these two modalities, this paper proposes UTA-Sign, an unsupervised thermal-event video augmentation for traffic signage in low-illumination environments, targeting elements such as license plates and roadblock indicators. To address the signage blind spots of thermal imaging and the non-uniform sampling of event cameras, we developed a dual-boosting mechanism that fuses thermal frames and event signals for consistent signage representation over time. The proposed method utilizes thermal frames to provide accurate motion cues as temporal references for aligning the uneven event signals. At the same time, event signals contribute subtle signage content to the raw thermal frames, enhancing the overall understanding of the environment. The proposed method is validated on datasets collected from real-world scenarios, demonstrating superior quality in traffic signage sketching and improved detection accuracy at the perceptual level.
Authors:Sijie Yang, Binyu Lei, Filip Biljecki
Title: Urban Comfort Assessment in the Era of Digital Planning: A Multidimensional, Data-driven, and AI-assisted Framework
Abstract:
Ensuring liveability and comfort is one of the fundamental objectives of urban planning. Numerous studies have employed computational methods to assess and quantify factors related to urban comfort such as greenery coverage, thermal comfort, and walkability. However, a clear definition of urban comfort and its comprehensive evaluation framework remain elusive. Our research explores the theoretical interpretations and methodologies for assessing urban comfort within digital planning, emphasising three key dimensions: multidimensional analysis, data support, and AI assistance.
Authors:Thomas Krug, Fabian Raisch, Dominik Aimer, Markus Wirnsberger, Ferdinand Sigg, Benjamin Schäfer, Benjamin Tischler
Title: BUILDA: A Thermal Building Data Generation Framework for Transfer Learning
Abstract:
Transfer learning (TL) can improve data-driven modeling of building thermal dynamics. Therefore, many new TL research areas emerge in the field, such as selecting the right source model for TL. However, these research directions require massive amounts of thermal building data which is lacking presently. Neither public datasets nor existing data generators meet the needs of TL research in terms of data quality and quantity. Moreover, existing data generation approaches typically require expert knowledge in building simulation. We present BuilDa, a thermal building data generation framework for producing synthetic data of adequate quality and quantity for TL research. The framework does not require profound building simulation knowledge to generate large volumes of data. BuilDa uses a single-zone Modelica model that is exported as a Functional Mock-up Unit (FMU) and simulated in Python. We demonstrate BuilDa by generating data and utilizing it for pretraining and fine-tuning TL models.
Authors:Ninad Gaikwad, Kasey Dettlaff, Athul Jose P, Anamika Dubey
Title: An Open-Source Simulation and Data Management Tool for EnergyPlus Building Models
Abstract:
We present a new open-source, GUI-based application created using Plotly-Dash, along with an integrated PostgreSQL-based relational database, developed to streamline EnergyPlus building model simulation workflows. The application facilitates data generation, aggregation (across thermal zones), and visualization based on customizable user preferences, while the database efficiently stores and retrieves complex simulation data generated by EnergyPlus. We demonstrate the need for this application and database, emphasizing how existing approaches for generating, managing, and analyzing EnergyPlus simulation data can be cumbersome, particularly when handling a large number of building models with varying simulation setups. This integrated framework enables building energy engineers and researchers to simplify their EnergyPlus simulations, manage generated simulation data, perform data analyses, and support data-driven modeling tasks.
Authors:Ninad Gaikwad, Kunal Shankar, Anamika Dubey, Alan Love, Olvar Bergland
Title: Comparing Building Thermal Dynamics Models and Estimation Methods for Grid-Edge Applications
Abstract:
We need computationally efficient and accurate building thermal dynamics models for use in grid-edge applications. This work evaluates two grey-box approaches for modeling building thermal dynamics: RC-network models and structured regression models. For RC-network models, we compare parameter estimation methods including Nonlinear Least Squares, Batch Estimation, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. We use the Almon Lag Structure with Linear Least Squares for estimating the structured regression models. The performance of these models and methods is evaluated on simulated house and commercial building data across three different simulation types.
Authors:Michele Minervini, Madison Chin, Jacob Kupperman, Nana Liu, Ivy Luo, Meghan Ly, Soorya Rethinasamy, Kathie Wang, Mark M. Wilde
Title: Constrained free energy minimization for the design of thermal states and stabilizer thermodynamic systems
Abstract:
A quantum thermodynamic system is described by a Hamiltonian and a list of conserved, non-commuting charges, and a fundamental goal is to determine the minimum energy of the system subject to constraints on the charges. Recently, [Liu et al., arXiv:2505.04514] proposed first- and second-order classical and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for solving a dual chemical potential maximization problem, and they proved that these algorithms converge to global optima by means of gradient-ascent approaches. In this paper, we benchmark these algorithms on several problems of interest in thermodynamics, including one- and two-dimensional quantum Heisenberg models with nearest and next-to-nearest neighbor interactions and with the charges set to the total $x$, $y$, and $z$ magnetizations. We also offer an alternative compelling interpretation of these algorithms as methods for designing ground and thermal states of controllable Hamiltonians, with potential applications in molecular and material design. Furthermore, we introduce stabilizer thermodynamic systems as thermodynamic systems based on stabilizer codes, with the Hamiltonian constructed from a given code's stabilizer operators and the charges constructed from the code's logical operators. We benchmark the aforementioned algorithms on several examples of stabilizer thermodynamic systems, including those constructed from the one-to-three-qubit repetition code, the perfect one-to-five-qubit code, and the two-to-four-qubit error-detecting code. Finally, we observe that the aforementioned hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, when applied to stabilizer thermodynamic systems, can serve as alternative methods for encoding qubits into stabilizer codes at a fixed temperature, and we provide an effective method for warm-starting these encoding algorithms whenever a single qubit is encoded into multiple physical qubits.
Authors:Arunava Chaudhuri, Shubhi Shukla, Sarani Bhattacharya, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
Title: "Energon": Unveiling Transformers from GPU Power and Thermal Side-Channels
Abstract:
Transformers have become the backbone of many Machine Learning (ML) applications, including language translation, summarization, and computer vision. As these models are increasingly deployed in shared Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) environments via Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), concerns around their security grow. In particular, the risk of side-channel attacks that reveal architectural details without physical access remains underexplored, despite the high value of the proprietary models they target. This work to the best of our knowledge is the first to investigate GPU power and thermal fluctuations as side-channels and further exploit them to extract information from pre-trained transformer models. The proposed analysis shows how these side channels can be exploited at user-privilege to reveal critical architectural details such as encoder/decoder layer and attention head for both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the practical impact by evaluating multiple language and vision pre-trained transformers which are publicly available. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that the attack model achieves a high accuracy of over 89% on average for model family identification and 100% for hyperparameter classification, in both single-process as well as noisy multi-process scenarios. Moreover, by leveraging the extracted architectural information, we demonstrate highly effective black-box transfer adversarial attacks with an average success rate exceeding 93%, underscoring the security risks posed by GPU side-channel leakage in deployed transformer models.
Authors:Neil F. Johnson, Frank Yingjie Huo
Title: Multispin Physics of AI Tipping Points and Hallucinations
Abstract:
Output from generative AI such as ChatGPT, can be repetitive and biased. But more worrying is that this output can mysteriously tip mid-response from good (correct) to bad (misleading or wrong) without the user noticing. In 2024 alone, this reportedly caused $67 billion in losses and several deaths. Establishing a mathematical mapping to a multispin thermal system, we reveal a hidden tipping instability at the scale of the AI's 'atom' (basic Attention head). We derive a simple but essentially exact formula for this tipping point which shows directly the impact of a user's prompt choice and the AI's training bias. We then show how the output tipping can get amplified by the AI's multilayer architecture. As well as helping improve AI transparency, explainability and performance, our results open a path to quantifying users' AI risk and legal liabilities.
Authors:Daniele Lanzoni, Olivier Pierre-Louis, Roberto Bergamaschini, Francesco Montalenti
Title: Learning Kinetic Monte Carlo stochastic dynamics with Deep Generative Adversarial Networks
Abstract:
We show that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) may be fruitfully exploited to learn stochastic dynamics, surrogating traditional models while capturing thermal fluctuations. Specifically, we showcase the application to a two-dimensional, many-particle system, focusing on surface-step fluctuations and on the related time-dependent roughness. After the construction of a dataset based on Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, a conditional GAN is trained to propagate stochastically the state of the system in time, allowing the generation of new sequences with a reduced computational cost. Modifications with respect to standard GANs, which facilitate convergence and increase accuracy, are discussed. The trained network is demonstrated to quantitatively reproduce equilibrium and kinetic properties, including scaling laws, with deviations of a few percent from the exact value. Extrapolation limits and future perspectives are critically discussed.
Authors:Johannes van Randenborgh, Steffen Daniel, Moritz Schulze Darup
Title: A lightweight numerical model for predictive control of borehole thermal energy storages
Abstract:
Borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) can reduce the operation of fossil fuel-based heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems for buildings. With BTES, thermal energy is stored via a borehole heat exchanger in the ground. Model predictive control (MPC) may maximize the use of BTES by achieving a dynamic interaction between the building and BTES. However, modeling BTES for MPC is challenging, and a trade-off between model accuracy and an easy-to-solve optimal control problem (OCP) must be found. This manuscript presents an accurate numerical model yielding an easy-to-solve linear-quadratic OCP.
Authors:Hassan Zahid Butt, Xingpeng Li
Title: Approximating CCCV charging using SOC-dependent tapered charging power constraints in long-term microgrid planning
Abstract:
Traditional long-term microgrid planning models assume constant power charging for battery energy storage systems (BESS), overlooking efficiency losses that occur toward the end of charge due to rising internal resistance. While this issue can be mitigated at the cell level using constant current-constant voltage (CCCV) charging, it is impractical at the pack level in large-scale systems. However, battery management systems and inverter controls can emulate this effect by tapering charging power at high state-of-charge (SOC) levels, trading off charging speed for improved efficiency and reduced thermal stress. Ignoring this behavior in planning models can lead to undersized batteries and potential reliability issues. This paper proposes a tractable and scalable approach to approximate CCCV behavior using SOC-dependent tapered charging power (TCP) constraints. A MATLAB-based proof of concept demonstrates the energy delivery and efficiency benefits of tapering. The method is integrated into a long-term planning framework and evaluated under a synthetic load and solar profile. Results show tapering significantly affects BESS sizing, cost, and reliability under dynamic operating conditions that demand fast charging. These findings highlight tapering as a critical modeling factor for accurately capturing BESS performance in long-term microgrid planning.
Authors:Raffael Theiler, Olga Fink
Title: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Short-term State Forecasting in Power Systems across Domains and Time Scales: A Hydroelectric Power Plant Case Study
Abstract:
Accurate short-term state forecasting is essential for efficient and stable operation of modern power systems, especially in the context of increasing variability introduced by renewable and distributed energy resources. As these systems evolve rapidly, it becomes increasingly important to reliably predict their states in the short term to ensure operational stability, support control decisions, and enable interpretable monitoring of sensor and machine behavior. Modern power systems often span multiple physical domains - including electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, and thermal - posing significant challenges for modeling and prediction. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising data-driven framework for system state estimation and state forecasting in such settings. By leveraging the topological structure of sensor networks, GNNs can implicitly learn inter-sensor relationships and propagate information across the network. However, most existing GNN-based methods are designed under the assumption of homogeneous sensor relationships and are typically constrained to a single physical domain. This limitation restricts their ability to integrate and reason over heterogeneous sensor data commonly encountered in real-world energy systems, such as those used in energy conversion infrastructure. In this work, we propose the use of Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks to address these limitations. Our approach models both homogeneous intra-domain and heterogeneous inter-domain relationships among sensor data from two distinct physical domains - hydraulic and electrical - which exhibit fundamentally different temporal dynamics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms conventional baselines on average by 35.5% in terms of normalized root mean square error, confirming its effectiveness in multi-domain, multi-rate power system state forecasting.
Authors:R. Sharma, M. Raissi, Y. B. Guo
Title: Physics-Informed Machine Learning Regulated by Finite Element Analysis for Simulation Acceleration of Laser Powder Bed Fusion
Abstract:
Efficient simulation of Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is crucial for process prediction due to the lasting issue of high computation cost using traditional numerical methods such as finite element analysis (FEA). This study presents an efficient modeling framework termed FEA-Regulated Physics-Informed Neural Network (FEA-PINN) to accelerate the thermal field prediction in a LPBF process while maintaining the FEA accuracy. A novel dynamic material updating strategy is developed to capture the dynamic phase change of powder-liquid-solid in the PINN model. The PINN model incorporates temperature-dependent material properties and phase change behavior using the apparent heat capacity method. While the PINN model demonstrates high accuracy with a small training data and enables generalization of new process parameters via transfer learning, it faces the challenge of high computation cost in time-dependent problems due to the residual accumulation. To overcome this issue, the FEA-PINN framework integrates corrective FEA simulations during inference to enforce physical consistency and reduce error drift. A comparative analysis shows that FEA-PINN achieves equivalent accuracy to FEA while significantly reducing computational cost. The framework has been validated using the benchmark FEA data and demonstrated through single-track scanning in LPBF.
Authors:Haitao Huang, Chuangtao Chen, Qinglin Zhao
Title: Continuous-variable Quantum Diffusion Model for State Generation and Restoration
Abstract:
The generation and preservation of complex quantum states against environmental noise are paramount challenges in advancing continuous-variable (CV) quantum information processing. This paper introduces a novel framework based on continuous-variable quantum diffusion principles, synergizing them with CV quantum neural networks (CVQNNs) to address these dual challenges. For the task of state generation, our Continuous-Variable Quantum Diffusion Generative model (CVQD-G) employs a physically driven forward diffusion process using a thermal loss channel, which is then inverted by a learnable, parameter-efficient backward denoising process based on a CVQNN with time-embedding. This framework's capability is further extended for state recovery by the Continuous-Variable Quantum Diffusion Restoration model (CVQD-R), a specialized variant designed to restore quantum states, particularly coherent states with unknown parameters, from thermal degradation. Extensive numerical simulations validate these dual capabilities, demonstrating the high-fidelity generation of diverse Gaussian (coherent, squeezed) and non-Gaussian (Fock, cat) states, typically with fidelities exceeding 99%, and confirming the model's ability to robustly restore corrupted states. Furthermore, a comprehensive complexity analysis reveals favorable training and inference costs, highlighting the framework's efficiency, scalability, and its potential as a robust tool for quantum state engineering and noise mitigation in realistic CV quantum systems.
Authors:Hanyang Zhou, Haozhe Lou, Wenhao Liu, Enyu Zhao, Yue Wang, Daniel Seita
Title: The MOTIF Hand: A Robotic Hand for Multimodal Observations with Thermal, Inertial, and Force Sensors
Abstract:
Advancing dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands requires rich sensory capabilities, while existing designs lack onboard thermal and torque sensing. In this work, we propose the MOTIF hand, a novel multimodal and versatile robotic hand that extends the LEAP hand by integrating: (i) dense tactile information across the fingers, (ii) a depth sensor, (iii) a thermal camera, (iv), IMU sensors, and (v) a visual sensor. The MOTIF hand is designed to be relatively low-cost (under 4000 USD) and easily reproducible. We validate our hand design through experiments that leverage its multimodal sensing for two representative tasks. First, we integrate thermal sensing into 3D reconstruction to guide temperature-aware, safe grasping. Second, we show how our hand can distinguish objects with identical appearance but different masses - a capability beyond methods that use vision only.
Authors:Yu Liu, Yangtao Meng, Xianfei Pan, Jie Jiang, Changhao Chen
Title: ThermalLoc: A Vision Transformer-Based Approach for Robust Thermal Camera Relocalization in Large-Scale Environments
Abstract:
Thermal cameras capture environmental data through heat emission, a fundamentally different mechanism compared to visible light cameras, which rely on pinhole imaging. As a result, traditional visual relocalization methods designed for visible light images are not directly applicable to thermal images. Despite significant advancements in deep learning for camera relocalization, approaches specifically tailored for thermal camera-based relocalization remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce ThermalLoc, a novel end-to-end deep learning method for thermal image relocalization. ThermalLoc effectively extracts both local and global features from thermal images by integrating EfficientNet with Transformers, and performs absolute pose regression using two MLP networks. We evaluated ThermalLoc on both the publicly available thermal-odometry dataset and our own dataset. The results demonstrate that ThermalLoc outperforms existing representative methods employed for thermal camera relocalization, including AtLoc, MapNet, PoseNet, and RobustLoc, achieving superior accuracy and robustness.
Authors:Shuchen Sun, Ligen Shi, Chang Liu, Lina Wu, Jun Qiu
Title: Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Based on Implicit Neural Representations
Abstract:
Infrared and visible light image fusion aims to combine the strengths of both modalities to generate images that are rich in information and fulfill visual or computational requirements. This paper proposes an image fusion method based on Implicit Neural Representations (INR), referred to as INRFuse. This method parameterizes a continuous function through a neural network to implicitly represent the multimodal information of the image, breaking through the traditional reliance on discrete pixels or explicit features. The normalized spatial coordinates of the infrared and visible light images serve as inputs, and multi-layer perceptrons is utilized to adaptively fuse the features of both modalities, resulting in the output of the fused image. By designing multiple loss functions, the method jointly optimizes the similarity between the fused image and the original images, effectively preserving the thermal radiation information of the infrared image while maintaining the texture details of the visible light image. Furthermore, the resolution-independent characteristic of INR allows for the direct fusion of images with varying resolutions and achieves super-resolution reconstruction through high-density coordinate queries. Experimental results indicate that INRFuse outperforms existing methods in both subjective visual quality and objective evaluation metrics, producing fused images with clear structures, natural details, and rich information without the necessity for a training dataset.
Authors:Evan J. D. Anderson, Michael S. Bullock, Ohad Kimelfeld, Christopher K. Eyre, Filip Rozpędek, Uzi Pereg, Boulat A. Bash
Title: Covert Entanglement Generation over Bosonic Channels
Abstract:
We explore covert entanglement generation over the lossy thermal-noise bosonic channel, which is a quantum-mechanical model of many practical settings, including optical, microwave, and radio-frequency (RF) channels. Covert communication ensures that an adversary is unable to detect the presence of transmissions, which are concealed in channel noise. We show that a $\textit{square root law}$ (SRL) for covert entanglement generation similar to that for classical: $L_{\rm EG}\sqrt{n}$ entangled bits (ebits) can be generated covertly and reliably over $n$ uses of a bosonic channel. We report a single-letter expression for optimal $L_{\rm EG}$ as well as an achievable method. We additionally analyze the performance of covert entanglement generation using single- and dual-rail photonic qubits, which may be more practical for physical implementation.
Authors:Ondřej Benedikt, Michal Sojka, Přemysl Šůcha, Pavel Zaykov, Zdeněk Hanzálek
Title: Thermal Modeling and Optimal Allocation of Avionics Safety-critical Tasks on Heterogeneous MPSoCs
Abstract:
Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) can deliver high performance needed in many industrial domains, including aerospace. However, their high power consumption, combined with avionics safety standards, brings new thermal management challenges. This paper investigates techniques for offline thermal-aware allocation of periodic tasks on heterogeneous MPSoCs running at a fixed clock frequency, as required in avionics. The goal is to find the assignment of tasks to (i) cores and (ii) temporal isolation windows while minimizing the MPSoC temperature. To achieve that, we propose and analyze three power models, and integrate them within several novel optimization approaches based on heuristics, a black-box optimizer, and Integer Linear Programming (ILP). We perform the experimental evaluation on three popular MPSoC platforms (NXP i.MX8QM MEK, NXP i.MX8QM Ixora, NVIDIA TX2) and observe a difference of up to 5.5°C among the tested methods (corresponding to a 22% reduction w.r.t. the ambient temperature). We also show that our method, integrating the empirical power model with the ILP, outperforms the other methods on all tested platforms.
Authors:Alex Brown, Joscha Fregin, Thomas Bendall, Thomas Melvin, Daniel Ruprecht, Jemma Shipton
Title: Fast-wave slow-wave spectral deferred correction methods applied to the compressible Euler equations
Abstract:
This paper investigates the application of a fast-wave slow-wave spectral deferred correction time-stepping method (FWSW-SDC) to the compressible Euler equations. The resulting model achieves arbitrary order accuracy in time, demonstrating robust performance in standard benchmark idealised test cases for dynamical cores used for numerical weather prediction. The model uses a compatible finite element spatial discretisation, achieving good linear wave dispersion properties without spurious computational modes. A convergence test confirms the model's high temporal accuracy. Arbitrarily high spatial-temporal convergence is demonstrated using a gravity wave test case. The model is further extended to include the parametrisation of a simple physics process by adding two phases of moisture and its validity is demonstrated for a rising thermal problem. Finally, a baroclinic wave in simulated in a Cartesian domain.
Authors:Mingquan Feng, Yixin Huang, Yifan Fu, Shaobo Wang, Junchi Yan
Title: KO: Kinetics-inspired Neural Optimizer with PDE Simulation Approaches
Abstract:
The design of optimization algorithms for neural networks remains a critical challenge, with most existing methods relying on heuristic adaptations of gradient-based approaches. This paper introduces KO (Kinetics-inspired Optimizer), a novel neural optimizer inspired by kinetic theory and partial differential equation (PDE) simulations. We reimagine the training dynamics of network parameters as the evolution of a particle system governed by kinetic principles, where parameter updates are simulated via a numerical scheme for the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) that models stochastic particle collisions. This physics-driven approach inherently promotes parameter diversity during optimization, mitigating the phenomenon of parameter condensation, i.e. collapse of network parameters into low-dimensional subspaces, through mechanisms analogous to thermal diffusion in physical systems. We analyze this property, establishing both a mathematical proof and a physical interpretation. Extensive experiments on image classification (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet) and text classification (IMDB, Snips) tasks demonstrate that KO consistently outperforms baseline optimizers (e.g., Adam, SGD), achieving accuracy improvements while computation cost remains comparable.
Authors:Lei Wan, Prabesh Gupta, Andreas Eich, Marcel Kettelgerdes, Hannan Ejaz Keen, Michael Klöppel-Gersdorf, Alexey Vinel
Title: VALISENS: A Validated Innovative Multi-Sensor System for Cooperative Automated Driving
Abstract:
Perception is a core capability of automated vehicles and has been significantly advanced through modern sensor technologies and artificial intelligence. However, perception systems still face challenges in complex real-world scenarios. To improve robustness against various external factors, multi-sensor fusion techniques are essential, combining the strengths of different sensor modalities. With recent developments in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X communication, sensor fusion can now extend beyond a single vehicle to a cooperative multi-agent system involving Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV) and intelligent infrastructure. This paper presents VALISENS, an innovative multi-sensor system distributed across multiple agents. It integrates onboard and roadside LiDARs, radars, thermal cameras, and RGB cameras to enhance situational awareness and support cooperative automated driving. The thermal camera adds critical redundancy for perceiving Vulnerable Road User (VRU), while fusion with roadside sensors mitigates visual occlusions and extends the perception range beyond the limits of individual vehicles. We introduce the corresponding perception module built on this sensor system, which includes object detection, tracking, motion forecasting, and high-level data fusion. The proposed system demonstrates the potential of cooperative perception in real-world test environments and lays the groundwork for future Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) applications.
Authors:Yi Zhang, Nikolaos Farmakidis, Ioannis Roumpos, Miltiadis Moralis-Pegios, Apostolos Tsakyridis, June Sang Lee, Bowei Dong, Yuhan He, Samarth Aggarwal, Nikolaos Pleros, Harish Bhaskaran
Title: All-optical temporal integration mediated by subwavelength heat antennas
Abstract:
Optical computing systems deliver unrivalled processing speeds for scalar operations. Yet, integrated implementations have been constrained to low-dimensional tensor operations that fall short of the vector dimensions required for modern artificial intelligence. We demonstrate an all-optical neuromorphic computing system based on time division multiplexing, capable of processing input vectors exceeding 250,000 elements within a unified framework. The platform harnesses optically driven thermo-optic modulation in standing wave optical fields, with titanium nano-antennas functioning as wavelength-selective absorbers. Counterintuitively, the thermal time dynamics of the system enable simultaneous time integration of ultra-fast (50GHz) signals and the application of programmable, non-linear activation functions, entirely within the optical domain. This unified framework constitutes a leap towards large-scale photonic computing that satisfies the dimensional requirements of AI workloads.
Authors:Johannes van Randenborgh, Moritz Schulze Darup
Title: A moving horizon estimator for aquifer thermal energy storages
Abstract:
Aquifer thermal energy storages (ATES) represent groundwater saturated aquifers that store thermal energy in the form of heated or cooled groundwater. Combining two ATES, one can harness excess thermal energy from summer (heat) and winter (cold) to support the building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) technology. In general, a dynamic operation of ATES throughout the year is beneficial to avoid using fossil fuel-based HVAC technology and maximize the ``green use'' of ATES. Model predictive control (MPC) with an appropriate system model may become a crucial control approach for ATES systems. Consequently, the MPC model should reflect spatial temperature profiles around ATES' boreholes to predict extracted groundwater temperatures accurately. However, meaningful predictions require the estimation of the current state of the system, as measurements are usually only at the borehole of the ATES. In control, this is often realized by model-based observers. Still, observing the state of an ATES system is non-trivial, since the model is typically hybrid. We show how to exploit the specific structure of the hybrid ATES model and design an easy-to-solve moving horizon estimator based on a quadratic program.
Authors:Mehmet Basaran, Frederik Rogiers, Martine Baelmans, Maarten Blommaert
Title: Optimal Sizing and Material Choice for Additively Manufactured Compact Plate Heat Exchangers
Abstract:
With advancements in additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities, new opportunities arise to design compact heat exchangers (cHEXs) that leverage AM's degrees of freedom (DOFs) to enhance energy and material efficiency. However, excessive size reduction in counterflow cHEXs can compromise effectiveness due to axial heat conduction through the solid material, influenced by thermal conductivity and wall thickness. This study investigates how AM material selection and thin-wall production limitations might constrain the core size of counterflow plate heat exchangers when targeting maximum power density. An optimization framework evaluates power densities for six materials: plastic, austenitic steel, Al2O3, AlN, aluminum, and copper. Evaluations are conducted under constant effectiveness and pressure drop while accounting for AM-specific plate thickness limits and a lower bound on plate spacing to address fouling. Across all scenarios, copper cHEXs exhibit the lowest power density, despite high thermal conductivity. Without constraints on plate thickness and spacing, the optimal plastic cHEX achieves a power density 1800x greater than the steel baseline, while copper decreases by a factor of 0.98. With equal plate thickness of 0.5 mm for all materials, plastic retains the highest power density, 12.2x more than copper. Introducing a fouling constraint of 0.8 mm plate spacing shifts the optimal material to austenitic steel. When material-specific plate thicknesses are considered, the plastic cHEX achieves the highest power density, five times greater than copper, due to superior thin-wall resolution. This study highlights the impact of AM constraints on the energy and material efficiency of cHEXs, and shows that low-conductivity materials like plastic or austenitic steel can outperform high-conductivity materials like copper in compact designs.
Authors:Mohammad Shadman Hashem, Ahsan Raza, Sama E Shan, Seokhee Jeon
Title: Pneumatic Multi-mode Silicone Actuator with Pressure, Vibration, and Cold Thermal Feedback
Abstract:
A wide range of haptic feedback is crucial for achieving high realism and immersion in virtual environments. Therefore, a multi-modal haptic interface that provides various haptic signals simultaneously is highly beneficial. This paper introduces a novel silicone fingertip actuator that is pneumatically actuated, delivering a realistic and effective haptic experience by simultaneously providing pressure, vibrotactile, and cold thermal feedback. The actuator features a design with multiple air chambers, each with controllable volume achieved through pneumatic valves connected to compressed air tanks. The lower air chamber generates pressure feedback, while the upper chamber produces vibrotactile feedback. In addition, two integrated lateral air nozzles create a cold thermal sensation. To showcase the system's capabilities, we designed two unique 3D surfaces in the virtual environment: a frozen meat surface and an abrasive icy surface. These surfaces simulate tactile perceptions of coldness, pressure, and texture. Comprehensive performance assessments and user studies were conducted to validate the actuator's effectiveness, highlighting its diverse feedback capabilities compared to traditional actuators that offer only single feedback modalities.
Authors:Pratyush Kumar Singh, Danial Faghihi
Title: Technical Note: Continuum Theory of Mixture for Three-phase Thermomechanical Model of Fiber-reinforced Aerogel Composites
Abstract:
We present a thermodynamically consistent three-phase model for the coupled thermal transport and mechanical deformation of ceramic aerogel porous composite materials, which is formulated via continuum mixture theory. The composite comprises a solid silica skeleton, a gaseous fluid phase, and dispersed solid fibers. The thermal transport model incorporates the effects of meso- and macro-pore size variations due to the Knudsen effect, achieved by upscaling phonon transport relations to derive constitutive equations for the fluid thermal conductivity. The mechanical model captures solid-solid and solid-fluid interactions through momentum exchange between phases. A mixed finite element formulation is employed to solve the multiphase model, and numerical studies are conducted to analyze key features of the computational model.
Authors:Jonas Mirlach, Lei Wan, Andreas Wiedholz, Hannan Ejaz Keen, Andreas Eich
Title: R-LiViT: A LiDAR-Visual-Thermal Dataset Enabling Vulnerable Road User Focused Roadside Perception
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, the integration of roadside perception systems is essential for overcoming occlusion challenges and enhancing the safety of Vulnerable Road Users(VRUs). While LiDAR and visual (RGB) sensors are commonly used, thermal imaging remains underrepresented in datasets, despite its acknowledged advantages for VRU detection in extreme lighting conditions. In this paper, we present R-LiViT, the first dataset to combine LiDAR, RGB, and thermal imaging from a roadside perspective, with a strong focus on VRUs. R-LiViT captures three intersections during both day and night, ensuring a diverse dataset. It includes 10,000 LiDAR frames and 2,400 temporally and spatially aligned RGB and thermal images across 150 traffic scenarios, with 7 and 8 annotated classes respectively, providing a comprehensive resource for tasks such as object detection and tracking. The dataset and the code for reproducing our evaluation results are made publicly available.
Authors:Leonardo D. González, Joshua L. Pulsipher, Shengli Jiang, Tyler Soderstrom, Victor M. Zavala
Title: A Digital Twin Simulator of a Pastillation Process with Applications to Automatic Control based on Computer Vision
Abstract:
We present a digital-twin simulator for a pastillation process. The simulation framework produces realistic thermal image data of the process that is used to train computer vision-based soft sensors based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs); the soft sensors produce output signals for temperature and product flow rate that enable real-time monitoring and feedback control. Pastillation technologies are high-throughput devices that are used in a broad range of industries; these processes face operational challenges such as real-time identification of clog locations (faults) in the rotating shell and the automatic, real-time adjustment of conveyor belt speed and operating conditions to stabilize output. The proposed simulator is able to capture this behavior and generates realistic data that can be used to benchmark different algorithms for image processing and different control architectures. We present a case study to illustrate the capabilities; the study explores behavior over a range of equipment sizes, clog locations, and clog duration. A feedback controller (tuned using Bayesian optimization) is used to adjust the conveyor belt speed based on the CNN output signal to achieve the desired process outputs.
Authors:Pouya Shaeri, Saud AlKhaled, Ariane Middel
Title: A Multimodal Physics-Informed Neural Network Approach for Mean Radiant Temperature Modeling
Abstract:
Outdoor thermal comfort is a critical determinant of urban livability, particularly in hot desert climates where extreme heat poses challenges to public health, energy consumption, and urban planning. Mean Radiant Temperature ($T_{mrt}$) is a key parameter for evaluating outdoor thermal comfort, especially in urban environments where radiation dynamics significantly impact human thermal exposure. Traditional methods of estimating $T_{mrt}$ rely on field measurements and computational simulations, both of which are resource intensive. This study introduces a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) approach that integrates shortwave and longwave radiation modeling with deep learning techniques. By leveraging a multimodal dataset that includes meteorological data, built environment characteristics, and fisheye image-derived shading information, our model enhances predictive accuracy while maintaining physical consistency. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PINN framework outperforms conventional deep learning models, with the best-performing configurations achieving an RMSE of 3.50 and an $R^2$ of 0.88. This approach highlights the potential of physics-informed machine learning in bridging the gap between computational modeling and real-world applications, offering a scalable and interpretable solution for urban thermal comfort assessments.
Authors:Donát M. Takács, Tamás Fülöp, Róbert Kovács, Mátyás Szücs
Title: Investigation of the piston effect in supercritical fluids via a reversible--irreversible vector field splitting-based explicit time integration scheme
Abstract:
In the vicinity of the liquid--vapor critical point, supercritical fluids behave strongly compressibly and, in parallel, thermophysical properties have strong state dependence. These lead to various peculiar phenomena, one of which being the piston effect where a sudden heating induces a mechanical pulse. The coupling between thermal and mechanical processes, in the linear approximation, yields a non-trivially rich thermoacoustics. The numerous applications of supercritical fluids raise the need for reliable yet fast and efficient numerical solution for thermoacoustic time and space dependence in this sensitive domain. Here, we present a second-order accurate, fully explicit staggered space-time grid finite difference method for such coupled linear thermoacoustic problems. Time integration is based on the splitting of the state space vector field representing the interactions that affect the dynamics into reversible and irreversible parts, which splitting procedure leads to decoupled wave and heat equations. The former is a hyperbolic partial differential equation, while the latter is a parabolic one, therefore, different time integration algorithms must be amalgamated to obtain a reliable, dispersion error-free, and dissipation error-free numerical solution. Finally, the thermoacoustic approximation of the supercritical piston effect is investigated via the developed method.
Authors:Peretz Yafin, Nir Sochen, Iftach Klapp
Title: Scene-based nonuniformity correction with homography transformation
Abstract:
Due to their affordable, low mass, and small dimensions, uncooled microbolometer-based thermal focal plane arrays (UC-FPAs) are useful for long-wave infrared (LWIR)imaging applications. However, in outdoor conditions typical in agricultural remote sensing, cameras based on UC-FPAs may suffer from drift in offset and gain. To tackle the persistent drift, the system requires continuous calibration. Our goal in this study was to eliminate this requirement via a computational schema. In a former study, we estimated unknown gain and offset values and thermographic images of an object from a sequence of pairs of successive images taken at two different blur levels.In the current work, we took on a similar problem using a sequence of shifted images, with relative shifts caused by realistic drone hovering modeled by homography transformation. This places our work in the realm of scene-based nonuniformity correction problems. We show that an object's thermographic values, as well as gain and offset, can be jointly estimated by relying on a few sets of shifted images. We use a minimum likelihood estimator, which is found using alternating minimization. Registration is done using a generalized Lucas-Kanade method. Simulations show promising accuracy with mean Pearson correlation of more than 0.9999998 between ground truth and restoration. Under ideal assumptions, this is equivalent to a mean restoration error of less than 0.01 Celsius degree.
Authors:Peiyi Chen, Irene M. Gamba, Qin Li, Li Wang
Title: Reconstruction of heat relaxation index in phonon transport equation
Abstract:
For nano-materials, heat conductivity is an ill-defined concept. This classical concept assumes the validity of Fourier's law, which states the heat flux is proportional to temperature gradient, with heat conductivity used to denote this ratio. However, this macroscopic constitutive relation breaks down at nano-scales. Instead, heat is propagated using phonon transport equation, an ab initio model derived from the first principle. In this equation, a material's thermal property is coded in a coefficient termed the relaxation time ($τ$). We study an inverse problem in this paper, by using material's temperature response upon heat injection to infer the relaxation time. This inverse problem is formulated in a PDE-constrained optimization, and numerically solved by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method and its variants. In the execution of SGD, Fréchet derivative is computed and Lipschitz continuity is proved. This approach, in comparison to the earlier studies, honors the nano-structure of of heat conductivity in a nano-material, and we numerically verify the break down of the Fourier's law.
Authors:Shengyu Tao, Guangyuan Ma, Huixiong Yang, Minyan Lu, Guodan Wei, Guangmin Zhou, Xuan Zhang
Title: PulseBat: A field-accessible dataset for second-life battery diagnostics from realistic histories using multidimensional rapid pulse test
Abstract:
As electric vehicles (EVs) approach the end of their operational life, their batteries retain significant economic value and present promising opportunities for second-life use and material recycling. This is particularly compelling for Global South and other underdeveloped regions, where reliable energy storage is vital to addressing critical challenges posed by weak and even nonexistent power grid and energy infrastructures. However, despite this potential, widespread adoption has been hindered by critical uncertainties surrounding the technical performance, safety, and recertification of second-life batteries. In cases where they have been redeployed, mismatches between estimated and actual performance often render batteries technically unsuitable or hazardous, turning them into liabilities for communities they were intended to benefit. This considerable misalignment exacerbates energy access disparities and undermines the broader vision of energy justice, highlighting an urgent need for robust and scalable solutions to unlock the potential. In the PulseBat Dataset, the authors tested 464 retired lithium-ion batteries, covering 3 cathode material types, 6 historical usages, 3 physical formats, and 6 capacity designs. The pulse test experiments were performed repeatedly for each second-life battery with 10 pulse width, 10 pulse magnitude, multiple state-of-charge, and state-of-health conditions, e.g., from 0.37 to 1.03. The PulseBat Dataset recorded these test conditions and the voltage response as well as the temperature signals that were subject to the injected pulse current, which could be used as a valuable data resource for critical diagnostics tasks such as state-of-charge estimation, state-of-health estimation, cathode material type identification, open-circuit voltage reconstruction, thermal management, and beyond.
Authors:Zhong Zheng, Seyfal Sultanov, Michael E. Papka, Zhiling Lan
Title: Exploring Uncore Frequency Scaling for Heterogeneous Computing
Abstract:
High-performance computing (HPC) systems are essential for scientific discovery and engineering innovation. However, their growing power demands pose significant challenges, particularly as systems scale to the exascale level. Prior uncore frequency tuning studies have primarily focused on conventional HPC workloads running on homogeneous systems. As HPC advances toward heterogeneous computing, integrating diverse GPU workloads on heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems, it is crucial to revisit and enhance uncore scaling. Our investigation reveals that uncore frequency scales down only when CPU power approaches its TDP (Thermal Design Power), an uncommon scenario in GPU-dominant applications, resulting in unnecessary power waste in modern heterogeneous computing systems. To address this, we present MAGUS, a user-transparent uncore frequency scaling runtime for heterogeneous computing. Effective uncore tuning is inherently complex, requiring dynamic detection of application execution phases that affect uncore utilization. Moreover, any robust strategy must work across a diverse range of applications, each with unique behaviors and resource requirements. Finally, an efficient runtime should introduce minimal overhead. We incorporate several key techniques in the design of MAGUS, including monitoring and predicting memory throughput, managing frequent phase transitions, and leveraging vendor-supplied power management support. We evaluate MAGUS using a diverse set of GPU benchmarks and applications across multiple heterogeneous systems with different CPU and GPU architectures. The experimental results show that MAGUS achieves up to 27% energy savings and 26% energy-delay product (EDP) reduction compared to the default settings while maintaining a performance loss below 5% and an overhead under 1%.
Authors:Barbara Wirthl, Paolo Decuzzi, Bernhard A. Schrefler, Wolfgang A. Wall
Title: Computational modelling of cancer nanomedicine: Integrating hyperthermia treatment into a multiphase porous-media tumour model
Abstract:
Heat-based cancer treatment, so-called hyperthermia, can be used to destroy tumour cells directly or to make them more susceptible to chemotherapy or radiation therapy. To apply heat locally, iron oxide nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream and accumulate at the tumour site, where they generate heat when exposed to an alternating magnetic field. However, the temperature must be precisely controlled to achieve therapeutic benefits while avoiding damage to healthy tissue. We therefore present a computational model for nanoparticle-mediated hyperthermia treatment fully integrated into a multiphase porous-media model of the tumour and its microenvironment. We study how the temperature depends on the amount of nanoparticles accumulated in the tumour area and the specific absorption rate of the nanoparticles. Our results show that host tissue surrounding the tumour is also exposed to considerable doses of heat due to the high thermal conductivity of the tissue, which may cause pain or even unnecessary irreversible damage. Further, we include a lumped and a discrete model for the cooling effect of blood perfusion. Using a discrete model of a realistic microvasculature reveals that the small capillaries do not have a significant cooling effect during hyperthermia treatment and that the commonly used lumped model based on Pennes' bioheat equation overestimates the effect: within the specific conditions analysed, the difference between lumped and discrete approaches is approximatively 0.75°C, which could influence the therapeutic intervention outcome. Such a comprehensive computational model, as presented here, can provide insights into the optimal treatment parameters for nanoparticle-mediated hyperthermia and can be used to design more efficient treatment strategies.
Authors:Ben S. Southworth, Steven Walton, Steven B. Roberts, HyeongKae Park
Title: Moment-based adaptive time integration for thermal radiation transport
Abstract:
In this paper we develop a framework for moment-based adaptive time integration of deterministic multifrequency thermal radiation transpot (TRT). We generalize our recent semi-implicit-explicit (IMEX) integration framework for gray TRT to multifrequency TRT, and also introduce a semi-implicit variation that facilitates higher-order integration of TRT, where each stage is implicit in all components except opacities. To appeal to the broad literature on adaptivity with Runge--Kutta methods, we derive new embedded methods for four asymptotic preserving IMEX Runge--Kutta schemes we have found to be robust in our previous work on TRT and radiation hydrodynamics. We then use a moment-based high-order-low-order representation of the transport equations. Due to the high dimensionality, memory is always a concern in simulating TRT. We form error estimates and adaptivity in time purely based on temperature and radiation energy, for a trivial overhead in computational cost and memory usage compared with the base second order integrators. We then test the adaptivity in time on the tophat and Larsen problem, demonstrating the ability of the adaptive algorithm to naturally vary the timestep across 4--5 orders of magnitude, ranging from the dynamical timescales of the streaming regime to the thick diffusion limit.
Authors:Ran Zhang, Caihua Wan, Yingqian Xu, Xiaohan Li, Raik Hoffmann, Meike Hindenberg, Shiqiang Liu, Dehao Kong, Shilong Xiong, Shikun He, Alptekin Vardar, Qiang Dai, Junlu Gong, Yihui Sun, Zejie Zheng, Thomas Kämpfe, Guoqiang Yu, Xiufeng Han
Title: Engineering-Oriented Design of Drift-Resilient MTJ Random Number Generator via Hybrid Control Strategies
Abstract:
Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJs) have shown great promise as hardware sources for true random number generation (TRNG) due to their intrinsic stochastic switching behavior. However, practical deployment remains challenged by drift in switching probability caused by thermal fluctuations, device aging, and environmental instability. This work presents an engineering-oriented, drift-resilient MTJ-based TRNG architecture, enabled by a hybrid control strategy that combines self-stabilizing feedback with pulse width modulation. A key component is the Downcalibration-2 scheme, which updates the control parameter every two steps using only integer-resolution timing, ensuring excellent statistical quality without requiring bit discarding, pre-characterization, or external calibration. Extensive experimental measurements and numerical simulations demonstrate that this approach maintains stable randomness under dynamic temperature drift, using only simple digital logic. The proposed architecture offers high throughput, robustness, and scalability, making it well-suited for secure hardware applications, embedded systems, and edge computing environments.
Authors:Fabian Raisch, Thomas Krug, Christoph Goebel, Benjamin Tischler
Title: GenTL: A General Transfer Learning Model for Building Thermal Dynamics
Abstract:
Transfer Learning (TL) is an emerging field in modeling building thermal dynamics. This method reduces the data required for a data-driven model of a target building by leveraging knowledge from a source building. Consequently, it enables the creation of data-efficient models that can be used for advanced control and fault detection & diagnosis. A major limitation of the TL approach is its inconsistent performance across different sources. Although accurate source-building selection for a target is crucial, it remains a persistent challenge. We present GenTL, a general transfer learning model for single-family houses in Central Europe. GenTL can be efficiently fine-tuned to a large variety of target buildings. It is pretrained on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with data from 450 different buildings. The general transfer learning model eliminates the need for source-building selection by serving as a universal source for fine-tuning. Comparative analysis with conventional single-source to single-target TL demonstrates the efficacy and reliability of the general pretraining approach. Testing GenTL on 144 target buildings for fine-tuning reveals an average prediction error (RMSE) reduction of 42.1 % compared to fine-tuning single-source models.
Authors:Pratyush Kumar Singh, Danial Faghihi
Title: Chance-Constrained Optimal Design of Porous Thermal Insulation Systems Under Spatially Correlated Uncertainty
Abstract:
This paper presents a computationally efficient method for the optimal design of silica aerogel porous material systems, balancing thermal insulation performance with mechanical stability under stress concentrations. The proposed approach explicitly accounts for additive manufacturing uncertainties by modeling material porosity as a spatially correlated stochastic field within a multiphase finite element formulation. A risk-averse objective function, incorporating statistical moments of the design objective, is employed in conjunction with chance constraints that enforce mechanical stability by restricting the probability of exceeding critical stress thresholds. To mitigate the prohibitively high computational cost associated with the large-dimensional uncertainty space and Monte Carlo estimations of the objective function's statistical moments, a second-order Taylor expansion is utilized as a control variate. Furthermore, a continuation-based smoothing strategy is introduced to address the non-differentiability of the chance constraints, ensuring compatibility with gradient-based optimization. The resulting framework achieves computational scalability, remaining agnostic to the dimensionality of the stochastic design space. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated through numerical experiments on two- and three-dimensional thermal break systems for building insulation. The results highlight the framework's capability to solve large-scale, chance-constrained optimal design problems governed by finite element models with uncertain design parameter spaces reaching dimensions in the hundreds of thousands.
Authors:R. Sharma, Y. B. Guo
Title: Thermal-Mechanical Physics Informed Deep Learning For Fast Prediction of Thermal Stress Evolution in Laser Metal Deposition
Abstract:
Understanding thermal stress evolution in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is crucial for producing high-quality components. Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) have shown great potential for modeling complex multiphysics problems in metal AM. While physics-based simulations face the challenge of high computational costs, conventional data-driven ML models require large, labeled training datasets to achieve accurate predictions. Unfortunately, generating large datasets for ML model training through time-consuming experiments or high-fidelity simulations is highly expensive in metal AM. To address these challenges, this study introduces a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework that incorporates governing physical laws into deep neural networks (NNs) to predict temperature and thermal stress evolution during the laser metal deposition (LMD) process. The study also discusses the enhanced accuracy and efficiency of the PINN model when supplemented with small simulation data. Furthermore, it highlights the PINN transferability, enabling fast predictions with a set of new process parameters using a pre-trained PINN model as an online soft sensor, significantly reducing computation time compared to physics-based numerical models while maintaining accuracy.
Authors:Serhii Svystun, Oleksandr Melnychenko, Pavlo Radiuk, Oleg Savenko, Andrii Lysyi
Title: Distributed Intelligent System Architecture for UAV-Assisted Monitoring of Wind Energy Infrastructure
Abstract:
With the rapid development of green energy, the efficiency and reliability of wind turbines are key to sustainable renewable energy production. For that reason, this paper presents a novel intelligent system architecture designed for the dynamic collection and real-time processing of visual data to detect defects in wind turbines. The system employs advanced algorithms within a distributed framework to enhance inspection accuracy and efficiency using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with integrated visual and thermal sensors. An experimental study conducted at the "Staryi Sambir-1" wind power plant in Ukraine demonstrates the system's effectiveness, showing a significant improvement in defect detection accuracy (up to 94%) and a reduction in inspection time per turbine (down to 1.5 hours) compared to traditional methods. The results show that the proposed intelligent system architecture provides a scalable and reliable solution for wind turbine maintenance, contributing to the durability and performance of renewable energy infrastructure.
Authors:Serhii Svystun, Oleksandr Melnychenko, Pavlo Radiuk, Oleg Savenko, Anatoliy Sachenko, Andrii Lysyi
Title: Thermal and RGB Images Work Better Together in Wind Turbine Damage Detection
Abstract:
The inspection of wind turbine blades (WTBs) is crucial for ensuring their structural integrity and operational efficiency. Traditional inspection methods can be dangerous and inefficient, prompting the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that access hard-to-reach areas and capture high-resolution imagery. In this study, we address the challenge of enhancing defect detection on WTBs by integrating thermal and RGB images obtained from UAVs. We propose a multispectral image composition method that combines thermal and RGB imagery through spatial coordinate transformation, key point detection, binary descriptor creation, and weighted image overlay. Using a benchmark dataset of WTB images annotated for defects, we evaluated several state-of-the-art object detection models. Our results show that composite images significantly improve defect detection efficiency. Specifically, the YOLOv8 model's accuracy increased from 91% to 95%, precision from 89% to 94%, recall from 85% to 92%, and F1-score from 87% to 93%. The number of false positives decreased from 6 to 3, and missed defects reduced from 5 to 2. These findings demonstrate that integrating thermal and RGB imagery enhances defect detection on WTBs, contributing to improved maintenance and reliability.
Authors:Cody R. Longwell, Conor K. Trygstad, Nestor O. Perez-Arancibia
Title: Power-Efficient Actuation for Insect-Scale Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Abstract:
We present a new evolution of the Very Little Eel-Inspired roBot, the VLEIBot++, a 900-mg swimmer driven by two 10-mg bare high-work density (HWD) actuators, whose functionality is based on the use of shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires. An actuator of this type consumes an average power of about 40 mW during in-air operation. We integrated onboard power and computation into the VLEIBot++ using a custom-built printed circuit board (PCB) and an 11-mAh 3.7-V 507-mg single-cell lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery, which in conjunction enable autonomous swimming for about 20 min on a single charge. This robot can swim at speeds of up to 18.7 mm/s (0.46 Bl/s) and is the first subgram microswimmer with onboard power, actuation, and computation developed to date. Unfortunately, the approach employed to actuate VLEIBot++ prototypes is infeasible for underwater applications because a typical 10-mg bare SMA-based microactuator requires an average power on the order of 800 mW when operating underwater. To address this issue, we introduce a new 13-mg power-efficient high-performance SMA-based microactuator that can function with similar power requirements (approx. 80 mW on average) and actuation performance (approx. 3 mm at low frequencies) in air and water. This design is based on the use of a sealed flexible air-capsule that encloses the SMA wires that drive the microactuator with the purpose of passively controlling the heat-transfer rate of the thermal system. Furthermore, this new power-efficient encapsulated actuator requires low voltages of excitation (3 to 4 V) and simple power electronics to function. The breakthroughs presented in this paper represent a path towards the creation of insect-scale autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).
Authors:Mohammad Shadman Hashem, Ahsan Raza, Seokhee Jeon
Title: Silicone-made Tactile Actuator Integrated with Hot Thermo-fiber Finger Sleeve
Abstract:
Multi-mode haptic feedback is essential to achieve high realism and immersion in virtual environments. This paper proposed a novel silicone fingertip actuator integrated with a hot thermal fabric finger sleeve to render pressure, vibration, and hot thermal feedback simultaneously. The actuator is pneumatically actuated to render a realistic and effective tactile experience in accordance with hot thermal sensation. The silicone actuator, with two air chambers controlled by pneumatic valves connected to compressed air tanks. Simultaneously, a PWM signal from a microcontroller regulates the temperature of the thermal fabric sleeve, enhancing overall system functionality. The lower chamber of the silicone actuator is responsible for pressure feedback, whereas the upper chamber is devoted to vibrotactile feedback. The conductive yarn or thread was utilized to spread the thermal feedback actuation points on the thermal fabric's surface. To demonstrate the actuator's capability, a VR environment consisting of a bowl of liquid and a stove with fire was designed. Based on different functionalities the scenario can simulate the tactile perception of pressure, vibration, and temperature simultaneously or consecutively.
Authors:Duy Nhat Phan, Sushant Jha, James P. Mavo, Erin L. Lanigan, Linh Nguyen, Lokendra Poudel, Rahul Bhowmik
Title: Scalable AI Framework for Defect Detection in Metal Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is transforming the manufacturing sector by enabling efficient production of intricately designed products and small-batch components. However, metal parts produced via AM can include flaws that cause inferior mechanical properties, including reduced fatigue response, yield strength, and fracture toughness. To address this issue, we leverage convolutional neural networks (CNN) to analyze thermal images of printed layers, automatically identifying anomalies that impact these properties. We also investigate various synthetic data generation techniques to address limited and imbalanced AM training data. Our models' defect detection capabilities were assessed using images of Nickel alloy 718 layers produced on a laser powder bed fusion AM machine and synthetic datasets with and without added noise. Our results show significant accuracy improvements with synthetic data, emphasizing the importance of expanding training sets for reliable defect detection. Specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)-generated datasets streamlined data preparation by eliminating human intervention while maintaining high performance, thereby enhancing defect detection capabilities. Additionally, our denoising approach effectively improves image quality, ensuring reliable defect detection. Finally, our work integrates these models in the CLoud ADditive MAnufacturing (CLADMA) module, a user-friendly interface, to enhance their accessibility and practicality for AM applications. This integration supports broader adoption and practical implementation of advanced defect detection in AM processes.
Authors:Lokendra Poudel, Sushant Jha, Ryan Meeker, Duy-Nhat Phan, Rahul Bhowmik
Title: Advanced Predictive Quality Assessment for Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing with Deep Learning Model
Abstract:
Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing (UAM) employs ultrasonic welding to bond similar or dissimilar metal foils to a substrate, resulting in solid, consolidated metal components. However, certain processing conditions can lead to inter-layer defects, affecting the final product's quality. This study develops a method to monitor in-process quality using deep learning-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The CNN models were evaluated on their ability to classify samples with and without embedded thermocouples across five power levels (300W, 600W, 900W, 1200W, 1500W) using thermal images with supervised labeling. Four distinct CNN classification models were created for different scenarios including without (baseline) and with thermocouples, only without thermocouples across power levels, only with thermocouples across power levels, and combined without and with thermocouples across power levels. The models achieved 98.29% accuracy on combined baseline and thermocouple images, 97.10% for baseline images across power levels, 97.43% for thermocouple images, and 97.27% for both types across power levels. The high accuracy, above 97%, demonstrates the system's effectiveness in identifying and classifying conditions within the UAM process, providing a reliable tool for quality assurance and process control in manufacturing environments.
Authors:David López-García, Fermín Segovia, Jacob Rodríguez-Rivero, Javier Ramírez, David Pérez, Raúl Serrano, Juan Manuel Górriz
Title: RESISTO Project: Automatic detection of operation temperature anomalies for power electric transformers using thermal imaging
Abstract:
The RESISTO project represents a pioneering initiative in Europe aimed at enhancing the resilience of the power grid through the integration of advanced technologies. This includes artificial intelligence and thermal surveillance systems to mitigate the impact of extreme meteorological phenomena. RESISTO endeavors to predict, prevent, detect, and recover from weather-related incidents, ultimately enhancing the quality of service provided and ensuring grid stability and efficiency in the face of evolving climate challenges. In this study, we introduce one of the fundamental pillars of the project: a monitoring system for the operating temperature of different regions within power transformers, aiming to detect and alert early on potential thermal anomalies. To achieve this, a distributed system of thermal cameras for real-time temperature monitoring has been deployed in The Doñana National Park, alongside servers responsible for the storing, analyzing, and alerting of any potential thermal anomalies. An adaptive prediction model was developed for temperature forecasting, which learns online from the newly available data. In order to test the long-term performance of the proposed solution, we generated a synthetic temperature database for the whole of the year 2022. Overall, the proposed system exhibits promising capabilities in predicting and detecting thermal anomalies in power electric transformers, showcasing potential applications in enhancing grid reliability and preventing equipment failures.
Authors:Haotong Liang, Chuangye Wang, Heshan Yu, Dylan Kirsch, Rohit Pant, Austin McDannald, A. Gilad Kusne, Ji-Cheng Zhao, Ichiro Takeuchi
Title: Real-time experiment-theory closed-loop interaction for autonomous materials science
Abstract:
Iterative cycles of theoretical prediction and experimental validation are the cornerstone of the modern scientific method. However, the proverbial "closing of the loop" in experiment-theory cycles in practice are usually ad hoc, often inherently difficult, or impractical to repeat on a systematic basis, beset by the scale or the time constraint of computation or the phenomena under study. Here, we demonstrate Autonomous MAterials Search Engine (AMASE), where we enlist robot science to perform self-driving continuous cyclical interaction of experiments and computational predictions for materials exploration. In particular, we have applied the AMASE formalism to the rapid mapping of a temperature-composition phase diagram, a fundamental task for the search and discovery of new materials. Thermal processing and experimental determination of compositional phase boundaries in thin films are autonomously interspersed with real-time updating of the phase diagram prediction through the minimization of Gibbs free energies. AMASE was able to accurately determine the eutectic phase diagram of the Sn-Bi binary thin-film system on the fly from a self-guided campaign covering just a small fraction of the entire composition - temperature phase space, translating to a 6-fold reduction in the number of necessary experiments. This study demonstrates for the first time the possibility of real-time, autonomous, and iterative interactions of experiments and theory carried out without any human intervention.
Authors:Zhanwei Yu, Yi Zhao, Xiaoli Chu, Di Yuan
Title: Online Learning for Intelligent Thermal Management of Interference-coupled and Passively Cooled Base Stations
Abstract:
Passively cooled base stations (PCBSs) have emerged to deliver better cost and energy efficiency. However, passive cooling necessitates intelligent thermal control via traffic management, i.e., the instantaneous data traffic or throughput of a PCBS directly impacts its thermal performance. This is particularly challenging for outdoor deployment of PCBSs because the heat dissipation efficiency is uncertain and fluctuates over time. What is more, the PCBSs are interference-coupled in multi-cell scenarios. Thus, a higher-throughput PCBS leads to higher interference to the other PCBSs, which, in turn, would require more resource consumption to meet their respective throughput targets. In this paper, we address online decision-making for maximizing the total downlink throughput for a multi-PCBS system subject to constraints related on operating temperature. We demonstrate that a reinforcement learning (RL) approach, specifically soft actor-critic (SAC), can successfully perform throughput maximization while keeping the PCBSs cool, by adapting the throughput to time-varying heat dissipation conditions. Furthermore, we design a denial and reward mechanism that effectively mitigates the risk of overheating during the exploration phase of RL. Simulation results show that our approach achieves up to 88.6% of the global optimum. This is very promising, as our approach operates without prior knowledge of future heat dissipation efficiency, which is required by the global optimum.
Authors:Lucia Gordon, Nikhil Behari, Samuel Collier, Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly, Jackson A. Killian, Catherine Ressijac, Peter Boucher, Andrew Davies, Milind Tambe
Title: Find Rhinos without Finding Rhinos: Active Learning with Multimodal Imagery of South African Rhino Habitats
Abstract:
Much of Earth's charismatic megafauna is endangered by human activities, particularly the rhino, which is at risk of extinction due to the poaching crisis in Africa. Monitoring rhinos' movement is crucial to their protection but has unfortunately proven difficult because rhinos are elusive. Therefore, instead of tracking rhinos, we propose the novel approach of mapping communal defecation sites, called middens, which give information about rhinos' spatial behavior valuable to anti-poaching, management, and reintroduction efforts. This paper provides the first-ever mapping of rhino midden locations by building classifiers to detect them using remotely sensed thermal, RGB, and LiDAR imagery in passive and active learning settings. As existing active learning methods perform poorly due to the extreme class imbalance in our dataset, we design MultimodAL, an active learning system employing a ranking technique and multimodality to achieve competitive performance with passive learning models with 94% fewer labels. Our methods could therefore save over 76 hours in labeling time when used on a similarly-sized dataset. Unexpectedly, our midden map reveals that rhino middens are not randomly distributed throughout the landscape; rather, they are clustered. Consequently, rangers should be targeted at areas with high midden densities to strengthen anti-poaching efforts, in line with UN Target 15.7.
Authors:S. Ares de Parga, J. R. Bravo, N. Sibuet, J. A. Hernandez, R. Rossi, Stefan Boschert, Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí, Andrés E. Tomás, Cristian Cătălin Tatu, Fernando Vázquez-Novoa, Jorge Ejarque, Rosa M. Badia
Title: Parallel Reduced Order Modeling for Digital Twins using High-Performance Computing Workflows
Abstract:
The integration of reduced-order models (ROMs) with high-performance computing (HPC) is critical for developing digital twins, particularly for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance of industrial systems. This paper presents a comprehensive, HPC-enabled workflow for developing and deploying projection-based reduced-order models (PROMs) for large-scale mechanical simulations. We use PyCOMPSs' parallel framework to efficiently execute ROM training simulations, employing parallel singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithms such as randomized SVD, Lanczos SVD, and full SVD based on tall-skinny QR (TSQR). Moreover, we introduce a partitioned version of the hyper-reduction scheme known as the Empirical Cubature Method (ECM) to further enhance computational efficiency in PROMs for mechanical systems. Despite the widespread use of HPC for PROMs, there is a significant lack of publications detailing comprehensive workflows for building and deploying end-to-end PROMs in HPC environments. Our workflow is validated through a case study focusing on the thermal dynamics of a motor, a multiphysics problem involving convective heat transfer and mechanical components. The PROM is designed to deliver a real-time prognosis tool that could enable rapid and safe motor restarts post-emergency shutdowns under different operating conditions, demonstrating its potential impact on the practice of simulations in engineering mechanics. To facilitate deployment, we use the Workflow as a Service (WaaS) strategy and Functional Mock-Up Units (FMUs) to ensure compatibility and ease of integration across HPC, edge, and cloud environments. The outcomes illustrate the efficacy of combining PROMs and HPC, establishing a precedent for scalable, real-time digital twin applications in computational mechanics across multiple industries.
Authors:Prakash Thakolkaran, Yiwen Zheng, Yaqi Guo, Aniruddh Vashisth, Siddhant Kumar
Title: Deep learning reveals key predictors of thermal conductivity in covalent organic frameworks
Abstract:
The thermal conductivity of covalent organic frameworks (COFs), an emerging class of nanoporous polymeric materials, is crucial for many applications, yet the link between their structure and thermal properties remains poorly understood. Analysis of a dataset containing over 2,400 COFs reveals that conventional features such as density, pore size, void fraction, and surface area do not reliably predict thermal conductivity. To address this, an attention-based machine learning model was trained, accurately predicting thermal conductivities even for structures outside the training set. The attention mechanism was then utilized to investigate the model's success. The analysis identified dangling molecular branches as a key predictor of thermal conductivity, a discovery supported by feature importance assessments conducted on regression models. These findings indicate that COFs with dangling functional groups exhibit lower thermal transfer capabilities. Molecular dynamics simulations support this observation, revealing significant mismatches in the vibrational density of states due to the presence of dangling branches.
Authors:Matteo Tomasetto, Andrea Manzoni, Francesco Braghin
Title: Real-time optimal control of high-dimensional parametrized systems by deep learning-based reduced order models
Abstract:
Steering a system towards a desired target in a very short amount of time is challenging from a computational standpoint. Indeed, the intrinsically iterative nature of optimal control problems requires multiple simulations of the physical system to be controlled. Moreover, the control action needs to be updated whenever the underlying scenario undergoes variations. Full-order models based on, e.g., the Finite Element Method, do not meet these requirements due to the computational burden they usually entail. On the other hand, conventional reduced order modeling techniques such as the Reduced Basis method, are intrusive, rely on a linear superimposition of modes, and lack of efficiency when addressing nonlinear time-dependent dynamics. In this work, we propose a non-intrusive Deep Learning-based Reduced Order Modeling (DL-ROM) technique for the rapid control of systems described in terms of parametrized PDEs in multiple scenarios. In particular, optimal full-order snapshots are generated and properly reduced by either Proper Orthogonal Decomposition or deep autoencoders (or a combination thereof) while feedforward neural networks are exploited to learn the map from scenario parameters to reduced optimal solutions. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction therefore allows us to consider state variables and control actions that are both low-dimensional and distributed. After (i) data generation, (ii) dimensionality reduction, and (iii) neural networks training in the offline phase, optimal control strategies can be rapidly retrieved in an online phase for any scenario of interest. The computational speedup and the high accuracy obtained with the proposed approach are assessed on different PDE-constrained optimization problems, ranging from the minimization of energy dissipation in incompressible flows modelled through Navier-Stokes equations to the thermal active cooling in heat transfer.
Authors:Sarah A. Flanery, Christiana Chamon
Title: Noise-Based Authentication: Is It Secure?
Abstract:
This paper introduces a three-point biometric authentication system for a blockchain-based decentralized identity network. We use existing biometric authentication systems to demonstrate the unique noise fingerprints that belong to each individual human and the respective information leak from the biological characteristics. We then propose the concept of using unique thermal noise amplitudes generated by each user and explore the open questions regarding the robustness of unconditionally secure authentication.
Authors:Thomas Kuijpers, Jorn van Kampen, Theo Hofman
Title: System-level thermal and electrical modeling of battery systems for electric aircraft design
Abstract:
This work introduces a framework for simulating the electrical power consumption of an 8-seater electric aircraft equipped with high-energy-density NMC Lithium-ion cells. We propose an equivalent circuit model (ECM) to capture the thermal and electrical battery behavior. Furthermore, we assess the need for a battery thermal management system (BTMS) by determining heat generation at the cell level and optimize BTMS design to minimize energy consumption over a predefined flight regime. The proposed baseline battery design includes a 304-kWh battery system with BTMS, ensuring failure redundancy through two parallel switched battery banks. Simulation results explore the theoretical flight range without BTMS and reveal advantages in increasing battery capacity under specific conditions. Optimization efforts focus on BTMS design, highlighting the superior performance of water cooling over air cooling. However, the addition of a 9.9 kW water-cooled BTMS results in a 16.5% weight increase (387 kg) compared to no BTMS, reducing the simulated range of the aircraft from 480 km to 410 km. Lastly, we address a heating-induced thermal runaway scenario, demonstrating the robustness of the proposed battery design in preventing thermal runaway.
Authors:Philipp Flotho, Moritz Piening, Anna Kukleva, Gabriele Steidl
Title: T-FAKE: Synthesizing Thermal Images for Facial Landmarking
Abstract:
Facial analysis is a key component in a wide range of applications such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and entertainment. Despite the availability of various facial RGB datasets, the thermal modality, which plays a crucial role in life sciences, medicine, and biometrics, has been largely overlooked. To address this gap, we introduce the T-FAKE dataset, a new large-scale synthetic thermal dataset with sparse and dense landmarks. To facilitate the creation of the dataset, we propose a novel RGB2Thermal loss function, which enables the domain-adaptive transfer of RGB faces to thermal style. By utilizing the Wasserstein distance between thermal and RGB patches and the statistical analysis of clinical temperature distributions on faces, we ensure that the generated thermal images closely resemble real samples. Using RGB2Thermal style transfer based on our RGB2Thermal loss function, we create the large-scale synthetic thermal T-FAKE dataset with landmark and segmentation annotations. Leveraging our novel T-FAKE dataset, probabilistic landmark prediction, and label adaptation networks, we demonstrate significant improvements in landmark detection methods on thermal images across different landmark conventions. Our models show excellent performance with both sparse 70-point landmarks and dense 478-point landmark annotations. Moreover, our RGB2Thermal loss leads to notable results in terms of perceptual evaluation and temperature prediction.
Authors:Zefang Liu, Weston M. Stacey
Title: Application of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for ITER Burning Plasma Dynamics
Abstract:
The dynamics of burning plasmas in tokamaks are crucial for advancing controlled thermonuclear fusion. This study applies the NeuralPlasmaODE, a multi-region multi-timescale transport model, to simulate the complex energy transfer processes in ITER deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasmas. Our model captures the interactions between energetic alpha particles, electrons, and ions, which are vital for understanding phenomena such as thermal runaway instability. We employ neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODEs) for the numerical derivation of diffusivity parameters, enabling precise modeling of energy interactions between different plasma regions. By leveraging transfer learning, we utilize model parameters derived from DIII-D experimental data, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of our simulations without training from scratch. Applying this model to ITER's inductive and non-inductive operational scenarios, our results demonstrate that radiation and transport processes effectively remove excess heat from the core plasma, preventing thermal runaway instability. This study underscores the potential of machine learning in advancing our understanding and control of burning plasma dynamics in fusion reactors.
Authors:Haneet Kour, Rakesh Kumar Jha, Sanjeev Jain, Shubha Jain
Title: Thermal Radiation (TR) mode: A Deployment Perspective for 5G NR
Abstract:
The 5G New Radio NR technology is under standardization process by 3GPP to provide outline for a new radio interface for the next generation of cellular networks. The aim of the 5G networks include not only to provide enhanced capacity coverage but also support advanced services such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication URLLC massive Machine Type Communication mMTC. Key features of NR include Ultra lean carrier design to minimize the power consumption by limiting the always-on signal transmissions and to reduce interference in the neighboring cells . Another feature is the use of massive number of antennas for transmission as well as reception of signals. This rise in the number of antennas to provide a greater coverage brings about various challenges and impact in the system. With the increase in investigations in the mmWave frequencies, there is a need to investigate the health hazards they have on human body and the environment at large. This paper intends to provide an insight into the harmful impacts of Radio Frequency RF fields. The radiation metric to study the RF impact for far field is power density and for near field is Specific Absorption Rate SAR. These are the two main EM radiation metrics to find out the exposure due to uplink and downlink phenomenon in mobile communications. Mobile communication systems are addressed particularly to discuss the Electromagnetic EM Radiation impact as smart phones are used in close proximity to the body. A proposal in the form of Thermal Radiation TR mode is given to reduce the radiations emitted from a mobile phone. The performance of the proposed mode is validated from the results by achieving reduced power density, complexity and exposure ratio.
Authors:Ertugrul Alper, Eray Guven, Gunes Karabulut Kurt, Enver Ozdemir
Title: The Error Analysis of the Secret Key Generation Algorithm Using Analog Function Computation
Abstract:
This study introduces a decentralized approach to secure wireless communication using a cryptographic secret key generation algorithm among distributed nodes. The system model employs Gaussian prime numbers, ensuring the collaborative generation of a secret key. Pre-processing and post-processing functions enable to generate a secret key across the network. An error model evaluates aspects like thermal noise power and channel estimation errors, while simulations assess the success rate to factorize the norm of the secret key. It is observed that path loss-induced large scale fading emerges as a critical component impacting information and power loss. The robustness of the proposed model under fading channel conditions is evaluated with a success rate. Additionally, it is also observed that the tolerance value set in the factorization algorithms has a significant impact on the success rate. Furthermore, the success rate is compared in two scenarios, one with 2 users and another with 3 users, to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the system performance.
Authors:Mingjin Zhang, Yuchun Wang, Jie Guo, Yunsong Li, Xinbo Gao, Jing Zhang
Title: IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection
Abstract:
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a significant advancement in natural image segmentation, exhibiting potent zero-shot performance suitable for various downstream image segmentation tasks. However, directly utilizing the pretrained SAM for Infrared Small Target Detection (IRSTD) task falls short in achieving satisfying performance due to a notable domain gap between natural and infrared images. Unlike a visible light camera, a thermal imager reveals an object's temperature distribution by capturing infrared radiation. Small targets often show a subtle temperature transition at the object's boundaries. To address this issue, we propose the IRSAM model for IRSTD, which improves SAM's encoder-decoder architecture to learn better feature representation of infrared small objects. Specifically, we design a Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD)-based block and incorporate it into multiple levels of SAM's encoder to help it capture essential structural features while suppressing noise. Additionally, we devise a Granularity-Aware Decoder (GAD) to fuse the multi-granularity feature from the encoder to capture structural information that may be lost in long-distance modeling. Extensive experiments on the public datasets, including NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K, validate the design choice of IRSAM and its significant superiority over representative state-of-the-art methods. The source code are available at: github.com/IPIC-Lab/IRSAM.
Authors:Manaswin Oddiraju, Zaki Hasnain, Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, Eric Sunada, Souma Chowdhury
Title: Physics-Informed Machine Learning Towards A Real-Time Spacecraft Thermal Simulator
Abstract:
Modeling thermal states for complex space missions, such as the surface exploration of airless bodies, requires high computation, whether used in ground-based analysis for spacecraft design or during onboard reasoning for autonomous operations. For example, a finite-element thermal model with hundreds of elements can take significant time to simulate, which makes it unsuitable for onboard reasoning during time-sensitive scenarios such as descent and landing, proximity operations, or in-space assembly. Further, the lack of fast and accurate thermal modeling drives thermal designs to be more conservative and leads to spacecraft with larger mass and higher power budgets. The emerging paradigm of physics-informed machine learning (PIML) presents a class of hybrid modeling architectures that address this challenge by combining simplified physics models with machine learning (ML) models resulting in models which maintain both interpretability and robustness. Such techniques enable designs with reduced mass and power through onboard thermal-state estimation and control and may lead to improved onboard handling of off-nominal states, including unplanned down-time. The PIML model or hybrid model presented here consists of a neural network which predicts reduced nodalizations (distribution and size of coarse mesh) given on-orbit thermal load conditions, and subsequently a (relatively coarse) finite-difference model operates on this mesh to predict thermal states. We compare the computational performance and accuracy of the hybrid model to a data-driven neural net model, and a high-fidelity finite-difference model of a prototype Earth-orbiting small spacecraft. The PIML based active nodalization approach provides significantly better generalization than the neural net model and coarse mesh model, while reducing computing cost by up to 1.7x compared to the high-fidelity model.
Authors:K. Adhikari, M. K. Mudunuru, K. B. Nakshatrala
Title: Closed-loop geothermal systems: Modeling and predictions
Abstract:
Geothermal energy is a sustainable baseload source recognized for its ability to provide clean energy on a large scale. Advanced Geothermal Systems (AGS) -- offer promising prototypes -- employ a closed-loop vascular layout that runs deep beneath the Earth's surface. A working fluid (e.g., water or supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2)) circulates through the vasculature, entering the subsurface at the inlet and exiting at the outlet with an elevated temperature. For designing and performing cost-benefit analysis before deploying large-scale projects and maintaining efficiency while enabling real-time monitoring during the operational phase, modeling offers cost-effective solutions; often, it is the only available option for performance assessment. A knowledge gap exists due to the lack of a fast predictive modeling framework that considers the vascular intricacies, particularly the jumps in the solution fields across the channel. Noting that the channel diameter is considerably smaller in scale compared to the surrounding geological domain, we develop a reduced-order modeling (ROM) framework for closed-loop geothermal systems. This ROM incorporates the jump conditions and provides a quick and accurate prediction of the temperature field, including the outlet temperature, which directly correlates with the power production capacity and thermal draw-down. We demonstrate the predictive capabilities of the framework by establishing the uniqueness of the solutions and reporting representative numerical solutions. The modeling framework and the predictions reported in this paper benefit the closed-loop geothermal community, enabling them to determine the system's performance and optimal capacity.
Authors:Elias N. Pergantis, Parveen Dhillon, Levi D. Reyes Premer, Alex H. Lee, Davide Ziviani, Kevin J. Kircher
Title: Humidity-Aware Model Predictive Control for Residential Air Conditioning: A Field Study
Abstract:
Model predictive control of residential air conditioning could reduce energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining or improving occupants' thermal comfort. However, most approaches to predictive air conditioning control either do not model indoor humidity or treat it as constant. This simplification stems from challenges with modeling indoor humidity dynamics, particularly the high-order, nonlinear equations that govern heat and mass transfer between the air conditioner's evaporator coil and the indoor air. This paper develops a machine-learning approach to modeling indoor humidity dynamics that is suitable for real-world deployment at scale. This study then investigates the value of humidity modeling in four field tests of predictive control in an occupied house. The four field tests evaluate two different building models: One with constant humidity and one with time-varying humidity. Each modeling approach is tested in two different predictive controllers: One that focuses on reducing energy costs and one that focuses on constraining electric power below a utility-specified threshold. The two models lead to similar performance for reducing energy costs. Combining the results of this study and a prior heating study of the same house, the estimated year-round energy cost savings were $340-497 or 22-31% (95% confidence intervals); these savings were consistent across both humidity models. However, in the demand response tests, the simplifying assumption of constant humidity led to far more frequent and severe violations of the power constraint. These results suggest that accurate building models are important for nonlinear objectives, such as reducing or constraining peak demand, while for linear objectives such as reducing energy costs or emissions, model accuracy is less important.
Authors:Habtamu Hailemichael, Beshah Ayalew
Title: Combined film and pulse heating of lithium ion batteries to improve performance in low ambient temperature
Abstract:
Low ambient temperatures significantly reduce Lithium ion batteries' (LIBs') charge/discharge power and energy capacity, and cause rapid degradation through lithium plating. These limitations can be addressed by preheating the LIB with an external heat source or by exploiting the internal heat generation through the LIB's internal impedance. Fast external heating generates large temperature gradients across the LIB due to the low thermal conductivity of the cell, while internal impedance heating (usually through AC or pulse charge/discharging) tends to be relatively slow, although it can achieve more uniform temperature distribution. This paper investigates the potential of combining externally sourced resistive film heating with bidirectional pulse heating to achieve fast preheating without causing steep temperature gradients. The LIB is modeled with the Doyle Fuller Newman (DFN) electrochemical model and 1D thermal model, and reinforcement learning (RL) is used to optimize the pulse current amplitude and film voltage concurrently. The results indicate that the optimal policy for maximizing the rate of temperature rise while limiting temperature gradients has the film heating dominate the initial phases and create the ideal conditions for pulse heating to take over. In addition, the pulse component shares the heating load and reduces the energy rating of the auxiliary power source.
Authors:Kingsley Nweye, Kathryn Kaspar, Giacomo Buscemi, Tiago Fonseca, Giuseppe Pinto, Dipanjan Ghose, Satvik Duddukuru, Pavani Pratapa, Han Li, Javad Mohammadi, Luis Lino Ferreira, Tianzhen Hong, Mohamed Ouf, Alfonso Capozzoli, Zoltan Nagy
Title: CityLearn v2: Energy-flexible, resilient, occupant-centric, and carbon-aware management of grid-interactive communities
Abstract:
As more distributed energy resources become part of the demand-side infrastructure, it is important to quantify the energy flexibility they provide on a community scale, particularly to understand the impact of geographic, climatic, and occupant behavioral differences on their effectiveness, as well as identify the best control strategies to accelerate their real-world adoption. CityLearn provides an environment for benchmarking simple and advanced distributed energy resource control algorithms including rule-based, model-predictive, and reinforcement learning control. CityLearn v2 presented here extends CityLearn v1 by providing a simulation environment that leverages the End-Use Load Profiles for the U.S. Building Stock dataset to create virtual grid-interactive communities for resilient, multi-agent distributed energy resources and objective control with dynamic occupant feedback. This work details the v2 environment design and provides application examples that utilize reinforcement learning to manage battery energy storage system charging/discharging cycles, vehicle-to-grid control, and thermal comfort during heat pump power modulation.
Authors:Johannes van Randenborgh, Moritz Schulze Darup
Title: MPC using mixed-integer programming for aquifer thermal energy storages
Abstract:
Aquifer thermal energy storages (ATES) are used to temporally store thermal energy in groundwater saturated aquifers. Typically, two storages are combined, one for heat and one for cold, to support heating and cooling of buildings. This way, the use of classical fossil fuel-based heating, ventilation, and air conditioning can be significantly reduced. Exploiting the benefits of ATES beyond "seasonal" heating in winter and cooling in summer as well as meeting legislative restrictions requires sophisticated control. We propose a tailored model predictive control (MPC) scheme for the sustainable operation of ATES systems, which mainly builds on a novel model and objective function. The new approach leads to a mixed-integer quadratic program. Its performance is evaluated on real data from an ATES system in Belgium.
Authors:Mikael Skog, Oleksandr Kotlyar, Vladimír Kubelka, Martin Magnusson
Title: Human Detection from 4D Radar Data in Low-Visibility Field Conditions
Abstract:
Autonomous driving technology is increasingly being used on public roads and in industrial settings such as mines. While it is essential to detect pedestrians, vehicles, or other obstacles, adverse field conditions negatively affect the performance of classical sensors such as cameras or lidars. Radar, on the other hand, is a promising modality that is less affected by, e.g., dust, smoke, water mist or fog. In particular, modern 4D imaging radars provide target responses across the range, vertical angle, horizontal angle and Doppler velocity dimensions. We propose TMVA4D, a CNN architecture that leverages this 4D radar modality for semantic segmentation. The CNN is trained to distinguish between the background and person classes based on a series of 2D projections of the 4D radar data that include the elevation, azimuth, range, and Doppler velocity dimensions. We also outline the process of compiling a novel dataset consisting of data collected in industrial settings with a car-mounted 4D radar and describe how the ground-truth labels were generated from reference thermal images. Using TMVA4D on this dataset, we achieve an mIoU score of 78.2% and an mDice score of 86.1%, evaluated on the two classes background and person
Authors:Shuo Jiang, Weifeng Li, Yuping Qian, Yangjun Zhang, Jianxi Luo
Title: AutoTRIZ: Automating Engineering Innovation with TRIZ and Large Language Models
Abstract:
Various ideation methods, such as morphological analysis and design-by-analogy, have been developed to aid creative problem-solving and innovation. Among them, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) stands out as one of the best-known methods. However, the complexity of TRIZ and its reliance on users' knowledge, experience, and reasoning capabilities limit its practicality. To address this, we introduce AutoTRIZ, an artificial ideation system that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate and enhance the TRIZ methodology. By leveraging LLMs' vast pre-trained knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, AutoTRIZ offers a novel, generative, and interpretable approach to engineering innovation. AutoTRIZ takes a problem statement from the user as its initial input, automatically conduct the TRIZ reasoning process and generates a structured solution report. We demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of AutoTRIZ through comparative experiments with textbook cases and a real-world application in the design of a Battery Thermal Management System (BTMS). Moreover, the proposed LLM-based framework holds the potential for extension to automate other knowledge-based ideation methods, such as SCAMPER, Design Heuristics, and Design-by-Analogy, paving the way for a new era of AI-driven innovation tools.
Authors:Gilberto Campaña, Pablo Muñoz, Enrique Otarola
Title: Finite element approximation for a convective Brinkman--Forchheimer problem coupled with a heat equation
Abstract:
We investigate a convective Brinkman--Forchheimer problem coupled with a heat equation. The investigated model considers thermal diffusion and viscosity depending on the temperature. We prove the existence of a solution without restriction on the data and uniqueness when the solution is slightly smoother and the data is suitably restricted. We also propose a finite element discretization scheme for the considered model and derive convergence results and a priori error estimates. Finally, we illustrate the theory with numerical examples.
Authors:Fatemeh Hossein Khani, Omid Akbari, Muhammad Shafique
Title: A Two-Level Thermal Cycling-aware Task Mapping Technique for Reliability Management in Manycore Systems
Abstract:
Reliability management is one of the primary concerns in manycore systems design. Different aging mechanisms such as Negative-Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI), Electromigration (EM), and thermal cycling can reduce the reliability of these systems. However, state-of-the-art works mainly focused on NBTI and EM, whereas a few works have considered the thermal cycling effect. The thermal cycling effect can significantly aggravate the systems lifetime. Moreover, the thermal effects of cores on each other due to their adjacency may also influence the systems Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). This paper introduces a new technique to manage the reliability of manycore systems. The technique considers thermal cycling, adjacency of cores, and process variation-induced diversity of operating frequencies. It uses two levels of task mapping to improve system lifetime. At the first level, cores with close temperatures are packed into the same bin, and then, an arrived task is assigned to a bin with a similar temperature. Afterward in the second level, the task is assigned to a core inside the selected bin in the first level, based on performance requirements and the core frequency. Compared to the conventional TC-aware techniques, the proposed method is performed at a higher level (bins level) to reduce the thermal variations of cores inside a bin, and improves the system MTTFTC, making it a promising solution for manycore systems. The efficacy of our proposed technique is evaluated on 16, 32, 64, and 256 core systems using SPLASH2 and PARSEC benchmark suite applications. The results show up to 20% MTTFTC increment compared to the conventional thermal cycling-aware task mapping techniques.
Authors:S. M. Mallikarjunaiah, Dambaru Bhatta
Title: A Finite Element Model for Hydro-thermal Convective Flow in a Porous Medium: Effects of Hydraulic Resistivity and Thermal Diffusivity
Abstract:
In this article, a finite element model is implemented to analyze hydro-thermal convective flow in a porous medium. The mathematical model encompasses Darcy's law for incompressible fluid behavior, which is coupled with a convection-diffusion-type energy equation to characterize the temperature in the porous medium. The current investigation presents an efficient, stable, and accurate finite element discretization for the hydro-thermal convective flow model. The well-posedness of the proposed discrete Galerkin finite element formulation is guaranteed due to the decoupling property and the linearity of the numerical method. Computational experiments confirm the optimal convergence rates for a manufactured solution. Several numerical results are obtained for the variations of the hydraulic resistivity and thermal diffusivity. In the present study, the bottom wall is maintained at a constant higher hot temperature while side vertical walls are thermally insulated and the top wall is maintained at a constant cold temperature. Heat transfer rates at the heated bottom wall are presented in terms of local Nusselt number. A linear variation in hydraulic resistivity and a quadratic variation in thermal diffusivity show an increase in the heat transfer rate.
Authors:Dafang Zhao, Zheng Chen, Zhengmao Li, Xiaolei Yuan, Ittetsu Taniguchi
Title: Improving Building Temperature Forecasting: A Data-driven Approach with System Scenario Clustering
Abstract:
Heat, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a critical role in maintaining a comfortable thermal environment and cost approximately 40% of primary energy usage in the building sector. For smart energy management in buildings, usage patterns and their resulting profiles allow the improvement of control systems with prediction capabilities. However, for large-scale HVAC system management, it is difficult to construct a detailed model for each subsystem. In this paper, a new data-driven room temperature prediction model is proposed based on the k-means clustering method. The proposed data-driven temperature prediction approach extracts the system operation feature through historical data analysis and further simplifies the system-level model to improve generalization and computational efficiency. We evaluate the proposed approach in the real world. The results demonstrated that our approach can significantly reduce modeling time without reducing prediction accuracy.
Authors:Elias N. Pergantis, Priyadarshan, Nadah Al Theeb, Parveen Dhillon, Jonathan P. Ore, Davide Ziviani, Eckhard A. Groll, Kevin J. Kircher
Title: Field demonstration of predictive heating control for an all-electric house in a cold climate
Abstract:
Efficient electric heat pumps that replace fossil-fueled heating systems could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, electric heat pumps can sharply increase electricity demand, causing high utility bills and stressing the power grid. Residential neighborhoods could see particularly high electricity demand during cold weather, when heat demand rises and heat pump efficiencies fall. This paper presents the development and field demonstration of a predictive control system for an air-to-air heat pump with backup electric resistance heat. The control system adjusts indoor temperature set-points based on weather forecasts, occupancy conditions, and data-driven models of the building and heating equipment. Field tests from January to March of 2023 in an occupied, all-electric, 208 m^2 detached single-family house in Indiana, USA, included outdoor temperatures as low as -15 C. On average over these tests, the control system reduced daily heating energy use by 19% (95% confidence interval: 13--24%), energy used for backup heat by 38%, and the frequency of using the highest stage (19 kW) of backup heat by 83%. Concurrent surveys of residents showed that the control system maintained satisfactory thermal comfort. The control system could reduce the house's total annual heating costs by about $300 (95% confidence interval: 23--34%). These real-world results could strengthen the case for deploying predictive home heating control, bringing the technology one step closer to reducing emissions, utility bills, and power grid impacts at scale.
Authors:G. Bejarano, D. Rodríguez, J. M. Lemos, M. Vargas, M. G. Ortega
Title: MINLP-based hybrid strategy for operating mode selection of TES-backed-up refrigeration systems
Abstract:
This brief deals with the satisfaction of the daily cooling demand by a hybrid system that consists of a vapour-compression refrigeration cycle and a thermal energy storage (TES) unit, based on phase change materials. The addition of the TES tank to the original refrigeration plant allows to schedule the cooling production regardless of the instantaneous demand, given that the TES tank can store cold energy and release it whenever deemed appropriate. The scheduling problem is posed as an optimization problem based on mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP), since it includes both discrete and continuous variables. The latter corresponds to the references on the main cooling powers involved in the problem (cooling production at the evaporator and TES charging/discharging), whereas the discrete variables define the operating mode scheduling. Therefore, in addition to the hybrid features of the physical plant, a hybrid optimal control strategy is also proposed. A receding horizon approach is applied, similar to model predictive control (MPC) strategies, while economic criteria are imposed in the objective function, as well as feasibility issues. The TES state estimation is also addressed, since its instantaneous charge ratio is not measurable. The proposed strategy is applied in simulation to a challenging cooling demand profile and the main advantages of the MINLP-based strategy over a non-linear MPC-based scheduling strategy previously developed are highlighted, regarding operating cost, ease of tuning, and ability to adapt to cooling demand variations.
Authors:G. Bejarano, J. J. Suffo, M. Vargas, M. G Ortega
Title: Novel scheme for a PCM-based cold energy storage system. Design, modelling, and simulation
Abstract:
This paper studies the design and dynamic modelling of a novel thermal energy storage (TES) system combined with a refrigeration system based on phase change materials (PCM). Cold-energy production supported by TES systems is a very appealing field of research, since it allows flexible cold-energy management, combining demand fulfilment with cost reduction strategies. The paper proposes and compares two different simulation models for a cold-energy storage system based on PCM. First, a continuous model is developed, the application of which is limited to decoupled charging/discharging operations. Given such conditions, it is a relatively precise model, useful for the tuning of the TES parameters. The second proposed model is a discrete one, which, despite implementing a discrete approximation of the system behaviour, allows to study more general conditions, such as series of partial charging/discharging operations. Simulation results of both models are compared regarding decoupled charging/discharging operations, and the ability of the discrete model to represent more realistic partial operations is analysed.
Authors:D. Rodríguez, G. Bejarano, M. Vargas, J. M. Lemos, M. G. Ortega
Title: Modelling and cooling power control of a TES-backed-up vapour-compression refrigeration system
Abstract:
This work addresses the modelling, power control, and optimization of a thermal energy storage (TES) system combined with a vapour-compression refrigeration facility based on phase change materials (PCM). Given a novel design of a PCM-based TES tank and its interconnection with an existing refrigeration system, the joint dynamic modelling is first studied, exploring the different time scales that coexist at the interconnected system. Diverse operating modes are defined, according to the intended use of the TES tank as a cold-energy buffer to decouple cooling demand and production, whereas the static characteristic and power limits are calculated and show the high coupling between the main cooling powers involved (TES charging/discharging power, and direct power production at the evaporator). In this light, a decoupling control strategy is proposed, where the low-level controllers are simply PI regulators and the refrigerant/secondary mass flows are considered as virtual manipulated variables, applying a feedforward-based cascade strategy. The control performance is evaluated through a thorough simulation that includes all operating modes, where the reference tracking is shown to be fast and reliable enough to address high-level scheduling strategies, where the references on the main cooling powers are intended to be imposed considering economic and efficiency criteria.
Authors:G. Bejarano, M. Vargas, M. G. Ortega, F. Castaño, J. E. Normey-Rico
Title: Efficient simulation strategy for PCM-based cold-energy storage systems
Abstract:
This paper proposes a computationally efficient simulation strategy for cold thermal energy storage (TES) systems based on phase change material (PCM). Taking as a starting point the recent design of a TES system based on PCM, designed to complement a vapour-compression refrigeration plant, the new highly efficient modelling strategy is described and its performance is compared against the pre-existing one. The need for a new computationally efficient approach comes from the fact that, in the near future, such a TES model is intended to be used in combination with the model of the own mother refrigeration plant, in order to address efficient, long-term energy management strategies, where computation time will become a major issue. Comparative simulations show that the proposed computationally efficient strategy reduces the simulation time to a small fraction of the original figure (from around 1/30th till around 1/120th, depending on the particular choice of the main sampling interval), at the expense of affordable inaccuracy in terms of the PCM charge ratio.
Authors:K. Adhikari, J. F. Patrick, K. B. Nakshatrala
Title: Effect of temperature-dependent material properties on thermal regulation in microvascular composites
Abstract:
Fiber-reinforced composites (FRC) provide structural systems with unique features that appeal to various civilian and military sectors. Often, one needs to modulate the temperature field to achieve the intended functionalities (e.g., self-healing) in these lightweight structures. Vascular-based active cooling offers one efficient way of thermal regulation in such material systems. However, the thermophysical properties (e.g., thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity) of FRC and their base constituents depend on temperature, and such structures are often subject to a broad spectrum of temperatures. Notably, prior active cooling modeling studies did not account for such temperature dependence. Thus, the primary aim of this paper is to reveal the effect of temperature-dependent material properties -- obtained via material characterization -- on the qualitative and quantitative behaviors of active cooling. By applying mathematical analysis and conducting numerical simulations, we show this dependence does not affect qualitative attributes, such as minimum and maximum principles (in the same spirit as \textsc{Hopf}'s results for elliptic partial differential equations). However, the dependence slightly affects quantitative results, such as the mean surface temperature and thermal efficiency. The import of our study is that it provides a deeper understanding of thermal regulation systems under practical scenarios and can guide researchers and practitioners in perfecting associated designs.
Authors:Keiya Hirashima, Kana Moriwaki, Michiko S. Fujii, Yutaka Hirai, Takayuki R. Saitoh, Junichiro Makino, Shirley Ho
Title: Surrogate Modeling for Computationally Expensive Simulations of Supernovae in High-Resolution Galaxy Simulations
Abstract:
Some stars are known to explode at the end of their lives, called supernovae (SNe). The substantial amount of matter and energy that SNe release provides significant feedback to star formation and gas dynamics in a galaxy. SNe release a substantial amount of matter and energy to the interstellar medium, resulting in significant feedback to star formation and gas dynamics in a galaxy. While such feedback has a crucial role in galaxy formation and evolution, in simulations of galaxy formation, it has only been implemented using simple {\it sub-grid models} instead of numerically solving the evolution of gas elements around SNe in detail due to a lack of resolution. We develop a method combining machine learning and Gibbs sampling to predict how a supernova (SN) affects the surrounding gas. The fidelity of our model in the thermal energy and momentum distribution outperforms the low-resolution SN simulations. Our method can replace the SN sub-grid models and help properly simulate un-resolved SN feedback in galaxy formation simulations. We find that employing our new approach reduces the necessary computational cost to $\sim$ 1 percent compared to directly resolving SN feedback.
Authors:Qiuhao Hu, Mohammad Reza Amini, Ashley Wiese, Ilya Kolmanovsky, Jing Sun
Title: Robust Model Predictive Control for Enhanced Fast Charging on Electric Vehicles through Integrated Power and Thermal Management
Abstract:
This paper explores the synergies between integrated power and thermal management (iPTM) and battery charging in an electric vehicle (EV). A multi-objective model predictive control (MPC) framework is developed to optimize the fast charging performance while enforcing the constraints in the power and thermal loops. The approach takes into account the coupling of the battery and cabin thermal management. The case study of a commercial EV demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively meet the requirements of fast charging and thermal management when accurate preview information is available. However, failure to predict the charging event can result in performance degradation with longer charging time. A time-varying weighting strategy is proposed to enhance charging performance in the presence of uncertainty. This strategy leverages the battery state-of-charge (SOC) and adjusts the priority of the multi-objective MPC at different phases during charging. Simulated results using a commercial EV use case show improved robustness in charging time using the proposed strategy.
Authors:Petra Raussi, Jirapa Kamsamrong, Alexandros Paspatis, Kai Heussen, Tesfaye Amare Zerihun, Edmund Widl, Filip Pröstl Andrén, Jawad H Kazmi, Thomas I. Strasser, Felipe Castro, Luigi Pellegrino
Title: Energy Systems Test Case Discovery Enabled by Test Case Profile and Repository
Abstract:
Smart energy systems comprise multiple domains like power, thermal, control, information, and communication technology, which increases the complexity of research and development studies. This expansion also requires larger and ever so complex experimental pilot environments driving the demand for geographically distributed multi-research infrastructure tests. The Holistic Test Description approach supports the design of multi-domain and multi-research infrastructure tests by organizing the test cases into comprehensive segments, ensuring all relevant items for testing are covered. These test cases eventually form a pool, which to understand holistically would require studying and reading all the descriptions. This work proposes therefore the concept of Test Case Profiles to improve test case discovery and the structured creation of them. Test Case Profiles add further structure to the indexing in test case repositories. Along with the proposed indexing method, four different use cases are introduced to motivate additional applications of the proposed concept.
Authors:Vasantha Ramani, Pandarasamy Arjunan, Kameshwar Poolla, Clayton Miller
Title: Semantic segmentation of longitudinal thermal images for identification of hot and cool spots in urban areas
Abstract:
This work presents the analysis of semantically segmented, longitudinally, and spatially rich thermal images collected at the neighborhood scale to identify hot and cool spots in urban areas. An infrared observatory was operated over a few months to collect thermal images of different types of buildings on the educational campus of the National University of Singapore. A subset of the thermal image dataset was used to train state-of-the-art deep learning models to segment various urban features such as buildings, vegetation, sky, and roads. It was observed that the U-Net segmentation model with `resnet34' CNN backbone has the highest mIoU score of 0.99 on the test dataset, compared to other models such as DeepLabV3, DeeplabV3+, FPN, and PSPnet. The masks generated using the segmentation models were then used to extract the temperature from thermal images and correct for differences in the emissivity of various urban features. Further, various statistical measure of the temperature extracted using the predicted segmentation masks is shown to closely match the temperature extracted using the ground truth masks. Finally, the masks were used to identify hot and cool spots in the urban feature at various instances of time. This forms one of the very few studies demonstrating the automated analysis of thermal images, which can be of potential use to urban planners for devising mitigation strategies for reducing the urban heat island (UHI) effect, improving building energy efficiency, and maximizing outdoor thermal comfort.
Authors:Tingwei Zhang, Rishi Jha, Eugene Bagdasaryan, Vitaly Shmatikov
Title: Adversarial Illusions in Multi-Modal Embeddings
Abstract:
Multi-modal embeddings encode texts, images, thermal images, sounds, and videos into a single embedding space, aligning representations across different modalities (e.g., associate an image of a dog with a barking sound). In this paper, we show that multi-modal embeddings can be vulnerable to an attack we call "adversarial illusions." Given an image or a sound, an adversary can perturb it to make its embedding close to an arbitrary, adversary-chosen input in another modality. These attacks are cross-modal and targeted: the adversary can align any image or sound with any target of his choice. Adversarial illusions exploit proximity in the embedding space and are thus agnostic to downstream tasks and modalities, enabling a wholesale compromise of current and future tasks, as well as modalities not available to the adversary. Using ImageBind and AudioCLIP embeddings, we demonstrate how adversarially aligned inputs, generated without knowledge of specific downstream tasks, mislead image generation, text generation, zero-shot classification, and audio retrieval. We investigate transferability of illusions across different embeddings and develop a black-box version of our method that we use to demonstrate the first adversarial alignment attack on Amazon's commercial, proprietary Titan embedding. Finally, we analyze countermeasures and evasion attacks.
Authors:Christophe Bonneville, Youngsoo Choi, Debojyoti Ghosh, Jonathan L. Belof
Title: GPLaSDI: Gaussian Process-based Interpretable Latent Space Dynamics Identification through Deep Autoencoder
Abstract:
Numerically solving partial differential equations (PDEs) can be challenging and computationally expensive. This has led to the development of reduced-order models (ROMs) that are accurate but faster than full order models (FOMs). Recently, machine learning advances have enabled the creation of non-linear projection methods, such as Latent Space Dynamics Identification (LaSDI). LaSDI maps full-order PDE solutions to a latent space using autoencoders and learns the system of ODEs governing the latent space dynamics. By interpolating and solving the ODE system in the reduced latent space, fast and accurate ROM predictions can be made by feeding the predicted latent space dynamics into the decoder. In this paper, we introduce GPLaSDI, a novel LaSDI-based framework that relies on Gaussian process (GP) for latent space ODE interpolations. Using GPs offers two significant advantages. First, it enables the quantification of uncertainty over the ROM predictions. Second, leveraging this prediction uncertainty allows for efficient adaptive training through a greedy selection of additional training data points. This approach does not require prior knowledge of the underlying PDEs. Consequently, GPLaSDI is inherently non-intrusive and can be applied to problems without a known PDE or its residual. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Burgers equation, Vlasov equation for plasma physics, and a rising thermal bubble problem. Our proposed method achieves between 200 and 100,000 times speed-up, with up to 7% relative error.
Authors:Yue Wu, Zhiwu Huang, Dongjun Li, Heng Li, Jun Peng, Daniel Stroe, Ziyou Song
Title: Optimal battery thermal management for electric vehicles with battery degradation minimization
Abstract:
The control of a battery thermal management system (BTMS) is essential for the thermal safety, energy efficiency, and durability of electric vehicles (EVs) in hot weather. To address the battery cooling optimization problem, this paper utilizes dynamic programming (DP) to develop an online rule-based control strategy. Firstly, an electrical-thermal-aging model of the $\rm LiFePO_4$ battery pack is established. A control-oriented onboard BTMS model is proposed and verified under different speed profiles and temperatures. Then in the DP framework, a cost function consisting of battery aging cost and cooling-induced electricity cost is minimized to obtain the optimal compressor power. By exacting three rules "fast cooling, slow cooling, and temperature-maintaining" from the DP result, a near-optimal rule-based cooling strategy, which uses as much regenerative energy as possible to cool the battery pack, is proposed for online execution. Simulation results show that the proposed online strategy can dramatically improve the driving economy and reduce battery degradation under diverse operation conditions, achieving less than a 3% difference in battery loss compared to the offline DP. Recommendations regarding battery cooling under different real-world cases are finally provided.
Authors:Rida Fatima, Hassan Zahid Butt, Xingpeng Li
Title: Optimal Dynamic Reconfiguration of Distribution Networks
Abstract:
The aim of distribution networks is to meet their local area power demand with maximum reliability. As the electricity consumption tends to increase every year, limited line thermal capacity can lead to network congestion. Continuous development and upgradation of the distribution network is thus required to meet the energy demand, which poses a significant increase in cost. The objective of this research is to analyze distribution network topologies and introduce a topology reconfiguration scheme based on the cost and demand of electricity. Traditional electrical distribution networks are static and inefficient. To make the network active, an optimal dynamic network topology reconfiguration (DNTR) is proposed to control line switching and reconnect some loads to different substations such that the cost of electricity can be minimized. The proposed DNTR strategy was tested on a synthetic radial distribution network with three substations each connecting to an IEEE 13-bus system. Simulation results demonstrated significant cost saving in daily operations of this distribution system.
Authors:Jiale Linghu, Hao Dong, Junzhi Cui, Yufeng Nie
Title: Higher-order multi-scale deep Ritz method for multi-scale problems of authentic composite materials
Abstract:
The direct deep learning simulation for multi-scale problems remains a challenging issue. In this work, a novel higher-order multi-scale deep Ritz method (HOMS-DRM) is developed for thermal transfer equation of authentic composite materials with highly oscillatory and discontinuous coefficients. In this novel HOMS-DRM, higher-order multi-scale analysis and modeling are first employed to overcome limitations of prohibitive computation and Frequency Principle when direct deep learning simulation. Then, improved deep Ritz method are designed to high-accuracy and mesh-free simulation for macroscopic homogenized equation without multi-scale property and microscopic lower-order and higher-order cell problems with highly discontinuous coefficients. Moreover, the theoretical convergence of the proposed HOMS-DRM is rigorously demonstrated under appropriate assumptions. Finally, extensive numerical experiments are presented to show the computational accuracy of the proposed HOMS-DRM. This study offers a robust and high-accuracy multi-scale deep learning framework that enables the effective simulation and analysis of multi-scale problems of authentic composite materials.
Authors:Navot Oz, Nir Sochen, David Mendelovich, Iftach Klapp
Title: Estimating temperatures with low-cost infrared cameras using deep neural networks
Abstract:
Low-cost thermal cameras are inaccurate (usually $\pm 3^\circ C$) and have space-variant nonuniformity across their detector. Both inaccuracy and nonuniformity are dependent on the ambient temperature of the camera. The goal of this work was to estimate temperatures with low-cost infrared cameras, and rectify the nonuniformity. A nonuniformity simulator that accounts for the ambient temperature was developed. An end-to-end neural network that incorporates both the physical model of the camera and the ambient camera temperature was introduced. The neural network was trained with the simulated nonuniformity data to estimate the object's temperature and correct the nonuniformity, using only a single image and the ambient temperature measured by the camera itself. Results of the proposed method significantly improved the mean temperature error compared to previous works by up to $0.5^\circ C$. In addition, constraining the physical model of the camera with the network lowered the error by an additional $0.1^\circ C$. The mean temperature error over an extensive validation dataset was $0.37^\circ C$. The method was verified on real data in the field and produced equivalent results.
Authors:Baihong Lin, Zengrong Lin, Yulan Guo, Yulan Zhang, Jianxiao Zou, Shicai Fan
Title: Variational Probabilistic Fusion Network for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB-T semantic segmentation has been widely adopted to handle hard scenes with poor lighting conditions by fusing different modality features of RGB and thermal images. Existing methods try to find an optimal fusion feature for segmentation, resulting in sensitivity to modality noise, class-imbalance, and modality bias. To overcome the problems, this paper proposes a novel Variational Probabilistic Fusion Network (VPFNet), which regards fusion features as random variables and obtains robust segmentation by averaging segmentation results under multiple samples of fusion features. The random samples generation of fusion features in VPFNet is realized by a novel Variational Feature Fusion Module (VFFM) designed based on variation attention. To further avoid class-imbalance and modality bias, we employ the weighted cross-entropy loss and introduce prior information of illumination and category to control the proposed VFFM. Experimental results on MFNet and PST900 datasets demonstrate that the proposed VPFNet can achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance.
Authors:Kaiwen Cai, Qiyue Xia, Peize Li, John Stankovic, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Title: Robust Human Detection under Visual Degradation via Thermal and mmWave Radar Fusion
Abstract:
The majority of human detection methods rely on the sensor using visible lights (e.g., RGB cameras) but such sensors are limited in scenarios with degraded vision conditions. In this paper, we present a multimodal human detection system that combines portable thermal cameras and single-chip mmWave radars. To mitigate the noisy detection features caused by the low contrast of thermal cameras and the multi-path noise of radar point clouds, we propose a Bayesian feature extractor and a novel uncertainty-guided fusion method that surpasses a variety of competing methods, either single-modal or multi-modal. We evaluate the proposed method on real-world data collection and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Authors:Xue Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Jiangtao Wang, Jiacheng Ying, Zehua Sheng, Heng Yu, Chunguang Li, Hui-Liang Shen
Title: TFDet: Target-Aware Fusion for RGB-T Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
Pedestrian detection plays a critical role in computer vision as it contributes to ensuring traffic safety. Existing methods that rely solely on RGB images suffer from performance degradation under low-light conditions due to the lack of useful information. To address this issue, recent multispectral detection approaches have combined thermal images to provide complementary information and have obtained enhanced performances. Nevertheless, few approaches focus on the negative effects of false positives caused by noisy fused feature maps. Different from them, we comprehensively analyze the impacts of false positives on the detection performance and find that enhancing feature contrast can significantly reduce these false positives. In this paper, we propose a novel target-aware fusion strategy for multispectral pedestrian detection, named TFDet. TFDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on two multispectral pedestrian benchmarks, KAIST and LLVIP. TFDet can easily extend to multi-class object detection scenarios. It outperforms the previous best approaches on two multispectral object detection benchmarks, FLIR and M3FD. Importantly, TFDet has comparable inference efficiency to the previous approaches, and has remarkably good detection performance even under low-light conditions, which is a significant advancement for ensuring road safety.
Authors:Elham Kiyani, Hamidreza Yazdani Sarvestani, Hossein Ravanbakhsh, Razyeh Behbahani, Behnam Ashrafi, Meysam Rahmat, Mikko Karttunen
Title: Designing architectured ceramics for transient thermal applications using finite element and deep learning
Abstract:
Topologically interlocking architectures can generate tough ceramics with attractive thermo-mechanical properties. This concept can make the material design pathway a challenging task, since modeling the whole design space is neither effective nor feasible. We propose an approach to design high-performance architectured ceramics using machine learning (ML) with data from finite element analysis (FEA). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) are used as the deep learning approaches. A limited set of FEA simulation data containing a variety of architectural design parameters is used to train our neural networks, including learning how independent and dependent design parameters are related. A trained network is then used to predict the optimum structure from the configurations. A FEA simulation is run on the best predictions of both MLP and CNN algorithms to evaluate the performance of our networks. Although a limited amount of simulation data are available, our networks are effective in predicting the transient thermo-mechanical responses of possible panel designs. For example, the optimal design after using CNN prediction resulted in $\approx \! 30\%$ improvement in terms of edge temperature.
Authors:Subin Lin, Vasantha Ramani, Miguel Martin, Pandarasamy Arjunan, Adrian Chong, Filip Biljecki, Marcel Ignatius, Kameshwar Poolla, Clayton Miller
Title: District-scale surface temperatures generated from high-resolution longitudinal thermal infrared images
Abstract:
The paper describes a dataset that was collected by infrared thermography, which is a non-contact, non-intrusive technique to collect data and analyze the built environment in various aspects. While most studies focus on the city and building scales, the rooftop observatory provides high temporal and spatial resolution observations with dynamic interactions on the district scale. The rooftop infrared thermography observatory with a multi-modal platform that is capable of assessing a wide range of dynamic processes in urban systems was deployed in Singapore. It was placed on the top of two buildings that overlook the outdoor context of the campus of the National University of Singapore. The platform collects remote sensing data from tropical areas on a temporal scale, allowing users to determine the temperature trend of individual features such as buildings, roads, and vegetation. The dataset includes 1,365,921 thermal images collected on average at approximately 10 seconds intervals from two locations during ten months.
Authors:Matěj Hejda, Eli A. Doris, Simon Bilodeau, Joshua Robertson, Dafydd Owen-Newns, Bhavin J. Shastri, Paul R. Prucnal, Antonio Hurtado
Title: Interfacing spiking VCSEL-neurons with silicon photonics weight banks towards integrated neuromorphic photonic systems
Abstract:
Spiking neurons and neural networks constitute a fundamental building block for brain-inspired computing, which is posed to benefit significantly from photonic hardware implementations. In this work, we experimentally investigate an interconnected system based on an ultrafast spiking VCSEL-neuron and a silicon photonics (SiPh) integrated micro-ring resonator (MRR) weight bank, and demonstrate two different functional arrangements of these devices. First, we show that MRR weightbanks can be used in conjuction with the spiking VCSEL-neurons to perform amplitude weighting of sub-ns optical spiking signals. Second, we show that a continuous firing VCSEL-neuron can be directly modulated using a locking signal propagated through a single weighting micro-ring, and we utilize this functionality to perform optical spike firing rate-coding via thermal tuning of the micro-ring resonator. Given the significant track record of both integrated weight banks and photonic VCSEL-neurons, we believe these results demonstrate the viability of combining these two classes of devices for use in functional neuromorphic photonic systems.
Authors:Pol Jané-Soneira, Ionela Prodan, Albertus Johannes Malan, Sören Hohmann
Title: On MPC-based Strategies for Optimal Voltage References in DC Microgrids
Abstract:
Modern power systems are characterized by low inertia and fast voltage dynamics due to the increase of sources connecting via power electronics and the removal of large traditional thermal generators. Power electronics are commonly equipped with fast controllers that are able to reach a desired voltage setpoint within seconds. In this paper, we propose and compare two approaches using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to compute optimal voltage references for the power electronic devices in order to minimize the losses in a DC microgrid: i) a traditional setpoint-tracking MPC which receives a previously computed optimal setpoint; ii) an economic MPC which does not require a priori computed setpoints. We show that the economic MPC outperforms the setpoint-tracking MPC in simulations with the CIGRE benchmark system when multiple load disturbances occur. Some insights and discussions related to the stability of the closed-loop system using its dissipativity properties are highlighted for both approaches.
Authors:Hannah Klion, Revathi Jambunathan, Michael E. Rowan, Eloise Yang, Donald Willcox, Jean-Luc Vay, Remi Lehe, Andrew Myers, Axel Huebl, Weiqun Zhang
Title: Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Advanced Maxwell Solver Algorithms
Abstract:
Relativistic magnetic reconnection is a non-ideal plasma process that is a source of non-thermal particle acceleration in many high-energy astrophysical systems. Particle-in-cell (PIC) methods are commonly used for simulating reconnection from first principles. While much progress has been made in understanding the physics of reconnection, especially in 2D, the adoption of advanced algorithms and numerical techniques for efficiently modeling such systems has been limited. With the GPU-accelerated PIC code WarpX, we explore the accuracy and potential performance benefits of two advanced Maxwell solver algorithms: a non-standard finite difference scheme (CKC) and an ultrahigh-order pseudo-spectral method (PSATD). We find that for the relativistic reconnection problem, CKC and PSATD qualitatively and quantitatively match the standard Yee-grid finite-difference method. CKC and PSATD both admit a time step that is 40% longer than Yee, resulting in a ~40% faster time to solution for CKC, but no performance benefit for PSATD when using a current deposition scheme that satisfies Gauss's law. Relaxing this constraint maintains accuracy and yields a 30% speedup. Unlike Yee and CKC, PSATD is numerically stable at any time step, allowing for a larger time step than with the finite-difference methods. We found that increasing the time step 2.4-3 times over the standard Yee step still yields accurate results, but only translates to modest performance improvements over CKC due to the current deposition scheme used with PSATD. Further optimization of this scheme will likely improve the effective performance of PSATD.
Authors:Yuki Ozawa, Dafang Zhao, Daichi Watari, Ittetsu Taniguchi, Toshihiro Suzuki, Yoshiyuki Shimoda, Takao Onoye
Title: Data-driven HVAC Control Using Symbolic Regression: Design and Implementation
Abstract:
The large amount of data collected in buildings makes energy management smarter and more energy efficient. This study proposes a design and implementation methodology of data-driven heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control. Building thermodynamics is modeled using a symbolic regression model (SRM) built from the collected data. Additionally, an HVAC system model is also developed with a data-driven approach. A model predictive control (MPC) based HVAC scheduling is formulated with the developed models to minimize energy consumption and peak power demand and maximize thermal comfort. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated in the workspace in the actual campus building. The HVAC system using the proposed framework reduces the peak power by 16.1\% compared to the widely used thermostat controller.
Authors:Shashank Saxena, Jan-Hendrik Bastek, Miguel Spinola, Prateek Gupta, Dennis M. Kochmann
Title: GNN-Assisted Phase Space Integration with Application to Atomistics
Abstract:
Overcoming the time scale limitations of atomistics can be achieved by switching from the state-space representation of Molecular Dynamics (MD) to a statistical-mechanics-based representation in phase space, where approximations such as maximum-entropy or Gaussian phase packets (GPP) evolve the atomistic ensemble in a time-coarsened fashion. In practice, this requires the computation of expensive high-dimensional integrals over all of phase space of an atomistic ensemble. This, in turn, is commonly accomplished efficiently by low-order numerical quadrature. We show that numerical quadrature in this context, unfortunately, comes with a set of inherent problems, which corrupt the accuracy of simulations -- especially when dealing with crystal lattices with imperfections. As a remedy, we demonstrate that Graph Neural Networks, trained on Monte-Carlo data, can serve as a replacement for commonly used numerical quadrature rules, overcoming their deficiencies and significantly improving the accuracy. This is showcased by three benchmarks: the thermal expansion of copper, the martensitic phase transition of iron, and the energy of grain boundaries. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed technique over classically used third- and fifth-order Gaussian quadrature, we highlight the impact on time-coarsened atomistic predictions, and we discuss the computational efficiency. The latter is of general importance when performing frequent evaluation of phase space or other high-dimensional integrals, which is why the proposed framework promises applications beyond the scope of atomistics.
Authors:Sheng-Yang Chiu, Yu-Ting Huang, Chieh-Ting Lin, Yu-Chee Tseng, Jen-Jee Chen, Meng-Hsuan Tu, Bo-Chen Tung, YuJou Nieh
Title: Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing via Thermal-Generative Images
Abstract:
Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, video conferencing has evolved as a new paradigm of communication and teamwork. However, private and personal information can be easily leaked through cameras during video conferencing. This includes leakage of a person's appearance as well as the contents in the background. This paper proposes a novel way of using online low-resolution thermal images as conditions to guide the synthesis of RGB images, bringing a promising solution for real-time video conferencing when privacy leakage is a concern. SPADE-SR (Spatially-Adaptive De-normalization with Self Resampling), a variant of SPADE, is adopted to incorporate the spatial property of a thermal heatmap and the non-thermal property of a normal, privacy-free pre-recorded RGB image provided in a form of latent code. We create a PAIR-LRT-Human (LRT = Low-Resolution Thermal) dataset to validate our claims. The result enables a convenient way of video conferencing where users no longer need to groom themselves and tidy up backgrounds for a short meeting. Additionally, it allows a user to switch to a different appearance and background during a conference.
Authors:K. B. Nakshatrala, K. Adhikari
Title: Thermal regulation in thin vascular systems: A sensitivity analysis
Abstract:
One of the ways natural and synthetic systems regulate temperature is via circulating fluids through vasculatures embedded within their bodies. Because of the flexibility and availability of proven fabrication techniques, vascular-based thermal regulation is attractive for thin microvascular systems. Although preliminary designs and experiments demonstrate the feasibility of thermal modulation by pushing fluid through embedded micro-vasculatures, one has yet to optimize the performance before translating the concept into real-world applications. It will be beneficial to know how two vital design variables -- host material's thermal conductivity and fluid's heat capacity rate -- affect a thermal regulation system's performance, quantified in terms of the mean surface temperature. This paper fills the remarked inadequacy by performing adjoint-based sensitivity analysis and unravels a surprising non-monotonic trend. Increasing thermal conductivity can either increase or decrease the mean surface temperature; the increase happens if countercurrent heat exchange -- transfer of heat from one segment of the vasculature to another -- is significant. In contrast, increasing the heat capacity rate will invariably lower the mean surface temperature, for which we provide mathematical proof. The reported results (a) dispose of some misunderstandings in the literature, especially on the effect of the host material's thermal conductivity, (b) reveal the role of countercurrent heat exchange in altering the effects of design variables, and (c) guide designers to realize efficient microvascular active-cooling systems. The analysis and findings will advance the field of thermal regulation both on theoretical and practical fronts.
Authors:Kamilya Smagulova, Mohammed E. Fouda, Ahmed Eltawil
Title: Thermal Heating in ReRAM Crossbar Arrays: Challenges and Solutions
Abstract:
The higher speed, scalability and parallelism offered by ReRAM crossbar arrays foster development of ReRAM-based next generation AI accelerators. At the same time, sensitivity of ReRAM to temperature variations decreases R_on/Roff ratio and negatively affects the achieved accuracy and reliability of the hardware. Various works on temperature-aware optimization and remapping in ReRAM crossbar arrays reported up to 58\% improvement in accuracy and 2.39$\times$ ReRAM lifetime enhancement. This paper classifies the challenges caused by thermal heat, starting from constraints in ReRAM cells' dimensions and characteristics to their placement in the architecture. In addition, it reviews available solutions designed to mitigate the impact of these challenges, including emerging temperature-resilient DNN training methods. Our work also provides a summary of the techniques and their advantages and limitations.
Authors:Bo Zhou, Ruiwei Jiang, Siqian Shen
Title: Frequency Stability-Constrained Unit Commitment: Tight Approximation using Bernstein Polynomials
Abstract:
As we replace conventional synchronous generators with renewable energy, the frequency security of power systems is at higher risk. This calls for a more careful consideration of unit commitment (UC) and primary frequency response (PFR) reserves. This paper studies frequency-secured UC under significant wind power uncertainty. We coordinate the thermal units and wind farms to provide frequency support, wherein we optimize the variable inverter droop factors of the wind farms for higher economy. In addition, we adopt distributionally robust chance constraints (DRCCs) to handle the wind power uncertainty. To depict the frequency dynamics, we incorporate a differential-algebraic equation (DAE) with the dead band into the UC model. Notably, we apply Bernstein polynomials to derive tight inner approximation of the DAE and obtain mixed-integer linear constraints, which can be computed in off-the-shelf solvers. Case studies demonstrate the tightness and effectiveness of the proposed method in guaranteeing frequency security.
Authors:Tim Hsu, Babak Sadigh, Nicolas Bertin, Cheol Woo Park, James Chapman, Vasily Bulatov, Fei Zhou
Title: Score-based denoising for atomic structure identification
Abstract:
We propose an effective method for removing thermal vibrations that complicate the task of analyzing complex dynamics in atomistic simulation of condensed matter. Our method iteratively subtracts thermal noises or perturbations in atomic positions using a denoising score function trained on synthetically noised but otherwise perfect crystal lattices. The resulting denoised structures clearly reveal underlying crystal order while retaining disorder associated with crystal defects. Purely geometric, agnostic to interatomic potentials, and trained without inputs from explicit simulations, our denoiser can be applied to simulation data generated from vastly different interatomic interactions. The denoiser is shown to improve existing classification methods such as common neighbor analysis and polyhedral template matching, reaching perfect classification accuracy on a recent benchmark dataset of thermally perturbed structures up to the melting point. Demonstrated here in a wide variety of atomistic simulation contexts, the denoiser is general, robust, and readily extendable to delineate order from disorder in structurally and chemically complex materials.
Authors:Donát M. Takács, Áron Pozsár, Tamás Fülöp
Title: Thermodynamically extended symplectic numerical simulation of viscoelastic, thermal expansion and heat conduction phenomena in solids
Abstract:
Symplectic numerical schemes for reversible dynamical systems predict the solution reliably over large times as well, and are a good starting point for extension to schemes for simulating irreversible situations like viscoelastic wave propagation and heat conduction coupled via thermal expansion occuring in rocks, plastics, biological samples etc. Dissipation error (artificial nonpreservation of energies and amplitudes) of the numerical solution should be as small as possible since it should not be confused with the real dissipation occuring in the irreversible system. In addition, the other well-known numerical artefact, dispersion error (artificial oscillations emerging at sharp changes), should also be minimal to avoid confusion with the true wavy behaviour. The continuum thermodynamical aspects (respect for balances with fluxes, systematic constitutive relationships between intensive quantities and fluxes, the second law of thermodynamics with positive definite entropy production, and the spacetime-based kinematic viewpoint) prove valuable for obtaining such extended schemes and for monitoring the solutions. Generalizing earlier works in this direction, here, we establish and investigate such a numerical scheme for one-dimensional viscoelastic wave propagation in the presence of heat conduction coupled via thermal expansion, demonstrating long-term reliability and the applicability of thermodynamics-based quantities in supervising the quality of the solution.
Authors:Vasantha Ramani, Miguel Martin, Pandarasamy Arjunan, Adrian Chong, Kameshwar Poolla, Clayton Miller
Title: Longitudinal thermal imaging for scalable non-residential HVAC and occupant behaviour characterization
Abstract:
This work presents a study on the characterization of the air-conditioning (AC) usage pattern of non-residential buildings from thermal images collected from an urban-scale infrared (IR) observatory. To achieve this first, an image processing scheme, for cleaning and extraction of the temperature time series from the thermal images is implemented. To test the accuracy of the thermal measurements using IR camera, the extracted temperature is compared against the ground truth surface temperature measurements. It is observed that the detrended thermal measurements match well with the ground truth surface temperature measurements. Subsequently, the operational pattern of the water-cooled systems and window AC units are extracted from the analysis of the thermal signature. It is observed that for the water-cooled system, the difference between the rate of change of the window and wall can be used to extract the operational pattern. While, in the case of the window AC units, wavelet transform of the AC unit temperature is used to extract the frequency and time domain information of the AC unit operation. The results of the analysis are compared against the indoor temperature sensors installed in the office spaces of the building. It is realized that the accuracy in the prediction of the operational pattern is highest between 8 pm to 10 am, and it reduces during the day because of solar radiation and high daytime temperature. Subsequently, a characterization study is conducted for eight window/split AC units from the thermal image collected during the nighttime. This forms one of the first studies on the operational behavior of HVAC systems for non-residential buildings using the longitudinal thermal imaging technique. The output from this study can be used to better understand the operational and occupant behavior, without requiring to deploy a large array of sensors in the building space.
Authors:Federico Tartarini, Mario Frei, Stefano Schiavon, Yun Xuan Chua, Clayton Miller
Title: Cozie Apple: An iOS mobile and smartwatch application for environmental quality satisfaction and physiological data collection
Abstract:
Collecting feedback from people in indoor and outdoor environments is traditionally challenging and complex in a reliable, longitudinal, and non-intrusive way. This paper introduces Cozie Apple, an open-source mobile and smartwatch application for iOS devices. This platform allows people to complete a watch-based micro-survey and provide real-time feedback about environmental conditions via their Apple Watch. It leverages the inbuilt sensors of a smartwatch to collect physiological (e.g., heart rate, activity) and environmental (sound level) data. This paper outlines data collected from 48 research participants who used the platform to report perceptions of urban-scale environmental comfort (noise and thermal) and contextual factors such as who they were with and what activity they were doing. The results of 2,400 micro-surveys across various urban settings are illustrated in this paper showing the variability of noise-related distractions, thermal comfort, and associated context. The results show people experience at least a little noise distraction 58% of the time, with people talking being the most common reason (46%). This effort is novel due to its focus on spatial and temporal scalability and collection of noise, distraction, and associated contextual information. These data set the stage for larger deployments, deeper analysis, and more helpful prediction models toward better understanding the occupants' needs and perceptions. These innovations could result in real-time control signals to building systems or nudges for people to change their behavior.
Authors:Miguel Martin, Vasantha Ramani, Clayton Miller
Title: InfraRed Investigation in Singapore (IRIS) Observatory: Urban heat island contributors and mitigators analysis using neighborhood-scale thermal imaging
Abstract:
This paper studies heat fluxes from contributors and mitigators of urban heat islands using thermal images and weather data. Thermal images were collected from an observatory operating on the rooftop of a building between November 2021 and April 2022. Over the same period, an automatic weather station network was used to measure weather conditions at several locations on a university campus in Singapore. From data collected by the observatory and the automatic weather station network, a method was developed to estimate the heat emitted by building facades, vegetation, and traffic. Before performing the analysis of urban heat fluxes, it was observed that the surface temperature collected from the observatory is sensitive to some variables. After the sensitivity analysis, thermal images were calibrated against measurements of the surface temperature in an outdoor environment. Finally, several contributors and mitigators of urban heat islands were analyzed from heat fluxes assessed with thermal images and weather data. According to thermal images collected by the rooftop observatory, concrete walls are an important contributor to urban heat islands due to the longwave radiation they emit at night. Vegetation, on the other hand, seems to be an effective mitigator because of latent heat fluxes generated by evapotranspiration. Traffic looks to be a negligible source of heat if considered over a small portion of a road. In the future, more efforts can be made to estimate the magnitude of the heat released by an air-conditioning system from thermal images.
Authors:Seyed Mojtaba Marvasti-Zadeh, Devin Goodsman, Nilanjan Ray, Nadir Erbilgin
Title: Early Detection of Bark Beetle Attack Using Remote Sensing and Machine Learning: A Review
Abstract:
This paper provides a comprehensive review of past and current advances in the early detection of bark beetle-induced tree mortality from three primary perspectives: bark beetle & host interactions, RS, and ML/DL. In contrast to prior efforts, this review encompasses all RS systems and emphasizes ML/DL methods to investigate their strengths and weaknesses. We parse existing literature based on multi- or hyper-spectral analyses and distill their knowledge based on: bark beetle species & attack phases with a primary emphasis on early stages of attacks, host trees, study regions, RS platforms & sensors, spectral/spatial/temporal resolutions, spectral signatures, spectral vegetation indices (SVIs), ML approaches, learning schemes, task categories, models, algorithms, classes/clusters, features, and DL networks & architectures. Although DL-based methods and the random forest (RF) algorithm showed promising results, highlighting their potential to detect subtle changes across visible, thermal, and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral regions, they still have limited effectiveness and high uncertainties. To inspire novel solutions to these shortcomings, we delve into the principal challenges & opportunities from different perspectives, enabling a deeper understanding of the current state of research and guiding future research directions.
Authors:Shivom Bhargava, Sanjita Prajapati, Pranamesh Chakraborty
Title: Thermal infrared image based vehicle detection in low-level illumination conditions using multi-level GANs
Abstract:
Vehicle detection accuracy is fairly accurate in good-illumination conditions but susceptible to poor detection accuracy under low-light conditions. The combined effect of low-light and glare from vehicle headlight or tail-light results in misses in vehicle detection more likely by state-of-the-art object detection models. However, thermal infrared images are robust to illumination changes and are based on thermal radiation. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been extensively used in image domain transfer tasks. State-of-the-art GAN models have attempted to improve vehicle detection accuracy in night-time by converting infrared images to day-time RGB images. However, these models have been found to under-perform during night-time conditions compared to day-time conditions, as day-time infrared images looks different than night-time infrared images. Therefore, this study attempts to alleviate this shortcoming by proposing three different approaches based on combination of GAN models at two different levels that try to reduce the feature distribution gap between day-time and night-time infrared images. Quantitative analysis to compare the performance of the proposed models with the state-of-the-art models has been done by testing the models using state-of-the-art object detection models. Both the quantitative and qualitative analyses have shown that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art GAN models for vehicle detection in night-time conditions, showing the efficacy of the proposed models.
Authors:Dan Crisan, Darryl D. Holm, Oana Lang, Prince Romeo Mensah, Wei Pan
Title: Theoretical analysis and numerical approximation for the stochastic thermal quasi-geostrophic model
Abstract:
This paper investigates the mathematical properties of a stochastic version of the balanced 2D thermal quasigeostrophic (TQG) model of potential vorticity dynamics. This stochastic TQG model is intended as a basis for parametrisation of the dynamical creation of unresolved degrees of freedom in computational simulations of upper ocean dynamics when horizontal buoyancy gradients and bathymetry affect the dynamics, particularly at the submesoscale (250m--10km). Specifically, we have chosen the SALT (Stochastic Advection by Lie Transport) algorithm introduced in [1] and applied in [2,3] as our modelling approach. The SALT approach preserves the Kelvin circulation theorem and an infinite family of integral conservation laws for TQG. The goal of the SALT algorithm is to quantify the uncertainty in the process of up-scaling, or coarse-graining of either observed or synthetic data at fine scales, for use in computational simulations at coarser scales. The present work provides a rigorous mathematical analysis of the solution properties of the thermal quasigeostrophic (TQG) equations with stochastic advection by Lie transport (SALT) [4,5].
Authors:François Dubois, Pierre Lallemand
Title: On single distribution lattice Boltzmann schemes for the approximation of Navier Stokes equations
Abstract:
In this contribution we study the formal ability of a multi-resolution-times lattice Boltzmann scheme to approximate isothermal and thermal compressible Navier Stokes equations with a single particle distribution. More precisely, we consider a total of 12 classical square lattice Boltzmann schemes with prescribed sets of conserved and nonconserved moments. The question is to determine the algebraic expressions of the equilibrium functions for the nonconserved moments and the relaxation parameters associated to each scheme. We compare the fluid equations and the result of the Taylor expansion method at second order accuracy for bidimensional examples with a maximum of 17 velocities and three-dimensional schemes with at most 33 velocities. In some cases, it is not possible to fit exactly the physical model. For several examples, we adjust the Navier Stokes equations and propose nontrivial expressions for the equilibria.
Authors:Tim Keil, Mario Ohlberger
Title: A Relaxed Localized Trust-Region Reduced Basis Approach for Optimization of Multiscale Problems
Abstract:
In this contribution, we are concerned with parameter optimization problems that are constrained by multiscale PDE state equations. As an efficient numerical solution approach for such problems, we introduce and analyze a new relaxed and localized trust-region reduced basis method. Localization is obtained based on a Petrov-Galerkin localized orthogonal decomposition method and its recently introduced two-scale reduced basis approximation. We derive efficient localizable a posteriori error estimates for the optimality system, as well as for the two-scale reduced objective functional. While the relaxation of the outer trust-region optimization loop still allows for a rigorous convergence result, the resulting method converges much faster due to larger step sizes in the initial phase of the iterative algorithms. The resulting algorithm is parallelized in order to take advantage of the localization. Numerical experiments are given for a multiscale thermal block benchmark problem. The experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the approach, particularly for large scale problems, where methods based on traditional finite element approximation schemes are prohibitive or fail entirely.
Authors:Jiadi Zhang, Mohammad Reza Amini, Ilya Kolmanovsky, Munechika Tsutsumi, Hayato Nakada
Title: Development of a Model Predictive Airpath Controller for a Diesel Engine on a High-Fidelity Engine Model with Transient Thermal Dynamics
Abstract:
This paper presents the results of a model predictive controller (MPC) development for diesel engine air-path regulation. The control objective is to track the intake manifold pressure and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rate targets by manipulating the EGR valve and variable geometry turbine (VGT) while satisfying state and control constraints. The MPC controller is designed and verified using a high-fidelity engine model in GT-Power. The controller exploits a low-order rate-based linear parameter-varying (LPV) model for prediction which is identified from transient response data generated by the GT-Power model. It is shown that transient engine thermal dynamics influence the airpath dynamics, specifically the intake manifold pressure response, however, MPC demonstrates robustness against inaccuracies in modeling these thermal dynamics. In particular, we show that MPC can be successfully implemented using a rate-based prediction model with two inputs (EGR and VGT positions) identified from data with steady-state wall temperature dynamics, however, closed-loop performance can be improved if a prediction model (i) is identified from data with transient thermal dynamics, and (ii) has the fuel injection rate as extra model input. Further, the MPC calibration process across the engine operating range to achieve improved performance is addressed. As the MPC calibration is shown to be sensitive to the operating conditions, a fast calibration process is proposed.
Authors:Federico Zocco, Pantelis Sopasakis, Beatrice Smyth, Wassim M. Haddad
Title: Thermodynamical Material Networks for Modeling, Planning, and Control of Circular Material Flows
Abstract:
Waste production, carbon dioxide atmospheric accumulation, and dependence on finite natural resources are expressions of the unsustainability of the current industrial networks that supply fuels, energy, and manufacturing products. In particular, circular manufacturing supply chains and carbon control networks are urgently needed. To model and design these and, in general, any material networks, we propose to generalize the approach used for traditional networks such as water and thermal power systems by using compartmental dynamical thermodynamics and graph theory. The key idea is that the thermodynamic compartments and their connections can be added, removed or modified as needed to achieve a circular material flow. The design methodology is explained and its application is illustrated through examples. In addition, we provide a physics-based definition of circularity and, by implementing a nonlinear compartmental control, we strengthen the connection between "Industry 4.0" and "Sustainability". The paper source code is publicly available.
Authors:Stefan Rhys Jeske, Jan Bender, Kirsten Bobzin, Hendrik Heinemann, Kevin Jasutyn, Marek Simon, Oleg Mokrov, Rahul Sharma, Uwe Reisgen
Title: Application and Benchmark of SPH for Modeling the Impact in Thermal Spraying
Abstract:
The properties of a thermally sprayed coating, such as its durability or thermal conductivity depend on its microstructure, which is in turn directly related to the particle impact process. To simulate this process we present a 3D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) model, which represents the molten droplet as an incompressible fluid, while a semi-implicit Enthalpy-Porosity method is applied for the mushy zone during solidification. In addition, we present an implicit correction for SPH simulations, based on well known approaches, from which we can observe improved performance and simulation stability. We apply our SPH method to the impact and solidification of Al$_2$O$_3$ droplets onto a free slip substrate and perform a rigorous quantitative comparison of our method with the commercial software Ansys Fluent using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) approach, while taking identical physical effects into consideration. The results are evaluated in depth and we discuss the applicability of either method for the simulation of thermal spray deposition. We show that SPH is an excellent method for solving this free surface problem accurately and efficiently.
Authors:Süleyman Yıldız, Murat Uzunca, Bülent Karasözen
Title: Intrusive and non-intrusive reduced order modeling of the rotating thermal shallow water equation
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate projection-based intrusive and data-driven non-intrusive model order reduction methods in numerical simulation of rotating thermal shallow water equation (RTSWE) in parametric and non-parametric form. Discretization of the RTSWE in space with centered finite differences leads to Hamiltonian system of ordinary differential equations with linear and quadratic terms. The full-order model (FOM) is obtained by applying linearly implicit Kahan's method in time. Applying proper orthogonal decomposition with Galerkin projection (POD-G), we construct the intrusive reduced-order model (ROM). We apply operator inference (OpInf) with re-projection for non-intrusive reduced-order modeling. In the parametric case, we make use of the parameter dependency at the level of the PDE without interpolating between the reduced operators. The least-squares problem of the OpInf is regularized with the minimum norm solution. Both ROMs behave similar and are able to accurately predict the test and training data and capture system behavior in the prediction phase with several orders of computational speedup over the FOM. The preservation of system physics such as the conserved quantities of the RTSWE by both ROMs enables that the models fit better to data and stable solutions are obtained in long-term predictions, which are robust to parameter changes.
Authors:Hao Wang, Yan Meng, Quansheng Zhang, Mohammad Reza Amini, Ilya V. Kolmanovsky, Jing Sun, Mark Jennings
Title: MPC-Based Precision Cooling Strategy (PCS) for Efficient Thermal Management of Automotive Air Conditioning System
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an MPC-based precision cooling strategy (PCS) for energy efficient thermal management of automotive air conditioning (A/C) system. The proposed PCS is able to provide precise tracking of the time-varying cooling power trajectory, which is assumed to match the passenger comfort requirements. In addition, by leveraging the emerging connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) technology, vehicle speed preview can be incorporated in our A/C thermal management strategy for further energy efficiency improvement. This proposed A/C thermal management strategy is developed and evaluated based on a physics-based A/C system model (ACSim) from Ford Motor Company for the vehicles with electrified powertrains. In a comparison with Ford benchmark case over SC03 cycle, for tracking the same cooling power trajectory, the proposed PCS provides 4.9% energy saving at the cost of a slight increase in the cabin temperature (less than 1$^oC$). It is also demonstrated that by coordinating with future vehicle speed and shifting the A/C power load, the A/C energy consumption can be further reduced.
Authors:Xun Gong, Hao Wang, Mohammad Reza Amini, Ilya Kolmanovsky, Jing Sun
Title: Integrated Optimization of Power Split, Engine Thermal Management, and Cabin Heating for Hybrid Electric Vehicles
Abstract:
Cabin heating demand and engine efficiency degradation in cold weather lead to considerable increase in fuel consumption of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), especially in congested traffic conditions. This paper presents an integrated power and thermal management (i-PTM) scheme for the optimization of power split, engine thermal management, and cabin heating of HEVs. A control-oriented model of a power split HEV, including power and thermal loops, is developed and experimentally validated against data collected from a 2017 Toyota Prius HEV. Based on this model, the dynamic programming (DP) technique is adopted to derive a bench-mark for minimal fuel consumption, using 2-dimensional (power split and engine thermal management) and 3-dimensional (power split, engine thermal management, and cabin heating) formulations. Simulation results for a real-world congested driving cycle show that the engine thermal effect and the cabin heating requirement can significantly influence the optimal behavior for the power management, and substantial potential on fuel saving can be achieved by the i-PTM optimization as compared to conventional power and thermal management strategies.
Authors:Earl Ranario, Ismael Mayanja, Heesup Yun, Brian N. Bailey, J. Mason Earles
Title: Enabling Plant Phenotyping in Weedy Environments using Multi-Modal Imagery via Synthetic and Generated Training Data
Abstract:
Accurate plant segmentation in thermal imagery remains a significant challenge for high throughput field phenotyping, particularly in outdoor environments where low contrast between plants and weeds and frequent occlusions hinder performance. To address this, we present a framework that leverages synthetic RGB imagery, a limited set of real annotations, and GAN-based cross-modality alignment to enhance semantic segmentation in thermal images. We trained models on 1,128 synthetic images containing complex mixtures of crop and weed plants in order to generate image segmentation masks for crop and weed plants. We additionally evaluated the benefit of integrating as few as five real, manually segmented field images within the training process using various sampling strategies. When combining all the synthetic images with a few labeled real images, we observed a maximum relative improvement of 22% for the weed class and 17% for the plant class compared to the full real-data baseline. Cross-modal alignment was enabled by translating RGB to thermal using CycleGAN-turbo, allowing robust template matching without calibration. Results demonstrated that combining synthetic data with limited manual annotations and cross-domain translation via generative models can significantly boost segmentation performance in complex field environments for multi-model imagery.
Authors:Selma Yahia, Ildi Alla, Girija Bangalore Mohan, Daniel Rau, Mridula Singh, Valeria Loscri
Title: Seeing is Deceiving: Mirror-Based LiDAR Spoofing for Autonomous Vehicle Deception
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely heavily on LiDAR sensors for accurate 3D perception. We show a novel class of low-cost, passive LiDAR spoofing attacks that exploit mirror-like surfaces to inject or remove objects from an AV's perception. Using planar mirrors to redirect LiDAR beams, these attacks require no electronics or custom fabrication and can be deployed in real settings. We define two adversarial goals: Object Addition Attacks (OAA), which create phantom obstacles, and Object Removal Attacks (ORA), which conceal real hazards. We develop geometric optics models, validate them with controlled outdoor experiments using a commercial LiDAR and an Autoware-equipped vehicle, and implement a CARLA-based simulation for scalable testing. Experiments show mirror attacks corrupt occupancy grids, induce false detections, and trigger unsafe planning and control behaviors. We discuss potential defenses (thermal sensing, multi-sensor fusion, light-fingerprinting) and their limitations.
Authors:Elton Pan, Soonhyoung Kwon, Sulin Liu, Mingrou Xie, Alexander J. Hoffman, Yifei Duan, Thorben Prein, Killian Sheriff, Yuriy Roman-Leshkov, Manuel Moliner, Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, Elsa Olivetti
Title: DiffSyn: A Generative Diffusion Approach to Materials Synthesis Planning
Abstract:
The synthesis of crystalline materials, such as zeolites, remains a significant challenge due to a high-dimensional synthesis space, intricate structure-synthesis relationships and time-consuming experiments. Considering the one-to-many relationship between structure and synthesis, we propose DiffSyn, a generative diffusion model trained on over 23,000 synthesis recipes spanning 50 years of literature. DiffSyn generates probable synthesis routes conditioned on a desired zeolite structure and an organic template. DiffSyn achieves state-of-the-art performance by capturing the multi-modal nature of structure-synthesis relationships. We apply DiffSyn to differentiate among competing phases and generate optimal synthesis routes. As a proof of concept, we synthesize a UFI material using DiffSyn-generated synthesis routes. These routes, rationalized by density functional theory binding energies, resulted in the successful synthesis of a UFI material with a high Si/Al$_{\text{ICP}}$ of 19.0, which is expected to improve thermal stability and is higher than that of any previously recorded.
Authors:Ibai Ramirez, Jokin Alcibar, Joel Pino, Mikel Sanz, David Pardo, Jose I. Aizpurua
Title: Bayesian Physics Informed Neural Networks for Reliable Transformer Prognostics
Abstract:
Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) integrates physics and data into the learning process, offering improved generalization compared with purely data-driven models. Despite its potential, applications of SciML in prognostics remain limited, partly due to the complexity of incorporating partial differential equations (PDEs) for ageing physics and the scarcity of robust uncertainty quantification methods. This work introduces a Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Network (B-PINN) framework for probabilistic prognostics estimation. By embedding Bayesian Neural Networks into the PINN architecture, the proposed approach produces principled, uncertainty-aware predictions. The method is applied to a transformer ageing case study, where insulation degradation is primarily driven by thermal stress. The heat diffusion PDE is used as the physical residual, and different prior distributions are investigated to examine their impact on predictive posterior distributions and their ability to encode a priori physical knowledge. The framework is validated against a finite element model developed and tested with real measurements from a solar power plant. Results, benchmarked against a dropout-PINN baseline, show that the proposed B-PINN delivers more reliable prognostic predictions by accurately quantifying predictive uncertainty. This capability is crucial for supporting robust and informed maintenance decision-making in critical power assets.
Authors:Chi Yang, Fu Wang, Xiaofei Yang, Hao Huang, Weijia Cao, Xiaowen Chu
Title: SGMAGNet: A Baseline Model for 3D Cloud Phase Structure Reconstruction on a New Passive Active Satellite Benchmark
Abstract:
Cloud phase profiles are critical for numerical weather prediction (NWP), as they directly affect radiative transfer and precipitation processes. In this study, we present a benchmark dataset and a baseline framework for transforming multimodal satellite observations into detailed 3D cloud phase structures, aiming toward operational cloud phase profile retrieval and future integration with NWP systems to improve cloud microphysics parameterization. The multimodal observations consist of (1) high--spatiotemporal--resolution, multi-band visible (VIS) and thermal infrared (TIR) imagery from geostationary satellites, and (2) accurate vertical cloud phase profiles from spaceborne lidar (CALIOP\slash CALIPSO) and radar (CPR\slash CloudSat). The dataset consists of synchronized image--profile pairs across diverse cloud regimes, defining a supervised learning task: given VIS/TIR patches, predict the corresponding 3D cloud phase structure. We adopt SGMAGNet as the main model and compare it with several baseline architectures, including UNet variants and SegNet, all designed to capture multi-scale spatial patterns. Model performance is evaluated using standard classification metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1-score, and IoU. The results demonstrate that SGMAGNet achieves superior performance in cloud phase reconstruction, particularly in complex multi-layer and boundary transition regions. Quantitatively, SGMAGNet attains a Precision of 0.922, Recall of 0.858, F1-score of 0.763, and an IoU of 0.617, significantly outperforming all baselines across these key metrics.
Authors:Fengyi Wang, Xiangyu Fu, Nitish Thakor, Gordon Cheng
Title: Human-Inspired Soft Anthropomorphic Hand System for Neuromorphic Object and Pose Recognition Using Multimodal Signals
Abstract:
The human somatosensory system integrates multimodal sensory feedback, including tactile, proprioceptive, and thermal signals, to enable comprehensive perception and effective interaction with the environment. Inspired by the biological mechanism, we present a sensorized soft anthropomorphic hand equipped with diverse sensors designed to emulate the sensory modalities of the human hand. This system incorporates biologically inspired encoding schemes that convert multimodal sensory data into spike trains, enabling highly-efficient processing through Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). By utilizing these neuromorphic signals, the proposed framework achieves 97.14% accuracy in object recognition across varying poses, significantly outperforming previous studies on soft hands. Additionally, we introduce a novel differentiator neuron model to enhance material classification by capturing dynamic thermal responses. Our results demonstrate the benefits of multimodal sensory fusion and highlight the potential of neuromorphic approaches for achieving efficient, robust, and human-like perception in robotic systems.
Authors:Harris Song, Tuan-Anh Vu, Sanjith Menon, Sriram Narasimhan, M. Khalid Jawed
Title: HiddenObject: Modality-Agnostic Fusion for Multimodal Hidden Object Detection
Abstract:
Detecting hidden or partially concealed objects remains a fundamental challenge in multimodal environments, where factors like occlusion, camouflage, and lighting variations significantly hinder performance. Traditional RGB-based detection methods often fail under such adverse conditions, motivating the need for more robust, modality-agnostic approaches. In this work, we present HiddenObject, a fusion framework that integrates RGB, thermal, and depth data using a Mamba-based fusion mechanism. Our method captures complementary signals across modalities, enabling enhanced detection of obscured or camouflaged targets. Specifically, the proposed approach identifies modality-specific features and fuses them in a unified representation that generalizes well across challenging scenarios. We validate HiddenObject across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art or competitive performance compared to existing methods. These results highlight the efficacy of our fusion design and expose key limitations in current unimodal and naïve fusion strategies. More broadly, our findings suggest that Mamba-based fusion architectures can significantly advance the field of multimodal object detection, especially under visually degraded or complex conditions.
Authors:Rui Chen, Domenico Chiaradia, Antonio Frisoli, Daniele Leonardis
Title: A Soft Fabric-Based Thermal Haptic Device for VR and Teleoperation
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel fabric-based thermal-haptic interface for virtual reality and teleoperation. It integrates pneumatic actuation and conductive fabric with an innovative ultra-lightweight design, achieving only 2~g for each finger unit. By embedding heating elements within textile pneumatic chambers, the system delivers modulated pressure and thermal stimuli to fingerpads through a fully soft, wearable interface. Comprehensive characterization demonstrates rapid thermal modulation with heating rates up to 3$^{\circ}$C/s, enabling dynamic thermal feedback for virtual or teleoperation interactions. The pneumatic subsystem generates forces up to 8.93~N at 50~kPa, while optimization of fingerpad-actuator clearance enhances cooling efficiency with minimal force reduction. Experimental validation conducted with two different user studies shows high temperature identification accuracy (0.98 overall) across three thermal levels, and significant manipulation improvements in a virtual pick-and-place tasks. Results show enhanced success rates (88.5\% to 96.4\%, p = 0.029) and improved force control precision (p = 0.013) when haptic feedback is enabled, validating the effectiveness of the integrated thermal-haptic approach for advanced human-machine interaction applications.
Authors:Joe Alexandersen, Magnus Appel
Title: Large-Scale Topology Optimisation of Time-dependent Thermal Conduction Using Space-Time Finite Elements and a Parallel Space-Time Multigrid Preconditioner
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel space-time topology optimisation framework for time-dependent thermal conduction problems, aiming to significantly reduce the time-to-solution. By treating time as an additional spatial dimension, we discretise the governing equations using a stabilised continuous Galerkin space-time finite element method. The resulting large all-at-once system is solved using an iterative Krylov solver preconditioned with a parallel space-time multigrid method employing a semi-coarsening strategy. Implemented in a fully parallel computing framework, the method yields a parallel-in-time method that demonstrates excellent scalability on a distributed-memory supercomputer, solving problems up to 4.2 billion degrees of freedom. Comparative studies show up to 52x speed-up over traditional time-stepping approaches, with only moderate increases in total computational cost in terms of core-hours. The framework is validated on benchmark problems with both time-constant and time-varying designs, and its flexibility is demonstrated through variations in material properties. These results establish the proposed space-time method as a promising approach for large-scale time-dependent topology optimisation in thermal applications.
Authors:Brooks Kinch, Benjamin Shaffer, Elizabeth Armstrong, Michael Meehan, John Hewson, Nathaniel Trask
Title: Structure-Preserving Digital Twins via Conditional Neural Whitney Forms
Abstract:
We present a framework for constructing real-time digital twins based on structure-preserving reduced finite element models conditioned on a latent variable Z. The approach uses conditional attention mechanisms to learn both a reduced finite element basis and a nonlinear conservation law within the framework of finite element exterior calculus (FEEC). This guarantees numerical well-posedness and exact preservation of conserved quantities, regardless of data sparsity or optimization error. The conditioning mechanism supports real-time calibration to parametric variables, allowing the construction of digital twins which support closed loop inference and calibration to sensor data. The framework interfaces with conventional finite element machinery in a non-invasive manner, allowing treatment of complex geometries and integration of learned models with conventional finite element techniques. Benchmarks include advection diffusion, shock hydrodynamics, electrostatics, and a complex battery thermal runaway problem. The method achieves accurate predictions on complex geometries with sparse data (25 LES simulations), including capturing the transition to turbulence and achieving real-time inference ~0.1s with a speedup of 3.1x10^8 relative to LES. An open-source implementation is available on GitHub.
Authors:Shengao Yi, Xiaojiang Li, Wei Tu, Tianhong Zhao
Title: Planning for Cooler Cities: A Multimodal AI Framework for Predicting and Mitigating Urban Heat Stress through Urban Landscape Transformation
Abstract:
As extreme heat events intensify due to climate change and urbanization, cities face increasing challenges in mitigating outdoor heat stress. While traditional physical models such as SOLWEIG and ENVI-met provide detailed assessments of human-perceived heat exposure, their computational demands limit scalability for city-wide planning. In this study, we propose GSM-UTCI, a multimodal deep learning framework designed to predict daytime average Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) at 1-meter hyperlocal resolution. The model fuses surface morphology (nDSM), high-resolution land cover data, and hourly meteorological conditions using a feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) architecture that dynamically conditions spatial features on atmospheric context. Trained on SOLWEIG-derived UTCI maps, GSM-UTCI achieves near-physical accuracy, with an R2 of 0.9151 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.41°C, while reducing inference time from hours to under five minutes for an entire city. To demonstrate its planning relevance, we apply GSM-UTCI to simulate systematic landscape transformation scenarios in Philadelphia, replacing bare earth, grass, and impervious surfaces with tree canopy. Results show spatially heterogeneous but consistently strong cooling effects, with impervious-to-tree conversion producing the highest aggregated benefit (-4.18°C average change in UTCI across 270.7 km2). Tract-level bivariate analysis further reveals strong alignment between thermal reduction potential and land cover proportions. These findings underscore the utility of GSM-UTCI as a scalable, fine-grained decision support tool for urban climate adaptation, enabling scenario-based evaluation of greening strategies across diverse urban environments.
Authors:Ruchira V Bhat, Rahul Bhowmick, Avinash Singh, Krishna Kumar Sabapathy
Title: Meta-learning of Gibbs states for many-body Hamiltonians with applications to Quantum Boltzmann Machines
Abstract:
The preparation of quantum Gibbs states is a fundamental challenge in quantum computing, essential for applications ranging from modeling open quantum systems to quantum machine learning. Building on the Meta-Variational Quantum Eigensolver framework proposed by Cervera-Lierta et al.(2021) and a problem driven ansatz design, we introduce two meta-learning algorithms: Meta-Variational Quantum Thermalizer (Meta-VQT) and Neural Network Meta-VQT (NN-Meta VQT) for efficient thermal state preparation of parametrized Hamiltonians on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Meta-VQT utilizes a fully quantum ansatz, while NN Meta-VQT integrates a quantum classical hybrid architecture. Both leverage collective optimization over training sets to generalize Gibbs state preparation to unseen parameters. We validate our methods on upto 8-qubit Transverse Field Ising Model and the 2-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms, demonstrating efficient thermal state generation beyond training data. For larger systems, we show that our meta-learned parameters when combined with appropriately designed ansatz serve as warm start initializations, significantly outperforming random initializations in the optimization tasks. Furthermore, a 3- qubit Kitaev ring example showcases our algorithm's effectiveness across finite-temperature crossover regimes. Finally, we apply our algorithms to train a Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM) on a 2-qubit Heisenberg model with all field terms, achieving enhanced training efficiency, improved Gibbs state accuracy, and a 30-fold runtime speedup over existing techniques such as variational quantum imaginary time (VarQITE)-based QBM highlighting the scalability and practicality of meta-algorithm-based QBMs.
Authors:Yasser Ashraf, Ahmed Sharshar, Velibor Bojkovic, Bin Gu
Title: SPACT18: Spiking Human Action Recognition Benchmark Dataset with Complementary RGB and Thermal Modalities
Abstract:
Spike cameras, bio-inspired vision sensors, asynchronously fire spikes by accumulating light intensities at each pixel, offering ultra-high energy efficiency and exceptional temporal resolution. Unlike event cameras, which record changes in light intensity to capture motion, spike cameras provide even finer spatiotemporal resolution and a more precise representation of continuous changes. In this paper, we introduce the first video action recognition (VAR) dataset using spike camera, alongside synchronized RGB and thermal modalities, to enable comprehensive benchmarking for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). By preserving the inherent sparsity and temporal precision of spiking data, our three datasets offer a unique platform for exploring multimodal video understanding and serve as a valuable resource for directly comparing spiking, thermal, and RGB modalities. This work contributes a novel dataset that will drive research in energy-efficient, ultra-low-power video understanding, specifically for action recognition tasks using spike-based data.
Authors:Abhay Negi, Omey M. Manyar, Satyandra K. Gupta
Title: Kinematic Model Optimization via Differentiable Contact Manifold for In-Space Manipulation
Abstract:
Robotic manipulation in space is essential for emerging applications such as debris removal and in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (ISAM). A key requirement for these tasks is the ability to perform precise, contact-rich manipulation under significant uncertainty. In particular, thermal-induced deformation of manipulator links and temperature-dependent encoder bias introduce kinematic parameter errors that significantly degrade end-effector accuracy. Traditional calibration techniques rely on external sensors or dedicated calibration procedures, which can be infeasible or risky in dynamic, space-based operational scenarios. This paper proposes a novel method for kinematic parameter estimation that only requires encoder measurements and binary contact detection. The approach focuses on estimating link thermal deformation strain and joint encoder biases by leveraging information of the contact manifold - the set of relative SE(3) poses at which contact between the manipulator and environment occurs. We present two core contributions: (1) a differentiable, learning-based model of the contact manifold, and (2) an optimization-based algorithm for estimating kinematic parameters from encoder measurements at contact instances. By enabling parameter estimation using only encoder measurements and contact detection, this method provides a robust, interpretable, and data-efficient solution for safe and accurate manipulation in the challenging conditions of space.
Authors:Ning Chu, Siya Zheng, Shanqing Zhang, Li Li, Caifang Cai, Ali Mohammad-Djafari, Feng Zhao, Yuanbo Song
Title: Temperature calibration of surface emissivities with an improved thermal image enhancement network
Abstract:
Infrared thermography faces persistent challenges in temperature accuracy due to material emissivity variations, where existing methods often neglect the joint optimization of radiometric calibration and image degradation. This study introduces a physically guided neural framework that unifies temperature correction and image enhancement through a symmetric skip-CNN architecture and an emissivity-aware attention module. The pre-processing stage segments the ROIs of the image and and initially corrected the firing rate. A novel dual-constrained loss function strengthens the statistical consistency between the target and reference regions through mean-variance alignment and histogram matching based on Kullback-Leibler dispersion. The method works by dynamically fusing thermal radiation features and spatial context, and the model suppresses emissivity artifacts while recovering structural details. After validating the industrial blower system under different conditions, the improved network realizes the dynamic fusion of thermal radiation characteristics and spatial background, with accurate calibration results in various industrial conditions.
Authors:Sindhu Boddu, Arindam Mukherjee
Title: Efficient Edge Deployment of Quantized YOLOv4-Tiny for Aerial Emergency Object Detection on Raspberry Pi 5
Abstract:
This paper presents the deployment and performance evaluation of a quantized YOLOv4-Tiny model for real-time object detection in aerial emergency imagery on a resource-constrained edge device the Raspberry Pi 5. The YOLOv4-Tiny model was quantized to INT8 precision using TensorFlow Lite post-training quantization techniques and evaluated for detection speed, power consumption, and thermal feasibility under embedded deployment conditions. The quantized model achieved an inference time of 28.2 ms per image with an average power consumption of 13.85 W, demonstrating a significant reduction in power usage compared to its FP32 counterpart. Detection accuracy remained robust across key emergency classes such as Ambulance, Police, Fire Engine, and Car Crash. These results highlight the potential of low-power embedded AI systems for real-time deployment in safety-critical emergency response applications.
Authors:Conor Rowan, John Evans, Kurt Maute, Alireza Doostan
Title: Solving engineering eigenvalue problems with neural networks using the Rayleigh quotient
Abstract:
From characterizing the speed of a thermal system's response to computing natural modes of vibration, eigenvalue analysis is ubiquitous in engineering. In spite of this, eigenvalue problems have received relatively little treatment compared to standard forward and inverse problems in the physics-informed machine learning literature. In particular, neural network discretizations of solutions to eigenvalue problems have seen only a handful of studies. Owing to their nonlinearity, neural network discretizations prevent the conversion of the continuous eigenvalue differential equation into a standard discrete eigenvalue problem. In this setting, eigenvalue analysis requires more specialized techniques. Using a neural network discretization of the eigenfunction, we show that a variational form of the eigenvalue problem called the "Rayleigh quotient" in tandem with a Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure is a particularly simple and robust approach to find the eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenfunctions. This method is shown to be useful for finding sets of harmonic functions on irregular domains, parametric and nonlinear eigenproblems, and high-dimensional eigenanalysis. We also discuss the utility of harmonic functions as a spectral basis for approximating solutions to partial differential equations. Through various examples from engineering mechanics, the combination of the Rayleigh quotient objective, Gram-Schmidt procedure, and the neural network discretization of the eigenfunction is shown to offer unique advantages for handling continuous eigenvalue problems.
Authors:Walter Boscheri, Michael Dumbser, Raphael Loubère, Pierre-Henri Maire
Title: A structure-preserving and thermodynamically compatible cell-centered Lagrangian finite volume scheme for continuum mechanics
Abstract:
In this work we present a novel structure-preserving scheme for the discretization of the Godunov-Peshkov-Romenski (GPR) model of continuum mechanics written in Lagrangian form. This model admits an extra conservation law for the total energy (first principle of thermodynamics) and satisfies the entropy inequality (second principle of thermodynamics). Furthermore, in the absence of algebraic source terms, the distortion field of the continuum and the specific thermal impulse satisfy a curl-free condition, provided the initial data are curl-free. Last but not least, the determinant of the distortion field is related to the density of the medium, i.e. the system is also endowed with a nonlinear algebraic constraint. The objective of this work is to construct and analyze a new semi-discrete thermodynamically compatible cell-centered Lagrangian finite volume scheme on moving unstructured meshes that satisfies the following structural properties of the governing PDE exactly at the discrete level: i) compatibility with the first law of thermodynamics, i.e. discrete total energy conservation; ii) compatibility with the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. discrete entropy inequality; iii) exact discrete compatibility between the density and the determinant of the distortion field; iv) exact preservation of the curl-free property of the distortion field and of the specific thermal impulse in the absence of algebraic source terms. We show that it is possible to achieve all above properties simultaneously. Unlike in existing schemes, we choose to directly discretize the entropy inequality, hence obtaining total energy conservation as a consequence of an appropriate and thermodynamically compatible discretization of all the other equations.
Authors:Chao Tian, Chao Yang, Guoqing Zhu, Qiang Wang, Zhenyu He
Title: Learning A Robust RGB-Thermal Detector for Extreme Modality Imbalance
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) object detection utilizes thermal infrared (TIR) images to complement RGB data, improving robustness in challenging conditions. Traditional RGB-T detectors assume balanced training data, where both modalities contribute equally. However, in real-world scenarios, modality degradation-due to environmental factors or technical issues-can lead to extreme modality imbalance, causing out-of-distribution (OOD) issues during testing and disrupting model convergence during training. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel base-and-auxiliary detector architecture. We introduce a modality interaction module to adaptively weigh modalities based on their quality and handle imbalanced samples effectively. Additionally, we leverage modality pseudo-degradation to simulate real-world imbalances in training data. The base detector, trained on high-quality pairs, provides a consistency constraint for the auxiliary detector, which receives degraded samples. This framework enhances model robustness, ensuring reliable performance even under severe modality degradation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in handling extreme modality imbalances~(decreasing the Missing Rate by 55%) and improving performance across various baseline detectors.
Authors:An Zou, Yuankai Xu, Yinchen Ni, Jintao Chen, Yehan Ma, Jing Li, Christopher Gill, Xuan Zhang, Yier Jin
Title: A Survey of Real-time Scheduling on Accelerator-based Heterogeneous Architecture for Time Critical Applications
Abstract:
Accelerator-based heterogeneous architectures, such as CPU-GPU, CPU-TPU, and CPU-FPGA systems, are widely adopted to support the popular artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that demand intensive computation. When deployed in real-time applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles, these architectures must meet stringent timing constraints. To summarize these achievements, this article presents a comprehensive survey of real-time scheduling techniques for accelerator-based heterogeneous platforms. It highlights key advancements from the past ten years, showcasing how proposed solutions have evolved to address the distinct challenges and requirements of these systems. This survey begins with an overview of the hardware characteristics and common task execution models used in accelerator-based heterogeneous systems. It then categorizes the reviewed works based on soft and hard deadline constraints. For soft real-time approaches, we cover real-time scheduling methods supported by hardware vendors and strategies focusing on timing-critical scheduling, energy efficiency, and thermal-aware scheduling. For hard real-time approaches, we first examine support from processor vendors. We then discuss scheduling techniques that guarantee hard deadlines (with strict response time analysis). After reviewing general soft and hard real-time scheduling methods, we explore application- or scenario-driven real-time scheduling techniques for accelerator-enabled heterogeneous computing platforms. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of open issues and challenges within this research area.
Authors:Magnus Appel, Joe Alexandersen
Title: Space-Time Multigrid Methods Suitable for Topology Optimisation of Transient Heat Conduction
Abstract:
This paper presents Space-Time MultiGrid (STMG) methods which are suitable for performing topology optimisation of transient heat conduction problems. The proposed methods use a pointwise smoother and uniform Cartesian space-time meshes. For problems with high contrast in the diffusivity, it was found that it is beneficial to define a coarsening strategy based on the geometric mean of the minimum and maximum diffusivity. However, other coarsening strategies may be better for other smoothers. Several methods of discretising the coarse levels were tested. Of these, it was best to use a method which averages the thermal resistivities on the finer levels. However, this was likely a consequence of the fact that only one spatial dimension was considered for the test problems. A second coarsening strategy was proposed which ensures spatial resolution on the coarse grids. Mixed results were found for this strategy. The proposed STMG methods were used as a solver for a one-dimensional topology optimisation problem. In this context, the adjoint problem was also solved using the STMG methods. The STMG methods were sufficiently robust for this application, since they converged during every optimisation cycle. It was found that the STMG methods also work for the adjoint problem when the prolongation operator only sends information forwards in time, even although the direction of time for the adjoint problem is backwards.
Authors:Alessandro Arduino, Oriano Bottauscio, Denise Grappein, Stefano Scialó, Fabio Vicini, Umberto Zanovello, Luca Zilberti
Title: 3D-1D modelling of cranial mesh heating induced by low or medium frequency magnetic fields
Abstract:
Safety assessment of patients with one-dimensionally structured passive implants, like cranial meshes or stents, exposed to low or medium frequency magnetic fields, like those generated in magnetic resonance imaging or magnetic hyperthermia, can be challenging, because of the different length scales of the implant and the human body. Most of the methods used to estimate the heating induced near such implants neglect the presence of the metallic materials within the body, modeling the metal as thermal seeds. To overcome this limitation, a novel numerical approach that solves three-dimensional and one-dimensional coupled problems is proposed. The proposed method is compared with measurements performed on a cranial mesh exposed to the magnetic field generated by a gradient coil system for magnetic resonance imaging. Then, it is applied to a magnetic hyperthermia case study in which a patient with a cranial mesh is exposed to the magnetic field generated by a collar-type magnetic hyperthermia applicator for neck tumour treatment. The experimental comparison of the proposed method predictions and the measurement data shows an improved accuracy near the maximum temperature increase up to 25% with respect to the method based on thermal seeds. The application of the proposed method applied to the magnetic hyperthermia case study leads to a prediction of the maximum temperature increase that is 10% lower than the one overestimated by relying on thermal seeds. At the same time, the proposed method corrects the underestimation of the thermal seeds in the regions where the electromagnetic power is not directly deposited and the temperature increase is only due to heat transfer. The proposed method leads to improved results with respect to previous approximations by modelling the thermal diffusion through the highly conductive metallic implants.
Authors:Jeesuk Shin, Cheolwoong Kim, Sunwoong Yang, Minseo Lee, Sung Joong Kim, Joongoo Jeon
Title: Node Assigned physics-informed neural networks for thermal-hydraulic system simulation: CVH/FL module
Abstract:
Severe accidents (SAs) in nuclear power plants have been analyzed using thermal-hydraulic (TH) system codes such as MELCOR and MAAP. These codes efficiently simulate the progression of SAs, while they still have inherent limitations due to their inconsistent finite difference schemes. The use of empirical schemes incorporating both implicit and explicit formulations inherently induces unidirectional coupling in multi-physics analyses. The objective of this study is to develop a novel numerical method for TH system codes using physics-informed neural network (PINN). They have shown strength in solving multi-physics due to the innate feature of neural networks-automatic differentiation. We propose a node-assigned PINN (NA-PINN) that is suitable for the control volume approach-based system codes. NA-PINN addresses the issue of spatial governing equation variation by assigning an individual network to each nodalization of the system code, such that spatial information is excluded from both the input and output domains, and each subnetwork learns to approximate a purely temporal solution. In this phase, we evaluated the accuracy of the PINN methods for the hydrodynamic module. In the 6 water tank simulation, PINN and NA-PINN showed maximum absolute errors of 1.678 and 0.007, respectively. It should be noted that only NA-PINN demonstrated acceptable accuracy. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to successfully implement a system code using PINN. Our future work involves extending NA-PINN to a multi-physics solver and developing it in a surrogate manner.
Authors:Martin Cooney, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez
Title: Blimp-based Crime Scene Analysis
Abstract:
Crime is a critical problem -- which often takes place behind closed doors, posing additional difficulties for investigators. To bring hidden truths to light, evidence at indoor crime scenes must be documented before any contamination or degradation occurs. Here, we address this challenge from the perspective of artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and robotics: Specifically, we explore the use of a blimp as a "floating camera" to drift over and record evidence with minimal disturbance. Adopting a rapid prototyping approach, we develop a proof-of-concept to investigate capabilities required for manual or semi-autonomous operation. Consequently, our results demonstrate the feasibility of equipping indoor blimps with various components (such as RGB and thermal cameras, LiDARs, and WiFi, with 20 minutes of battery life). Moreover, we confirm the core premise: that such blimps can be used to observe crime scene evidence while generating little airflow. We conclude by proposing some ideas related to detection (e.g., of bloodstains), mapping, and path planning, with the aim of stimulating further discussion and exploration.
Authors:Daiyaan Arfeen, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Ankit More, Bhargava Gopireddy, Ahmet Inci, Gregory R. Ganger
Title: Nonuniform-Tensor-Parallelism: Mitigating GPU failure impact for Scaled-up LLM Training
Abstract:
LLM training is scaled up to 10Ks of GPUs by a mix of data-(DP) and model-parallel (MP) execution. Critical to achieving efficiency is tensor-parallel (TP; a form of MP) execution within tightly-coupled subsets of GPUs, referred to as a scale-up domain, and the larger the scale-up domain the better the performance. New datacenter architectures are emerging with more GPUs able to be tightly-coupled in a scale-up domain, such as moving from 8 GPUs to 72 GPUs connected via NVLink. Unfortunately, larger scale-up domains increase the blast-radius of failures, with a failure of single GPU potentially impacting TP execution on the full scale-up domain, which can degrade overall LLM training throughput dramatically. With as few as 0.1% of GPUs being in a failed state, a high TP-degree job can experience nearly 10% reduction in LLM training throughput. We propose nonuniform-tensor-parallelism (NTP) to mitigate this amplified impact of GPU failures. In NTP, a DP replica that experiences GPU failures operates at a reduced TP degree, contributing throughput equal to the percentage of still-functional GPUs. We also propose a rack-design with improved electrical and thermal capabilities in order to sustain power-boosting of scale-up domains that have experienced failures; combined with NTP, this can allow the DP replica with the reduced TP degree (i.e., with failed GPUs) to keep up with the others, thereby achieving near-zero throughput loss for large-scale LLM training.
Authors:Edoardo Del Bianco, Davide Torielli, Federico Rollo, Damiano Gasperini, Arturo Laurenzi, Lorenzo Baccelliere, Luca Muratore, Marco Roveri, Nikos G. Tsagarakis
Title: A High-Force Gripper with Embedded Multimodal Sensing for Powerful and Perception Driven Grasping
Abstract:
Modern humanoid robots have shown their promising potential for executing various tasks involving the grasping and manipulation of objects using their end-effectors. Nevertheless, in the most of the cases, the grasping and manipulation actions involve low to moderate payload and interaction forces. This is due to limitations often presented by the end-effectors, which can not match their arm-reachable payload, and hence limit the payload that can be grasped and manipulated. In addition, grippers usually do not embed adequate perception in their hardware, and grasping actions are mainly driven by perception sensors installed in the rest of the robot body, frequently affected by occlusions due to the arm motions during the execution of the grasping and manipulation tasks. To address the above, we developed a modular high grasping force gripper equipped with embedded multi-modal perception functionalities. The proposed gripper can generate a grasping force of 110 N in a compact implementation. The high grasping force capability is combined with embedded multi-modal sensing, which includes an eye-in-hand camera, a Time-of-Flight (ToF) distance sensor, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and an omnidirectional microphone, permitting the implementation of perception-driven grasping functionalities. We extensively evaluated the grasping force capacity of the gripper by introducing novel payload evaluation metrics that are a function of the robot arm's dynamic motion and gripper thermal states. We also evaluated the embedded multi-modal sensing by performing perception-guided enhanced grasping operations.
Authors:Shijun Liao, Shijie Qin
Title: Physical significance of artificial numerical noise in direct numerical simulation of turbulence
Abstract:
Using clean numerical simulation (CNS) in which artificial numerical noise is negligible over a finite, sufficiently long interval of time, we provide evidence, for the first time, that artificial numerical noise in direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulence is approximately equivalent to thermal fluctuation and/or stochastic environmental noise. This confers physical significance on the artificial numerical noise of DNS of the Navier-Stokes equations. As a result, DNS on a fine mesh should correspond to turbulence under small internal/external physical disturbance, whereas DNS on a sparse mesh corresponds to turbulent flow under large physical disturbance, respectively. The key point is that: all of them have physical meanings and so are correct in terms of their deterministic physics, even if their statistics are quite different. This is illustrated herein. Our paper provides a positive viewpoint regarding the presence of artificial numerical noise in DNS.
Authors:Abigail R. Hering, Mansha Dubey, Elahe Hosseini, Meghna Srivastava, Yu An, Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, Houman Homayoun, Marina S. Leite
Title: Machine Learning Reveals Composition Dependent Thermal Stability in Halide Perovskites
Abstract:
Halide perovskites exhibit unpredictable properties in response to environmental stressors, due to several composition-dependent degradation mechanisms. In this work, we apply data visualization and machine learning (ML) techniques to reveal unexpected correlations between composition, temperature, and material properties while using high throughput, in situ environmental photoluminescence (PL) experiments. Correlation heatmaps show the strong influence of Cs content on film degradation, and dimensionality reduction visualization methods uncover clear composition-based data clusters. An extreme gradient boosting algorithm (XGBoost) effectively forecasts PL features for ten perovskite films with both composition-agnostic (>85% accuracy) and composition-dependent (>75% accuracy) model approaches, while elucidating the relative feature importance of composition (up to 99%). This model validates a previously unseen anti-correlation between Cs content and material thermal stability. Our ML-based framework can be expanded to any perovskite family, significantly reducing the analysis time currently employed to identify stable options for photovoltaics.
Authors:Simone Fasolato, Anirudh Allam, Simona Onori, Davide M. Raimondo
Title: Analyzing cell-to-cell heterogeneities and cell configurations in parallel-connected battery modules using physics-based modeling
Abstract:
In parallel-connected cells, cell-to-cell (CtC) heterogeneities can lead to current and thermal gradients that may adversely impact the battery performance and aging. Sources of CtC heterogeneity include manufacturing process tolerances, poor module configurations, and inadequate thermal management. Understanding which CtC heterogeneity sources most significantly impact battery performance is crucial, as it can provide valuable insights. In this study, we use an experimentally validated electrochemical battery model to simulate hundreds of battery configurations, each consisting of four cells in parallel. We conduct a statistical analysis to evaluate the relative importance of key cell-level parameters, interconnection resistance, cell spacing, and location on performance and aging. The analysis reveals that heterogeneities in electrode active material volume fractions primarily impact module capacity, energy, and cell current, leading to substantial thermal gradients. However, to fully capture the output behavior, interconnection resistance, state of charge gradients and the effect of the temperature on parameter values must also be considered. Additionally, module design configurations, particularly cell location, exacerbate thermal gradients, accelerating long-term module degradation. This study also offers insights into optimizing cell arrangement during module design to reduce thermal gradients and enhance overall battery performance and longevity. Simulation results with four cells indicate a reduction of 51.8% in thermal gradients, leading to a 5.2% decrease in long-term energy loss.
Authors:Alexandra Watkins, Ritam Ghosh, Evan Chow, Nilanjan Sarkar
Title: Immersive and Wearable Thermal Rendering for Augmented Reality
Abstract:
In augmented reality (AR), where digital content is overlaid onto the real world, realistic thermal feedback has been shown to enhance immersion. Yet current thermal feedback devices, heavily influenced by the needs of virtual reality, often hinder physical interactions and are ineffective for immersion in AR. To bridge this gap, we have identified three design considerations relevant for AR thermal feedback: indirect feedback to maintain dexterity, thermal passthrough to preserve real-world temperature perception, and spatiotemporal rendering for dynamic sensations. We then created a unique and innovative thermal feedback device that satisfies these criteria. Human subject experiments assessing perceptual sensitivity, object temperature matching, spatial pattern recognition, and moving thermal stimuli demonstrated the impact of our design, enabling realistic temperature discrimination, virtual object perception, and enhanced immersion. These findings demonstrate that carefully designed thermal feedback systems can bridge the sensory gap between physical and virtual interactions, enhancing AR realism and usability.
Authors:Ruiyang Ha, Songyi Jiang, Bin Li, Bikang Pan, Yihang Zhu, Junjie Zhang, Xiatian Zhu, Shaogang Gong, Jingya Wang
Title: Multi-modal Multi-platform Person Re-Identification: Benchmark and Method
Abstract:
Conventional person re-identification (ReID) research is often limited to single-modality sensor data from static cameras, which fails to address the complexities of real-world scenarios where multi-modal signals are increasingly prevalent. For instance, consider an urban ReID system integrating stationary RGB cameras, nighttime infrared sensors, and UAVs equipped with dynamic tracking capabilities. Such systems face significant challenges due to variations in camera perspectives, lighting conditions, and sensor modalities, hindering effective person ReID. To address these challenges, we introduce the MP-ReID benchmark, a novel dataset designed specifically for multi-modality and multi-platform ReID. This benchmark uniquely compiles data from 1,930 identities across diverse modalities, including RGB, infrared, and thermal imaging, captured by both UAVs and ground-based cameras in indoor and outdoor environments. Building on this benchmark, we introduce Uni-Prompt ReID, a framework with specific-designed prompts, tailored for cross-modality and cross-platform scenarios. Our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, establishing a robust foundation for future research in complex and dynamic ReID environments. Our dataset are available at:https://mp-reid.github.io/.
Authors:Roozbeh Siyadatzadeh, Mohsen Ansari, Muhammad Shafique, Alireza Ejlali
Title: RL-TIME: Reinforcement Learning-based Task Replication in Multicore Embedded Systems
Abstract:
Embedded systems power many modern applications and must often meet strict reliability, real-time, thermal, and power requirements. Task replication can improve reliability by duplicating a task's execution to handle transient and permanent faults, but blindly applying replication often leads to excessive overhead and higher temperatures. Existing design-time methods typically choose the number of replicas based on worst-case conditions, which can waste resources under normal operation. In this paper, we present RL-TIME, a reinforcement learning-based approach that dynamically decides the number of replicas according to actual system conditions. By considering both the reliability target and a core-level Thermal Safe Power (TSP) constraint at run-time, RL-TIME adapts the replication strategy to avoid unnecessary overhead and overheating. Experimental results show that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, RL-TIME reduces power consumption by 63%, increases schedulability by 53%, and respects TSP 72% more often.
Authors:Myisha A. Chowdhury, Qiugang Lu
Title: Equivalent-Circuit Thermal Model for Batteries with One-Shot Parameter Identification
Abstract:
Accurate state of temperature (SOT) estimation for batteries is crucial for regulating their temperature within a desired range to ensure safe operation and optimal performance. The existing measurement-based methods often generate noisy signals and cannot scale up for large-scale battery packs. The electrochemical model-based methods, on the contrary, offer high accuracy but are computationally expensive. To tackle these issues, inspired by the equivalentcircuit voltage model for batteries, this paper presents a novel equivalent-circuit electro-thermal model (ECTM) for modeling battery surface temperature. By approximating the complex heat generation inside batteries with data-driven nonlinear (polynomial) functions of key measurable parameters such as state-of-charge (SOC), current, and terminal voltage, our ECTM is simplified into a linear form that admits rapid solutions. Such simplified ECTM can be readily identified with one single (one-shot) cycle data. The proposed model is extensively validated with benchmark NASA, MIT, and Oxford battery datasets. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the model, despite being identified with one-shot cycle data, in predicting battery temperatures robustly under different battery degradation status and ambient conditions.
Authors:Runxi Wang, Ziheng Wang, Ting Lin, Jacob M. Raby, Mircea R. Stan, Xinfei Guo
Title: Cool-3D: An End-to-End Thermal-Aware Framework for Early-Phase Design Space Exploration of Microfluidic-Cooled 3DICs
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of three-dimensional integrated circuits (3DICs) has heightened the need for early-phase design space exploration (DSE) to minimize design iterations and unexpected challenges. Emphasizing the pre-register-transfer level (Pre-RTL) design phase is crucial for reducing trial-and-error costs. However, 3DIC design introduces additional complexities due to thermal constraints and an expanded design space resulting from vertical stacking and various cooling strategies. Despite this need, existing Pre-RTL DSE tools for 3DICs remain scarce, with available solutions often lacking comprehensive design options and full customization support. To bridge this gap, we present Cool-3D, an end-to-end, thermal-aware framework for 3DIC design that integrates mainstream architectural-level simulators, including gem5, McPAT, and HotSpot 7.0, with advanced cooling models. Cool-3D enables broad and fine-grained design space exploration, built-in microfluidic cooling support for thermal analysis, and an extension interface for non-parameterizable customization, allowing designers to model and optimize 3DIC architectures with greater flexibility and accuracy. To validate the Cool-3D framework, we conduct three case studies demonstrating its ability to model various hardware design options and accurately capture thermal behaviors. Cool-3D serves as a foundational framework that not only facilitates comprehensive 3DIC design space exploration but also enables future innovations in 3DIC architecture, cooling strategies, and optimization techniques. The entire framework, along with the experimental data, is in the process of being released on GitHub.
Authors:Chinmay Patwardhan, Jonas Kusch
Title: A Parallel, Energy-Stable Low-Rank Integrator for Nonlinear Multi-Scale Thermal Radiative Transfer
Abstract:
Thermal radiative transfer models physical phenomena ranging from supernovas in astrophysics to radiation from a hohlraum striking a fusion target in plasma physics. Transport and absorption of particles in radiative transfer at different rates lead to a complex interaction between the material and particles that involves highly varying time scales. Resolving these effects can require prohibitively small step sizes, which, combined with nonlinear effects and the particle density's high-dimensional phase space, render conventional numerical methods computationally expensive. This work presents an asymptotic--preserving, mass conservative, rank-adaptive, and parallel integrator for a macro--micro decomposition-based dynamical low-rank approximation of the thermal radiative transfer equations. The proposed integrator efficiently incorporates reflection-transmission type boundary conditions in the low-rank factors. It captures the nonlinear effects of thermal radiation and is energy stable with the step size restriction capturing both hyperbolic and parabolic CFL conditions. The efficacy of the proposed integrator is demonstrated with numerical experiments.
Authors:David Elkouss, Ananda G. Maity, Aditya Nema, Sergii Strelchuk
Title: A finite sufficient set of conditions for catalytic majorization
Abstract:
The majorization relation has found numerous applications in mathematics, quantum information and resource theory, and quantum thermodynamics, where it describes the allowable transitions between two physical states. In many cases, when state vector $x$ does not majorize state vector $y$, it is nevertheless possible to find a catalyst - another vector $z$ such that $x \otimes z$ majorizes $y \otimes z$. Determining the feasibility of such catalytic transformation typically involves checking an infinite set of inequalities. Here, we derive a finite sufficient set of inequalities that imply catalysis. Extending this framework to thermodynamics, we also establish a finite set of sufficient conditions for catalytic state transformations under thermal operations. For novel examples, we provide a software toolbox implementing these conditions.
Authors:Lei, Chen, Juheon Lee, Juan Carlos Catana, Tsegai Yhdego, Nathan Moroney, Mohammad Amin Nabian, Hui Wang, Jun Zeng
Title: GraphCompNet: A Position-Aware Model for Predicting and Compensating Shape Deviations in 3D Printing
Abstract:
This paper introduces a data-driven algorithm for modeling and compensating shape deviations in additive manufacturing (AM), addressing challenges in geometric accuracy and batch production. While traditional methods, such as analytical models and metrology, laid the groundwork for geometric precision, they are often impractical for large-scale production. Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) have improved compensation precision, but issues remain in generalizing across complex geometries and adapting to position-dependent variations. We present a novel approach for powder bed fusion (PBF) processes, using GraphCompNet, which is a computational framework combining graph-based neural networks with a generative adversarial network (GAN)-inspired training process. By leveraging point cloud data and dynamic graph convolutional neural networks (DGCNNs), GraphCompNet models complex shapes and incorporates position-specific thermal and mechanical factors. A two-stage adversarial training procedure iteratively refines compensated designs via a compensator-predictor architecture, offering real-time feedback and optimization. Experimental validation across diverse shapes and positions shows the framework significantly improves compensation accuracy (35 to 65 percent) across the entire print space, adapting to position-dependent variations. This work advances the development of Digital Twin technology for AM, enabling scalable, real-time monitoring and compensation, and addressing critical gaps in AM process control. The proposed method supports high-precision, automated industrial-scale design and manufacturing systems.
Authors:Ruizhe Yang, Zhongkai Yi, Ying Xu, Guiyu Chen, Haojie Yang, Rong Yi, Tongqing Li, Miaozhe ShenJin Li, Haoxiang Gao, Hongyu Duan
Title: Adaptive Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization for Capacity Planning of Hybrid Heat Sources in Electric-Heat Coupling Systems of Cold Regions
Abstract:
The traditional heat-load generation pattern of combined heat and power generators has become a problem leading to renewable energy source (RES) power curtailment in cold regions, motivating the proposal of a planning model for alternative heat sources. The model aims to identify non-dominant capacity allocation schemes for heat pumps, thermal energy storage, electric boilers, and combined storage heaters to construct a Pareto front, considering both economic and sustainable objectives. The integration of various heat sources from both generation and consumption sides enhances flexibility in utilization. The study introduces a novel optimization algorithm, the adaptive multi-objective Bayesian optimization (AMBO). Compared to other widely used multi-objective optimization algorithms, AMBO eliminates predefined parameters that may introduce subjectivity from planners. Beyond the algorithm, the proposed model incorporates a noise term to account for inevitable simulation deviations, enabling the identification of better-performing planning results that meet the unique requirements of cold regions. What's more, the characteristics of electric-thermal coupling scenarios are captured and reflected in the operation simulation model to make sure the simulation is close to reality. Numerical simulation verifies the superiority of the proposed approach in generating a more diverse and evenly distributed Pareto front in a sample-efficient manner, providing comprehensive and objective planning choices.
Authors:Hamid Toshani, Janith Petangoda, Chatura Samarakoon, Phillip Stanley-Marbell
Title: Sensitivity Analysis of the Laser Power Control System to Measurement Noise in SLS 3D Printers
Abstract:
Uniform temperature distribution in Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) is essential for producing durable 3D prints. Achieving uniformity requires a laser power control system that minimises deviation of the printing temperatures from the target temperature. Because the estimate of the actual process temperature is an input to the laser power control, uncertainty in the estimate of the actual temperature can lead to fluctuations in laser power that affect the thermal performance of the SLS. This article investigates the sensitivity of a laser power control system to temperature measurement uncertainty. This article evaluates the effectiveness of two methods for quantifying the effect of input uncertainty on a SLS laser power control system: a recent innovation in uncertainty-tracked architecture and traditional Monte Carlo simulation. We show that recent advances in computer architecture for arithmatic on probability distributions make it possible for the first time, to perform control system uncertainty analysis with latencies under 30 ms, while achieving the same level of uncertainty analysis as Monte Carlo methods with latencies that are two orders of magnitude slower.
Authors:Zhengwen Shen, Yulian Li, Han Zhang, Yuchen Weng, Jun Wang
Title: Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multimodal Image Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB and thermal image fusion have great potential to exhibit improved semantic segmentation in low-illumination conditions. Existing methods typically employ a two-branch encoder framework for multimodal feature extraction and design complicated feature fusion strategies to achieve feature extraction and fusion for multimodal semantic segmentation. However, these methods require massive parameter updates and computational effort during the feature extraction and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel multimodal fusion network (EFNet) based on an early fusion strategy and a simple but effective feature clustering for training efficient RGB-T semantic segmentation. In addition, we also propose a lightweight and efficient multi-scale feature aggregation decoder based on Euclidean distance. We validate the effectiveness of our method on different datasets and outperform previous state-of-the-art methods with lower parameters and computation.
Authors:Navneet Singh, Shiva Raj Pokhrel
Title: Modeling Feature Maps for Quantum Machine Learning
Abstract:
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers significant potential for complex tasks like genome sequence classification, but quantum noise on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices poses practical challenges. This study systematically evaluates how various quantum noise models including dephasing, amplitude damping, depolarizing, thermal noise, bit-flip, and phase-flip affect key QML algorithms (QSVC, Peg-QSVC, QNN, VQC) and feature mapping techniques (ZFeatureMap, ZZFeatureMap, and PauliFeatureMap). Results indicate that QSVC is notably robust under noise, whereas Peg-QSVC and QNN are more sensitive, particularly to depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise. The PauliFeatureMap is especially vulnerable, highlighting difficulties in maintaining accurate classification under noisy conditions. These findings underscore the critical importance of feature map selection and noise mitigation strategies in optimizing QML for genomic classification, with promising implications for personalized medicine.
Authors:Qinghao Zhang, Wenrui Li, Pinjia Zhang
Title: A High-accuracy Calibration Method of Transient TSEPs for Power Semiconductor Devices
Abstract:
The thermal sensitive electrical parameter (TSEP) method is crucial for enhancing the reliability of power devices through junction temperature monitoring. The TSEP method comprises three key processes: calibration, regression, and application. While significant efforts have been devoted to improving regression algorithms and increasing TSEP sensitivity to enhance junction temperature monitoring accuracy, these approaches have reached a bottleneck. In reality, the calibration method significantly influences monitoring accuracy, an aspect often overlooked in conventional TSEP methods. To address this issue, we propose a high-accuracy calibration method for transient TSEPs. First, a temperature compensation strategy based on thermal analysis is introduced to mitigate the temperature difference caused by load current during dual pulse tests. Second, the impact of stray parameters is analyzed to identify coupled parameters, which are typically neglected in existing methods. Third, it is observed that random errors follow a logarithm Gaussian distribution, covering a hidden variable. A neural network is used to obtain the junction temperature predictive model. The proposed calibration method is experimental validated in threshold voltage as an example. Compared with conventional calibration methods, the mean absolute error is reduced by over 30%. Moreover, this method does not require additional hardware cost and has good generalization.
Authors:Michael Bezick, Blake A. Wilson, Vaishnavi Iyer, Yuheng Chen, Vladimir M. Shalaev, Sabre Kais, Alexander V. Kildishev, Alexandra Boltasseva, Brad Lackey
Title: PearSAN: A Machine Learning Method for Inverse Design using Pearson Correlated Surrogate Annealing
Abstract:
PearSAN is a machine learning-assisted optimization algorithm applicable to inverse design problems with large design spaces, where traditional optimizers struggle. The algorithm leverages the latent space of a generative model for rapid sampling and employs a Pearson correlated surrogate model to predict the figure of merit of the true design metric. As a showcase example, PearSAN is applied to thermophotovoltaic (TPV) metasurface design by matching the working bands between a thermal radiator and a photovoltaic cell. PearSAN can work with any pretrained generative model with a discretized latent space, making it easy to integrate with VQ-VAEs and binary autoencoders. Its novel Pearson correlational loss can be used as both a latent regularization method, similar to batch and layer normalization, and as a surrogate training loss. We compare both to previous energy matching losses, which are shown to enforce poor regularization and performance, even with upgraded affine parameters. PearSAN achieves a state-of-the-art maximum design efficiency of 97%, and is at least an order of magnitude faster than previous methods, with an improved maximum figure-of-merit gain.
Authors:Saakaar Bhatnagar, Andrew Comerford, Zelu Xu, Simone Reitano, Luigi Scrimieri, Luca Giuliano, Araz Banaeizadeh
Title: A Layered Swarm Optimization Method for Fitting Battery Thermal Runaway Models to Accelerating Rate Calorimetry Data
Abstract:
Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is a critical safety concern for the battery industry due to its potential to cause uncontrolled temperature rises and subsequent fires that can engulf the battery pack and its surroundings. Modeling and simulation offer cost-effective tools for designing strategies to mitigate thermal runaway. Accurately simulating the chemical kinetics of thermal runaway, commonly represented by systems of Arrhenius-based Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), requires fitting kinetic parameters to experimental calorimetry data, such as Accelerating Rate Calorimetry (ARC) measurements. However, existing fitting methods often rely on empirical assumptions and simplifications that compromise generality or require manual tuning during the fitting process. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) offers a promising approach for directly fitting kinetic parameters to experimental data. Yet, for systems created by multiple Arrhenius ODEs, the computational cost of fitting using a brute-force approach that searches the entire parameter space simultaneously can become prohibitive. This work introduces a divide-and-conquer approach based on PSO to fit N-equation Arrhenius ODE models to ARC data. The proposed method achieves more accurate parameter fitting compared to the brute-force method while maintaining low computational costs. The method is analyzed using two distinct ARC datasets, and the resulting models are further validated through simulations of 3D ARC and oven tests, showing excellent agreement with experimental data and alignment with expected trends.
Authors:Zaid Abulawi, Rui Hu, Prasanna Balaprakash, Yang Liu
Title: Bayesian optimized deep ensemble for uncertainty quantification of deep neural networks: a system safety case study on sodium fast reactor thermal stratification modeling
Abstract:
Accurate predictions and uncertainty quantification (UQ) are essential for decision-making in risk-sensitive fields such as system safety modeling. Deep ensembles (DEs) are efficient and scalable methods for UQ in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs); however, their performance is limited when constructed by simply retraining the same DNN multiple times with randomly sampled initializations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method that combines Bayesian optimization (BO) with DE, referred to as BODE, to enhance both predictive accuracy and UQ. We apply BODE to a case study involving a Densely connected Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) trained on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data to predict eddy viscosity in sodium fast reactor thermal stratification modeling. Compared to a manually tuned baseline ensemble, BODE estimates total uncertainty approximately four times lower in a noise-free environment, primarily due to the baseline's overestimation of aleatoric uncertainty. Specifically, BODE estimates aleatoric uncertainty close to zero, while aleatoric uncertainty dominates the total uncertainty in the baseline ensemble. We also observe a reduction of more than 30% in epistemic uncertainty. When Gaussian noise with standard deviations of 5% and 10% is introduced into the data, BODE accurately fits the data and estimates uncertainty that aligns with the data noise. These results demonstrate that BODE effectively reduces uncertainty and enhances predictions in data-driven models, making it a flexible approach for various applications requiring accurate predictions and robust UQ.
Authors:Sertac Kilickaya, Cansu Celebioglu, Levent Eren, Murat Askar
Title: Thermal Image-based Fault Diagnosis in Induction Machines via Self-Organized Operational Neural Networks
Abstract:
Condition monitoring of induction machines is crucial to prevent costly interruptions and equipment failure. Mechanical faults such as misalignment and rotor issues are among the most common problems encountered in industrial environments. To effectively monitor and detect these faults, a variety of sensors, including accelerometers, current sensors, temperature sensors, and microphones, are employed in the field. As a non-contact alternative, thermal imaging offers a powerful monitoring solution by capturing temperature variations in machines with thermal cameras. In this study, we propose using 2-dimensional Self-Organized Operational Neural Networks (Self-ONNs) to diagnose misalignment and broken rotor faults from thermal images of squirrel-cage induction motors. We evaluate our approach by benchmarking its performance against widely used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), including ResNet, EfficientNet, PP-LCNet, SEMNASNet, and MixNet, using a Workswell InfraRed Camera (WIC). Our results demonstrate that Self-ONNs, with their non-linear neurons and self-organizing capability, achieve diagnostic performance comparable to more complex CNN models while utilizing a shallower architecture with just three operational layers. Its streamlined architecture ensures high performance and is well-suited for deployment on edge devices, enabling its use also in more complex multi-function and/or multi-device monitoring systems.
Authors:Zhipeng Lyu, Jinrong Su, Zhe Li, Xiang Li, Hanghang Yan, Lei Chen
Title: A Compact Hybrid Battery Thermal Management System for Enhanced Cooling
Abstract:
Hybrid battery thermal management systems (HBTMS) combining active liquid cooling and passive phase change materials (PCM) cooling have shown a potential for the thermal management of lithium-ion batteries. However, the fill volume of coolant and PCM in hybrid cooling systems is limited by the size and weight of the HBTMS at high charge/discharge rates. These limitations result in reduced convective heat transfer from the coolant during discharge. The liquefaction rate of PCM is accelerated and the passive cooling effect is reduced. In this paper, we propose a compact hybrid cooling system with multi-inlet U-shaped microchannels for which the gap between channels is embedded by PCM/aluminum foam for compactness. Nanofluid cooling (NC) technology with better thermal conductivity is used. A pulsed flow function is further developed for enhanced cooling (EC) with reduced power consumption. An experimentally validated thermal-fluid dynamics model is developed to optimize operating conditions including coolant type, cooling direction, channel height, inlet flow rate, and cooling scheme. The results show that the hybrid cooling solution of NC+PCM+EC adopted by HBTMS further reduces the maximum temperature of the Li-ion battery by 3.44°C under a discharge rate of 1C at room temperature of 25°C with only a 5% increase in power consumption, compared to the conventional liquid cooling method for electric vehicles (EV). The average number of battery charges has increased by about 6 to 15 percent. The results of this study can help improve the range as well as driving safety of new energy EV.
Authors:Kshitij Nikhal, Cedric Nimpa Fondje, Benjamin S. Riggan
Title: Cross-Spectral Attention for Unsupervised RGB-IR Face Verification and Person Re-identification
Abstract:
Cross-spectral biometrics, such as matching imagery of faces or persons from visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) bands, have rapidly advanced over the last decade due to increasing sensitivity, size, quality, and ubiquity of IR focal plane arrays and enhanced analytics beyond the visible spectrum. Current techniques for mitigating large spectral disparities between RGB and IR imagery often include learning a discriminative common subspace by exploiting precisely curated data acquired from multiple spectra. Although there are challenges with determining robust architectures for extracting common information, a critical limitation for supervised methods is poor scalability in terms of acquiring labeled data. Therefore, we propose a novel unsupervised cross-spectral framework that combines (1) a new pseudo triplet loss with cross-spectral voting, (2) a new cross-spectral attention network leveraging multiple subspaces, and (3) structured sparsity to perform more discriminative cross-spectral clustering. We extensively compare our proposed RGB-IR biometric learning framework (and its individual components) with recent and previous state-of-the-art models on two challenging benchmark datasets: DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory Visible-Thermal Face Dataset (ARL-VTF) and RegDB person re-identification dataset, and, in some cases, achieve performance superior to completely supervised methods.
Authors:Zixin Huang, Mark M. Wilde
Title: Information geometry of bosonic Gaussian thermal states
Abstract:
Bosonic Gaussian thermal states form a fundamental class of states in quantum information science. This paper explores the information geometry of these states, focusing on characterizing the distance between two nearby states and the geometry induced by a parameterization in terms of their mean vectors and Hamiltonian matrices. In particular, for the family of bosonic Gaussian thermal states, we derive expressions for their Fisher-Bures and Kubo-Mori information matrices with respect to their mean vectors and Hamiltonian matrices. An important application of our formulas consists of fundamental limits on how well one can estimate these parameters. We additionally establish formulas for the derivatives and the symmetric logarithmic derivatives of bosonic Gaussian thermal states. The former could have applications in gradient descent algorithms for quantum machine learning when using bosonic Gaussian thermal states as an ansatz, and the latter in formulating optimal strategies for single parameter estimation of bosonic Gaussian thermal states. Finally, the expressions for the aforementioned information matrices could have additional applications in natural gradient descent algorithms when using bosonic Gaussian thermal states as an ansatz.
Authors:Smruti Suresh, Michael Angelo Carvajal, Nathaniel Hanson, Ethan Holand, Samuel Hibbard, Taskin Padir
Title: Use-Inspired Mobile Robot to Improve Safety of Building Retrofit Workforce in Constrained Spaces
Abstract:
The inspection of confined critical infrastructure such as attics or crawlspaces is challenging for human operators due to insufficient task space, limited visibility, and the presence of hazardous materials. This paper introduces a prototype of PARIS (Precision Application Robot for Inaccessible Spaces): a use-inspired teleoperated mobile robot manipulator system that was conceived, developed, and tested for and selected as a Phase I winner of the U.S. Department of Energy's E-ROBOT Prize. To improve the thermal efficiency of buildings, the PARIS platform supports: 1) teleoperated mapping and navigation, enabling the human operator to explore compact spaces; 2) inspection and sensing, facilitating the identification and localization of under-insulated areas; and 3) air-sealing targeted gaps and cracks through which thermal energy is lost. The resulting versatile platform can also be tailored for targeted application of treatments and remediation in constrained spaces.
Authors:Tengji Xu, Zeyu Luo, Shaojie Liu, Li Fan, Qiarong Xiao, Benshan Wang, Dongliang Wang, Chaoran Huang
Title: Perfecting Imperfect Physical Neural Networks with Transferable Robustness using Sharpness-Aware Training
Abstract:
AI models are essential in science and engineering, but recent advances are pushing the limits of traditional digital hardware. To address these limitations, physical neural networks (PNNs), which use physical substrates for computation, have gained increasing attention. However, developing effective training methods for PNNs remains a significant challenge. Current approaches, regardless of offline and online training, suffer from significant accuracy loss. Offline training is hindered by imprecise modeling, while online training yields device-specific models that can't be transferred to other devices due to manufacturing variances. Both methods face challenges from perturbations after deployment, such as thermal drift or alignment errors, which make trained models invalid and require retraining. Here, we address the challenges with both offline and online training through a novel technique called Sharpness-Aware Training (SAT), where we innovatively leverage the geometry of the loss landscape to tackle the problems in training physical systems. SAT enables accurate training using efficient backpropagation algorithms, even with imprecise models. PNNs trained by SAT offline even outperform those trained online, despite modeling and fabrication errors. SAT also overcomes online training limitations by enabling reliable transfer of models between devices. Finally, SAT is highly resilient to perturbations after deployment, allowing PNNs to continuously operate accurately under perturbations without retraining. We demonstrate SAT across three types of PNNs, showing it is universally applicable, regardless of whether the models are explicitly known. This work offers a transformative, efficient approach to training PNNs, addressing critical challenges in analog computing and enabling real-world deployment.
Authors:Jerome Gilles, Stephane Landeau, Tristan Dagobert, Philippe Chevalier, Christian Bolut
Title: IR image databases generation under target intrinsic thermal variability constraints
Abstract:
This paper deals with the problem of infrared image database generation for ATR assessment purposes. Huge databases are required to have quantitative and objective performance evaluations. We propose a method which superimpose targets and occultants on background under image quality metrics constraints to generate realistic images. We also propose a method to generate target signatures with intrinsic thermal variability based on 3D models plated with real infrared textures.
Authors:Jerome Gilles, Stephane Landeau, Tristan Dagobert, Philippe Chevalier, Christian Bolut
Title: Génération de bases de données images IR sous contraintes avec variabilité thermique intrinsèque des cibles
Abstract:
In this communication, we propose a method which permits to simulate images of targets in infrared imagery by superimposition of vehicle signatures in background, eventually with occultants. We develop a principle which authorizes us to generate different thermal configurations of target signatures. This method enables us to easily generate huge datasets for ATR algorithms performance evaluation.
Authors:Nikos Sakellariou, Antonios Lalas, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras
Title: Multi-Sensor Fusion for UAV Classification Based on Feature Maps of Image and Radar Data
Abstract:
The unique cost, flexibility, speed, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them an attractive choice in many applications in contemporary society. This, however, causes an ever-increasing number of reported malicious or accidental incidents, rendering the need for the development of UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. We propose a methodology for developing a system that fuses already processed multi-sensor data into a new Deep Neural Network to increase its classification accuracy towards UAV detection. The DNN model fuses high-level features extracted from individual object detection and classification models associated with thermal, optronic, and radar data. Additionally, emphasis is given to the model's Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture that combines the features of the three sensor modalities by stacking the extracted image features of the thermal and optronic sensor achieving higher classification accuracy than each sensor alone.
Authors:Shijun Liao, Shijie Qin
Title: Noise-expansion cascade: an origin of randomness of turbulence
Abstract:
Randomness is one of the most important characteristics of turbulence, but its origin remains an open question. By means of a ``thought experiment'' via several clean numerical experiments based on the Navier-Stokes equations for two-dimensional turbulent Kolmogorov flow, we reveal a new phenomenon, which we call the ``noise-expansion cascade'' whereby all micro-level noises/disturbances at different orders of magnitudes in the initial condition of Navier-Stokes equations enlarge consistently, say, one by one like an inverse cascade, to macro-level. More importantly, each noise/disturbance input may greatly change the macro-level characteristics and statistics of the resulting turbulence, clearly indicating that micro-level noise/disturbance might have great influence on macro-level characteristics and statistics of turbulence. Besides, the noise-expansion cascade closely connects randomness of micro-level noise/disturbance and macro-level disorder of turbulence, thus revealing an origin of randomness of turbulence. This also highly suggests that unavoidable thermal fluctuations must be considered when simulating turbulence, even if such fluctuations are several orders of magnitudes smaller than other external environmental disturbances. Hopefully, the ``noise-expansion cascade'' as a fundamental property of the NS equations could greatly deepen our understandings about turbulence, and besides is helpful for attacking the fourth millennium problem posed by Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000.
Authors:Daniel Andrés Arcones, Martin Weiser, Phaedon-Stelios Koutsourelakis, Jörg F. Unger
Title: Embedded Model Form Uncertainty Quantification with Measurement Noise for Bayesian Model Calibration
Abstract:
A key factor in ensuring the accuracy of computer simulations that model physical systems is the proper calibration of their parameters based on real-world observations or experimental data. Inevitably, uncertainties arise, and Bayesian methods provide a robust framework for quantifying and propagating these uncertainties to model predictions. Nevertheless, Bayesian methods paired with inexact models usually produce predictions unable to represent the observed datapoints. Additionally, the quantified uncertainties of these overconfident models cannot be propagated to other Quantities of Interest (QoIs) reliably. A promising solution involves embedding a model inadequacy term in the inference parameters, allowing the quantified model form uncertainty to influence non-observed QoIs. This paper introduces a more interpretable framework for embedding the model inadequacy compared to existing methods. To overcome the limitations of current approaches, we adapt the existing likelihood models to properly account for noise in the measurements and propose two new formulations designed to address their shortcomings. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of this inadequacy-embedding approach in the presence of discrepancies between measurements and model predictions, including noise and outliers. Particular attention is given to how the uncertainty associated with the model inadequacy term propagates to the QoIs, enabling a more comprehensive statistical analysis of prediction's reliability. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to estimate the uncertainty in the predicted heat flux from a transient thermal simulation using temperature observations.
Authors:Lucia Gordon, Nico Lang, Catherine Ressijac, Andrew Davies
Title: Multimodal Fusion Strategies for Mapping Biophysical Landscape Features
Abstract:
Multimodal aerial data are used to monitor natural systems, and machine learning can significantly accelerate the classification of landscape features within such imagery to benefit ecology and conservation. It remains under-explored, however, how these multiple modalities ought to be fused in a deep learning model. As a step towards filling this gap, we study three strategies (Early fusion, Late fusion, and Mixture of Experts) for fusing thermal, RGB, and LiDAR imagery using a dataset of spatially-aligned orthomosaics in these three modalities. In particular, we aim to map three ecologically-relevant biophysical landscape features in African savanna ecosystems: rhino middens, termite mounds, and water. The three fusion strategies differ in whether the modalities are fused early or late, and if late, whether the model learns fixed weights per modality for each class or generates weights for each class adaptively, based on the input. Overall, the three methods have similar macro-averaged performance with Late fusion achieving an AUC of 0.698, but their per-class performance varies strongly, with Early fusion achieving the best recall for middens and water and Mixture of Experts achieving the best recall for mounds.
Authors:Shuwei Xing, Derek W. Cool, David Tessier, Elvis C. S. Chen, Terry M. Peters, Aaron Fenster
Title: Deep Regression 2D-3D Ultrasound Registration for Liver Motion Correction in Focal Tumor Thermal Ablation
Abstract:
Liver tumor ablation procedures require accurate placement of the needle applicator at the tumor centroid. The lower-cost and real-time nature of ultrasound (US) has advantages over computed tomography (CT) for applicator guidance, however, in some patients, liver tumors may be occult on US and tumor mimics can make lesion identification challenging. Image registration techniques can aid in interpreting anatomical details and identifying tumors, but their clinical application has been hindered by the tradeoff between alignment accuracy and runtime performance, particularly when compensating for liver motion due to patient breathing or movement. Therefore, we propose a 2D-3D US registration approach to enable intra-procedural alignment that mitigates errors caused by liver motion. Specifically, our approach can correlate imbalanced 2D and 3D US image features and use continuous 6D rotation representations to enhance the model's training stability. The dataset was divided into 2388, 196 and 193 image pairs for training, validation and testing, respectively. Our approach achieved a mean Euclidean distance error of 2.28 mm $\pm$ 1.81 mm and a mean geodesic angular error of 2.99$^{\circ}$ $\pm$ 1.95$^{\circ}$, with a runtime of 0.22 seconds per 2D-3D US image pair. These results demonstrate that our approach can achieve accurate alignment and clinically acceptable runtime, indicating potential for clinical translation.
Authors:Baohe Zhang, Lilli Frison, Thomas Brox, Joschka Bödecker
Title: Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Safe Heat Pump Control
Abstract:
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a significant research area within RL, where integrating constraints with rewards is crucial for enhancing safety and performance across diverse control tasks. In the context of heating systems in the buildings, optimizing the energy efficiency while maintaining the residents' thermal comfort can be intuitively formulated as a constrained optimization problem. However, to solve it with RL may require large amount of data. Therefore, an accurate and versatile simulator is favored. In this paper, we propose a novel building simulator I4B which provides interfaces for different usages and apply a model-free constrained RL algorithm named constrained Soft Actor-Critic with Linear Smoothed Log Barrier function (CSAC-LB) to the heating optimization problem. Benchmarking against baseline algorithms demonstrates CSAC-LB's efficiency in data exploration, constraint satisfaction and performance.
Authors:Zhaojun Ruan, Libao Shi
Title: An Enhanced Semidefinite Relaxation Model Combined with Clique Graph Merging Strategy for Efficient AC Optimal Power Flow Solution
Abstract:
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective methods for deriving the tightest lower bounds of the optimal power flow (OPF) problems. In this paper, an enhanced semidefinite relaxation model that integrates tighter λ-based quadratic convex relaxation, valid inequalities, and optimality-based bound tightening algorithms derived in accordance with the branch thermal limit boundary surface into the SDP framework is presented to further tighten the lower bounds of the feasible region of OPF problems, effectively combining the advantages of these recent advancements. Additionally, the utilization of chordal decomposition in the complex matrix formulation of SDP can significantly accelerate the solution time. Notably, for the same SDP problem, different chordal decompositions can result in varying solution time. To address this problem, this paper proposes a clique graph merging strategy within the complex matrix SDP framework, which assesses clique sizes and the computational burden on interior-point solvers, as well as reducing the need for hyperparameter tuning and further enhancing the solution efficiency. Finally, the proposed hybrid relaxation model is evaluated using MATPOWER and PGLib-OPF test cases, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing the optimality gap and validating its computational performance on test cases with up to 13659-node.
Authors:Anirudh Tunga, Jordan Heim, Michael Mueterthies, Thomas Gruenwald, Jonathan Nistor
Title: AI Enabled Neutron Flux Measurement and Virtual Calibration in Boiling Water Reactors
Abstract:
Accurately capturing the three dimensional power distribution within a reactor core is vital for ensuring the safe and economical operation of the reactor, compliance with Technical Specifications, and fuel cycle planning (safety, control, and performance evaluation). Offline (that is, during cycle planning and core design), a three dimensional neutronics simulator is used to estimate the reactor's power, moderator, void, and flow distributions, from which margin to thermal limits and fuel exposures can be approximated. Online, this is accomplished with a system of local power range monitors (LPRMs) designed to capture enough neutron flux information to infer the full nodal power distribution. Certain problems with this process, ranging from measurement and calibration to the power adaption process, pose challenges to operators and limit the ability to design reload cores economically (e.g., engineering in insufficient margin or more margin than required). Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being used to solve the problems to reduce maintenance costs, improve the accuracy of online local power measurements, and decrease the bias between offline and online power distributions, thereby leading to a greater ability to design safe and economical reload cores. We present ML models trained from two deep neural network (DNN) architectures, SurrogateNet and LPRMNet, that demonstrate a testing error of 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively. Applications of these models can include virtual sensing capability for bypassed or malfunctioning LPRMs, on demand virtual calibration of detectors between successive calibrations, highly accurate nuclear end of life determinations for LPRMs, and reduced bias between measured and predicted power distributions within the core.
Authors:Ehsanoddin Ghorbanichemazkati, Amro M. Farid
Title: Generalizing Linear Graphs and Bond Graph Models with Hetero-functional Graphs for System-of-Systems Engineering Applications
Abstract:
In the 20th century, individual technology products like the generator, telephone, and automobile were connected to form many of the large-scale, complex, infrastructure networks we know today: the power grid, the communication infrastructure, and the transportation system. Progressively, these networked systems began interacting, forming what is now known as systems-of-systems. Because the component systems in the system-of-systems differ, modeling and analysis techniques with primitives applicable across multiple domains or disciplines are needed. For example, linear graphs and bond graphs have been used extensively in the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and mechatronic fields to design and analyze a wide variety of engineering systems. In contrast, hetero-functional graph theory (HFGT) has emerged to study many complex engineering systems and systems-of-systems (e.g. electric power, potable water, wastewater, natural gas, oil, coal, multi-modal transportation, mass-customized production, and personalized healthcare delivery systems). This paper seeks to relate hetero-functional graphs to linear graphs and bond graphs and demonstrate that the former is a generalization of the latter two. The contribution is relayed in three stages. First, the three modeling techniques are compared conceptually. Next, these techniques are contrasted on six example systems: (a) an electrical system, (b) a translational mechanical system, (c) a rotational mechanical system, (d) a fluidic system, (e) a thermal system, and (f) a multi-energy (electro-mechanical) system. Finally, this paper proves mathematically that hetero-functional graphs are a formal generalization of both linear graphs and bond graphs.
Authors:Zhirong Zeng, Xiaotao Liu, Meng Sun, Hongyu Wang, Jing Liu
Title: Cross Fusion RGB-T Tracking with Bi-directional Adapter
Abstract:
Many state-of-the-art RGB-T trackers have achieved remarkable results through modality fusion. However, these trackers often either overlook temporal information or fail to fully utilize it, resulting in an ineffective balance between multi-modal and temporal information. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross Fusion RGB-T Tracking architecture (CFBT) that ensures the full participation of multiple modalities in tracking while dynamically fusing temporal information. The effectiveness of CFBT relies on three newly designed cross spatio-temporal information fusion modules: Cross Spatio-Temporal Augmentation Fusion (CSTAF), Cross Spatio-Temporal Complementarity Fusion (CSTCF), and Dual-Stream Spatio-Temporal Adapter (DSTA). CSTAF employs a cross-attention mechanism to enhance the feature representation of the template comprehensively. CSTCF utilizes complementary information between different branches to enhance target features and suppress background features. DSTA adopts the adapter concept to adaptively fuse complementary information from multiple branches within the transformer layer, using the RGB modality as a medium. These ingenious fusions of multiple perspectives introduce only less than 0.3\% of the total modal parameters, but they indeed enable an efficient balance between multi-modal and temporal information. Extensive experiments on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Saakaar Bhatnagar, Andrew Comerford, Zelu Xu, Davide Berti Polato, Araz Banaeizadeh, Alessandro Ferraris
Title: Chemical Reaction Neural Networks for Fitting Accelerating Rate Calorimetry Data
Abstract:
As the demand for lithium-ion batteries rapidly increases there is a need to design these cells in a safe manner to mitigate thermal runaway. Thermal runaway in batteries leads to an uncontrollable temperature rise and potentially fires, which is a major safety concern. Typically, when modelling the chemical kinetics of thermal runaway calorimetry data ( e.g. Accelerating Rate Calorimetry (ARC)) is needed to determine the temperature-driven decomposition kinetics. Conventional methods of fitting Arrhenius Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) thermal runaway models to Accelerated Rate Calorimetry (ARC) data make several assumptions that reduce the fidelity and generalizability of the obtained model. In this paper, Chemical Reaction Neural Networks (CRNNs) are trained to fit the kinetic parameters of N-equation Arrhenius ODEs to ARC data obtained from a Molicel 21700 P45B. The models are found to be better approximations of the experimental data. The flexibility of the method is demonstrated by experimenting with two-equation and four-equation models. Thermal runaway simulations are conducted in 3D using the obtained kinetic parameters, showing the applicability of the obtained thermal runaway models to large-scale simulations.
Authors:Sean Rescsanski, Rainer Hebert, Azadeh Haghighi, Jiong Tang, Farhad Imani
Title: Towards Intelligent Cooperative Robotics in Additive Manufacturing: Past, Present and Future
Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have undergone significant advancements through the integration of cooperative robotics additive manufacturing (C-RAM) platforms. By deploying AM processes on the end effectors of multiple robotic arms, not only are traditional constraints such as limited build volumes circumvented, but systems also achieve accelerated fabrication speeds, cooperative sensing capabilities, and in-situ multi-material deposition. Despite advancements, challenges remain, particularly regarding defect generation including voids, cracks, and residual stress. Various factors contribute to these issues, including toolpath planning (i.e., slicing strategies), part decomposition for cooperative printing, and motion planning (i.e., path and trajectory planning). This review first examines the critical aspects of system control for C-RAM systems comprised of slicing and motion planning. The methods for the mitigation of defects through the adjustment of these aspects and the process parameters of AM methods are then described in the context of how they modify the AM process: pre-process, inter-layer (i.e., during layer pauses), and mid-layer (i.e., during material deposition). The application of advanced sensing technologies, including high-resolution cameras, laser scanners, and thermal imaging, to facilitate the capture of micro, meso, and macro-scale defects is explored. The role of digital twins is analyzed, emphasizing their capability to simulate and predict manufacturing outcomes, enabling preemptive adjustments to prevent defects. Finally, the outlook and future opportunities for developing next-generation C-RAM systems are outlined.
Authors:Guoqing Zhu, Honghu Pan, Qiang Wang, Chao Tian, Chao Yang, Zhenyu He
Title: Data Generation Scheme for Thermal Modality with Edge-Guided Adversarial Conditional Diffusion Model
Abstract:
In challenging low light and adverse weather conditions,thermal vision algorithms,especially object detection,have exhibited remarkable potential,contrasting with the frequent struggles encountered by visible vision algorithms. Nevertheless,the efficacy of thermal vision algorithms driven by deep learning models remains constrained by the paucity of available training data samples. To this end,this paper introduces a novel approach termed the edge guided conditional diffusion model. This framework aims to produce meticulously aligned pseudo thermal images at the pixel level,leveraging edge information extracted from visible images. By utilizing edges as contextual cues from the visible domain,the diffusion model achieves meticulous control over the delineation of objects within the generated images. To alleviate the impacts of those visible-specific edge information that should not appear in the thermal domain,a two-stage modality adversarial training strategy is proposed to filter them out from the generated images by differentiating the visible and thermal modality. Extensive experiments on LLVIP demonstrate ECDM s superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of image generation quality.
Authors:Elizabeth Buechler, Aaron Goldin, Ram Rajagopal
Title: Designing model predictive control strategies for grid-interactive water heaters for load shifting applications
Abstract:
Model predictive control (MPC) strategies allow residential water heaters to shift load in response to dynamic price signals. Crucially, the performance of such strategies is sensitive to various algorithm design choices. In this work, we develop a framework for implementing model predictive controls on residential water heaters for load shifting applications. We use this framework to analyze how four different design factors affect control performance and thermal comfort: (i) control model fidelity, (ii) temperature sensor configuration, (iii) water draw estimation methodology, and (iv) water draw forecasting methodology. We propose new methods for estimating water draw patterns without the use of a flow meter. MPC strategies are compared under two different time-varying price signals through simulations using a high-fidelity tank model and real-world draw data. Results show that control model fidelity and the number of temperature sensors have the largest impact on electricity costs, while the water draw forecasting methodology has a significant impact on thermal comfort and the frequency of runout events. Results provide practical insight into effective MPC design for water heaters in home energy management systems.
Authors:Thomas Rudolf, Philip Muhl, Sören Hohmann, Lutz Eckstein
Title: Scenario-based Thermal Management Parametrization Through Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
The thermal system of battery electric vehicles demands advanced control. Its thermal management needs to effectively control active components across varying operating conditions. While robust control function parametrization is required, current methodologies show significant drawbacks. They consume considerable time, human effort, and extensive real-world testing. Consequently, there is a need for innovative and intelligent solutions that are capable of autonomously parametrizing embedded controllers. Addressing this issue, our paper introduces a learning-based tuning approach. We propose a methodology that benefits from automated scenario generation for increased robustness across vehicle usage scenarios. Our deep reinforcement learning agent processes the tuning task context and incorporates an image-based interpretation of embedded parameter sets. We demonstrate its applicability to a valve controller parametrization task and verify it in real-world vehicle testing. The results highlight the competitive performance to baseline methods. This novel approach contributes to the shift towards virtual development of thermal management functions, with promising potential of large-scale parameter tuning in the automotive industry.
Authors:Ashwani Punia, Rajendra K. Ray
Title: Effect of Uniform and Non-uniform wall heating on Three-Dimensional Magneto-Hydrodynamics Natural Convection and Entropy Generation: A computational study using New Higher Order Super Compact Scheme
Abstract:
Current research work deals with the effect of uniform and non-uniform wall heating on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) natural convection within a three-dimensional (3D) cavity filled with molten lithium. A new Higher-Order Super Compact (HOSC) finite difference scheme is used to analyze the thermal behavior under both heating scenarios. After the quantitative and qualitative validations, the computed results are analyzed for a range of Hartman number ($Ha = 25, 50, 100, 150$) and Rayleigh number ($Ra = 10^3, 10^4, 10^5$) with fixed $Pr=0.065$ (molten lithium). Three distinct heating scenarios, i.e., uniform heating ($T_h = 1$), $y$-dependent non-uniform heating ($T_h = sin(πy$)), and a combination of $y$ and $z$-dependent non-uniform heating ($T_h = sin(πy)sin(πz)$) are investigated on the left wall ($x=0$) of the cubic cavity. It is found that variations in the $Ha$ and $Ra$, along with distinct thermal boundary conditions, exert significant effects on both the temperature distribution and flow field inside the 3D cubical cavity. Specifically, an increase in $Ra$ corresponds to enhanced heat transfer, highlighting the dominance of convection. Conversely, an increase in $Ha$ leads to a reduction in heat transfer due to the deceleration of fluid velocity. The scenario in which walls are uniformly heated exhibits the most significant total entropy generation. It is observed that with an increase in the $Ra$, the Bejan number ($Be$) decreases, which ultimately leads to an increase in total entropy generation. The implementation of the new HOSC scheme in this analysis showcases its effectiveness in capturing the complexities of 3D MHD-driven natural convection and entropy generation. This study offers significant information that might help improve the optimization and design of relevant engineering systems. Thus, our work stands out as genuinely novel and pioneering in its approach.
Authors:Prakash KC, Maryam Naghibolhosseini, Mohsen Zayernouri
Title: Multi-Scenario and Stochastic Thermo-Electro-Mechanical Modeling of Failure in Power Transmission Lines
Abstract:
Transmission lines, crucial to the power grid, are subjected to diverse environmental conditions such as wind, temperature, humidity, and pollution. While these conditions represent a consistent impact on the transmission lines, certain unpredictable conditions such as unexpected high wind, wildfire, and icing pose catastrophic risks to the reliability and integrity of the transmission lines. These factors in the presence of initial damage and electrical loads greatly affect the material properties. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive thermo-electro-mechanical model to investigate the long-term effect of unexpected high wind, wildfire, and ice on transmission lines. This study offers an in-depth perspective on temperature and damage evolution within the power lines by incorporating a phase field model for damage and fatigue, alongside thermal and electrical models. We define a state function to assess the failure, considering damage and temperature. We study three scenarios deterministically to establish a basic understanding and analyze the stochastic behavior using the Probabilistic Collocation Method (PCM). We utilize PCM for forward uncertainty quantification, conducting sensitivity analysis, and evaluating the probability of failure. This approach offers an in-depth examination of the potential risks associated with transmission lines under unfavorable circumstances.
Authors:Saaketh Desai, Sadhvikas Addamane, Jeffery Y. Tsao, Igal Brener, Remi Dingreville, Prasad P. Iyer
Title: Self-driving lab discovers principles for steering spontaneous emission
Abstract:
We developed an autonomous experimentation platform to accelerate interpretable scientific discovery in ultrafast nanophotonics, targeting a novel method to steer spontaneous emission from reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces. Controlling spontaneous emission is crucial for clean-energy solutions in illumination, thermal radiation engineering, and remote sensing. Despite the potential of reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces with embedded sources for spatiotemporal control, achieving arbitrary far-field control remains challenging. Here, we present a self-driving lab (SDL) platform that addresses this challenge by discovering the governing equations for predicting the far-field emission profile from light-emitting metasurfaces. We discover that both the spatial gradient (grating-like) and the curvature (lens-like) of the local refractive index are key factors in steering spontaneous emission. The SDL employs a machine-learning framework comprising: (1) a variational autoencoder for generating complex spatial refractive index profiles, (2) an active learning agent for guiding experiments with real-time closed-loop feedback, and (3) a neural network-based equation learner to uncover structure-property relationships. The SDL demonstrated a four-fold enhancement in peak emission directivity (up to 77%) over a 72° field of view within ~300 experiments. Our findings reveal that combinations of positive gratings and lenses are as effective as negative lenses and gratings for all emission angles, offering a novel strategy for controlling spontaneous emission beyond conventional Fourier optics.
Authors:Yongjun Yan, Qingpeng Ding, Mingwu Li, Junyan Yan, Shing Shin Cheng
Title: Refined Motion Compensation with Soft Laser Manipulators using Data-Driven Surrogate Models
Abstract:
Non-contact laser ablation, a precise thermal technique, simultaneously cuts and coagulates tissue without the insertion errors associated with rigid needles. Human organ motions, such as those in the liver, exhibit rhythmic components influenced by respiratory and cardiac cycles, making effective laser energy delivery to target lesions while compensating for tumor motion crucial. This research introduces a data-driven method to derive surrogate models of a soft manipulator. These low-dimensional models offer computational efficiency when integrated into the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, while still capturing the manipulator's dynamics with and without control input. Spectral Submanifolds (SSM) theory models the manipulator's autonomous dynamics, acknowledging its tendency to reach equilibrium when external forces are removed. Preliminary results show that the MPC controller using the surrogate model outperforms two other models within the same MPC framework. The data-driven MPC controller also supports a design-agnostic feature, allowing the interchangeability of different soft manipulators within the laser ablation surgery robot system.
Authors:Prakash KC, Maryam Naghibolhosseini, Mohsen Zayernouri
Title: Thermo-Electro-Mechanical Modeling of Power Transmission Line Failures across Four US States
Abstract:
The failure of overhead transmission lines in the United States can lead to significant economic losses and widespread blackouts, affecting the lives of millions. This study focuses on the reliability of transmission lines, specifically examining the effects of wind, ambient temperature, and current demands on lines, incorporating minimal and significant pre-existing damage. We develop a Thermo-Electro-Mechanical Model to analyze the transmission line failures across sensitive and affected states of the United States, integrating historical data on wind and ambient temperature. By combining numerical simulation with historical data analysis, our research assesses the impact of varying environmental conditions on the reliability of transmission lines. Our methodology begins with a deterministic approach to model temperature and damage evolution, using phase-field modeling for fatigue and damage, coupled with electrical and thermal models. Later, we adopt the Probability Collocation Method to investigate the stochastic behavior of the system, enhancing our understanding of uncertainties in model parameters, conducting sensitivity analysis, and estimating the probability of failures over time. This approach allows for a comprehensive analysis of factors affecting transmission line reliability, contributing valuable insights into improving power line's resilience against environmental conditions.
Authors:Eduardo A. Barros De Moraes, Prakash KC, Mohsen Zayernouri
Title: A Thermo-Electro-Mechanical Model for Long-Term Reliability of Aging Transmission Lines
Abstract:
Integrity and reliability of a national power grid system are essential to society's development and security. Among the power grid components, transmission lines are critical due to exposure and vulnerability to severe external conditions, including high winds, ice, and extreme temperatures. The combined effects of external agents with high electrical load and presence of damage precursors greatly affects the conducting material's properties due to a thermal runaway cycle that accelerates the aging process. In this paper, we develop a thermo-electro-mechanical model for long-term failure analysis of overhead transmission lines. A phase-field model of damage and fatigue, coupled with electrical and thermal modules, provides a detailed description of the conductor's temperature evolution. We define a limit state function based on maximum operating temperature to avoid excessive overheating and sagging. We study four representative scenarios deterministically, and propose the Probabilistic Collocation Method (PCM) as a tool to understand the stochastic behavior of the system. We use PCM in forward parametric uncertainty quantification, global sensitivity analysis, and computation of failure probability curves in a straightforward and computationally efficient fashion, and we quantify the most influential parameters that affect the failure predictability from a physics-based perspective.
Authors:Jorge Espin, Dong Zhang, Daniele Toti, Andrea Pozzi
Title: Deep-MPC: A DAGGER-Driven Imitation Learning Strategy for Optimal Constrained Battery Charging
Abstract:
In the realm of battery charging, several complex aspects demand meticulous attention, including thermal management, capacity degradation, and the need for rapid charging while maintaining safety and battery lifespan. By employing the imitation learning paradigm, this manuscript introduces an innovative solution to confront the inherent challenges often associated with conventional predictive control strategies for constrained battery charging. A significant contribution of this study lies in the adaptation of the Dataset Aggregation (DAGGER) algorithm to address scenarios where battery parameters are uncertain, and internal states are unobservable. Results drawn from a practical battery simulator that incorporates an electrochemical model highlight substantial improvements in battery charging performance, particularly in meeting all safety constraints and outperforming traditional strategies in computational processing.
Authors:Matteo Turisini, Giorgio Amati, Andrea Acquaviva
Title: Energy efficiency: a Lattice Boltzmann study
Abstract:
The energy consumption and the compute performance of a fluid dynamic code have been investigated varying parallelization approach, arithmetic precision and clock speed. The code is based on a Lattice Boltzmann approximation, is written in Fortran and was executed on high-end GPUs of Leonardo Booster supercomputer. Tests were conducted on single server nodes (up to 4 GPUs in parallel). Performance metrics like the number of operations per second and energy consumption are reported, to quantify how smart coding approach and system adjustment can contribute to reduction of energy footprint while keeping the scientific throughput almost unaltered or with acceptable level of degradation. Results indicate that this application can be executed with 20% of energy saving and reduced thermal stress, at the cost of 5% more computing time. The paper presents preliminary conclusions, as it is a first step of a larger study dedicated to energy efficiency at scale.
Authors:Heesup Yun, Sassoum Lo, Christine H. Diepenbrock, Brian N. Bailey, J. Mason Earles
Title: VisTA-SR: Improving the Accuracy and Resolution of Low-Cost Thermal Imaging Cameras for Agriculture
Abstract:
Thermal cameras are an important tool for agricultural research because they allow for non-invasive measurement of plant temperature, which relates to important photochemical, hydraulic, and agronomic traits. Utilizing low-cost thermal cameras can lower the barrier to introducing thermal imaging in agricultural research and production. This paper presents an approach to improve the temperature accuracy and image quality of low-cost thermal imaging cameras for agricultural applications. Leveraging advancements in computer vision techniques, particularly deep learning networks, we propose a method, called $\textbf{VisTA-SR}$ ($\textbf{Vis}$ual \& $\textbf{T}$hermal $\textbf{A}$lignment and $\textbf{S}$uper-$\textbf{R}$esolution Enhancement) that combines RGB and thermal images to enhance the capabilities of low-resolution thermal cameras. The research includes calibration and validation of temperature measurements, acquisition of paired image datasets, and the development of a deep learning network tailored for agricultural thermal imaging. Our study addresses the challenges of image enhancement in the agricultural domain and explores the potential of low-cost thermal cameras to replace high-resolution industrial cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing temperature accuracy and image sharpness, paving the way for more accessible and efficient thermal imaging solutions in agriculture.
Authors:Jinzhong Wang, Xuetao Tian, Shun Dai, Tao Zhuo, Haorui Zeng, Hongjuan Liu, Jiaqi Liu, Xiuwei Zhang, Yanning Zhang
Title: RGB-T Object Detection via Group Shuffled Multi-receptive Attention and Multi-modal Supervision
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection, utilizing both visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (T) modals, has garnered significant attention for its robust performance across diverse weather and lighting conditions. However, effectively exploiting the complementarity between RGB-T modals while maintaining efficiency remains a critical challenge. In this paper, a very simple Group Shuffled Multi-receptive Attention (GSMA) module is proposed to extract and combine multi-scale RGB and thermal features. Then, the extracted multi-modal features are directly integrated with a multi-level path aggregation neck, which significantly improves the fusion effect and efficiency. Meanwhile, multi-modal object detection often adopts union annotations for both modals. This kind of supervision is not sufficient and unfair, since objects observed in one modal may not be seen in the other modal. To solve this issue, Multi-modal Supervision (MS) is proposed to sufficiently supervise RGB-T object detection. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks, KAIST and DroneVehicle, demonstrate the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining competitive efficiency.
Authors:Hasib-Al Rashid, Tinoosh Mohsenin
Title: TinyM$^2$Net-V3: Memory-Aware Compressed Multimodal Deep Neural Networks for Sustainable Edge Deployment
Abstract:
The advancement of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms has led to a notable increase in energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions, intensifying concerns about climate change. This growing problem has brought the environmental sustainability of AI technologies to the forefront, especially as they expand across various sectors. In response to these challenges, there is an urgent need for the development of sustainable AI solutions. These solutions must focus on energy-efficient embedded systems that are capable of handling diverse data types even in environments with limited resources, thereby ensuring both technological progress and environmental responsibility. Integrating complementary multimodal data into tiny machine learning models for edge devices is challenging due to increased complexity, latency, and power consumption. This work introduces TinyM$^2$Net-V3, a system that processes different modalities of complementary data, designs deep neural network (DNN) models, and employs model compression techniques including knowledge distillation and low bit-width quantization with memory-aware considerations to fit models within lower memory hierarchy levels, reducing latency and enhancing energy efficiency on resource-constrained devices. We evaluated TinyM$^2$Net-V3 in two multimodal case studies: COVID-19 detection using cough, speech, and breathing audios, and pose classification from depth and thermal images. With tiny inference models (6 KB and 58 KB), we achieved 92.95% and 90.7% accuracies, respectively. Our tiny machine learning models, deployed on resource limited hardware, demonstrated low latencies within milliseconds and very high power efficiency.
Authors:Tatiana Boura, Natalia Koliou, George Meramveliotakis, Stasinos Konstantopoulos, George Kosmadakis
Title: Predicting Solar Heat Production to Optimize Renewable Energy Usage
Abstract:
Utilizing solar energy to meet space heating and domestic hot water demand is very efficient (in terms of environmental footprint as well as cost), but in order to ensure that user demand is entirely covered throughout the year needs to be complemented with auxiliary heating systems, typically boilers and heat pumps. Naturally, the optimal control of such a system depends on an accurate prediction of solar thermal production. Experimental testing and physics-based numerical models are used to find a collector's performance curve - the mapping from solar radiation and other external conditions to heat production - but this curve changes over time once the collector is exposed to outdoor conditions. In order to deploy advanced control strategies in small domestic installations, we present an approach that uses machine learning to automatically construct and continuously adapt a model that predicts heat production. Our design is driven by the need to (a) construct and adapt models using supervision that can be extracted from low-cost instrumentation, avoiding extreme accuracy and reliability requirements; and (b) at inference time, use inputs that are typically provided in publicly available weather forecasts. Recent developments in attention-based machine learning, as well as careful adaptation of the training setup to the specifics of the task, have allowed us to design a machine learning-based solution that covers our requirements. We present positive empirical results for the predictive accuracy of our solution, and discuss the impact of these results on the end-to-end system.
Authors:Rixin Yu, Erdzan Hodzic, Karl-Johan Nogenmyr
Title: Learning Flame Evolution Operator under Hybrid Darrieus Landau and Diffusive Thermal Instability
Abstract:
Recent advancements in the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with physical sciences have led to significant progress in addressing complex phenomena governed by nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE). This paper explores the application of novel operator learning methodologies to unravel the intricate dynamics of flame instability, particularly focusing on hybrid instabilities arising from the coexistence of Darrieus-Landau (DL) and Diffusive-Thermal (DT) mechanisms. Training datasets encompass a wide range of parameter configurations, enabling the learning of parametric solution advancement operators using techniques such as parametric Fourier Neural Operator (pFNO), and parametric convolutional neural networks (pCNN). Results demonstrate the efficacy of these methods in accurately predicting short-term and long-term flame evolution across diverse parameter regimes, capturing the characteristic behaviors of pure and blended instabilities. Comparative analyses reveal pFNO as the most accurate model for learning short-term solutions, while all models exhibit robust performance in capturing the nuanced dynamics of flame evolution. This research contributes to the development of robust modeling frameworks for understanding and controlling complex physical processes governed by nonlinear PDE.
Authors:Nianchang Huang, Yang Yang, Ruida Xi, Qiang Zhang, Jungong Han, Jin Huang
Title: Salient Object Detection From Arbitrary Modalities
Abstract:
Toward desirable saliency prediction, the types and numbers of inputs for a salient object detection (SOD) algorithm may dynamically change in many real-life applications. However, existing SOD algorithms are mainly designed or trained for one particular type of inputs, failing to be generalized to other types of inputs. Consequentially, more types of SOD algorithms need to be prepared in advance for handling different types of inputs, raising huge hardware and research costs. Differently, in this paper, we propose a new type of SOD task, termed Arbitrary Modality SOD (AM SOD). The most prominent characteristics of AM SOD are that the modality types and modality numbers will be arbitrary or dynamically changed. The former means that the inputs to the AM SOD algorithm may be arbitrary modalities such as RGB, depths, or even any combination of them. While, the latter indicates that the inputs may have arbitrary modality numbers as the input type is changed, e.g. single-modality RGB image, dual-modality RGB-Depth (RGB-D) images or triple-modality RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGB-D-T) images. Accordingly, a preliminary solution to the above challenges, ı.e. a modality switch network (MSN), is proposed in this paper. In particular, a modality switch feature extractor (MSFE) is first designed to extract discriminative features from each modality effectively by introducing some modality indicators, which will generate some weights for modality switching. Subsequently, a dynamic fusion module (DFM) is proposed to adaptively fuse features from a variable number of modalities based on a novel Transformer structure. Finally, a new dataset, named AM-XD, is constructed to facilitate research on AM SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AM SOD method can effectively cope with changes in the type and number of input modalities for robust salient object detection.
Authors:Rachel, Chen, Wenjia Zheng, Sandeep Jalui, Pavan Suri, Jun Zeng
Title: 3D object quality prediction for Metal Jet Printer with Multimodal thermal encoder
Abstract:
With the advancements in 3D printing technologies, it is extremely important that the quality of 3D printed objects, and dimensional accuracies should meet the customer's specifications. Various factors during metal printing affect the printed parts' quality, including the power quality, the printing stage parameters, the print part's location inside the print bed, the curing stage parameters, and the metal sintering process. With the large data gathered from HP's MetJet printing process, AI techniques can be used to analyze, learn, and effectively infer the printed part quality metrics, as well as assist in improving the print yield. In-situ thermal sensing data captured by printer-installed thermal sensors contains the part thermal signature of fusing layers. Such part thermal signature contains a convoluted impact from various factors. In this paper, we use a multimodal thermal encoder network to fuse data of a different nature including the video data vectorized printer control data, and exact part thermal signatures with a trained encoder-decoder module. We explored the data fusing techniques and stages for data fusing, the optimized end-to-end model architecture indicates an improved part quality prediction accuracy.
Authors:Isidora Teofilovic, Ali Cem, David Sanchez-Jacome, Daniel Perez-Lopez, Francesco Da Ros
Title: Thermal Crosstalk Modelling and Compensation Methods for Programmable Photonic Integrated Circuits
Abstract:
Photonic integrated circuits play an important role in the field of optical computing, promising faster and more energy-efficient operations compared to their digital counterparts. This advantage stems from the inherent suitability of optical signals to carry out matrix multiplication. However, even deterministic phenomena such as thermal crosstalk make precise programming of photonic chips a challenging task. Here, we train and experimentally evaluate three models incorporating varying degrees of physics intuition to predict the effect of thermal crosstalk in different locations of an integrated programmable photonic mesh. We quantify the effect of thermal crosstalk by the resonance wavelength shift in the power spectrum of a microring resonator implemented in the chip, achieving modelling errors <0.5 pm. We experimentally validate the models through compensation of the crosstalk-induced wavelength shift. Finally, we evaluate the generalization capabilities of one of the models by employing it to predict and compensate for the effect of thermal crosstalk for parts of the chip it was not trained on, revealing root-mean-square-errors of <2.0 pm.
Authors:Runxi Wang, Jun-Han Han, Mircea Stan, Xinfei Guo
Title: Hot-LEGO: Architect Microfluidic Cooling Equipped 3DICs with Pre-RTL Thermal Simulation
Abstract:
Microfluidic cooling has been recognized as one of the most promising solutions to achieve efficient thermal management for three-dimensional integrated circuits (3DICs). It enables more opportunities to architect 3DICs with different die configurations. It becomes increasingly important to perform thermal analysis in the early design phases to validate the architectural design decisions. This is even more critical for microfluidic cooling equipped 3DICs as the embedded cooling structures greatly influence the performance, power, and reliability of the stacked system. We exploited the existing architectural simulators and developed a Pre-register-transfer-level (Pre-RTL) thermal simulation methodology named Hot-LEGO that integrates these tools with their latest features such as support for microfluidic cooling and 3DIC stacking configurations. This methodology differs from existing ones by looking into the design granularity at a much finer level which enables the exploration of unique architecture combinations across the vertical stack. Though architectural-level simulators are not designed for signoff-calibre, it offers speed and agility which are imperative for early design space exploration. We claim that this ongoing work will speed up the co-design cycle of microfluidic cooling and offer a portable methodology for architects to perform exhaustive search for the optimal microarchitecture solutions in 3DICs.
Authors:Yang Luo, Xiqing Guo, Hao Li
Title: From Two-Stream to One-Stream: Efficient RGB-T Tracking via Mutual Prompt Learning and Knowledge Distillation
Abstract:
Due to the complementary nature of visible light and thermal infrared modalities, object tracking based on the fusion of visible light images and thermal images (referred to as RGB-T tracking) has received increasing attention from researchers in recent years. How to achieve more comprehensive fusion of information from the two modalities at a lower cost has been an issue that researchers have been exploring. Inspired by visual prompt learning, we designed a novel two-stream RGB-T tracking architecture based on cross-modal mutual prompt learning, and used this model as a teacher to guide a one-stream student model for rapid learning through knowledge distillation techniques. Extensive experiments have shown that, compared to similar RGB-T trackers, our designed teacher model achieved the highest precision rate, while the student model, with comparable precision rate to the teacher model, realized an inference speed more than three times faster than the teacher model.(Codes will be available if accepted.)
Authors:Trevor Exley, Rashmi Wijesundara, Shuopu Wang, Arian Moridani, Amir Jafari
Title: TVIM: Thermo-Active Variable Impedance Module: Evaluating Shear-Mode Capabilities of Polycaprolactone
Abstract:
In this work, we introduce an advanced thermo-active variable impedance module which builds upon our previous innovation in thermal-based impedance adjustment for actuation systems. Our initial design harnessed the temperature-responsive, viscoelastic properties of Polycaprolactone (PCL) to modulate stiffness and damping, facilitated by integrated flexible Peltier elements. While effective, the reliance on compressing and the inherent stress relaxation characteristics of PCL led to suboptimal response times in impedance adjustments. Addressing these limitations, the current iteration of our module pivots to a novel 'shear-mode' operation. By conducting comprehensive shear rheology analyses on PCL, we have identified a configuration that eliminates the viscoelastic delay, offering a faster response with improved heat transfer efficiency. A key advantage of our module lies in its scalability and elimination of additional mechanical actuators for impedance adjustment. The compactness and efficiency of thermal actuation through Peltier elements allow for significant downsizing, making these thermal, variable impedance modules exceptionally well-suited for applications where space constraints and actuator weight are critical considerations. This development represents a significant leap forward in the design of variable impedance actuators, offering a more versatile, responsive, and compact solution for a wide range of robotic and biomechanical applications.
Authors:Ronald M. Caplan, Craig D. Johnston, Lars K. S. Daldoff, Jon A. Linker
Title: Advancing parabolic operators in thermodynamic MHD models II: Evaluating a Practical Time Step Limit for Unconditionally Stable Methods
Abstract:
Unconditionally stable time stepping schemes are useful and often practically necessary for advancing parabolic operators in multi-scale systems. However, serious accuracy problems may emerge when taking time steps that far exceed the explicit stability limits. In our previous work, we compared the accuracy and performance of advancing parabolic operators in a thermodynamic MHD model using an implicit method and an explicit super time-stepping (STS) method. We found that while the STS method outperformed the implicit one with overall good results, it was not able to damp oscillatory behavior in the solution efficiently, hindering its practical use. In this follow-up work, we evaluate an easy-to-implement method for selecting a practical time step limit (PTL) for unconditionally stable schemes. This time step is used to `cycle' the operator-split thermal conduction and viscosity parabolic operators. We test the new time step with both an implicit and STS scheme for accuracy, performance, and scaling. We find that, for our test cases here, the PTL dramatically improves the STS solution, matching or improving the solution of the original implicit scheme, while retaining most of its performance and scaling advantages. The PTL shows promise to allow more accurate use of unconditionally stable schemes for parabolic operators and reliable use of STS methods.
Authors:Fabio Widmer, Stijn van Dooren, Christopher H. Onder
Title: Optimization of the Energy-Comfort Trade-Off of HVAC Systems in Electric City Buses Based on a Steady-State Model
Abstract:
The electrification of public transport vehicles offers the potential to relieve city centers of pollutant and noise emissions. Furthermore, electric buses have lower life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than diesel buses, particularly when operated with sustainably produced electricity. However, the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system can consume a significant amount of energy, thus limiting the achievable driving range. In this paper, we address the HVAC system in an electric city bus by analyzing the trade-off between the energy consumption and the thermal comfort of the passengers. We do this by developing a dynamic thermal model for the bus, which we simplify by considering it to be in steady state. We introduce a method that is able to quickly optimize the steady-state HVAC system inputs for a large number of samples representative of a year-round operation. A comparison between the results from the steady-state optimization approach and a dynamic simulation reveals small deviations in both the HVAC system power demand and achieved thermal comfort. Thus, the approximation of the system performance with a steady-state model is justified. We present two case studies to demonstrate the practical relevance of the approach. First, we show how the method can be used to compare different HVAC system designs based on a year-round performance evaluation. Second, we show how the method can be used to extract setpoints for online controllers that achieve close-to-optimal performance without any predictive information. In conclusion, this study shows that a steady-state analysis of the HVAC systems of an electric city bus is a valuable approach to evaluate and optimize its performance.
Authors:Chinmay Patwardhan, Martin Frank, Jonas Kusch
Title: Asymptotic-preserving and energy stable dynamical low-rank approximation for thermal radiative transfer equations
Abstract:
The thermal radiative transfer equations model temperature evolution through a background medium as a result of radiation. When a large number of particles are absorbed in a short time scale, the dynamics tend to a non-linear diffusion-type equation called the Rosseland approximation. The main challenges for constructing numerical schemes that exhibit the correct limiting behavior are posed by the solution's high-dimensional phase space and multi-scale effects. In this work, we propose an asymptotic-preserving and rank-adaptive dynamical low-rank approximation scheme based on the macro-micro decomposition of the particle density and a modified augmented basis-update \& Galerkin integrator. We show that this scheme, for linear particle emission by the material, dissipates energy over time under a step size restriction that captures the hyperbolic and parabolic CFL conditions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in a series of numerical experiments.
Authors:Christina Schenk, Aditya Vasudevan, Maciej Haranczyk, Ignacio Romero
Title: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Control of Reaction-Diffusion Problems
Abstract:
Mathematical and computational tools have proven to be reliable in decision-making processes. In recent times, in particular, machine learning-based methods are becoming increasingly popular as advanced support tools. When dealing with control problems, reinforcement learning has been applied to decision-making in several applications, most notably in games. The success of these methods in finding solutions to complex problems motivates the exploration of new areas where they can be employed to overcome current difficulties. In this paper, we explore the use of automatic control strategies to initial boundary value problems in thermal and disease transport. Specifically, in this work, we adapt an existing reinforcement learning algorithm using a stochastic policy gradient method and we introduce two novel reward functions to drive the flow of the transported field. The new model-based framework exploits the interactions between a reaction-diffusion model and the modified agent. The results show that certain controls can be implemented successfully in these applications, although model simplifications had to be assumed.
Authors:Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Cory Beard, Zhu Li
Title: MODIPHY: Multimodal Obscured Detection for IoT using PHantom Convolution-Enabled Faster YOLO
Abstract:
Low-light conditions and occluded scenarios impede object detection in real-world Internet of Things (IoT) applications like autonomous vehicles and security systems. While advanced machine learning models strive for accuracy, their computational demands clash with the limitations of resource-constrained devices, hampering real-time performance. In our current research, we tackle this challenge, by introducing ``YOLO Phantom", one of the smallest YOLO models ever conceived. YOLO Phantom utilizes the novel Phantom Convolution block, achieving comparable accuracy to the latest YOLOv8n model while simultaneously reducing both parameters and model size by 43\%, resulting in a significant 19\% reduction in Giga Floating-Point Operations (GFLOPs). YOLO Phantom leverages transfer learning on our multimodal RGB-infrared dataset to address low-light and occlusion issues, equipping it with robust vision under adverse conditions. Its real-world efficacy is demonstrated on an IoT platform with advanced low-light and RGB cameras, seamlessly connecting to an AWS-based notification endpoint for efficient real-time object detection. Benchmarks reveal a substantial boost of 17\% and 14\% in frames per second (FPS) for thermal and RGB detection, respectively, compared to the baseline YOLOv8n model. For community contribution, both the code and the multimodal dataset are available on GitHub.
Authors:Christian Stippel, Thomas Heitzinger, Rafael Sterzinger, Martin Kampel
Title: Closing the Gap in Human Behavior Analysis: A Pipeline for Synthesizing Trimodal Data
Abstract:
In pervasive machine learning, especially in Human Behavior Analysis (HBA), RGB has been the primary modality due to its accessibility and richness of information. However, linked with its benefits are challenges, including sensitivity to lighting conditions and privacy concerns. One possibility to overcome these vulnerabilities is to resort to different modalities. For instance, thermal is particularly adept at accentuating human forms, while depth adds crucial contextual layers. Despite their known benefits, only a few HBA-specific datasets that integrate these modalities exist. To address this shortage, our research introduces a novel generative technique for creating trimodal, i.e., RGB, thermal, and depth, human-focused datasets. This technique capitalizes on human segmentation masks derived from RGB images, combined with thermal and depth backgrounds that are sourced automatically. With these two ingredients, we synthesize depth and thermal counterparts from existing RGB data utilizing conditional image-to-image translation. By employing this approach, we generate trimodal data that can be leveraged to train models for settings with limited data, bad lightning conditions, or privacy-sensitive areas.
Authors:Rishabh Madan, Skyler Valdez, David Kim, Sujie Fang, Luoyan Zhong, Diego Virtue, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Title: RABBIT: A Robot-Assisted Bed Bathing System with Multimodal Perception and Integrated Compliance
Abstract:
This paper introduces RABBIT, a novel robot-assisted bed bathing system designed to address the growing need for assistive technologies in personal hygiene tasks. It combines multimodal perception and dual (software and hardware) compliance to perform safe and comfortable physical human-robot interaction. Using RGB and thermal imaging to segment dry, soapy, and wet skin regions accurately, RABBIT can effectively execute washing, rinsing, and drying tasks in line with expert caregiving practices. Our system includes custom-designed motion primitives inspired by human caregiving techniques, and a novel compliant end-effector called Scrubby, optimized for gentle and effective interactions. We conducted a user study with 12 participants, including one participant with severe mobility limitations, demonstrating the system's effectiveness and perceived comfort. Supplementary material and videos can be found on our website https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/rabbit.
Authors:Ivan Liu, Fangyuan Liu, Qi Zhong, Fei Ma, Shiguang Ni
Title: Your blush gives you away: detecting hidden mental states with remote photoplethysmography and thermal imaging
Abstract:
Multimodal emotion recognition techniques are increasingly essential for assessing mental states. Image-based methods, however, tend to focus predominantly on overt visual cues and often overlook subtler mental state changes. Psychophysiological research has demonstrated that HR and skin temperature are effective in detecting ANS activities, thereby revealing these subtle changes. However, traditional HR tools are generally more costly and less portable, while skin temperature analysis usually necessitates extensive manual processing. Advances in remote-PPG and automatic thermal ROI detection algorithms have been developed to address these issues, yet their accuracy in practical applications remains limited. This study aims to bridge this gap by integrating r-PPG with thermal imaging to enhance prediction performance. Ninety participants completed a 20-minute questionnaire to induce cognitive stress, followed by watching a film aimed at eliciting moral elevation. The results demonstrate that the combination of r-PPG and thermal imaging effectively detects emotional shifts. Using r-PPG alone, the prediction accuracy was 77% for cognitive stress and 61% for moral elevation, as determined by SVM. Thermal imaging alone achieved 79% accuracy for cognitive stress and 78% for moral elevation, utilizing a RF algorithm. An early fusion strategy of these modalities significantly improved accuracies, achieving 87% for cognitive stress and 83% for moral elevation using RF. Further analysis, which utilized statistical metrics and explainable machine learning methods including SHAP, highlighted key features and clarified the relationship between cardiac responses and facial temperature variations. Notably, it was observed that cardiovascular features derived from r-PPG models had a more pronounced influence in data fusion, despite thermal imaging's higher predictive accuracy in unimodal analysis.
Authors:Tengji Xu, Weipeng Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Zeyu Luo, Qiarong Xiao, Benshan Wang, Mingcheng Luo, Xingyuan Xu, Bhavin J. Shastri, Paul R. Prucnal, Chaoran Huang
Title: Control-free and efficient integrated photonic neural networks via hardware-aware training and pruning
Abstract:
Integrated photonic neural networks (PNNs) are at the forefront of AI computing, leveraging on light's unique properties, such as large bandwidth, low latency, and potentially low power consumption. Nevertheless, the integrated optical components within PNNs are inherently sensitive to external disturbances and thermal interference, which can detrimentally affect computing accuracy and reliability. Current solutions often use complicated control methods, resulting in high hardware complexity impractical for large-scale PNNs. In response, we propose a novel hardware-aware training and pruning approach. The core idea is to train the parameters of a physical neural network towards its noise-robust and energy-efficient region. This innovation enables control-free and energy-efficient photonic computing. Our method is validated across diverse integrated PNN architectures. Through experimental validation, our approach significantly enhances the computing precision of MRR-based PNN, achieving a notable 4-bit improvement without the need for complex device control mechanisms or energy-intensive temperature stabilization circuits. Specifically, it improves the accuracy of experimental handwritten digit classification from 67.0% to 95.0%, nearing theoretical limits and achieved without a thermoelectric controller. Additionally, this approach reduces the energy by tenfold. We further extend the validation to various architectures, such as PCM-based PNN, demonstrating the broad applicability of our approach across different platforms. This advancement represents a significant step towards the practical, energy-efficient, and noise-resilient implementation of large-scale integrated PNNs.
Authors:Honghe Dai, Site Mo, Haoxin Wang, Nan Yin, Songhai Fan, Bixiong Li
Title: Pre-insertion resistors temperature prediction based on improved WOA-SVR
Abstract:
The pre-insertion resistors (PIR) within high-voltage circuit breakers are critical components and warm up by generating Joule heat when an electric current flows through them. Elevated temperature can lead to temporary closure failure and, in severe cases, the rupture of PIR. To accurately predict the temperature of PIR, this study combines finite element simulation techniques with Support Vector Regression (SVR) optimized by an Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm (IWOA) approach. The IWOA includes Tent mapping, a convergence factor based on the sigmoid function, and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck variation strategy. The IWOA-SVR model is compared with the SSA-SVR and WOA-SVR. The results reveal that the prediction accuracies of the IWOA-SVR model were 90.2% and 81.5% (above 100$^\circ$C) in the 3$^\circ$C temperature deviation range and 96.3% and 93.4% (above 100$^\circ$C) in the 4$^\circ$C temperature deviation range, surpassing the performance of the comparative models. This research demonstrates the method proposed can realize the online monitoring of the temperature of the PIR, which can effectively prevent thermal faults PIR and provide a basis for the opening and closing of the circuit breaker within a short period.
Authors:Dmitry Chizhik, Jinfeng Du, Reinaldo Valenzuela, Andrea Bedin, Martti Moisio, Rodolfo Feick
Title: Measured and Modeled Outdoor Indoor Coverage at 28 GHz into High Thermal Efficiency Buildings
Abstract:
28 GHz outdoor-indoor coverage into modern office buildings with high thermal efficiency windows is found to be severely limited due to 46 dB median penetration loss at normal incidence and additional 15 dB median oblique incidence loss. The study is based on measurements of path gain over 280 outdoor-indoor links, at ranges up to 100 m. A simple theoretical path gain model is extended to include building penetration through multiple sides of the building as well as a reflection from another building. The theoretical model accounts for the building orientation relative to the source, resulting in 4.9 dB RMSE relative to data, as compared to 5.7 dB RMSE from a linear fit and 14.7 dB RMSE for the 3GPP recommended model. Only coarse description of the buildings is required: building orientation and exterior wall composition, without any interior details. Coverage range for SNR>-8 dB from an outdoor base to a terminal just inside a high-efficiency building is under 35 m
Authors:Yuanyuan Duan, Xingchen Liu, Zhiping Yu, Hanming Wu, Leilai Shao, Xiaolei Zhu
Title: RLPlanner: Reinforcement Learning based Floorplanning for Chiplets with Fast Thermal Analysis
Abstract:
Chiplet-based systems have gained significant attention in recent years due to their low cost and competitive performance. As the complexity and compactness of a chiplet-based system increase, careful consideration must be given to microbump assignments, interconnect delays, and thermal limitations during the floorplanning stage. This paper introduces RLPlanner, an efficient early-stage floorplanning tool for chiplet-based systems with a novel fast thermal evaluation method. RLPlanner employs advanced reinforcement learning to jointly minimize total wirelength and temperature. To alleviate the time-consuming thermal calculations, RLPlanner incorporates the developed fast thermal evaluation method to expedite the iterations and optimizations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed fast thermal evaluation method achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.25 K and delivers over 120x speed-up compared to the open-source thermal solver HotSpot. When integrated with our fast thermal evaluation method, RLPlanner achieves an average improvement of 20.28\% in minimizing the target objective (a combination of wirelength and temperature), within a similar running time, compared to the classic simulated annealing method with HotSpot.
Authors:Tolga Çöplü, Marc Loedi, Arto Bendiken, Mykhailo Makohin, Joshua J. Bouw, Stephen Cobb
Title: A Performance Evaluation of a Quantized Large Language Model on Various Smartphones
Abstract:
This paper explores the feasibility and performance of on-device large language model (LLM) inference on various Apple iPhone models. Amidst the rapid evolution of generative AI, on-device LLMs offer solutions to privacy, security, and connectivity challenges inherent in cloud-based models. Leveraging existing literature on running multi-billion parameter LLMs on resource-limited devices, our study examines the thermal effects and interaction speeds of a high-performing LLM across different smartphone generations. We present real-world performance results, providing insights into on-device inference capabilities.
Authors:Elizabeth Buechler, Aaron Goldin, Ram Rajagopal
Title: Improving the Load Flexibility of Stratified Electric Water Heaters: Design and Experimental Validation of MPC Strategies
Abstract:
Residential electric water heaters have significant load shifting capabilities due to their thermal heat capacity and large energy consumption. Model predictive control (MPC) has been shown to be an effective control strategy to enable water heater load shifting in home energy management systems. In this work, we analyze how modeling tank stratification in an MPC formulation impacts control performance for stratified electric water heaters under time-of-use (TOU) rates. Specifically, we propose an MPC formulation based on a three-node thermal model that captures tank stratification, and compare it to a one-node formulation that does not capture stratification and a standard thermostatic controller. These strategies are compared through both real-time laboratory testing and simulation-based evaluation for different water use patterns. Laboratory experiments show cost reductions of 12.3-23.2% for the one-node MPC and 31.2-42.5% for the three-node MPC relative to the thermostatic controller. The performance of the one-node MPC is limited by significant plant-model mismatch, while the three-node formulation better approximates real-world dynamics and results in much more effective cost reduction and load shifting. A simple analysis of how each strategy performs under water use forecast errors is also provided.
Authors:Walter Boscheri, Raphael Loubére, Jean-Philippe Braeunig, Pierre-Henri Maire
Title: A geometrically and thermodynamically compatible finite volume scheme for continuum mechanics on unstructured polygonal meshes
Abstract:
We present a novel Finite Volume (FV) scheme on unstructured polygonal meshes that is provably compliant with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Geometric Conservation Law (GCL) at the same time. The governing equations are provided by a subset of the class of symmetric and hyperbolic thermodynamically compatible (SHTC) models. Our numerical method discretizes the equations for the conservation of momentum, total energy, distortion tensor and thermal impulse vector, hence accounting in one single unified mathematical formalism for a wide range of physical phenomena in continuum mechanics. By means of two conservative corrections directly embedded in the definition of the numerical fluxes, the new schemes are proven to satisfy two extra conservation laws, namely an entropy balance law and a geometric equation that links the distortion tensor to the density evolution. As such, the classical mass conservation equation can be discarded. Firstly, the GCL is derived at the continuous level, and subsequently it is satisfied by introducing the new concepts of general potential and generalized Gibbs relation. Once compatibility of the GCL is ensured, thermodynamic compatibility is tackled in the same manner, thus achieving the satisfaction of a local cell entropy inequality. The two corrections are orthogonal, meaning that they can coexist simultaneously without interfering with each other. The compatibility of the new FV schemes holds true at the semi-discrete level, and time integration of the governing PDE is carried out relying on Runge-Kutta schemes. A large suite of test cases demonstrates the structure preserving properties of the schemes at the discrete level as well.
Authors:Depanshu Sani, Sandeep Mahato, Sourabh Saini, Harsh Kumar Agarwal, Charu Chandra Devshali, Saket Anand, Gaurav Arora, Thiagarajan Jayaraman
Title: SICKLE: A Multi-Sensor Satellite Imagery Dataset Annotated with Multiple Key Cropping Parameters
Abstract:
The availability of well-curated datasets has driven the success of Machine Learning (ML) models. Despite greater access to earth observation data in agriculture, there is a scarcity of curated and labelled datasets, which limits the potential of its use in training ML models for remote sensing (RS) in agriculture. To this end, we introduce a first-of-its-kind dataset called SICKLE, which constitutes a time-series of multi-resolution imagery from 3 distinct satellites: Landsat-8, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2. Our dataset constitutes multi-spectral, thermal and microwave sensors during January 2018 - March 2021 period. We construct each temporal sequence by considering the cropping practices followed by farmers primarily engaged in paddy cultivation in the Cauvery Delta region of Tamil Nadu, India; and annotate the corresponding imagery with key cropping parameters at multiple resolutions (i.e. 3m, 10m and 30m). Our dataset comprises 2,370 season-wise samples from 388 unique plots, having an average size of 0.38 acres, for classifying 21 crop types across 4 districts in the Delta, which amounts to approximately 209,000 satellite images. Out of the 2,370 samples, 351 paddy samples from 145 plots are annotated with multiple crop parameters; such as the variety of paddy, its growing season and productivity in terms of per-acre yields. Ours is also one among the first studies that consider the growing season activities pertinent to crop phenology (spans sowing, transplanting and harvesting dates) as parameters of interest. We benchmark SICKLE on three tasks: crop type, crop phenology (sowing, transplanting, harvesting), and yield prediction
Authors:Saeid Bayat, Nastaran Shahmansouri, Satya RT Peddada, Alex Tessier, Adrian Butscher, James T Allison
Title: Advancing Fluid-Based Thermal Management Systems Design: Leveraging Graph Neural Networks for Graph Regression and Efficient Enumeration Reduction
Abstract:
In this research, we developed a graph-based framework to represent various aspects of optimal thermal management system design, with the aim of rapidly and efficiently identifying optimal design candidates. Initially, the graph-based framework is utilized to generate diverse thermal management system architectures. The dynamics of these system architectures are modeled under various loading conditions, and an open-loop optimal controller is employed to determine each system's optimal performance. These modeled cases constitute the dataset, with the corresponding optimal performance values serving as the labels for the data. In the subsequent step, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model is trained on 30% of the labeled data to predict the systems' performance, effectively addressing a regression problem. Utilizing this trained model, we estimate the performance values for the remaining 70% of the data, which serves as the test set. In the third step, the predicted performance values are employed to rank the test data, facilitating prioritized evaluation of the design scenarios. Specifically, a small subset of the test data with the highest estimated ranks undergoes evaluation via the open-loop optimal control solver. This targeted approach concentrates on evaluating higher-ranked designs identified by the GNN, replacing the exhaustive search (enumeration-based) of all design cases. The results demonstrate a significant average reduction of over 92% in the number of system dynamic modeling and optimal control analyses required to identify optimal design scenarios.
Authors:Yadong Zhang, Pranav M Karve, Sankaran Mahadevan
Title: Power grid operational risk assessment using graph neural network surrogates
Abstract:
We investigate the utility of graph neural networks (GNNs) as proxies of power grid operational decision-making algorithms (optimal power flow (OPF) and security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC)) to enable rigorous quantification of the operational risk. To conduct principled risk analysis, numerous Monte Carlo (MC) samples are drawn from the (foretasted) probability distributions of spatio-temporally correlated stochastic grid variables. The corresponding OPF and SCUC solutions, which are needed to quantify the risk, are generated using traditional OPF and SCUC solvers to generate data for training GNN model(s). The GNN model performance is evaluated in terms of the accuracy of predicting quantities of interests (QoIs) derived from the decision variables in OPF and SCUC. Specifically, we focus on thermal power generation and load shedding at system and individual zone level. We also perform reliability and risk quantification based on GNN predictions and compare with that obtained from OPF/SCUC solutions. Our results demonstrate that GNNs are capable of providing fast and accurate prediction of QoIs and thus can be good surrogate models for OPF and SCUC. The excellent accuracy of GNN-based reliability and risk assessment further suggests that GNN surrogate has the potential to be applied in real-time and hours-ahead risk quantification.
Authors:Christian Bergfried, Yvonne Späck-Leigsnering, Roland Seebacher, Heinrich Eickhoff, Annette Muetze
Title: Thermal Finite Element Modeling and Simulation of a Squirrel-Cage Induction Machine
Abstract:
Finite element models of electrical machines allow insights in electrothermal stresses which endanger the insulation system of the machine. This paper presents a thermal finite element model of a 3.7 kW squirrel-cage induction machine. The model resolves the conductors and the surrounding insulation materials in the stator slots. A set of transient thermal scenarios is defined and measured in the machine laboratory. These data are used to assess the finite element model.
Authors:Pascal Den Boef, Jos Maubach, Wil Schilders, Nathan van de Wouw
Title: Stochastic Optimization of Large-Scale Parametrized Dynamical Systems
Abstract:
Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the synthesis setting or minimizing error in the reduction setting. When the involved dynamics are large-scale (e.g., high-dimensional semi-discretizations of partial differential equations), the optimization becomes computationally infeasible. Existing methods in literature lack computational scalability or solve an approximation of the problem (thereby losing guarantees with respect to the original problem). In this paper, we propose a novel method that circumvents these issues. The method is an extension of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which is widely used in the context of large-scale machine learning problems. The proposed SGD scheme minimizes the $\mathcal{H}_2$ norm of a (differentiable) parametrized dynamical system, and we prove that the scheme is guaranteed to preserve stability with high probability under boundedness conditions on the step size. Conditioned on the stability preservation, we also obtain probabilistic convergence guarantees to local minimizers. The method is also applicable to problems involving non-realizable dynamics as it only requires frequency-domain input-output samples. We demonstrate the potential of the approach on two numerical examples: fixed-order observer design for a large-scale thermal model and controller tuning for an infinite-dimensional system.
Authors:Reyhane Ahmadi, Amirreza Ahmadnejad, Somayyeh Koohi
Title: Free-Space Optical Spiking Neural Network
Abstract:
Neuromorphic engineering has emerged as a promising avenue for developing brain-inspired computational systems. However, conventional electronic AI-based processors often encounter challenges related to processing speed and thermal dissipation. As an alternative, optical implementations of such processors have been proposed, capitalizing on the intrinsic information-processing capabilities of light. Within the realm of optical neuromorphic engineering, various optical neural networks (ONNs) have been explored. Among these, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have exhibited notable success in emulating the computational principles of the human brain. Nevertheless, the integration of optical SNN processors has presented formidable obstacles, mainly when dealing with the computational demands of large datasets. In response to these challenges, we introduce a pioneering concept: the Free-space Optical deep Spiking Convolutional Neural Network (OSCNN). This novel approach draws inspiration from computational models of the human eye. We have meticulously designed various optical components within the OSCNN to tackle object detection tasks across prominent benchmark datasets, including MNIST, ETH 80, and Caltech. Our results demonstrate promising performance with minimal latency and power consumption compared to their electronic ONN counterparts. Additionally, we conducted several pertinent simulations, such as optical intensity to-latency conversion and synchronization. Of particular significance is the evaluation of the feature extraction layer, employing a Gabor filter bank, which stands to impact the practical deployment of diverse ONN architectures significantly.
Authors:Lorenzo Schena, Pedro Marques, Romain Poletti, Samuel Ahizi, Jan Van den Berghe, Miguel A. Mendez
Title: Reinforcement Twinning: from digital twins to model-based reinforcement learning
Abstract:
Digital twins promise to revolutionize engineering by offering new avenues for optimization, control, and predictive maintenance. We propose a novel framework for simultaneously training the digital twin of an engineering system and an associated control agent. The twin's training combines adjoint-based data assimilation and system identification methods, while the control agent's training merges model-based optimal control with model-free reinforcement learning. The control agent evolves along two independent paths: one driven by model-based optimal control and the other by reinforcement learning. The digital twin serves as a virtual environment for confrontation and indirect interaction, functioning as an "expert demonstrator." The best policy is selected for real-world interaction and cloned to the other path if training stagnates. We call this framework Reinforcement Twinning (RT). The framework is tested on three diverse engineering systems and control tasks: (1) controlling a wind turbine under varying wind speeds, (2) trajectory control of flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs) facing wind gusts, and (3) mitigating thermal loads in managing cryogenic storage tanks. These test cases use simplified models with known ground truth closure laws. Results show that the adjoint-based digital twin training is highly sample-efficient, completing within a few iterations. For the control agent training, both model-based and model-free approaches benefit from their complementary learning experiences. The promising results pave the way for implementing the RT framework on real systems.
Authors:Alfredo V Clemente, Alessandro Nocente, Massimiliano Ruocco
Title: Global Transformer Architecture for Indoor Room Temperature Forecasting
Abstract:
A thorough regulation of building energy systems translates in relevant energy savings and in a better comfort for the occupants. Algorithms to predict the thermal state of a building on a certain time horizon with a good confidence are essential for the implementation of effective control systems. This work presents a global Transformer architecture for indoor temperature forecasting in multi-room buildings, aiming at optimizing energy consumption and reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with HVAC systems. Recent advancements in deep learning have enabled the development of more sophisticated forecasting models compared to traditional feedback control systems. The proposed global Transformer architecture can be trained on the entire dataset encompassing all rooms, eliminating the need for multiple room-specific models, significantly improving predictive performance, and simplifying deployment and maintenance. Notably, this study is the first to apply a Transformer architecture for indoor temperature forecasting in multi-room buildings. The proposed approach provides a novel solution to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of temperature forecasting, serving as a valuable tool to optimize energy consumption and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector.
Authors:Sungjin Cheong, Wonho Jung, Yoon Seop Lim, Yong-Hwa Park
Title: Thermal-Infrared Remote Target Detection System for Maritime Rescue based on Data Augmentation with 3D Synthetic Data
Abstract:
This paper proposes a thermal-infrared (TIR) remote target detection system for maritime rescue using deep learning and data augmentation. We established a self-collected TIR dataset consisting of multiple scenes imitating human rescue situations using a TIR camera (FLIR). Additionally, to address dataset scarcity and improve model robustness, a synthetic dataset from a 3D game (ARMA3) to augment the data is further collected. However, a significant domain gap exists between synthetic TIR and real TIR images. Hence, a proper domain adaptation algorithm is essential to overcome the gap. Therefore, we suggest a domain adaptation algorithm in a target-background separated manner from 3D game-to-real, based on a generative model, to address this issue. Furthermore, a segmentation network with fixed-weight kernels at the head is proposed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and provide weak attention, as remote TIR targets inherently suffer from unclear boundaries. Experiment results reveal that the network trained on augmented data consisting of translated synthetic and real TIR data outperforms that trained on only real TIR data by a large margin. Furthermore, the proposed segmentation model surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation methods.
Authors:Saeid Bayat, Nastaran Shahmansouri, Satya RT Peddada, Alex Tessier, Adrian Butscher, James T Allison
Title: Extracting Design Knowledge from Optimization Data: Enhancing Engineering Design in Fluid Based Thermal Management Systems
Abstract:
As mechanical systems become more complex and technological advances accelerate, the traditional reliance on heritage designs for engineering endeavors is being diminished in its effectiveness. Considering the dynamic nature of the design industry where new challenges are continually emerging, alternative sources of knowledge need to be sought to guide future design efforts. One promising avenue lies in the analysis of design optimization data, which has the potential to offer valuable insights and overcome the limitations of heritage designs. This paper presents a step toward extracting knowledge from optimization data in multi-split fluid-based thermal management systems using different classification machine learning methods, so that designers can use it to guide decisions in future design efforts. This approach offers several advantages over traditional design heritage methods, including applicability in cases where there is no design heritage and the ability to derive optimal designs. We showcase our framework through four case studies with varying levels of complexity. These studies demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing the design of complex thermal management systems. Our results show that the knowledge extracted from the configuration design optimization data provides a good basis for more general design of complex thermal management systems. It is shown that the objective value of the estimated optimal configuration closely approximates the true optimal configuration with less than 1 percent error, achieved using basic features based on the system heat loads without involving the corresponding optimal open loop control (OLOC) features. This eliminates the need to solve the OLOC problem, leading to reduced computation costs.
Authors:David Kröger, Milijana Teodosic, Christian Rehtanz
Title: Modeling and Contribution of Flexible Heating Systems for Transmission Grid Congestion Management
Abstract:
The large-scale integration of flexible heating systems in the European electricity market leads to a substantial increase of transportation requirements and consecutively grid congestions in the continental transmission grid. Novel model formulations for the grid-aware operation of both individual small-scale heat pumps and large-scale power-to-heat (PtH) units located in district heating networks are presented. The functionality of the models and the contribution of flexible heating systems for transmission grid congestion management is evaluated by running simulations for the target year 2035 for the German transmission grid. The findings show a decrease in annual conventional redispatch volumes and renewable energy sources (RES) curtailment resulting in cost savings of approximately 6 % through the integration of flexible heating systems in the grid congestion management scheme. The analysis suggests that especially large-scale PtH units in combination with thermal energy storages can contribute significantly to the alleviation of grid congestion and foster RES integration.
Authors:Saeid Bayat, Nastaran Shahmansouri, Satya RT Peddada, Alexander Tessier, Adrian Butscher, James T Allison
Title: Multi-split configuration design for fluid-based thermal management systems
Abstract:
High power density systems require efficient cooling to maintain their thermal performance. Despite this, as systems get larger and more complex, human practice and insight may not suffice to determine the desired thermal management system designs. To this end, a framework for automatic architecture exploration is presented in this article for a class of single-phase, multi-split cooling systems. For this class of systems, heat generation devices are clustered based on their spatial information, and flow-split are added only when required and at the location of heat devices. To generate different architectures, candidate architectures are represented as graphs. From these graphs, dynamic physics models are created automatically using a graph-based thermal modeling framework. Then, an optimal fluid flow distribution problem is solved by addressing temperature constraints in the presence of exogenous heat loads to achieve optimal performance. The focus in this work is on the design of general multi-split heat management systems. The architectures discussed here can be used for various applications in the domain of configuration design. The multi-split algorithm can produce configurations where splitting can occur at any of the vertices. The results presented include 3 categories of cases and are discussed in detail.
Authors:Alessandro R. Galloni, Yifan Yuan, Minning Zhu, Haoming Yu, Ravindra S. Bisht, Chung-Tse Michael Wu, Christine Grienberger, Shriram Ramanathan, Aaron D. Milstein
Title: Temporal credit assignment for one-shot learning utilizing a phase transition material
Abstract:
Design of hardware based on biological principles of neuronal computation and plasticity in the brain is a leading approach to realizing energy- and sample-efficient artificial intelligence and learning machines. An important factor in selection of the hardware building blocks is the identification of candidate materials with physical properties suitable to emulate the large dynamic ranges and varied timescales of neuronal signaling. Previous work has shown that the all-or-none spiking behavior of neurons can be mimicked by threshold switches utilizing phase transitions. Here we demonstrate that devices based on a prototypical metal-insulator-transition material, vanadium dioxide (VO2), can be dynamically controlled to access a continuum of intermediate resistance states. Furthermore, the timescale of their intrinsic relaxation can be configured to match a range of biologically-relevant timescales from milliseconds to seconds. We exploit these device properties to emulate three aspects of neuronal analog computation: fast (~1 ms) spiking in a neuronal soma compartment, slow (~100 ms) spiking in a dendritic compartment, and ultraslow (~1 s) biochemical signaling involved in temporal credit assignment for a recently discovered biological mechanism of one-shot learning. Simulations show that an artificial neural network using properties of VO2 devices to control an agent navigating a spatial environment can learn an efficient path to a reward in up to 4 fold fewer trials than standard methods. The phase relaxations described in our study may be engineered in a variety of materials, and can be controlled by thermal, electrical, or optical stimuli, suggesting further opportunities to emulate biological learning.
Authors:Forsad Al Hossain, Tanjid Hasan Tonmoy, Andrew A. Lover, George A. Corey, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam, Tauhidur Rahman
Title: Crowdotic: A Privacy-Preserving Hospital Waiting Room Crowd Density Estimation with Non-speech Audio
Abstract:
Privacy-preserving crowd density analysis finds application across a wide range of scenarios, substantially enhancing smart building operation and management while upholding privacy expectations in various spaces. We propose a non-speech audio-based approach for crowd analytics, leveraging a transformer-based model. Our results demonstrate that non-speech audio alone can be used to conduct such analysis with remarkable accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time when non-speech audio signals are proposed for predicting occupancy. As far as we know, there has been no other similar approach of its kind prior to this. To accomplish this, we deployed our sensor-based platform in the waiting room of a large hospital with IRB approval over a period of several months to capture non-speech audio and thermal images for the training and evaluation of our models. The proposed non-speech-based approach outperformed the thermal camera-based model and all other baselines. In addition to demonstrating superior performance without utilizing speech audio, we conduct further analysis using differential privacy techniques to provide additional privacy guarantees. Overall, our work demonstrates the viability of employing non-speech audio data for accurate occupancy estimation, while also ensuring the exclusion of speech-related content and providing robust privacy protections through differential privacy guarantees.
Authors:Yuankai Lin, Yulin Zhou, Kaiji Huang, Qi Zhong, Tao Cheng, Hua Yang, Zhouping Yin
Title: GelSplitter: Tactile Reconstruction from Near Infrared and Visible Images
Abstract:
The GelSight-like visual tactile (VT) sensor has gained popularity as a high-resolution tactile sensing technology for robots, capable of measuring touch geometry using a single RGB camera. However, the development of multi-modal perception for VT sensors remains a challenge, limited by the mono camera. In this paper, we propose the GelSplitter, a new framework approach the multi-modal VT sensor with synchronized multi-modal cameras and resemble a more human-like tactile receptor. Furthermore, we focus on 3D tactile reconstruction and implement a compact sensor structure that maintains a comparable size to state-of-the-art VT sensors, even with the addition of a prism and a near infrared (NIR) camera. We also design a photometric fusion stereo neural network (PFSNN), which estimates surface normals of objects and reconstructs touch geometry from both infrared and visible images. Our results demonstrate that the accuracy of RGB and NIR fusion is higher than that of RGB images alone. Additionally, our GelSplitter framework allows for a flexible configuration of different camera sensor combinations, such as RGB and thermal imaging.
Authors:Xuda Ye, Zhennan Zhou
Title: Quantitative Convergence Analysis of Path Integral Representations for Quantum Thermal Average
Abstract:
The quantum thermal average is a central topic in quantum physics and can be represented by the path integrals. For the computational perspective, the path integral representation (PIR) needs to be approximated in a finite-dimensional space, and the convergence of such approximation is termed as the convergence of the PIR. In this paper, we establish the Trotter product formula in the trace form, which connects the quantum thermal average and the Boltzmann distribution of a continuous loop in a rigorous way. We prove the qualitative convergence of the standard PIR, and obtain the explicit convergence rates of the continuous loop PIR. These results showcase various approaches to approximate the quantum thermal average, which provide theoretical guarantee for the path integral approaches of quantum thermal equilibrium systems, such as the path integral molecular dynamics.
Authors:Daniel Broyles, Christopher R. Hayner, Karen Leung
Title: WiSARD: A Labeled Visual and Thermal Image Dataset for Wilderness Search and Rescue
Abstract:
Sensor-equipped unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to help reduce search times and alleviate safety risks for first responders carrying out Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) operations, the process of finding and rescuing person(s) lost in wilderness areas. Unfortunately, visual sensors alone do not address the need for robustness across all the possible terrains, weather, and lighting conditions that WiSAR operations can be conducted in. The use of multi-modal sensors, specifically visual-thermal cameras, is critical in enabling WiSAR UAVs to perform in diverse operating conditions. However, due to the unique challenges posed by the wilderness context, existing dataset benchmarks are inadequate for developing vision-based algorithms for autonomous WiSAR UAVs. To this end, we present WiSARD, a dataset with roughly 56,000 labeled visual and thermal images collected from UAV flights in various terrains, seasons, weather, and lighting conditions. To the best of our knowledge, WiSARD is the first large-scale dataset collected with multi-modal sensors for autonomous WiSAR operations. We envision that our dataset will provide researchers with a diverse and challenging benchmark that can test the robustness of their algorithms when applied to real-world (life-saving) applications.
Authors:Saakaar Bhatnagar, Andrew Comerford, Araz Banaeizadeh
Title: Physics Informed Neural Networks for Modeling of 3D Flow-Thermal Problems with Sparse Domain Data
Abstract:
Successfully training Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for highly nonlinear PDEs on complex 3D domains remains a challenging task. In this paper, PINNs are employed to solve the 3D incompressible Navier-Stokes (NS) equations at moderate to high Reynolds numbers for complex geometries. The presented method utilizes very sparsely distributed solution data in the domain. A detailed investigation on the effect of the amount of supplied data and the PDE-based regularizers is presented. Additionally, a hybrid data-PINNs approach is used to generate a surrogate model of a realistic flow-thermal electronics design problem. This surrogate model provides near real-time sampling and was found to outperform standard data-driven neural networks when tested on unseen query points. The findings of the paper show how PINNs can be effective when used in conjunction with sparse data for solving 3D nonlinear PDEs or for surrogate modeling of design spaces governed by them.
Authors:Timothy D. Gebhard, Daniel Angerhausen, Björn S. Konrad, Eleonora Alei, Sascha P. Quanz, Bernhard Schölkopf
Title: Parameterizing pressure-temperature profiles of exoplanet atmospheres with neural networks
Abstract:
Atmospheric retrievals (AR) of exoplanets typically rely on a combination of a Bayesian inference technique and a forward simulator to estimate atmospheric properties from an observed spectrum. A key component in simulating spectra is the pressure-temperature (PT) profile, which describes the thermal structure of the atmosphere. Current AR pipelines commonly use ad hoc fitting functions here that limit the retrieved PT profiles to simple approximations, but still use a relatively large number of parameters. In this work, we introduce a conceptually new, data-driven parameterization scheme for physically consistent PT profiles that does not require explicit assumptions about the functional form of the PT profiles and uses fewer parameters than existing methods. Our approach consists of a latent variable model (based on a neural network) that learns a distribution over functions (PT profiles). Each profile is represented by a low-dimensional vector that can be used to condition a decoder network that maps $P$ to $T$. When training and evaluating our method on two publicly available datasets of self-consistent PT profiles, we find that our method achieves, on average, better fit quality than existing baseline methods, despite using fewer parameters. In an AR based on existing literature, our model (using two parameters) produces a tighter, more accurate posterior for the PT profile than the five-parameter polynomial baseline, while also speeding up the retrieval by more than a factor of three. By providing parametric access to physically consistent PT profiles, and by reducing the number of parameters required to describe a PT profile (thereby reducing computational cost or freeing resources for additional parameters of interest), our method can help improve AR and thus our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres and their habitability.
Authors:Romain Barbedienne, Sara Yasmine Ouerk, Mouadh Yagoubi, Hassan Bouia, Aurelie Kaemmerlen, Benoit Charrier
Title: Hybrid data driven/thermal simulation model for comfort assessment
Abstract:
Machine learning models improve the speed and quality of physical models. However, they require a large amount of data, which is often difficult and costly to acquire. Predicting thermal comfort, for example, requires a controlled environment, with participants presenting various characteristics (age, gender, ...). This paper proposes a method for hybridizing real data with simulated data for thermal comfort prediction. The simulations are performed using Modelica Language. A benchmarking study is realized to compare different machine learning methods. Obtained results look promising with an F1 score of 0.999 obtained using the random forest model.
Authors:Yang Luo, Xiqing Guo, Hui Feng, Lei Ao
Title: RGB-T Tracking via Multi-Modal Mutual Prompt Learning
Abstract:
Object tracking based on the fusion of visible and thermal im-ages, known as RGB-T tracking, has gained increasing atten-tion from researchers in recent years. How to achieve a more comprehensive fusion of information from the two modalities with fewer computational costs has been a problem that re-searchers have been exploring. Recently, with the rise of prompt learning in computer vision, we can better transfer knowledge from visual large models to downstream tasks. Considering the strong complementarity between visible and thermal modalities, we propose a tracking architecture based on mutual prompt learning between the two modalities. We also design a lightweight prompter that incorporates attention mechanisms in two dimensions to transfer information from one modality to the other with lower computational costs, embedding it into each layer of the backbone. Extensive ex-periments have demonstrated that our proposed tracking ar-chitecture is effective and efficient, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high running speeds.
Authors:Luis Badesa, Carlos Matamala, Goran Strbac
Title: Who should pay for frequency-containment ancillary services? Making responsible units bear the cost to shape investment in generation and loads
Abstract:
While the operating cost of electricity grids based on thermal generation was largely driven by the cost of fuel, as renewable penetration increases, ancillary services represent an increasingly large proportion of the running costs. Electric frequency is an important magnitude in highly renewable grids, as it becomes more volatile and therefore the cost related to maintaining it within safe bounds has significantly increased. So far, costs for frequency-containment ancillary services have been socialised in most countries, but it has become relevant to rethink this regulatory arrangement. In this paper, we discuss the issue of cost allocation for these services, highlighting the need to evolve towards a causation-based regulatory framework. We argue that parties responsible for creating the need for ancillary services should bear these costs. However, this would imply an important change in electricity market policy, therefore it is necessary to understand the impact on current and future investments on generation, as well as on electricity tariffs. Here we provide a mostly qualitative analysis of this issue, defining guidelines for practical implementation and further study.
Authors:Md Junayed Hasan, Eyad Elyan, Yijun Yan, Jinchang Ren, Md Mostafa Kamal Sarker
Title: Segmentation Framework for Heat Loss Identification in Thermal Images: Empowering Scottish Retrofitting and Thermographic Survey Companies
Abstract:
Retrofitting and thermographic survey (TS) companies in Scotland collaborate with social housing providers to tackle fuel poverty. They employ ground-level infrared (IR) camera-based-TSs (GIRTSs) for collecting thermal images to identi-fy the heat loss sources resulting from poor insulation. However, this identifica-tion process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, necessitating extensive data processing. To automate this, an AI-driven approach is necessary. Therefore, this study proposes a deep learning (DL)-based segmentation framework using the Mask Region Proposal Convolutional Neural Network (Mask RCNN) to validate its applicability to these thermal images. The objective of the framework is to au-tomatically identify, and crop heat loss sources caused by weak insulation, while also eliminating obstructive objects present in those images. By doing so, it min-imizes labor-intensive tasks and provides an automated, consistent, and reliable solution. To validate the proposed framework, approximately 2500 thermal imag-es were collected in collaboration with industrial TS partner. Then, 1800 repre-sentative images were carefully selected with the assistance of experts and anno-tated to highlight the target objects (TO) to form the final dataset. Subsequently, a transfer learning strategy was employed to train the dataset, progressively aug-menting the training data volume and fine-tuning the pre-trained baseline Mask RCNN. As a result, the final fine-tuned model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) score of 77.2% for segmenting the TO, demonstrating the significant po-tential of proposed framework in accurately quantifying energy loss in Scottish homes.
Authors:Xuda Ye, Zhennan Zhou
Title: Dimension-free Ergodicity of Path Integral Molecular Dynamics
Abstract:
The quantum thermal average plays a central role in describing the thermodynamic properties of a quantum system. Path integral molecular dynamics (PIMD) is a prevailing approach for computing quantum thermal averages by approximating the quantum partition function as a classical isomorphism on an augmented space, enabling efficient classical sampling, but the theoretical knowledge of the ergodicity of the sampling is lacking. Parallel to the standard PIMD with $N$ ring polymer beads, we also study the Matsubara mode PIMD, where the ring polymer is replaced by a continuous loop composed of $N$ Matsubara modes. Utilizing the generalized $Γ$ calculus, we prove that both the Matsubara mode PIMD and the standard PIMD have uniform-in-$N$ ergodicity, i.e., the convergence rate towards the invariant distribution does not depend on the number of modes or beads $N$.
Authors:Jiangce Chen, Wenzhuo Xu, Martha Baldwin, Björn Nijhuis, Ton van den Boogaard, Noelia Grande Gutiérrez, Sneha Prabha Narra, Christopher McComb
Title: Capturing Local Temperature Evolution during Additive Manufacturing through Fourier Neural Operators
Abstract:
High-fidelity, data-driven models that can quickly simulate thermal behavior during additive manufacturing (AM) are crucial for improving the performance of AM technologies in multiple areas, such as part design, process planning, monitoring, and control. However, the complexities of part geometries make it challenging for current models to maintain high accuracy across a wide range of geometries. Additionally, many models report a low mean square error (MSE) across the entire domain (part). However, in each time step, most areas of the domain do not experience significant changes in temperature, except for the heat-affected zones near recent depositions. Therefore, the MSE-based fidelity measurement of the models may be overestimated. This paper presents a data-driven model that uses Fourier Neural Operator to capture the local temperature evolution during the additive manufacturing process. In addition, the authors propose to evaluate the model using the $R^2$ metric, which provides a relative measure of the model's performance compared to using mean temperature as a prediction. The model was tested on numerical simulations based on the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method for the Direct Energy Deposition process, and the results demonstrate that the model achieves high fidelity as measured by $R^2$ and maintains generalizability to geometries that were not included in the training process.
Authors:Stefano Spinelli, Marcello Farina, Andrea Ballarino
Title: An optimal hierarchical control scheme for smart generation units: an application to combined steam and electricity generation
Abstract:
Optimal management of thermal and energy grids with fluctuating demand and prices requires to orchestrate the generation units (GU) among all their operating modes. A hierarchical approach is proposed to control coupled energy nonlinear systems. The high level hybrid optimization defines the unit commitment, with the optimal transition strategy, and best production profiles. The low level dynamic model predictive control (MPC), receiving the set-points from the upper layer, safely governs the systems considering process constraints. To enhance the overall efficiency of the system, a method to optimal start-up the GU is here presented: a linear parameter varying MPC computes the optimal trajectory in closed-loop by iteratively linearising the system along the previous optimal solution. The introduction of an intermediate equilibrium state as additional decision variable permits the reduction of the optimization horizon,while a terminal cost term steers the system to the target set-point. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors:Alexandra Bünger, Roland Herzog, Andreas Naumann, Martin Stoll
Title: Uncertainty Propagation of Initial Conditions in Thermal Models
Abstract:
The operation of machine tools often demands a highly accurate knowledge of the tool center point's (TCP) position. The displacement of the TCP over time can be inferred from thermal models, which comprise a set of geometrically coupled heat equations. Each of these equations represents the temperature in part of the machine, and they are often formulated on complicated geometries. The accuracy of the TCP prediction depends highly on the accuracy of the model parameters, such as heat exchange parameters, and the initial temperature. Thus it is of utmost interest to determine the influence of these parameters on the TCP displacement prediction. In turn, the accuracy of the parameter estimate is essentially determined by the measurement accuracy and the sensor placement. Determining the accuracy of a given sensor configuration is a key prerequisite of optimal sensor placement. We develop here a thermal model for a particular machine tool. On top of this model we propose two numerical algorithms to evaluate any given thermal sensor configuration with respect to its accuracy. We compute the posterior variances from the posterior covariance matrix with respect to an uncertain initial temperature field. The full matrix is dense and potentially very large, depending on the model size. Thus, we apply a low-rank method to approximate relevant entries, i.e. the variances on its diagonal. We first present a straightforward way to compute this approximation which requires computation of the model sensitivities with with respect to the initial values. Additionally, we present a low-rank tensor method which exploits the underlying system structure. We compare the efficiency of both algorithms with respect to runtime and memory requirements and discuss their respective advantages with regard to optimal sensor placement problems.
Authors:Anirudha Ramesh, Anurag Ghosh, Christoph Mertz, Jeff Schneider
Title: Enhancing Visual Domain Adaptation with Source Preparation
Abstract:
Robotic Perception in diverse domains such as low-light scenarios, where new modalities like thermal imaging and specialized night-vision sensors are increasingly employed, remains a challenge. Largely, this is due to the limited availability of labeled data. Existing Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques, while promising to leverage labels from existing well-lit RGB images, fail to consider the characteristics of the source domain itself. We holistically account for this factor by proposing Source Preparation (SP), a method to mitigate source domain biases. Our Almost Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (AUDA) framework, a label-efficient semi-supervised approach for robotic scenarios -- employs Source Preparation (SP), Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) and Supervised Alignment (SA) from limited labeled data. We introduce CityIntensified, a novel dataset comprising temporally aligned image pairs captured from a high-sensitivity camera and an intensifier camera for semantic segmentation and object detection in low-light settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in semantic segmentation, with experiments showing that SP enhances UDA across a range of visual domains, with improvements up to 40.64% in mIoU over baseline, while making target models more robust to real-world shifts within the target domain. We show that AUDA is a label-efficient framework for effective DA, significantly improving target domain performance with only tens of labeled samples from the target domain.
Authors:Martin Brenner, Napoleon H. Reyes, Teo Susnjak, Andre L. C. Barczak
Title: RGB-D And Thermal Sensor Fusion: A Systematic Literature Review
Abstract:
In the last decade, the computer vision field has seen significant progress in multimodal data fusion and learning, where multiple sensors, including depth, infrared, and visual, are used to capture the environment across diverse spectral ranges. Despite these advancements, there has been no systematic and comprehensive evaluation of fusing RGB-D and thermal modalities to date. While autonomous driving using LiDAR, radar, RGB, and other sensors has garnered substantial research interest, along with the fusion of RGB and depth modalities, the integration of thermal cameras and, specifically, the fusion of RGB-D and thermal data, has received comparatively less attention. This might be partly due to the limited number of publicly available datasets for such applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of both, state-of-the-art and traditional methods used in fusing RGB-D and thermal camera data for various applications, such as site inspection, human tracking, fault detection, and others. The reviewed literature has been categorised into technical areas, such as 3D reconstruction, segmentation, object detection, available datasets, and other related topics. Following a brief introduction and an overview of the methodology, the study delves into calibration and registration techniques, then examines thermal visualisation and 3D reconstruction, before discussing the application of classic feature-based techniques as well as modern deep learning approaches. The paper concludes with a discourse on current limitations and potential future research directions. It is hoped that this survey will serve as a valuable reference for researchers looking to familiarise themselves with the latest advancements and contribute to the RGB-DT research field.
Authors:Lin Jiang, Anthony Dowling, Ming-C. Cheng, Yu Liu
Title: PODTherm-GP: A Physics-based Data-Driven Approach for Effective Architecture-Level Thermal Simulation of Multi-Core CPUs
Abstract:
A thermal simulation methodology derived from the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and the Galerkin projection (GP), hereafter referred to as PODTherm-GP, is evaluated in terms of its efficiency and accuracy in a multi-core CPU. The GP projects the heat transfer equation onto a mathematical space whose basis functions are generated from thermal data enabled by the POD learning algorithm. The thermal solution data are collected from FEniCS using the finite element method (FEM) accounting for appropriate parametric variations. The GP incorporates physical principles of heat transfer in the methodology to reach high accuracy and efficiency. The dynamic power map for the CPU in FEM thermal simulation is generated from gem5 and McPACT, together with the SPLASH-2 benchmarks as the simulation workload. It is shown that PODTherm-GP offers an accurate thermal prediction of the CPU with a resolution as fine as the FEM. It is also demonstrated that PODTherm-GP is capable of predicting the dynamic thermal profile of the chip with a good accuracy beyond the training conditions. Additionally, the approach offers a reduction in degrees of freedom by more than 5 orders of magnitude and a speedup of 4 orders, compared to the FEM.
Authors:Yang Luo, Xiqing Guo, Mingtao Dong, Jin Yu
Title: RGB-T Tracking Based on Mixed Attention
Abstract:
RGB-T tracking involves the use of images from both visible and thermal modalities. The primary objective is to adaptively leverage the relatively dominant modality in varying conditions to achieve more robust tracking compared to single-modality tracking. An RGB-T tracker based on mixed attention mechanism to achieve complementary fusion of modalities (referred to as MACFT) is proposed in this paper. In the feature extraction stage, we utilize different transformer backbone branches to extract specific and shared information from different modalities. By performing mixed attention operations in the backbone to enable information interaction and self-enhancement between the template and search images, it constructs a robust feature representation that better understands the high-level semantic features of the target. Then, in the feature fusion stage, a modality-adaptive fusion is achieved through a mixed attention-based modality fusion network, which suppresses the low-quality modality noise while enhancing the information of the dominant modality. Evaluation on multiple RGB-T public datasets demonstrates that our proposed tracker outperforms other RGB-T trackers on general evaluation metrics while also being able to adapt to longterm tracking scenarios.
Authors:Abhijith Jayakumar, Marc Vuffray, Andrey Y. Lokhov
Title: Learning Energy-Based Representations of Quantum Many-Body States
Abstract:
Efficient representation of quantum many-body states on classical computers is a problem of enormous practical interest. An ideal representation of a quantum state combines a succinct characterization informed by the system's structure and symmetries, along with the ability to predict the physical observables of interest. A number of machine learning approaches have been recently used to construct such classical representations [1-6] which enable predictions of observables [7] and account for physical symmetries [8]. However, the structure of a quantum state gets typically lost unless a specialized ansatz is employed based on prior knowledge of the system [9-12]. Moreover, most such approaches give no information about what states are easier to learn in comparison to others. Here, we propose a new generative energy-based representation of quantum many-body states derived from Gibbs distributions used for modeling the thermal states of classical spin systems. Based on the prior information on a family of quantum states, the energy function can be specified by a small number of parameters using an explicit low-degree polynomial or a generic parametric family such as neural nets, and can naturally include the known symmetries of the system. Our results show that such a representation can be efficiently learned from data using exact algorithms in a form that enables the prediction of expectation values of physical observables. Importantly, the structure of the learned energy function provides a natural explanation for the hardness of learning for a given class of quantum states.
Authors:Theo Jules, Gal Brener, Tal Kachman, Noam Levi, Yohai Bar-Sinai
Title: Charting the Topography of the Neural Network Landscape with Thermal-Like Noise
Abstract:
The training of neural networks is a complex, high-dimensional, non-convex and noisy optimization problem whose theoretical understanding is interesting both from an applicative perspective and for fundamental reasons. A core challenge is to understand the geometry and topography of the landscape that guides the optimization. In this work, we employ standard Statistical Mechanics methods, namely, phase-space exploration using Langevin dynamics, to study this landscape for an over-parameterized fully connected network performing a classification task on random data. Analyzing the fluctuation statistics, in analogy to thermal dynamics at a constant temperature, we infer a clear geometric description of the low-loss region. We find that it is a low-dimensional manifold whose dimension can be readily obtained from the fluctuations. Furthermore, this dimension is controlled by the number of data points that reside near the classification decision boundary. Importantly, we find that a quadratic approximation of the loss near the minimum is fundamentally inadequate due to the exponential nature of the decision boundary and the flatness of the low-loss region. This causes the dynamics to sample regions with higher curvature at higher temperatures, while producing quadratic-like statistics at any given temperature. We explain this behavior by a simplified loss model which is analytically tractable and reproduces the observed fluctuation statistics.
Authors:N. V. Jagtap, M. K. Mudunuru, K. B. Nakshatrala
Title: CoolPINNs: A Physics-informed Neural Network Modeling of Active Cooling in Vascular Systems
Abstract:
Emerging technologies like hypersonic aircraft, space exploration vehicles, and batteries avail fluid circulation in embedded microvasculatures for efficient thermal regulation. Modeling is vital during these engineered systems' design and operational phases. However, many challenges exist in developing a modeling framework. What is lacking is an accurate framework that (i) captures sharp jumps in the thermal flux across complex vasculature layouts, (ii) deals with oblique derivatives (involving tangential and normal components), (iii) handles nonlinearity because of radiative heat transfer, (iv) provides a high-speed forecast for real-time monitoring, and (v) facilitates robust inverse modeling. This paper addresses these challenges by availing the power of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). We develop a fast, reliable, and accurate Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) framework for vascular-based thermal regulation -- called CoolPINNs: a PINNs-based modeling framework for active cooling. The proposed mesh-less framework elegantly overcomes all the mentioned challenges. The significance of the reported research is multi-fold. First, the framework is valuable for real-time monitoring of thermal regulatory systems because of rapid forecasting. Second, researchers can address complex thermoregulation designs inasmuch as the approach is mesh-less. Finally, the framework facilitates systematic parameter identification and inverse modeling studies, perhaps the current framework's most significant utility.
Authors:Ye Tian, Zhengshuo Li, Wenchuan Wu, Miao Fan
Title: Joint Chance-Constrained Economic Dispatch Involving Joint Optimization of Frequency-related Inverter Control and Regulation Reserve Allocation
Abstract:
The issues of uncertainty and frequency security could become significantly serious in power systems with the high penetration of volatile inverter-based renewables (IBRs). These issues make it necessary to consider the uncertainty and frequency-related constraints in the economic dispatch (ED) programs. However, existing ED studies rarely proactively optimize the control parameters of inverter-based resources related to fast regulation (e.g., virtual inertia and droop coefficients) in cooperation with other dispatchable resources to improve the system frequency security and dispatch reliability. This paper first proposes a joint chance-constrained economic dispatch model that jointly optimizes the frequency-related inverter control, the system up/down reserves, and base-point power for the minimal total operational cost. In the proposed model, multiple dispatchable resources including thermal units, dispatchable IBRs and energy storage are considered, and the (virtual) inertias, the regulation reserve allocations and the base-point power are coordinated. To ensure the system reliability, the joint chance-constraint formulation is also adopted. Additionally, since the traditional sample average approximation (SAA) method cost much computational burden, a novel mix-SAA (MSAA) method is proposed to transform the original intractable model into a linear model that can be efficiently solved via commercial solvers. The case studies validated the satisfactory efficacy of the proposed ED model and the efficiency of the MSAA.
Authors:Renato Spacek, Gabriel Stoltz
Title: Extending the regime of linear response with synthetic forcings
Abstract:
Transport coefficients, such as the mobility, thermal conductivity and shear viscosity, are quantities of prime interest in statistical physics. At the macroscopic level, transport coefficients relate an external forcing of magnitude $η$, with $η\ll 1$, acting on the system to an average response expressed through some steady-state flux. In practice, steady-state averages involved in the linear response are computed as time averages over a realization of some stochastic differential equation. Variance reduction techniques are of paramount interest in this context, as the linear response is scaled by a factor of $1/η$, leading to large statistical error. One way to limit the increase in the variance is to allow for larger values of $η$ by increasing the range of values of the forcing for which the nonlinear part of the response is sufficiently small. In theory, one can add an extra forcing to the physical perturbation of the system, called synthetic forcing, as long as this extra forcing preserves the invariant measure of the reference system. The aim is to find synthetic perturbations allowing to reduce the nonlinear part of the response as much as possible. We present a mathematical framework for quantifying the quality of synthetic forcings, in the context of linear response theory, and discuss various possible choices for them. Our findings are illustrated with numerical results in low-dimensional systems.
Authors:Fabio Widmer, Andreas Ritter, Mathias Achermann, Fabian Büeler, Joshua Bagajo, Christopher H. Onder
Title: Highly Efficient Year-Round Energy and Comfort Optimization of HVAC Systems in Electric City Buses
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel approach to perform highly efficient numerical simulations of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system of an electric city bus. The models for this simulation are based on the assumption of a steady-state operation. We show two approaches to obtain the minimum energy requirement for a certain thermal comfort criterion under specific ambient conditions. Due to the computationally efficient approach developed, we can evaluate the model on a large dataset of 7500 scenarios in various ambient conditions to estimate the year-round performance of the system subject to different comfort requirements. Compared to a heating strategy based on positive temperature coefficient (PTC) elements, we can thus show that a heat pump (HP) can reduce the annual mean power consumption by up to 60%. Ceiling-mounted radiant heating elements complementing a PTC heating system can reduce the annual mean power consumption by up to 10%, while they cannot improve the energy efficiency when used in conjunction with a HP. Finally, a broad sensitivity study reveals the fact that improving the HP's heating-mode coefficient of performance (COP) manifests the largest leverage in terms of mean annual power consumption. Moreover, the annual energy expenditure for cooling are around eight times smaller than those for heating. The case study considered thus reveals that the advantages of improving the COP of the cooling mode are significantly lower.
Authors:Marc-Philippe Neumann, Giona Fieni, Camillo Balerna, Pol Duhr, Alberto Cerofolini, Christopher H. Onder
Title: Low-level Online Control of the Formula 1 Power Unit with Feedforward Cylinder Deactivation
Abstract:
Since 2014, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile has prescribed a parallel hybrid powertrain for the Formula 1 race cars. The complex low-level interactions between the thermal and the electrical part represent a non-trivial and challenging system to be controlled online. We present a novel controller architecture composed of a supervisory controller for the energy management, a feedforward cylinder deactivation controller, and a track region-dependent low-level nonlinear model predictive controller to optimize the engine actuators. Except for the nonlinear model predictive controller, the proposed controller subsystems are computationally inexpensive and are real time capable. The framework is tested and validated in a simulation environment for several realistic scenarios disturbed by driver actions or grip conditions on the track. In particular, we analyze how the control architecture deals with an unexpected gearshift trajectory during an acceleration phase. Further, we demonstrate how an increased maximum velocity trajectory impacts the online low-level controller. Our results show a suboptimality over an entire lap with respect to the benchmark solution of 49 ms and 64 ms, respectively, which we deem acceptable. Compared to the same control architecture with full knowledge of the disturbances, the suboptimality amounted to only 2 ms and 17 ms. For all case studies we show that the cylinder deactivation capability decreases the suboptimality by 7 to 8 ms.
Authors:Makoto Nakagawa, Yuki Noguchi, Kei Matsushima, Takayuki Yamada
Title: Level set-based multiscale topology optimization for a thermal cloak design problem using the homogenization method
Abstract:
Artificially designed composite materials consist of microstructures, that exhibit various thermal properties depending on their shapes, such as anisotropic thermal conductivity. One of the representative applications of such composite materials for thermal control is the thermal cloak. This study proposed a topology optimization method based on a level set method for a heat conduction problem to optimally design composite materials that achieve a thermal cloak. The homogenization method was introduced to evaluate its effective thermal conductivity coefficient. Then, we formulated a multiscale topology optimization method for the composite materials in the framework of the homogenization method, where the microstructures were optimized to minimize objective functions defined using the macroscopic temperature field. We presented examples of optimal structures in a two-dimensional problem and discussed the validity of the obtained structures.
Authors:Sheng Luo, Yihan He, Baofang Cai, Xiao Gong, Gengchiau Liang
Title: Probabilistic-Bits based on Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistors for Stochastic Computing
Abstract:
A probabilistic-bit (p-bit) is the fundamental building block in the circuit network of a stochastic computing, and it could produce a continuous random bit-stream with tunable probability. Utilizing the stochasticity in few-domain ferroelectric material(FE), we propose for the first time, the p-bits based on ferroelectric FET. The stochasticity of the FE p-bits stems from the thermal noise-induced lattice vibration, which renders dipole fluctuations and is tunable by an external electric field. The impact of several key FE parameters on p-bits' stochasticity is evaluated, where the domain properties are revealed to play crucial roles. Furthermore, the integer factorization based on FE p-bits circuit network is performed to verify its functionality, and the accuracy is found to depend on FE p-bits' stochasticity. The proposed FE p-bits possess the advantages of both extremely low hardware coast and the compatibility with CMOS-technology, rendering it a promising candidate for stochastic computing applications.
Authors:Hossein Hooshyar, Rahul Kadavil, Victor Paduani, Aboutaleb Haddadi, AHM Jakaria, Aminul Huque
Title: Grid Services by Behind-the-Meter Distributed Energy Resources: NY State Grid Case Study
Abstract:
This paper presents a case study for utilizing behind-the-meter (BTM) distributed energy resources (DERs) to provide grid services when controlled by a DER Management System (DERMS). The testbed consists of a 5,000 buses transient-stability (TS) real-time (RT) model, two 9,500 buses distribution feeders from local utilities modeled in a distribution system simulator (DSS), and hundreds of DERs. MQTT communication protocol is utilized to interface the models in RT. Two main studies are carried. In the first, it is found that DERs with frequency-watt droop response can help maintaining stability in the future NYS grid in which thermal synchronous generators have been substituted by renewable energy resources. In the second, results demonstrate that BTM DERs can provide similar level of frequency regulation services expected from large utility-scale generation.
Authors:Ruo Li, Yichen Yang
Title: Slip and Jump Coefficients for General Gas-Surface Interactions According to the Moment Method
Abstract:
We develop a moment method based on the Hermite series of arbitrary order to calculate viscous-slip, thermal-slip, and temperature-jump coefficients for general gas-surface scattering kernels. Under some usual assumptions of scattering kernels, the solvability is obtained by showing the positive definiteness of the symmetric coefficient matrix in the boundary conditions. For gas flows with the Cercignani-Lampis gas-surface interaction and inverse-power-law intermolecular potentials, the model can capture the slip and jump coefficients accurately with elegant analytic expressions. On the one hand, the proposed method can apply to the cases of arbitrary order moments with increasing accuracy. On the other hand, the explicit formulae for low-order situations are simpler and more accurate than some existing results in references. Therefore, one may apply these formulae in slip and jump conditions to improve the accuracy of macroscopic fluid dynamic models for gas flows.
Authors:Yang Li, Meng Han, Mohammad Shahidehpour, Jiazheng Li, Chao Long
Title: Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Scheduling of Community Integrated Energy Systems with Uncertain Renewable Generations Considering Integrated Demand Response
Abstract:
A community integrated energy system (CIES) is an important carrier of the energy internet and smart city in geographical and functional terms. Its emergence provides a new solution to the problems of energy utilization and environmental pollution. To coordinate the integrated demand response and uncertainty of renewable energy generation (RGs), a data-driven two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model is constructed. A comprehensive norm consisting of the 1-norm and infinity-norm is used as the uncertainty probability distribution information set, thereby avoiding complex probability density information. To address multiple uncertainties of RGs, a generative adversarial network based on the Wasserstein distance with gradient penalty is proposed to generate RG scenarios, which has wide applicability. To further tap the potential of the demand response, we take into account the ambiguity of human thermal comfort and the thermal inertia of buildings. Thus, an integrated demand response mechanism is developed that effectively promotes the consumption of renewable energy. The proposed method is simulated in an actual CIES in North China. In comparison with traditional stochastic programming and robust optimization, it is verified that the proposed DRO model properly balances the relationship between economical operation and robustness while exhibiting stronger adaptability. Furthermore, our approach outperforms other commonly used DRO methods with better operational economy, lower renewable power curtailment rate, and higher computational efficiency.
Authors:Max Rose, Christian A. Hans, Johannes Schiffer
Title: A Predictive Operation Controller for an Electro-Thermal Microgrid Utilizing Variable Flow Temperatures
Abstract:
We propose an optimal operation control strategy for an electro-thermal microgrid. Compared to existing work, our approach increases flexibility by operating the thermal network with variable flow temperatures and in that way explicitly exploits its inherent storage capacities. To this end, the microgrid is represented by a multi-layer network composed of an electrical and a thermal layer. We show that the system behavior can be represented by a discrete-time state model derived from DC power flow approximations and 1d incompressible Euler equations. Both layers are interconnected via heat pumps. By combining this model with desired operating objectives and constraints, we obtain a constrained convex optimization problem. This is used to derive a model predictive control scheme for the optimal operation of electro-thermal microgrids. The performance of the proposed operation control algorithm is demonstrated in a numerical case study.
Authors:Jack Y. Araz, Michael Spannowsky
Title: Quantum-probabilistic Hamiltonian learning for generative modelling & anomaly detection
Abstract:
The Hamiltonian of an isolated quantum mechanical system determines its dynamics and physical behaviour. This study investigates the possibility of learning and utilising a system's Hamiltonian and its variational thermal state estimation for data analysis techniques. For this purpose, we employ the method of Quantum Hamiltonian-based models for the generative modelling of simulated Large Hadron Collider data and demonstrate the representability of such data as a mixed state. In a further step, we use the learned Hamiltonian for anomaly detection, showing that different sample types can form distinct dynamical behaviours once treated as a quantum many-body system. We exploit these characteristics to quantify the difference between sample types. Our findings show that the methodologies designed for field theory computations can be utilised in machine learning applications to employ theoretical approaches in data analysis techniques.
Authors:Josy John, K. Harikumar, J. Senthilnath, Suresh Sundaram
Title: An Efficient Approach with Dynamic Multi-Swarm of UAVs for Forest Firefighting
Abstract:
In this paper, the Multi-Swarm Cooperative Information-driven search and Divide and Conquer mitigation control (MSCIDC) approach is proposed for faster detection and mitigation of forest fire by reducing the loss of biodiversity, nutrients, soil moisture, and other intangible benefits. A swarm is a cooperative group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that fly together to search and quench the fire effectively. The multi-swarm cooperative information-driven search uses a multi-level search comprising cooperative information-driven exploration and exploitation for quick/accurate detection of fire location. The search level is selected based on the thermal sensor information about the potential fire area. The dynamicity of swarms, aided by global regulative repulsion and merging between swarms, reduces the detection and mitigation time compared to the existing methods. The local attraction among the members of the swarm helps the non-detector members to reach the fire location faster, and divide-and-conquer mitigation control ensures a non-overlapping fire sector allocation for all members quenching the fire. The performance of MSCIDC has been compared with different multi-UAV methods using a simulated environment of pine forest. The performance clearly shows that MSCIDC mitigates fire much faster than the multi-UAV methods. The Monte-Carlo simulation results indicate that the proposed method reduces the average forest area burnt by $65\%$ and mission time by $60\%$ compared to the best result case of the multi-UAV approaches, guaranteeing a faster and successful mission.
Authors:Hsin-Yuan Huang, Yu Tong, Di Fang, Yuan Su
Title: Learning many-body Hamiltonians with Heisenberg-limited scaling
Abstract:
Learning a many-body Hamiltonian from its dynamics is a fundamental problem in physics. In this work, we propose the first algorithm to achieve the Heisenberg limit for learning an interacting $N$-qubit local Hamiltonian. After a total evolution time of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-1})$, the proposed algorithm can efficiently estimate any parameter in the $N$-qubit Hamiltonian to $ε$-error with high probability. The proposed algorithm is robust against state preparation and measurement error, does not require eigenstates or thermal states, and only uses $\mathrm{polylog}(ε^{-1})$ experiments. In contrast, the best previous algorithms, such as recent works using gradient-based optimization or polynomial interpolation, require a total evolution time of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$ experiments. Our algorithm uses ideas from quantum simulation to decouple the unknown $N$-qubit Hamiltonian $H$ into noninteracting patches, and learns $H$ using a quantum-enhanced divide-and-conquer approach. We prove a matching lower bound to establish the asymptotic optimality of our algorithm.
Authors:Abhijith Thoopul Anantharanga, Mohammad Saber Hashemi, Azadeh Sheidaei
Title: Linking Properties to Microstructure in Liquid Metal Embedded Elastomers via Machine Learning
Abstract:
Liquid metals (LM) are embedded in an elastomer matrix to obtain soft composites with unique thermal, dielectric, and mechanical properties. They have applications in soft robotics, biomedical engineering, and wearable electronics. By linking the structure to the properties of these materials, it is possible to perform material design rationally. Liquid-metal embedded elastomers (LMEEs) have been designed for targeted electro-thermo-mechanical properties by semi-supervised learning of structure-property (SP) links in a variational autoencoder network (VAE). The design parameters are the microstructural descriptors that are physically meaningful and have affine relationships with the synthetization of the studied particulate composite. The machine learning (ML) model is trained on a generated dataset of microstructural descriptors with their multifunctional property quantities as their labels. Sobol sequence is used for in-silico Design of Experiment (DoE) by sampling the design space to generate a comprehensive dataset of 3D microstructure realizations via a packing algorithm. The mechanical responses of the generated microstructures are simulated using a previously developed Finite Element (FE) model, considering the surface tension induced by LM inclusions, while the linear thermal and dielectric constants are homogenized with the help of our in-house Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) package. Following the training by minimization of an appropriate loss function, the VAE encoder acts as the surrogate of numerical solvers of the multifunctional homogenizations, and its decoder is used for the material design. Our results indicate the satisfactory performance of the surrogate model and the inverse calculator with respect to high-fidelity numerical simulations validated with LMEE experimental results.
Authors:Sanmitra Banerjee, Mahdi Nikdast, Krishnendu Chakrabarty
Title: Characterizing Coherent Integrated Photonic Neural Networks under Imperfections
Abstract:
Integrated photonic neural networks (IPNNs) are emerging as promising successors to conventional electronic AI accelerators as they offer substantial improvements in computing speed and energy efficiency. In particular, coherent IPNNs use arrays of Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) for unitary transformations to perform energy-efficient matrix-vector multiplication. However, the underlying MZI devices in IPNNs are susceptible to uncertainties stemming from optical lithographic variations and thermal crosstalk and can experience imprecisions due to non-uniform MZI insertion loss and quantization errors due to low-precision encoding in the tuned phase angles. In this paper, we, for the first time, systematically characterize the impact of such uncertainties and imprecisions (together referred to as imperfections) in IPNNs using a bottom-up approach. We show that their impact on IPNN accuracy can vary widely based on the tuned parameters (e.g., phase angles) of the affected components, their physical location, and the nature and distribution of the imperfections. To improve reliability measures, we identify critical IPNN building blocks that, under imperfections, can lead to catastrophic degradation in the classification accuracy. We show that under multiple simultaneous imperfections, the IPNN inferencing accuracy can degrade by up to 46%, even when the imperfection parameters are restricted within a small range. Our results also indicate that the inferencing accuracy is sensitive to imperfections affecting the MZIs in the linear layers next to the input layer of the IPNN.
Authors:Siu-Wing Cheng, Man Ting Wong
Title: On Non-Negative Quadratic Programming in Geometric Optimization
Abstract:
We present experimental and theoretical results on a method that applies a numerical solver iteratively to solve several non-negative quadratic programming problems in geometric optimization. The method gains efficiency by exploiting the potential sparsity of the intermediate solutions. We implemented the method to call quadprog of MATLAB iteratively. In comparison with a single call of quadprog, we obtain a 10-fold speedup on two proximity graph problems in $\mathbb{R}^d$ on some public data sets, a 10-fold speedup on the minimum enclosing ball problem on random points in a unit cube in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and a 5-fold speedup on the polytope distance problem on random points from a cube in $\mathbb{R}^d$ when the input size is significantly larger than the dimension; we also obtain a 2-fold or more speedup on deblurring some gray-scale space and thermal images via non-negative least square. We compare with two minimum enclosing ball software by Gärtner and Fischer et al.; for 1000 nearly cospherical points or random points in a unit cube, the iterative method overtakes the software by Gärtner at 20 dimensions and the software by Fischer et al. at 170 dimensions. In the image deblurring experiments, the iterative method compares favorably with other software that can solve non-negative least square, including FISTA with backtracking, SBB, FNNLS, and lsqnonneg of MATLAB. We analyze theoretically the number of iterations taken by the iterative scheme to reduce the gap between the current solution value and the optimum by a factor $e$. Under certain assumptions, we prove a bound proportional to the square root of the number of variables.
Authors:Amir Tasbihi, Frank R. Kschischang
Title: Practical Considerations in Direct Detection Under Tukey Signalling
Abstract:
The deliberate introduction of controlled intersymbol interference (ISI) in Tukey signalling enables the recovery of signal amplitude and (in part) signal phase under direct detection, giving rise to significant data rate improvements compared to intensity modulation with direct detection (IMDD). The use of an integrate-and-dump detector makes precise waveform shaping unnecessary, thereby equipping the scheme with a high degree of robustness to nonlinear signal distortions introduced by practical modulators. Signal sequences drawn from star quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM) formats admit an efficient trellis description that facilitates codebook design and low-complexity near maximum-likelihood sequence detection in the presence of both shot noise and thermal noise. Under the practical (though suboptimal) allocation of a 50% duty cycle between ISI-free and ISI-present signalling segments, at a symbol rate of 50 Gbaud and a launch power of -10 dBm the Tukey scheme has a maximum theoretically achievable throughput of 200 Gb/s with an (8,4)-SQAM constellation, while an IMDD scheme achieves about 145 Gb/s using PAM-8. Note that the two mentioned constellations have the same number of magnitude levels and the difference in throughput is resulting from exploiting phase information under using a complex-valued signal constellation.
Authors:Xuanyu Liu, Huajie Chen, Christoph Ortner
Title: Convergence of the Discrete Minimum Energy Path
Abstract:
The minimum energy path (MEP) describes the mechanism of reaction, and the energy barrier along the path can be used to calculate the reaction rate in thermal systems. The nudged elastic band (NEB) method is one of the most commonly used schemes to compute MEPs numerically. It approximates an MEP by a discrete set of configuration images, where the discretization size determines both computational cost and accuracy of the simulations. In this paper, we consider a discrete MEP to be a stationary state of the NEB method and prove an optimal convergence rate of the discrete MEP with respect to the number of images. Numerical simulations for the transitions of some several proto-typical model systems are performed to support the theory.
Authors:Paul R. Genssler, Austin Vas, Hussam Amrouch
Title: Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing: How Thermal-Friendly for Edge Computing?
Abstract:
Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging machine learning (ML) methods. It is based on large vectors of binary or bipolar symbols and a few simple mathematical operations. The promise of HDC is a highly efficient implementation for embedded systems like wearables. While fast implementations have been presented, other constraints have not been considered for edge computing. In this work, we aim at answering how thermal-friendly HDC for edge computing is. Devices like smartwatches, smart glasses, or even mobile systems have a restrictive cooling budget due to their limited volume. Although HDC operations are simple, the vectors are large, resulting in a high number of CPU operations and thus a heavy load on the entire system potentially causing temperature violations. In this work, the impact of HDC on the chip's temperature is investigated for the first time. We measure the temperature and power consumption of a commercial embedded system and compare HDC with conventional CNN. We reveal that HDC causes up to 6.8°C higher temperatures and leads to up to 47% more CPU throttling. Even when both HDC and CNN aim for the same throughput (i.e., perform a similar number of classifications per second), HDC still causes higher on-chip temperatures due to the larger power consumption.
Authors:Zihang Dong, Xi Zhang, Goran Strbac
Title: Values of Coordinated Residential Space Heating in Demand Response Provision
Abstract:
Demand-side response from space heating in residential buildings can potentially provide a huge amount of flexibility for the power system, particularly with deep electrification of the heat sector. In this context, this paper presents a novel distributed control strategy to coordinate space heating across numerous residential households with diversified thermal parameters. By employing an iterative algorithm under the game-theoretical framework, each household adjusts its own heating schedule through demand shift and thermal comfort compensation with the purpose of achieving individual cost savings, whereas the aggregate peak demand is effectively shaved on the system level. Additionally, an innovative thermal comfort model which considers both the temporal and spatial differences in customised thermal comfort requirements is proposed. Through a series of case studies, it is demonstrated that the proposed space heating coordination strategy can facilitate effective energy arbitrage for individual buildings, driving a 13.96% reduction in system operational cost and 28.22% peak shaving. Moreover, the superiority of the proposed approach in thermal comfort maintenance is numerically analysed based on the proposed thermal comfort quantification model.
Authors:Aamir Arsalan, Muhammad Majid, Imran Fareed Nizami, Waleed Manzoor, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Jihyoung Ryu
Title: Human Stress Assessment: A Comprehensive Review of Methods Using Wearable Sensors and Non-wearable Techniques
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive review of methods covering significant subjective and objective human stress detection techniques available in the literature. The methods for measuring human stress responses could include subjective questionnaires (developed by psychologists) and objective markers observed using data from wearable and non-wearable sensors. In particular, wearable sensor-based methods commonly use data from electroencephalography, electrocardiogram, galvanic skin response, electromyography, electrodermal activity, heart rate, heart rate variability, and photoplethysmography both individually and in multimodal fusion strategies. Whereas, methods based on non-wearable sensors include strategies such as analyzing pupil dilation and speech, smartphone data, eye movement, body posture, and thermal imaging. Whenever a stressful situation is encountered by an individual, physiological, physical, or behavioral change is induced which help in coping with the challenge at hand. A wide range of studies has attempted to establish a relationship between these stressful situations and the response of human beings by using different kinds of psychological, physiological, physical, and behavioral measures. Inspired by the lack of availability of a definitive verdict about the relationship of human stress with these different kinds of markers, a detailed survey about human stress detection methods is conducted in this paper. In particular, we explore how stress detection methods can benefit from artificial intelligence utilizing relevant data from various sources. This review will prove to be a reference document that would provide guidelines for future research enabling effective detection of human stress conditions.
Authors:Samuel Olivier, Will Pazner, Terry S. Haut, Ben C. Yee
Title: A Family of Independent Variable Eddington Factor Methods with Efficient Preconditioned Iterative Solvers
Abstract:
We present a family of discretizations for the Variable Eddington Factor (VEF) equations that have high-order accuracy on curved meshes and efficient preconditioned iterative solvers. The VEF discretizations are combined with a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin transport discretization to form an effective high-order, linear transport method. The VEF discretizations are derived by extending the unified analysis of Discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic problems to the VEF equations. This framework is used to define analogs of the interior penalty, second method of Bassi and Rebay, minimal dissipation local Discontinuous Galerkin, and continuous finite element methods. The analysis of subspace correction preconditioners, which use a continuous operator to iteratively precondition the discontinuous discretization, is extended to the case of the non-symmetric VEF system. Numerical results demonstrate that the VEF discretizations have arbitrary-order accuracy on curved meshes, preserve the thick diffusion limit, and are effective on a proxy problem from thermal radiative transfer in both outer transport iterations and inner preconditioned linear solver iterations. In addition, a parallel weak scaling study of the interior penalty VEF discretization demonstrates the scalability of the method out to 1152 processors.
Authors:Sharana Kumar Shivanand, Bojana Rosić, Hermann G. Matthies
Title: Stochastic Modelling of Symmetric Positive Definite Material Tensors
Abstract:
Spatial symmetries and invariances play an important role in the behaviour of materials and should be respected in the description and modelling of material properties. The focus here is the class of physically symmetric and positive definite tensors, as they appear often in the description of materials, and one wants to be able to prescribe certain classes of spatial symmetries and invariances for each member of the whole ensemble, while at the same time demanding that the mean or expected value of the ensemble be subject to a possibly 'higher' spatial invariance class. We formulate a modelling framework which not only respects these two requirements$-$positive definiteness and invariance$-$but also allows a fine control over orientation on one hand, and strength/size on the other. As the set of positive definite tensors is not a linear space, but rather an open convex cone in the linear space of physically symmetric tensors, we consider it advantageous to widen the notion of mean to the so-called Fréchet mean on a metric space, which is based on distance measures or metrics between positive definite tensors other than the usual Euclidean one. It is shown how the random ensemble can be modelled and generated, independently in its scaling and orientational or directional aspects, with a Lie algebra representation via a memoryless transformation. The parameters which describe the elements in this Lie algebra are then to be considered as random fields on the domain of interest. As an example, a 2D and a 3D model of steady-state heat conduction in a human proximal femur, a bone with high material anisotropy, is modelled with a random thermal conductivity tensor, and the numerical results show the distinct impact of incorporating into the constitutive model different material uncertainties$-$scaling, orientation, and prescribed material symmetry$-$on the desired quantities of interest.
Authors:Duarte Rondao, Nabil Aouf, Mark A. Richardson
Title: ChiNet: Deep Recurrent Convolutional Learning for Multimodal Spacecraft Pose Estimation
Abstract:
This paper presents an innovative deep learning pipeline which estimates the relative pose of a spacecraft by incorporating the temporal information from a rendezvous sequence. It leverages the performance of long short-term memory (LSTM) units in modelling sequences of data for the processing of features extracted by a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone. Three distinct training strategies, which follow a coarse-to-fine funnelled approach, are combined to facilitate feature learning and improve end-to-end pose estimation by regression. The capability of CNNs to autonomously ascertain feature representations from images is exploited to fuse thermal infrared data with red-green-blue (RGB) inputs, thus mitigating the effects of artefacts from imaging space objects in the visible wavelength. Each contribution of the proposed framework, dubbed ChiNet, is demonstrated on a synthetic dataset, and the complete pipeline is validated on experimental data.
Authors:Joseph Breda, Shwetak Patel
Title: Intuitive and Ubiquitous Fever Monitoring Using Smartphones and Smartwatches
Abstract:
Inside all smart devices, such as smartphones or smartwatches, there are thermally sensitive resistors known as thermistors which are used to monitor the temperature of the device. These thermistors are sensitive to temperature changes near their location on-device. While they are designed to measure the temperature of the device components such as the battery, they can also sense changes in the temperature of the ambient environment or thermal entities in contact with the device. We have developed a model to estimate core body temperature from signals sensed by these thermistors during a user interaction in which the user places the capacitive touchscreen of a smart device against a thermal site on their body such as their forehead. During the interaction, the device logs the temperature sensed by the thermistors as well as the raw capacitance seen by the touch screen to capture features describing the rate of heat transfer from the body to the device and device-to-skin contact respectively. These temperature and contact features are then used to model the rate of heat transferred from the user's body to the device and thus core-body temperature of the user for ubiquitous and accessible fever monitoring using only a smart device. We validate this system in a lab environment on a simulated skin-like heat source with a temperature estimate mean absolute error of 0.743$^{\circ}$F (roughly 0.4$^{\circ}$C) and limit of agreement of $\pm2.374^{\circ}$F (roughly 1.3$^{\circ}$C) which is comparable to some off-the-shelf peripheral and tympanic thermometers. We found a Pearson's correlation $R^2$ of 0.837 between ground truth temperature and temperature estimated by our system. We also deploy this system in an ongoing clinical study on a population of 7 participants in a clinical environment to show the similarity between simulated and clinical trials.
Authors:Mohammad Saber Hashemi, Masoud Safdari, Azadeh Sheidaei
Title: A Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Accelerating the Design of Particulate Composites: Application to Thermal Conductivity
Abstract:
A supervised machine learning (ML) based computational methodology for the design of particulate multifunctional composite materials with desired thermal conductivity (TC) is presented. The design variables are physical descriptors of the material microstructure that directly link microstructure to the material's properties. A sufficiently large and uniformly sampled database was generated based on the Sobol sequence. Microstructures were realized using an efficient dense packing algorithm, and the TCs were obtained using our previously developed Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) homogenization method. Our optimized ML method is trained over the generated database and establishes the complex relationship between the structure and properties. Finally, the application of the trained ML model in the inverse design of a new class of composite materials, liquid metal (LM) elastomer, with desired TC is discussed. The results show that the surrogate model is accurate in predicting the microstructure behavior with respect to high-fidelity FFT simulations, and inverse design is robust in finding microstructure parameters according to case studies.
Authors:Md Ahsanul Abeed, Supriyo Bandyopadhyay
Title: Low Barrier Nanomagnet Design for Binary Stochastic Neurons: Design Challenges for Real Nanomagnets with Fabrication Defects
Abstract:
Much attention has been focused on the design of low barrier nanomagnets (LBM), whose magnetizations vary randomly in time owing to thermal noise, for use in binary stochastic neurons (BSN) which are hardware accelerators for machine learning. The performance of BSNs depend on two important parameters: the correlation time associated with the random magnetization dynamics in a LBM, and the spin-polarized pinning current which stabilizes the magnetization of a LBM in a chosen direction within a chosen time. Here, we show that common fabrication defects in LBMs make these two parameters unpredictable since they are strongly sensitive to the defects. That makes the design of BSNs with real LBMs very challenging. Unless the LBMs are fabricated with extremely tight control, the BSNs which use them could be unreliable or suffer from poor yield.
Authors:Piotr Bartman, Krzysztof Bartosz, Michał Jureczka, Paweł Szafraniec
Title: Numerical analysis of a non-clamped dynamic thermoviscoelastic contact problem
Abstract:
In this work, we analyze a non-clamped dynamic viscoelastic contact problem involving thermal effect. The friction law is described by a non-monotone relation between the tangential stress and the tangential velocity. This leads to a system of second-order inclusion for displacement and a parabolic equation for temperature. We provide a fully discrete approximation of the problem and find optimal error estimates without any smallness assumption on the data. The theoretical result is illustrated by numerical simulations.
Authors:Ayan K. Biswas, Jayasimha Atulasimha, Supriyo Bandyopadhyay
Title: Energy-efficient hybrid spintronic-straintronic reconfigurable bit comparator
Abstract:
We propose a reconfigurable bit comparator implemented with a nanowire spin valve whose two contacts are magnetostrictive with bistable magnetization. Reference and input bits are "written" into the magnetization states of the two contacts with electrically generated strain and the spin-valve's resistance is lowered if they match. Multiple comparators can be interfaced in parallel with a magneto-tunneling junction to determine if an N-bit input stream matches an N-bit reference stream bit by bit. The system is robust against thermal noise at room temperature and a 16-bit comparator can operate at roughly 416 MHz while dissipating at most 420 aJ per cycle.
Authors:Naveed D. Riaziat, Joseph Chen, Axel Krieger, Jeremy D. Brown
Title: Towards Autonomous Robotic Electrosurgery via Thermal Imaging
Abstract:
Electrosurgery is a surgical technique that can improve tissue cutting by reducing cutting force and bleeding. However, electrosurgery adds a risk of thermal injury to surrounding tissue. Expert surgeons estimate desirable cutting velocities based on experience but have no quantifiable reference to indicate if a particular velocity is optimal. Furthermore, prior demonstrations of autonomous electrosurgery have primarily used constant tool velocity, which is not robust to changes in electrosurgical tissue characteristics, power settings, or tool type. Thermal imaging feedback provides information that can be used to reduce thermal injury while balancing cutting force by controlling tool velocity. We introduce Thermography for Electrosurgical Rate Modulation via Optimization (ThERMO) to autonomously reduce thermal injury while balancing cutting force by intelligently controlling tool velocity. We demonstrate ThERMO in tissue phantoms and compare its performance to the constant velocity approach. Overall, ThERMO improves cut success rate by a factor of three and can reduce peak cutting force by a factor of two. ThERMO responds to varying environmental disturbances, reduces damage to tissue, and completes cutting tasks that would otherwise result in catastrophic failure for the constant velocity approach.
Authors:Ahmed S. Alahmed, Audun Botterud, Saurabh Amin, Ali T. Al-Awami
Title: Watts and Drops: Co-Scheduling Power and Water in Desalination Plants
Abstract:
We develop a mathematical framework to jointly schedule water and electricity in a profit-maximizing renewable colocated water desalination plant that integrates both thermal and membrane based technologies. The price-taking desalination plant sells desalinated water to a water utility at a given price and engages in bidirectional electricity transactions with the grid, purchasing or selling power based on its net electricity demand. We show that the optimal scheduling policy depends on the plant's internal renewable generation and follows a simple threshold structure. Under the optimal policy, thermal based water output decreases monotonically with renewable output, while membrane based water output increases monotonically. We characterize the structure and intuition behind the threshold policy and examine key special properties.
Authors:Christopher Silver, Thangarajah Akilan
Title: Thermal Imaging-based Real-time Fall Detection using Motion Flow and Attention-enhanced Convolutional Recurrent Architecture
Abstract:
Falls among seniors are a major public health issue. Existing solutions using wearable sensors, ambient sensors, and RGB-based vision systems face challenges in reliability, user compliance, and practicality. Studies indicate that stakeholders, such as older adults and eldercare facilities, prefer non-wearable, passive, privacy-preserving, and real-time fall detection systems that require no user interaction. This study proposes an advanced thermal fall detection method using a Bidirectional Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (BiConvLSTM) model, enhanced with spatial, temporal, feature, self, and general attention mechanisms. Through systematic experimentation across hundreds of model variations exploring the integration of attention mechanisms, recurrent modules, and motion flow, we identified top-performing architectures. Among them, BiConvLSTM achieved state-of-the-art performance with a ROC-AUC of $99.7\%$ on the TSF dataset and demonstrated robust results on TF-66, a newly emerged, diverse, and privacy-preserving benchmark. These results highlight the generalizability and practicality of the proposed model, setting new standards for thermal fall detection and paving the way toward deployable, high-performance solutions.
Authors:Sriram Narayanan, Mani Ramanagopal, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan
Title: Dual Band Video Thermography Near Ambient Conditions
Abstract:
Long-wave infrared radiation captured by a thermal camera consists of two components: (a) light from the environment reflected or transmitted by a surface, and (b) light emitted by the surface after undergoing heat transport through the object and exchanging heat with the surrounding environment. Separating these components is essential for understanding object properties such as emissivity, temperature, reflectance and shape. Previous thermography studies often assume that only one component is dominant (e.g., in welding) or that the second component is constant and can be subtracted. However, in near-ambient conditions, which are most relevant to computer vision applications, both components are typically comparable in magnitude and vary over time. We introduce the first method that separates reflected and emitted components of light in videos captured by two thermal cameras with different spectral sensitivities. We derive a dual-band thermal image formation model and develop algorithms to estimate the surface's emissivity and its time-varying temperature while isolating a dynamic background. We quantitatively evaluate our approach using carefully calibrated emissivities for a range of materials and show qualitative results on complex everyday scenes, such as a glass filled with hot liquid and people moving in the background.
Authors:Zeqing Leo Yuan, Mani Ramanagopal, Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan
Title: Ordinality of Visible-Thermal Image Intensities for Intrinsic Image Decomposition
Abstract:
Decomposing an image into its intrinsic photometric factors--shading and reflectance--is a long-standing challenge due to the lack of extensive ground-truth data for real-world scenes. Recent methods rely on synthetic data or sparse annotations for limited indoor and even fewer outdoor scenes. We introduce a novel training-free approach for intrinsic image decomposition using only a pair of visible and thermal images. We leverage the principle that light not reflected from an opaque surface is absorbed and detected as heat by a thermal camera. This allows us to relate the ordinalities between visible and thermal image intensities to the ordinalities of shading and reflectance, which can densely self-supervise an optimizing neural network to recover shading and reflectance. We perform quantitative evaluations with known reflectance and shading under natural and artificial lighting, and qualitative experiments across diverse outdoor scenes. The results demonstrate superior performance over recent learning-based models and point toward a scalable path to curating real-world ordinal supervision, previously infeasible via manual labeling.
Authors:Yusheng Zheng, Wenxue Liu, Yunhong Che, Ferdinand Grimm, Jingyuan Zhao, Xiaosong Hu, Simona Onori, Remus Teodorescu, Gregory J. Offer
Title: Merging Physics-Based Synthetic Data and Machine Learning for Thermal Monitoring of Lithium-ion Batteries: The Role of Data Fidelity
Abstract:
Since the internal temperature is less accessible than surface temperature, there is an urgent need to develop accurate and real-time estimation algorithms for better thermal management and safety. This work presents a novel framework for resource-efficient and scalable development of accurate, robust, and adaptive internal temperature estimation algorithms by blending physics-based modeling with machine learning, in order to address the key challenges in data collection, model parameterization, and estimator design that traditionally hinder both approaches. In this framework, a physics-based model is leveraged to generate simulation data that includes different operating scenarios by sweeping the model parameters and input profiles. Such a cheap simulation dataset can be used to pre-train the machine learning algorithm to capture the underlying mapping relationship. To bridge the simulation-to-reality gap resulting from imperfect modeling, transfer learning with unsupervised domain adaptation is applied to fine-tune the pre-trained machine learning model, by using limited operational data (without internal temperature values) from target batteries. The proposed framework is validated under different operating conditions and across multiple cylindrical batteries with convective air cooling, achieving a root mean square error of 0.5 °C when relying solely on prior knowledge of battery thermal properties, and less than 0.1 °C when using thermal parameters close to the ground truth. Furthermore, the role of the simulation data quality in the proposed framework has been comprehensively investigated to identify promising ways of synthetic data generation to guarantee the performance of the machine learning model.
Authors:Binh Huy Nguyen, Matti Schneider
Title: Symmetries in stochastic homogenization and acclimatizations for the RVE method
Abstract:
We investigate the implications of a given symmetry of a random microstructure on the obtained effective tensor and its fluctuation in the context of thermal conductivity, and study strategies for enforcing these symmetries in postprocessing via orthogonal projectors. Within the framework of the representative volume element (RVE) method, we establish the invariance conditions for the effective tensor and its fluctuation under different symmetry groups of the microstructure. Interestingly, the symmetry of the considered cell type in the RVE method may break the ensemble symmetry and compromise the approximation of the effective properties. To rectify this issue, we introduce dedicated techniques which permit to enforce the expected symmetries in postprocessing and study the implications on the bounds for the effective properties as well as the total, the random and the systematic errors. We provide theoretical arguments that suitable projections lead to unbiased variance-reduction strategies which furthermore enforce the expected symmetries exactly. Through large-scale FFT-based homogenization simulations, we study the symmetry structure of the estimated effective conductivities and their fluctuations. Moreover, we demonstrate the power of the symmetry-projection techniques for fiber-reinforced composite microstructures of industrial scale.
Authors:Riddhiman Raut, Evan M. Mihalko, Amrita Basak
Title: Multiscale Graph Neural Network for Turbulent Flow-Thermal Prediction Around a Complex-Shaped Pin-Fin
Abstract:
This study presents the development of a domain-responsive edge-aware multiscale Graph Neural Network for predicting steady, turbulent flow and thermal behavior in a two-dimensional channel containing arbitrarily shaped complex pin-fin geometries. The training dataset was constructed through an automated framework that integrated geometry generation, meshing, and flow-field solutions in ANSYS Fluent. The pin-fin geometry was parameterized using piecewise cubic splines, producing 1,000 diverse configurations through Latin Hypercube Sampling. Each simulation was converted into a graph structure, where nodes carried a feature vector containing spatial coordinates, a normalized streamwise position, one-hot boundary indicators, and a signed distance to the nearest boundary such as wall. This graph structure served as input to the newly developed Graph Neural Network, which was trained to predict temperature, velocity magnitude, and pressure at each node using data from ANSYS. The network predicted fields with outstanding accuracy, capturing boundary layers, recirculation, and the stagnation region upstream of the pin-fins while reducing wall time by 2-3 orders of magnitude. In conclusion, the novel graph neural network offered a fast and reliable surrogate for simulations in complex flow configurations.
Authors:Paul M. Riechers, Thomas J. Elliott
Title: Identifiability and minimality bounds of quantum and post-quantum models of classical stochastic processes
Abstract:
To make sense of the world around us, we develop models, constructed to enable us to replicate, describe, and explain the behaviours we see. Focusing on the broad case of sequences of correlated random variables, i.e., classical stochastic processes, we tackle the question of determining whether or not two different models produce the same observable behavior. This is the problem of identifiability. Curiously, the physics of the model need not correspond to the physics of the observations; recent work has shown that it is even advantageous -- in terms of memory and thermal efficiency -- to employ quantum models to generate classical stochastic processes. We resolve the identifiability problem in this regime, providing a means to compare any two models of a classical process, be the models classical, quantum, or `post-quantum', by mapping them to a canonical `generalized' hidden Markov model. Further, this enables us to place (sometimes tight) bounds on the minimal dimension required of a quantum model to generate a given classical stochastic process.
Authors:Ferdinand Thein, Hendrik Ranocha
Title: Computing Radially-Symmetric Solutions of the Ultra-Relativistic Euler Equations with Entropy-Stable Discontinuous Galerkin Methods
Abstract:
The ultra--relativistic Euler equations describe gases in the relativistic case when the thermal energy dominates. These equations for an ideal gas are given in terms of the pressure, the spatial part of the dimensionless four-velocity, and the particle density. Kunik et al.\ (2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2024.113330) proposed genuine multi--dimensional benchmark problems for the ultra--relativistic Euler equations. In particular, they compared full two-dimensional discontinuous Galerkin simulations for radially symmetric problems with solutions computed using a specific one-dimensional scheme. Of particular interest in the solutions are the formation of shock waves and a pressure blow-up. In the present work we derive an entropy-stable flux for the ultra--relativistic Euler equations. Therefore, we derive the main field (or entropy variables) and the corresponding potentials. We then present the entropy-stable flux and conclude with simulation results for different test cases both in 2D and in 3D.
Authors:Ferdinand Thein, Hendrik Ranocha
Title: Computing Radially-Symmetric Solutions of the Ultra-Relativistic Euler Equations with Entropy-Stable Discontinuous Galerkin Methods
Abstract:
The ultra--relativistic Euler equations describe gases in the relativistic case when the thermal energy dominates. These equations for an ideal gas are given in terms of the pressure, the spatial part of the dimensionless four-velocity, and the particle density. Kunik et al.\ (2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2024.113330) proposed genuine multi--dimensional benchmark problems for the ultra--relativistic Euler equations. In particular, they compared full two-dimensional discontinuous Galerkin simulations for radially symmetric problems with solutions computed using a specific one-dimensional scheme. Of particular interest in the solutions are the formation of shock waves and a pressure blow-up. In the present work we derive an entropy-stable flux for the ultra--relativistic Euler equations. Therefore, we derive the main field (or entropy variables) and the corresponding potentials. We then present the entropy-stable flux and conclude with simulation results for different test cases both in 2D and in 3D.
Authors:Mehran Ebrahimi, Masayuki Yano
Title: An online-adaptive hyperreduced reduced basis element method for parameterized component-based nonlinear systems using hierarchical error estimation
Abstract:
We present an online-adaptive hyperreduced reduced basis element method for model order reduction of parameterized, component-based nonlinear systems. The method, in the offline phase, prepares a library of hyperreduced archetype components of various fidelity levels and, in the online phase, assembles the target system using instantiated components whose fidelity is adaptively selected to satisfy a user-prescribed system-level error tolerance. To achieve this, we introduce a hierarchical error estimation framework that compares solutions at successive fidelity levels and drives a local refinement strategy based on component-wise error indicators. We also provide an efficient estimator for the system-level error to ensure that the adaptive strategy meets the desired accuracy. Component-wise hyperreduction is performed using an empirical quadrature procedure, with the training accuracy guided by the Brezzi--Rappaz--Raviart theorem. The proposed method is demonstrated on a family of nonlinear thermal fin systems comprising up to 225 components and 68 parameters. Numerical results show that the hyperreduced basis element model achieves O(100) computational reduction at 1% error level relative to the truth finite-element model. In addition, the adaptive refinement strategy provides more effective error control than uniform refinement by selectively enriching components with higher local errors.
Authors:Zhong Guo, Prabir Barooah
Title: A Central Chilled Water Plant Model for Designing Learning-Based Controllers
Abstract:
We describe a framework of modeling a central chilled water plant (CCWP) that consists of an aggregate cooling coil, a number of heterogeneous chillers and cooling towers, and a chilled water-based thermal energy storage system. We improve upon existing component models from the open literature using a constrained optimization-based framework to ensure that the models respect capacities of all the heat exchangers (cooling coils, chillers, and cooling towers) irrespective of the inputs provided. As a result, the proposed model has a wider range of validity compared to existing models; the latter can produce highly erroneous outputs when inputs are not within normal operating range. This feature is essential for training learning-based controllers that can choose inputs beyond normal operating conditions and is lacking in currently available models. The overall plant model is implemented in Matlab and is made publicly available. Simulation of a CCWP with closed loop control is provided as an illustration.
Authors:Yibo Chen, Eren Kurshan, Dave Motschman, Charles Johnson, Yuan Xie
Title: Through Silicon Via Aware Design Planning for Thermally Efficient 3-D Integrated Circuits
Abstract:
3-D integrated circuits (3-D ICs) offer performance advantages due to their increased bandwidth and reduced wire-length enabled by through-silicon-via structures (TSVs). Traditionally TSVs have been considered to improve the thermal conductivity in the vertical direction. However, the lateral thermal blockage effect becomes increasingly important for TSV via farms (a cluster of TSV vias used for signal bus connections between layers) because the TSV size and pitch continue to scale in μm range and the metal to insulator ratio becomes smaller. Consequently, dense TSV farms can create lateral thermal blockages in thinned silicon substrate and exacerbate the local hotspots. In this paper, we propose a thermal-aware via farm placement technique for 3-D ICs to minimize lateral heat blockages caused by dense signal bus TSV structures.
Authors:Cyril Voyant, Milan Despotovic, Luis Garcia-Gutierrez, Mohammed Asloune, Yves-Marie Saint-Drenan, Jean-Laurent Duchaud, hjuvan Antone Faggianelli, Elena Magliaro
Title: Short-Term Forecasting of Energy Production and Consumption Using Extreme Learning Machine: A Comprehensive MIMO based ELM Approach
Abstract:
A novel methodology for short-term energy forecasting using an Extreme Learning Machine ($\mathtt{ELM}$) is proposed. Using six years of hourly data collected in Corsica (France) from multiple energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, thermal, bioenergy, and imported electricity), our approach predicts both individual energy outputs and total production (including imports, which closely follow energy demand, modulo losses) through a Multi-Input Multi-Output ($\mathtt{MIMO}$) architecture. To address non-stationarity and seasonal variability, sliding window techniques and cyclic time encoding are incorporated, enabling dynamic adaptation to fluctuations. The $\mathtt{ELM}$ model significantly outperforms persistence-based forecasting, particularly for solar and thermal energy, achieving an $\mathtt{nRMSE}$ of $17.9\%$ and $5.1\%$, respectively, with $\mathtt{R^2} > 0.98$ (1-hour horizon). The model maintains high accuracy up to five hours ahead, beyond which renewable energy sources become increasingly volatile. While $\mathtt{MIMO}$ provides marginal gains over Single-Input Single-Output ($\mathtt{SISO}$) architectures and offers key advantages over deep learning methods such as $\mathtt{LSTM}$, it provides a closed-form solution with lower computational demands, making it well-suited for real-time applications, including online learning. Beyond predictive accuracy, the proposed methodology is adaptable to various contexts and datasets, as it can be tuned to local constraints such as resource availability, grid characteristics, and market structures.
Authors:Maksym Szemer, Szymon Buchaniec, Grzegorz Brus
Title: Persistence is All You Need -- A Topological Lens on Microstructural Characterization
Abstract:
The microstructure critically governs the properties of materials used in energy and chemical engineering technologies, from catalysts and filters to thermal insulators and sensors. Therefore, accurate design is based on quantitative descriptors of microstructural features. Here we show that eight key descriptors can be extracted by a single workflow that fuses computational topology with assembly-learning-based regression. First, 1312 synthetic three-dimensional microstructures were generated and evaluated using established algorithms, and a labeled data set of ground-truth parameters was built. Converting every structure into a persistence image allowed us to train a deep neural network that predicts the eight descriptors. In an independent test set, the model achieved on average R^2 ~ 0.84 and Pearson r ~ 0.92, demonstrating both precision and generality. The approach provides a unified and scalable tool for rapid characterization of functional porous materials.
Authors:Cheng Li, Pengfei Danga, Yuehui Xiana, Yumei Zhou, Bofeng Shi, Xiangdong Ding, Jun Suna, Dezhen Xue
Title: Generative Inversion for Property-Targeted Materials Design: Application to Shape Memory Alloys
Abstract:
The design of shape memory alloys (SMAs) with high transformation temperatures and large mechanical work output remains a longstanding challenge in functional materials engineering. Here, we introduce a data-driven framework based on generative adversarial network (GAN) inversion for the inverse design of high-performance SMAs. By coupling a pretrained GAN with a property prediction model, we perform gradient-based latent space optimization to directly generate candidate alloy compositions and processing parameters that satisfy user-defined property targets. The framework is experimentally validated through the synthesis and characterization of five NiTi-based SMAs. Among them, the Ni$_{49.8}$Ti$_{26.4}$Hf$_{18.6}$Zr$_{5.2}$ alloy achieves a high transformation temperature of 404 $^\circ$C, a large mechanical work output of 9.9 J/cm$^3$, a transformation enthalpy of 43 J/g , and a thermal hysteresis of 29 °C, outperforming existing NiTi alloys. The enhanced performance is attributed to a pronounced transformation volume change and a finely dispersed of Ti$_2$Ni-type precipitates, enabled by sluggish Zr and Hf diffusion, and semi-coherent interfaces with localized strain fields. This study demonstrates that GAN inversion offers an efficient and generalizable route for the property-targeted discovery of complex alloys.
Authors:Siyuan He, Peiran Yan, Yandong He, Youwei Zhuo, Tianyu Jia
Title: Tasa: Thermal-aware 3D-Stacked Architecture Design with Bandwidth Sharing for LLM Inference
Abstract:
The autoregressive decoding in LLMs is the major inference bottleneck due to the memory-intensive operations and limited hardware bandwidth. 3D-stacked architecture is a promising solution with significantly improved memory bandwidth, which vertically stacked multi DRAM dies on top of logic die. However, our experiments also show the 3D-stacked architecture faces severer thermal issues compared to 2D architecture, in terms of thermal temperature, gradient and scalability. To better exploit the potential of 3D-stacked architecture, we present Tasa, a heterogeneous architecture with cross-stack thermal optimizations to balance the temperature distribution and maximize the performance under the thermal constraints. High-performance core is designed for compute-intensive operations, while high-efficiency core is used for memory-intensive operators, e.g. attention layers. Furthermore, we propose a bandwidth sharing scheduling to improve the bandwidth utilization in such heterogeneous architecture. Extensive thermal experiments show that our Tasa architecture demonstrates greater scalability compared with the homogeneous 3D-stacked architecture, i.e. up to 5.55 $\tccentigrade$, 9.37 $\tccentigrade$, and 7.91 $\tccentigrade$ peak temperature reduction for 48, 60, and 72 core configurations. Our experimental for Llama-65B and GPT-3 66B inferences also demonstrate 2.85x and 2.21x speedup are obtained over the GPU baselines and state-of-the-art heterogeneous PIM-based LLM accelerator
Authors:Shreshth A. Malik, Tiarnan A. S. Doherty, Benjamin Colmey, Stephen J. Roberts, Yarin Gal, Paul A. Midgley
Title: Hybrid Physics-Machine Learning Models for Quantitative Electron Diffraction Refinements
Abstract:
High-fidelity electron microscopy simulations required for quantitative crystal structure refinements face a fundamental challenge: while physical interactions are well-described theoretically, real-world experimental effects are challenging to model analytically. To address this gap, we present a novel hybrid physics-machine learning framework that integrates differentiable physical simulations with neural networks. By leveraging automatic differentiation throughout the simulation pipeline, our method enables gradient-based joint optimization of physical parameters and neural network components representing experimental variables, offering superior scalability compared to traditional second-order methods. We demonstrate this framework through application to three-dimensional electron diffraction (3D-ED) structure refinement, where our approach learns complex thickness distributions directly from diffraction data rather than relying on simplified geometric models. This method achieves state-of-the-art refinement performance across synthetic and experimental datasets, recovering atomic positions, thermal displacements, and thickness profiles with high fidelity. The modular architecture proposed can naturally be extended to accommodate additional physical phenomena and extended to other electron microscopy techniques. This establishes differentiable hybrid modeling as a powerful new paradigm for quantitative electron microscopy, where experimental complexities have historically limited analysis.
Authors:Yinan Yu, Alex Gonzalez-Caceres, Samuel Scheidegger, Sanjay Somanath, Alexander Hollberg
Title: Deep Learning-based Scalable Image-to-3D Facade Parser for Generating Thermal 3D Building Models
Abstract:
Renovating existing buildings is essential for climate impact. Early-phase renovation planning requires simulations based on thermal 3D models at Level of Detail (LoD) 3, which include features like windows. However, scalable and accurate identification of such features remains a challenge. This paper presents the Scalable Image-to-3D Facade Parser (SI3FP), a pipeline that generates LoD3 thermal models by extracting geometries from images using both computer vision and deep learning. Unlike existing methods relying on segmentation and projection, SI3FP directly models geometric primitives in the orthographic image plane, providing a unified interface while reducing perspective distortions. SI3FP supports both sparse (e.g., Google Street View) and dense (e.g., hand-held camera) data sources. Tested on typical Swedish residential buildings, SI3FP achieved approximately 5% error in window-to-wall ratio estimates, demonstrating sufficient accuracy for early-stage renovation analysis. The pipeline facilitates large-scale energy renovation planning and has broader applications in urban development and planning.
Authors:Stephanie Wohlfahrt, Christoph Praschl, Horst Leitner, Wolfram Jantsch, Julia Konic, Silvio Schueler, Andreas Stöckl, David C. Schedl
Title: Advancing Wildlife Monitoring: Drone-Based Sampling for Roe Deer Density Estimation
Abstract:
We use unmanned aerial drones to estimate wildlife density in southeastern Austria and compare these estimates to camera trap data. Traditional methods like capture-recapture, distance sampling, or camera traps are well-established but labour-intensive or spatially constrained. Using thermal (IR) and RGB imagery, drones enable efficient, non-intrusive animal counting. Our surveys were conducted during the leafless period on single days in October and November 2024 in three areas of a sub-Illyrian hill and terrace landscape. Flight transects were based on predefined launch points using a 350 m grid and an algorithm that defined the direction of systematically randomized transects. This setup allowed surveying large areas in one day using multiple drones, minimizing double counts. Flight altitude was set at 60 m to avoid disturbing roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) while ensuring detection. Animals were manually annotated in the recorded imagery and extrapolated to densities per square kilometer. We applied three extrapolation methods with increasing complexity: naive area-based extrapolation, bootstrapping, and zero-inflated negative binomial modelling. For comparison, a Random Encounter Model (REM) estimate was calculated using camera trap data from the flight period. The drone-based methods yielded similar results, generally showing higher densities than REM, except in one area in October. We hypothesize that drone-based density reflects daytime activity in open and forested areas, while REM estimates average activity over longer periods within forested zones. Although both approaches estimate density, they offer different perspectives on wildlife presence. Our results show that drones offer a promising, scalable method for wildlife density estimation.
Authors:Dylan Stow, Russell Barnes, Eren Kurshan, Yuan Xie
Title: Thermal-Aware 3D Design for Side-Channel Information Leakage
Abstract:
Side-channel attacks are important security challenges as they reveal sensitive information about on-chip activities. Among such attacks, the thermal side-channel has been shown to disclose the activities of key functional blocks and even encryption keys. This paper proposes a novel approach to proactively conceal critical activities in the functional layers while minimizing the power dissipation by (i) leveraging inherent characteristics of 3D integration to protect from side-channel attacks and (ii) dynamically generating custom activity patterns to match the activity to be concealed in the functional layers. Experimental analysis shows that 3D technology combined with the proposed run-time algorithm effectively reduces the Side channel vulnerability Factor (SVF) below 0.05 and the Spatial Thermal Side-channel Factor (STSF) below 0.59.
Authors:Pallock Halder, Satyajit Mojumder
Title: Physics-guided denoiser network for enhanced additive manufacturing data quality
Abstract:
Modern engineering systems are increasingly equipped with sensors for real-time monitoring and decision-making. However, the data collected by these sensors is often noisy and difficult to interpret, limiting its utility for control and diagnostics. In this work, we propose a physics-informed denoising framework that integrates energy-based model and Fisher score regularization to jointly reduce data noise and enforce physical consistency with a physics-based model. The approach is first validated on benchmark problems, including the simple harmonic oscillator, Burgers' equation, and Laplace's equation, across varying noise levels. We then apply the denoising framework to real thermal emission data from laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing experiments, using a trained Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) surrogate model of the LPBF process to guide denoising. Results show that the proposed method outperforms baseline neural network denoisers, effectively reducing noise under a range of LPBF processing conditions. This physics-guided denoising strategy enables robust, real-time interpretation of low-cost sensor data, facilitating predictive control and improved defect mitigation in additive manufacturing.
Authors:Sheikh Md Shakeel Hassan, Xianwei Zou, Akash Dhruv, Vishwanath Ganesan, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran
Title: Bubbleformer: Forecasting Boiling with Transformers
Abstract:
Modeling boiling (an inherently chaotic, multiphase process central to energy and thermal systems) remains a significant challenge for neural PDE surrogates. Existing models require future input (e.g., bubble positions) during inference because they fail to learn nucleation from past states, limiting their ability to autonomously forecast boiling dynamics. They also fail to model flow boiling velocity fields, where sharp interface-momentum coupling demands long-range and directional inductive biases. We introduce Bubbleformer, a transformer-based spatiotemporal model that forecasts stable and long-range boiling dynamics including nucleation, interface evolution, and heat transfer without dependence on simulation data during inference. Bubbleformer integrates factorized axial attention, frequency-aware scaling, and conditions on thermophysical parameters to generalize across fluids, geometries, and operating conditions. To evaluate physical fidelity in chaotic systems, we propose interpretable physics-based metrics that evaluate heat-flux consistency, interface geometry, and mass conservation. We also release BubbleML 2.0, a high-fidelity dataset that spans diverse working fluids (cryogens, refrigerants, dielectrics), boiling configurations (pool and flow boiling), flow regimes (bubbly, slug, annular), and boundary conditions. Bubbleformer sets new benchmark results in both prediction and forecasting of two-phase boiling flows.
Authors:Darío Slaifstein, Gautham Ram Chandra Mouli, Laura Ramirez-Elizondo, Pavol Bauer
Title: Sequential Operation of Residential Energy Hubs
Abstract:
The operation of residential energy hubs with multiple energy carriers (electricity, heat, mobility) poses a significant challenge due to different carrier dynamics, hybrid storage coordination and high-dimensional action-spaces. Energy management systems oversee their operation, deciding the set points of the primary control layer. This paper presents a novel 2-stage economic model predictive controller for electrified buildings including physics-based models of the battery degradation and thermal systems. The hierarchical control operates in the Dutch sequential energy markets. In particular common assumptions regarding intra-day markets (auction and continuous-time) are discussed as well as the coupling of the different storage systems. The best control policy is to co-optimize day-ahead and intra-day auctions in the first stage, to later follow intra-day auctions. If no intra-day prices are known at the time of the day-ahead auction, its best to follow continuous time intra-day in the summer and the intra-day auction in the winter. Additionally, this sequential operation increases battery degradation. Finally, under our controller the realized short-term flexibility of the thermal energy storage is marginal compared to the flexibility delivered by static battery pack and electric vehicles with bidirectional charging.
Authors:Mufakir Qamar Ansari, Mudabir Qamar Ansari
Title: Racing to Idle: Energy Efficiency of Matrix Multiplication on Heterogeneous CPU and GPU Architectures
Abstract:
The paradigm shift towards multi-core and heterogeneous computing, driven by the fundamental power and thermal limits of single-core processors, has established energy efficiency as a first-class design constraint in high-performance computing (HPC). Heterogeneous systems, integrating traditional multi-core CPUs with specialized accelerators like discrete (dGPU) and integrated (iGPU) graphics processing units, offer a compelling path to navigating the trade-offs between performance and power. However, quantifying these trade-offs on widely accessible hardware remains a critical area of study. This paper presents a direct, empirical measurement of the performance and energy-to-solution of a canonical HPC workload -- a 4096x4096 matrix-matrix multiplication -- on three distinct compute architectures within a single consumer-grade laptop: a multi-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, and an integrated AMD Radeon Vega GPU. Using standard, validated, and minimally intrusive tools such as Linux perf and nvidia-smi, we find that the discrete GPU is not only the performance leader, achieving a 93.5x speedup over the CPU, but is also the most energy-efficient, consuming only 2% of the energy used by the CPU, resulting in a 50-fold improvement in energy efficiency. These findings provide a practical demonstration of the "race to idle" principle and offer clear, quantitative guidance on architectural choices for energy-aware software development.
Authors:Leo Guo, Adwait Inamdar, Willem D. van Driel, GuoQi Zhang
Title: Adaptive Bayesian Data-Driven Design of Reliable Solder Joints for Micro-electronic Devices
Abstract:
Solder joint reliability related to failures due to thermomechanical loading is a critically important yet physically complex engineering problem. As a result, simulated behavior is oftentimes computationally expensive. In an increasingly data-driven world, the usage of efficient data-driven design schemes is a popular choice. Among them, Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process regression is one of the most important representatives. The authors argue that computational savings can be obtained from exploiting thorough surrogate modeling and selecting a design candidate based on multiple acquisition functions. This is feasible due to the relatively low computational cost, compared to the expensive simulation objective. This paper addresses the shortcomings in the adjacent literature by providing and implementing a novel heuristic framework to perform BO with adaptive hyperparameters across the various optimization iterations. Adaptive BO is subsequently compared to regular BO when faced with synthetic objective minimization problems. The results show the efficiency of adaptive BO when compared any worst-performing regular Bayesian schemes. As an engineering use case, the solder joint reliability problem is tackled by minimizing the accumulated non-linear creep strain under a cyclic thermal load. Results show that adaptive BO outperforms regular BO by 3% on average at any given computational budget threshold, critically saving half of the computational expense budget. This practical result underlines the methodological potential of the adaptive Bayesian data-driven methodology to achieve better results and cut optimization-related expenses. Lastly, in order to promote the reproducibility of the results, the data-driven implementations are made available on an open-source basis.
Authors:Jan M. Nordbotten, Martin A. Fernø, Bernd Flemisch, Anthony R. Kovscek, Knut-Andreas Lie, Jakub W. Both, Olav Møyner, Tor Harald Sandve, Etienne Ahusborde, Sebastian Bauer, Zhangxing Chen, Holger Class, Chaojie Di, Didier Ding, David Element, Abbas Firoozabadi, Eric Flauraud, Jacques Franc, Firdovsi Gasanzade, Yousef Ghomian, Marie Ann Giddins, Christopher Green, Bruno R. B. Fernandes, George Hadjisotiriou, Glenn Hammond, Hai Huang, Dickson Kachuma, Michel Kern, Timo Koch, Prasanna Krishnamurthy, Kjetil Olsen Lye, David Landa-Marbán, Michael Nole, Paolo Orsini, Nicolas Ruby, Pablo Salinas, Mohammad Sayyafzadeh, Jakub Solovský, Jakob Torben, Adam Turner, Denis V. Voskov, Kai Wendel, AbdAllah A. Youssef
Title: Benchmarking CO$_2$ Storage Simulations: Results from the 11th Society of Petroleum Engineers Comparative Solution Project
Abstract:
The 11th Society of Petroleum Engineers Comparative Solution Project (shortened SPE11 herein) benchmarked simulation tools for geological carbon dioxide (CO$_2$) storage. A total of 45 groups from leading research institutions and industry across the globe signed up to participate, with 18 ultimately contributing valid results that were included in the comparative study reported here. This paper summarizes the SPE11. A comprehensive introduction and qualitative discussion of the submitted data are provided, together with an overview of online resources for accessing the full depth of data. A global metric for analyzing the relative distance between submissions is proposed and used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the submissions. This analysis attempts to statistically resolve the key aspects influencing the variability between submissions. The study shows that the major qualitative variation between the submitted results is related to thermal effects, dissolution-driven convective mixing, and resolution of facies discontinuities. Moreover, a strong dependence on grid resolution is observed across all three versions of the SPE11. However, our quantitative analysis suggests that the observed variations are predominantly influenced by factors not documented in the technical responses provided by the participants. We therefore identify that unreported variations due to human choices within the process of setting up, conducting, and reporting on the simulations underlying each SPE11 submission are at least as impactful as the computational choices reported.
Authors:Ado Farsi, Nacime Bouziani, David A Ham
Title: Missing Physics Discovery through Fully Differentiable Finite Element-Based Machine Learning
Abstract:
Although many problems in science and engineering are modelled by well-established PDEs, they often involve unknown or incomplete relationships, such as material constitutive laws or thermal response, that limit accuracy and generality. Existing surrogate-modelling approaches directly approximate PDE solutions but remain tied to a specific geometry, boundary conditions, and set of physical constraints. To address these limitations, we introduce a fully differentiable finite element-based machine learning (FEBML) framework that embeds trainable operators for unknown physics within a state-of-the-art, general FEM solver, enabling true end-to-end differentiation. At its core, FEBML represents each unknown operator as an encode-process-decode pipeline over finite-element degrees of freedom: field values are projected to nodal coefficients, transformed by a neural network, and then lifted back to a continuous FE function, ensuring the learned physics respects the variational structure. We demonstrate its versatility by recovering nonlinear stress-strain laws from laboratory tests, applying the learned model to a new mechanical scenario without retraining, and identifying temperature-dependent conductivity in transient heat flow.
Authors:Satwik Dutta, Shruthigna Chandupatla, John Hansen
Title: Adapting Whisper for Lightweight and Efficient Automatic Speech Recognition of Children for On-device Edge Applications
Abstract:
Reliability on cloud providers for ASR inference to support child-centered voice-based applications is becoming challenging due to regulatory and privacy challenges. Motivated by a privacy-preserving design, this study aims to develop a lightweight & efficient Whisper ASR system capable of running on a Raspberry Pi. Upon evaluation of the MyST corpus and by examining various filtering strategies to fine-tune the `tiny.en' model, a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.9% was achieved (11.8% filtered). A low-rank compression reduces the encoder size by 0.51M with 1.26x faster inference in GPU, with 11% relative WER increase. During inference on Pi, the compressed version required ~2 GFLOPS fewer computations. The RTF for both the models ranged between [0.23-0.41] for various input audio durations. Analyzing the RAM usage and CPU temperature showed that the PI was capable of handling both the tiny models, however it was noticed that small models initiated additional overhead/thermal throttling.
Authors:Waqar Muhammad Ashraf, Amir H. Keshavarzzadeh, Abdulelah S. Alshehri, Abdulrahman bin Jumah, Ramit Debnath, Vivek Dua
Title: Domain-Informed Operation Excellence of Gas Turbine System with Machine Learning
Abstract:
The domain-consistent adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) remains low in thermal power plants due to the black-box nature of AI algorithms and low representation of domain knowledge in conventional data-centric analytics. In this paper, we develop a MAhalanobis Distance-based OPTimization (MAD-OPT) framework that incorporates the Mahalanobis distance-based constraint to introduce domain knowledge into data-centric analytics. The developed MAD-OPT framework is applied to maximize thermal efficiency and minimize turbine heat rate for a 395 MW capacity gas turbine system. We demonstrate that the MAD-OPT framework can estimate domain-informed optimal process conditions under different ambient conditions, and the optimal solutions are found to be robust as evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations. We also apply the MAD-OPT framework to estimate optimal process conditions beyond the design power generation limit of the gas turbine system, and have found comparable results with the actual data of the power plant. We demonstrate that implementing data-centric optimization analytics without incorporating domain-informed constraints may provide ineffective solutions that may not be implementable in the real operation of the gas turbine system. This research advances the integration of the data-driven domain knowledge into machine learning-powered analytics that enhances the domain-informed operation excellence and paves the way for safe AI adoption in thermal power systems.
Authors:Doyeong Lim, Yang Liu, Zavier Ndum Ndum, Christian Young, Yassin Hassan
Title: An AI-Driven Thermal-Fluid Testbed for Advanced Small Modular Reactors: Integration of Digital Twin and Large Language Models
Abstract:
This paper presents a multipurpose artificial intelligence (AI)-driven thermal-fluid testbed designed to advance Small Modular Reactor technologies by seamlessly integrating physical experimentation with advanced computational intelligence. The platform uniquely combines a versatile three-loop thermal-fluid facility with a high-fidelity digital twin and sophisticated AI frameworks for real-time prediction, control, and operational assistance. Methodologically, the testbed's digital twin, built upon the System Analysis Module code, is coupled with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network. This machine learning model, trained on experimental data, enables faster-than-real-time simulation, providing predictive insights into the system's dynamic behavior. The practical application of this AI integration is showcased through case studies. An AI-driven control framework where the GRU model accurately forecasts future system states and the corresponding control actions required to meet operational demands. Furthermore, an intelligent assistant, powered by a large language model, translates complex sensor data and simulation outputs into natural language, offering operators actionable analysis and safety recommendations. Comprehensive validation against experimental transients confirms the platform's high fidelity, with the GRU model achieving a temperature prediction root mean square error of 1.42 K. This work establishes an integrated research environment at the intersection of AI and thermal-fluid science, showcasing how AI-driven methodologies in modeling, control, and operator support can accelerate the innovation and deployment of next-generation nuclear systems.
Authors:Vivek Teja Tanjavooru, Prashant Pant, Thomas Hamacher, Holger Hesse
Title: Multi-Objective Nonlinear Power Split Control For BESS With Real-Time Simulation Feedback
Abstract:
This paper presents a mixed-integer, nonlinear, multi-objective optimization strategy for optimal power allocation among parallel strings in Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). High-fidelity control is achieved by co-simulating the optimizer with a BESS electro-thermal simulation that models spatial thermal dynamics of the battery, providing real-time State of Charge (SOC) and temperature feedback. The optimizer prioritizes reliability by enforcing power availability as a hard constraint and penalizing battery thermal derating. Within these bounds, the controller performs a Pareto sweep on the relative weights of inverter and battery losses to balance the trade-off between inverter efficiency and battery efficiency. The inverter loss model is based on an empirical lookup table (LUT) derived from a commercial inverter system, while the battery thermal loss model uses SOC and temperature-dependent internal resistance, with electric current computed from the battery Equivalent Circuit Model (ECM). When the optimization was applied to a two-string BESS, the competing effects of inverter and battery losses on system availability and thermal derating were observed. The balanced operation yielded improvements of 1% in battery efficiency, 1.5% in inverter efficiency, and 2% in derating efficiency, while maintaining higher availability. Additionally, a 5 degrees C reduction in BESS peak temperature also suggests reduced thermal stress without compromising availability.
Authors:Duong Nguyen-Ngoc Tran, Long Hoang Pham, Chi Dai Tran, Quoc Pham-Nam Ho, Huy-Hung Nguyen, Jae Wook Jeon
Title: A Novel Tuning Method for Real-time Multiple-Object Tracking Utilizing Thermal Sensor with Complexity Motion Pattern
Abstract:
Multi-Object Tracking in thermal images is essential for surveillance systems, particularly in challenging environments where RGB cameras struggle due to low visibility or poor lighting conditions. Thermal sensors enhance recognition tasks by capturing infrared signatures, but a major challenge is their low-level feature representation, which makes it difficult to accurately detect and track pedestrians. To address this, the paper introduces a novel tuning method for pedestrian tracking, specifically designed to handle the complex motion patterns in thermal imagery. The proposed framework optimizes two-stages, ensuring that each stage is tuned with the most suitable hyperparameters to maximize tracking performance. By fine-tuning hyperparameters for real-time tracking, the method achieves high accuracy without relying on complex reidentification or motion models. Extensive experiments on PBVS Thermal MOT dataset demonstrate that the approach is highly effective across various thermal camera conditions, making it a robust solution for real-world surveillance applications.
Authors:Subed Lamichhane, Haotian Lu, Sheldon X. -D. Tan
Title: EMSpice 2.1: A Coupled EM and IR Drop Analysis Tool with Joule Heating and Thermal Map Integration for VLSI Reliability
Abstract:
Electromigration (EM) remains a critical reliability concern in current and future copper-based VLSI circuits. As technology scales down, EM-induced IR drop becomes increasingly severe. While several EM-aware IR drop analysis tools have been proposed, few incorporate the real impact of temperature distribution on both EM and IR drop effects. In this work, we introduce EMSpice 2.1, an enhanced tool built upon the existing coupled IR-EM analysis framework, EMSpice 2.0, for EM-aware IR drop analysis. For the first time, EMSpice 2.1 uniquely integrates Joule heating effects and practical thermal maps derived from actual chip conditions. Additionally, it features improved interoperability with commercial EDA tools, facilitating more comprehensive EM and IR drop sign-off analysis. Our findings demonstrate that specific hotspot patterns significantly impact the lifetime of interconnects and overall chip reliability due to EM failures. Furthermore, our tool exhibits strong agreement with industry-standard tools such as COMSOL, achieving a speedup of over 200 times while maintaining high accuracy.
Authors:Aaron C. Davis, Siting Zhang, Adalyn Meeks, Diya Sakhrani, Luis Carlos Sanjuan Acosta, D. Ethan Kelley, Emma Caldwell, Luis Solorio, Craig J. Goergen, David J. Cappelleri
Title: Novel Design of 3D Printed Tumbling Microrobots for in vivo Targeted Drug Delivery
Abstract:
This paper presents innovative designs for 3D-printed tumbling microrobots, specifically engineered for targeted in vivo drug delivery applications. The microrobot designs, created using stereolithography 3D printing technologies, incorporate permanent micro-magnets to enable actuation via a rotating magnetic field actuator system. The experimental framework encompasses a series of locomotion characterization tests to evaluate microrobot performance under various conditions. Testing variables include variations in microrobot geometries, actuation frequencies, and environmental conditions, such as dry and wet environments, and temperature changes. The paper outlines designs for three drug loading methods, along with comprehensive assessments thermal drug release using a focused ultrasound system, as well as biocompatibility tests. Animal model testing involves tissue phantoms and in vivo rat models, ensuring a thorough evaluation of the microrobots' performance and compatibility. The results highlight the robustness and adaptability of the proposed microrobot designs, showcasing the potential for efficient and targeted in vivo drug delivery. This novel approach addresses current limitations in existing tumbling microrobot designs and paves the way for advancements in targeted drug delivery within the large intestine.
Authors:Reece Bourisaw, Reid McCants, Jean-Marie Le Corre, Anna Iskhakova, Arsen S. Iskhakov
Title: Data Collection with Non-Uniform Axial Power for Phase II of the OECD/NEA AI/ML Critical Heat Flux Benchmark
Abstract:
Critical heat flux (CHF) marks the onset of boiling crisis in light-water reactors, defining safe thermal-hydraulic operating limits. To support Phase II of the OECD/NEA AI/ML CHF benchmark, which introduces spatially varying power profiles, this work compiles and digitizes a broad CHF dataset covering both uniform and non-uniform axial heating conditions. Heating profiles were extracted from technical reports, interpolated onto a consistent axial mesh, validated via energy-balance checks, and encoded in machine-readable formats for benchmark compatibility. Classical CHF correlations exhibit substantial errors under uniform heating and degrade markedly when applied to non-uniform profiles, while modern tabular methods offer improved but still imperfect predictions. A neural network trained solely on uniform data performs well in that regime but fails to generalize to spatially varying scenarios, underscoring the need for models that explicitly incorporate axial power distributions. By providing these curated datasets and baseline modeling results, this study lays the groundwork for advanced transfer-learning strategies, rigorous uncertainty quantification, and design-optimization efforts in the next phase of the CHF benchmark.
Authors:Hang-Cheng Dong, Lu Zou, Bingguo Liu, Dong Ye, Guodong Liu
Title: Region-Aware CAM: High-Resolution Weakly-Supervised Defect Segmentation via Salient Region Perception
Abstract:
Surface defect detection plays a critical role in industrial quality inspection. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced the automation level of detection processes. However, conventional semantic segmentation and object detection models heavily rely on large-scale annotated datasets, which conflicts with the practical requirements of defect detection tasks. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised semantic segmentation framework comprising two key components: a region-aware class activation map (CAM) and pseudo-label training. To address the limitations of existing CAM methods, especially low-resolution thermal maps, and insufficient detail preservation, we introduce filtering-guided backpropagation (FGBP), which refines target regions by filtering gradient magnitudes to identify areas with higher relevance to defects. Building upon this, we further develop a region-aware weighted module to enhance spatial precision. Finally, pseudo-label segmentation is implemented to refine the model's performance iteratively. Comprehensive experiments on industrial defect datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The proposed framework effectively bridges the gap between weakly supervised learning and high-precision defect segmentation, offering a practical solution for resource-constrained industrial scenarios.
Authors:Tingting Zhou, Feng Zhang, Haoyang Fu, Baoxiang Pan, Renhe Zhang, Feng Lu, Zhixin Yang
Title: Lighting the Night with Generative Artificial Intelligence
Abstract:
The visible light reflectance data from geostationary satellites is crucial for meteorological observations and plays an important role in weather monitoring and forecasting. However, due to the lack of visible light at night, it is impossible to conduct continuous all-day weather observations using visible light reflectance data. This study pioneers the use of generative diffusion models to address this limitation. Based on the multi-band thermal infrared brightness temperature data from the Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager (AGRI) onboard the Fengyun-4B (FY4B) geostationary satellite, we developed a high-precision visible light reflectance generative model, called Reflectance Diffusion (RefDiff), which enables 0.47~μ\mathrm{m}, 0.65~μ\mathrm{m}, and 0.825~μ\mathrm{m} bands visible light reflectance generation at night. Compared to the classical models, RefDiff not only significantly improves accuracy through ensemble averaging but also provides uncertainty estimation. Specifically, the SSIM index of RefDiff can reach 0.90, with particularly significant improvements in areas with complex cloud structures and thick clouds. The model's nighttime generation capability was validated using VIIRS nighttime product, demonstrating comparable performance to its daytime counterpart. In summary, this research has made substantial progress in the ability to generate visible light reflectance at night, with the potential to expand the application of nighttime visible light data.
Authors:Di Zhang, Ligang Liu
Title: Asymptotic analysis and design of shell-based thermal lattice metamaterials
Abstract:
We present a rigorous asymptotic analysis framework for investigating the thermal conductivity of shell lattice metamaterials, extending prior work from mechanical stiffness to heat transfer. Central to our analysis is a new metric, the asymptotic directional conductivity (ADC), which captures the leading-order influence of the middle surface geometry on the effective thermal conductivity in the vanishing-thickness limit. A convergence theorem is established for evaluating ADC, along with a sharp upper bound and the necessary and sufficient condition for achieving this bound. These results provide the first theoretical justification for the optimal thermal conductivity of triply periodic minimal surfaces. Furthermore, we show that ADC yields a third-order approximation to the effective conductivity of shell lattices at low volume fractions. To support practical design applications, we develop a discrete algorithm for computing and optimizing ADC over arbitrary periodic surfaces. Numerical results confirm the theoretical predictions and demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithm.
Authors:Augustine Twumasi, Prokash Chandra Roy, Zixun Li, Soumya Shouvik Bhattacharjee, Zhengtao Gan
Title: Laser Scan Path Design for Controlled Microstructure in Additive Manufacturing with Integrated Reduced-Order Phase-Field Modeling and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
Laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) is a widely recognized additive manufacturing technology for producing intricate metal components with exceptional accuracy. A key challenge in L-PBF is the formation of complex microstructures affecting product quality. We propose a physics-guided, machine-learning approach to optimize scan paths for desired microstructure outcomes, such as equiaxed grains. We utilized a phase-field method (PFM) to model crystalline grain structure evolution. To reduce computational costs, we trained a surrogate machine learning model, a 3D U-Net convolutional neural network, using single-track phase-field simulations with various laser powers to predict crystalline grain orientations based on initial microstructure and thermal history. We investigated three scanning strategies across various hatch spacings within a square domain, achieving a two-orders-of-magnitude speedup using the surrogate model. To reduce trial and error in designing laser scan toolpaths, we used deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to generate optimized scan paths for target microstructure. Results from three cases demonstrate the DRL approach's effectiveness. We integrated the surrogate 3D U-Net model into our DRL environment to accelerate the reinforcement learning training process. The reward function minimizes both aspect ratio and grain volume of the predicted microstructure from the agent's scan path. The reinforcement learning algorithm was benchmarked against conventional zigzag approach for smaller and larger domains, showing machine learning methods' potential to enhance microstructure control and computational efficiency in L-PBF optimization.
Authors:Pietro Favaro, Jean-François Toubeau, François Vallée, Yury Dvorkin
Title: Decision-Focused Learning for Neural Network-Constrained Optimization: Application to HVAC Management System
Abstract:
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is a major electricity end-use with a substantial potential for grid services such as demand response. Harnessing this flexibility requires accurate modeling of the thermal dynamics of buildings, which is challenging due to their nonlinear and repetitive behavior (e.g., daily pattern), which reduce the value of historical data. To address this issue, this paper presents an HVAC management system formulated as a Mixed Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP), where Neural Network (NN) models of thermal dynamics are embedded as exact mixed-integer linear constraints. We employ Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) which tunes the NN parameters to improve the HVAC performance rather than prediction metrics. However, the discrete nature of the MIQP poses challenges for this approach, as it leads to gradients that are undefined or discontinuous, thus impeding standard gradient-based training. Here, we employ Stochastic Smoothing (SS), which enables efficient gradient computation without the need to differentiate through the MIQP. Experiments on a realistic five-zone building using a high-fidelity building simulator demonstrate that the proposed SS-DFL approach outperforms conventional two-stage and relaxed DFL methods in both cost savings and grid service performance, highlighting its potential for scalable, grid-interactive building control.
Authors:Cyrill Bösch, Geoffrey Roeder, Marc Serra-Garcia, Ryan P. Adams
Title: Local Learning Rules for Out-of-Equilibrium Physical Generative Models
Abstract:
We show that the out-of-equilibrium driving protocol of score-based generative models (SGMs) can be learned via local learning rules. The gradient with respect to the parameters of the driving protocol is computed directly from force measurements or from observed system dynamics. As a demonstration, we implement an SGM in a network of driven, nonlinear, overdamped oscillators coupled to a thermal bath. We first apply it to the problem of sampling from a mixture of two Gaussians in 2D. Finally, we train a 12x12 oscillator network on the MNIST dataset to generate images of handwritten digits 0 and 1.
Authors:Manuel Kollmar, Adrian Bürger, Markus Bohlayer, Angelika Altmann-Dieses, Marco Braun, Moritz Diehl
Title: A detailed simulation model for fifth generation district heating and cooling networks with seasonal latent storage evaluated on field data
Abstract:
Fifth generation district heating and cooling (5GDHC) networks accelerate the use of renewable energies in the heating sector and enable flexible, efficient and future-proof heating and cooling supply via a single network. Due to their low temperature level and high integration of renewables, 5GDHC systems pose new challenges for the modeling of these networks in order to simulate and test operational strategies. A particular feature is the use of uninsulated pipes, which allow energy exchange with the surrounding ground. Accurate modeling of this interaction is essential for reliable simulation and optimization. This paper presents a thermp-physical model of the pip connections, the surrounding soil, a latent heat storage in the form of an ice storage as a seasonal heat storage and the house transfer stations. The model is derived from mass and energy balances leading to ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Validation is performed using field date from the 5GDHC network in Gutach-Bleibach, Germany, which supplies heating and cooling to 30 modern buildings. With an average model deviation of 4.5 % in the normalized mean bias error (NMBE) and 15.9 % in the coefficient of the variation of the root mean square error (CVRMSE), the model's accuracy is validated against the available temperature measurements. The realistic representation of the thermal-hydraulic interactions between soil and pipes, as well as the heat flow within the network, confirms the accuracy of the model and its applicability for the simulation of 5GDHC systems. The model is made openly accessible under an open-source license.
Authors:Kazuma Kitazawa, Tsuyoshi Takatani
Title: Shape from Polarization of Thermal Emission and Reflection
Abstract:
Shape estimation for transparent objects is challenging due to their complex light transport. To circumvent these difficulties, we leverage the Shape from Polarization (SfP) technique in the Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR) spectrum, where most materials are opaque and emissive. While a few prior studies have explored LWIR SfP, these attempts suffered from significant errors due to inadequate polarimetric modeling, particularly the neglect of reflection. Addressing this gap, we formulated a polarization model that explicitly accounts for the combined effects of emission and reflection. Based on this model, we estimated surface normals using not only a direct model-based method but also a learning-based approach employing a neural network trained on a physically-grounded synthetic dataset. Furthermore, we modeled the LWIR polarimetric imaging process, accounting for inherent systematic errors to ensure accurate polarimetry. We implemented a prototype system and created ThermoPol, the first real-world benchmark dataset for LWIR SfP. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrated the high accuracy and broad applicability of our method across various materials, including those transparent in the visible spectrum.
Authors:M. Bernaschi, L. A. Fernandez, I. González-Adalid Pemartín, E. Marinari, V. Martin-Mayor, G. Parisi, F. Ricci-Tersenghi, J. J. Ruiz-Lorenzo, D. Yllanes
Title: Microcanonical simulated annealing: Massively parallel Monte Carlo simulations with sporadic random-number generation
Abstract:
Numerical simulations of models and theories that describe complex experimental systems $\unicode{x2014}$in fields like high-energy and condensed-matter physics$\unicode{x2014}$ are becoming increasingly important. Examples include lattice gauge theories, which can describe, among others, quantum chromodynamics (the Standard Model description of strong interactions between elementary particles), and spin-glass systems. Beyond fundamental research, these computational methods also find practical applications, among many others, in optimization, finance, and complex biological problems. However, Monte Carlo simulations, an important subcategory of these methods, are plagued by a major drawback: they are extremely greedy for (pseudo) random numbers. The total fraction of computer time dedicated to random-number generation increases as the hardware grows more sophisticated, and can get prohibitive for special-purpose computing platforms. We propose here a general-purpose microcanonical simulated annealing (MicSA) formalism that dramatically reduces such a burden. The algorithm is fully adapted to a massively parallel computation, as we show in the particularly demanding benchmark of the three-dimensional Ising spin glass. We carry out very stringent numerical tests of the new algorithm by comparing our results, obtained on GPUs, with high-precision standard (i.e., random-number-greedy) simulations performed on the Janus II custom-built supercomputer. In those cases where thermal equilibrium is reachable (i.e., in the paramagnetic phase), both simulations reach compatible values. More significantly, barring short-time corrections, a simple time rescaling suffices to map the MicSA off-equilibrium dynamics onto the results obtained with standard simulations.
Authors:Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Selene Ledain, Helge Aasen
Title: Model-Agnostic, Temperature-Informed Sampling Enhances Cross-Year Crop Mapping with Deep Learning
Abstract:
Crop type classification using optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers real-world applicability in scenarios where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, which reduces the reliability of such approaches for operational crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles of plant growth, we propose a simple, model-agnostic Thermal-Time-based Temporal Sampling (T3S) method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By subsampling time series in this biologically meaningful way, our method highlights key periods within the growing season while reducing temporal redundancy and noise. We evaluate the T3S on a multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset covering the entirety of Switzerland, which allows us to assess all applied methods on unseen years. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our approach yields substantial improvements in classification accuracy and, critically, provides well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Moreover, the T3S method excels in low-data regimes and enables significantly more accurate early-season classification. With just 10% of the training labels, it outperforms the current baseline in both accuracy and uncertainty calibration, and by the end of June, it achieves a performance similar to the full-season baseline model.
Authors:Farida Mohsen, Ali Safa
Title: Deep Fusion of Ultra-Low-Resolution Thermal Camera and Gyroscope Data for Lighting-Robust and Compute-Efficient Rotational Odometry
Abstract:
Accurate rotational odometry is crucial for autonomous robotic systems, particularly for small, power-constrained platforms such as drones and mobile robots. This study introduces thermal-gyro fusion, a novel sensor fusion approach that integrates ultra-low-resolution thermal imaging with gyroscope readings for rotational odometry. Unlike RGB cameras, thermal imaging is invariant to lighting conditions and, when fused with gyroscopic data, mitigates drift which is a common limitation of inertial sensors. We first develop a multimodal data acquisition system to collect synchronized thermal and gyroscope data, along with rotational speed labels, across diverse environments. Subsequently, we design and train a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that fuses both modalities for rotational speed estimation. Our analysis demonstrates that thermal-gyro fusion enables a significant reduction in thermal camera resolution without significantly compromising accuracy, thereby improving computational efficiency and memory utilization. These advantages make our approach well-suited for real-time deployment in resource-constrained robotic systems. Finally, to facilitate further research, we publicly release our dataset as supplementary material.
Authors:Dan Sturm, Marzieyh Rezaei, Alana Dee, Sajjad Moazeni
Title: C2PO: Coherent Co-packaged Optics using offset-QAM-16 for Beyond PAM-4 Optical I/O
Abstract:
Co-packaged optics (CPO) has emerged as a promising solution for achieving the ultra-high bandwidths, shoreline densities, and energy efficiencies required by future GPUs and network switches for AI. Microring modulators (MRMs) are well suited for transmitters due to their compact size, high energy efficiency, and natural compatibility with dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM). However, extending beyond the recently demonstrated 200 Gb/s will require more advanced modulation formats, such as higher-order coherent modulation (e.g., QAM-16). In this work, we show how microring resonators (MRMs) can be efficiently used to implement phase-constant amplitude modulators and form the building blocks of a transmitter for offset QAM-16, which has been shown to simplify carrier-phase recovery relative to conventional QAM. We simulate and evaluate the performance of our proposed MRM-based coherent CPO (C2PO) transmitters using a foundry-provided commercial silicon photonics process, demonstrating an input-normalized electric field amplitude contrast of 0.64 per dimension. Through full link-level bit error rate modeling, we show that our design achieves 400 Gb/s using offset QAM-16 at a total optical laser power of 9.65 dBm-comparable to that required by conventional QAM-16 MZI-based links, despite using 10-100x less area. We further conduct a thermal simulation to assess the transmitter's thermal stability at the MRM input optical power required to meet a target BER at the desired data rates. Finally, as a proof of concept, we demonstrate 25 Gb/s MRM-based offset QAM-4 modulation with a chip fabricated in the GlobalFoundries 45 nm monolithic silicon photonics process.
Authors:Shanthan Kumar Padisala, Satadru Dey
Title: Model Predictive Control-Based Optimal Energy Management of Autonomous Electric Vehicles Under Cold Temperatures
Abstract:
In autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs), battery energy must be judiciously allocated to satisfy primary propulsion demands and secondary auxiliary demands, particularly the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. This becomes especially critical when the battery is in a low state of charge under cold ambient conditions, and cabin heating and battery preconditioning (prior to actual charging) can consume a significant percentage of available energy, directly impacting the driving range. In such cases, one usually prioritizes propulsion or applies heuristic rules for thermal management, often resulting in suboptimal energy utilization. There is a pressing need for a principled approach that can dynamically allocate battery power in a way that balances thermal comfort, battery health and preconditioning, along with range preservation. This paper attempts to address this issue using real-time Model Predictive Control to optimize the power consumption between the propulsion, HVAC, and battery temperature preparation so that it can be charged immediately once the destination is reached.
Authors:Mostafa A. Atalla, Jelte Nieuwenhuis, Alan Martin, Xuan Wang, Ahranee Canden, Matt J. Carré, Roger Lewis, Aimée Sakes, Michaël Wiertlewski
Title: Active Lubrication of Transluminal Medical Instruments
Abstract:
Transluminal minimally invasive surgery uses natural orifices and small incisions to access internal anatomical structures, promoting quicker recovery and reduced morbidity. However, navigating instruments--catheters and endoscopes--through anatomical pathways creates frictional interactions with luminal walls, risking complications such as perforation, poor haptic feedback, and instrument buckling. In this paper, we present a new approach to actively lubricate transluminal instruments and dynamically reduce friction with surrounding tissues. This approach employs ultrasonic vibrations, at the instrument surface, to generate a pressurized fluid layer at the contact interface, lubricating the interface and thereby reducing friction. We implemented this approach in a prototype catheter, which we validated under dry and liquid-lubricated conditions, across rigid and soft interfaces, and along varied anatomical curvatures. In a cardiac catheter use case, active lubrication reduced friction by up to 42% on ex-vivo porcine aorta tissue and 82% on rigid substrates, denoting its potential performance on healthy and calcified tissue, respectively. Thermal imaging confirmed that temperature at the tissue-catheter interface remained within safe limits. Additionally, the system effectively prevented buckling during catheter insertion experiment, further showcasing its potential. By minimizing injury risk and enhancing procedural stability, active lubrication can drastically enhance the safety and efficacy of transluminal interventions.
Authors:Aditi Tiwari, Farzaneh Masoud, Dac Trong Nguyen, Jill Kraft, Heng Ji, Klara Nahrstedt
Title: Fire360: A Benchmark for Robust Perception and Episodic Memory in Degraded 360-Degree Firefighting Videos
Abstract:
Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is critical - scenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360-degree videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating transformation-invariant recognition. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty. The dataset is available at: https://uofi.box.com/v/fire360dataset.
Authors:Sonakshi Gupta, Akhlak Mahmood, Shivank Shukla, Rampi Ramprasad
Title: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Polymer Property Predictions
Abstract:
Machine learning has revolutionized polymer science by enabling rapid property prediction and generative design. Large language models (LLMs) offer further opportunities in polymer informatics by simplifying workflows that traditionally rely on large labeled datasets, handcrafted representations, and complex feature engineering. LLMs leverage natural language inputs through transfer learning, eliminating the need for explicit fingerprinting and streamlining training. In this study, we finetune general purpose LLMs -- open-source LLaMA-3-8B and commercial GPT-3.5 -- on a curated dataset of 11,740 entries to predict key thermal properties: glass transition, melting, and decomposition temperatures. Using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and hyperparameter optimization, we benchmark these models against traditional fingerprinting-based approaches -- Polymer Genome, polyGNN, and polyBERT -- under single-task (ST) and multi-task (MT) learning. We find that while LLM-based methods approach traditional models in performance, they generally underperform in predictive accuracy and efficiency. LLaMA-3 consistently outperforms GPT-3.5, likely due to its tunable open-source architecture. Additionally, ST learning proves more effective than MT, as LLMs struggle to capture cross-property correlations, a key strength of traditional methods. Analysis of molecular embeddings reveals limitations of general purpose LLMs in representing nuanced chemo-structural information compared to handcrafted features and domain-specific embeddings. These findings provide insight into the interplay between molecular embeddings and natural language processing, guiding LLM selection for polymer informatics.
Authors:Yanpei Shi, Bo Feng, Yuxin Zhong, Haochen Guo, Bangcheng Han, Rui Feng
Title: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Cross-Domain Predictive Control of Tapered Amplifier Thermal Stabilization
Abstract:
Thermally induced laser noise poses a critical limitation to the sensitivity of quantum sensor arrays employing ultra-stable amplified lasers, primarily stemming from nonlinear gain-temperature coupling effects in tapered amplifiers (TAs). To address this challenge, we present a robust intelligent control strategy that synergistically integrates an encoder-decoder physics-informed gated recurrent unit (PI-GRU) network with a model predictive control (MPC) framework. Our methodology incorporates physical soft constraints into the neural network architecture, yielding a predictive model with enhanced physical consistency that demonstrates robust extrapolation capabilities beyond the training data distribution. Leveraging the PI-GRU model's accurate multi-step predictive performance, we implement a hierarchical parallel MPC architecture capable of real-time thermal instability compensation. This hybrid approach achieves cross-domain consistent thermal stabilization in TAs under diverse laser power operations. Remarkably, while trained exclusively on low-power operational data, our system demonstrates exceptional generalization, improving prediction accuracy by 58.2% and temperature stability by 69.1% in previously unseen high-power operating regimes, as experimentally validated. The novel synchronization of physics-informed neural networks with advanced MPC frameworks presented in this work establishes a groundbreaking paradigm for addressing robustness challenges in cross-domain predictive control applications, overcoming conventional modeling limitations.
Authors:Myeongseok Nam, Wongi Park, Minsol Kim, Hyejin Hur, Soomok Lee
Title: Veta-GS: View-dependent deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting for thermal infrared Novel-view Synthesis
Abstract:
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) based on Thermal Infrared (TIR) imaging has gained attention in novel-view synthesis, showing real-time rendering. However, novel-view synthesis with thermal infrared images suffers from transmission effects, emissivity, and low resolution, leading to floaters and blur effects in rendered images. To address these problems, we introduce Veta-GS, which leverages a view-dependent deformation field and a Thermal Feature Extractor (TFE) to precisely capture subtle thermal variations and maintain robustness. Specifically, we design view-dependent deformation field that leverages camera position and viewing direction, which capture thermal variations. Furthermore, we introduce the Thermal Feature Extractor (TFE) and MonoSSIM loss, which consider appearance, edge, and frequency to maintain robustness. Extensive experiments on the TI-NSD benchmark show that our method achieves better performance over existing methods.
Authors:Michael Roop, Sagy Ephrati
Title: Thermal quasi-geostrophic model on the sphere: derivation and structure-preserving simulation
Abstract:
We derive the global model of thermal quasi-geostrophy on the sphere via asymptotic expansion of the thermal rotating shallow water equations. The model does not rely on the asymptotic expansion of the Coriolis force and extends the quasi-geostrophic model on the sphere by including an additional transported buoyancy field acting as a source term for the potential vorticity. We give its Hamiltonian description in terms of semidirect product Lie--Poisson brackets. The Hamiltonian formulation reveals the existence of an infinite number of conservation laws, Casimirs, parameterized by two arbitrary smooth functions. A structure-preserving discretization is provided based on Zeitlin's self-consistent matrix approximation for hydrodynamics. A Casimir-preserving time integrator is employed to numerically fully preserve the resulting finite-dimensional Lie--Poisson structure. Simulations reveal the formation of vorticity and buoyancy fronts, and large-scale structures in the buoyancy dynamics induced by the buoyancy-bathymetry interaction.
Authors:Michael Roop, Sagy Ephrati
Title: Thermal quasi-geostrophic model on the sphere: derivation and structure-preserving simulation
Abstract:
We derive the global model of thermal quasi-geostrophy on the sphere via asymptotic expansion of the thermal rotating shallow water equations. The model does not rely on the asymptotic expansion of the Coriolis force and extends the quasi-geostrophic model on the sphere by including an additional transported buoyancy field acting as a source term for the potential vorticity. We give its Hamiltonian description in terms of semidirect product Lie--Poisson brackets. The Hamiltonian formulation reveals the existence of an infinite number of conservation laws, Casimirs, parameterized by two arbitrary smooth functions. A structure-preserving discretization is provided based on Zeitlin's self-consistent matrix approximation for hydrodynamics. A Casimir-preserving time integrator is employed to numerically fully preserve the resulting finite-dimensional Lie--Poisson structure. Simulations reveal the formation of vorticity and buoyancy fronts, and large-scale structures in the buoyancy dynamics induced by the buoyancy-bathymetry interaction.
Authors:A. Ashok, A. Cabrera, S. Baje, A. Zambanini, K. Allinger, A. Bahr, S. van Waasen
Title: Self Clocked Digital LDO for Cryogenic Power Management in 22nm FDSOI with 98 Percent Efficiency
Abstract:
A universal quantum computer~(QC), though promising ground breaking solutions to complex problems, still faces several challenges with respect to scalability. Current state-of-the-art QC use a great quantity of cables to connect the physical qubits, situated in the cryogenic temperature, to room temperature electronics. Integrated cryogenic electronics together with semiconductor spin qubits is one way closer for scalability. Such a scalable quantum computer can have qubits and the control electronics at 4K stage. Being at 4K, more thermal dissipation is allowed without overloading the cooling capability of the fridge. Still, control and power circuitry is expected to be highly efficient. While commercial CMOS technologies are found to be operatable at \qty{}{mK}, lack of reliable cryogenic models while designing, increased mismatches at cryo temperatures makes the design challenging and risky. Using an FDSOI technology with backgate biasing to compensate for the threshold voltage drift happening at cryo~(compensating around 200mV) and digital circuitry is a way to address this challenge. In this work, a self-clocked digital low dropout regulator (DLDO) is designed in FDSOI for high power efficient, variation tolerant regulator to supply cryogenic circuits for Quantum computing. The proposed digital LDO is more resilient to mismatch and having self clocking and close and fine loops addresses the power efficiency and faster transient response.
Authors:Xue Cui, Vincent Gbouna Zakka, Minhyun Lee
Title: A computer vision-based model for occupancy detection using low-resolution thermal images
Abstract:
Occupancy plays an essential role in influencing the energy consumption and operation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Traditional HVAC typically operate on fixed schedules without considering occupancy. Advanced occupant-centric control (OCC) adopted occupancy status in regulating HVAC operations. RGB images combined with computer vision (CV) techniques are widely used for occupancy detection, however, the detailed facial and body features they capture raise significant privacy concerns. Low-resolution thermal images offer a non-invasive solution that mitigates privacy issues. The study developed an occupancy detection model utilizing low-resolution thermal images and CV techniques, where transfer learning was applied to fine-tune the You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) model. The developed model ultimately achieved satisfactory performance, with precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50 values approaching 1.000. The contributions of this model lie not only in mitigating privacy concerns but also in reducing computing resource demands.
Authors:Weihua Yang, Yicong Zhou
Title: Quaternion Infrared Visible Image Fusion
Abstract:
Visible images provide rich details and color information only under well-lighted conditions while infrared images effectively highlight thermal targets under challenging conditions such as low visibility and adverse weather. Infrared-visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from infrared and visible images to generate a high-quality fused image. Existing methods exhibit critical limitations such as neglecting color structure information in visible images and performance degradation when processing low-quality color-visible inputs. To address these issues, we propose a quaternion infrared-visible image fusion (QIVIF) framework to generate high-quality fused images completely in the quaternion domain. QIVIF proposes a quaternion low-visibility feature learning model to adaptively extract salient thermal targets and fine-grained texture details from input infrared and visible images respectively under diverse degraded conditions. QIVIF then develops a quaternion adaptive unsharp masking method to adaptively improve high-frequency feature enhancement with balanced illumination. QIVIF further proposes a quaternion hierarchical Bayesian fusion model to integrate infrared saliency and enhanced visible details to obtain high-quality fused images. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that our QIVIF surpasses state-of-the-art methods under challenging low-visibility conditions.
Authors:Michael Marinaccio, Fatemeh Afghah
Title: Seeing Heat with Color -- RGB-Only Wildfire Temperature Inference from SAM-Guided Multimodal Distillation using Radiometric Ground Truth
Abstract:
High-fidelity wildfire monitoring using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) typically requires multimodal sensing - especially RGB and thermal imagery - which increases hardware cost and power consumption. This paper introduces SAM-TIFF, a novel teacher-student distillation framework for pixel-level wildfire temperature prediction and segmentation using RGB input only. A multimodal teacher network trained on paired RGB-Thermal imagery and radiometric TIFF ground truth distills knowledge to a unimodal RGB student network, enabling thermal-sensor-free inference. Segmentation supervision is generated using a hybrid approach of segment anything (SAM)-guided mask generation, and selection via TOPSIS, along with Canny edge detection and Otsu's thresholding pipeline for automatic point prompt selection. Our method is the first to perform per-pixel temperature regression from RGB UAV data, demonstrating strong generalization on the recent FLAME 3 dataset. This work lays the foundation for lightweight, cost-effective UAV-based wildfire monitoring systems without thermal sensors.
Authors:Qianxi Fu, Youngjoon Suh, Xiaojing Zhang, Yoonjin Won
Title: Data-Driven Optical To Thermal Inference in Pool Boiling Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Abstract:
Phase change plays a critical role in thermal management systems, yet quantitative characterization of multiphase heat transfer remains limited by the challenges of measuring temperature fields in chaotic, rapidly evolving flow regimes. While computational methods offer spatiotemporal resolution in idealized cases, replicating complex experimental conditions remains prohibitively difficult. Here, we present a data-driven framework that leverages a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) to infer temperature fields from geometric phase contours in a canonical pool boiling configuration where advanced data collection techniques are restricted. Using high-speed imaging data and simulation-informed training, our model demonstrates the ability to reconstruct temperature fields with errors below 6%. We further show that standard data augmentation strategies are effective in enhancing both accuracy and physical plausibility of the predicted maps across both simulation and experimental datasets when precise physical constraints are not applicable. Our results highlight the potential of deep generative models to bridge the gap between observable multiphase phenomena and underlying thermal transport, offering a powerful approach to augment and interpret experimental measurements in complex two-phase systems.
Authors:Samuel Olivier, James S. Warsa, HyeongKae Park
Title: A Comparison of the Consistent and Independent Second Moment Methods Applied to Thermal Radiative Transfer
Abstract:
The design of efficient numerical methods for modeling thermal radiative transfer (TRT) is challenging due to the stiff, nonlinear coupling between radiation and material energies, especially at the time scales of interest in high energy density physics and astrophysics. Here, we investigate the use of the Second Moment Method (SMM) to accelerate absorption-emission within the context of the multigroup, Discrete Ordinates transport equations with discontinuous Galerkin spatial discretization. SMM employs a reduced-dimensional, diffusion-based model of radiation transport that, when coupled with suitable discrete closures, serves as a proxy for the transport equation, isolating the transport equation from the stiff absorption-emission physics. We use a gray low-order system to reduce the cost of solving the low-order system and leverage SMM low-order discretizations specifically designed to be scalably solvable with existing linear solver technology. Our algorithm robustly resolves the nonlinear TRT system while only relying on transport sweeps, linearly solving symmetric and positive definite, gray diffusion systems, and nonlinearly solving the spatially pointwise energy balance equation. This algorithm is used as a vehicle to compare the efficacy of low-order discretizations developed for steady-state, linear transport on gray and multigroup TRT problems in one and two spatial dimensions.
Authors:Aditi Nachnani, Kai K. Li-Caldwell, Saptarshi Biswas, Prince Sharma, Gaoyuan Ouyang, Prashant Singh
Title: Interpretable machine learning-guided design of Fe-based soft magnetic alloys
Abstract:
We present a machine-learning guided approach to predict saturation magnetization (MS) and coercivity (HC) in Fe-rich soft magnetic alloys, particularly Fe-Si-B systems. ML models trained on experimental data reveals that increasing Si and B content reduces MS from 1.81T (DFT~2.04 T) to ~1.54 T (DFT~1.56T) in Fe-Si-B, which is attributed to decreased magnetic density and structural modifications. Experimental validation of ML predicted magnetic saturation on Fe-1Si-1B (2.09T), Fe-5Si-5B (2.01T) and Fe-10Si-10B (1.54T) alloy compositions further support our findings. These trends are consistent with density functional theory (DFT) predictions, which link increased electronic disorder and band broadening to lower MS values. Experimental validation on selected alloys confirms the predictive accuracy of the ML model, with good agreement across compositions. Beyond predictive accuracy, detailed uncertainty quantification and model interpretability including through feature importance and partial dependence analysis reveals that MS is governed by a nonlinear interplay between Fe content, early transition metal ratios, and annealing temperature, while HC is more sensitive to processing conditions such as ribbon thickness and thermal treatment windows. The ML framework was further applied to Fe-Si-B/Cr/Cu/Zr/Nb alloys in a pseudo-quaternary compositional space, which shows comparable magnetic properties to NANOMET (Fe84.8Si0.5B9.4Cu0.8 P3.5C1), FINEMET (Fe73.5Si13.5B9 Cu1Nb3), NANOPERM (Fe88Zr7B4Cu1), and HITPERM (Fe44Co44Zr7B4Cu1. Our fundings demonstrate the potential of ML framework for accelerated search of high-performance, Co- and Ni-free, soft magnetic materials.
Authors:Dinan Li, Panagiotis Kakosimos
Title: Temperature Estimation in Induction Motors using Machine Learning
Abstract:
The number of electrified powertrains is ever increasing today towards a more sustainable future; thus, it is essential that unwanted failures are prevented, and a reliable operation is secured. Monitoring the internal temperatures of motors and keeping them under their thresholds is an important first step. Conventional modeling methods require expert knowledge and complicated mathematical approaches. With all the data a modern electric drive collects nowadays during the system operation, it is feasible to apply data-driven approaches for estimating thermal behaviors. In this paper, multiple machine-learning methods are investigated on their capability to approximate the temperatures of the stator winding and bearing in induction motors. The explored algorithms vary from linear to neural networks. For this reason, experimental lab data have been captured from a powertrain under predetermined operating conditions. For each approach, a hyperparameter search is then performed to find the optimal configuration. All the models are evaluated by various metrics, and it has been found that neural networks perform satisfactorily even under transient conditions.
Authors:Adrian Esser, Chiara Basla, Peter Wolf, Robert Riener
Title: Design and benchmarking of a two degree of freedom tendon driver unit for cable-driven wearable technologies
Abstract:
Exosuits have recently been developed as alternatives to rigid exoskeletons and are increasingly adopted for both upper and lower limb therapy and assistance in clinical and home environments. Many cable-driven exosuits have been developed but little has been published on their electromechanical designs and performance. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive design and performance analysis of a two degree of freedom tendon driver unit (TDU) for cable-driven wearable exosuits. Detailed methodologies are presented to benchmark the functionality of the TDU. A static torque output test compares the commanded and measured torques. A velocity control test evaluates the attenuation and phase shift across velocities. A noise test evaluates how loud the TDU is for the wearer under different speeds. A thermal stress test captures the cooling performance of the TDU to ensure safe operation at higher loads. Finally, a battery endurance test evaluates the runtime of the TDU under various loading conditions to inform the usable time. To demonstrate these tests, a modular TDU system for cable-driven applications is introduced, which allows components such as motors, pulleys, and sensors to be adapted based on the requirements of the intended application. By sharing detailed methodologies and performance results, this study aims to provide a TDU design that may be leveraged by others and resources for researchers and engineers to better document the capabilities of their TDU designs.
Authors:Dinan Li, Panagiotis Kakosimos, Luca Peretti
Title: Machine learning-based condition monitoring of powertrains in modern electric drives
Abstract:
The recent technological advances in digitalization have revolutionized the industrial sector. Leveraging data analytics has now enabled the collection of deep insights into the performance and, as a result, the optimization of assets. Industrial drives, for example, already accumulate all the necessary information to control electric machines. These signals include but are not limited to currents, frequency, and temperature. Integrating machine learning (ML) models responsible for predicting the evolution of those directly collected or implicitly derived parameters enhances the smartness of industrial systems even further. In this article, data already residing in most modern electric drives has been used to develop a data-driven thermal model of a power module. A test bench has been designed and used specifically for training and validating the thermal digital twin undergoing various static and dynamic operating profiles. Different approaches, from traditional linear models to deep neural networks, have been implemented to emanate the best ML model for estimating the case temperature of a power module. Several evaluation metrics were then used to assess the investigated methods' performance and implementation in industrial embedded systems.
Authors:Panagiotis Kakosimos, Alireza Nemat Saberi, Luca Peretti
Title: An Adaptive ML Framework for Power Converter Monitoring via Federated Transfer Learning
Abstract:
This study explores alternative framework configurations for adapting thermal machine learning (ML) models for power converters by combining transfer learning (TL) and federated learning (FL) in a piecewise manner. This approach inherently addresses challenges such as varying operating conditions, data sharing limitations, and security implications. The framework starts with a base model that is incrementally adapted by multiple clients via adapting three state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques: Fine-tuning, Transfer Component Analysis (TCA), and Deep Domain Adaptation (DDA). The Flower framework is employed for FL, using Federated Averaging for aggregation. Validation with field data demonstrates that fine-tuning offers a straightforward TL approach with high accuracy, making it suitable for practical applications. Benchmarking results reveal a comprehensive comparison of these methods, showcasing their respective strengths and weaknesses when applied in different scenarios. Locally hosted FL enhances performance when data aggregation is not feasible, while cloud-based FL becomes more practical with a significant increase in the number of clients, addressing scalability and connectivity challenges.
Authors:Jean-Luc Feugeas, Julien Mathiaud, Luc Mieussens, Thomas Vigier
Title: An asymptotic preserving scheme for the M1model of non-local thermal transport for two-dimensional structured and unstructured meshes
Abstract:
The M1 moment model for electronic transport is commonly used to describe non-local thermal transport effects in laser-plasma simulations. In this article, we propose a new asymptotic-preserving scheme based on the Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme (UGKS) for this model in two-dimensional space. This finite volume kinetic scheme follows the same approach as in our previous article and relies on a moment closure, at the numerical scale, of the microscopic flux of UGKS. The method is developed for both structured and unstructured meshes, and several techniques are introduced to ensure accurate fluxes in the diffusion limit. A second-order extension is also proposed. Several test cases validate the different aspects of the scheme and demonstrate its efficiency in multiscale simulations. In particular, the results demonstrate that this method accurately captures non-local thermal effects.
Authors:Janghyun Kim, Minseong Kweon, Jinsun Park, Ukcheol Shin
Title: All-day Depth Completion via Thermal-LiDAR Fusion
Abstract:
Depth completion, which estimates dense depth from sparse LiDAR and RGB images, has demonstrated outstanding performance in well-lit conditions. However, due to the limitations of RGB sensors, existing methods often struggle to achieve reliable performance in harsh environments, such as heavy rain and low-light conditions. Furthermore, we observe that ground truth depth maps often suffer from large missing measurements in adverse weather conditions such as heavy rain, leading to insufficient supervision. In contrast, thermal cameras are known for providing clear and reliable visibility in such conditions, yet research on thermal-LiDAR depth completion remains underexplored. Moreover, the characteristics of thermal images, such as blurriness, low contrast, and noise, bring unclear depth boundary problems. To address these challenges, we first evaluate the feasibility and robustness of thermal-LiDAR depth completion across diverse lighting (eg., well-lit, low-light), weather (eg., clear-sky, rainy), and environment (eg., indoor, outdoor) conditions, by conducting extensive benchmarks on the MS$^2$ and ViViD datasets. In addition, we propose a framework that utilizes COntrastive learning and Pseudo-Supervision (COPS) to enhance depth boundary clarity and improve completion accuracy by leveraging a depth foundation model in two key ways. First, COPS enforces a depth-aware contrastive loss between different depth points by mining positive and negative samples using a monocular depth foundation model to sharpen depth boundaries. Second, it mitigates the issue of incomplete supervision from ground truth depth maps by leveraging foundation model predictions as dense depth priors. We also provide in-depth analyses of the key challenges in thermal-LiDAR depth completion to aid in understanding the task and encourage future research.
Authors:Marie-Hélène Azam, Julien Berger, Edouard Walther, Sihem Guernouti
Title: Design and Experimental Validation of an Urban Microclimate Tool Integrating Indoor-Outdoor Detailed Longwave Radiative Fluxes at District Scale
Abstract:
Numerical simulation is a powerful tool for assessing the causes of an Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect or quantifying the impact of mitigation solutions on outdoor and indoor thermal comfort. For that purpose, several models have been developed at the district scale. At this scale, the outside surface energy budget is detailed, however building models are very simplified and considered as a boundary condition of the district scale model. This shortcoming inhibits the opportunity to investigate the effect of urban microclimate on the inside building conditions. The aim of this work is to improve the representation of the physical phenomena involved in the building models of a district model. For that purpose, the model integrates inside and outside fully detailed long-wave radiative flux. The numerical model is based on finite differences to solve conduction through all the surfaces and the radiosity method to solve long-wave radiative heat fluxes inside and outside. Calculated temperatures and heat fluxes are evaluated with respect to \textit{in situ} measurements from an experimental demonstrator over 14 sensors and a 24-day period. Results are also compared to state-of-the-art models simulation tool show improvement of the RMSE of $0.9 \ \mathsf{^{\,\circ}C}$ to $2.1 \ \mathsf{^{\,\circ}C}$ on the surface temperature modeled.
Authors:Sanath Keshav, Julius Herb, Felix Fritzen
Title: Spectral Normalization and Voigt-Reuss net: A universal approach to microstructure-property forecasting with physical guarantees
Abstract:
Heterogeneous materials are crucial to producing lightweight components, functional components, and structures composed of them. A crucial step in the design process is the rapid evaluation of their effective mechanical, thermal, or, in general, constitutive properties. The established procedure is to use forward models that accept microstructure geometry and local constitutive properties as inputs. The classical simulation-based approach, which uses, e.g., finite elements and FFT-based solvers, can require substantial computational resources. At the same time, simulation-based models struggle to provide gradients with respect to the microstructure and the constitutive parameters. Such gradients are, however, of paramount importance for microstructure design and for inverting the microstructure-property mapping. Machine learning surrogates can excel in these situations. However, they can lead to unphysical predictions that violate essential bounds on the constitutive response, such as the upper (Voigt-like) or the lower (Reuss-like) bound in linear elasticity. Therefore, we propose a novel spectral normalization scheme that a priori enforces these bounds. The approach is fully agnostic with respect to the chosen microstructural features and the utilized surrogate model. All of these will automatically and strictly predict outputs that obey the upper and lower bounds by construction. The technique can be used for any constitutive tensor that is symmetric and where upper and lower bounds (in the Löwner sense) exist, i.e., for permeability, thermal conductivity, linear elasticity, and many more. We demonstrate the use of spectral normalization in the Voigt-Reuss net using a simple neural network. Numerical examples on truly extensive datasets illustrate the improved accuracy, robustness, and independence of the type of input features in comparison to much-used neural networks.
Authors:Leo Tunkle, Kamal Abdulraheem, Linyu Lin, Majdi I. Radaideh
Title: Nuclear Microreactor Control with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
The economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors will depend on minimizing operating costs through advancements in autonomous control, especially when these microreactors are operating alongside other types of energy systems (e.g., renewable energy). This study explores the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) for real-time drum control in microreactors, exploring performance in regard to load-following scenarios. By leveraging a point kinetics model with thermal and xenon feedback, we first establish a baseline using a single-output RL agent, then compare it against a traditional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. This study demonstrates that RL controllers, including both single- and multi-agent RL (MARL) frameworks, can achieve similar or even superior load-following performance as traditional PID control across a range of load-following scenarios. In short transients, the RL agent was able to reduce the tracking error rate in comparison to PID. Over extended 300-minute load-following scenarios in which xenon feedback becomes a dominant factor, PID maintained better accuracy, but RL still remained within a 1% error margin despite being trained only on short-duration scenarios. This highlights RL's strong ability to generalize and extrapolate to longer, more complex transients, affording substantial reductions in training costs and reduced overfitting. Furthermore, when control was extended to multiple drums, MARL enabled independent drum control as well as maintained reactor symmetry constraints without sacrificing performance -- an objective that standard single-agent RL could not learn. We also found that, as increasing levels of Gaussian noise were added to the power measurements, the RL controllers were able to maintain lower error rates than PID, and to do so with less control effort.
Authors:Zhanat Karashbayeva, Julien Berger, Helcio R. B. Orlande, Marie-Hélène Azam
Title: Estimation of thermal properties and boundary heat transfer coefficient of the ground with a Bayesian technique
Abstract:
Urbanization is the key contributor for climate change. Increasing urbanization rate causes an urban heat island (UHI) effect, which strongly depends on the short- and long-wave radiation balance heat flux between the surfaces. In order to calculate accurately this heat flux, it is required to assess the surface temperature which depends on the knowledge of the thermal properties and the surface heat transfer coefficients in the heat transfer problem. The aim of this paper is to estimate the thermal properties of the ground and the time varying surface heat transfer coefficient by solving an inverse problem. The Dufort--Frankel scheme is applied for solving the unsteady heat transfer problem. For the inverse problem, a Markov chain Monte Carlo method is used to estimate the posterior probability density function of unknown parameters within the Bayesian framework of statistics, by applying the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for random sample generation. Actual temperature measurements available at different ground depths were used for the solution of the inverse problem. Different time discretizations were examined for the transient heat transfer coefficient at the ground surface, which then involved different prior distributions. Results of different case studies show that the estimated values of the unknown parameters were in accordance with literature values. Moreover, with the present solution of the inverse problem the temperature residuals were smaller than those obtained by using literature values for the unknowns.
Authors:Maarten Vlaswinkel, Duarte Antunes, Frank Willems
Title: Automated and Risk-Aware Engine Control Calibration Using Constrained Bayesian Optimization
Abstract:
Decarbonization of the transport sector sets increasingly strict demands to maximize thermal efficiency and minimize greenhouse gas emissions of Internal Combustion Engines. This has led to complex engines with a surge in the number of corresponding tunable parameters in actuator set points and control settings. Automated calibration is therefore essential to keep development time and costs at acceptable levels. In this work, an innovative self-learning calibration method is presented based on in-cylinder pressure curve shaping. This method combines Principal Component Decomposition with constrained Bayesian Optimization. To realize maximal thermal engine efficiency, the optimization problem aims at minimizing the difference between the actual in-cylinder pressure curve and an Idealized Thermodynamic Cycle. By continuously updating a Gaussian Process Regression model of the pressure's Principal Components weights using measurements of the actual operating conditions, the mean in-cylinder pressure curve as well as its uncertainty bounds are learned. This information drives the optimization of calibration parameters, which are automatically adapted while dealing with the risks and uncertainties associated with operational safety and combustion stability. This data-driven method does not require prior knowledge of the system. The proposed method is successfully demonstrated in simulation using a Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition engine model. The difference between the Gross Indicated Efficiency of the optimal solution found and the true optimum is 0.017%. For this complex engine, the optimal solution was found after 64.4s, which is relatively fast compared to conventional calibration methods.
Authors:Mehdi Moshtaghi, Siavash H. Khajavi, Joni Pajarinen
Title: RGB-Th-Bench: A Dense benchmark for Visual-Thermal Understanding of Vision Language Models
Abstract:
We introduce RGB-Th-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to comprehend RGB-Thermal image pairs. While VLMs have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual reasoning and multimodal understanding, their evaluation has been predominantly limited to RGB-based benchmarks, leaving a critical gap in assessing their capabilities in infrared vision tasks. Existing visible-infrared datasets are either task-specific or lack high-quality annotations necessary for rigorous model evaluation. To address these limitations, RGB-Th-Bench provides a comprehensive evaluation framework covering 14 distinct skill dimensions, with a total of 1,600+ expert-annotated Yes/No questions. The benchmark employs two accuracy metrics: a standard question-level accuracy and a stricter skill-level accuracy, which evaluates model robustness across multiple questions within each skill dimension. This design ensures a thorough assessment of model performance, including resilience to adversarial and hallucinated responses. We conduct extensive evaluations on 19 state-of-the-art VLMs, revealing significant performance gaps in RGB-Thermal understanding. Our results show that even the strongest models struggle with thermal image comprehension, with performance heavily constrained by their RGB-based capabilities. Additionally, the lack of large-scale application-specific and expert-annotated thermal-caption-pair datasets in pre-training is an important reason of the observed performance gap. RGB-Th-Bench highlights the urgent need for further advancements in multimodal learning to bridge the gap between visible and thermal image understanding. The dataset is available through this link, and the evaluation code will also be made publicly available.
Authors:Hanshuo Qiu, Jie Jiang, Ruoli Yang, Lixin Zhan, Jizhao Liu
Title: BIMII-Net: Brain-Inspired Multi-Iterative Interactive Network for RGB-T Road Scene Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
RGB-T road scene semantic segmentation enhances visual scene understanding in complex environments characterized by inadequate illumination or occlusion by fusing information from RGB and thermal images. Nevertheless, existing RGB-T semantic segmentation models typically depend on simple addition or concatenation strategies or ignore the differences between information at different levels. To address these issues, we proposed a novel RGB-T road scene semantic segmentation network called Brain-Inspired Multi-Iteration Interaction Network (BIMII-Net). First, to meet the requirements of accurate texture and local information extraction in road scenarios like autonomous driving, we proposed a deep continuous-coupled neural network (DCCNN) architecture based on a brain-inspired model. Second, to enhance the interaction and expression capabilities among multi-modal information, we designed a cross explicit attention-enhanced fusion module (CEAEF-Module) in the feature fusion stage of BIMII-Net to effectively integrate features at different levels. Finally, we constructed a complementary interactive multi-layer decoder structure, incorporating the shallow-level feature iteration module (SFI-Module), the deep-level feature iteration module (DFI-Module), and the multi-feature enhancement module (MFE-Module) to collaboratively extract texture details and global skeleton information, with multi-module joint supervision further optimizing the segmentation results. Experimental results demonstrate that BIMII-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the brain-inspired computing domain and outperforms most existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods. It also exhibits strong generalization capabilities on multiple RGB-T datasets, proving the effectiveness of brain-inspired computer models in multi-modal image segmentation tasks.
Authors:Konstantinos Tsoupos, Stylianos Tzelepis, Georgios Sklavenitis, Dimitrios Stoupis, Grigorios Pavlakis, Panagiotis Bountzioukas, Christina Athanasiadou, Lily Ha, David Palma, Loris Franchi, Alkis Hatzopoulos
Title: The On-Board Computer of the AcubeSAT Mission
Abstract:
AcubeSAT is an open-source CubeSat mission aiming to explore the effects of microgravity and radiation on eukaryotic cells using a compact microfluidic lab-on-a-chip platform. It is developed by SpaceDot, a volunteer, interdisciplinary student team at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and supported by the "Fly Your Satellite! 3" program of the European Space Agency (ESA) Education Office. The nanosatellite features an in-house designed on-board computer subsystem responsible for telecommand execution, telemetry fetching, onboard time synchronization, in-orbit patching, and fault recovery. The subsystem is designed on one PC/104 standard compatible Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that hosts the On-board Computer (OBC) on the one side and the Attitude and Orbit Control Subsystem (AOCS) on the other, and it is compatible with the LibreCube standard. The hosted subsystems are functionally isolated and feature an ARM Cortex-M7, radiation-tolerant microcontroller each. Before sending anything to space thorough testing is required and specifically the on-board computer board underwent vibration and thermal cycling tests to ensure nominal operation in all conditions. This paper aims to elucidate the decision-making process, design iterations, and development stages of the custom board and accompanying in-house software. Insights garnered from the initial partially successful environmental test campaign at the ESA CubeSat Support Facility will be shared, along with the ensuing preparations, results, and lessons learned from subsequent testing endeavors in April 2024. Furthermore, the current developmental status will be discussed alongside future electromagnetic compatibility testing, integration plan on a FlatSat, and prospects for the open-source design as a cost-effective, and modular solution that can be tailored with little effort for upcoming missions.
Authors:Darío Slaifstein, Gautham Ram Chandra Mouli, Laura Ramirez-Elizondo, Pavol Bauer
Title: Aging-aware Energy Management for Residential Multi-Carrier Energy Systems
Abstract:
In the context of building electrification, the operation of distributed energy resources integrating multiple energy carriers (electricity, heat, mobility) poses a significant challenge due to the nonlinear device dynamics, uncertainty, and computational issues. As such, energy management systems seek to decide the power dispatch in the best way possible. The objective is to minimize and balance operative costs (energy bills or asset degradation) with user requirements (mobility, heating, etc.). Current energy management uses empirical battery ageing models outside of their specific fitting conditions, resulting in inaccuracies and poor performance. Moreover, the link to thermal systems is also overlooked. This paper presents an ageing-aware day-ahead algorithm for electrified buildings that incorporates physics-based battery ageing models. The models distinguish between energy storage systems and make explicit the trade-off between grid cost and battery degradation. The proposed day-ahead algorithm can either cut down on grid costs or extend battery lifetime (electric vehicle or stationary battery packs). Moreover, it exploits the differences between cathode chemistries improving grid costs by 25% when using LFP cells, with respect to NMC cells. Finally, the performance using aged batteries is also enhanced with 35% grid cost observed savings, when passing from new to aged batteries in the summer.
Authors:Partho Bhoumik, Christopher Bailey, Krishnendu Chakrabarty
Title: Defect Analysis and Built-In-Self-Test for Chiplet Interconnects in Fan-out Wafer-Level Packaging
Abstract:
Fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) addresses the demand for higher interconnect densities by offering reduced form factor, improved signal integrity, and enhanced performance. However, FOWLP faces manufacturing challenges such as coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch, warpage, die shift, and post-molding protrusion, causing misalignment and bonding issues during redistribution layer (RDL) buildup. Moreover, the organic nature of the package exposes it to severe thermo-mechanical stresses during fabrication and operation. In order to address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive defect analysis and testing framework for FOWLP interconnects. We use Ansys Q3D to map defects to equivalent electrical circuit models and perform fault simulations to investigate the impacts of these defects on chiplet functionality. Additionally, we present a built-in self-test (BIST) architecture to detect stuck-at and bridging faults while accurately diagnosing the fault type and location. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed BIST solution and provide critical insights for optimizing design decisions in packages, balancing fault detection and diagnosis with the cost of testability insertion.
Authors:Aman Singh, Bhavya Giri Goswami, Ketan Nehete, Shishir N. Y. Kolathaya
Title: A Chain-Driven, Sandwich-Legged Quadruped Robot: Design and Experimental Analysis
Abstract:
This paper introduces a chain-driven, sandwich-legged, mid-size quadruped robot designed as an accessible research platform. The design prioritizes enhanced locomotion capabilities, improved reliability and safety of the actuation system, and simplified, cost-effective manufacturing processes. Locomotion performance is optimized through a sandwiched leg design and a dual-motor configuration, reducing leg inertia for agile movements. Reliability and safety are achieved by integrating robust cable strain reliefs, efficient heat sinks for motor thermal management, and mechanical limits to restrict leg motion. Simplified design considerations include a quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuator and the adoption of low-cost fabrication techniques, such as laser cutting and 3D printing, to minimize cost and ensure rapid prototyping. The robot weighs approximately 25 kg and is developed at a cost under \$8000, making it a scalable and affordable solution for robotics research. Experimental validations demonstrate the platform's capability to execute trot and crawl gaits on flat terrain and slopes, highlighting its potential as a versatile and reliable quadruped research platform.
Authors:Meng Yuan, Adam Burman, Changfu Zou
Title: Robust Model Predictive Control of Fast Lithium-ion Battery Pretreatment for Safe Recycling
Abstract:
The proper disposal and repurposing of end-of-life electric vehicle batteries are critical for maximizing their environmental benefits. This study introduces a robust model predictive control (MPC) framework designed to optimize the battery discharging process during pre-treatment, ensuring both efficiency and safety. The proposed method explicitly incorporates temperature constraints to prevent overheating and potential hazards. By leveraging a control-oriented equivalent circuit model integrated with thermal dynamics, the MPC algorithm dynamically adjusts the discharging profile to maintain safe operating temperatures. Additionally, the robust controller is designed to account for model mismatches between the nonlinear battery dynamics and the linearized model, ensuring reliable performance under varying conditions. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through simulations comparing the robust MPC method with conventional discharging strategies, including constant current-constant voltage (CC-CV) and constant current-constant temperature (CC-CT) methods. Results indicate that the robust MPC framework significantly reduces discharging time while adhering to safety constraints, offering a promising solution for the recycling and second-life applications of lithium-ion batteries.
Authors:Yiqing Guo, Nagur Cherukuru, Eric Lehmann, Xiubin Qi, Mark Doubelld, S. L. Kesav Unnithan, Ming Feng
Title: Decadal analysis of sea surface temperature patterns, climatology, and anomalies in temperate coastal waters with Landsat-8 TIRS observations
Abstract:
Sea surface temperature (SST) is a fundamental physical parameter characterising the thermal state of sea surface. Due to the intricate thermal interactions between land, sea, and atmosphere, the spatial gradients of SST in coastal waters often appear at finer spatial scales than those in open ocean waters. The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) onboard Landsat-8, with its 100-meter spatial resolution, offers a unique opportunity to uncover fine-scale coastal SST patterns that would otherwise be overlooked by coarser-resolution thermal sensors. In this study, we first analysed the spatiotemporal patterns of SST in South Australia's temperate coastal waters from 2014 to 2023 by developing an operational approach for SST retrieval from the Landsat-8 TIRS sensor. A buoy was deployed off the coast of Port Lincoln, South Australia, to validate the quality of SST retrievals. Then the daily baseline climatology of SST with 100 m resolution was constructed, which allowed for the detection and analysis of anomalous SST events. Our results suggest the following: (1) the satellite-derived SST data aligned well with the in-situ measured SST values; (2) the semi-enclosed, shallow regions of Upper Spencer Gulf and Upper St Vincent Gulf showed higher temperatures during summer and cooler temperatures during winter than waters closer to the open ocean, resulting in a higher seasonal variation in SST; (3) the near-shore shallow areas in Spencer Gulf and St Vincent Gulf, and regions surrounding Kangaroo Island, were identified to have a higher probability of SST anomalies compared to the rest of the study area; and (4) anomalous SST events were more likely to happen during the warm months than the cool months. We hope these findings would be helpful in supporting the fishing and aquaculture industries in the coastal waters of South Australia.
Authors:Waqar Muhammad Ashraf, Vivek Dua, Ramit Debnath
Title: Domain Consistent Industrial Decarbonisation of Global Coal Power Plants
Abstract:
Machine learning and optimisation techniques (MLOPT) hold significant potential to accelerate the decarbonisation of industrial systems by enabling data-driven operational improvements. However, the practical application of MLOPT in industrial settings is often hindered by a lack of domain compliance and system-specific consistency, resulting in suboptimal solutions with limited real-world applicability. To address this challenge, we propose a novel human-in-the-loop (HITL) constraint-based optimisation framework that integrates domain expertise with data-driven methods, ensuring solutions are both technically sound and operationally feasible. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework through a case study focused on enhancing the thermal efficiency and reducing the turbine heat rate of a 660 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant. By embedding domain knowledge as constraints within the optimisation process, our approach yields solutions that align with the plant's operational patterns and are seamlessly integrated into its control systems. Empirical validation confirms a mean improvement in thermal efficiency of 0.64\% and a mean reduction in turbine heat rate of 93 kJ/kWh. Scaling our analysis to 59 global coal power plants with comparable capacity and fuel type, we estimate a cumulative lifetime reduction of 156.4 million tons of carbon emissions. These results underscore the transformative potential of our HITL-MLOPT framework in delivering domain-compliant, implementable solutions for industrial decarbonisation, offering a scalable pathway to mitigate the environmental impact of coal-based power generation worldwide.
Authors:Amir Jahangiri, Tatiana Agback, Ulrika Brath, Vladislav Orekhov
Title: Towards Ultimate NMR Resolution with Deep Learning
Abstract:
In multidimensional NMR spectroscopy, practical resolution is defined as the ability to distinguish and accurately determine signal positions against a background of overlapping peaks, thermal noise, and spectral artifacts. In the pursuit of ultimate resolution, we introduce Peak Probability Presentations ($P^3$)- a statistical spectral representation that assigns a probability to each spectral point, indicating the likelihood of a peak maximum occurring at that location. The mapping between the spectrum and $P^3$ is achieved using MR-Ai, a physics-inspired deep learning neural network architecture, designed to handle multidimensional NMR spectra. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MR-Ai enables coprocessing of multiple spectra, facilitating direct information exchange between datasets. This feature significantly enhances spectral quality, particularly in cases of highly sparse sampling. Performance of MR-Ai and high value of the $P^3$ are demonstrated on the synthetic data and spectra of Tau, MATL1, Calmodulin, and several other proteins.
Authors:Mohammad Pivezhandi, Abusayeed Saifullah, Prashant Modekurthy
Title: A Statistical Learning Approach for Feature-Aware Task-to-Core Allocation in Heterogeneous Platforms
Abstract:
Optimizing task-to-core allocation can substantially reduce power consumption in multi-core platforms without degrading user experience. However, many existing approaches overlook critical factors such as parallelism, compute intensity, and heterogeneous core types. In this paper, we introduce a statistical learning approach for feature selection that identifies the most influential features - such as core type, speed, temperature, and application-level parallelism or memory intensity - for accurate environment modeling and efficient energy optimization. Our experiments, conducted with state-of-the-art Linux governors and thermal modeling techniques, show that correlation-aware task-to-core allocation lowers energy consumption by up to 10% and reduces core temperature by up to 5 degrees Celsius compared to random core selection. Furthermore, our compressed, bootstrapped regression model improves thermal prediction accuracy by 6% while cutting model parameters by 16%, yielding an overall mean square error reduction of 61.6% relative to existing approaches. We provided results based on superscalar Intel Core i7 12th Gen processors with 14 cores, but validated our method across a diverse set of hardware platforms and effectively balanced performance, power, and thermal demands through statistical feature evaluation.
Authors:Gregg Rabideau, Joseph Russino, Andrew Branch, Nihal Dhamani, Tiago Stegun Vaquero, Steve Chien, Jean-Pierre de la Croix, Federico Rossi
Title: Planning, scheduling, and execution on the Moon: the CADRE technology demonstration mission
Abstract:
NASA's Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) mission, slated for flight to the Moon's Reiner Gamma region in 2025/2026, is designed to demonstrate multi-agent autonomous exploration of the Lunar surface and sub-surface. A team of three robots and a base station will autonomously explore a region near the lander, collecting the data required for 3D reconstruction of the surface with no human input; and then autonomously perform distributed sensing with multi-static ground penetrating radars (GPR), driving in formation while performing coordinated radar soundings to create a map of the subsurface. At the core of CADRE's software architecture is a novel autonomous, distributed planning, scheduling, and execution (PS&E) system. The system coordinates the robots' activities, planning and executing tasks that require multiple robots' participation while ensuring that each individual robot's thermal and power resources stay within prescribed bounds, and respecting ground-prescribed sleep-wake cycles. The system uses a centralized-planning, distributed-execution paradigm, and a leader election mechanism ensures robustness to failures of individual agents. In this paper, we describe the architecture of CADRE's PS&E system; discuss its design rationale; and report on verification and validation (V&V) testing of the system on CADRE's hardware in preparation for deployment on the Moon.
Authors:F. Bagagiolo, E. Bertolazzi, L. Marzufero, A. Pegoretti, D. Rigotti
Title: Modelling of the bonding process for a non-woven fabric: analysis and numerics
Abstract:
This paper presents research conducted at the University of Trento addressing an industrial challenge from Fater S.p.A. regarding the thermal bonding of non-woven fabrics for diaper production. The problem consists in a possible analysis of the behavior of the bonding process of a non-woven fabric. In particular, the bonding process is not given by the use of some kind of glue, but just by the pressure of two fiber webs through two high-velocity steel-made rollers. The research comprised the formulation and theoretical as well as numerical analysis of analytical, mechanical and thermal models for the stress-strain behavior of the non-woven fabric's fibers and for the bonding process with heating effects.
Authors:F. Bagagiolo, E. Bertolazzi, L. Marzufero, A. Pegoretti, D. Rigotti
Title: Modelling of the bonding process for a non-woven fabric: analysis and numerics
Abstract:
This paper presents research conducted at the University of Trento addressing an industrial challenge from Fater S.p.A. regarding the thermal bonding of non-woven fabrics for diaper production. The problem consists in a possible analysis of the behavior of the bonding process of a non-woven fabric. In particular, the bonding process is not given by the use of some kind of glue, but just by the pressure of two fiber webs through two high-velocity steel-made rollers. The research comprised the formulation and theoretical as well as numerical analysis of analytical, mechanical and thermal models for the stress-strain behavior of the non-woven fabric's fibers and for the bonding process with heating effects.
Authors:Yuzhuo Li, Yunwei Li
Title: AI Load Dynamics--A Power Electronics Perspective
Abstract:
As AI-driven computing infrastructures rapidly scale, discussions around data center design often emphasize energy consumption, water and electricity usage, workload scheduling, and thermal management. However, these perspectives often overlook the critical interplay between AI-specific load transients and power electronics. This paper addresses that gap by examining how large-scale AI workloads impose unique demands on power conversion chains and, in turn, how the power electronics themselves shape the dynamic behavior of AI-based infrastructure. We illustrate the fundamental constraints imposed by multi-stage power conversion architectures and highlight the key role of final-stage modules in defining realistic power slew rates for GPU clusters. Our analysis shows that traditional designs, optimized for slower-varying or CPU-centric workloads, may not adequately accommodate the rapid load ramps and drops characteristic of AI accelerators. To bridge this gap, we present insights into advanced converter topologies, hierarchical control methods, and energy buffering techniques that collectively enable robust and efficient power delivery. By emphasizing the bidirectional influence between AI workloads and power electronics, we hope this work can set a good starting point and offer practical design considerations to ensure future exascale-capable data centers can meet the stringent performance, reliability, and scalability requirements of next-generation AI deployments.
Authors:Tuna Erdoğan, Shi-Yuan Wang, Shang-Jen Su, Matthieu Bloch
Title: Joint Communication and Sensing with Bipartite Entanglement over Bosonic Channels
Abstract:
We consider a joint communication and sensing problem in an optical link in which a low-power transmitter attempts to communicate with a receiver while simultaneously identifying the range of a defect creating a backscattered signal. We model the system as a lossy thermal noise bosonic channel in which the location of the target, modeled as a beamsplitter, affects the timing of the backscattered signal. Motivated by the envisioned deployment of entanglement sharing quantum networks, we allow the transmitter to exploit entanglement to assist its sensing and communication. Since entanglement is known to enhance sensing, as known from quantum illumination, and increase communication rates, as known from the characterization of the entanglement-assisted capacity, the transmitter is faced with a trade-off and must judiciously allocate its entanglement resources. Our main result is a characterization of the trade-offs incurred in the form of an achievable rate/error-exponent region which can beat time-sharing in certain cases. The proof of our result relies on technical results of independent interests, by which we carefully show how to extend the known asymptotic characterization of multi-hypothesis testing Chernoff exponent in finite-dimensional spaces to infinite-dimensional spaces and provide a characterization of phase shift keying modulated displaced thermal states in Fock basis.
Authors:Viktor Kozák, Karel Košnar, Jan Chudoba, Miroslav Kulich, Libor Přeučil
Title: Visual Localization via Semantic Structures in Autonomous Photovoltaic Power Plant Inspection
Abstract:
Inspection systems utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with thermal cameras are increasingly popular for the maintenance of photovoltaic (PV) power plants. However, automation of the inspection task is a challenging problem as it requires precise navigation to capture images from optimal distances and viewing angles. This paper presents a novel localization pipeline that directly integrates PV module detection with UAV navigation, allowing precise positioning during inspection. Detections are used to identify the power plant structures in the image and associate these with the power plant model. We define visually recognizable anchor points for the initial association and use object tracking to discern global associations. We present three distinct methods for visual segmentation of PV modules based on traditional computer vision, deep learning, and their fusion, and we evaluate their performance in relation to the proposed localization pipeline. The presented methods were verified and evaluated using custom aerial inspection data sets, demonstrating their robustness and applicability for real-time navigation. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of the power plant model's precision on the localization methods.
Authors:Shaojie Zhang, Ozgur B. Akan
Title: Ion Transmitter for Molecular Communication
Abstract:
Molecular communication (MC) is an emerging paradigm that takes inspiration from biological processes, enabling communication at the nanoscale and facilitating the development of the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT). Traditional models of MC often rely on idealized assumptions that overlook practical challenges related to noise and signal behavior. This paper proposes and evaluates the first physical MC ion transmitter (ITX) using an ion exchange membrane. The circuit network model is used to simulate ion transport and analyze both transient and steady-state behavior. This analysis includes the effects of noise sources such as thermal and shot noise on signal integrity and SNR. The main contributions of this paper are to demonstrate how a practical MC ITX can produce a realistic waveform and to highlight future research challenges associated with a physical membrane-based ITX.
Authors:Guillermo Federico Umbricht, Domingo Alberto Tarzia, Diana Rubio
Title: Analytical and Numerical Study of a Convection-Diffusion-Reaction-Source Problem in Multilayered Materials
Abstract:
In this work, a thermal energy transfer problem in a one-dimensional multilayer body is theoretically analyzed, considering diffusion, advection, internal heat generation or loss linearly dependent on temperature in each layer, as well as heat generation due to external sources. Additionally, the thermal contact resistance at the interfaces between each pair of materials is taken into account. The problem is mathematically modeled, and explicit analytical solutions are derived using Fourier techniques. A convergent finite difference scheme is also formulated to simulate specific cases. The solution is consistent with previous results. A numerical example is provided, demonstrating the coherence between the obtained results and the physical behavior of the problem. This work was recently published for a two-layer body; the generalization to m-layer bodies allows for conclusions that enhance the theoretical understanding of heat transfer in multilayer materials and may contribute to improving the thermal design of multilayer engineering systems.
Authors:Pegah Eshraghi, Arman Nikkhah Dehnavi, Maedeh Mirdamadi, Riccardo Talami, Zahra-Sadat Zomorodian
Title: An AI-driven framework for rapid and localized optimizations of urban open spaces
Abstract:
As urbanization accelerates, open spaces are increasingly recognized for their role in enhancing sustainability and well-being, yet they remain underexplored compared to built spaces. This study introduces an AI-driven framework that integrates machine learning models (MLMs) and explainable AI techniques to optimize Sky View Factor (SVF) and visibility, key spatial metrics influencing thermal comfort and perceived safety in urban spaces. Unlike global optimization methods, which are computationally intensive and impractical for localized adjustments, this framework supports incremental design improvements with lower computational costs and greater flexibility. The framework employs SHapley Adaptive Explanations (SHAP) to analyze feature importance and Counterfactual Explanations (CFXs) to propose minimal design changes. Simulations tested five MLMs, identifying XGBoost as the most accurate, with building width, park area, and heights of surrounding buildings as critical for SVF, and distances from southern buildings as key for visibility. Compared to Genetic Algorithms, which required approximately 15/30 minutes across 3/4 generations to converge, the tested CFX approach achieved optimized results in 1 minute with a 5% RMSE error, demonstrating significantly faster performance and suitability for scalable retrofitting strategies. This interpretable and computationally efficient framework advances urban performance optimization, providing data-driven insights and practical retrofitting solutions for enhancing usability and environmental quality across diverse urban contexts.
Authors:Shuo Tong, Han Liu, Runyuan Guo, Xueqiong Tian, Wenqing Wang, Ding Liu, Youmin Zhang
Title: A Text-Based Knowledge-Embedded Soft Sensing Modeling Approach for General Industrial Process Tasks Based on Large Language Model
Abstract:
Data-driven soft sensors (DDSS) have become mainstream methods for predicting key performance indicators in process industries. However, DDSS development requires complex and costly customized designs tailored to various tasks during the modeling process. Moreover, DDSS are constrained to a single structured data modality, limiting their ability to incorporate additional contextual knowledge. Furthermore, DDSSs' limited representation learning leads to weak predictive performance with scarce data. To address these challenges, we propose a general framework named LLM-TKESS (large language model for text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensing), harnessing the powerful general problem-solving capabilities, cross-modal knowledge transfer abilities, and few-shot capabilities of LLM for enhanced soft sensing modeling. Specifically, an auxiliary variable series encoder (AVS Encoder) is proposed to unleash LLM's potential for capturing temporal relationships within series and spatial semantic relationships among auxiliary variables. Then, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning alignment strategy: in the first stage, employing parameter-efficient fine-tuning through autoregressive training adjusts LLM to rapidly accommodate process variable data, resulting in a soft sensing foundation model (SSFM). Subsequently, by training adapters, we adapt the SSFM to various downstream tasks without modifying its architecture. Then, we propose two text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensors, integrating new natural language modalities to overcome the limitations of pure structured data models. Furthermore, benefiting from LLM's pre-existing world knowledge, our model demonstrates outstanding predictive capabilities in small sample conditions. Using the thermal deformation of air preheater rotor as a case study, we validate through extensive experiments that LLM-TKESS exhibits outstanding performance.
Authors:Giuseppe Nicoletta, Mauro Daniel Luigi Bruno, Peng Yu, Zhiming Wang, Maria Penelope De Santo, Roberto Caputo, Antonio Ferraro
Title: Anti-counterfeiting tags with camouflaged QR codes on nanocavities, using polymer-dispersed-liquid-crystals
Abstract:
Counterfeiting poses an evergrowing challenge, driving the need for innovative and sophisticated anti-counterfeiting strategies and technologies. Many solutions focus on tags characterized by optical features that are partially or completely camouflaged to the human eye, thus discouraging scammers. In this paper, a QR code is laser printed on a thin plastic foil previously coated by a specific nanocavity consisting of a metal/insulator/metal/insulator (MIMI) multilayer. This metamaterial possesses unique features in terms of light transmission that are due to the specific design. A thin layer of polymer dispersed liquid crystals, fabricated incorporating specific nematic liquid crystals in a polymer matrix, is able to camouflage the QR code that becomes, then, readable only under specific thermal conditions. Three anti-counterfeiting tags were fabricated, each using a distinct LC with its own nematic-isotropic transition temperature. The peculiar combination of the unique optical properties of nematic liquid crystals and optical nanocavities results in the creation of a novel type of tags showing two different encoding levels. Stress tests including water immersion, bending test, and prolonged heating have been performed ensuring the long-term stability of the tags. The realized two security-level anti-counterfeiting tags are cost-effective, straightforward to manufacture and, thanks to their flexibility, can be easily integrated into packaging and products.
Authors:Mehran Ebrahimi, Masayuki Yano
Title: A hyperreduced reduced basis element method for reduced-order modeling of component-based nonlinear systems
Abstract:
We introduce a hyperreduced reduced basis element method for model reduction of parameterized, component-based systems in continuum mechanics governed by nonlinear partial differential equations. In the offline phase, the method constructs, through a component-wise empirical training, a library of archetype components defined by a component-wise reduced basis and hyperreduced quadrature rules with varying hyperreduction fidelities. In the online phase, the method applies an online adaptive scheme informed by the Brezzi-Rappaz-Raviart theorem to select an appropriate hyperreduction fidelity for each component to meet the user-prescribed error tolerance at the system level. The method accommodates the rapid construction of hyperreduced models for large-scale component-based nonlinear systems and enables model reduction of problems with many continuous and topology-varying parameters. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated on a two-dimensional nonlinear thermal fin system that comprises up to 225 components and 68 independent parameters.
Authors:Suman Itani, Yibo Zhang, Jiadong Zang
Title: Large Language Model-Driven Database for Thermoelectric Materials
Abstract:
Thermoelectric materials provide a sustainable way to convert waste heat into electricity. However, data-driven discovery and optimization of these materials are challenging because of a lack of a reliable database. Here we developed a comprehensive database of 7,123 thermoelectric compounds, containing key information such as chemical composition, structural detail, seebeck coefficient, electrical and thermal conductivity, power factor, and figure of merit (ZT). We used the GPTArticleExtractor workflow, powered by large language models (LLM), to extract and curate data automatically from the scientific literature published in Elsevier journals. This process enabled the creation of a structured database that addresses the challenges of manual data collection. The open access database could stimulate data-driven research and advance thermoelectric material analysis and discovery.
Authors:Edward J. Oughton, Dennies K. Bor, Michael Wiltberger, Robert Weigel, C. Trevor Gaunt, Ridvan Dogan, Liling Huang
Title: A physics-engineering-economic model coupling approach for estimating the socio-economic impacts of space weather scenarios
Abstract:
There is growing concern about our vulnerability to space weather hazards and the disruption critical infrastructure failures could cause to society and the economy. However, the socio-economic impacts of space weather hazards, such as from geomagnetic storms, remain under-researched. This study introduces a novel framework to estimate the economic impacts of electricity transmission infrastructure failure due to space weather. By integrating existing geophysical and geomagnetically induced current (GIC) estimation models with a newly developed geospatial model of the Continental United States power grid, GIC vulnerabilities are assessed for a range of space weather scenarios. The approach evaluates multiple power network architectures, incorporating input-output economic modeling to translate business and population disruptions into macroeconomic impacts from GIC-related thermal heating failures. The results indicate a daily GDP loss from 6 billion USD to over 10 billion USD. Even under conservative GIC thresholds (75 A/ph) aligned with thermal withstand limits from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), significant economic disruptions are evident. This study is limited by its restriction to thermal heating analysis, though GICs can also affect the grid through other pathways, such as voltage instability and harmonic distortions. Addressing these other failure mechanisms need to be the focus of future research.
Authors:Chengzhong Zhang, Hongyu Zhao, Wenjie Zhang
Title: Accuracy and robust early detection of short-circuit faults in single-cell lithium battery
Abstract:
Effective early-stage detection of internal short circuit in lithium-ion batteries is crucial to preventing thermal runaway. This report proposes an effective approach to address this challenging issue, in which the current change, state of charge and resistance are considered simultaneously to depict the voltage differential envelope curve. The envelope naturally utilizes the inherent physical information of the battery and accounts for error interference, providing a high-precision range for battery voltage fluctuations under any operating conditions. This study validates the algorithm using data from 10 fault intervals under dynamic operating condition. The results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves 100% accuracy and responds rapidly, enabling timely detection of early-stage internal short circuit faults in batteries. Compared to signal processing-based and neural network methods, the proposed approach offers significant advantages in both accuracy and practicality, making it highly relevant for the safe application and widespread adoption of lithium-ion batteries.
Authors:Stephen Whitelam, Corneel Casert
Title: Thermodynamic computing out of equilibrium
Abstract:
We present the design for a thermodynamic computer that can perform arbitrary nonlinear calculations in or out of equilibrium. Simple thermodynamic circuits, fluctuating degrees of freedom in contact with a thermal bath and confined by a quartic potential, display an activity that is a nonlinear function of their input. Such circuits can therefore be regarded as thermodynamic neurons, and can serve as the building blocks of networked structures that act as thermodynamic neural networks, universal function approximators whose operation is powered by thermal fluctuations. We simulate a digital model of a thermodynamic neural network, and show that its parameters can be adjusted by genetic algorithm to perform nonlinear calculations at specified observation times, regardless of whether the system has attained thermal equilibrium. This work expands the field of thermodynamic computing beyond the regime of thermal equilibrium, enabling fully nonlinear computations, analogous to those performed by classical neural networks, at specified observation times.
Authors:Nicolas Delaissé, Peyman Havaej, Dieter Fauconnier, Joris Degroote
Title: A Two-Phase Flow Solver with Variable Liquid Compressibility and Temperature Equation for Partitioned Simulation of Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication
Abstract:
This paper presents a new solver developed in OpenFOAM for the modeling of lubricant in the narrow gap between two surfaces inducing hydrodynamic pressures up to few gigapascal. Cavitation is modeled using the homogeneous equilibrium model. The mechanical and thermodynamic constitutive behavior of the lubricant is accurately captured by inclusion of compressibility, lubricant rheology and thermal effects. Different constitutive models can be selected at run time, through the adoption of the modular approach of OpenFOAM. By combining the lubricant solver with a structural solver using a coupling tool, elastohydrodynamically lubricated contacts can be accurately simulated in a partitioned way. The solution approach is validated and examples with different slip conditions are included. The benefit for the OpenFOAM community of this work is the creation of a new solver for lubricant flow in challenging conditions and at the same the illustration of combining OpenFOAM solvers with other open-source software packages.
Authors:Indu Kant Deo, Youngsoo Choi, Saad A. Khairallah, Alexandre Reikher, Maria Strantza
Title: Data-Driven, Parameterized Reduced-order Models for Predicting Distortion in Metal 3D Printing
Abstract:
In Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), the applied laser energy produces high thermal gradients that lead to unacceptable final part distortion. Accurate distortion prediction is essential for optimizing the 3D printing process and manufacturing a part that meets geometric accuracy requirements. This study introduces data-driven parameterized reduced-order models (ROMs) to predict distortion in LPBF across various machine process settings. We propose a ROM framework that combines Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) with Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and compare its performance against a deep-learning based parameterized graph convolutional autoencoder (GCA). The POD-GPR model demonstrates high accuracy, predicting distortions within $\pm0.001mm$, and delivers a computational speed-up of approximately 1800x.
Authors:Tuğçe Gökdemir, Jakub Rydzewski
Title: A Note on Spectral Map
Abstract:
In molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, transitions between states are often rare events due to energy barriers that exceed the thermal temperature. Because of their infrequent occurrence and the huge number of degrees of freedom in molecular systems, understanding the physical properties that drive rare events is immensely difficult. A common approach to this problem is to propose a collective variable (CV) that describes this process by a simplified representation. However, choosing CVs is not easy, as it often relies on physical intuition. Machine learning (ML) techniques provide a promising approach for effectively extracting optimal CVs from MD data. Here, we provide a note on a recent unsupervised ML method called spectral map, which constructs CVs by maximizing the timescale separation between slow and fast variables in the system.
Authors:Bryce Hopkins, Leo ONeill, Michael Marinaccio, Eric Rowell, Russell Parsons, Sarah Flanary, Irtija Nazim, Carl Seielstad, Fatemeh Afghah
Title: FLAME 3 Dataset: Unleashing the Power of Radiometric Thermal UAV Imagery for Wildfire Management
Abstract:
The increasing accessibility of radiometric thermal imaging sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential for advancing AI-driven aerial wildfire management. Radiometric imaging provides per-pixel temperature estimates, a valuable improvement over non-radiometric data that requires irradiance measurements to be converted into visible images using RGB color palettes. Despite its benefits, this technology has been underutilized largely due to a lack of available data for researchers. This study addresses this gap by introducing methods for collecting and processing synchronized visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery using UAVs at prescribed fires. The included imagery processing pipeline drastically simplifies and partially automates each step from data collection to neural network input. Further, we present the FLAME 3 dataset, the first comprehensive collection of side-by-side visual spectrum and radiometric thermal imagery of wildland fires. Building on our previous FLAME 1 and FLAME 2 datasets, FLAME 3 includes radiometric thermal Tag Image File Format (TIFFs) and nadir thermal plots, providing a new data type and collection method. This dataset aims to spur a new generation of machine learning models utilizing radiometric thermal imagery, potentially trivializing tasks such as aerial wildfire detection, segmentation, and assessment. A single-burn subset of FLAME 3 for computer vision applications is available on Kaggle with the full 6 burn set available to readers upon request.
Authors:Chintan Jansari, Stéphane P. A. Bordas, Marco Montemurro, Elena Atroshchenko
Title: Design of thermal meta-structures made of functionally graded materials using isogeometric density-based topology optimization
Abstract:
The thermal conductivity of Functionally Graded Materials (FGMs) can be efficiently designed through topology optimization to obtain thermal meta-structures that actively steer the heat flow. Compared to conventional analytical design methods, topology optimization allows handling arbitrary geometries, boundary conditions and design requirements; and producing alternate designs for non-unique problems. Additionally, as far as the design of meta-structures is concerned, topology optimization does not need intuition-based coordinate transformation or the form invariance of governing equations, as in the case of transformation thermotics. We explore isogeometric density-based topology optimization in the continuous setting, which perfectly aligns with FGMs. In this formulation, the density field, geometry and solution of the governing equations are parameterized using non-uniform rational basis spline entities. Accordingly, the heat conduction problem is solved using Isogeometric Analysis. We design various 2D & 3D thermal meta-structures under different design scenarios to showcase the effectiveness and versatility of our approach. We also design thermal meta-structures based on architected cellular materials, a special class of FGMs, using their empirical material laws calculated via numerical homogenization.
Authors:Demetrius Gulewicz, Uduak Inyang-Udoh, Trevor Bird, Neera Jain
Title: Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a Hybrid Thermal Management System
Abstract:
Model predictive control has gained popularity for its ability to satisfy constraints and guarantee robustness for certain classes of systems. However, for systems whose dynamics are characterized by a high state dimension, substantial nonlinearities, and stiffness, suitable methods for online nonlinear MPC are lacking. One example of such a system is a vehicle thermal management system (TMS) with integrated thermal energy storage (TES), also referred to as a hybrid TMS. Here, hybrid refers to the ability to achieve cooling through a conventional heat exchanger or via melting of a phase change material, or both. Given increased electrification in vehicle platforms, more stringent performance specifications are being placed on TMS, in turn requiring more advanced control methods. In this paper, we present the design and real-time implementation of a nonlinear model predictive controller with 77 states on an experimental hybrid TMS testbed. We show how, in spite of high-dimension and stiff dynamics, an explicit integration method can be obtained by linearizing the dynamics at each time step within the MPC horizon. This integration method further allows the first-order gradients to be calculated with minimal additional computational cost. Through simulated and experimental results, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed solution method and the benefits of TES for mitigating highly transient heat loads achieved by actively controlling its charging and discharging behavior.
Authors:Zhen Hao, Ning Jiang, Liu Liu
Title: An efficient Asymptotic-Preserving scheme for the Boltzmann mixture with disparate mass
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop and implement an efficient asymptotic-preserving (AP) scheme to solve the gas mixture of Boltzmann equations under the disparate mass scaling relevant to the so-called "epochal relaxation" phenomenon. The disparity in molecular masses, ranging across several orders of magnitude, leads to significant challenges in both the evaluation of collision operators and the designing of time-stepping schemes to capture the multi-scale nature of the dynamics. A direct implementation of the spectral method faces prohibitive computational costs as the mass ratio increases due to the need to resolve vastly different thermal velocities. Unlike [I. M. Gamba, S. Jin, and L. Liu, Commun. Math. Sci., 17 (2019), pp. 1257-1289], we propose an alternative approach based on proper truncation of asymptotic expansions of the collision operators, which significantly reduces the computational complexity and works well for small $\varepsilon$. By incorporating the separation of three time scales in the model's relaxation process [P. Degond and B. Lucquin-Desreux, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 6 (1996), pp. 405-436], we design an AP scheme that captures the specific dynamics of the disparate mass model while maintaining computational efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in handling large mass ratios of heavy and light species, as well as capturing the epochal relaxation phenomenon.
Authors:Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Chen
Title: Distributed Coordination of Grid-Forming and Grid-Following Inverters for Optimal Frequency Control in Power Systems
Abstract:
The large-scale integration of inverter-interfaced renewable energy sources presents significant challenges to maintaining power balance and nominal frequency in modern power systems. This paper studies grid-level coordinated control of grid-forming (GFM) and grid-following (GFL) inverter-based resources (IBRs) for scalable and optimal frequency control. We propose a fully distributed optimal frequency control algorithm based on the projected primal-dual gradient method and by leveraging the structure of the underlying physical system dynamics. The proposed algorithm i) restores the nominal system frequency while minimizing total control cost and enforcing IBR power capacity limits and line thermal constraints, and ii) operates in a distributed manner that only needs local measurements and neighbor-to-neighbor communication. In particular, when the line thermal constraints are disregarded, the proposed algorithm admits a fully local implementation that requires no communication, while still ensuring optimality and satisfying IBR power capacity limits. We establish the global asymptotic convergence of the algorithm using Lyapunov stability analysis. The effectiveness and optimality of the proposed algorithms are validated through high-fidelity, 100% inverter-based electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations on the IEEE 39-bus system.
Authors:Xujun Wei, Feng Zhang, Renhe Zhang, Wenwen Li, Cuiping Liu, Bin Guo, Jingwei Li, Haoyang Fu, Xu Tang
Title: DaYu: Data-Driven Model for Geostationary Satellite Observed Cloud Images Forecasting
Abstract:
In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based weather forecasting methods have widely demonstrated strong competitiveness among the weather forecasting systems. However, these methods are insufficient for high-spatial-resolution short-term nowcasting within 6 hours, which is crucial for warning short-duration, mesoscale and small-scale weather events. Geostationary satellite remote sensing provides detailed, high spatio-temporal and all-day observations, which can address the above limitations of existing methods. Therefore, this paper proposed an advanced data-driven thermal infrared cloud images forecasting model, "DaYu." Unlike existing data-driven weather forecasting models, DaYu is specifically designed for geostationary satellite observations, with a temporal resolution of 0.5 hours and a spatial resolution of ${0.05}^\circ$ $\times$ ${0.05}^\circ$. DaYu is based on a large-scale transformer architecture, which enables it to capture fine-grained cloud structures and learn fast-changing spatio-temporal evolution features effectively. Moreover, its attention mechanism design achieves a balance in computational complexity, making it practical for applications. DaYu not only achieves accurate forecasts up to 3 hours with a correlation coefficient higher than 0.9, 6 hours higher than 0.8, and 12 hours higher than 0.7, but also detects short-duration, mesoscale, and small-scale weather events with enhanced detail, effectively addressing the shortcomings of existing methods in providing detailed short-term nowcasting within 6 hours. Furthermore, DaYu has significant potential in short-term climate disaster prevention and mitigation.
Authors:Shunjing Zhao, Hanlun Lei, Xian Shi
Title: Deep operator neural network applied to efficient computation of asteroid surface temperature and the Yarkovsky effect
Abstract:
Surface temperature distribution is crucial for thermal property-based studies about irregular asteroids in our Solar System. While direct numerical simulations could model surface temperatures with high fidelity, they often take a significant amount of computational time, especially for problems where temperature distributions are required to be repeatedly calculated. To this end, deep operator neural network (DeepONet) provides a powerful tool due to its high computational efficiency and generalization ability. In this work, we applied DeepONet to the modelling of asteroid surface temperatures. Results show that the trained network is able to predict temperature with an accuracy of ~1% on average, while the computational cost is five orders of magnitude lower, hence enabling thermal property analysis in a multidimensional parameter space. As a preliminary application, we analyzed the orbital evolution of asteroids through direct N-body simulations embedded with instantaneous Yarkovsky effect inferred by DeepONet-based thermophysical modelling.Taking asteroids (3200) Phaethon and (89433) 2001 WM41 as examples, we show the efficacy and efficiency of our AI-based approach.
Authors:E. García-Macías, Z. D. Harris, E. Martínez-Pañeda
Title: TDS Simulator: A MATLAB App to model temperature-programmed hydrogen desorption
Abstract:
We present TDS Simulator, a new software tool aimed at modelling thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS) experiments. TDS is a widely used technique for quantifying key characteristics of hydrogen-material interactions, such as diffusivity and trapping. However, interpreting the output of TDS experiments is non-trivial and requires appropriate post-processing tools. This work introduces the first software tool capable of simulating TDS curves for arbitrary choices of material parameters and hydrogen trap characteristics, using the primary hydrogen diffusion and trapping models (Oriani, McNabb-Foster). Moreover, TDS Simulator contains a specific functionality for loading experimental TDS data and conducting the inverse calibration of a selected transport model, providing automatic estimates of the density and binding energy of each hydrogen trap type in the material. In its first version, TDS Simulator is provided as a MATLAB App, which is made freely available to the community and provides a simple graphical user interface (GUI) to make use of TDS Simulator straightforward. As reported in the present manuscript, the outputs of TDS Simulator have been extensively validated against literature data. Demonstrations of automatic determination of trap characteristics from experimental data through the optimisation tool are also provided. The present work enables an efficient and straightforward characterisation of hydrogen-material characteristics relevant to multiple applications, from nuclear fusion to the development of hydrogen-compatible materials for the hydrogen economy. TDS Simulator can be downloaded from https://mechmat.web.ox.ac.uk/codes.
Authors:Xiaoqi Ling, Cheng Cai, Demin Kong, Zhisheng Wei, Jing Wu, Lei Wang, Zhaohong Deng
Title: EMOCPD: Efficient Attention-based Models for Computational Protein Design Using Amino Acid Microenvironment
Abstract:
Computational protein design (CPD) refers to the use of computational methods to design proteins. Traditional methods relying on energy functions and heuristic algorithms for sequence design are inefficient and do not meet the demands of the big data era in biomolecules, with their accuracy limited by the energy functions and search algorithms. Existing deep learning methods are constrained by the learning capabilities of the networks, failing to extract effective information from sparse protein structures, which limits the accuracy of protein design. To address these shortcomings, we developed an Efficient attention-based Models for Computational Protein Design using amino acid microenvironment (EMOCPD). It aims to predict the category of each amino acid in a protein by analyzing the three-dimensional atomic environment surrounding the amino acids, and optimize the protein based on the predicted high-probability potential amino acid categories. EMOCPD employs a multi-head attention mechanism to focus on important features in the sparse protein microenvironment and utilizes an inverse residual structure to optimize the network architecture. The proposed EMOCPD achieves over 80% accuracy on the training set and 68.33% and 62.32% accuracy on two independent test sets, respectively, surpassing the best comparative methods by over 10%. In protein design, the thermal stability and protein expression of the predicted mutants from EMOCPD show significant improvements compared to the wild type, effectively validating EMOCPD's potential in designing superior proteins. Furthermore, the predictions of EMOCPD are influenced positively, negatively, or have minimal impact based on the content of the 20 amino acids, categorizing amino acids as positive, negative, or neutral. Research findings indicate that EMOCPD is more suitable for designing proteins with lower contents of negative amino acids.
Authors:Weidong Wu, Yong Zhang, Lili Hao, Yang Chen, Xiaoyan Sun, Dunwei Gong
Title: Physics-informed Partitioned Coupled Neural Operator for Complex Networks
Abstract:
Physics-Informed Neural Operators provide efficient, high-fidelity simulations for systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). However, most existing studies focus only on multi-scale, multi-physics systems within a single spatial region, neglecting the case with multiple interconnected sub-regions, such as gas and thermal systems. To address this, this paper proposes a Physics-Informed Partitioned Coupled Neural Operator (PCNO) to enhance the simulation performance of such networks. Compared to the existing Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), this method designs a joint convolution operator within the Fourier layer, enabling global integration capturing all sub-regions. Additionally, grid alignment layers are introduced outside the Fourier layer to help the joint convolution operator accurately learn the coupling relationship between sub-regions in the frequency domain. Experiments on gas networks demonstrate that the proposed operator not only accurately simulates complex systems but also shows good generalization and low model complexity.
Authors:Mikhail Khrenov, Moon Tan, Lauren Fitzwater, Michelle Hobdari, Sneha Prabha Narra
Title: Trajectory Optimization for Spatial Microstructure Control in Electron Beam Metal Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) opens the possibility for spatial control of as-fabricated microstructure and properties. However, since the solid state diffusional transformations that drive microstructure outcomes are governed by nonlinear ODEs in terms of temperature, which is itself governed by PDEs over the entire part domain, solving for the system inputs needed to achieve desired microstructure distributions has proven difficult. In this work, we present a trajectory optimization approach for spatial control of microstructure in metal AM, which we demonstrate by controlling the hardness of a low-alloy steel in electron beam powder bed fusion (EB-PBF). To this end, we present models for thermal and microstructural dynamics. Next, we use experimental data to identify the parameters of the microstructure transformation dynamics. We then pose spatial microstructure control as a finite-horizon optimal control problem. The optimal power field trajectory is computed using an augmented Lagrangian differential dynamic programming (AL-DDP) method with GPU acceleration. The resulting time-varying power fields are then realized on an EB-PBF machine through an approximation scheme. Measurements of the resultant hardness shows that the optimized power field trajectory is able to closely produce the desired hardness distribution.
Authors:Arash Baharvandi, Duong Tung Nguyen
Title: Optimal Network Expansion Planning Considering Uncertain Dynamic Thermal Line Rating
Abstract:
This paper examines the integrated generation and transmission expansion planning problem to address the growing challenges associated with increasing power network loads. The proposed approach optimizes the operation and investment costs for new generation units and transmission lines, while also considering the environmental benefits of integrating renewable energy sources (RES) and the impact of electric vehicle (EV) charging on the grid. The inherent uncertainties in demand, EV charging loads, and RES generation are managed using a hybrid stochastic-robust optimization approach. Additionally, the model integrates Dynamic Thermal Line Rating (DTLR) to improve the efficiency and resilience of transmission lines. The framework also tackles the uncertainty related to DTLR, incorporating a heuristic linearization technique to reduce model complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed model and techniques is evaluated through simulations conducted on two case studies: the modified IEEE 6-bus system and the IEEE 24-bus Reliability Test System.
Authors:Sijie Yang, Adrian Chong, Pengyuan Liu, Filip Biljecki
Title: Thermal Comfort in Sight: Thermal Affordance and its Visual Assessment for Sustainable Streetscape Design
Abstract:
In response to climate change and urban heat island effects, enhancing human thermal comfort in cities is crucial for sustainable urban development. Traditional methods for investigating the urban thermal environment and corresponding human thermal comfort level are often resource intensive, inefficient, and limited in scope. To address these challenges, we (1) introduce a new concept named thermal affordance, which formalizes the integrated inherent capacity of a streetscape to influence human thermal comfort based on its visual and physical features; and (2) an efficient method to evaluate it (visual assessment of thermal affordance -- VATA), which combines street view imagery (SVI), online and in-field surveys, and statistical learning algorithms. VATA extracts five categories of image features from SVI data and establishes 19 visual-perceptual indicators for streetscape visual assessment. Using a multi-task neural network and elastic net regression, we model their chained relationship to predict and comprehend thermal affordance for Singapore. VATA predictions are validated with field-investigated OTC data, providing a cost-effective, scalable, and transferable method to assess the thermal comfort potential of urban streetscape. Moreover, we demonstrate its utility by generating a geospatially explicit mapping of thermal affordance, outlining a model update workflow for long-term urban-scale analysis, and implementing a two-stage prediction and inference approach (IF-VPI-VATA) to guide future streetscape improvements. This framework can inform streetscape design to support sustainable, liveable, and resilient urban environments.
Authors:Yifu Ding, Jansen Wong, Serena Patel, Dharik Mallapragada, Guiyan Zang, Robert Stoner
Title: A Dataset of the Operating Station Heat Rate for 806 Indian Coal Plant Units using Machine Learning
Abstract:
India aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070 and has set an ambitious target of 500 GW of renewable power generation capacity by 2030. Coal plants currently contribute to more than 60\% of India's electricity generation in 2022. Upgrading and decarbonizing high-emission coal plants became a pressing energy issue. A key technical parameter for coal plants is the operating station heat rate (SHR), which represents the thermal efficiency of a coal plant. Yet, the operating SHR of Indian coal plants varies and is not comprehensively documented. This study extends from several existing databases and creates an SHR dataset for 806 Indian coal plant units using machine learning (ML), presenting the most comprehensive coverage to date. Additionally, it incorporates environmental factors such as water stress risk and coal prices as prediction features to improve accuracy. This dataset, easily downloadable from our visualization platform, could inform energy and environmental policies for India's coal power generation as the country transitions towards its renewable energy targets.
Authors:Dhruv Suri, Praneet Dutta, Flora Xue, Ines Azevedo, Ravi Jain
Title: Operational Wind Speed Forecasts for Chile's Electric Power Sector Using a Hybrid ML Model
Abstract:
As Chile's electric power sector advances toward a future powered by renewable energy, accurate forecasting of renewable generation is essential for managing grid operations. The integration of renewable energy sources is particularly challenging due to the operational difficulties of managing their power generation, which is highly variable compared to fossil fuel sources, delaying the availability of clean energy. To mitigate this, we quantify the impact of increasing intermittent generation from wind and solar on thermal power plants in Chile and introduce a hybrid wind speed forecasting methodology which combines two custom ML models for Chile. The first model is based on TiDE, an MLP-based ML model for short-term forecasts, and the second is based on a graph neural network, GraphCast, for medium-term forecasts up to 10 days. Our hybrid approach outperforms the most accurate operational deterministic systems by 4-21% for short-term forecasts and 5-23% for medium-term forecasts and can directly lower the impact of wind generation on thermal ramping, curtailment, and system-level emissions in Chile.
Authors:Eléa Prat, Pierre Pinson, Richard M. Lusby, Riwal Plougonven, Jordi Badosa, Philippe Drobinski
Title: Optimal Operation of a Building with Electricity-Heat Networks and Seasonal Storage
Abstract:
As seasonal thermal energy storage emerges as an efficient solution to reduce CO2 emissions of buildings, challenges appear related to its optimal operation. In a system including short-term electricity storage, long-term heat storage, and where electricity and heat networks are connected through a heat pump, it becomes crucial to operate the system on two time scales. Based on real data from a university building, we simulate the operation of such a system over a year, comparing different strategies based on model predictive control (MPC). The first objective of this paper is to determine the minimum prediction horizon to retrieve the results of the full-horizon operation problem with cost minimization. The second objective is to evaluate a method that combines MPC with setting targets on the heat storage level at the end of the prediction horizon, based on historical data. For a prediction horizon of 6 days, the suboptimality gap with the full-horizon results is 4.31%, compared to 11.42% when using a prediction horizon of 42 days and fixing the final level to be equal to the initial level, which is a common approach.
Authors:Tim Hageman, Jessica Mejía, Ravindra Duddu, Emilio Martínez-Pañeda
Title: Ice viscosity governs hydraulic fracture that causes rapid drainage of supraglacial lakes
Abstract:
Full thickness crevasses can transport water from the glacier surface to the bedrock where high water pressures can open kilometre-long cracks along the basal interface, which can accelerate glacier flow. We present a first computational modelling study that describes time-dependent fracture propagation in an idealised glacier causing rapid supraglacial lake drainage. A novel two-scale numerical method is developed to capture the elastic and viscoelastic deformations of ice along with crevasse propagation. The fluid-conserving thermo-hydro-mechanical model incorporates turbulent fluid flow and accounts for melting/refreezing in fractures. Applying this model to observational data from a 2008 rapid lake drainage event indicates that viscous deformation exerts a much stronger control on hydrofracture propagation compared to thermal effects. This finding contradicts the conventional assumption that elastic deformation is adequate to describe fracture propagation in glaciers over short timescales (minutes to several hours) and instead demonstrates that viscous deformation must be considered to reproduce observations of lake drainage rate and local ice surface elevation change. As supraglacial lakes continue expanding inland and as Greenland Ice Sheet temperatures become warmer than -8 degree C, our results suggest rapid lake drainages are likely to occur without refreezing, which has implications for the rate of sea level rise.
Authors:Siddhant Agarwal, Nicola Tosi, Christian Hüttig, David S. Greenberg, Ali Can Bekar
Title: Accelerating the discovery of steady-states of planetary interior dynamics with machine learning
Abstract:
Simulating mantle convection often requires reaching a computationally expensive steady-state, crucial for deriving scaling laws for thermal and dynamical flow properties and benchmarking numerical solutions. The strong temperature dependence of the rheology of mantle rocks causes viscosity variations of several orders of magnitude, leading to a slow-evolving stagnant lid where heat conduction dominates, overlying a rapidly-evolving and strongly convecting region. Time-stepping methods, while effective for fluids with constant viscosity, are hindered by the Courant criterion, which restricts the time step based on the system's maximum velocity and grid size. Consequently, achieving steady-state requires a large number of time steps due to the disparate time scales governing the stagnant and convecting regions. We present a concept for accelerating mantle convection simulations using machine learning. We generate a dataset of 128 two-dimensional simulations with mixed basal and internal heating, and pressure- and temperature-dependent viscosity. We train a feedforward neural network on 97 simulations to predict steady-state temperature profiles. These can then be used to initialize numerical time stepping methods for different simulation parameters. Compared to typical initializations, the number of time steps required to reach steady-state is reduced by a median factor of 3.75. The benefit of this method lies in requiring very few simulations to train on, providing a solution with no prediction error as we initialize a numerical method, and posing minimal computational overhead at inference time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and discuss the potential implications for accelerated simulations for advancing mantle convection research.
Authors:Piyush Agrawal, Ihina Mahajan, Shivam Choubey, Manish Agrawal
Title: Efficient FGM optimization with a novel design space and DeepONet
Abstract:
This manuscript proposes an optimization framework to find the tailor-made functionally graded material (FGM) profiles for thermoelastic applications. This optimization framework consists of (1) a random profile generation scheme, (2) deep learning (DL) based surrogate models for the prediction of thermal and structural quantities, and (3) a genetic algorithm (GA). From the proposed random profile generation scheme, we strive for a generic design space that does not contain impractical designs, i.e., profiles with sharp gradations. We also show that the power law is a strict subset of the proposed design space. We use a dense neural network-based surrogate model for the prediction of maximum stress, while the deep neural operator DeepONet is used for the prediction of the thermal field. The point-wise effective prediction of the thermal field enables us to implement the constraint that the metallic content of the FGM remains within a specified limit. The integration of the profile generation scheme and DL-based surrogate models with GA provides us with an efficient optimization scheme. The efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated through various numerical examples.
Authors:Ali Cox, Quntao Zhuang, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Saikat Guha
Title: Quantum Illumination Advantage for Classification Among an Arbitrary Library of Targets
Abstract:
Quantum illumination (QI) is the task of querying a scene using a transmitter probe whose quantum state is entangled with a reference beam retained in ideal storage, followed by optimally detecting the target-returned light together with the stored reference, to make decisions on characteristics of targets at stand-off range, at precision that exceeds what is achievable with a classical transmitter of the same brightness and otherwise identical conditions. Using tools from perturbation theory, we show that in the limit of low transmitter brightness, high loss, and high thermal background, there is a factor of four improvement in the Chernoff exponent of the error probability in discriminating any number of apriori-known reflective targets when using a Gaussian-state entangled QI probe, over using classical coherent-state illumination (CI). While this advantage was known for detecting the presence or absence of a target, it had not been proven for the generalized task of discriminating between arbitrary target libraries. In proving our result, we derive simple general analytic expressions for the lowest-order asymptotic expansions of the quantum Chernoff exponents for QI and CI in terms of the signal brightness, loss, thermal noise, and the modal expansion coefficients of the target-reflected light's radiant exitance profiles when separated by a spatial mode sorter after entering the entrance pupil of the receiver's aperture.
Authors:Hongyun Wang, Shannon E. Foley, Hong Zhou
Title: Assessing skin thermal injury risk in exposure tests of heating until flight
Abstract:
We assess the skin thermal injury risk in the situation where a test subject is exposed to an electromagnetic beam until the occurrence of flight action. The physical process is modeled as follows. The absorbed electromagnetic power increases the skin temperature. Wherever it is above a temperature threshold, thermal nociceptors are activated and transduce an electrical signal. When the activated skin volume reaches a threshold, the flight signal is initiated. After the delay of human reaction time, the flight action is materialized when the subject moves away or the beam power is turned off. The injury risk is quantified by the thermal damage parameter calculated in the Arrhenius equation. It depends on the beam power density absorbed into the skin, which is not measurable. In addition, the volume threshold for flight initiation is unknown. To circumference these difficulties, we normalize the formulation and write the thermal damage parameter in terms of the occurrence time of flight action, which is reliably observed in exposure tests. This thermal injury formulation provides a viable framework for investigating the effects of model parameters.
Authors:Wan Li, Wei Li, Moheng Rong, Yutao Rao, Hui Tang, Yudong Zhang, Feng Wang
Title: Respiratory Differencing: Enhancing Pulmonary Thermal Ablation Evaluation Through Pre- and Intra-Operative Image Fusion
Abstract:
CT image-guided thermal ablation is widely used for lung cancer treatment; however, follow-up data indicate that physicians' subjective assessments of intraoperative images often overestimate the ablation effect, potentially leading to incomplete treatment. To address these challenges, we developed \textit{Respiratory Differencing}, a novel intraoperative CT image assistance system aimed at improving ablation evaluation. The system first segments tumor regions in preoperative CT images and then employs a multi-stage registration process to align these images with corresponding intraoperative or postoperative images, compensating for respiratory deformations and treatment-induced changes. This system provides two key outputs to help physicians evaluate intraoperative ablation. First, differential images are generated by subtracting the registered preoperative images from the intraoperative ones, allowing direct visualization and quantitative comparison of pre- and post-treatment differences. These differential images enable physicians to assess the relative positions of the tumor and ablation zones, even when the tumor is no longer visible in post-ablation images, thus improving the subjective evaluation of ablation effectiveness. Second, the system provides a quantitative metric that measures the discrepancies between the tumor area and the treatment zone, offering a numerical assessment of the overall efficacy of ablation.This pioneering system compensates for complex lung deformations and integrates pre- and intra-operative imaging data, enhancing quality control in cancer ablation treatments. A follow-up study involving 35 clinical cases demonstrated that our system significantly outperforms traditional subjective assessments in identifying under-ablation cases during or immediately after treatment, highlighting its potential to improve clinical decision-making and patient outcomes.
Authors:Huiying Fan, Hongyu Lu, Geyu Lyu, Angshuman Guin, Randall Guensler
Title: A Framework for Assessing Cumulative Exposure to Extreme Temperatures During Transit Trip
Abstract:
The combined influence of urban heat islands, climate change, and extreme temperature events are increasingly impacting transit travelers, especially vulnerable populations such as older adults, people with disabilities, and those with chronic diseases. Previous studies have generally attempted to address this issue at either the micro- or macro-level, but each approach presents different limitations in modeling the impacts on transit trips. Other research proposes a meso-level approach to address some of these gaps, but the use of additive exposure calculation and spatial shortest path routing poses constraints meso-modeling accuracy. This study introduces HeatPath Analyzer, a framework to assess the exposure of transit riders to extreme temperatures, using TransitSim 4.0 to generate second-by-second spatio-temporal trip trajectories, the traveler activity profiles, and thermal comfort levels along the entire journey. The approach uses heat stress combines the standards proposed by the NWS and CDC to estimate cumulative exposure for transit riders, with specific parameters tailored to the elderly and people with disabilities. The framework assesses the influence of extreme heat and winter chill. A case study in Atlanta, GA, reveals that 10.2% of trips on an average summer weekday in 2019 were at risk of extreme heat. The results uncover exposure disparities across different transit trip mode segments, and across mitigation-based and adaptation-based strategies. While the mitigation-based strategy highlights high-exposure segments such as long ingress and egress, adaptation should be prioritized toward the middle or second half of the trip when a traveler is waiting for transit or transferring between routes. A comparison between the traditional additive approach and the dynamic approach presented also shows significant disparities, which, if overlooked, can mislead policy decisions.
Authors:Veit-Lorenz Heuthe, Emanuele Panizon, Hongri Gu, Clemens Bechinger
Title: Counterfactual rewards promote collective transport using individually controlled swarm microrobots
Abstract:
Swarm robots offer fascinating opportunities to perform complex tasks beyond the capabilities of individual machines. Just as a swarm of ants collectively moves a large object, similar functions can emerge within a group of robots through individual strategies based on local sensing. However, realizing collective functions with individually controlled microrobots is particularly challenging due to their micrometer size, large number of degrees of freedom, strong thermal noise relative to the propulsion speed, complex physical coupling between neighboring microrobots, and surface collisions. Here, we implement Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to generate a control strategy for up to 200 microrobots whose motions are individually controlled by laser spots. During the learning process, we employ so-called counterfactual rewards that automatically assign credit to the individual microrobots, which allows for fast and unbiased training. With the help of this efficient reward scheme, swarm microrobots learn to collectively transport a large cargo object to an arbitrary position and orientation, similar to ant swarms. We demonstrate that this flexible and versatile swarm robotic system is robust to variations in group size, the presence of malfunctioning units, and environmental noise. Such control strategies can potentially enable complex and automated assembly of mobile micromachines, programmable drug delivery capsules, and other advanced lab-on-a-chip applications.
Authors:Andreas Walch, Attila Szabo, Harald Steinlechner, Thomas Ortner, Eduard Gröller, Johanna Schmidt
Title: BEMTrace: Visualization-driven approach for deriving Building Energy Models from BIM
Abstract:
Building Information Modeling (BIM) describes a central data pool covering the entire life cycle of a construction project. Similarly, Building Energy Modeling (BEM) describes the process of using a 3D representation of a building as a basis for thermal simulations to assess the building's energy performance. This paper explores the intersection of BIM and BEM, focusing on the challenges and methodologies in converting BIM data into BEM representations for energy performance analysis. BEMTrace integrates 3D data wrangling techniques with visualization methodologies to enhance the accuracy and traceability of the BIM-to-BEM conversion process. Through parsing, error detection, and algorithmic correction of BIM data, our methods generate valid BEM models suitable for energy simulation. Visualization techniques provide transparent insights into the conversion process, aiding error identification, validation, and user comprehension. We introduce context-adaptive selections to facilitate user interaction and to show that the BEMTrace workflow helps users understand complex 3D data wrangling processes.
Authors:Hashnayne Ahmed, Shashanka Biswas, Farzana Akter Tina
Title: Mixed Convection and Entropy Generation Analysis of Carbon Nanotube-Water Nanofluid in a Square Cavity with Cylinders and Flow Deflectors
Abstract:
This study explores the mixed convection of carbon nanotube (CNT)-water nanofluid within a square cavity containing heated cylinders under the influence of a magnetic field, focusing on three geometric configurations: a single heated cylinder, two heated cylinders, and two heated cylinders with a flow deflector. The impact of various parameters, including Reynolds number ($Re$), Richardson number ($Ri$), Hartmann number ($Ha$), wavy wall peaks ($n$), nanoparticle volume fraction ($ϕ$), Hartmann angle ($γ$), rotational speed ($ω$), and inclination angle ($α$), on thermal and fluid dynamic behaviors is analyzed. MWCNT nanofluids exhibit up to a 19.1% increase in $Nu_{\text{ave}}$ compared to SWCNT nanofluids, confirming their superior heat transfer performance. Adding a second heated cylinder increases $Nu_{\text{ave}}$ by approximately 71.7% compared to a single-cylinder configuration, while the inclusion of a flow deflector modifies vortex structures, further enhancing convective transport. Increasing wavy wall peaks ($n$) enhances heat transfer by intensifying vortex formation and disrupting thermal boundary layers, leading to a more uniform temperature distribution. SWCNT nanofluids exhibit Bejan numbers up to 58.7% higher than MWCNT nanofluids, indicating greater thermal irreversibility. These findings provide valuable insights for optimizing thermal management systems in engineering applications, highlighting the importance of selecting appropriate nanofluids, geometric configurations, and magnetic field parameters to achieve optimal thermal performance and fluid stability.
Authors:Yukai Chen, Simei Yang, Debjyoti Bhattacharjee, Francky Catthoor, Arindam Mallik
Title: SAfEPaTh: A System-Level Approach for Efficient Power and Thermal Estimation of Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator
Abstract:
The design of energy-efficient, high-performance, and reliable Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators involves significant challenges due to complex power and thermal management issues. This paper introduces SAfEPaTh, a novel system-level approach for accurately estimating power and temperature in tile-based CNN accelerators. By addressing both steady-state and transient-state scenarios, SAfEPaTh effectively captures the dynamic effects of pipeline bubbles in interlayer pipelines, utilizing real CNN workloads for comprehensive evaluation. Unlike traditional methods, it eliminates the need for circuit-level simulations or on-chip measurements. Our methodology leverages TANIA, a cutting-edge hybrid digital-analog tile-based accelerator featuring analog-in-memory computing cores alongside digital cores. Through rigorous simulation results using the ResNet18 model, we demonstrate SAfEPaTh's capability to accurately estimate power and temperature within 500 seconds, encompassing CNN model accelerator mapping exploration and detailed power and thermal estimations. This efficiency and accuracy make SAfEPaTh an invaluable tool for designers, enabling them to optimize performance while adhering to stringent power and thermal constraints. Furthermore, SAfEPaTh's adaptability extends its utility across various CNN models and accelerator architectures, underscoring its broad applicability in the field. This study contributes significantly to the advancement of energy-efficient and reliable CNN accelerator designs, addressing critical challenges in dynamic power and thermal management.
Authors:Riddhiman Raut, Amit Kumar Ball, Amrita Basak
Title: Temperature Distribution Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion using Transferable and Scalable Graph Neural Networks
Abstract:
This study presents novel predictive models using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for simulating thermal dynamics in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) processes. By developing and validating Single-Laser GNN (SL-GNN) and Multi-Laser GNN (ML-GNN) surrogates, the research introduces a scalable data-driven approach that learns fundamental physics from small-scale Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations and applies them to larger domains. Achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 3.77% with the baseline SL-GNN model, GNNs effectively learn from high-resolution simulations and generalize well across larger geometries. The proposed models capture the complexity of the heat transfer process in L-PBF while significantly reducing computational costs. For example, a thermomechanical simulation for a 2 mm x 2 mm domain typically requires about 4 hours, whereas the SL-GNN model can predict thermal distributions almost instantly. Calibrating models to larger domains enhances predictive performance, with significant drops in MAPE for 3 mm x 3 mm and 4 mm x 4 mm domains, highlighting the scalability and efficiency of this approach. Additionally, models show a decreasing trend in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) when tuned to larger domains, suggesting potential for becoming geometry-agnostic. The interaction of multiple lasers complicates heat transfer, necessitating larger model architectures and advanced feature engineering. Using hyperparameters from Gaussian process-based Bayesian optimization, the best ML-GNN model demonstrates a 46.4% improvement in MAPE over the baseline ML-GNN model. In summary, this approach enables more efficient and flexible predictive modeling in L-PBF additive manufacturing.
Authors:Thomas Dengiz, Max Kleinebrahm
Title: Imitation learning with artificial neural networks for demand response with a heuristic control approach for heat pumps
Abstract:
The flexibility of electrical heating devices can help address the issues arising from the growing presence of unpredictable renewable energy sources in the energy system. In particular, heat pumps offer an effective solution by employing smart control methods that adjust the heat pump's power output in reaction to demand response signals. This paper combines imitation learning based on an artificial neural network with an intelligent control approach for heat pumps. We train the model using the output data of an optimization problem to determine the optimal operation schedule of a heat pump. The objective is to minimize the electricity cost with a time-variable electricity tariff while keeping the building temperature within acceptable boundaries. We evaluate our developed novel method, PSC-ANN, on various multi-family buildings with differing insulation levels that utilize an underfloor heating system as thermal storage. The results show that PSC-ANN outperforms a positively evaluated intelligent control approach from the literature and a conventional control approach. Further, our experiments reveal that a trained imitation learning model for a specific building is also applicable to other similar buildings without the need to train it again with new data. Our developed approach also reduces the execution time compared to optimally solving the corresponding optimization problem. PSC-ANN can be integrated into multiple buildings, enabling them to better utilize renewable energy sources by adjusting their electricity consumption in response to volatile external signals.
Authors:Mohamed Fawzi Abdelshafie Abuhussein, Ashraf Darwish, Aboul Ella Hassanien
Title: Exploring Thermography Technology: A Comprehensive Facial Dataset for Face Detection, Recognition, and Emotion
Abstract:
This dataset includes 6823 thermal images captured using a UNI-T UTi165A camera for face detection, recognition, and emotion analysis. It consists of 2485 facial recognition images depicting emotions (happy, sad, angry, natural, surprised), 2054 images for face recognition, and 2284 images for face detection. The dataset covers various conditions, color palettes, shooting angles, and zoom levels, with a temperature range of -10°C to 400°C and a resolution of 19,200 pixels. It serves as a valuable resource for advancing thermal imaging technology, aiding in algorithm development, and benchmarking for facial recognition across different palettes. Additionally, it contributes to facial motion recognition, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in computer vision, psychology, and neuroscience. The dataset promotes transparency in thermal face detection and recognition research, with applications in security, healthcare, and human-computer interaction.
Authors:Xin Liu, Xingchen Liu, Paul Witherell
Title: A Framework for Simulating the Path-level Residual Stress in the Laser Powder Bed Fusion Process
Abstract:
Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing has revolutionized industries with its capability to create intricate and customized components. The LPBF process uses moving heat sources to melt and solidify metal powders. The fast melting and cooling leads to residual stress, which critically affects the part quality. Currently, the computational intensity of accurately simulating the residual stress on the path scale remains a significant challenge, limiting our understanding of the LPBF processes. This paper presents a framework for simulating the LPBF process residual stress based on the path-level thermal history. Compared with the existing approaches, the path-level simulation requires discretization only to capture the scanning path rather than the details of the melt pools, thus requiring less dense mesh and is more computationally efficient. We develop this framework by introducing a new concept termed effective thermal strain to capture the anisotropic thermal strain near and around the melt pool. We validate our approach with the high-fidelity results from the literature. We use the proposed approach to simulate various single-island scanning patterns and layers with multiple full and trimmed islands. We further investigate the influence of the path-level thermal history and the layer shape on the residual stress by analyzing their simulation results.
Authors:Narek Papyan, Michel Kulhandjian, Hovannes Kulhandjian, Levon Hakob Aslanyan
Title: AI-based Drone Assisted Human Rescue in Disaster Environments: Challenges and Opportunities
Abstract:
In this survey we are focusing on utilizing drone-based systems for the detection of individuals, particularly by identifying human screams and other distress signals. This study has significant relevance in post-disaster scenarios, including events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, military conflicts, wildfires, and more. These drones are capable of hovering over disaster-stricken areas that may be challenging for rescue teams to access directly. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, are frequently deployed for search-and-rescue missions during disaster situations. Typically, drones capture aerial images to assess structural damage and identify the extent of the disaster. They also employ thermal imaging technology to detect body heat signatures, which can help locate individuals. In some cases, larger drones are used to deliver essential supplies to people stranded in isolated disaster-stricken areas. In our discussions, we delve into the unique challenges associated with locating humans through aerial acoustics. The auditory system must distinguish between human cries and sounds that occur naturally, such as animal calls and wind. Additionally, it should be capable of recognizing distinct patterns related to signals like shouting, clapping, or other ways in which people attempt to signal rescue teams. To tackle this challenge, one solution involves harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze sound frequencies and identify common audio signatures. Deep learning-based networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can be trained using these signatures to filter out noise generated by drone motors and other environmental factors. Furthermore, employing signal processing techniques like the direction of arrival (DOA) based on microphone array signals can enhance the precision of tracking the source of human noises.
Authors:Kento Kaneko, Claude Le Bris, Anthony T. Patera
Title: Error Estimators for the Small-Biot Lumped Approximation for the Conduction Dunking Problem
Abstract:
We consider the dunking problem: a solid body at uniform temperature $T_{\text i}$ is placed in a environment characterized by farfield temperature $T_\infty$ and spatially uniform time-independent heat transfer coefficient. We permit heterogeneous material composition: spatially dependent density, specific heat, and thermal conductivity. Mathematically, the problem is described by a heat equation with Robin boundary conditions. The crucial parameter is the Biot number -- a nondimensional heat transfer (Robin) coefficient; we consider the limit of small Biot number. We introduce first-order and second-order asymptotic approximations (in Biot number) for several quantities of interest, notably the spatial domain average temperature as a function of time; the first-order approximation is simply the standard engineering `lumped' model. We then provide asymptotic error estimates for the first-order and second-order approximations for small Biot number, and also, for the first-order approximation, alternative strict bounds valid for all Biot number. Companion numerical solutions of the heat equation confirm the effectiveness of the error estimates for small Biot number. The second-order approximation and the first-order and second-order error estimates depend on several functional outputs associated to an elliptic partial differential equation; the latter is derived from Biot-sensitivity analysis of the heat equation eigenproblem in the limit of small Biot number. Most important is $ϕ$, the only functional output required for the first-order error estimates; $ϕ$ admits a simple physical interpretation in terms of conduction length scale. We investigate the domain and property dependence of $ϕ$: most notably, we characterize spatial domains for which the standard lumped-model error criterion -- Biot number (based on volume-to-area length scale) small -- is deficient.
Authors:Shizhe Li, Chen-Song Zhang
Title: OpenCAEPoro: A Parallel Simulation Framework for Multiphase and Multicomponent Porous Media Flows
Abstract:
OpenCAEPoro is a parallel numerical simulation software developed in C++ for simulating multiphase and multicomponent flows in porous media. The software utilizes a set of general-purpose compositional model equations, enabling it to handle a diverse range of fluid dynamics, including the black oil model, compositional model, and thermal recovery models. OpenCAEPoro establishes a unified solving framework that integrates many widely used methods, such as IMPEC, FIM, and AIM. This framework allows dynamic collaboration between different methods. Specifically, based on this framework, we have developed an adaptively coupled domain decomposition method, which can provide initial solutions for global methods to accelerate the simulation. The reliability of OpenCAEPoro has been validated through benchmark testing with the SPE comparative solution project. Furthermore, its robust parallel efficiency has been tested in distributed parallel environments, demonstrating its suitability for large-scale simulation problems.
Authors:Mikhail Khrenov, William Frieden Templeton, Sneha Prabha Narra
Title: ADDOPT: An Additive Manufacturing Optimal Control Framework Demonstrated in Minimizing Layer-Level Thermal Variance in Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion
Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques hold promise but face significant challenges in process planning and optimization. The large temporal and spatial variations in temperature that can occur in layer-wise AM lead to thermal excursions, resulting in property variations and defects. These variations cannot always be fully mitigated by simple static parameter search. To address this challenge, we propose a general approach based on modeling AM processes on the part-scale in state-space and framing AM process planning as a numerical optimal control problem. We demonstrate this approach on the problem of minimizing thermal variation in a given layer in the electron beam powder bed fusion (EB-PBF) AM process, and are able to compute globally optimal dynamic process plans. These optimized process plans are then evaluated in simulation, achieving an 87% and 86% reduction in cumulative variance compared to random spot melting and a uniform power field respectively, and are further validated in experiment. This one-shot feedforward planning approach expands the capabilities of AM technology by minimizing the need for experimentation and iteration to achieve process optimization. Further, this work opens the possibility for the application of optimal control theory to part-scale optimization and control in AM.
Authors:Anna Dalklint, Joe Alexandersen, Andreas Henrik Frederiksen, Konstantinos Poulios, Ole Sigmund
Title: Topology optimization of contact-aided thermo-mechanical regulators
Abstract:
Topology optimization is used to systematically design contact-aided thermo-mechanical regulators, i.e. components whose effective thermal conductivity is tunable by mechanical deformation and contact. The thermo-mechanical interactions are modeled using a fully coupled non-linear thermo-mechanical finite element framework. To obtain the intricate heat transfer response, the components leverage self-contact, which is modeled using a third medium contact method. The effective heat transfer properties of the regulators are tuned by solving a topology optimization problem using a traditional gradient based algorithm. Several designs of thermo-mechanical regulators in the form of switches, diodes and triodes are presented.
Authors:Seongjun Kang, Gwangbin Kim, Seokhyun Hwang, Jeongju Park, Ahmed Elsharkawy, SeungJun Kim
Title: Dual-sided Peltier Elements for Rapid Thermal Feedback in Wearables
Abstract:
This paper introduces a motor-driven Peltier device designed to deliver immediate thermal sensations within extended reality (XR) environments. The system incorporates eight motor-driven Peltier elements, facilitating swift transitions between warm and cool sensations by rotating preheated or cooled elements to opposite sides. A multi-layer structure, comprising aluminum and silicone layers, ensures user comfort and safety while maintaining optimal temperatures for thermal stimuli. Time-temperature characteristic analysis demonstrates the system's ability to provide warm and cool sensations efficiently, with a dual-sided lifetime of up to 206 seconds at a 2V input. Our system design is adaptable to various body parts and can be synchronized with corresponding visual stimuli to enhance the immersive sensation of virtual object interaction and information delivery.
Authors:Ibai Ramirez, Joel Pino, David Pardo, Mikel Sanz, Luis del Rio, Alvaro Ortiz, Kateryna Morozovska, Jose I. Aizpurua
Title: Residual-based Attention Physics-informed Neural Networks for Spatio-Temporal Ageing Assessment of Transformers Operated in Renewable Power Plants
Abstract:
Transformers are crucial for reliable and efficient power system operations, particularly in supporting the integration of renewable energy. Effective monitoring of transformer health is critical to maintain grid stability and performance. Thermal insulation ageing is a key transformer failure mode, which is generally tracked by monitoring the hotspot temperature (HST). However, HST measurement is complex, costly, and often estimated from indirect measurements. Existing HST models focus on space-agnostic thermal models, providing worst-case HST estimates. This article introduces a spatio-temporal model for transformer winding temperature and ageing estimation, which leverages physics-based partial differential equations (PDEs) with data-driven Neural Networks (NN) in a Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) configuration to improve prediction accuracy and acquire spatio-temporal resolution. The computational accuracy of the PINN model is improved through the implementation of the Residual-Based Attention (PINN-RBA) scheme that accelerates the PINN model convergence. The PINN-RBA model is benchmarked against self-adaptive attention schemes and classical vanilla PINN configurations. For the first time, PINN based oil temperature predictions are used to estimate spatio-temporal transformer winding temperature values, validated through PDE numerical solution and fiber optic sensor measurements. Furthermore, the spatio-temporal transformer ageing model is inferred, which supports transformer health management decision-making. Results are validated with a distribution transformer operating on a floating photovoltaic power plant.
Authors:Arani Mukhopadhyay, Anish Pal, Mohamad Jafari Gukeh, Constantine M. Megaridis
Title: Thermal Performance of a Liquid-cooling Assisted Thin Wickless Vapor Chamber
Abstract:
The ever-increasing need for power consumption in electronic devices, coupled with the requirement for thinner size, calls for the development of efficient heat spreading components. Vapor chambers (VCs), because of their ability to effectively spread heat over a large area by two-phase heat transfer, seem ideal for such applications. However, creating thin and efficient vapor chambers that work over a wide range of power inputs is a persisting challenge. VCs that use wicks for circulating the phase changing media, suffer from capillary restrictions, dry-out, clogging, increase in size and weight, and can often be costly. Recent developments in wick-free wettability patterned vapor chambers replace traditional wicks with laser-fabricated wickless components. An experimental setup allows for fast testing and experimental evaluation of water-charged VCs with liquid-assisted cooling. The sealed chamber can maintain vacuum for long durations, and can be used for testing of very thin wick-free VCs. This work extends our previous study by decreasing overall thickness of the wick-free VC down to 3 mm and evaluates its performance. Furthermore, the impact of wettability patterns on VC performance is investigated, by carrying out experiments both in non-patterned and patterned VCs. Experiments are first carried out on a wick-free VC with no wettability patterns and comprising of an entirely superhydrophilic evaporator coupled with a hydrophobic condenser. Thereafter, wettability patterns that aid the rapid return of water to the heated site on the evaporator and improve condensation on the condenser of the vapor chamber are implemented. The thermal characteristics show that the patterned VCs outperform the non-patterned VCs under all scenarios. The patterned VCs exhibit low thermal resistance independent of fluid charging ratio withstanding higher power inputs without thermal dry-outs.
Authors:Arani Mukhopadhyay, Anish Pal, Congbo Bao, Mohamad Jafari Gukeh, Sudip K. Mazumder, Constantine M. Megaridis
Title: Evaluation of Thermal Performance of a Wick-free Vapor Chamber in Power Electronics Cooling
Abstract:
Efficient thermal management in high-power electronics cooling can be achieved using phase-change heat transfer devices, such as vapor chambers. Traditional vapor chambers use wicks to transport condensate for efficient thermal exchange and to prevent "dry-out" of the evaporator. However, wicks in vapor chambers present significant design challenges arising out of large pressure drops across the wicking material, which slows down condensate transport rates and increases the chances for dry-out. Thicker wicks add to overall thermal resistance, while deterring the development of thinner devices by limiting the total thickness of the vapor chamber. Wickless vapor chambers eliminate the use of metal wicks entirely, by incorporating complementary wettability-patterned flat plates on both the evaporator and the condenser side. Such surface modifications enhance fluid transport on the evaporator side, while allowing the chambers to be virtually as thin as imaginable, thereby permitting design of thermally efficient thin electronic cooling devices. While wick-free vapor chambers have been studied and efficient design strategies have been suggested, we delve into real-life applications of wick-free vapor chambers in forced air cooling of high-power electronics. An experimental setup is developed wherein two Si-based MOSFETs of TO-247-3 packaging having high conduction resistance, are connected in parallel and switched at 100 kHz, to emulate high frequency power electronics operations. A rectangular copper wick-free vapor chamber spreads heat laterally over a surface 13 times larger than the heating area. This chamber is cooled externally by a fan that circulates air at room temperature. The present experimental setup extends our previous work on wick-free vapor chambers, while demonstrating the effectiveness of low-cost air cooling in vapor-chamber enhanced high-power electronics applications.
Authors:Ozan Baris Mulayim, Edson Severnini, Mario Bergés
Title: Unmasking the Role of Remote Sensors in Comfort, Energy and Demand Response
Abstract:
In single-zone multi-node systems (SZMRSs), temperature controls rely on a single probe near the thermostat, resulting in temperature discrepancies that cause thermal discomfort and energy waste. Augmenting smart thermostats (STs) with per-room sensors has gained acceptance by major ST manufacturers. This paper leverages additional sensory information to empirically characterize the services provided by buildings, including thermal comfort, energy efficiency, and demand response (DR). Utilizing room-level time-series data from 1,000 houses, metadata from 110,000 houses across the United States, and data from two real-world testbeds, we examine the limitations of SZMNSs and explore the potential of remote sensors. We discovered that comfortable DR durations (CDRDs) for rooms are typically 70% longer or 40% shorter than for the room with the thermostat. When averaging, rooms at the control temperature's bounds are typically deviated around -3°F to 2.5°F from the average. Moreover, in 95% of houses, we identified rooms experiencing notably higher solar gains compared to the rest of the rooms, while 85% and 70% of houses demonstrated lower heat input and poor insulation, respectively. Lastly, it became evident that the consumption of cooling energy escalates with the increase in the number of sensors, whereas heating usage experiences fluctuations ranging from -19% to +25%. This study serves as a benchmark for assessing the thermal comfort and DR services in the existing housing stock, while also highlighting the energy efficiency impacts of sensing technologies. Our approach sets the stage for more granular, precise control strategies of SZMNSs.
Authors:Yuhao Liu, Keita Yoshioka, Tao You, Hanzhang Li, Fengshou Zhang
Title: A phase-field fracture model in thermo-poro-elastic media with micromechanical strain energy degradation
Abstract:
This work extends the hydro-mechanical phase-field fracture model to non-isothermal conditions with micromechanics based poroelasticity, which degrades Biot's coefficient not only with the phase-field variable (damage) but also with the energy decomposition scheme. Furthermore, we propose a new approach to update porosity solely determined by the strain change rather than damage evolution as in the existing models. As such, these poroelastic behaviors of Biot's coefficient and the porosity dictate Biot's modulus and the thermal expansion coefficient. For numerical implementation, we employ an isotropic diffusion method to stabilize the advection-dominated heat flux and adapt the fixed stress split method to account for the thermal stress. We verify our model against a series of analytical solutions such as Terzaghi's consolidation, thermal consolidation, and the plane strain hydraulic fracture propagation, known as the KGD fracture. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the stabilization method and intricate thermo-hydro-mechanical interactions during hydraulic fracturing with and without a pre-existing weak interface.
Authors:Mohsen Asghari Ilani, Yaser Mike Banad
Title: Modeling Melt Pool Geometry in Metal Additive Manufacturing Using Goldak's Semi-Ellipsoidal Heat Source: A Data-driven Computational Approach
Abstract:
This analytical solution, based on Goldak's Semi-Ellipsoidal Heat Source model, captures the dynamic temperature evolution from a semi-ellipsoidal power density moving heat source within a semi-infinite body. It tackles the convection-diffusion heat transfer equation by integrating an instantaneous point heat source across the volume of the ellipsoidal shape. The model's precision is validated by the excellent match between the predicted transient temperatures and empirical data from bead-on-plate specimens, enhancing its capability to accurately predict in-process temperature profiles in laser-based metal additive manufacturing (AM) operations. Developed in Python, the model offers customized calculations from setup to boundary conditions, adapting to variations in material properties under intense heat gradients. It considers the temperature dependency of thermal material properties and AM-process parameters, accounting for significant temperature gradients and changes in heat transfer mechanisms. The model also includes phase changes of melting or solidification with adjusted heat capacity to accurately reflect these transformations. Additionally, it considers the effects of variable laser power, scanning speed, and timing across each scanning pattern segment, acknowledging the thermal interactions between successive layers and their impact on heat transfer. This comprehensive analytical model is ready for applications including thermal stress analysis, microstructure modeling, and simulation of AM processes, predicting residual stresses and distortions.
Authors:Mian Qin, Junhao Ding, Shuo Qu, Xu Song, Charlie C. L. Wang, Wei-Hsin Liao
Title: Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Toolpath Generation for Thermal Uniformity in Laser Powder Bed Fusion Process
Abstract:
Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a widely used metal additive manufacturing technology. However, the accumulation of internal residual stress during printing can cause significant distortion and potential failure. Although various scan patterns have been studied to reduce possible accumulated stress, such as zigzag scanning vectors with changing directions or a chessboard-based scan pattern with divided small islands, most conventional scan patterns cannot significantly reduce residual stress. The proposed adaptive toolpath generation (ATG) algorithms, aiming to minimize the thermal gradients, may result in extremely accumulated temperature fields in some cases. To address these issues, we developed a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based toolpath generation framework, with the goal of achieving uniformly distributed heat and avoiding extremely thermal accumulation regions during the LPBF process. We first developed an overall pipeline for the DRL-based toolpath generation framework, which includes uniformly sampling, agent moving and environment observation, action selection, moving constraints, rewards calculation, and the training process. To accelerate the training process, we simplified the data-intensive numerical model by considering the turning angles on the toolpath. We designed the action spaces with three options, including the minimum temperature value, the smoothest path, and the second smoothest path. The reward function was designed to minimize energy density to ensure the temperature field remains relatively stable. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed DRL-based toolpath generation framework, we performed numerical simulations of polygon shape printing domains. In addition, four groups of thin plate samples with different scan patterns were compared using the LPBF process.
Authors:Yu Gu, Puyang Huang, Tianhao Chen, Chenyi Fu, Aitian Chen, Shouzhong Peng, Xixiang Zhang, Xufeng Kou
Title: A noise-tolerant, resource-saving probabilistic binary neural network implemented by the SOT-MRAM compute-in-memory system
Abstract:
We report a spin-orbit torque(SOT) magnetoresistive random-access memory(MRAM)-based probabilistic binary neural network(PBNN) for resource-saving and hardware noise-tolerant computing applications. With the presence of thermal fluctuation, the non-destructive SOT-driven magnetization switching characteristics lead to a random weight matrix with controllable probability distribution. In the meanwhile, the proposed CIM architecture allows for the concurrent execution of the probabilistic vector-matrix multiplication (PVMM) and binarization. Furthermore, leveraging the effectiveness of random binary cells to propagate multi-bit probabilistic information, our SOT-MRAM-based PBNN system achieves a 97.78\% classification accuracy under a 7.01\% weight variation on the MNIST database through 10 sampling cycles, and the number of bit-level computation operations is reduced by a factor of 6.9 compared to that of the full-precision LeNet-5 network. Our work provides a compelling framework for the design of reliable neural networks tailored to the applications with low power consumption and limited computational resources.
Authors:Stefanos Laskaridis, Kleomenis Katevas, Lorenzo Minto, Hamed Haddadi
Title: MELTing point: Mobile Evaluation of Language Transformers
Abstract:
Transformers have revolutionized the machine learning landscape, gradually making their way into everyday tasks and equipping our computers with "sparks of intelligence". However, their runtime requirements have prevented them from being broadly deployed on mobile. As personal devices become increasingly powerful and prompt privacy becomes an ever more pressing issue, we explore the current state of mobile execution of Large Language Models (LLMs). To achieve this, we have created our own automation infrastructure, MELT, which supports the headless execution and benchmarking of LLMs on device, supporting different models, devices and frameworks, including Android, iOS and Nvidia Jetson devices. We evaluate popular instruction fine-tuned LLMs and leverage different frameworks to measure their end-to-end and granular performance, tracing their memory and energy requirements along the way. Our analysis is the first systematic study of on-device LLM execution, quantifying performance, energy efficiency and accuracy across various state-of-the-art models and showcases the state of on-device intelligence in the era of hyperscale models. Results highlight the performance heterogeneity across targets and corroborates that LLM inference is largely memory-bound. Quantization drastically reduces memory requirements and renders execution viable, but at a non-negligible accuracy cost. Drawing from its energy footprint and thermal behavior, the continuous execution of LLMs remains elusive, as both factors negatively affect user experience. Last, our experience shows that the ecosystem is still in its infancy, and algorithmic as well as hardware breakthroughs can significantly shift the execution cost. We expect NPU acceleration, and framework-hardware co-design to be the biggest bet towards efficient standalone execution, with the alternative of offloading tailored towards edge deployments.
Authors:Andreas Bott, Mario Beykirch, Florian Steinke
Title: Efficient Training of Learning-Based Thermal Power Flow for 4th Generation District Heating Grids
Abstract:
Thermal power flow (TPF) is an important task for various control purposes in 4 Th generation district heating grids with multiple decentral heat sources and meshed grid structures. Computing the TPF, i.e., determining the grid state consisting of temperatures, pressures, and mass flows for given supply and demand values, is classically done by solving the nonlinear heat grid equations, but can be sped up by orders of magnitude using learned models such as neural networks. We propose a novel, efficient scheme to generate a sufficiently large training data set covering relevant supply and demand values. Instead of sampling supply and demand values, our approach generates training examples from a proxy distribution over generator and consumer mass flows, omitting the iterations needed for solving the heat grid equations. The exact, but slightly different, training examples can be weighted to represent the original training distribution. We show with simulations for typical grid structures that the new approach can reduce training set generation times by two orders of magnitude compared to sampling supply and demand values directly, without loss of relevance for the training samples. Moreover, learning TPF with a training data set is shown to outperform sample-free, physics-aware training approaches significantly.
Authors:Nicholas Sung, Liu Zheng, Pingfeng Wang, Faez Ahmed
Title: Cooling-Guide Diffusion Model for Battery Cell Arrangement
Abstract:
Our study introduces a Generative AI method that employs a cooling-guided diffusion model to optimize the layout of battery cells, a crucial step for enhancing the cooling performance and efficiency of battery thermal management systems. Traditional design processes, which rely heavily on iterative optimization and extensive guesswork, are notoriously slow and inefficient, often leading to suboptimal solutions. In contrast, our innovative method uses a parametric denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) with classifier and cooling guidance to generate optimized cell layouts with enhanced cooling paths, significantly lowering the maximum temperature of the cells. By incorporating position-based classifier guidance, we ensure the feasibility of generated layouts. Meanwhile, cooling guidance directly optimizes cooling-efficiency, making our approach uniquely effective. When compared to two advanced models, the Tabular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (TabDDPM) and the Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN), our cooling-guided diffusion model notably outperforms both. It is five times more effective than TabDDPM and sixty-six times better than CTGAN across key metrics such as feasibility, diversity, and cooling efficiency. This research marks a significant leap forward in the field, aiming to optimize battery cell layouts for superior cooling efficiency, thus setting the stage for the development of more effective and dependable battery thermal management systems.
Authors:Xiaotong Yu, Ruihan Xie, Zhihe Zhao, Chang-Wen Chen
Title: CSDNet: Detect Salient Object in Depth-Thermal via A Lightweight Cross Shallow and Deep Perception Network
Abstract:
While we enjoy the richness and informativeness of multimodal data, it also introduces interference and redundancy of information. To achieve optimal domain interpretation with limited resources, we propose CSDNet, a lightweight \textbf{C}ross \textbf{S}hallow and \textbf{D}eep Perception \textbf{Net}work designed to integrate two modalities with less coherence, thereby discarding redundant information or even modality. We implement our CSDNet for Salient Object Detection (SOD) task in robotic perception. The proposed method capitalises on spatial information prescreening and implicit coherence navigation across shallow and deep layers of the depth-thermal (D-T) modality, prioritising integration over fusion to maximise the scene interpretation. To further refine the descriptive capabilities of the encoder for the less-known D-T modalities, we also propose SAMAEP to guide an effective feature mapping to the generalised feature space. Our approach is tested on the VDT-2048 dataset, leveraging the D-T modality outperforms those of SOTA methods using RGB-T or RGB-D modalities for the first time, achieves comparable performance with the RGB-D-T triple-modality benchmark method with 5.97 times faster at runtime and demanding 0.0036 times fewer FLOPs. Demonstrates the proposed CSDNet effectively integrates the information from the D-T modality. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors:P. Hofman, F. P. van der Meer, L. J. Sluys
Title: Modeling of progressive high-cycle fatigue in composite laminates accounting for local stress ratios
Abstract:
A numerical framework for simulating progressive failure under high-cycle fatigue loading is validated against experiments of composite quasi-isotropic open-hole laminates. Transverse matrix cracking and delamination are modeled with a mixed-mode fatigue cohesive zone model, covering crack initiation and propagation. Furthermore, XFEM is used for simulating transverse matrix cracks and splits at arbitrary locations. An adaptive cycle jump approach is employed for efficiently simulating high-cycle fatigue while accounting for local stress ratio variations in the presence of thermal residual stresses. The cycle jump scheme is integrated in the XFEM framework, where the local stress ratio is used to determine the insertion of cracks and to propagate fatigue damage. The fatigue cohesive zone model is based on S-N curves and requires static material properties and only a few fatigue parameters, calibrated on simple fracture testing specimens. The simulations demonstrate a good correspondence with experiments in terms of fatigue life and damage evolution.
Authors:Jeremy Z. Yan, Prashant Kumar, Wolfgang Rauch
Title: Effect of turbulent diffusion in modeling anaerobic digestion
Abstract:
In this study, the impact of turbulent diffusion on mixing of biochemical reaction models is explored by implementing and validating different models. An original codebase called CHAD (Coupled Hydrodynamics and Anaerobic Digestion) is extended to incorporate turbulent diffusion and validate it against results from OpenFOAM with 2D Rayleigh-Taylor Instability and lid-driven cavity simulations. The models are then tested for the applications with Anaerobic Digestion - a widely used wastewater treatment method. The findings demonstrate that the implemented models accurately capture turbulent diffusion when provided with an accurate flow field. Specifically, a minor effect of chemical turbulent diffusion on biochemical reactions within the anaerobic digestion tank is observed, while thermal turbulent diffusion significantly influences mixing. By successfully implementing turbulent diffusion models in CHAD, its capabilities for more accurate anaerobic digestion simulations are enhanced, aiding in optimizing the design and operation of anaerobic digestion reactors in real-world wastewater treatment applications.
Authors:Olivier Maher, Roy Bernini, Nele Harnack, Bernd Gotsmann, Marilyne Sousa, Valeria Bragaglia, Siegfried Karg
Title: Highly Reproducible and CMOS-compatible VO2-based Oscillators for Brain-inspired Computing
Abstract:
With remarkable electrical and optical switching properties induced at low power and near room temperature (68C), vanadium dioxide (VO2) has sparked rising interest in unconventional computing among the phase-change materials research community. The scalability and the potential to compute beyond the von Neumann model make VO2 especially appealing for implementation in oscillating neural networks for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, to solve constraint satisfaction problems, and for pattern recognition. Its integration into large networks of oscillators on a Silicon platform still poses challenges associated with the stabilization in the correct oxidation state and the ability to fabricate a structure with predictable electrical behavior showing very low variability. In this work, the role played by the different annealing parameters applied by three methods (slow thermal annealing, flash annealing, and rapid thermal annealing), following the vanadium oxide atomic layer deposition (ALD), on the formation of VO2 grains is studied and an optimal substrate stack configuration that minimizes variability between devices is proposed. Material and electrical characterizations are performed on the different films and a step-by-step recipe to build reproducible VO2-based oscillators is presented, which is argued to be made possible thanks to the introduction of a hafnium oxide (HfO2) layer between the silicon substrate and the vanadium oxide layer. Up to seven nearly identical VO2-based devices are contacted simultaneously to create a network of oscillators, paving the way for large-scale implementation of VO2 oscillating neural networks.
Authors:Yifu Ding, Serena Patel, Dharik Mallapragada, Robert James Stoner
Title: Repurposing Coal Power Plants into Thermal Energy Storage for Supporting Zero-carbon Data Centers
Abstract:
Coal power plants will need to be phased out and face stranded asset risks under the net-zero energy system transition. Repurposing coal power plants could recoup profits and reduce carbon emissions using the existing infrastructure and grid connections. This paper investigates a retrofitting strategy that turns coal power plants into thermal energy storage (TES) and zero-carbon data centers (DCs). The proposed capacity expansion model considers the co-locations of DCs, local renewablewith the system-generation, andlevel coal retir energy storage ement and retrofitting. We optimize the DC system configurations under the hourly-matching carbon policy and flexible operations. Results show that under hourly-matching carbon constraints, the retrofitted TES could complement the operations of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) to reduce system costs. This could render DCs with optimal co-located renewable generations and energy storage more cost-effective than unconstrained DCs.
Authors:Minh Dang Tu, Kieu Trang Le, Manh Duong Phung
Title: Object Detection in Thermal Images Using Deep Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Abstract:
This work presents a neural network model capable of recognizing small and tiny objects in thermal images collected by unmanned aerial vehicles. Our model consists of three parts, the backbone, the neck, and the prediction head. The backbone is developed based on the structure of YOLOv5 combined with the use of a transformer encoder at the end. The neck includes a BI-FPN block combined with the use of a sliding window and a transformer to increase the information fed into the prediction head. The prediction head carries out the detection by evaluating feature maps with the Sigmoid function. The use of transformers with attention and sliding windows increases recognition accuracy while keeping the model at a reasonable number of parameters and computation requirements for embedded systems. Experiments conducted on public dataset VEDAI and our collected datasets show that our model has a higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods such as ResNet, Faster RCNN, ComNet, ViT, YOLOv5, SMPNet, and DPNetV3. Experiments on the embedded computer Jetson AGX show that our model achieves a real-time computation speed with a stability rate of over 90%.
Authors:Polina Kurtser, Kailun Feng, Thomas Olofsson, Aitor De Andres
Title: One-class anomaly detection through color-to-thermal AI for building envelope inspection
Abstract:
We present a label-free method for detecting anomalies during thermographic inspection of building envelopes. It is based on the AI-driven prediction of thermal distributions from color images. Effectively the method performs as a one-class classifier of the thermal image regions with high mismatch between the predicted and actual thermal distributions. The algorithm can learn to identify certain features as normal or anomalous by selecting the target sample used for training. We demonstrated this principle by training the algorithm with data collected at different outdoors temperature, which lead to the detection of thermal bridges. The method can be implemented to assist human professionals during routine building inspections or combined with mobile platforms for automating examination of large areas.
Authors:Mohadeseh Azari, Paul Polakos, Kaushik P. Seshadreesan
Title: Quantum Switches for Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill Qubit-based All-Photonic Quantum Networks
Abstract:
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code, being information theoretically near optimal for quantum communication over Gaussian thermal-loss optical channels, is likely to be the encoding of choice for advanced quantum networks of the future. Quantum repeaters based on GKP-encoded light have been shown to support high end-to-end entanglement rates across large distances despite realistic finite squeezing in GKP code preparation and homodyne detection inefficiencies. Here, we introduce a quantum switch for GKP-qubit-based quantum networks, whose architecture involves multiplexed GKP-qubit-based entanglement link generation with clients, and their all-photonic storage, together enabled by GKP-qubit graph state resources. For bipartite entanglement distribution between clients via entanglement swapping, the switch uses a multi-client generalization of a recently introduced $\textit{entanglement-ranking-based link matching}$ protocol heuristic. Since generating the GKP-qubit graph state resource is hardware intensive, given a total resource budget and an arbitrary layout of clients, we address the question of their optimal allocation towards the different client-pair connections served by the switch such that the sum throughput of the switch is maximized while also being fair in terms of the individual entanglement rates. We illustrate our results for an exemplary data center network, where the data center is a client of a switch and all of its other clients aim to connect to the data center alone -- a scenario that also captures the general case of a gateway router connecting a local area network to a global network. Together with compatible quantum repeaters, our quantum switch provides a way to realize quantum networks of arbitrary topology.
Authors:Javier López-Martínez, José Luis Blanco-Claraco, José Pérez-Alonso, Ángel Jesús Callejón-Ferre
Title: Distributed network for measuring climatic parameters in heterogeneous environments: Application in a greenhouse
Abstract:
In Mediterranean countries of Southern Europe, the climatic conditions are usually favourable to cultivate greenhouse vegetables but not always for workers. The aim of this study was to design a network of weather stations capable of gathering data of environmental parameters related to the wellbeing of workers in greenhouses in south-eastern Spain. The unevenness of the thermal environment was studied both vertically as well as horizontally following guideline ISO 7726. The results indicate that the greenhouse should be considered a heterogeneous environment, implying that, for an evaluation of the environmental conditions related to thermal stress of the workers inside the greenhouse, measurements should be taken at different points within the greenhouse at three heights (ankle, abdomen, and head).
Authors:Costas Mylonas, Donata Boric, Leila Luttenberger Maric, Alexandros Tsitsanis, Eleftheria Petrianou, Magda Foti
Title: Empowering Aggregators with Practical Data-Driven Tools: Harnessing Aggregated and Disaggregated Flexibility for Demand Response
Abstract:
This study explores the interaction between aggregators and building occupants in activating flexibility through Demand Response (DR) programs, with a focus on reinforcing the resilience of the energy system considering the uncertainties presented by Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Firstly, it introduces a methodology of optimizing aggregated flexibility provision strategies in environments with limited data, utilizing Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) and clustering techniques to identify building occupants' activity patterns. Secondly, the study assesses the disaggregated flexibility provision of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems during DR events, employing machine learning and optimization techniques for precise, device-level analysis. The first approach offers a non-intrusive pathway for aggregators to provide flexibility services in environments of a single smart meter for the whole building's consumption, while the second approach maximizes the amount of flexibility in the case of dedicated metering devices to the HVAC systems by carefully considering building occupants' thermal comfort profiles. Through the application of data-driven techniques and encompassing case studies from both industrial and residential buildings, this paper not only unveils pivotal opportunities for aggregators in the balancing and emerging flexibility markets but also successfully develops and demonstrates end-to-end practical tools for aggregators.
Authors:Zihao Wang, Yu Hou, Lucio Soibelman
Title: A New Method of Pixel-level In-situ U-value Measurement for Building Envelopes Based on Infrared Thermography
Abstract:
The potential energy loss of aging buildings traps building owners in a cycle of underfunding operations and overpaying maintenance costs. Energy auditors intending to generate an energy model of a target building for performance assessment may struggle to obtain accurate results as the spatial distribution of temperatures is not considered when calculating the U-value of the building envelope. This paper proposes a pixel-level method based on infrared thermography (IRT) that considers two-dimensional (2D) spatial temperature distributions of the outdoor and indoor surfaces of the target wall to generate a 2D U-value map of the wall. The result supports that the proposed method can better reflect the actual thermal insulation performance of the target wall compared to the current IRT-based methods that use a single-point room temperature as input.
Authors:Ali Safa, Wout Mommen, Lars Keuninckx
Title: Resource-Efficient Gesture Recognition using Low-Resolution Thermal Camera via Spiking Neural Networks and Sparse Segmentation
Abstract:
This work proposes a novel approach for hand gesture recognition using an inexpensive, low-resolution (24 x 32) thermal sensor processed by a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) followed by Sparse Segmentation and feature-based gesture classification via Robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA). Compared to the use of standard RGB cameras, the proposed system is insensitive to lighting variations while being significantly less expensive compared to high-frequency radars, time-of-flight cameras and high-resolution thermal sensors previously used in literature. Crucially, this paper shows that the innovative use of the recently proposed Monostable Multivibrator (MMV) neural networks as a new class of SNN achieves more than one order of magnitude smaller memory and compute complexity compared to deep learning approaches, while reaching a top gesture recognition accuracy of 93.9% using a 5-class thermal camera dataset acquired in a car cabin, within an automotive context. Our dataset is released for helping future research.
Authors:Markus Holzer, Travis Mitchell, Christopher R. Leonardi, Ulrich Ruede
Title: Development of a central-moment phase-field lattice Boltzmann model for thermocapillary flows: Droplet capture and computational performance
Abstract:
This study develops a computationally efficient phase-field lattice Boltzmann model with the capability to simulate thermocapillary flows. The model was implemented into the open-source simulation framework, waLBerla, and extended to conduct the collision stage using central moments. The multiphase model was coupled with both a passive-scalar thermal LB, and a RK solution to the energy equation in order to resolve temperature-dependent surface tension phenomena. Various lattice stencils (D3Q7, D3Q15, D3Q19, D3Q27) were tested for the passive-scalar LB and both the second- and fourth-order RK methods were investigated. There was no significant difference observed in the accuracy of the LB or RK schemes. The passive scalar D3Q7 LB discretisation tended to provide computational benefits, while the second order RK scheme is superior in memory usage. This paper makes contributions relating to the modelling of thermocapillary flows and to understanding the behaviour of droplet capture with thermal sources analogous to thermal tweezers. Four primary contributions to the literature are identified. First, a new 3D thermocapillary, central-moment phase-field LB model is presented and implemented in the open-source software, waLBerla. Second, the accuracy and computational performance of various techniques to resolve the energy equation for multiphase, incompressible fluids is investigated. Third, the dynamic droplet transport behaviour in the presence of thermal sources is studied and insight is provided on the potential ability to manipulate droplets based on local domain heating. Finally, a concise analysis of the computational performance together with near-perfect scaling results on NVIDIA and AMD GPU-clusters is shown. This research enables the detailed study of droplet manipulation and control in thermocapillary devices.
Authors:Navid Mohammadzadeh, Huy Truong-Ba, Michael E. Cholette, Theodore A. Steinberg, Giampaolo Manzolini
Title: A Stochastic-MILP dispatch optimization model for Concentrated Solar Thermal under uncertainty
Abstract:
Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) offers a promising solution for large-scale solar energy utilization as Thermal Energy Storage (TES) enables electricity generation independently of daily solar fluctuations, shifting to high-priced electricity intervals. The development of dispatch planning tools is mandatory to account for uncertainties associated with solar irradiation and electricity price forecasts as well as limited storage capacity. This study proposes the Stochastic Mixed Integer Linear Program (SMILP) to maximize expected profit within a specified scenario space. The SMILP scenario space is generated by different Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function percentiles of the potential solar energy to accumulate in storage and the expected profit is estimated using the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method. SMILP exhibits robust performance, however, its computational time poses a challenge. Thus, three heuristic solutions are developed which run a set of deterministic optimizations on different historical weather profiles to generate candidate dispatching plans (DPs). The candidate DP with the best average performance on all profiles is then selected. The new methods were applied to a case study for a 115 MW CST plant in South Australia. When the historical database has a limited set of historical weather profiles, the SMILP achieves 6% to 9% higher profit than the closest benchmark when the DP is applied to novel weather conditions. With a large historical weather data, the performance of SMILP and Heuristic-2 becomes nearly identical because the SMILP can only utilize a limited number of trajectories for optimization without becoming computationally infeasible. In this case, Heuristic-2 emerges a practical alternative, since it provides similar average profit in a reasonable time (saving about 7 hours in computing time).
Authors:Wenli Wu, Ye Guo, Jiantao Shi
Title: Integrating Renewable Energy Sources as Reserve Providers: Modeling, Pricing, and Properties
Abstract:
In pursuit of carbon neutrality, many countries have adopted renewable portfolio standards to facilitate the integration of renewable energy. However, increasing penetration of renewable energy resources will also pose higher requirements on system flexibility. Allowing renewable themselves to participate in the reserve market could be a viable solution. To this end, this paper proposes an optimal dispatch model for joint energy-reserve procurement that incorporates renewable portfolio standards and RES serve as reserve providers. Potential generator outages and deviations in renewable and load power are modelled through a given number of probability-weighted scenarios. In particular, reserve resources are initially booked in the base case and then activated in non-base scenarios through the re-dispatch process. Marginal pricing is used to derive energy, reserve, and power deviation prices. Next, we develop the associated settlement process and establish several market properties. The proposed pricing scheme establishes equivalence between thermal generators and renewable units by accounting for their uncertainties, including thermal generator outages and renewable power deviations, and their flexibility, namely reserve and re-dispatch. We have shown that for renewable resources, supplying reserve according to the dispatch results compared to generating as much as possible leads to better profits. Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and properties established.
Authors:Akshit Gupta, Simone Mora, Fan Zhang, Martine Rutten, R. Venkatesha Prasad, Carlo Ratti
Title: GreenScan: Towards large-scale terrestrial monitoring the health of urban trees using mobile sensing
Abstract:
Healthy urban greenery is a fundamental asset to mitigate climate change phenomena such as extreme heat and air pollution. However, urban trees are often affected by abiotic and biotic stressors that hamper their functionality, and whenever not timely managed, even their survival. While the current greenery inspection techniques can help in taking effective measures, they often require a high amount of human labor, making frequent assessments infeasible at city-wide scales. In this paper, we present GreenScan, a ground-based sensing system designed to provide health assessments of urban trees at high spatio-temporal resolutions, with low costs. The system utilises thermal and multi-spectral imaging sensors fused using a custom computer vision model in order to estimate two tree health indexes. The evaluation of the system was performed through data collection experiments in Cambridge, USA. Overall, this work illustrates a novel approach for autonomous mobile ground-based tree health monitoring on city-wide scales at high temporal resolutions with low-costs.
Authors:Runze Mao, Yingrui Wang, Min Zhang, Han Li, Jiayang Xu, Xinyu Dong, Yan Zhang, Zhi X. Chen
Title: An integrated framework for accelerating reactive flow simulation using GPU and machine learning models
Abstract:
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) have brought potentially game-changing opportunities in accelerating reactive flow simulations. In this study, we introduce an open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework that integrates the strengths of machine learning (ML) and graphics processing unit (GPU) to demonstrate their combined capability. Within this framework, all computational operations are solely executed on GPU, including ML-accelerated chemistry integration, fully-implicit solving of PDEs, and computation of thermal and transport properties, thereby eliminating the CPU-GPU memory copy overhead. Optimisations both within the kernel functions and during the kernel launch process are conducted to enhance computational performance. Strategies such as static data reorganisation and dynamic data allocation are adopted to reduce the GPU memory footprint. The computational performance is evaluated in two turbulent flame benchmarks using quasi-DNS and LES modelling, respectively. Remarkably, while maintaining a similar level of accuracy to the conventional CPU/CVODE-based solver, the GPU/ML-accelerated approach shows an overall speedup of over two orders of magnitude for both cases. This result highlights that high-fidelity turbulent combustion simulation with finite-rate chemistry that requires normally hundreds of CPUs can now be performed on portable devices such as laptops with a medium-end GPU.
Authors:Kalpak Bansod, Yanshan Wan, Yugesh Rai
Title: Liquid Leak Detection Using Thermal Images
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive solution to address the critical challenge of liquid leaks in the oil and gas industry, leveraging advanced computer vision and deep learning methodologies. Employing You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT DETR) models, our project focuses on enhancing early identification of liquid leaks in key infrastructure components such as pipelines, pumps, and tanks. Through the integration of surveillance thermal cameras and sensors, the combined YOLO and RT DETR models demonstrate remarkable efficacy in the continuous monitoring and analysis of visual data within oil and gas facilities. YOLO's real-time object detection capabilities swiftly recognize leaks and their patterns, while RT DETR excels in discerning specific leak-related features, particularly in thermal images. This approach significantly improves the accuracy and speed of leak detection, ultimately mitigating environmental and financial risks associated with liquid leaks.
Authors:Victor Parque, Aiki Nakamura, Tomoyuki Miyashita
Title: A Study on the Inductance and Thermal Regression and Optimization for Automatic Layout Design of Power Modules
Abstract:
Power modules with excellent inductance and temperature metrics are significant to meet the rising sophistication of energy demand in new technologies. In this paper, we use a surrogate-based approach to render optimal layouts of power modules with feasible and attractive inductance-temperature ratios at low computational budget. In particular, we use the class of feedforward networks to estimate the surrogate relationships between power module layout-design variables and inductance-temperature factors rendered from simulations; and Differential Evolution algorithms to optimize and locate feasible layout configurations of power module substrates minimizing inductance and temperature ratios. Our findings suggest the desirable classes of feedforward networks and gradient-free optimization algorithms being able to estimate and optimize power module layouts efficiently and effectively.
Authors:Eduard Heiss, Andrey Kozyr, Oleg Morozov
Title: Formations organization in robotic swarm using the thermal motion equivalent method
Abstract:
Due to its decentralised, distributed and scalable nature, swarm robotics has great potential for applications ranging from agriculture to environmental monitoring and logistics. Various swarm control methods and algorithms are currently known, such as virtual leader, vector and potential field, and others. Such methods often show good results in specific conditions and tasks. The variety of tasks solved by the swarm requires the development of a universal control algorithm. In this paper, we propose an evolution of a thermal motion equivalent method (TMEM) inspired by the behavioural similarity of thermodynamic interactions between molecules. Previous research has shown the high efficiency of such a method for terrain monitoring tasks. This work addresses the problem of swarm formation of geometric structures, as required for logistics and formation movement tasks. It is shown that the formation of swarm geometric structures using the TMEM is possible with a special nonlinear interaction function of the agents. A piecewise linear interaction function is proposed that allows the formation of a stable group of agents. The results of the paper are validated by numerical modelling of the swarm dynamics. A linear quadrocopter model is considered as an agent. The fairness of the choice of the interaction function is shown.
Authors:David Wolpert, Jan Korbel, Christopher Lynn, Farita Tasnim, Joshua Grochow, Gülce Kardeş, James Aimone, Vijay Balasubramanian, Eric de Giuli, David Doty, Nahuel Freitas, Matteo Marsili, Thomas E. Ouldridge, Andrea Richa, Paul Riechers, Édgar Roldán, Brenda Rubenstein, Zoltan Toroczkai, Joseph Paradiso
Title: Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?
Abstract:
The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational characteristics of dynamical physical systems has been a major theoretical interest since at least the 19th century, and has been of increasing practical importance as the energetic cost of digital devices has exploded over the last half century. One of the most important thermodynamic features of real-world computers is that they operate very far from thermal equilibrium, in finite time, with many quickly (co-)evolving degrees of freedom. Such computers also must almost always obey multiple physical constraints on how they work. For example, all modern digital computers are periodic processes, governed by a global clock. Another example is that many computers are modular, hierarchical systems, with strong restrictions on the connectivity of their subsystems. This properties hold both for naturally occurring computers, like brains or Eukaryotic cells, as well as digital systems. These features of real-world computers are absent in 20th century analyses of the thermodynamics of computational processes, which focused on quasi-statically slow processes. However, the field of stochastic thermodynamics has been developed in the last few decades - and it provides the formal tools for analyzing systems that have exactly these features of real-world computers. We argue here that these tools, together with other tools currently being developed in stochastic thermodynamics, may help us understand at a far deeper level just how the fundamental physical properties of dynamic systems are related to the computation that they perform.
Authors:Srikanth Itapu, Vamsi Borra, Daniel G. Georgiev
Title: Laser-Based Fabrication of Microstructures on Nickel Thin Films and Its Applications in On-Chip Thin Film Inductors
Abstract:
This work reports on the fabrication of microbump structures on Ni films by single-pulse, localized laser irradiation. Conditions for the reproducible formation of such microstructures have been identified in terms of laser-irradiation and film parameters after systematic studies involving a relevant parameter space. The cracks and voids morphology of the sputtered films was rendered undesirable and hence, smoother Ni thin film of same thickness (200nm) were deposited by vacuum evaporation. The continuous nature of the film resulted in radially symmetric thermal expansion and deformation, thus achieving a high yield of microstructures. An improvement in the inductance and the quality factor of on-chip spiral inductors incorporating such laser-microstructured ferromagnetic nickel thin films was observed, which demonstrates the potential of such a laser-based method for fabrication or fine tuning of various micro-/nanoelectric/electronic sensor and other components and systems.
Authors:Fernando Ruiz, Begona Arrue, Anibal Ollero
Title: Thermally-Resilient Soft Gripper for On-Orbit Operations
Abstract:
Research in soft manipulators has significantly enhanced object grasping capabilities, thanks to their adaptability to various shapes and sizes. Applying this technology to on-orbit servicing, especially during the capture and containment stages of active space debris removal missions, might offer a secure, adaptable, and cost-effective solution compared to the trend of increasing the degrees of freedom and complexity of the manipulator (e.g. ClearSpace, Astroscale). This work aims to conduct an experimental proof of concept, for which challenges such as radiation, vacuum, and microgravity are significant, but the predominant issue is ensuring effective operation in the extreme temperature swings, where flexible materials may exhibit cryogenic crystallization or drastic shifts in their elasticity. This work addresses this challenge through an initial stage of analytical modeling of the thermal dynamics inside the manipulator in orbit; which is then used for the development of a first experimental prototype tested with liquid nitrogen and heat guns. The multi-layered design for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) leverages the properties of TPU at low infill rates for lightweight inherent flexibility, silicone rubber ensuring structural integrity, PTFE (Teflon) for unparalleled thermal stability, and aerogel for insulation. The tendon-actuated servo-driven gripper is tested in the laboratory by varying the shape and size of objects during the grasping. The results, based on servomotor force metrics to assess the flexible manipulator's adaptability and object capture efficiency across temperature changes, affirm the concept's viability. Forces increase up to 220$\%$ in cryogenic conditions and decrease by no more than 50$\%$ at high temperatures.
Authors:Xinning Yi, Tianguang Lu, Yixiao Li, Qian Ai, Ran Hao
Title: Collaborative planning and optimization for electric-thermal-hydrogen-coupled energy systems with portfolio selection of the complete hydrogen energy chain
Abstract:
Under the global low-carbon target, the uneven spatiotemporal distribution of renewable energy resources exacerbates the uncertainty and seasonal power imbalance. Additionally, the issue of an incomplete hydrogen energy chain is widely overlooked in planning models, which hinders the complete analysis of the role of hydrogen in energy systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a high-resolution collaborative planning model for electricity-thermal-hydrogen-coupled energy systems considering both the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of renewable energy resources and the multi-scale bottom-to-top investment strategy for the complete hydrogen energy chain. Considering the high-resolution system operation flexibility, this paper proposes a hydrogen chain-based fast clustering optimization method that can handle high-dimensional data and multi-time scale operation characteristics. The model optimizes the geographical distribution and capacity configuration of the Northeast China energy system in 2050, with hourly operational characteristics. The planning optimization covered single-energy devices, multi-energy-coupled conversion devices, and electric-hydrogen transmission networks. Last but not least, this paper thoroughly examines the optimal portfolio selection of different hydrogen technologies based on the differences in cost, flexibility, and efficiency. In the Pareto analysis, the proposed model reduces CO2 emissions by 60% with a competitive cost. This paper provides a zero-carbon pathway for multi-energy systems with a cost 4% less than the social cost of carbon $44.6/ton, and the integration of the complete hydrogen energy chain reduces the renewable energy curtailment by 97.0%. Besides, the portfolio selection results indicate that the system favors the SOEC with the highest energy efficiency and the PEMFC with the fastest dynamic response when achieving zero-carbon emissions
Authors:Hang Shuai, Fangxing Li, Jinxiang Zhu, William Jerome Tingen, Srijib Mukherjee
Title: Modeling the impact of extreme summer drought on conventional and renewable generation capacity: methods and a case study on the Eastern U.S. power system
Abstract:
The United States has witnessed a growing prevalence of droughts in recent years, posing significant challenges to water supplies and power generation. The resulting impacts on power systems, including reduced capacity and the potential for power outages, underscore the need for accurate assessment methods to ensure the reliable operation of the nation's energy infrastructure. A critical step is to evaluate the usable capacity of a regional power system's generation fleet, which is a complex undertaking and requires precise modeling of the effects of hydrological and meteorological conditions on diverse generating technologies. This paper proposes a systematic, analytical approach for assessing the impacts of extreme summer drought events on the available capacity of hydro, thermal, and renewable energy generators. More specifically, the systematic framework provides plant-level capacity derating models for hydroelectric, once-through cooling thermoelectric, recirculating cooling thermoelectric, combustion turbine, solar PV, and wind turbine systems. Application of the proposed impact assessment framework to the 2025 generation fleet of the real-world power system in the PJM and SERC regions yields insightful results. By examining the daily usable capacity of 6,055 at-risk generators throughout the study region, we find that in the event of the recurrence of the 2007 southeastern summer drought in the near future, the usable capacity of all at-risk power plants may experience a substantial decrease compared to a typical summer, falling within the range of 71% to 81%. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the usable capacity would experience a more pronounced decline under more severe drought conditions. The findings of this study offer valuable insights, enabling stakeholders to enhance the resilience of power systems against the potential effects of extreme drought in the future.
Authors:Khaled I Alsharif, Alexander H Pesch, Vamsi Borra, Pedro Cortes, Eric MacDonald, Frank X Li, Kyosung Choo
Title: Transient Thermal and Electrical Characteristics of a Cylindrical LiFeS2 Cell with Equivalent Circuit Model
Abstract:
This study examines the discharge behaviour of a cylindrical LiFeS2 cell to evaluate the parameters that can be used to predict and estimate the nonlinear dynamic response of a battery. A linear model is developed to simulate the discharge behaviour and examine the thermal behaviour. In particular, a commercial-grade battery is discharged with the industry-standard hybrid power pulsing characterization (HPPC) test and the current and voltage responses are recorded. The dynamic system is modelled with the equivalent circuit model (ECM) through MATLAB Simulink. A block diagram representation of the equivalent circuit model governing equations was developed. The parameter estimation tool was utilized to reduce the error and fit the simulation results to the experimental voltage responses, in order to obtain state of charge dependent dynamic parameters. Those parameters were then used in a Dual-Potential Multi-Scale Multi-Domain (MSMD) Battery Model solved in ANSYS Fluent to analyze the thermal behaviour by acquiring the temperature profiles and the temperature distribution within the cell. The nonlinear behaviour of the battery was characterized and the equivalent circuit model parameters were identified and are shown to agree with the experimental voltage responses. Furthermore, it is found that the battery temperature increased by 7.35 deg and was distributed uniformly within the cell.
Authors:Jose Miguel Sanz-Alcaine, Eduardo Sebastian, Francisco Jose Perez-Cebolla, Asier Arruti, Carlos Bernal-Ruiz, Iosu Aizpuru
Title: Estimation of Semiconductor Power Losses Through Automatic Thermal Modeling
Abstract:
The optimal design of power converters requires accurate knowledge of the dissipation elements of its system to achieve the desired performance and security requirements. Calorimetric methods have surpassed classical electrical methods for the estimation of semiconductor power losses but have mechanical limitations and resort to analytical electrothermal equivalent circuits for this task. These electrothermal models are highly dependent on the topology and technology used on the power converter leading to either simplifications that underestimate the thermal effects or intractable sets of differential equations. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel data-driven identification method to characterize the thermal dynamics of power converters allowing the designer to obtain semiconductor total power losses only by means of temperature measurements without the need of a calorimeter. Given a set of power vs.temperature profiles, our solution identifies the linear model that best fits the data. The solution is based on an optimization problem that allows not only accurate identification but also coding of the desired modeling requirements, such as dynamics' invertibility to allow the estimation of power losses from the temperature profiles. The proposed methodology can be applied to any power converter topology. Furthermore, by obtaining a linear model, standard control theory techniques can be exploited to analyze and control the thermal dynamics. Real experiments validate the generality and accuracy of the proposal.
Authors:Min Gyung Yu, Xu Ma, Bowen Huang, Karthik Devaprasad, Fredericka Brown, Di Wu
Title: Enhancing Building Energy Efficiency through Advanced Sizing and Dispatch Methods for Energy Storage
Abstract:
Energy storage and electrification of buildings hold great potential for future decarbonized energy systems. However, there are several technical and economic barriers that prevent large-scale adoption and integration of energy storage in buildings. These barriers include integration with building control systems, high capital costs, and the necessity to identify and quantify value streams for different stakeholders. To overcome these obstacles, it is crucial to develop advanced sizing and dispatch methods to assist planning and operational decision-making for integrating energy storage in buildings. This work develops a simple and flexible optimal sizing and dispatch framework for thermal energy storage (TES) and battery energy storage (BES) systems in large-scale office buildings. The optimal sizes of TES, BES, as well as other building assets are determined in a joint manner instead of sequentially to avoid sub-optimal solutions. The solution is determined considering both capital costs in optimal sizing and operational benefits in optimal dispatch. With the optimally sized systems, we implemented real-time operation using the model-based control (MPC), facilitating the effective and efficient management of energy resources. Comprehensive assessments are performed using simulation studies to quantify potential energy and economic benefits by different utility tariffs and climate locations, to improve our understanding of the techno-economic performance of different TES and BES systems, and to identify barriers to adopting energy storage for buildings. Finally, the proposed framework will provide guidance to a broad range of stakeholders to properly design energy storage in buildings and maximize potential benefits, thereby advancing affordable building energy storage deployment and helping accelerate the transition towards a cleaner and more equitable energy economy.
Authors:Miao Chang, Tan Vuong, Manas Palaparthi, Lachlan Howell, Alessio Bonti, Mohamed Abdelrazek, Duc Thanh Nguyen
Title: An empirical study of automatic wildlife detection using drone thermal imaging and object detection
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence has the potential to make valuable contributions to wildlife management through cost-effective methods for the collection and interpretation of wildlife data. Recent advances in remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS or ``drones'') and thermal imaging technology have created new approaches to collect wildlife data. These emerging technologies could provide promising alternatives to standard labourious field techniques as well as cover much larger areas. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive review and empirical study of drone-based wildlife detection. Specifically, we collect a realistic dataset of drone-derived wildlife thermal detections. Wildlife detections, including arboreal (for instance, koalas, phascolarctos cinereus) and ground dwelling species in our collected data are annotated via bounding boxes by experts. We then benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on our collected dataset. We use these experimental results to identify issues and discuss future directions in automatic animal monitoring using drones.
Authors:Zhong Guo, Aditya Chaudhari, Austin R. Coffman, Prabir Barooah
Title: Optimal Control of District Cooling Energy Plant with Reinforcement Learning and MPC
Abstract:
We consider the problem of optimal control of district cooling energy plants (DCEPs) consisting of multiple chillers, a cooling tower, and a thermal energy storage (TES), in the presence of time-varying electricity price. A straightforward application of model predictive control (MPC) requires solving a challenging mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) because of the on/off of chillers and the complexity of the DCEP model. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an attractive alternative since its real-time control computation is much simpler. But designing an RL controller is challenging due to myriad design choices and computationally intensive training. In this paper, we propose an RL controller and an MPC controller for minimizing the electricity cost of a DCEP, and compare them via simulations. The two controllers are designed to be comparable in terms of objective and information requirements. The RL controller uses a novel Q-learning algorithm that is based on least-squares policy iteration. We describe the design choices for the RL controller, including the choice of state space and basis functions, that are found to be effective. The proposed MPC controller does not need a mixed integer solver for implementation, but only a nonlinear program (NLP) solver. A rule-based baseline controller is also proposed to aid in comparison. Simulation results show that the proposed RL and MPC controllers achieve similar savings over the baseline controller, about 17%.
Authors:Hooman Taghavi, Ahmad El Shafei, Adel Nasiri
Title: Liquid Cooling System for a High Power, Medium Frequency, and Medium Voltage Isolated Power Converter
Abstract:
Power electronics systems, widely used in various applications such as industrial automation, electric cars, and renewable energy, have the primary function of converting and controlling electrical power to the desired type of load. Despite their reliability and efficiency, power losses in these systems generate significant heat that must be dissipated to maintain performance and prevent damage. Cooling systems play a crucial role in ensuring safe operating temperatures for system components. Air and liquid cooling are the leading technologies used in the power electronics world. Air cooling is simple and cost-effective but is limited by ambient temperature and component thermal resistance. While more efficient, liquid cooling requires more maintenance and has higher upfront costs. Water-cooling systems have become famous for regulating thermal loads as they can effectively remove heat from localized high-temperature areas, such as the challenging hotspots in power electronics systems. In addition to designing a cooling system for a power electronic system, this study investigated the impact of three major parameters; cold plate material, channel shape/size, and coolant inlet velocity. The research examined and analyzed these factors and their trade-off analysis to obtain cooling system design and optimization insights. This study might improve power electronics system performance, reliability, and durability by improving heat dissipation and thermal management.
Authors:Aadhar Chauhan, Isaac Remy, Danny Broyles, Karen Leung
Title: MISFIT-V: Misaligned Image Synthesis and Fusion using Information from Thermal and Visual
Abstract:
Detecting humans from airborne visual and thermal imagery is a fundamental challenge for Wilderness Search-and-Rescue (WiSAR) teams, who must perform this function accurately in the face of immense pressure. The ability to fuse these two sensor modalities can potentially reduce the cognitive load on human operators and/or improve the effectiveness of computer vision object detection models. However, the fusion task is particularly challenging in the context of WiSAR due to hardware limitations and extreme environmental factors. This work presents Misaligned Image Synthesis and Fusion using Information from Thermal and Visual (MISFIT-V), a novel two-pronged unsupervised deep learning approach that utilizes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a cross-attention mechanism to capture the most relevant features from each modality. Experimental results show MISFIT-V offers enhanced robustness against misalignment and poor lighting/thermal environmental conditions compared to existing visual-thermal image fusion methods.
Authors:Xhani Marvin Saß, Thilo Krachenfels, Frederik Dermot Pustelnik, Jean-Pierre Seifert, Christian Große, Frank Altmann
Title: Modulation to the Rescue: Identifying Sub-Circuitry in the Transistor Morass for Targeted Analysis
Abstract:
Physical attacks form one of the most severe threats against secure computing platforms. Their criticality arises from their corresponding threat model: By, e.g., passively measuring an integrated circuit's (IC's) environment during a security-related operation, internal secrets may be disclosed. Furthermore, by actively disturbing the physical runtime environment of an IC, an adversary can cause a specific, exploitable misbehavior. The set of physical attacks consists of techniques that apply either globally or locally. When compared to global techniques, local techniques exhibit a much higher precision, hence having the potential to be used in advanced attack scenarios. However, using physical techniques with additional spatial dependency expands the parameter search space exponentially. In this work, we present and compare two techniques, namely laser logic state imaging (LLSI) and lock-in thermography (LIT), that can be used to discover sub-circuitry of an entirely unknown IC based on optical and thermal principles. We show that the time required to identify specific regions can be drastically reduced, thus lowering the complexity of physical attacks requiring positional information. Our case study on an Intel H610 Platform Controller Hub showcases that, depending on the targeted voltage rail, our technique reduces the search space by around 90 to 98 percent.
Authors:Ramin Nourollahi, Rasoul Esmaeilzadeh
Title: Using conservative voltage reduction and dynamic thermal rating for congestion management of power network
Abstract:
Increasing the amount of electric power that is used on the demand side has brought more attention to the peak-load management of the distribution network (DN). The creation of infrastructures for smart grids, the efficient utilization of the distributed network's components, and the appropriate administration of the distributed network would result in a valuable solution for the operators of the distributed network. As a result, a framework for peak-load management is given in this research. Within this framework, the real-time rating of the components and the voltage-dependent characteristics of the electric loads work together to assist the DN operator in effectively navigating peak periods. The combination of the conservation voltage reduction (CVR) and the dynamic thermal rating (DTR) of the components that make up the DN produces outcomes that are more helpful than any of these factors alone could provide. This is true even though each of these factors contributes to the efficient functioning of the DN. According to the findings, as compared to the individual implementation of CVR, the simultaneous utilization of DTR and CVR results in a cost-savings rise at peak events which is 58.75 percentage points more than the individual implementation. In addition, a discussion is offered concerning the current difficulties that are being experienced by the feeders that are providing the voltage-dependent constant-power loads during the utilization of the CVR, which are handled by the dynamic rating of the components that make up the DN.
Authors:Sleiman Farah, Gorm Bruun Andresen
Title: Investment-based optimisation of energy storage design parameters in a grid-connected hybrid renewable energy system
Abstract:
Grid-connected hybrid renewable power systems with energy storage can reduce the intermittency of renewable power supply. However, emerging energy storage technologies need improvement to compete with lithium-ion batteries and reduce the cost of energy. Identifying and optimizing the the most valuable improvement path of these technologies is challenging due to the non-linearity of the energy system model when considering parameters as independent variables. To overcome this, a novel investment-based optimization method is proposed. The method involves linear optimization of the hybrid renewable energy system and subsequent investment optimization, accounting for diminishing improvements per investment. Applied to thermal energy, pumped thermal energy, molten salt, and adiabatic compressed air energy storage technologies, the results show that enhancing discharge efficiency is most valuable for all technologies. Reducing discharge capacity costs and energy storage capacity cost can also become important. Charge capacity cost and charge efficiency are found to be of lesser significance. The study provides detailed improvement pathways for each technology under various operational conditions, assisting developers in resource allocation. Overall, the investment-based optimization method and findings contribute to enhancing the competitiveness of emerging energy storage technologies and reducing reliance on batteries in renewable energy systems.
Authors:Bokai Liu, Weizhuo Lu, Xiaoyue Hu, Chao Zhang, Cuixia Wang, Yilin Qu, Thomas Olofsson
Title: Multiscale modeling of thermal properties in Polyurethane incorporated with phase change materials composites: A case study
Abstract:
Polyurethane (PU) is an ideal thermal insulation material due to its excellent thermal properties. The incorporation of Phase Change Materials (PCMs) capsules into Polyurethane (PU) has been shown to be effective in building envelopes. This design can significantly increase the stability of the indoor thermal environment and reduce the fluctuation of indoor air temperature. We develop a multiscale model of a PU-PCM foam composite and study the thermal conductivity of this material. Later, the design of materials can be optimized by obtaining thermal conductivity. We conduct a case study based on the performance of this optimized material to fully consider the thermal comfort of the occupants of a building envelope with the application of PU-PCMs composites in a single room. At the same time, we also predict the energy consumption of this case. All the outcomes show that this design is promising, enabling the passive design of building energy and significantly improving occupants' comfort.
Authors:Jose Miguel Sanz-Alcaine, Francisco Jose Perez-Cebolla, Carlos Bernal-Ruiz, Asier Arruti, Iosu Aizpuru, Juan Sanchez
Title: Loss Measurement of Low RDS Devices Through Thermal Modelling - The Advantage of Not Turning it Fully On
Abstract:
This paper presents and evaluates a novel method for generating power losses on transistors avoiding high currents. These could heat up the circuit tracks, affecting the accurate thermal modeling of the system. The proposed procedure is based on the transistor current regulation with low gate voltages and the linearity between power and temperature, being useful for all transistor technologies (Si, SiC and GaN). Through this method, low DC currents are enough to bring transistors to their thermal limits. Thermal stability issues and their differences between technologies are discussed and an experimental validation of the method is carried out.
Authors:Somayye Rostami, Douglas G. Down, George Karakostas
Title: Thermal-aware Workload Distribution for Data Centers with Demand Variations
Abstract:
Thermal-aware workload distribution is a common approach in the literature for power consumption optimization in data centers. However, data centers also have other operational costs such as the cost of equipment maintenance and replacement. It has been shown that server reliability depends on frequency of their temperature variations, arising from workload transitions due to dynamic demands. In this work, we formulate a nonlinear optimization problem that considers the cost of workload transitions in addition to IT and cooling power consumption. To approximate the solution, we first linearize the problem; the result is a mixed integer programming problem. A modified heuristic is then proposed to approximate the solution of the linear problem. Finally, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach is integrated with the proposed heuristics for automatic workload reconfiguration when future demand is not known exactly, but predictions are available. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes are attractive in different settings.
Authors:Unay Dorken Gallastegi, Hoover Rueda-Chacon, Martin J. Stevens, Vivek K Goyal
Title: Absorption-Based, Passive Range Imaging from Hyperspectral Thermal Measurements
Abstract:
Passive hyperspectral longwave infrared measurements are remarkably informative about the surroundings. Remote object material and temperature determine the spectrum of thermal radiance, and range, air temperature, and gas concentrations determine how this spectrum is modified by propagation to the sensor. We introduce a passive range imaging method based on computationally separating these phenomena. Previous methods assume hot and highly emitting objects; ranging is more challenging when objects' temperatures do not deviate greatly from air temperature. Our method jointly estimates range and intrinsic object properties, with explicit consideration of air emission, though reflected light is assumed negligible. Inversion being underdetermined is mitigated by using a parametric model of atmospheric absorption and regularizing for smooth emissivity estimates. To assess where our estimate is likely accurate, we introduce a technique to detect which scene pixels are significantly influenced by reflected downwelling. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the importance of regularization, temperature differentials, and availability of many spectral bands. We apply our method to longwave infrared (8--13 $μ$m) hyperspectral image data acquired from natural scenes with no active illumination. Range features from 15m to 150m are recovered, with good qualitative match to lidar data for pixels classified as having negligible reflected downwelling.
Authors:Xin Liu, Xingchen Liu, Goldy Kumar, Paul Witherell
Title: Scalable Path Level Thermal History Simulation of PBF process validated by Melt Pool Images
Abstract:
In this paper we outline the development of a scalable PBF thermal history simulation built on CAPL and based on melt pool physics and dynamics. The new approach inherits linear scalability from CAPL and has three novel ingredients. Firstly, to simulate the laser scanning on a solid surface, we discretize the entire simulation domain instead of only the manufacturing toolpath by appending fictitious paths to the manufacturing toolpath. Secondly, to simulate the scanning on overlapping toolpaths, the path-scale simulations are initialized by a Voronoi diagram for line segments discretized from the manufacturing toolpath. Lastly, we propose a modified conduction model that considers the high thermal gradient around the melt pool. We validate the simulation against melt pool images captured with the co-axial melt pool monitoring (MPM) system on the NIST Additive Manufacturing Metrology Testbed (AMMT). Excellent agreements in the length and width of melt pools are found between simulations and experiments conducted on a custom-controlled laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) testbed on a nickel-alloy (IN625) solid surface. To the authors' best knowledge, this paper is the first to validate a full path-scale thermal history with experimentally acquired melt pool images. Comparing the simulation results and the experimental data, we discuss the influence of laser power on the melt pool length on the path-scale level. We also identify the possible ways to further improve the accuracy of the CAPL simulation without sacrificing efficiency.
Authors:Jing Li, Tianguang Lu, Xinning Yi, Shaorui Wang, Xueqian He
Title: Capacity Expansion of High Renewable Penetrated Energy Systems Considering Concentrating Solar Power for Seasonal Energy Balance
Abstract:
With the increasing proportion of variable renewable energy which owns fluctuation characteristics and the promotion of the Clean Heating policy, the seasonal energy imbalance of the system has been more and more challenging. There is a lack of effective means to mitigate this challenge under the background of gradual compression of the traditional thermal unit construction. Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a promising technology to replace thermal units by integrating emergency boilers to cope with extreme weather, and can meet long-time energy balance as a seasonal peak regulation source. In this paper, we propose a long-term high-resolution expansion planning model of the energy system under high renewable penetration which integrates CSP technology for seasonal energy balance. With the projection to 2050, by taking the energy system in Xinjiang province which is a typical area of the Clean Heating project with rich irradiance as a case study, it shows that the optimal deployment of CSP and electric boiler (EB) can reduce the cost, peak-valley difference of net load and renewable curtailment by 8.73%, 19.72% and 58.24% respectively at 65% renewable penetration compared to the base scenario.
Authors:Truong-Dong Do, Nghe-Nhan Truong, My-Ha Le
Title: Real-time Human Detection in Fire Scenarios using Infrared and Thermal Imaging Fusion
Abstract:
Fire is considered one of the most serious threats to human lives which results in a high probability of fatalities. Those severe consequences stem from the heavy smoke emitted from a fire that mostly restricts the visibility of escaping victims and rescuing squad. In such hazardous circumstances, the use of a vision-based human detection system is able to improve the ability to save more lives. To this end, a thermal and infrared imaging fusion strategy based on multiple cameras for human detection in low-visibility scenarios caused by smoke is proposed in this paper. By processing with multiple cameras, vital information can be gathered to generate more useful features for human detection. Firstly, the cameras are calibrated using a Light Heating Chessboard. Afterward, the features extracted from the input images are merged prior to being passed through a lightweight deep neural network to perform the human detection task. The experiments conducted on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano computer demonstrated that the proposed method can process with reasonable speed and can achieve favorable performance with a mAP@0.5 of 95%.
Authors:Nati Ofir, Jean-Christophe Nebel
Title: Visible and infrared self-supervised fusion trained on a single example
Abstract:
Multispectral imaging is an important task of image processing and computer vision, which is especially relevant to applications such as dehazing or object detection. With the development of the RGBT (RGB & Thermal) sensor, the problem of visible (RGB) to Near Infrared (NIR) image fusion has become particularly timely. Indeed, while visible images see color, but suffer from noise, haze, and clouds, the NIR channel captures a clearer picture. The proposed approach fuses these two channels by training a Convolutional Neural Network by Self Supervised Learning (SSL) on a single example. For each such pair, RGB and NIR, the network is trained for seconds to deduce the final fusion. The SSL is based on the comparison of the Structure of Similarity and Edge-Preservation losses, where the labels for the SSL are the input channels themselves. This fusion preserves the relevant detail of each spectral channel without relying on a heavy training process. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves similar or better qualitative and quantitative multispectral fusion results than other state-of-the-art methods that do not rely on heavy training and/or large datasets.
Authors:F. Conte, S. Massucco, F. Silvestro, D. Cirio, M. Rapizza
Title: Demand Response by Aggregates of Domestic Water Heaters with Adaptive Model Predictive Control
Abstract:
This paper describes an intelligent management algorithm for an aggregate of domestic electric water heaters called to provide a demand response service. This algorithm is developed using Model Predictive Control. The model of the entire aggregate is dynamically identified using a recursive polynomial model estimation technique. This allows the control to be adaptive, i.e., able to adjust its decisions to the system characteristics, which vary over time due to the daily distribution of users hot water consumption. To answer the demand response requirements, aggregated power variations are realized by modifying the temperature set-points of the water heaters without compromising the users comfort. The developed approach allows tracking a regulation signal and mitigating the so-called rebound, i.e., the recovery of energy needed by the aggregate at the end of the service to return to the baseline thermal state. Analyses in a simulation environment allow the validation of the potentialities of the proposed method.
Authors:Luisa Fleig, Melvin Liebsch, Stephan Russenschuck, Sebastian Schöps
Title: Data-Driven Update of B(H) Curves of Iron Yokes in Normal Conducting Accelerator Magnets
Abstract:
Constitutive equations are used in electromagnetic field simulations to model a material response to applied fields or forces. The $B(H)$ characteristic of iron laminations depends on thermal and mechanical stresses that may have occurred during the manufacturing process. Data-driven modelling and updating of the $B(H)$ characteristic are therefore well known necessities. In this work the $B(H)$ curve of an iron yoke of an accelerator magnet is updated based on observed magnetic flux density data by solving a non-linear inverse problem. The inverse problem is regularized by restricting the solution to the function space that is spanned by the truncated Karhunen Loeve expansion of a stochastic $B(H)$-curve model based on material measurements. It is shown that this method is able to retrieve a previously selected ground truth $B(H)$-curve. With the update of the $B(H)$ characteristic, the numerical model gains predictive capacities for excitation currents that were not included in the data.
Authors:Luís Marques, Jose Javier Escribano Macias, Panagiotis Angeloudis
Title: Probabilistic Planning for Maritime Search and Rescue
Abstract:
Maritime accidents cause thousands of disappearances every year, with migrant crossings being particularly dangerous and under-reported. Current coastal and NGO search and rescue services are unable to provide a timely response, so new technologies such as autonomous UAVs are needed. We present a thorough formalization of the maritime search and rescue problem considering its time-critical and probabilistic nature. Further, we introduce a method for determining the optimal search altitude for any aerial thermal-based detection system, so as to maximize overall mission success.
Authors:Mira Gergácz, Ákos Kereszturi
Title: Analysing high resolution digital Mars images using machine learning
Abstract:
The search for ephemeral liquid water on Mars is an ongoing activity. After the recession of the seasonal polar ice cap on Mars, small water ice patches may be left behind in shady places due to the low thermal conductivity of the Martian surface and atmosphere. During late spring and early summer, these patches may be exposed to direct sunlight and warm up rapidly enough for the liquid phase to emerge. To see the spatial and temporal occurrence of such ice patches, optical images should be searched for and checked. Previously a manual image analysis was conducted on 110 images from the southern hemisphere, captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter space mission. Out of these, 37 images were identified with smaller ice patches, which were distinguishable by their brightness, colour and strong connection to local topographic shading. In this study, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is applied to find further images with potential water ice patches in the latitude band between -40° and -60°, where the seasonal retreat of the polar ice cap happens. Previously analysed HiRISE images were used to train the model, where each image was split into hundreds of pieces (chunks), expanding the training dataset to 6240 images. A test run conducted on 38 new HiRISE images indicates that the program can generally recognise small bright patches, however further training might be needed for more precise identification. This further training has been conducted now, incorporating the results of the previous test run. To retrain the model, 18646 chunks were analysed and 48 additional epochs were ran. In the end the model produced a 94% accuracy in recognising ice, 58% of these images showed small enough ice patches on them. The rest of the images was covered by too much ice or showed CO2 ice sublimation in some places.
Authors:Eric Heisler, Siddharth Saurav, Aadesh Deshmukh, Sandip Mazumder, Ponnuswamy Sadayappan, Hari Sundar
Title: Automating GPU Scalability for Complex Scientific Models: Phonon Boltzman Transport Equation
Abstract:
Heterogeneous computing environments combining CPU and GPU resources provide a great boost to large-scale scientific computing applications. Code generation utilities that partition the work into CPU and GPU tasks while considering data movement costs allow researchers to more quickly and easily develop high-performance solutions, and make these resources accessible to a larger user base. We present developments for a domain-specific language (DSL) and code generation framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). These enhancements facilitate GPU-accelerated solution of the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) for phonons, which is the governing equation for simulating thermal transport in semiconductor materials at sub-micron scales. The solution of the BTE involves thousands of coupled PDEs as well as complicated boundary conditions and nonlinear processing at each time step. These developments enable the DSL to generate configurable hybrid GPU/CPU code that couples accelerated kernels with user-defined code. We observed performance improvements of around 18X compared to a CPU-only version produced by this same DSL with minimal additional programming effort.
Authors:Gabriele Meoni, Roberto Del Prete, Federico Serva, Alix De Beussche, Olivier Colin, Nicolas Longépé
Title: Unlocking the Use of Raw Multispectral Earth Observation Imagery for Onboard Artificial Intelligence
Abstract:
Nowadays, there is growing interest in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) on board Earth Observation (EO) satellites for time-critical applications, such as natural disaster response. However, the unavailability of raw satellite data currently hinders research on lightweight pre-processing techniques and limits the exploration of end-to-end pipelines, which could offer more efficient and accurate extraction of insights directly from the source data. To fill this gap, this work presents a novel methodology to automate the creation of datasets for the detection of target events (e.g., warm thermal hotspots) or objects (e.g., vessels) from Sentinel-2 raw data and other multispectral EO pushbroom raw imagery. The presented approach first processes the raw data by applying a pipeline consisting of spatial band registration and georeferencing of the raw data pixels. Then, it detects the target events by leveraging event-specific state-of-the-art algorithms on the Level-1C products, which are mosaicked and cropped on the georeferenced correspondent raw granule area. The detected events are finally re-projected back onto the corresponding raw images. We apply the proposed methodology to realize THRawS (Thermal Hotspots in Raw Sentinel-2 data), the first dataset of Sentinel-2 raw data containing warm thermal hotspots. THRawS includes 1090 samples containing wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and 33,335 event-free acquisitions to enable thermal hotspot detection and general classification applications. This dataset and associated toolkits provide the community with both an immediately useful resource as well as a framework and methodology acting as a template for future additions. With this work, we hope to pave the way for research on energy-efficient pre-processing algorithms and AI-based end-to-end processing systems on board EO satellites.
Authors:Daniel C. Hinck, Jonas J. Schöttler, Maria Krantz, Katharina-Sophie Isleif, Oliver Niggemann
Title: A Cross-Frequency Protective Emblem: Protective Options for Medical Units and Wounded Soldiers in the Context of (fully) Autonomous Warfare
Abstract:
The protection of non-combatants in times of (fully) autonomous warfare raises the question of the timeliness of the international protective emblem. Incidents in the recent past indicate that it is becoming necessary to transfer the protective emblem to other dimensions of transmission and representation. (Fully) Autonomous weapon systems are often launched from a great distance to the aiming point and there may be no possibility for the operators to notice protective emblems at the point of impact. In this case, the weapon system would have to detect such protective emblems and, if necessary, disintegrate autonomously or request an abort via human-in-the-loop. In our paper, we suggest ways in which a cross-frequency protective emblem can be designed. On the one hand, the technical deployment, e.g. in the form of RADAR beacons, is considered, as well as the interpretation by methods of machine learning. With regard to the technical deployment, possibilities are considered to address different sensors and to send signals out as resiliently as possible. When considering different signals, approaches are considered as to how software can recognise the protective emblems under the influence of various boundary conditions and react to them accordingly. In particular, a distinction is made here between the recognition of actively emitted signals and passive protective signals, e.g. the recognition of wounded or surrendering persons via drone-based electro-optical and thermal cameras. Finally, methods of distribution are considered, including encryption and authentication of the received signal, and ethical aspects of possible misuse are examined.
Authors:Trent DeGiovanni, Fernando Guevara Vasquez, China Mauck
Title: Imaging with thermal noise induced currents
Abstract:
We use thermal noise induced currents to image the real and imaginary parts of the conductivity of a body. Covariances of the thermal noise currents measured at a few electrodes are shown to be related to a deterministic problem. We use the covariances obtained while selectively heating the body to recover the real power density in the body under known boundary conditions and at a known frequency. The resulting inverse problem is related to acousto-electric tomography, but where the conductivity is complex and only the real power is measured. We study the local solvability of this problem by determining where its linearization is elliptic. Numerical experiments illustrating this inverse problem are included.
Authors:Nathalie Ramos, Christoph Mittermeier, Josef Kiendl
Title: Experimental and numerical investigations on heat transfer in fused filament fabrication 3D-printed specimens
Abstract:
A good understanding of the heat transfer in fused filament fabrication is crucial for an accurate stress prediction and subsequently for repetitive, high quality printing. This work focuses on two challenges that have been presented when it comes to the accuracy and efficiency in simulating the heat transfer in the fused filament fabrication process. With the prospect of choosing correct thermal boundary conditions expressing the natural convection between printed material and its environment, values for the convective heat transfer coefficient and ambient temperature were calibrated through numerical data fitting of experimental thermal measurements. Furthermore, modeling simplifications were proposed for an efficient numerical discretization of infill structures. Samples were printed with varying infill characteristics, such as varying air void size, infill densities and infill patterns. Thermal measurements were performed to investigate the role of these parameters on the heat transfer and based on these observations, possible modeling simplifications were studied in the numerical simulations.
Authors:Nathalie Ramos, Christoph Mittermeier, Josef Kiendl
Title: Efficient simulation of the heat transfer in fused filament fabrication
Abstract:
Heat transfer simulations of the fused filament fabrication process are an important tool to predict bonding, residual stresses and strength of 3D printed parts. But in order to capture the significant thermal gradients that occur in the FFF printing process, a fine mesh discretization and short time steps are required, leading to extensive computational efforts. In this work a simulation framework is presented which combines several efficiency measures with the objective of reducing the computational efforts required in simulating the FFF printing process without simplifying the deposition physics or reducing the overall accuracy. Thus, the material deposition has been modeled with a hybrid element activation approach and elements are adaptively coarsened through an error-based coarsening condition. Additionally, an appropriate coarsening technique is presented for geometries with air-filled infill patterns. The accuracy of the numerical framework is experimentally validated and the efficiency of the framework is validated numerically by comparing the performance of models with and without any efficiency measures. Finally, its effectiveness is shown by simulating the printing process of a larger geometry.
Authors:UngJin Na, Moonhee Choi, HangJin Jo
Title: Critical heat flux diagnosis using conditional generative adversarial networks
Abstract:
The critical heat flux (CHF) is an essential safety boundary in boiling heat transfer processes employed in high heat flux thermal-hydraulic systems. Identifying CHF is vital for preventing equipment damage and ensuring overall system safety, yet it is challenging due to the complexity of the phenomena. For an in-depth understanding of the complicated phenomena, various methodologies have been devised, but the acquisition of high-resolution data is limited by the substantial resource consumption required. This study presents a data-driven, image-to-image translation method for reconstructing thermal data of a boiling system at CHF using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs). The supervised learning process relies on paired images, which include total reflection visualizations and infrared thermometry measurements obtained from flow boiling experiments. Our proposed approach has the potential to not only provide evidence connecting phase interface dynamics with thermal distribution but also to simplify the laborious and time-consuming experimental setup and data-reduction procedures associated with infrared thermal imaging, thereby providing an effective solution for CHF diagnosis.
Authors:Marcel F. Langer, J. Thorben Frank, Florian Knoop
Title: Stress and heat flux via automatic differentiation
Abstract:
Machine-learning potentials provide computationally efficient and accurate approximations of the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface. This potential determines many materials properties and simulation techniques usually require its gradients, in particular forces and stress for molecular dynamics, and heat flux for thermal transport properties. Recently developed potentials feature high body order and can include equivariant semi-local interactions through message-passing mechanisms. Due to their complex functional forms, they rely on automatic differentiation (AD), overcoming the need for manual implementations or finite-difference schemes to evaluate gradients. This study demonstrates a unified AD approach to obtain forces, stress, and heat flux for such potentials, and provides a model-independent implementation. The method is tested on the Lennard-Jones potential, and then applied to predict cohesive properties and thermal conductivity of tin selenide using an equivariant message-passing neural network potential.
Authors:Axel Gödrich, Daniel König, Gabriel Eilertsen, Michael Teutsch
Title: Joint tone mapping and denoising of thermal infrared images via multi-scale Retinex and multi-task learning
Abstract:
Cameras digitize real-world scenes as pixel intensity values with a limited value range given by the available bits per pixel (bpp). High Dynamic Range (HDR) cameras capture those luminance values in higher resolution through an increase in the number of bpp. Most displays, however, are limited to 8 bpp. Naive HDR compression methods lead to a loss of the rich information contained in those HDR images. In this paper, tone mapping algorithms for thermal infrared images with 16 bpp are investigated that can preserve this information. An optimized multi-scale Retinex algorithm sets the baseline. This algorithm is then approximated with a deep learning approach based on the popular U-Net architecture. The remaining noise in the images after tone mapping is reduced implicitly by utilizing a self-supervised deep learning approach that can be jointly trained with the tone mapping approach in a multi-task learning scheme. Further discussions are provided on denoising and deflickering for thermal infrared video enhancement in the context of tone mapping. Extensive experiments on the public FLIR ADAS Dataset prove the effectiveness of our proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Nicholas Pacheco, Yash Garje, Aakash Rohra, Loris Fichera
Title: Losing Focus: Can It Be Useful in Robotic Laser Surgery?
Abstract:
This paper proposes a method to regulate the tissue temperature during laser surgery by robotically controlling the laser focus. Laser-tissue interactions are generally considered hard to control due to the inherent inhomogeneity of biological tissue, which can create significant variability in its thermal response to laser irradiation. In this study, we use methods from nonlinear control theory to synthesize a temperature controller capable of working on virtually any tissue type without any prior knowledge of its physical properties. The performance of the controller is evaluated in ex-vivo experiments.
Authors:Martin Thißen, Elke Hergenröther
Title: Why Existing Multimodal Crowd Counting Datasets Can Lead to Unfulfilled Expectations in Real-World Applications
Abstract:
More information leads to better decisions and predictions, right? Confirming this hypothesis, several studies concluded that the simultaneous use of optical and thermal images leads to better predictions in crowd counting. However, the way multimodal models extract enriched features from both modalities is not yet fully understood. Since the use of multimodal data usually increases the complexity, inference time, and memory requirements of the models, it is relevant to examine the differences and advantages of multimodal compared to monomodal models. In this work, all available multimodal datasets for crowd counting are used to investigate the differences between monomodal and multimodal models. To do so, we designed a monomodal architecture that considers the current state of research on monomodal crowd counting. In addition, several multimodal architectures have been developed using different multimodal learning strategies. The key components of the monomodal architecture are also used in the multimodal architectures to be able to answer whether multimodal models perform better in crowd counting in general. Surprisingly, no general answer to this question can be derived from the existing datasets. We found that the existing datasets hold a bias toward thermal images. This was determined by analyzing the relationship between the brightness of optical images and crowd count as well as examining the annotations made for each dataset. Since answering this question is important for future real-world applications of crowd counting, this paper establishes criteria for a potential dataset suitable for answering whether multimodal models perform better in crowd counting in general.
Authors:Somayye Rostami, Douglas G. Down, George Karakostas
Title: Linearized Data Center Workload and Cooling Management
Abstract:
With the current high levels of energy consumption of data centers, reducing power consumption by even a small percentage is beneficial. We propose a framework for thermal-aware workload distribution in a data center to reduce cooling power consumption. The framework includes linearization of the general optimization problem and proposing a heuristic to approximate the solution for the resulting Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problems. We first define a general nonlinear power optimization problem including several cooling parameters, heat recirculation effects, and constraints on server temperatures. We propose to study a linearized version of the problem, which is easier to analyze. As an energy saving scenario and as a proof of concept for our approach, we also consider the possibility that the red-line temperature for idle servers is higher than that for busy servers. For the resulting ILP problem, we propose a heuristic for intelligent rounding of the fractional solution. Through numerical simulations, we compare our heuristics with two baseline algorithms. We also evaluate the performance of the solution of the linearized system on the original system. The results show that the proposed approach can reduce the cooling power consumption by more than 30 percent compared to the case of continuous utilizations and a single red-line temperature.
Authors:Shubham Pande, Bhaswar Chakrabarti, Anjan Chakravorty
Title: Thermal Crosstalk Analysis in RRAM Passive Crossbar Arrays
Abstract:
As the packing density of resistive random access memory (RRAM) devices increases, the effect of thermal cross-talk across the devices in a crossbar array arrangement influences their overall operation significantly. The electro-thermal effects in a densely packed RRAM crossbar can accelerate the retention and endurance degradation; hence poses a serious reliability threat. This paper systematically investigates the electro-thermal effects in passive RRAM crossbar arrays using COMSOL multi-physics simulations. Furthermore, we propose a methodology to model the thermal cross-talk effect and incorporate it in a SPICE-compatible physics-based RRAM compact model. Finally, we demonstrate the impact of thermal coupling on RRAM crossbar array operation in terms of vector-matrix multiplication using calibrated SPICE simulations.
Authors:Marcel F. Langer, Florian Knoop, Christian Carbogno, Matthias Scheffler, Matthias Rupp
Title: Heat flux for semi-local machine-learning potentials
Abstract:
The Green-Kubo (GK) method is a rigorous framework for heat transport simulations in materials. However, it requires an accurate description of the potential-energy surface and carefully converged statistics. Machine-learning potentials can achieve the accuracy of first-principles simulations while allowing to reach well beyond their simulation time and length scales at a fraction of the cost. In this paper, we explain how to apply the GK approach to the recent class of message-passing machine-learning potentials, which iteratively consider semi-local interactions beyond the initial interaction cutoff. We derive an adapted heat flux formulation that can be implemented using automatic differentiation without compromising computational efficiency. The approach is demonstrated and validated by calculating the thermal conductivity of zirconium dioxide across temperatures.
Authors:Michael Shanks, Uduak Inyang-Udoh, Neera Jain
Title: Design and validation of a state-dependent Riccati equation filter for state of charge estimation in a latent thermal storage device
Abstract:
Latent thermal energy storage (TES) devices could enable advances in many thermal management applications, including peak load shifting for reducing energy demand and cost of HVAC or providing supplemental heat rejection in transient thermal management systems. However, real-time feedback control of such devices is currently limited by the absence of suitable state of charge estimation techniques, given the nonlinearities associated with phase change dynamics. In this paper we design and experimentally validate a state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) filter for state of charge estimation in a phase change material (PCM)-based TES device integrated into a single-phase thermal-fluid loop. The advantage of the SDRE filter is that it does not require linearization of the nonlinear finite-volume model; instead, it uses a linear parameter-varying system model which can be quickly derived using graph-based methods. We leverage graph-based methods to prove that the system model is uniformly detectable, guaranteeing that the state estimates are bounded. Using measurements from five thermocouples embedded in the PCM of the TES and two thermocouples measuring the fluid temperature at the inlet and outlet of the device, the state estimator uses a reduced-order finite-volume model to determine the temperature distribution inside the PCM and in turn, the state of charge of the device. We demonstrate the state estimator in simulation and on experimental data collected from a thermal management system testbed to show that the state estimation error converges near zero and remains bounded.
Authors:Noor E Karishma Shaik, Bryce Widdicombe, Dechuan Sun, Sam E John, Dongryeol Ryu, Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas, Ranjith R Unnithan
Title: Longwave infrared multispectral image sensor system using aluminum-germanium plasmonic filter arrays
Abstract:
A multispectral camera records image data in various wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum to acquire additional information that a conventional camera fails to capture. With the advent of high-resolution image sensors and colour filter technologies, multispectral imagers in the visible wavelengths have become popular with increasing commercial viability in the last decade. However, multispectral imaging in longwave infrared (LWIR: 8 to 14 microns) is still an emerging area due to the limited availability of optical materials, filter technologies, and high-resolution sensors. Images from LWIR multispectral cameras can capture emission spectra of objects to extract additional information that a human eye fails to capture and thus have important applications in precision agriculture, forestry, medicine, and object identification. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an LWIR multispectral image sensor with three wavelength bands using optical elements made of an aluminum-based plasmonic filter array sandwiched in germanium. To realize the multispectral sensor, the filter arrays are then integrated into a 3D printed wheel stacked on a low-resolution monochrome thermal sensor. Our prototype device is calibrated using a blackbody and its thermal output has been enhanced with computer vision methods. By applying a state-of-the-art deep learning method, we have also reconstructed multispectral images to a better spatial resolution. Scientifically, our work demonstrates a versatile spectral thermography technique for detecting target signatures in the LWIR range and other advanced spectral analyses.
Authors:Neelotpal Majumdar, Marcel Sarstedt, Lutz Hofmann
Title: Distribution grid power flexibility aggregation at multiple interconnections between the high and extra high voltage grid levels
Abstract:
The energy transition towards renewable based power provision requires improved monitoring and control of distributed energy resources (DERs), installed predominantly at the distribution grid level. Due to the gradual phase out of thermal generation, a shift of ancillary services provision like voltage control, congestion management and dynamic support from DERs is underway. Increased planning for procurement of ancillary services from underlying grid levels is required. Therefore, provision of flexible active and reactive power potentials from distribution system operators to transmission system operators at the vertical system interface is a subject of current research. At present, provision of active and reactive power flexibilities (PQ-flexibilities) across radial system interconnections are investigated, which involves a single transformer branch interconnection across two different voltage levels. Inclusion of multiple interconnections in a meshed grid structure increases the complexity as proximal interdependencies of interconnections to PQ-flexibilities require consideration. The objective of this paper is to address the flexibility aggregation across multiple vertical interconnections. Alternating current power transfer distribution factors (AC-PTDFs) are used to determine the power flow across the interconnections. Subsequent integration in a linear optimization environment controls the interconnection power flows (IPF) using a weighted objective function. Therefore, power flow regulation is enabled according to the requirements and specifications of both the underlying and overlaying grid level. The results show interdependent concentric flexibility regions or Feasible Operating Regions (FORs) in accordance with the manipulation of the weighted objective function.
Authors:Oscar Lee, Robin Msiska, Maarten A. Brems, Mathias Klaui, Hidekazu Kurebayashi, Karin Everschor-Sitte
Title: Perspective on unconventional computing using magnetic skyrmions
Abstract:
Learning and pattern recognition inevitably requires memory of previous events, a feature that conventional CMOS hardware needs to artificially simulate. Dynamical systems naturally provide the memory, complexity, and nonlinearity needed for a plethora of different unconventional computing approaches. In this perspective article, we focus on the unconventional computing concept of reservoir computing and provide an overview of key physical reservoir works reported. We focus on the promising platform of magnetic structures and, in particular, skyrmions, which potentially allow for low-power applications. Moreover, we discuss skyrmion-based implementations of Brownian computing, which has recently been combined with reservoir computing. This computing paradigm leverages the thermal fluctuations present in many skyrmion systems. Finally, we provide an outlook on the most important challenges in this field.
Authors:Sergey Bravyi, Anirban Chowdhury, David Gosset, Vojtech Havlicek, Guanyu Zhu
Title: Quantum complexity of the Kronecker coefficients
Abstract:
Whether or not the Kronecker coefficients of the symmetric group count some set of combinatorial objects is a longstanding open question. In this work we show that a given Kronecker coefficient is proportional to the rank of a projector that can be measured efficiently using a quantum computer. In other words a Kronecker coefficient counts the dimension of the vector space spanned by the accepting witnesses of a QMA verifier, where QMA is the quantum analogue of NP. This implies that approximating the Kronecker coefficients to within a given relative error is not harder than a certain natural class of quantum approximate counting problems that captures the complexity of estimating thermal properties of quantum many-body systems. A second consequence is that deciding positivity of Kronecker coefficients is contained in QMA, complementing a recent NP-hardness result of Ikenmeyer, Mulmuley and Walter. We obtain similar results for the related problem of approximating row sums of the character table of the symmetric group. Finally, we discuss an efficient quantum algorithm that approximates normalized Kronecker coefficients to inverse-polynomial additive error.
Authors:Kyle Davis, Raphael Leiteritz, Dirk Pflüger, Miriam Schulte
Title: Deep learning based surrogate modeling for thermal plume prediction of groundwater heat pumps
Abstract:
The ability for groundwater heat pumps to meet space heating and cooling demands without relying on fossil fuels, has prompted their mass roll out in dense urban environments. In regions with high subsurface groundwater flow rates, the thermal plume generated from a heat pump's injection well can propagate downstream, affecting surrounding users and reducing their heat pump efficiency. To reduce the probability of interference, regulators often rely on simple analytical models or high fidelity groundwater simulations to determine the impact that a heat pump has on the subsurface aquifer and surrounding heat pumps. These are either too inaccurate or too computationally expensive for everyday use. In this work, a surrogate model was developed to provide a quick, high accuracy prediction tool of the thermal plume generated by a heat pump within heterogeneous subsurface aquifers. Three variations of a convolutional neural network were developed that accepts the known groundwater Darcy velocities as discrete two-dimensional inputs and predicts the temperature within the subsurface aquifer around the heat pump. A data set consisting of 800 numerical simulation samples, generated from random permeability fields and pressure boundary conditions, was used to provide pseudo-randomized Darcy velocity fields as input fields and the temperature field solution for training the network. The subsurface temperature field output from the network provides a more realistic temperature field that follows the Darcy velocity streamlines, while being orders of magnitude faster than conventional high fidelity solvers
Authors:Manuel Koch, Colin N. Jones
Title: Comparison of behavioral systems theory and conventional linear models for predicting building zone temperature in long-term in situ measurements
Abstract:
The potential of Model Predictive Control in buildings has been shown many times, being successfully used to achieve various goals, such as minimizing energy consumption or maximizing thermal comfort. However, mass deployment has thus far failed, in part because of the high engineering cost of obtaining and maintaining a sufficiently accurate model. This can be addressed by using adaptive data-driven approaches. The idea of using behavioral systems theory for this purpose has recently found traction in the academic community. In this study, we compare variations thereof with different amounts of data used, different regularization weights, and different methods of data selection. Autoregressive models with exogenous inputs (ARX) are used as a well-established reference. All methods are evaluated by performing iterative system identification on two long-term data sets from real occupied buildings, neither of which include artificial excitation for the purpose of system identification. We find that: (1) Sufficient prediction accuracy is achieved with all methods. (2) The ARX models perform slightly better, while having the additional advantages of fewer tuning parameters and faster computation. (3) Adaptive and non-adaptive schemes perform similarly. (4) The regularization weights of the behavioral systems theory methods show the expected trade-off characteristic with an optimal middle value. (5) Using the most recent data yields better performance than selecting data with similar weather as the day to be predicted. (6) More data improves the model performance.
Authors:Pablo Gómez, Johan Östman, Vinutha Magal Shreenath, Gabriele Meoni
Title: PAseos Simulates the Environment for Operating multiple Spacecraft
Abstract:
The next generation of spacecraft is anticipated to enable various new applications involving onboard processing, machine learning and decentralised operational scenarios. Even though many of these have been previously proposed and evaluated, the operational constraints of real mission scenarios are often either not considered or only rudimentary. Here, we present an open-source Python module called PASEOS that is capable of modelling operational scenarios involving one or multiple spacecraft. It considers several physical phenomena including thermal, power, bandwidth and communications constraints as well as the impact of radiation on spacecraft. PASEOS can be run both as a high-performance-oriented numerical simulation and/or in a real-time mode directly on edge hardware. We demonstrate these capabilities in three scenarios, one in real-time simulation on a Unibap iX-10 100 satellite processor, another in a simulation modelling an entire constellation performing tasks over several hours and one training a machine learning model in a decentralised setting. While we demonstrate tasks in Earth orbit, PASEOS is conceptually designed to allow deep space scenarios too. Our results show that PASEOS can model the described scenarios efficiently and thus provide insight into operational considerations. We show this in terms of runtime and overhead as well as by investigating the modelled temperature, battery status and communication windows of a constellation. By running PASEOS on an actual satellite processor, we showcase how PASEOS can be directly included in hardware demonstrators for future missions. Overall, we provide the first solution to holistically model the physical constraints spacecraft encounter in Earth orbit and beyond. The PASEOS module is available open-source online together with an extensive documentation to enable researchers to quickly incorporate it in their studies.
Authors:Ashkan Mansouri Yarahmadi, Michael Breuß, Carsten Hartmann
Title: Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network for Temperature Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
In context of laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF), it is known that the properties of the final fabricated product highly depend on the temperature distribution and its gradient over the manufacturing plate. In this paper, we propose a novel means to predict the temperature gradient distributions during the printing process by making use of neural networks. This is realized by employing heat maps produced by an optimized printing protocol simulation and used for training a specifically tailored recurrent neural network in terms of a long short-term memory architecture. The aim of this is to avoid extreme and inhomogeneous temperature distribution that may occur across the plate in the course of the printing process. In order to train the neural network, we adopt a well-engineered simulation and unsupervised learning framework. To maintain a minimized average thermal gradient across the plate, a cost function is introduced as the core criteria, which is inspired and optimized by considering the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP). As time evolves the unsupervised printing process governed by TSP produces a history of temperature heat maps that maintain minimized average thermal gradient. All in one, we propose an intelligent printing tool that provides control over the substantial printing process components for L-PBF, i.e.\ optimal nozzle trajectory deployment as well as online temperature prediction for controlling printing quality.
Authors:Xiwen Liu, Keshava Katti, Deep Jariwala
Title: Accelerate & Actualize: Can 2D Materials Bridge the Gap Between Neuromorphic Hardware and the Human Brain?
Abstract:
Two-dimensional (2D) materials present an exciting opportunity for devices and systems beyond the von Neumann computing architecture paradigm due to their diversity of electronic structure, physical properties, and atomically-thin, van der Waals structures that enable ease of integration with conventional electronic materials and silicon-based hardware. All major classes of non-volatile memory (NVM) devices have been demonstrated using 2D materials, including their operation as synaptic devices for applications in neuromorphic computing hardware. Their atomically-thin structure, superior physical properties, i.e., mechanical strength, electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as gate-tunable electronic properties provide performance advantages and novel functionality in NVM devices and systems. However, device performance and variability as compared to incumbent materials and technology remain major concerns for real applications. Ultimately, the progress of 2D materials as a novel class of electronic materials and specifically their application in the area of neuromorphic electronics will depend on their scalable synthesis in thin-film form with desired crystal quality, defect density, and phase purity.
Authors:Hamza El-Kebir, Junren Ran, Yongseok Lee, Leonardo P. Chamorro, Martin Ostoja-Starzewski, Richard Berlin, Gabriela M. Aguiluz Cornejo, Enrico Benedetti, Pier C. Giulianotti, Joseph Bentsman
Title: Minimally Invasive Live Tissue High-fidelity Thermophysical Modeling using Real-time Thermography
Abstract:
We present a novel thermodynamic parameter estimation framework for energy-based surgery on live tissue, with direct applications to tissue characterization during electrosurgery. This framework addresses the problem of estimating tissue-specific thermodynamics in real-time, which would enable accurate prediction of thermal damage impact to the tissue and damage-conscious planning of electrosurgical procedures. Our approach provides basic thermodynamic information such as thermal diffusivity, and also allows for obtaining the thermal relaxation time and a model of the heat source, yielding in real-time a controlled hyperbolic thermodynamics model. The latter accounts for the finite thermal propagation time necessary for modeling of the electrosurgical action, in which the probe motion speed often surpasses the speed of thermal propagation in the tissue operated on. Our approach relies solely on thermographer feedback and a knowledge of the power level and position of the electrosurgical pencil, imposing only very minor adjustments to normal electrosurgery to obtain a high-fidelity model of the tissue-probe interaction. Our method is minimally invasive and can be performed in situ. We apply our method first to simulated data based on porcine muscle tissue to verify its accuracy and then to in vivo liver tissue, and compare the results with those from the literature. This comparison shows that parameterizing the Maxwell--Cattaneo model through the framework proposed yields a noticeably higher fidelity real-time adaptable representation of the thermodynamic tissue response to the electrosurgical impact than currently available. A discussion on the differences between the live and the dead tissue thermodynamics is also provided.
Authors:Markus Fleschutz, Markus Bohlayer, Marco Braun, Michael D. Murphy
Title: From prosumer to flexumer: Case study on the value of flexibility in decarbonizing the multi-energy system of a manufacturing company
Abstract:
Digitalization and sector coupling enable companies to turn into flexumers. By using the flexibility of their multi-energy system (MES), they reduce costs and carbon emissions while stabilizing the electricity system. However, to identify the necessary investments in energy conversion and storage technologies to leverage demand response (DR) potentials, companies need to assess the value of flexibility. Therefore, this study quantifies the flexibility value of a production company's MES by optimizing the synthesis, design, and operation of a decarbonizing MES considering self-consumption optimization, peak shaving, and integrated DR based on hourly prices and carbon emission factors (CEFs). The detailed case study of a beverage company in northern Germany considers vehicle-to-X of powered industrial trucks, power-to-heat on multiple temperatures, wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, and energy storage systems (thermal energy, electricity, and hydrogen). We propose and apply novel data-driven metrics to evaluate the intensity of price-based and CEF-based DR. The results reveal that flexibility usage reduces decarbonization costs (by 19-80% depending on electricity and carbon removal prices), total annual costs, operating carbon emissions, energy-weighted average prices and CEFs, and fossil energy dependency. The results also suggest that a net-zero operational carbon emission MES requires flexibility, which, in an economic case, is provided by a combination of different flexible technologies and storage systems that complement each other. While the value of flexibility depends on various market and consumer-specific factors such as electricity or carbon removal prices, this study highlights the importance of demand flexibility for the decarbonization of MESs.
Authors:William Bennett, Ryan G. McClarren
Title: Benchmark solutions for radiative transfer with a moving mesh and exact uncollided source treatments
Abstract:
The set of benchmark solutions used in the thermal radiative transfer community suffer some coverage gaps, in particular nonlinear, non-equilibrium problems. Also, there are no non-equilibrium, optically thick benchmarks. These shortcomings motivated the development of a numerical method free from the requirement of linearity and easily able to converge on smooth optically thick problems, a moving mesh Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework that utilizes an uncollided source treatment. Having already proven this method on time dependent scattering transport problems, we present here solutions to non-equilibrium thermal radiative transfer problems for familiar linearized systems together with more physical nonlinear systems in both optically thin and thick regimes, including both the full transport and the $S_2$/$P_1$ solution. Geometric convergence is observed for smooth sources at all times and some nonsmooth sources at late times when there is local equilibrium. Also, accurate solutions are achieved for step sources when the solution is not smooth.
Authors:Vu Nguyen, Olatunji Olayiwola, Boyun Guo, Ning Liu
Title: Well Cement Degradation and Wellbore Integrity in Geological CO2 Storages: A Literature Review
Abstract:
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged as the most effective method to curb the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It can store up to 5 billion tons of CO2 per year. To guarantee a safe and economical geological storage, the well cement degradation and wellbore integrity need to be studied thoroughly. This review paper is designed to provide a fundamental background of well cement degradation and wellbore integrity in geological CO2 storages to support the researchers in further investigation. The review mainly focuses on mechanical, thermal, chemical property changes and corrosion time for cement in experiments and simulation during geological CO2 storage. However, the debonding interface between casing/cement or cement/formation has not been addressed profoundly. A further investigation should inspect how pressure, temperature, and chemical reaction affect the micro-annuli of casing/cement or cement/formation. Also, a mathe-matical model should be established to predict the corrosion rate in geological CO2 storage.
Authors:Weiming Wang, Fred van Keulen, Jun Wu
Title: Fabrication Sequence Optimization for Minimizing Distortion in Multi-Axis Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
Additive manufacturing of metal parts involves phase transformations and high temperature gradients which lead to uneven thermal expansion and contraction, and, consequently, distortion of the fabricated components. The distortion has a great influence on the structural performance and dimensional accuracy, e.g., for assembly. It is therefore of critical importance to model, predict and, ultimately, reduce distortion. In this paper, we present a computational framework for fabrication sequence optimization to minimize distortion in multi-axis additive manufacturing (e.g., robotic wire arc additive manufacturing), in which the fabrication sequence is not limited to planar layers only. We encode the fabrication sequence by a continuous pseudo-time field, and optimize it using gradient-based numerical optimization. To demonstrate this framework, we adopt a computationally tractable yet reasonably accurate model to mimic the material shrinkage in metal additive manufacturing and thus to predict the distortion of the fabricated components. Numerical studies show that optimized curved layers can reduce distortion by orders of magnitude as compared to their planar counterparts.
Authors:Thi Nguyen Khoa Nguyen, Thibault Dairay, Raphaël Meunier, Christophe Millet, Mathilde Mougeot
Title: Fixed-budget online adaptive learning for physics-informed neural networks. Towards parameterized problem inference
Abstract:
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have gained much attention in various fields of engineering thanks to their capability of incorporating physical laws into the models. PINNs integrate the physical constraints by minimizing the partial differential equations (PDEs) residuals on a set of collocation points. The distribution of these collocation points appears to have a huge impact on the performance of PINNs and the assessment of the sampling methods for these points is still an active topic. In this paper, we propose a Fixed-Budget Online Adaptive Learning (FBOAL) method, which decomposes the domain into sub-domains, for training collocation points based on local maxima and local minima of the PDEs residuals. The effectiveness of FBOAL is demonstrated for non-parameterized and parameterized problems. The comparison with other adaptive sampling methods is also illustrated. The numerical results demonstrate important gains in terms of the accuracy and computational cost of PINNs with FBOAL over the classical PINNs with non-adaptive collocation points. We also apply FBOAL in a complex industrial application involving coupling between mechanical and thermal fields. We show that FBOAL is able to identify the high-gradient locations and even give better predictions for some physical fields than the classical PINNs with collocation points sampled on a pre-adapted finite element mesh built thanks to numerical expert knowledge. From the present study, it is expected that the use of FBOAL will help to improve the conventional numerical solver in the construction of the mesh.
Authors:Ahmed El Kerim, Pierre Gosselet, Frédéric Magoulès
Title: Asynchronous global-local non-invasive coupling for linear elliptic problems
Abstract:
This paper presents the first asynchronous version of the Global/Local non-invasive coupling, capable of dealing efficiently with multiple, possibly adjacent, patches. We give a new interpretation of the coupling in terms of primal domain decomposition method, and we prove the convergence of the relaxed asynchronous iteration. The asynchronous paradigm lifts many bottlenecks of the Global/Local coupling performance. We illustrate the method on several linear elliptic problems as encountered in thermal and elasticity studies.
Authors:Leonardo Boledi, Fabian Key, Benjamin Terschanski, Stefanie Elgeti, Julia Kowalski
Title: A scale-coupled numerical method for transient close-contact melting
Abstract:
We introduce a numerical workflow to model and simulate transient close-contact melting processes based on the space-time finite element method. That is, we aim at computing the velocity at which a forced heat source melts through a phase-change material. Existing approaches found in the literature consider a thermo-mechanical equilibrium in the contact melt film, which results in a constant melting velocity of the heat source. This classical approach, however, cannot account for transient effects in which the melting velocity adjusts itself to equilibrium conditions. With our contribution, we derive a model for the transient melting process of a planar heat source. We iteratively cycle between solving for the heat equation in the solid material and updating the melting velocity. The latter is computed based on the heat flux in the vicinity of the heat source. The motion of the heated body is simulated via the moving mesh strategy referred to as the Virtual Region Shear-Slip Mesh Update Method, which avoids remeshing and is particularly efficient in representing unidirectional movement. We show numerical examples to validate our methodology and present two application scenarios, a 2D planar thermal melting probe and a 2D hot-wire cutting machine.
Authors:Ebbe Kyhl Gøtske, Gorm Bruun Andresen, Marta Victoria
Title: Cost and efficiency requirements for a successful electricity storage in a highly renewable European energy system
Abstract:
Future highly renewable energy systems might require substantial storage deployment. At the current stage, the technology portfolio of dominant storage options is limited to pumped-hydro storage and Li-Ion batteries. It is uncertain which storage design will be able to compete with these options. Considering Europe as a case study, we derive the cost and efficiency requirements of a generic storage technology, which we refer to as storage-X, to be deployed in the cost-optimal system. This is performed while including existing pumped-hydro facilities and accounting for the competition from stationary Li-ion batteries, flexible generation technology, and flexible demand in a highly renewable sector-coupled energy system. Based on a sample space of 724 storage configurations, we show that energy capacity cost and discharge efficiency largely determine the optimal storage deployment, in agreement with previous studies. Here, we show that charge capacity cost is also important due to its impact on renewable curtailment. A significant deployment of storage-X in a cost-optimal system requires (a) discharge efficiency of at least 95%, (b) discharge efficiency of at least 50% together with low energy capacity cost (10EUR/kWh), or (c) discharge efficiency of at least 25% with very low energy capacity cost (2EUR/kWh). Comparing our findings with seven emerging technologies reveals that none of them fulfill these requirements. Thermal Energy Storage (TES) is, however, on the verge of qualifying due to its low energy capacity cost and concurrent low charge capacity cost. Exploring the space of storage designs reveals that system cost reduction from storage-X deployment can reach 9% at its best, but this requires high round-trip efficiency (90%) and low charge capacity cost (35EUR/kW).
Authors:Ali Cox, Quntao Zhuang, Christos Gagatsos, Boulat Bash, Saikat Guha
Title: Transceiver designs to attain the entanglement assisted communications capacity
Abstract:
Pre-shared entanglement can significantly boost communication rates in the high thermal noise and low-brightness transmitter regime. In this regime, for a lossy-bosonic channel with additive thermal noise, the ratio between the entanglement-assisted capacity and the Holevo capacity - the maximum reliable-communications rate permitted by quantum mechanics without any pre-shared entanglement - scales as $\log(1/{\bar N}_{\rm S})$, where the mean transmitted photon number per mode, ${\bar N}_{\rm S} \ll 1$. Thus, pre-shared entanglement, e.g., distributed by the quantum internet or a satellite-assisted quantum link, promises to significantly improve low-power radio-frequency communications. In this paper, we propose a pair of structured quantum transceiver designs that leverage continuous-variable pre-shared entanglement generated, e.g., from a down-conversion source, binary phase modulation, and non-Gaussian joint detection over a code word block, to achieve this scaling law of capacity enhancement. Further, we describe a modification to the aforesaid receiver using a front-end that uses sum-frequency generation sandwiched with dynamically-programmable in-line two-mode squeezers, and a receiver back-end that takes full advantage of the output of the receiver's front-end by employing a non-destructive multimode vacuum-or-not measurement to achieve the entanglement-assisted classical communications capacity.
Authors:Sheik Murad Hassan Anik, Xinghua Gao, Na Meng
Title: Machine learning approach in the development of building occupant personas
Abstract:
The user persona is a communication tool for designers to generate a mental model that describes the archetype of users. Developing building occupant personas is proven to be an effective method for human-centered smart building design, which considers occupant comfort, behavior, and energy consumption. Optimization of building energy consumption also requires a deep understanding of occupants' preferences and behaviors. The current approaches to developing building occupant personas face a major obstruction of manual data processing and analysis. In this study, we propose and evaluate a machine learning-based semi-automated approach to generate building occupant personas. We investigate the 2015 Residential Energy Consumption Dataset with five machine learning techniques - Linear Discriminant Analysis, K Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree (Random Forest), Support Vector Machine, and AdaBoost classifier - for the prediction of 16 occupant characteristics, such as age, education, and, thermal comfort. The models achieve an average accuracy of 61% and accuracy over 90% for attributes including the number of occupants in the household, their age group, and preferred usage of heating or cooling equipment. The results of the study show the feasibility of using machine learning techniques for the development of building occupant persona to minimize human effort.
Authors:Weishun Zhong, Xun Gao, Susanne F. Yelin, Khadijeh Najafi
Title: Many-body localized hidden generative models
Abstract:
Born machines are quantum-inspired generative models that leverage the probabilistic nature of quantum states. Here, we present a new architecture called many-body localized (MBL) hidden Born machine that utilizes both MBL dynamics and hidden units as learning resources. We show that the hidden units act as an effective thermal bath that enhances the trainability of the system, while the MBL dynamics stabilize the training trajectories. We numerically demonstrate that the MBL hidden Born machine is capable of learning a variety of tasks, including a toy version of MNIST handwritten digits, quantum data obtained from quantum many-body states, and non-local parity data. Our architecture and algorithm provide novel strategies of utilizing quantum many-body systems as learning resources, and reveal a powerful connection between disorder, interaction, and learning in quantum many-body systems.
Authors:Shuheng Liao, Tianju Xue, Jihoon Jeong, Samantha Webster, Kornel Ehmann, Jian Cao
Title: Hybrid thermal modeling of additive manufacturing processes using physics-informed neural networks for temperature prediction and parameter identification
Abstract:
Understanding the thermal behavior of additive manufacturing (AM) processes is crucial for enhancing the quality control and enabling customized process design. Most purely physics-based computational models suffer from intensive computational costs and the need of calibrating unknown parameters, thus not suitable for online control and iterative design application. Data-driven models taking advantage of the latest developed computational tools can serve as a more efficient surrogate, but they are usually trained over a large amount of simulation data and often fail to effectively use small but high-quality experimental data. In this work, we developed a hybrid physics-based data-driven thermal modeling approach of AM processes using physics-informed neural networks. Specifically, partially observed temperature data measured from an infrared camera is combined with the physics laws to predict full-field temperature history and to discover unknown material and process parameters. In the numerical and experimental examples, the effectiveness of adding auxiliary training data and using the pretrained model on training efficiency and prediction accuracy, as well as the ability to identify unknown parameters with partially observed data, are demonstrated. The results show that the hybrid thermal model can effectively identify unknown parameters and capture the full-field temperature accurately, and thus it has the potential to be used in iterative process design and real-time process control of AM.
Authors:Chen Liu, Abhishek Chakraborty, Nikhil Chawla, Neer Roggel
Title: Frequency Throttling Side-Channel Attack
Abstract:
Modern processors dynamically control their operating frequency to optimize resource utilization, maximize energy savings, and conform to system-defined constraints. If, during the execution of a software workload, the running average of any electrical or thermal parameter exceeds its corresponding predefined threshold value, the power management architecture will reactively adjust CPU frequency to ensure safe operating conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate how such power management-based frequency throttling activity forms a source of timing side-channel information leakage, which can be exploited by an attacker to infer secret data even from a constant-cycle victim workload. The proposed frequency throttling side-channel attack can be launched by both kernel-space and user-space attackers, thus compromising security guarantees provided by isolation boundaries. We validate our attack methodology across different systems and threat models by performing experiments on a constant-cycle implementation of AES algorithm based on AES-NI instructions. The results of our experimental evaluations demonstrate that the attacker can successfully recover all bytes of an AES key by measuring encryption execution times. Finally, we discuss different options to mitigate the threat posed by frequency throttling side-channel attacks, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.
Authors:Samy Lakhal, Alexandre Darmon, Michael Benzaquen
Title: A New Spin on Color Quantization
Abstract:
We address the problem of image color quantization using a Maximum Entropy based approach. Focusing on pixel mapping we argue that adding thermal noise to the system yields better visual impressions than that obtained from a simple energy minimization. To quantify this observation, we introduce the coarse-grained quantization error, and seek the optimal temperature which minimizes this new observable. By comparing images with different structural properties, we show that the optimal temperature is a good proxy for complexity at different scales. Noting that the convoluted error is a key observable, we directly minimize it using a Monte Carlo algorithm to generate a new series of quantized images. Adopting an original approach based on the informativity of finite size samples, we are able to determine the optimal convolution parameter leading to the best visuals. Finally, we test the robustness of our method against changes in image type, color palette and convolution kernel.
Authors:Paolo Andrea Erdman, Frank Noé
Title: Model-free optimization of power/efficiency tradeoffs in quantum thermal machines using reinforcement learning
Abstract:
A quantum thermal machine is an open quantum system that enables the conversion between heat and work at the micro or nano-scale. Optimally controlling such out-of-equilibrium systems is a crucial yet challenging task with applications to quantum technologies and devices. We introduce a general model-free framework based on Reinforcement Learning to identify out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic cycles that are Pareto optimal trade-offs between power and efficiency for quantum heat engines and refrigerators. The method does not require any knowledge of the quantum thermal machine, nor of the system model, nor of the quantum state. Instead, it only observes the heat fluxes, so it is both applicable to simulations and experimental devices. We test our method on a model of an experimentally realistic refrigerator based on a superconducting qubit, and on a heat engine based on a quantum harmonic oscillator. In both cases, we identify the Pareto-front representing optimal power-efficiency tradeoffs, and the corresponding cycles. Such solutions outperform previous proposals made in the literature, such as optimized Otto cycles, reducing quantum friction.
Authors:Siqi Gu, Zhichao Lian
Title: A Unified Multi-Task Learning Framework of Real-Time Drone Supervision for Crowd Counting
Abstract:
In this paper, a novel Unified Multi-Task Learning Framework of Real-Time Drone Supervision for Crowd Counting (MFCC) is proposed, which utilizes an image fusion network architecture to fuse images from the visible and thermal infrared image, and a crowd counting network architecture to estimate the density map. The purpose of our framework is to fuse two modalities, including visible and thermal infrared images captured by drones in real-time, that exploit the complementary information to accurately count the dense population and then automatically guide the flight of the drone to supervise the dense crowd. To this end, we propose the unified multi-task learning framework for crowd counting for the first time and re-design the unified training loss functions to align the image fusion network and crowd counting network. We also design the Assisted Learning Module (ALM) to fuse the density map feature to the image fusion encoder process for learning the counting features. To improve the accuracy, we propose the Extensive Context Extraction Module (ECEM) that is based on a dense connection architecture to encode multi-receptive-fields contextual information and apply the Multi-domain Attention Block (MAB) for concerning the head region in the drone view. Finally, we apply the prediction map to automatically guide the drones to supervise the dense crowd. The experimental results on the DroneRGBT dataset show that, compared with the existing methods, ours has comparable results on objective evaluations and an easier training process.
Authors:Aurelien Junior Noupelah, Antoine Tambue, Jean Louis Woukeng
Title: Strong convergence of an fractional exponential integrator scheme for the finite element discretization of time-fractional SPDE driven by standard and fractional Brownian motions
Abstract:
The aim of this work is to provide the first strong convergence result of numerical approximation of a general time-fractional second order stochastic partial differential equation involving a Caputo derivative in time of order $α\in(\frac 12; 1)$ and driven simultaneously by a multiplicative standard Brownian motion and additive fBm with Hurst parameter $H\in(\frac 12, 1)$, more realistic to model the random effects on transport of particles in medium with thermal memory. We prove the existence and uniqueness results and perform the spatial discretization using the finite element and the temporal discretization using a fractional exponential integrator scheme. We provide the temporal and spatial convergence proofs for our fully discrete scheme and the result shows that the convergence orders depend on the regularity of the initial data, the power of the fractional derivative, and the Hurst parameter $H$.
Authors:Sergey Bravyi, Anirban Chowdhury, David Gosset, Pawel Wocjan
Title: On the complexity of quantum partition functions
Abstract:
The partition function and free energy of a quantum many-body system determine its physical properties in thermal equilibrium. Here we study the computational complexity of approximating these quantities for $n$-qubit local Hamiltonians. First, we report a classical algorithm with $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ runtime which approximates the free energy of a given $2$-local Hamiltonian provided that it satisfies a certain denseness condition. Our algorithm combines the variational characterization of the free energy and convex relaxation methods. It contributes to a body of work on efficient approximation algorithms for dense instances of optimization problems which are hard in the general case, and can be viewed as simultaneously extending existing algorithms for (a) the ground energy of dense $2$-local Hamiltonians, and (b) the free energy of dense classical Ising models. Secondly, we establish polynomial-time equivalence between the problem of approximating the free energy of local Hamiltonians and three other natural quantum approximate counting problems, including the problem of approximating the number of witness states accepted by a QMA verifier. These results suggest that simulation of quantum many-body systems in thermal equilibrium may precisely capture the complexity of a broad family of computational problems that has yet to be defined or characterized in terms of known complexity classes. Finally, we summarize state-of-the-art classical and quantum algorithms for approximating the free energy and show how to improve their runtime and memory footprint.
Authors:Michael J. Roberts, Sisi Zhang, Eleanor Yuan, James Jones, Matthias Fripp
Title: Using Temperature Sensitivity to Estimate Shiftable Electricity Demand: Implications for power system investments and climate change
Abstract:
Growth of intermittent renewable energy and climate change make it increasingly difficult to manage electricity demand variability. Centralized storage can help but is costly. An alternative is to shift demand. Cooling and heating demands are substantial and can be economically shifted using thermal storage. To estimate what thermal storage, employed at scale, might do to reshape electricity loads, we pair fine-scale weather data with hourly electricity use to estimate the share of temperature-sensitive demand across 31 regions that span the continental United States. We then show how much variability can be reduced by shifting temperature-sensitive loads, with and without improved transmission between regions. We find that approximately three quarters of within-day, within-region demand variability can be eliminated by shifting just half of temperature-sensitive demand. The variability-reducing benefits of shifting temperature-sensitive demand complement those gained from improved interregional transmission, and greatly mitigate the challenge of serving higher peaks under climate change.
Authors:Roya Firoozi, Sara Sattarzadeh, Satadru Dey
Title: Cylindrical Battery Fault Detection under Extreme Fast Charging: A Physics-based Learning Approach
Abstract:
High power operation in extreme fast charging significantly increases the risk of internal faults in Electric Vehicle batteries which can lead to accelerated battery failure. Early detection of these faults is crucial for battery safety and widespread deployment of fast charging. In this setting, we propose a real-time {detection} framework for battery voltage and thermal faults. A major challenge in battery fault detection arises from the effect of uncertainties originating from sensor inaccuracies, nominal aging, or unmodelled dynamics. Inspired by physics-based learning, we explore a detection paradigm that combines physics-based models, model-based detection observers, and data-driven learning techniques to address this challenge. Specifically, we construct the {detection} observers based on an experimentally identified electrochemical-thermal model, and subsequently design the observer tuning parameters following Lyapunov's stability theory. Furthermore, we utilize Gaussian Process Regression technique to learn the model and measurement uncertainties which in turn aid the {detection} observers in distinguishing faults and uncertainties. Such uncertainty learning essentially helps suppressing their effects, potentially enabling early detection of faults. We perform simulation and experimental case studies on the proposed fault {detection} scheme verifying the potential of physics-based learning in early detection of battery faults.
Authors:Paul Honore Takam, Ralf Wunderlich, Olivier Menoukeu Pamen
Title: Short-Term Behavior of a Geothermal Energy Storage: Numerical Applications
Abstract:
This paper is devoted to numerical simulations of the short-term behavior of the spatial temperature distribution in a geothermal energy storage. Such simulations are needed for the optimal control and management of residential heating systems equipped with an underground thermal storage. We apply numerical methods derived in our companion paper [15] in which we study the governing initial boundary value problem for a linear heat equation with convection. Further, we perform extensive numerical experiments in order to investigate properties of the spatio-temporal temperature distribution and of its aggregated characteristics.
Authors:Paul Honore Takam, Ralf Wunderlich, Olivier Menoukeu Pamen
Title: Short-Term Behavior of a Geothermal Energy Storage: Modeling and Theoretical Results
Abstract:
This paper investigates numerical methods for simulations of the short-term behavior of a geothermal energy storage. Such simulations are needed for the optimal control and management of residential heating systems equipped with an underground thermal storage. There a given volume under or aside of a building is filled with soil and insulated to the surrounding ground. The thermal energy is stored by raising the temperature of the soil inside the storage. It is charged and discharged via pipe heat exchangers filled with a moving fluid. Simulations of geothermal energy storages aim to determine how much energy can be stored in or taken from the storage within a given short period of time. The latter depends on the dynamics of the spatial temperature distribution in the storage which is governed by a linear heat equation with convection and appropriate boundary and interface conditions. We consider semi- and full discretization of that PDE using finite difference schemes and study associated stability problems. Numerical results based on the derived methods are presented in the companion paper [17].
Authors:Anindya Bhaduri, Ashwini Gupta, Audrey Olivier, Lori Graham-Brady
Title: An efficient optimization based microstructure reconstruction approach with multiple loss functions
Abstract:
Stochastic microstructure reconstruction involves digital generation of microstructures that match key statistics and characteristics of a (set of) target microstructure(s). This process enables computational analyses on ensembles of microstructures without having to perform exhaustive and costly experimental characterizations. Statistical functions-based and deep learning-based methods are among the stochastic microstructure reconstruction approaches applicable to a wide range of material systems. In this paper, we integrate statistical descriptors as well as feature maps from a pre-trained deep neural network into an overall loss function for an optimization based reconstruction procedure. This helps us to achieve significant computational efficiency in reconstructing microstructures that retain the critically important physical properties of the target microstructure. A numerical example for the microstructure reconstruction of bi-phase random porous ceramic material demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed methodology. We further perform a detailed finite element analysis (FEA) of the reconstructed microstructures to calculate effective elastic modulus, effective thermal conductivity and effective hydraulic conductivity, in order to analyse the algorithm's capacity to capture the variability of these material properties with respect to those of the target microstructure. This method provides an economic, efficient and easy-to-use approach for reconstructing random multiphase materials in 2D which has the potential to be extended to 3D structures.
Authors:Dongqi Zheng, Wenjin Fu, Guangzong Chen
Title: A Real-Time On-Device Defect Detection Framework for Laser Power-Meter Sensors via Unsupervised Learning
Abstract:
We present an automated vision-based system for defect detection and classification of laser power meter sensor coatings. Our approach addresses the critical challenge of identifying coating defects such as thermal damage and scratches that can compromise laser energy measurement accuracy in medical and industrial applications. The system employs an unsupervised anomaly detection framework that trains exclusively on ``good'' sensor images to learn normal coating distribution patterns, enabling detection of both known and novel defect types without requiring extensive labeled defect datasets. Our methodology consists of three key components: (1) a robust preprocessing pipeline using Laplacian edge detection and K-means clustering to segment the area of interest, (2) synthetic data augmentation via StyleGAN2, and (3) a UFlow-based neural network architecture for multi-scale feature extraction and anomaly map generation. Experimental evaluation on 366 real sensor images demonstrates $93.8\%$ accuracy on defective samples and $89.3\%$ accuracy on good samples, with image-level AUROC of 0.957 and pixel-level AUROC of 0.961. The system provides potential annual cost savings through automated quality control and processing times of 0.5 seconds per image in on-device implementation.
Authors:Manuel Nkegoum, Minh-Tan Pham, Élisa Fromont, Bruno Avignon, Sébastien Lefèvre
Title: FSMODNet: A Closer Look at Few-Shot Detection in Multispectral Data
Abstract:
Few-shot multispectral object detection (FSMOD) addresses the challenge of detecting objects across visible and thermal modalities with minimal annotated data. In this paper, we explore this complex task and introduce a framework named "FSMODNet" that leverages cross-modality feature integration to improve detection performance even with limited labels. By effectively combining the unique strengths of visible and thermal imagery using deformable attention, the proposed method demonstrates robust adaptability in complex illumination and environmental conditions. Experimental results on two public datasets show effective object detection performance in challenging low-data regimes, outperforming several baselines we established from state-of-the-art models. All code, models, and experimental data splits can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Test-B48D.
Authors:Muhammad Kaif Laghari, Areeb Ahmed Shaikh, Faiz Khan, Aafia Gul Siddiqui
Title: Native Mixed Reality Compositing on Meta Quest 3: A Quantitative Feasibility Study of ARM-Based SoCs and Thermal Headroom
Abstract:
The adoption of current mixed reality (MR) content creation is primarily based on external PC-centric platforms and third-party cameras, limiting adoption for standalone virtual reality (VR) users. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of integrating an enhanced LIV SDK-like MR compositing pipeline into the Meta Quest 3 hardware, enabling native first-person physical perspective (FPP) MR content creation without external infrastructure. We conducted a simulation-based feasibility study using hardware specifications, developer documentation, and benchmarking with ARM-based SoCs, including Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and MediaTek Dimensity 9300. The approach suggested Camera Passthrough Enhancement using Meta's experimental Passthrough Camera API with on-device machine learning segmentation through Unity Sentis and FastSAM, and an optimized real-time compositing engine for standalone VR. Benchmarking results show that Quest 3's Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 can support lightweight native MR compositing at 720p30 resolution using 95\% resource utilization, leaving 5\% thermal headroom for sustained runtime. Comparison with next-generation SoCs such as Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 demonstrates 34\% headroom, enabling more robust MR experiences with 1.5--2x faster CPU/GPU performance and higher memory bandwidth. While current Quest 3 hardware supports basic native MR compositing, thermal limits restrict operation to 5--10 minutes before throttling. Experimental results confirm standalone MR content creation is possible on current hardware for short recordings, with new XR SoCs offering the headroom for extended sessions and improved quality. These findings lay groundwork for transitioning MR content creation from PC-based workflows to all-in-one VR devices, enhancing MR production for content creators and researchers.
Authors:Hemanth Puppala, Wayne Sarasua, Srinivas Biyaguda, Farhad Farzinpour, Mashrur Chowdhury
Title: Real-time Deer Detection and Warning in Connected Vehicles via Thermal Sensing and Deep Learning
Abstract:
Deer-vehicle collisions represent a critical safety challenge in the United States, causing nearly 2.1 million incidents annually and resulting in approximately 440 fatalities, 59,000 injuries, and 10 billion USD in economic damages. These collisions also contribute significantly to declining deer populations. This paper presents a real-time detection and driver warning system that integrates thermal imaging, deep learning, and vehicle-to-everything communication to help mitigate deer-vehicle collisions. Our system was trained and validated on a custom dataset of over 12,000 thermal deer images collected in Mars Hill, North Carolina. Experimental evaluation demonstrates exceptional performance with 98.84 percent mean average precision, 95.44 percent precision, and 95.96 percent recall. The system was field tested during a follow-up visit to Mars Hill and readily sensed deer providing the driver with advanced warning. Field testing validates robust operation across diverse weather conditions, with thermal imaging maintaining between 88 and 92 percent detection accuracy in challenging scenarios where conventional visible light based cameras achieve less than 60 percent effectiveness. When a high probability threshold is reached sensor data sharing messages are broadcast to surrounding vehicles and roadside units via cellular vehicle to everything (CV2X) communication devices. Overall, our system achieves end to end latency consistently under 100 milliseconds from detection to driver alert. This research establishes a viable technological pathway for reducing deer-vehicle collisions through thermal imaging and connected vehicles.
Authors:Austin Wilson, Sahar Kapasi, Zane Greene, Alexis E. Block
Title: Enhancing the NAO: Extending Capabilities of Legacy Robots for Long-Term Research
Abstract:
Many research groups face challenges when legacy (unsupported) robotic platforms lose manufacturer support and cannot accommodate modern sensing, speech, and interaction capabilities. We present the Enhanced NAO, a revitalized version of Aldebaran's NAO robot that uses upgraded microphones, RGB-D and thermal cameras, and additional compute resources in a fully self-contained package. This system combines cloud and local models for perception and dialogue, while preserving the NAO's expressive body and behaviors. In a pilot validation study, the Enhanced NAO delivered significantly higher conversational quality and stronger user preference compared to the NAO AI Edition, without increasing response latency. Key upgrades, such as beamforming microphones and low-latency audio processing, reduced artifacts like self-hearing and improved multi-party separation. Expanded visual and thermal sensing established a foundation for future interaction capabilities. Beyond the NAO, our framework provides a platform-agnostic strategy for extending the lifespan and research utility of legacy robots, ensuring they remain valuable tools for human-robot interaction.
Authors:C. Coelho, D. Fernández, M. Hohmann, L. Penter, S. Ihlenfeldt, O. Niggemann
Title: An Open Dataset for Temperature Modelling in Machine Tools
Abstract:
This data set descriptor introduces a structured, high-resolution dataset of transient thermal simulations for a vertical axis of a machine tool test rig. The data set includes temperature and heat flux values recorded at 29 probe locations at 1800 time steps, sampled every second over a 30-minute range, across 17 simulation runs derived from a fractional factorial design. First, a computer-aided design model was de-featured, segmented, and optimized, followed by finite element (FE) modelling. Detailed information on material, mesh, and boundary conditions is included. To support research and model development, the dataset provides summary statistics, thermal evolution plots, correlation matrix analyses, and a reproducible Jupyter notebook. The data set is designed to support machine learning and deep learning applications in thermal modelling for prediction, correction, and compensation of thermally induced deviations in mechanical systems, and aims to support researchers without FE expertise by providing ready-to-use simulation data.
Authors:Yukta Pareek, Abdul Malik Al Mardhouf Al Saadi, Amrita Basak, Satadru Dey
Title: Real-Time Thermal State Estimation and Forecasting in Laser Powder Bed Fusion
Abstract:
Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) is a widely adopted additive manufacturing process for fabricating complex metallic parts layer by layer. Effective thermal management is essential to ensure part quality and structural integrity, as thermal gradients and residual stresses can lead to defects such as warping and cracking. However, existing experimental or computational techniques lack the ability to forecast future temperature distributions in real time, an essential capability for proactive process control. This paper presents a real-time thermal state forecasting framework for L-PBF, based on a physics-informed reduced-order thermal model integrated with a Kalman filtering scheme. The proposed approach efficiently captures inter-layer heat transfer dynamics and enables accurate tracking and forecasting of spatial and temporal temperature evolution. Validation across multiple part geometries using measured data demonstrates that the method reliably estimates and forecasts peak temperatures and cooling trends. By enabling predictive thermal control, this framework offers a practical and computationally efficient solution for thermal management in L-PBF, paving the way toward closed-loop control in L-PBF.
Authors:Florian Wiesner, Matthias Wessling, Stephen Baek
Title: Towards a Physics Foundation Model
Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining. Access to a Physics Foundation Model (PFM) would be transformative -- democratizing access to high-fidelity simulations, accelerating scientific discovery, and eliminating the need for specialized solver development. Yet current physics-aware machine learning approaches remain fundamentally limited to single, narrow domains and require retraining for each new system. We present the General Physics Transformer (GPhyT), trained on 1.8 TB of diverse simulation data, that demonstrates foundation model capabilities are achievable for physics. Our key insight is that transformers can learn to infer governing dynamics from context, enabling a single model to simulate fluid-solid interactions, shock waves, thermal convection, and multi-phase dynamics without being told the underlying equations. GPhyT achieves three critical breakthroughs: (1) superior performance across multiple physics domains, outperforming specialized architectures by up to 29x, (2) zero-shot generalization to entirely unseen physical systems through in-context learning, and (3) stable long-term predictions through 50-timestep rollouts. By establishing that a single model can learn generalizable physical principles from data alone, this work opens the path toward a universal PFM that could transform computational science and engineering.
Authors:Xuyuan Kang, Xiao Wang, Jingjing An, Da Yan
Title: A novel approach of day-ahead cooling load prediction and optimal control for ice-based thermal energy storage (TES) system in commercial buildings
Abstract:
Thermal energy storage (TES) is an effective method for load shifting and demand response in buildings. Optimal TES control and management are essential to improve the performance of the cooling system. Most existing TES systems operate on a fixed schedule, which cannot take full advantage of its load shifting capability, and requires extensive investigation and optimization. This study proposed a novel integrated load prediction and optimized control approach for ice-based TES in commercial buildings. A cooling load prediction model was developed and a mid-day modification mechanism was introduced into the prediction model to improve the accuracy. Based on the predictions, a rule-based control strategy was proposed according to the time-of-use tariff; the mid-day control adjustment mechanism was introduced in accordance with the mid-day prediction modifications. The proposed approach was applied in the ice-based TES system of a commercial complex in Beijing, and achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 389 kW and coefficient of variance of MAE of 12.5%. The integrated prediction-based control strategy achieved an energy cost saving rate of 9.9%. The proposed model was deployed in the realistic building automation system of the case building and significantly improved the efficiency and automation of the cooling system.
Authors:Trung Kien La, Eric Guiffo Kaigom
Title: Deep Learning for Model-Free Prediction of Thermal States of Robot Joint Motors
Abstract:
In this work, deep neural networks made up of multiple hidden Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Feedforward layers are trained to predict the thermal behavior of the joint motors of robot manipulators. A model-free and scalable approach is adopted. It accommodates complexity and uncertainty challenges stemming from the derivation, identification, and validation of a large number of parameters of an approximation model that is hardly available. To this end, sensed joint torques are collected and processed to foresee the thermal behavior of joint motors. Promising prediction results of the machine learning based capture of the temperature dynamics of joint motors of a redundant robot with seven joints are presented.
Authors:Lucas Gallup, Kevin N. Long, Devin J. Roach, William D. Reinholtz, Adam Cook, Craig M. Hamel
Title: A Meshing Framework for Digital Twins for Extrusion based Additive Manufacturing
Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (AM) allows for manufacturing of complex three-dimensional geometries not typically realizable with standard subtractive manufacturing practices. The internal microstructure of a 3D printed component can have a significant impact on its mechanical, vibrational, and shock properties and allows for a richer design space when this is controllable. Due to the complex interactions of the internal geometry of an extrusion-based AM component, it is common practice to assume a homogeneous behavior or to perform characterization testing on the specific toolpath configurations. To avoid unnecessary testing or material waste, it is necessary to develop an accurate and consistent numerical simulation framework with relevant boundary value problems that can handle the complicated geometry of internal material microstructure present in AM components. Herein, a framework is proposed to directly create computational meshes suitable for finite element analysis (FEA) of the fine-scale features generated from extrusion-based AM tool paths to maintain a strong process-structure-property-performance linkage. This mesh can be manually or automatically analyzed using standard FEA simulations such as quasi-static preloading, modal analysis, or thermal analysis. The framework allows an in-silico assessment of a target AM geometry where fine-scale features may greatly impact quantities of design interest such as in soft elastomeric lattices where toolpath infill can greatly influence the self contact of a structure in compression, which we will use as a motivating exemplar. This approach greatly reduces the waste of both time and resources consumed through traditional build and test design cycles for non-intuitive design spaces. It also further allows for the exploration of toolpath infill to optimize component properties beyond simple linear properties such as density and stiffness.
Authors:Xicheng Wang, Yun. Feng, Dmitry Grishchenko, Pavel Kudinov, Ruifeng Tian, Sichao Tan
Title: Data-driven optimization of sparse sensor placement in thermal hydraulic experiments
Abstract:
Thermal-Hydraulic (TH) experiments provide valuable insight into the physics of heat and mass transfer and qualified data for code development, calibration and validation. However, measurements are typically collected from sparsely distributed sensors, offering limited coverage over the domain of interest and phenomena of interest. Determination of the spatial configuration of these sensors is crucial and challenging during the pre-test design stage. This paper develops a data-driven framework for optimizing sensor placement in TH experiments, including (i) a sensitivity analysis to construct datasets, (ii) Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) for dimensionality reduction, and (iii) QR factorization with column pivoting to determine optimal sensor configuration under spatial constraints. The framework is demonstrated on a test conducted in the TALL-3D Lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) loop. In this case, the utilization of optical techniques, such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), are impractical. Thereby the quantification of momentum and energy transport relies heavily on readings from Thermocouples (TCs). The test section was previously instrumented with many TCs determined through a manual process combining simulation results with expert judgement. The proposed framework provides a systematic and automated approach for sensor placement. The resulting TCs exhibit high sensitivity to the variation of uncertain input parameters and enable accurate full field reconstruction while maintaining robustness against measurement noise.
Authors:Amira Abbas, Nunzia Cerrato, Francisco Escudero Gutiérrez, Dmitry Grinko, Francesco Anna Mele, Pulkit Sinha
Title: Nearly optimal algorithms to learn sparse quantum Hamiltonians in physically motivated distances
Abstract:
We study the problem of learning Hamiltonians $H$ that are $s$-sparse in the Pauli basis, given access to their time evolution. Although Hamiltonian learning has been extensively investigated, two issues recur in much of the existing literature: the absence of matching lower bounds and the use of mathematically convenient but physically opaque error measures. We address both challenges by introducing two physically motivated distances between Hamiltonians and designing a nearly optimal algorithm with respect to one of these metrics. The first, time-constrained distance, quantifies distinguishability through dynamical evolution up to a bounded time. The second, temperature-constrained distance, captures distinguishability through thermal states at bounded inverse temperatures. We show that $s$-sparse Hamiltonians with bounded operator norm can be learned in both distances with $O(s \log(1/ε))$ experiments and $O(s^2/ε)$ evolution time. For the time-constrained distance, we further establish lower bounds of $Ω((s/n)\log(1/ε) + s)$ experiments and $Ω(\sqrt{s}/ε)$ evolution time, demonstrating near-optimality in the number of experiments. As an intermediate result, we obtain an algorithm that learns every Pauli coefficient of $s$-sparse Hamiltonians up to error $ε$ in $O(s\log(1/ε))$ experiments and $O(s/ε)$ evolution time, improving upon several recent results. The source of this improvement is a new isolation technique, inspired by the Valiant-Vazirani theorem (STOC'85), which shows that NP is as easy as detecting unique solutions. This isolation technique allows us to query the time evolution of a single Pauli coefficient of a sparse Hamiltonian--even when the Pauli support of the Hamiltonian is unknown--ultimately enabling us to recover the Pauli support itself.
Authors:Ueli Schilt, Somesh Vijayananda, Sarah Schneeberger, Manuel Meyer, Santhosh Iyyakkunnel, Pascal Marc Vecsei, Philipp Schuetz
Title: How can a geothermal storage system be optimally integrated into a local district? A case study
Abstract:
Achieving net-zero targets requires the phase-out of fossil-based heating. A major challenge is the seasonal mismatch between renewable heat supply and demand. District heating networks often dispose of excess heat in summer and rely on fossil backups in winter. Large-scale thermal energy storage offers a solution by storing surplus summer heat for use during winter, thus reducing the need for fossil fuels. This study investigates the feasibility of a large-scale thermal storage system at a power production site that supplies a large district heating network in the city of Bern, Switzerland. Specifically, the study examines the potential of a geothermal storage system to offset fossil fuel heat generation in winter by utilising heat stored during the summer months. Using a Python-based multi-energy system model, we simulate the optimal operation of the geothermal storage system with respect to cost and emissions, considering both supply and demand on an hourly basis over one year. Multi-objective optimisation is applied to generate a Pareto-optimal front. The results show that the geothermal storage system eliminates the requirement of 8 GWh of gas-powered heat supply and increases the waste heat utilisation by 20%, therefore lowering emissions. This effect is further increased when combined with an expansion of the district heating network, as individual, emission-heavy heaters are replaced by low-emission heat from the district heating network. The findings presented in this study can prove useful when evaluating similar systems across Switzerland.
Authors:Rileigh Bandy, Rebecca Morrison, Erin Mussoni, Teresa Portone
Title: Hybrid Physics-Data Enrichments to Represent Uncertainty in Reduced Gas-Surface Chemistry Models for Hypersonic Flight
Abstract:
During hypersonic flight, air reacts with a planetary re-entry vehicle's thermal protection system (TPS), creating reaction products that deplete the TPS. Reliable assessment of TPS performance depends on accurate ablation models. New finite-rate gas-surface chemistry models are advancing state-of-the-art in TPS ablation modeling, but model reductions that omit chemical species and reactions may be necessary in some cases for computational tractability. This work develops hybrid physics-based and data-driven enrichments to improve the predictive capability and quantify uncertainties in such low-fidelity models while maintaining computational tractability. We focus on discrepancies in predicted carbon monoxide production that arise because the low-fidelity model tracks only a subset of reactions. To address this, we embed targeted enrichments into the low-fidelity model to capture the influence of omitted reactions. Numerical results show that the hybrid enrichments significantly improve predictive accuracy while requiring the addition of only three reactions.
Authors:Mingyuan Yang, Qian Yu, Chao Yang
Title: PeTTO: Leveraging GPUs to Accelerate Topology Optimization with the Pseudo-Transient Methods
Abstract:
We present a Pseudo-Transient Topology Optimization (PeTTO) approach that can leverage graphics processing units (GPUs) to efficiently solve single-material and multi-material topology optimization problems. By integrating PeTTO with phase field methods, the partial differential equations (PDEs) constrained optimization problem in topology optimization is transformed into a set of time dependent PDEs, which can be analyzed using the knowledge of transient physics. The sensitivities with respect to the design variable are calculated with the automatic differentiation which help avoid tedious and error-prone manual derivations. The overall system of equations is efficiently solved using a hybrid of the pseudo-transient method and the accelerated pseudo-transient method, balancing the convergence rate and numerical stability. A variety of numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PeTTO approach. These examples cover different physics scenarios including mechanical and thermal problems, as well as single-material and multi-materials cases in both 2D and 3D. The numerical results show a 40- to 50-fold speedup when running the same PeTTO code on a single GPU compared to desktop CPUs. This work helps bridge the gap between high-performance computing and topology optimization, potentially enabling faster and better designs for real-world problems.
Authors:Henri ter Hofte, Nick van Ravenzwaaij
Title: NeedForHeat DataGear: An Open Monitoring System to Accelerate the Residential Heating Transition
Abstract:
We introduce NeedForHeat DataGear: an open hardware and open software data collection system designed to accelerate the residential heating transition. NeedForHeat DataGear collects time series monitoring data in homes that have not yet undergone a heating transition, enabling assessment of real-life thermal characteristics, heating system efficiency, and residents' comfort needs. This paper outlines its architecture and functionalities, emphasizing its modularity, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness for field data acquisition. Unlike conventional domestic monitoring solutions focused on home automation, direct feedback, or post-installation heat pump monitoring, it prioritizes time series data we deemed essential to evaluate the current situation in existing homes before the heating transition. Designed for seamless deployment across diverse households, NeedForHeat DataGear combines openness, security, and privacy with a low-cost, user-friendly approach, making it a valuable tool for researchers, energy professionals, and energy coaches.
Authors:Mohammad Ahangarkiasari, Hassan Pouraria
Title: Multi-Stage Graph Neural Networks for Data-Driven Prediction of Natural Convection in Enclosed Cavities
Abstract:
Buoyancy-driven heat transfer in closed cavities serves as a canonical testbed for thermal design High-fidelity CFD modelling yields accurate thermal field solutions, yet its reliance on expert-crafted physics models, fine meshes, and intensive computation limits rapid iteration. Recent developments in data-driven modeling, especially Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), offer new alternatives for learning thermal-fluid behavior directly from simulation data, particularly on irregular mesh structures. However, conventional GNNs often struggle to capture long-range dependencies in high-resolution graph structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multi-stage GNN architecture that leverages hierarchical pooling and unpooling operations to progressively model global-to-local interactions across multiple spatial scales. We evaluate the proposed model on our newly developed CFD dataset simulating natural convection within a rectangular cavities with varying aspect ratios where the bottom wall is isothermal hot, the top wall is isothermal cold, and the two vertical walls are adiabatic. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves higher predictive accuracy, improved training efficiency, and reduced long-term error accumulation compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNN baselines. These findings underscore the potential of the proposed multi-stage GNN approach for modeling complex heat transfer in mesh-based fluid dynamics simulations.
Authors:Caleb Gates, Patrick Moorhead, Jayden Ferguson, Omar Darwish, Conner Stallman, Pablo Rivas, Paapa Quansah
Title: Near Real-Time Dust Aerosol Detection with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks on MODIS Data
Abstract:
Dust storms harm health and reduce visibility; quick detection from satellites is needed. We present a near real-time system that flags dust at the pixel level using multi-band images from NASA's Terra and Aqua (MODIS). A 3D convolutional network learns patterns across all 36 bands, plus split thermal bands, to separate dust from clouds and surface features. Simple normalization and local filling handle missing data. An improved version raises training speed by 21x and supports fast processing of full scenes. On 17 independent MODIS scenes, the model reaches about 0.92 accuracy with a mean squared error of 0.014. Maps show strong agreement in plume cores, with most misses along edges. These results show that joint band-and-space learning can provide timely dust alerts at global scale; using wider input windows or attention-based models may further sharpen edges.
Authors:Matthieu Mesnage, Sophie Villenave, Bertrand Massot, Matthieu Blanchard, Pierre Raimbaud, Guillaume Lavoué, Claudine Gehin
Title: StimulHeat: a Low-Energy Wearable Thermal Feedback Device Using Peltier Elements with Heat Flow Controlled Loop for Hand Interactions in Virtual Reality
Abstract:
Nowadays, the majority of wearable thermal feedback systems designed for use in virtual reality applications are not compatible or not integrated to standard controllers and are based on temperature control. The objectives of the present work is to enable integration with existing controllers, in this case Valve Index controllers, and to propose an alternative approach to managing thermal stimulation with Peltier modules by controlling heat flow instead of temperature. We introduce StimulHeat as a wireless, low power thermal feedback system, based on the continuous relationship between heat and current injection in thermoelectric device (TED). First, we designed an optimized TED driver capable of injecting a continuous, bidirectional current into the TED, thereby driving it as a heater or cooler. Subsequently, this driver was implemented in an electronic board to include temperature and heat flow control loops, as well as Bluetooth Low Energy interface for remote control. A mechanical integration was conducted, in the form of a controller extension which is non-intrusive and can be clipped to Valve Index controllers to enclose the TED, temperature sensors and electronics. Finally, we present a user study validating StimulHeat for use in Virtual Reality, utilizing a Unity-built virtual environment with our open-source package.
Authors:Hugo Parada, Claudia Negulescu
Title: Spectral scheme for an energetic Fokker-Planck equation with $κ$-distribution steady states
Abstract:
The concern of the present paper is the design of efficient numerical schemes for a specific Fokker-Planck equation describing the dynamics of energetic particles occurring in thermonuclear fusion plasmas (runaway electrons for example). In the long-time limit, the velocity distribution function of these particles tends towards a thermal non-equilibrium $κ$-distribution function which is a steady-state of the considered Fokker-Planck equation. These $κ$-distribution functions have the particularity of being only algebraically decaying for large velocities, thus describing very well suprathermal particle populations. Our aim is to present two efficient spectral methods for the simulation of such energetic particle dynamics. The first method will be based on rational Chebyshev basis functions, rather than on Hermite basis sets, which are the basis of choice for Maxwellian steady states. The second method is based on a different polynomial basis set, constructed via the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation process. These two new spectral schemes, specifically adapted to the here considered physical context, shall permit to cope with the long-time asymptotics without significant numerical costs.
Authors:Yannick Weiss, Marlene Eder, Oguzhan Cesur, Steeven Villa
Title: Quantifying the Effect of Thermal Illusions in Virtual Reality
Abstract:
Thermal sensations are central to how we experience the world, yet most virtual and extended reality systems fail to simulate them effectively. While hardware-based thermal displays can provide accurate temperature changes, they are often bulky, power-intensive, and restrict user mobility. Consequently, recent works have explored thermal illusions, perceptual effects that rely on cross-modal interactions, to achieve thermal experiences without physical heating or cooling. While thermal illusions have been shown to consistently alter subjective ratings, the actual extent of their effect on the perceived temperature of interacted objects remains unexplored. To address this, we contribute the findings of two user studies following psychophysical procedures. We first ordered and scaled the effects of a variety of visual and auditory cues (N=20) and subsequently quantified their isolated and combined efficacy in offsetting physical temperature changes (N=24). We found that thermal illusions elicited robust changes in subjective judgments, and auditory cues showed potential as an alternative or complementary approach to established visual techniques. However, the actual effects induced by thermal illusions were relatively small (+-0.5°C) and did not consistently align with abstract ratings, suggesting a need to reconsider how future thermal illusions or experiences are designed and evaluated.
Authors:Sitong Tao, Fei Han
Title: A new definition of peridynamic damage for thermo-mechanical fracture modeling
Abstract:
A thermo-mechanical fracture modeling is proposed to address thermal failure issues, where the temperature field is calculated by a heat conduction model based on classical continuum mechanics (CCM), while the deformation field with discontinuities is calculated by the peridynamic (PD) model. The model is calculated by a CCM/PD alternating solution based on the finite element discretization, which ensures the calculation accuracy and facilitates engineering applications. The original PD model defines damage solely based on the number of broken bonds in the vicinity of the material point, neglecting the distribution of these bonds. To address this limitation, a new definition of the PD damage accounting for both the number of broken bonds and their specific distribution is proposed. As a result, damage in various directions can be captured, enabling more realistic thermal fracture simulations based on a unified mesh discretization. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated by comparing numerical examples with analytical solutions. Moreover, simulation results of quasi-static and dynamic crack propagation demonstrate the model's ability to aid in understanding the initiation and propagation mechanisms of complex thermal fractures.
Authors:Mirkan Emir Sancak, Unal Sen, Ulker Diler Keris-Sen
Title: A Novel Method to Determine Total Oxidant Concentration Produced by Non-Thermal Plasma Based on Image Processing and Machine Learning
Abstract:
Accurate determination of total oxidant concentration ([Ox]_{tot}) in non-thermal plasma (NTP)-treated aqueous systems remains a critical challenge due to the transient nature of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species and the subjectivity of conventional titration methods used for [Ox]_{tot} determination. This study introduces a novel, color-based computer analysis (CBCA) method that integrates advanced image processing with machine learning (ML) to quantify colorimetric shifts in potassium iodide (KI) solutions during oxidation. First, a custom-built visual data acquisition system captured high-resolution video of the color transitions in a KI solution during oxidation with an NTP system. The change in [Ox]_{tot} during the experiments was monitored with a standard titrimetric method. Second, the captured frames were processed using a robust image processing pipeline to extract RGB, HSV, and Lab color features. The extracted features were statistically evaluated, and the results revealed strong linear correlations with the measured [Ox]_{tot} values, particularly in the saturation (HSV), a and b (Lab), and blue (RGB) channels. Subsequently, the [Ox]_{tot} measurements and the extracted color features were used to train and validate five ML models. Among them, linear regression and gradient boosting models achieved the highest predictive accuracy (R^2 > 0.990). It was also found that reducing the feature set from nine to four resulted in comparable performance with improved prediction efficiency, especially for gradient boosting. Finally, comparison of the model predictions with real titration measurements revealed that the CBCA system successfully predicts the [Ox]_{tot} in KI solution with high accuracy (R^2 > 0.998) even with a reduced number of features.
Authors:Nicholas J. Sullivan, Julio J. Valdés, Kirk H. Bevan, Peter Grutter
Title: afspm: A Framework for Manufacturer-Agnostic Automation in Scanning Probe Microscopy
Abstract:
Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is a valuable technique by which one can investigate the physical characteristics of the surfaces of materials. However, its widespread use is hampered by the time-consuming nature of running an experiment and the significant domain knowledge required. Recent studies have shown the value of multiple forms of automation in improving this, but their use is limited due to the difficulty of integrating them with SPMs other than the one it was developed for. With this in mind, we propose an automation framework for SPMs aimed toward facilitating code sharing and reusability of developed components. Our framework defines generic control and data structure schemas which are passed among independent software processes (components), with the final SPM commands sent after passing through an SPM-specific translator. This approach permits multi-language support and allows for experimental components to be decoupled among multiple computers. Our mediation logic limits access to the SPM to a single component at a time, with a simple override mechanism in order to correct detected experiment problems. To validate our proposal, we integrated and tested it with two SPMs from separate manufacturers, and ran an experiment involving a thermal drift correction component.
Authors:Adam Suski, Elina Spyrou, Richard Green
Title: Missing Money and Market-Based Adequacy in Deeply Decarbonized Power Systems with Long-Duration Energy Storage
Abstract:
The ability of deeply decarbonised power systems to ensure adequacy may increasingly depend on long-duration energy storage (LDES). A central challenge is whether capacity markets (CMs), originally designed around thermal generation, can provide efficient investment signals when storage becomes a central participant. While recent studies have advanced methods for accrediting variable renewables and short-duration storage, the effectiveness of these methods in CMs with substantial LDES penetration remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we extend a two-stage stochastic equilibrium investment model by endogenising continuous, duration-based capacity accreditation for storage and apply it to a Great Britain-based case using 40 years of weather-driven demand and renewable profiles under varying emission limits. Results show that well-calibrated CMs can sustain near-efficient investment and mitigate revenue volatility, but their effectiveness diminishes in deeply decarbonized systems, underscoring both their potential and the regulatory challenges of supporting large-scale LDES.
Authors:He Li, Xinyu Liu, Weihang Kong, Xingchen Zhang
Title: FusionCounting: Robust visible-infrared image fusion guided by crowd counting via multi-task learning
Abstract:
Visible and infrared image fusion (VIF) is an important multimedia task in computer vision. Most VIF methods focus primarily on optimizing fused image quality. Recent studies have begun incorporating downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation and object detection, to provide semantic guidance for VIF. However, semantic segmentation requires extensive annotations, while object detection, despite reducing annotation efforts compared with segmentation, faces challenges in highly crowded scenes due to overlapping bounding boxes and occlusion. Moreover, although RGB-T crowd counting has gained increasing attention in recent years, no studies have integrated VIF and crowd counting into a unified framework. To address these challenges, we propose FusionCounting, a novel multi-task learning framework that integrates crowd counting into the VIF process. Crowd counting provides a direct quantitative measure of population density with minimal annotation, making it particularly suitable for dense scenes. Our framework leverages both input images and population density information in a mutually beneficial multi-task design. To accelerate convergence and balance tasks contributions, we introduce a dynamic loss function weighting strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate adversarial training to enhance the robustness of both VIF and crowd counting, improving the model's stability and resilience to adversarial attacks. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that FusionCounting not only enhances image fusion quality but also achieves superior crowd counting performance.
Authors:Zainab Akhtar, Eunice Jengo, Björn Haßler
Title: Generalizable AI Model for Indoor Temperature Forecasting Across Sub-Saharan Africa
Abstract:
This study presents a lightweight, domain-informed AI model for predicting indoor temperatures in naturally ventilated schools and homes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The model extends the Temp-AI-Estimator framework, trained on Tanzanian school data, and evaluated on Nigerian schools and Gambian homes. It achieves robust cross-country performance using only minimal accessible inputs, with mean absolute errors of 1.45°C for Nigerian schools and 0.65°C for Gambian homes. These findings highlight AI's potential for thermal comfort management in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Yannick Hollenweger, Dennis M. Kochman, Burigede Liu
Title: Temperature-Aware Recurrent Neural Operator for Temperature-Dependent Anisotropic Plasticity in HCP Materials
Abstract:
Neural network surrogate models for constitutive laws in computational mechanics have been in use for some time. In plasticity, these models often rely on gated recurrent units (GRUs) or long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, which excel at capturing path-dependent phenomena. However, they suffer from long training times and time-resolution-dependent predictions that extrapolate poorly. Moreover, most existing surrogates for macro- or mesoscopic plasticity handle only relatively simple material behavior. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Temperature-Aware Recurrent Neural Operator (TRNO), a time-resolution-independent neural architecture. We apply the TRNO to model the temperature-dependent plastic response of polycrystalline magnesium, which shows strong plastic anisotropy and thermal sensitivity. The TRNO achieves high predictive accuracy and generalizes effectively across diverse loading cases, temperatures, and time resolutions. It also outperforms conventional GRU and LSTM models in training efficiency and predictive performance. Finally, we demonstrate multiscale simulations with the TRNO, yielding a speedup of at least three orders of magnitude over traditional constitutive models.
Authors:Sojun Ono, Kazuyuki Sugimura
Title: Neural-Network Chemical Emulator for First-Star Formation: Robust Iterative Predictions over a Wide Density Range
Abstract:
We present a neural-network emulator for the thermal and chemical evolution in Population~III star formation. The emulator accurately reproduces the thermochemical evolution over a wide density range spanning 21 orders of magnitude (10$^{-3}$-10$^{18}$ cm$^{-3}$), tracking six primordial species: H, H$_2$, e$^{-}$, H$^{+}$, H$^{-}$, and H$_2^{+}$. To handle the broad dynamic range, we partition the density range into five subregions and train separate deep operator networks (DeepONets) in each region. When applied to randomly sampled thermochemical states, the emulator achieves relative errors below 10% in over 90% of cases for both temperature and chemical abundances (except for the rare species H$_2^{+}$). The emulator is roughly ten times faster on a CPU and more than 1000 times faster for batched predictions on a GPU, compared with conventional numerical integration. Furthermore, to ensure robust predictions under many iterations, we introduce a novel timescale-based update method, where a short-timestep update of each variable is computed by rescaling the predicted change over a longer timestep equal to its characteristic variation timescale. In one-zone collapse calculations, the results from the timescale-based method agree well with traditional numerical integration even with many iterations at a timestep as short as 10$^{-4}$ of the free-fall time. This proof-of-concept study suggests the potential for neural network-based chemical emulators to accelerate hydrodynamic simulations of star formation.
Authors:Hao Chen, Fang Qiu, Li An, Douglas Stow, Eve Bohnett, Haitao Lyu, Shuang Tian
Title: Multi-perspective monitoring of wildlife and human activities from camera traps and drones with deep learning models
Abstract:
Wildlife and human activities are key components of landscape systems. Understanding their spatial distribution is essential for evaluating human wildlife interactions and informing effective conservation planning. Multiperspective monitoring of wildlife and human activities by combining camera traps and drone imagery. Capturing the spatial patterns of their distributions, which allows the identification of the overlap of their activity zones and the assessment of the degree of human wildlife conflict. The study was conducted in Chitwan National Park (CNP), Nepal, and adjacent regions. Images collected by visible and nearinfrared camera traps and thermal infrared drones from February to July 2022 were processed to create training and testing datasets, which were used to build deep learning models to automatic identify wildlife and human activities. Drone collected thermal imagery was used for detecting targets to provide a multiple monitoring perspective. Spatial pattern analysis was performed to identify animal and resident activity hotspots and delineation potential human wildlife conflict zones. Among the deep learning models tested, YOLOv11s achieved the highest performance with a precision of 96.2%, recall of 92.3%, mAP50 of 96.7%, and mAP50 of 81.3%, making it the most effective for detecting objects in camera trap imagery. Drone based thermal imagery, analyzed with an enhanced Faster RCNN model, added a complementary aerial viewpoint for camera trap detections. Spatial pattern analysis identified clear hotspots for both wildlife and human activities and their overlapping patterns within certain areas in the CNP and buffer zones indicating potential conflict. This study reveals human wildlife conflicts within the conserved landscape. Integrating multiperspective monitoring with automated object detection enhances wildlife surveillance and landscape management.
Authors:Yongxiang Liu, Yuchun Ma, Eren Kurshan, Glenn Reinman, Jason Cong
Title: Fine Grain 3D Integration for Microarchitecture Design Through Cube Packing Exploration
Abstract:
Most previous 3D IC research focused on stacking traditional 2D silicon layers, so the interconnect reduction is limited to inter-block delays. In this paper, we propose techniques that enable efficient exploration of the 3D design space where each logical block can span more than one silicon layers. Although further power and performance improvement is achievable through fine grain 3D integration, the necessary modeling and tool infrastructure has been mostly missing. We develop a cube packing engine which can simultaneously optimize physical and architectural design for effective utilization of 3D in terms of performance, area and temperature. Our experimental results using a design driver show 36% performance improvement (in BIPS) over 2D and 14% over 3D with single layer blocks. Additionally multi-layer blocks can provide up to 30% reduction in power dissipation compared to the single-layer alternatives. Peak temperature of the design is kept within limits as a result of thermal-aware floorplanning and thermal via insertion techniques.
Authors:Mathis Rezzouk, Fabrice Gagnon, Alyson Champagne, Mathieu Roy, Philippe Albouy, Michel-Pierre Coll, Cem Subakan
Title: Towards Generalizable Learning Models for EEG-Based Identification of Pain Perception
Abstract:
EEG-based analysis of pain perception, enhanced by machine learning, reveals how the brain encodes pain by identifying neural patterns evoked by noxious stimulation. However, a major challenge that remains is the generalization of machine learning models across individuals, given the high cross-participant variability inherent to EEG signals and the limited focus on direct pain perception identification in current research. In this study, we systematically evaluate the performance of cross-participant generalization of a wide range of models, including traditional classifiers and deep neural classifiers for identifying the sensory modality of thermal pain and aversive auditory stimulation from EEG recordings. Using a novel dataset of EEG recordings from 108 participants, we benchmark model performance under both within- and cross-participant evaluation settings. Our findings show that traditional models suffered the largest drop from within- to cross-participant performance, while deep learning models proved more resilient, underscoring their potential for subject-invariant EEG decoding. Even though performance variability remained high, the strong results of the graph-based model highlight its potential to capture subject-invariant structure in EEG signals. On the other hand, we also share the preprocessed dataset used in this study, providing a standardized benchmark for evaluating future algorithms under the same generalization constraints.
Authors:Sabin Roman, Gregor Skok, Ljupco Todorovski, Saso Dzeroski
Title: Approximating the universal thermal climate index using sparse regression with orthogonal polynomials
Abstract:
This article explores novel data-driven modeling approaches for analyzing and approximating the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), a physiologically-based metric integrating multiple atmospheric variables to assess thermal comfort. Given the nonlinear, multivariate structure of UTCI, we investigate symbolic and sparse regression techniques as tools for interpretable and efficient function approximation. In particular, we highlight the benefits of using orthogonal polynomial bases-such as Legendre polynomials-in sparse regression frameworks, demonstrating their advantages in stability, convergence, and hierarchical interpretability compared to standard polynomial expansions. We demonstrate that our models achieve significantly lower root-mean squared losses than the widely used sixth-degree polynomial benchmark-while using the same or fewer parameters. By leveraging Legendre polynomial bases, we construct models that efficiently populate a Pareto front of accuracy versus complexity and exhibit stable, hierarchical coefficient structures across varying model capacities. Training on just 20% of the data, our models generalize robustly to the remaining 80%, with consistent performance under bootstrapping. The decomposition effectively approximates the UTCI as a Fourier-like expansion in an orthogonal basis, yielding results near the theoretical optimum in the L2 (least squares) sense. We also connect these findings to the broader context of equation discovery in environmental modeling, referencing probabilistic grammar-based methods that enforce domain consistency and compactness in symbolic expressions. Taken together, these results illustrate how combining sparsity, orthogonality, and symbolic structure enables robust, interpretable modeling of complex environmental indices like UTCI - and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approximation in both accuracy and efficiency.
Authors:Johannes F. Hevler, Shivam Verma, Mirat Soijtra, Carolyn R. Bertozzi
Title: Thermal Tracks: A Gaussian process-based framework for universal melting curve analysis enabling unconstrained hit identification in thermal proteome profiling experiments
Abstract:
Thermal Tracks is a Python-based statistical framework for analyzing protein thermal stability data that overcomes key limitations of existing thermal proteome profiling (TPP) work-flows. Unlike standard approaches that assume sigmoidal melting curves and are constrained by empirical null distributions (limiting significant hits to approximately 5 % of data), Thermal Tracks uses Gaussian Process (GP) models with squared-exponential kernels to flexibly model any melting curve shape while generating unbiased null distributions through kernel priors. This framework is particularly valuable for analyzing proteome-wide perturbations that significantly alter protein thermal stability, such as pathway inhibitions, genetic modifications, or environmental stresses, where conventional TPP methods may miss biologically relevant changes due to their statistical constraints. Furthermore, Thermal Tracks excels at analyzing proteins with un-conventional melting profiles, including phase-separating proteins and membrane proteins, which often exhibit complex, non-sigmoidal thermal stability behaviors. Thermal Tracks is freely available from GitHub and is implemented in Python, providing an accessible and flexible tool for proteome-wide thermal profiling studies.
Authors:Huan Zhang, Hui Zhang, Yan Wang, Yingxiang Xu
Title: Heterogeneous optimized Schwarz Methods for heat conduction in composites with thermal contact resistance
Abstract:
Heat transfer in composites is critical in engineering, where imperfect layer contact causes thermal contact resistance (TCR), leading to interfacial temperature discontinuity. We propose solving this numerically using the optimized Schwarz method (OSM), which decouples the heterogeneous problem into homogeneous subproblems. This avoids ill-conditioned systems from monolithic solving due to high contrast and interface jumps. Both energy estimate and Fourier analysis are used to prove the convergence of this algorithm when the standard Robin condition is applied to transmit information between subdomains. To achieve fast convergence, instead of the standard Robin, the scaled Robin transmission condition is proposed, and the involved free parameter is rigorously optimized. The results reveal several new findings due to the presence of TCR: first, the larger the TCR, the faster the OSM converges; second, mesh-independent convergence is achieved in the asymptotic sense, in contrast to the mesh-dependent results without TCR; and last, the heterogeneity contrast benefits the convergence, with a larger contrast leading to faster convergence. Interestingly, different from the case without TCR, the thermal conductivity also benefits the convergence, similar to the effect of heterogeneity. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings and demonstrate the method's potential for nonlinear problems on irregular domains.
Authors:Bernardino D'Amico, Francesco Pomponi, Jay H. Arehart, Lina Khaddour
Title: Who cuts emissions, who turns up the heat? causal machine learning estimates of energy efficiency interventions
Abstract:
Reducing domestic energy demand is central to climate mitigation and fuel poverty strategies, yet the impact of energy efficiency interventions is highly heterogeneous. Using a causal machine learning model trained on nationally representative data of the English housing stock, we estimate average and conditional treatment effects of wall insulation on gas consumption, focusing on distributional effects across energy burden subgroups. While interventions reduce gas demand on average (by as much as 19 percent), low energy burden groups achieve substantial savings, whereas those experiencing high energy burdens see little to no reduction. This pattern reflects a behaviourally-driven mechanism: households constrained by high costs-to-income ratios (e.g. more than 0.1) reallocate savings toward improved thermal comfort rather than lowering consumption. Far from wasteful, such responses represent rational adjustments in contexts of prior deprivation, with potential co-benefits for health and well-being. These findings call for a broader evaluation framework that accounts for both climate impacts and the equity implications of domestic energy policy.
Authors:Tai Hyoung Rhee, Dong-guw Lee, Ayoung Kim
Title: TIR-Diffusion: Diffusion-based Thermal Infrared Image Denoising via Latent and Wavelet Domain Optimization
Abstract:
Thermal infrared imaging exhibits considerable potentials for robotic perception tasks, especially in environments with poor visibility or challenging lighting conditions. However, TIR images typically suffer from heavy non-uniform fixed-pattern noise, complicating tasks such as object detection, localization, and mapping. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based TIR image denoising framework leveraging latent-space representations and wavelet-domain optimization. Utilizing a pretrained stable diffusion model, our method fine-tunes the model via a novel loss function combining latent-space and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) / dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) losses. Additionally, we implement a cascaded refinement stage to enhance fine details, ensuring high-fidelity denoising results. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art denoising methods. Furthermore, our method exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to diverse and challenging real-world TIR datasets, underscoring its effectiveness for practical robotic deployment.
Authors:Chunlin Wu, Liangliang Zhang, Tengxiang Wang, Huiming Yin
Title: Transient thermal analysis of a bi-layered composites with the dual-reciprocity inclusion-based boundary element method
Abstract:
This paper proposes a single-domain dual-reciprocity inclusion-based boundary element method (DR-iBEM) for a three-dimensional fully bonded bi-layered composite embedded with ellipsoidal inhomogeneities under transient/harmonic thermal loads. The heat equation is interpreted as a static one containing time- and frequency-dependent nonhomogeneous source terms, which is similar to eigen-fields but is transformed into a boundary integral by the dual-reciprocity method. Using the steady-state bimaterial Green's function, boundary integral equations are proposed to take into account continuity conditions of temperature and heat flux, which avoids setting up any continuity equations at the bimaterial interface. Eigen-temperature-gradients and eigen-heat-source are introduced to simulate the material mismatch in thermal conductivity and heat capacity, respectively. The DR-iBEM algorithm is particularly suitable for investigating the transient and harmonic thermal behaviors of bi-layered composites and is verified by the finite element method (FEM). Numerical comparison with the FEM demonstrates its robustness and accuracy. The method has been applied to a functionally graded material as a bimaterial with graded particle distributions, where particle size and gradation effects are evaluated.
Authors:Daniel Andrés López, Vincent Weber, Severin Zentgraf, Barlo Hillen, Perikles Simon, Elmar Schömer
Title: ThermoCycleNet: Stereo-based Thermogram Labeling for Model Transition to Cycling
Abstract:
Infrared thermography is emerging as a powerful tool in sports medicine, allowing assessment of thermal radiation during exercise and analysis of anatomical regions of interest, such as the well-exposed calves. Building on our previous advanced automatic annotation method, we aimed to transfer the stereo- and multimodal-based labeling approach from treadmill running to ergometer cycling. Therefore, the training of the semantic segmentation network with automatic labels and fine-tuning on high-quality manually annotated images has been examined and compared in different data set combinations. The results indicate that fine-tuning with a small fraction of manual data is sufficient to improve the overall performance of the deep neural network. Finally, combining automatically generated labels with small manually annotated data sets accelerates the adaptation of deep neural networks to new use cases, such as the transition from treadmill to bicycle.
Authors:Raul Castilla-Arquillo, Carlos Perez-del-Pulgar, Levin Gerdes, Alfonso Garcia-Cerezo, Miguel A. Olivares-Mendez
Title: OmniUnet: A Multimodal Network for Unstructured Terrain Segmentation on Planetary Rovers Using RGB, Depth, and Thermal Imagery
Abstract:
Robot navigation in unstructured environments requires multimodal perception systems that can support safe navigation. Multimodality enables the integration of complementary information collected by different sensors. However, this information must be processed by machine learning algorithms specifically designed to leverage heterogeneous data. Furthermore, it is necessary to identify which sensor modalities are most informative for navigation in the target environment. In Martian exploration, thermal imagery has proven valuable for assessing terrain safety due to differences in thermal behaviour between soil types. This work presents OmniUnet, a transformer-based neural network architecture for semantic segmentation using RGB, depth, and thermal (RGB-D-T) imagery. A custom multimodal sensor housing was developed using 3D printing and mounted on the Martian Rover Testbed for Autonomy (MaRTA) to collect a multimodal dataset in the Bardenas semi-desert in northern Spain. This location serves as a representative environment of the Martian surface, featuring terrain types such as sand, bedrock, and compact soil. A subset of this dataset was manually labeled to support supervised training of the network. The model was evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving a pixel accuracy of 80.37% and demonstrating strong performance in segmenting complex unstructured terrain. Inference tests yielded an average prediction time of 673 ms on a resource-constrained computer (Jetson Orin Nano), confirming its suitability for on-robot deployment. The software implementation of the network and the labeled dataset have been made publicly available to support future research in multimodal terrain perception for planetary robotics.
Authors:James Rhodes, Lawrence Ong, Duy T. Ngo
Title: WiRM: Wireless Respiration Monitoring Using Conjugate Multiple Channel State Information and Fast Iterative Filtering in Wi-Fi Systems
Abstract:
Monitoring respiratory health with the use of channel state information (CSI) has shown promising results. Many existing methods focus on monitoring only the respiratory rate, while others focus on monitoring the motion of the chest as a patient breathes, which is referred to as the respiratory waveform. This paper presents WiRM, a two-staged approach to contactless respiration monitoring. In the first stage, WiRM improves upon existing respiratory rate estimation techniques by using conjugate multiplication for phase sanitisation and adaptive multi-trace carving (AMTC) for tracing how the respiratory rate changes over time. When compared against three state-of-the-art methods, WiRM has achieved an average reduction of $38\%$ in respiratory rate root mean squared error (RMSE). In the second stage, WiRM uses this improved respiratory rate estimate to inform the decomposition and selection of the respiratory waveform from the CSI data. Remarkably, WiRM delivers a $178.3\%$ improvement in average absolute correlation with the ground truth respiratory waveform. Within the literature, it is difficult to compare the robustness of existing algorithms in noisy environments. In this paper, we develop a purpose-built simulation toolkit to evaluate the robustness of respiration monitoring solutions under various noise conditions, including thermal, multiplicative, and phase noise. Our results show that WiRM demonstrates improved or comparable resilience to these common noise sources.
Authors:Bingjia Xiao, Tao Chen, Wenbin Zhang, Xin Qian, Puqing Jiang
Title: Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization for Fast and Reliable Parameter Extraction in Thermoreflectance
Abstract:
Frequency-domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) is a widely used technique for characterizing thermal properties of multilayer thin films. However, extracting multiple parameters from FDTR measurements presents a nonlinear inverse problem due to its high dimensionality and multimodal, non-convex solution space. This study evaluates four popular global optimization algorithms: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Quantum Genetic Algorithm (QGA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Fireworks Algorithm (FWA), for extracting parameters from FDTR measurements of a GaN/Si heterostructure. However, none achieve reliable convergence within 60 seconds. To improve convergence speed and accuracy, we propose an AI-driven hybrid optimization framework that combines each global algorithm with a Quasi-Newton local refinement method, resulting in four hybrid variants: HGA, HQGA, HPSO, and HFWA. Among these, HPSO outperforms all other methods, with 80% of trials reaching the target fitness value within 60 seconds, showing greater robustness and a lower risk of premature convergence. In contrast, only 30% of HGA and HQGA trials and 20% of HFWA trials achieve this threshold. We then evaluate the worst-case performance across 100 independent trials for each algorithm when the time is extended to 1000 seconds. Only HPSO, PSO, and HGA consistently reach the target accuracy, with HPSO converging five times faster than the others. HPSO provides a general-purpose solution for inverse problems in thermal metrology and can be readily extended to other model-fitting techniques.
Authors:Shahriar Kabir, Istiak Ahmmed Rifti, H. M. Shadman Tabib, Mushfiqur Rahman, Sadatul Islam Sadi, Hasnaen Adil, Ahmed Mahir Sultan Rumi, Ch Md Rakin Haider
Title: SpectraSentinel: LightWeight Dual-Stream Real-Time Drone Detection, Tracking and Payload Identification
Abstract:
The proliferation of drones in civilian airspace has raised urgent security concerns, necessitating robust real-time surveillance systems. In response to the 2025 VIP Cup challenge tasks - drone detection, tracking, and payload identification - we propose a dual-stream drone monitoring framework. Our approach deploys independent You Only Look Once v11-nano (YOLOv11n) object detectors on parallel infrared (thermal) and visible (RGB) data streams, deliberately avoiding early fusion. This separation allows each model to be specifically optimized for the distinct characteristics of its input modality, addressing the unique challenges posed by small aerial objects in diverse environmental conditions. We customize data preprocessing and augmentation strategies per domain - such as limiting color jitter for IR imagery - and fine-tune training hyperparameters to enhance detection performance under conditions of heavy noise, low light, and motion blur. The resulting lightweight YOLOv11n models demonstrate high accuracy in distinguishing drones from birds and in classifying payload types, all while maintaining real-time performance. This report details the rationale for a dual-modality design, the specialized training pipelines, and the architectural optimizations that collectively enable efficient and accurate drone surveillance across RGB and IR channels.
Authors:Walter Boscheri, Firas Dhaouadi
Title: Structure Preserving Finite Volume Schemes on Voronoi Grids: Curl Involution, Asymptotic Limit and Thermodynamics
Abstract:
We propose a new curl-free and thermodynamically compatible finite volume scheme on Voronoi grids to solve compressible heat conducting flows written in first-order hyperbolic form. The approach is based on the definition of compatible discrete curl-grad operators, exploiting the triangular nature of the dual mesh. We design a cell solver reminiscent of the nodal solvers used in Lagrangian schemes to discretize the evolution equation for the thermal impulse vector, and we demonstrate that the resulting numerical scheme ensures energy conservation, local non-negative entropy production, as well as asymptotic consistency with the classical Fourier law in the stiff relaxation limit. A novel technique is proposed to transfer residuals from the dual to the primal mesh as subfluxes, which eventually yields the construction of entropy compatible semi-discrete methods. The scheme and its properties are validated on a set of numerical test cases.
Authors:Deepak Joshi, Mayukha Pal
Title: Lightweight Transformer-Driven Segmentation of Hotspots and Snail Trails in Solar PV Thermal Imagery
Abstract:
Accurate detection of defects such as hotspots and snail trails in photovoltaic modules is essential for maintaining energy efficiency and system reliablility. This work presents a supervised deep learning framework for segmenting thermal infrared images of PV panels, using a dataset of 277 aerial thermographic images captured by zenmuse XT infrared camera mounted on a DJI Matrice 100 drone. The preprocessing pipeline includes image resizing, CLAHE based contrast enhancement, denoising, and normalisation. A lightweight semantic segmentation model based on SegFormer is developed, featuring a customised Transformwer encoder and streamlined decoder, and fine-tuned on annotated images with manually labeled defect regions. To evaluate performance, we benchmark our model against U-Net, DeepLabV3, PSPNet, and Mask2Former using consistent preprocessing and augmentation. Evaluation metrices includes per-class Dice score, F1-score, Cohen's kappa, mean IoU, and pixel accuracy. The SegFormer-based model outperforms baselines in accuracy and efficiency, particularly for segmenting small and irregular defects. Its lightweight design real-time deployment on edge devices and seamless integration with drone-based systems for automated inspection of large-scale solar farms.
Authors:Hamza Mettali, Rousset François, Eric Bideaux, Clausse Marc
Title: Optimal Integration Of Heat-Pump And Solar Thermal Energy In The Pre-heating Loop Of Wood And Gas Boiler Based District Heating System
Abstract:
The integration of renewable sources is essential for decarbonizing heat production in district energy networks. Beyond biomass-based solutions, solar thermal energy, with or without heat pumps, presents a significant opportunity. However, system performance is highly dependent on outdoor and setpoint temperatures. This study aims to optimize system design using a multi-criteria approach that considers techno-economic and environmental (CO2) factors. A Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed, incorporating temperature discretization for problem linearization and capturing key dynamic characteristics of heat generators. The model improves convergence, reducing a 19% MIP gap in 26 hours to 10% in 12 hours by dissipating 6% excess solar heat. A multi-scenario analysis under two carbon taxation levels and different CO2 emission cases revealed solar integration up to 11,932 m${}^2$ but increased gas reliance (50%) and TES losses (49%). Wood boiler inclusion reduced solar dependency, covering 45% of heat, lowered LCOH, but limited renewable penetration. Higher carbon taxes boosted solar adoption but faced storage inefficiencies, while biomass enhanced cost efficiency and system stability.
Authors:Tianyuan Wang, Mark A Post, Mathieu Deremetz
Title: Design of a Modular Mobile Inspection and Maintenance Robot for an Orbital Servicing Hub
Abstract:
The use of autonomous robots in space is an essential part of the "New Space" commercial ecosystem of assembly and re-use of space hardware components in Earth orbit and beyond. The STARFAB project aims to create a ground demonstration of an orbital automated warehouse as a hub for sustainable commercial operations and servicing. A critical part of this fully-autonomous robotic facility will be the capability to monitor, inspect, and assess the condition of both the components stored in the warehouse, and the STARFAB facility itself. This paper introduces ongoing work on the STARFAB Mobile Inspection Module (MIM). The MIM uses Standard Interconnects (SI) so that it can be carried by Walking Manipulators (WM) as an independently-mobile robot, and multiple MIMs can be stored and retrieved as needed for operations on STARFAB. The MIM carries high-resolution cameras, a 3D profilometer, and a thermal imaging sensor, with the capability to add other modular sensors. A grasping tool and torque wrench are stored within the modular body for use by an attached WM for maintenance operations. Implementation and testing is still ongoing at the time of writing. This paper details the concept of operations for the MIM as an on-orbit autonomous inspection and maintenance system, the mechanical and electronic design of the MIM, and the sensors package used for non-destructive testing.
Authors:Marwan Hassini, Colette Mintsa-Eya, Eduardo Redondo-Iglesias, Pascal Venet
Title: Influence of Cell Position on the Capacity of Retired Batteries: Experimental and Statistical Studies
Abstract:
Understanding how batteries perform after automotive use is crucial to determining their potential for reuse. This article presents experimental results aimed at advancing knowledge of retired battery performance. Three modules extracted from electric vehicles were tested. Their performance was assessed, and the results were analyzed statistically using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The 36 retired cells exhibited a high level of performance, albeit with significant variation. On average, the cells had a 95% state of health capacity with a dispersion of 2.4%. ANOVA analysis suggests that cell performance is not correlated with their position inside the module. These results demonstrate the need to evaluate dispersion within retired batteries and to develop thermal management and balancing systems for second-life batteries.
Authors:Shantanav Chakraborty, Soonwon Choi, Soumik Ghosh, Tudor Giurgică-Tiron
Title: Fast computational deep thermalization
Abstract:
Deep thermalization refers to the emergence of Haar-like randomness from quantum systems upon partial measurements. As a generalization of quantum thermalization, it is often associated with high complexity and entanglement. Here, we introduce computational deep thermalization and construct the fastest possible dynamics exhibiting it at infinite effective temperature. Our circuit dynamics produce quantum states with low entanglement in polylogarithmic depth that are indistinguishable from Haar random states to any computationally bounded observer. Importantly, the observer is allowed to request many copies of the same residual state obtained from partial projective measurements on the state -- this condition is beyond the standard settings of quantum pseudorandomness, but natural for deep thermalization. In cryptographic terms, these states are pseudorandom, pseudoentangled, and crucially, retain these properties under local measurements. Our results demonstrate a new form of computational thermalization, where thermal-like behavior arises from structured quantum states endowed with cryptographic properties, instead of from highly unstructured ensembles. The low resource complexity of preparing these states suggests scalable simulations of deep thermalization using quantum computers. Our work also motivates the study of computational quantum pseudorandomness beyond BQP observers.
Authors:Nicholas Kirschbaum, Nathaniel Wood, Chang-Eun Kim, Thejaswi U. Tumkur, Chinedum Okwudire
Title: Vector-level Feedforward Control of LPBF Melt Pool Area Using a Physics-Based Thermal Model
Abstract:
Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is an additive manufacturing technique that has gained popularity thanks to its ability to produce geometrically complex, fully dense metal parts. However, these parts are prone to internal defects and geometric inaccuracies, stemming in part from variations in the melt pool. This paper proposes a novel vector-level feedforward control framework for regulating melt pool area in LPBF. By decoupling part-scale thermal behavior from small-scale melt pool physics, the controller provides a scale-agnostic prediction of melt pool area and efficient optimization over it. This is done by operating on two coupled lightweight models: a finite-difference thermal model that efficiently captures vector-level temperature fields and a reduced-order, analytical melt pool model. Each model is calibrated separately with minimal single-track and 2D experiments, and the framework is validated on a complex 3D geometry in both Inconel 718 and 316L stainless steel. Results showed that feedforward vector-level laser power scheduling reduced geometric inaccuracy in key dimensions by 62%, overall porosity by 16.5%, and photodiode variation by 6.8% on average. Overall, this modular, data-efficient approach demonstrates that proactively compensating for known thermal effects can significantly improve part quality while remaining computationally efficient and readily extensible to other materials and machines.
Authors:Aon Safdar, Usman Akram, Waseem Anwar, Basit Malik, Mian Ibad Ali
Title: YOLOatr : Deep Learning Based Automatic Target Detection and Localization in Thermal Infrared Imagery
Abstract:
Automatic Target Detection (ATD) and Recognition (ATR) from Thermal Infrared (TI) imagery in the defense and surveillance domain is a challenging computer vision (CV) task in comparison to the commercial autonomous vehicle perception domain. Limited datasets, peculiar domain-specific and TI modality-specific challenges, i.e., limited hardware, scale invariance issues due to greater distances, deliberate occlusion by tactical vehicles, lower sensor resolution and resultant lack of structural information in targets, effects of weather, temperature, and time of day variations, and varying target to clutter ratios all result in increased intra-class variability and higher inter-class similarity, making accurate real-time ATR a challenging CV task. Resultantly, contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning architectures underperform in the ATR domain. We propose a modified anchor-based single-stage detector, called YOLOatr, based on a modified YOLOv5s, with optimal modifications to the detection heads, feature fusion in the neck, and a custom augmentation profile. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on a comprehensive DSIAC MWIR dataset for real-time ATR over both correlated and decorrelated testing protocols. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ATR performance of up to 99.6%.
Authors:Michael Ryan, Mohammad Hassan Baqershahi, Hessamoddin Moshayedi, Elyas Ghafoori
Title: Physics-informed machine learning surrogate for scalable simulation of thermal histories during wire-arc directed energy deposition
Abstract:
Wire-arc directed energy deposition (DED) has emerged as a promising additive manufacturing (AM) technology for large-scale structural engineering applications. However, the complex thermal dynamics inherent to the process present challenges in ensuring structural integrity and mechanical properties of fabricated thick walls and plates. While finite element method (FEM) simulations have been conventionally employed to predict thermal history during deposition, their computational demand remains prohibitively high for actual large-scale applications. Given the necessity of multiple repetitive simulations for heat management and the determination of an optimal printing strategy, FEM simulation quickly becomes entirely infeasible. Instead, advancements have been made in using trained neural networks as surrogate models for rapid prediction. However, traditional data-driven approaches necessitate large amounts of relevant and verifiable external data, during the training and validation of the neural network. Regarding large-scale wire-arc DED, none of these data sources are readily available in quantities sufficient for an accurate surrogate. The introduction of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) has opened up an alternative simulation strategy by leveraging the existing physical knowledge of the phenomena with advanced machine learning methods. Despite their theoretical advantages, PINNs have seen limited application in the context of large-scale wire-arc DED for structural engineering. This study investigates the scalability of PINNs, focusing on efficient collocation points sampling, a critical factor controlling both the training time and model performance. Results show PINNs can reduce computational time and effort by up to 98.6%, while maintaining the desired accuracy and offering "super-resolution". Future directions for enhancing PINN performance in metal AM are discussed.
Authors:Luiz Aldeia Machado, Victor Coppo Leite, Elia Merzari, Arthur Motta, Roberto Ponciroli, Lander Ibarra, Lise Charlot
Title: Toward Developing Machine-Learning-Aided Tools for the Thermomechanical Monitoring of Nuclear Reactor Components
Abstract:
Proactive maintenance strategies, such as Predictive Maintenance (PdM), play an important role in the operation of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), particularly due to their capacity to reduce offline time by preventing unexpected shutdowns caused by component failures. In this work, we explore the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture combined with a computational thermomechanical model to calculate the temperature, stress, and strain of a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel rod during operation. This estimation relies on a limited number of temperature measurements from the cladding's outer surface. This methodology can potentially aid in developing PdM tools for nuclear reactors by enabling real-time monitoring of such systems. The training, validation, and testing datasets were generated through coupled simulations involving BISON, a finite element-based nuclear fuel performance code, and the MOOSE Thermal-Hydraulics Module (MOOSE-THM). We conducted eleven simulations, varying the peak linear heat generation rates. Of these, eight were used for training, two for validation, and one for testing. The CNN was trained for over 1,000 epochs without signs of overfitting, achieving highly accurate temperature distribution predictions. These were then used in a thermomechanical model to determine the stress and strain distribution within the fuel rod.
Authors:Pegah GhafGhanbari, Mircea Lazar, Javad Mohammadpour Velni
Title: Neural Parameter-varying Data-enabled Predictive Control of Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jets
Abstract:
Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Jets (APPJs) show significant potential for biomedical applications, but their inherent complexity, characterized by nonlinear dynamics and strong sensitivity to operating conditions like tip-to-surface distance, presents considerable challenges for achieving robust and reliable real-time control. To address these issues, this paper presents the Neural Parameter-Varying Data-enabled Predictive Control (NPV-DeePC) framework. By integrating hyper neural networks (hypernets) into the neural Data-enabled Predictive Control (DeePC) paradigm, the proposed method adaptively captures system nonlinearities and parameter variations, updates the neural feature space accordingly, and enables efficient and accurate trajectory prediction and control. The NPV-DeePC framework is validated through extensive simulations involving surface temperature tracking and thermal dose delivery. The results highlight its ability to outperform existing controllers in terms of accuracy and adaptability. The computational efficiency of the NPV-DeePC approach makes it a viable candidate for real-time applications. These findings underscore its potential to advance the safe and precise control of APPJs and provide a scalable solution for other parameter-varying nonlinear systems.
Authors:Mikael Vaillant, Victor Oliveira Ferreira, Wiebke Mainville, Jean-Michel Lamarre, Vincent Raymond, Moncef Chioua, Bruno Blais
Title: Surrogate Model for Heat Transfer Prediction in Impinging Jet Arrays using Dynamic Inlet/Outlet and Flow Rate Control
Abstract:
This study presents a surrogate model designed to predict the Nusselt number distribution in an enclosed impinging jet arrays, where each jet function independently and where jets can be transformed from inlets to outlets, leading to a vast number of possible flow arrangements. While computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can model heat transfer with high fidelity, their cost prohibits real-time application such as model-based temperature control. To address this, we generate a CNN-based surrogate model that can predict the Nusselt distribution in real time. We train it with data from implicit large eddy computational fluid dynamics simulations (Re < 2,000). We train two distinct models, one for a five by one array of jets (83 simulations) and one for a three by three array of jets (100 simulations). We introduce a method to extrapolate predictions to higher Reynolds numbers (Re < 10,000) using a correlation-based scaling. The surrogate models achieve high accuracy, with a normalized mean average error below 2% on validation data for the five by one surrogate model and 0.6% for the three by three surrogate model. Experimental validation confirms the model's predictive capabilities. This work provides a foundation for model-based control strategies in advanced thermal management applications.
Authors:Soroush Shahi, Farzad Shahabi, Rama Nabulsi, Glenn Fernandes, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Nabil Alshurafa
Title: THOR: Thermal-guided Hand-Object Reasoning via Adaptive Vision Sampling
Abstract:
Wearable cameras are increasingly used as an observational and interventional tool for human behaviors by providing detailed visual data of hand-related activities. This data can be leveraged to facilitate memory recall for logging of behavior or timely interventions aimed at improving health. However, continuous processing of RGB images from these cameras consumes significant power impacting battery lifetime, generates a large volume of unnecessary video data for post-processing, raises privacy concerns, and requires substantial computational resources for real-time analysis. We introduce THOR, a real-time adaptive spatio-temporal RGB frame sampling method that leverages thermal sensing to capture hand-object patches and classify them in real-time. We use low-resolution thermal camera data to identify moments when a person switches from one hand-related activity to another, and adjust the RGB frame sampling rate by increasing it during activity transitions and reducing it during periods of sustained activity. Additionally, we use the thermal cues from the hand to localize the region of interest (i.e., the hand-object interaction) in each RGB frame, allowing the system to crop and process only the necessary part of the image for activity recognition. We develop a wearable device to validate our method through an in-the-wild study with 14 participants and over 30 activities, and further evaluate it on Ego4D (923 participants across 9 countries, totaling 3,670 hours of video). Our results show that using only 3% of the original RGB video data, our method captures all the activity segments, and achieves hand-related activity recognition F1-score (95%) comparable to using the entire RGB video (94%). Our work provides a more practical path for the longitudinal use of wearable cameras to monitor hand-related activities and health-risk behaviors in real time.
Authors:Roham Maiti, Debasmita Bhoumik
Title: Brain Tumor Detection through Thermal Imaging and MobileNET
Abstract:
Brain plays a crucial role in regulating body functions and cognitive processes, with brain tumors posing significant risks to human health. Precise and prompt detection is a key factor in proper treatment and better patient outcomes. Traditional methods for detecting brain tumors, that include biopsies, MRI, and CT scans often face challenges due to their high costs and the need for specialized medical expertise. Recent developments in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) has exhibited strong capabilities in automating the identification and categorization of brain tumors from medical images, especially MRI scans. However, these classical ML models have limitations, such as high computational demands, the need for large datasets, and long training times, which hinder their accessibility and efficiency. Our research uses MobileNET model for efficient detection of these tumors. The novelty of this project lies in building an accurate tumor detection model which use less computing re-sources and runs in less time followed by efficient decision making through the use of image processing technique for accurate results. The suggested method attained an average accuracy of 98.5%.
Authors:J. de Curtò, Cristina LiCalzi, Julien Tubiana Warin, Jack Gehlert, Brian Langbein, Alexandre Gamboa, Chris Sixbey, William Maguire, Santiago Fernández, Álvaro Maestroarena, Alex Brenchley, Logan Maroclo, Philemon Mercado, Joshua DeJohn, Cesar Velez, Ethan Dahmus, Taylor Steinys, David Fritz, I. de ZarzÃ
Title: Advanced System Engineering Approaches to Emerging Challenges in Planetary and Deep-Space Exploration
Abstract:
This paper presents innovative solutions to critical challenges in planetary and deep-space exploration electronics. We synthesize findings across diverse mission profiles, highlighting advances in: (1) MARTIAN positioning systems with dual-frequency transmission to achieve $\pm$1m horizontal accuracy; (2) artificial reef platforms for Titan's hydrocarbon seas utilizing specialized sensor arrays and multi-stage communication chains; (3) precision orbital rendezvous techniques demonstrating novel thermal protection solutions; (4) miniaturized CubeSat architectures for asteroid exploration with optimized power-to-mass ratios; and (5) next-generation power management systems for MARS rovers addressing dust accumulation challenges. These innovations represent promising directions for future space exploration technologies, particularly in environments where traditional Earth-based electronic solutions prove inadequate. The interdisciplinary nature of these developments highlights the critical intersection of aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, and planetary science in advancing human exploration capabilities beyond Earth orbit.
Authors:Cyrus Addy, Ajay Kumar Gurumadaiah, Yixiang Gao, Kwame Awuah-Offei
Title: A Comprehensive Dataset for Underground Miner Detection in Diverse Scenario
Abstract:
Underground mining operations face significant safety challenges that make emergency response capabilities crucial. While robots have shown promise in assisting with search and rescue operations, their effectiveness depends on reliable miner detection capabilities. Deep learning algorithms offer potential solutions for automated miner detection, but require comprehensive training datasets, which are currently lacking for underground mining environments. This paper presents a novel thermal imaging dataset specifically designed to enable the development and validation of miner detection systems for potential emergency applications. We systematically captured thermal imagery of various mining activities and scenarios to create a robust foundation for detection algorithms. To establish baseline performance metrics, we evaluated several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms including YOLOv8, YOLOv10, YOLO11, and RT-DETR on our dataset. While not exhaustive of all possible emergency situations, this dataset serves as a crucial first step toward developing reliable thermal-based miner detection systems that could eventually be deployed in real emergency scenarios. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using thermal imaging for miner detection and establishes a foundation for future research in this critical safety application.
Authors:Graydon Schulze-Kalt, Robert Pitu, Spencer Shelton, Catherine Todd, Zane Ebel, Ian Goldberg, Leon Gold, Henry Czarnecki, Mason McCormack, Larry Li, Zumi Riekse, Brian Yu, Akash Piya, Vidya Suri, Dylan Hu, Colleen Kim, John Baird, Seth Knights, Logan Hanssler, Michael Lembeck, Tian Zhong
Title: Development of an Open-Source Spacecraft Bus for the PULSE-A CubeSat
Abstract:
The undergraduate-led Polarization-modUlated Laser Satellite Experiment (PULSE-A) at the University of Chicago seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of circular polarization shift keyed satellite-to-ground laser communication. PULSE-A's low-cost open-source bus serves as the backbone of the mission and has been designed in tandem with the Payload, with design driven by strict requirements for pointing accuracy, component alignment, power demand, and thermal stability. This work presents the design and testing of the PULSE-A bus. The spacecraft bus was designed to fill two major needs: (1) to meet the requirements of the PULSE-A mission, and (2) to be easily configurable for future missions that desire enhanced capabilities over other low-cost open-source designs. At its core, the bus features dual BeagleBone Black Industrial compute units, selected for their flight heritage, integrated via a PC/104 header standard. PULSE-A implements Goddard Space Flight Center's core Flight System (cFS), which takes a modular software architecture approach and is built in C. The use of C as the primary language aligns with the expertise of the University of Chicago's Computer Science department, allowing for ease of development by PULSE-A's undergraduate flight software team. The CubeSat structure utilizes Gran Systems' 3U frame, modified to accommodate openings for various ports and deployable components. Inside, the avionics stack uses the PC/104 standard quad rails, which terminate in PULSE-A's custom-designed Payload Box that houses all of the Payload components and optical fiber runs. This work also covers the techniques and iterative engineering processes used to develop the thermal control and dissipation mechanisms for the specific requirements, under volume, mass, and temperature-range constraints.
Authors:Ján Boldocký, Shahriar Dadras Javan, Martin Gulan, Martin Mönnigmann, Ján Drgoňa
Title: Learning to Solve Parametric Mixed-Integer Optimal Control Problems via Differentiable Predictive Control
Abstract:
We propose a novel approach to solving input- and state-constrained parametric mixed-integer optimal control problems using Differentiable Predictive Control (DPC). Our approach follows the differentiable programming paradigm by learning an explicit neural policy that maps control parameters to integer- and continuous-valued decision variables. This policy is optimized via stochastic gradient descent by differentiating the quadratic model predictive control objective through the closed-loop finite-horizon response of the system dynamics. To handle integrality constraints, we incorporate three differentiable rounding strategies. The approach is evaluated on a conceptual thermal energy system, comparing its performance with the optimal solution for different lengths of the prediction horizon. The simulation results indicate that our self-supervised learning approach can achieve near-optimal control performance while significantly reducing inference time by avoiding online optimization, thus implying its potential for embedded deployment even on edge devices.
Authors:Mahdi Falaki, Maria A. Amer
Title: Lightweight RGB-T Tracking with Mobile Vision Transformers
Abstract:
Single-modality object tracking (e.g., RGB-only) encounters difficulties in challenging imaging conditions, such as low illumination and adverse weather conditions. To solve this, multimodal tracking (e.g., RGB-T models) aims to leverage complementary data such as thermal infrared features. While recent Vision Transformer-based multimodal trackers achieve strong performance, they are often computationally expensive due to large model sizes. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight RGB-T tracking algorithm based on Mobile Vision Transformers (MobileViT). Our tracker introduces a progressive fusion framework that jointly learns intra-modal and inter-modal interactions between the template and search regions using separable attention. This design produces effective feature representations that support more accurate target localization while achieving a small model size and fast inference speed. Compared to state-of-the-art efficient multimodal trackers, our model achieves comparable accuracy while offering significantly lower parameter counts (less than 4 million) and the fastest GPU inference speed of 122 frames per second. This paper is the first to propose a tracker using Mobile Vision Transformers for RGB-T tracking and multimodal tracking at large. Tracker code and model weights will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Authors:Maoyuan Li, Sihong Li, Guancheng Shen, Yun Zhang, Huamin Zhou
Title: Online high-precision prediction method for injection molding product weight by integrating time series/non-time series mixed features and feature attention mechanism
Abstract:
To address the challenges of untimely detection and online monitoring lag in injection molding quality anomalies, this study proposes a mixed feature attention-artificial neural network (MFA-ANN) model for high-precision online prediction of product weight. By integrating mechanism-based with data-driven analysis, the proposed architecture decouples time series data (e.g., melt flow dynamics, thermal profiles) from non-time series data (e.g., mold features, pressure settings), enabling hierarchical feature extraction. A self-attention mechanism is strategically embedded during cross-domain feature fusion to dynamically calibrate inter-modality feature weights, thereby emphasizing critical determinants of weight variability. The results demonstrate that the MFA-ANN model achieves a RMSE of 0.0281 with 0.5 g weight fluctuation tolerance, outperforming conventional benchmarks: a 25.1% accuracy improvement over non-time series ANN models, 23.0% over LSTM networks, 25.7% over SVR, and 15.6% over RF models, respectively. Ablation studies quantitatively validate the synergistic enhancement derived from the integration of mixed feature modeling (contributing 22.4%) and the attention mechanism (contributing 11.2%), significantly enhancing the model's adaptability to varying working conditions and its resistance to noise. Moreover, critical sensitivity analyses further reveal that data resolution significantly impacts prediction reliability, low-fidelity sensor inputs degrade performance by 23.8% RMSE compared to high-precision measurements. Overall, this study provides an efficient and reliable solution for the intelligent quality control of injection molding processes.
Authors:Ali Chouman, Peter Riederer, Frédéric Wurtz
Title: Evaluation methodology of Model Predictive Controllers for building's energy systems
Abstract:
Climate change poses a serious threat to the Earth's ecosystems, fueled primarily by escalating greenhouse gas emissions. Among the main contributors, the building sector stands out due to its significant energy demand. Addressing this challenge requires innovative techniques in the control of energy systems in buildings. This paper deals with the formulation of a methodology designed to evaluate the performance of these controllers. The evaluation process involves the establishment of a comprehensive test protocol and a diverse set of scenarios to evaluate the controllers. Key performance indicators are used to quantify their effectiveness based on the test results. A practical case study is presented as an application to introduce this methodology, focusing on the integration of Model Predictive Controllers (MPCs) with the Dimosim thermal simulation platform. The digital twin of the Greener building in Grenoble is used as a model for emulation. The paper demonstrates the ability of the proposed methodology to test and rank MPCs in different test scenarios, providing valuable feedback on their performance capabilities. The paper highlights the importance of the developed approach in systematically evaluating and ranking MPCs for optimized building energy management.
Authors:Alborz Jelvani, Richard P Martin, Santosh Nagarakatte
Title: How to Increase Energy Efficiency with a Single Linux Command
Abstract:
Processors with dynamic power management provide a variety of settings to control energy efficiency. However, tuning these settings does not achieve optimal energy savings. We highlight how existing power capping mechanisms can address these limitations without requiring any changes to current power governors. We validate this approach using system measurements across a month-long data acquisition campaign from SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks on a server-class system equipped with dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Our results indicate that setting a simple power cap can improve energy efficiency by up to 25% over traditional energy-saving system configurations with little performance loss, as most default settings focus on thermal regulation and performance rather than compute efficiency. Power capping is very accessible compared to other approaches, as it can be implemented with a single Linux command. Our results point to programmers and administrators using power caps as a primary mechanism to maintain significant energy efficiency while retaining acceptable performance, as opposed to deploying complex DVFS algorithms.
Authors:Wouter J. Schuttert, Mohammed Iqbal Abdul Rasheed, Bojana Rosić
Title: Constitutive Manifold Neural Networks
Abstract:
Anisotropic material properties, such as the thermal conductivities of engineering composites, exhibit variability due to inherent material heterogeneity and manufacturing-related uncertainties. Mathematically, these properties are modeled as symmetric positive definite (SPD) tensors, which reside on a curved Riemannian manifold. Extending this description to a stochastic framework requires preserving both the SPD structure and the underlying spatial symmetries of the tensors. This is achieved through the spectral decomposition of tensors, which enables the parameterization of uncertainties into scale (strength) and rotation (orientation) components. To quantify the impact of strength and orientation uncertainties on the thermal behaviour of the composite, the stochastic material tensor must be propagated through a physics-based forward model. This process necessitates computationally efficient surrogate models, for which a feedforward neural network (FNN) is employed. However, conventional FNN architectures are not well-suited for SPD tensors, as directly using tensor components as input features fails to preserve their underlying geometric structure, often leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce the Constitutive Manifold Neural Network (CMNN), which incorporates input layers that map SPD tensors from the curved manifold to the local tangent space-a flat vector space-thus preserving the statistical and geometric information in the dataset. A case study involving steady-state heat conduction with stochastic anisotropic conductivity demonstrates that geometry-preserving neural network significantly enhances learning performance compared to conventional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). These findings underscore the importance of manifold-aware methods when working with tensor-valued data in engineering applications.
Authors:Ngoc Tuyen Do, Tri Nhu Do
Title: Feature Fusion and Knowledge-Distilled Multi-Modal Multi-Target Detection
Abstract:
In the surveillance and defense domain, multi-target detection and classification (MTD) is considered essential yet challenging due to heterogeneous inputs from diverse data sources and the computational complexity of algorithms designed for resource-constrained embedded devices, particularly for Al-based solutions. To address these challenges, we propose a feature fusion and knowledge-distilled framework for multi-modal MTD that leverages data fusion to enhance accuracy and employs knowledge distillation for improved domain adaptation. Specifically, our approach utilizes both RGB and thermal image inputs within a novel fusion-based multi-modal model, coupled with a distillation training pipeline. We formulate the problem as a posterior probability optimization task, which is solved through a multi-stage training pipeline supported by a composite loss function. This loss function effectively transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. Experimental results demonstrate that our student model achieves approximately 95% of the teacher model's mean Average Precision while reducing inference time by approximately 50%, underscoring its suitability for practical MTD deployment scenarios.
Authors:Joseph Sullivan, Ian Good, Samuel A. Burden, Jeffrey Ian Lipton
Title: Spring-Brake! Handed Shearing Auxetics Improve Efficiency of Hopping and Standing
Abstract:
Energy efficiency is critical to the success of legged robotics. Efficiency is lost through wasted energy during locomotion and standing. Including elastic elements has been shown to reduce movement costs, while including breaks can reduce standing costs. However, adding separate elements for each increases the mass and complexity of a leg, reducing overall system performance. Here we present a novel compliant mechanism using a Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) that acts as a spring and break in a monopod hopping robot. The HSA acts as a parallel elastic actuator, reducing electrical power for dynamic hopping and matching the efficiency of state-of-the-art compliant hoppers. The HSA\u2019s auxetic behavior enables dual functionality. During static tasks, it locks under large forces with minimal input power by blocking deformation, creating high friction similar to a capstan mechanism. This allows the leg to support heavy loads without motor torque, addressing thermal inefficiency. The multi-functional design enhances both dynamic and static performance, offering a versatile solution for robotic applications.
Authors:Carlos A. Vargas Venegas, Daning Huang, Patrick Blonigan, JohnTencer
Title: Physics-Infused Reduced-Order Modeling for Analysis of Multi-Layered Hypersonic Thermal Protection Systems
Abstract:
This work presents a physics-infused reduced-order modeling (PIROM) framework for efficient and accurate prediction of transient thermal behavior in multi-layered hypersonic thermal protection systems (TPS). The PIROM architecture integrates a reduced-physics backbone, based on the lumped-capacitance model (LCM), with data-driven correction dynamics formulated via a coarse-graining approach rooted in the Mori-Zwanzig formalism. While the LCM captures the dominant heat transfer mechanisms, the correction terms compensate for residual dynamics arising from higher-order non-linear interactions and heterogeneities across material layers. The proposed PIROM is benchmarked against two non-intrusive reduced-order models (ROMs): Operator Inference (OpInf) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE). The PIROM consistently achieves errors below 1% for a wide range of extrapolative settings involving time- and space-dependent boundary conditions and temperature-varying material property perturbations. In contrast, OpInf exhibits moderate degradation, and NODE suffers substantial loss in accuracy due to its lack of embedded physics. Despite higher training costs, PIROM delivers online evaluations of two orders of magnitude faster than the full-order model. These results demonstrate that PIROM effectively reconciles the trade-offs between accuracy, generalizability, and efficiency, providing a robust framework for thermal modeling of TPS under diverse operating conditions.
Authors:Hanseong Jo, Pavel Shafirin, Christopher Le, Caden Chan, Artur Davoyan
Title: Soft Electrothermal Meta-Actuator for Robust Multifunctional Control
Abstract:
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation constraints: unidirectional motion, environmental sensitivity, and slow response times limited by passive cooling. To overcome these constraints, we propose a meta-actuator architecture, which uses engineered heat transfer in thin films to achieve multifunctional operation. We demonstrate electrically selectable bidirectional motion with large deflection ($ \geq $28% of actuator length at 0.75 W), suppressed thermal sensitivity to ambient temperature changes when compared to conventional actuators (>100$ \times $ lower), and actively forced return to the rest state, which is 10 times faster than that with passive cooling. We further show that our meta-actuator approach enables extended ranges of motions for manipulating complex objects. Versatile soft gripper operations highlight the meta-actuator's potential for soft robotics and devices.
Authors:Zakia Tamanna Tisha, Ujjwal Guin
Title: Understanding the Security Landscape of Embedded Non-Volatile Memories: A Comprehensive Survey
Abstract:
The modern semiconductor industry requires memory solutions that can keep pace with the high-speed demands of high-performance computing. Embedded non-volatile memories (eNVMs) address these requirements by offering faster access to stored data at an improved computational throughput and efficiency. Furthermore, these technologies offer numerous appealing features, including limited area-energy-runtime budget and data retention capabilities. Among these, the data retention feature of eNVMs has garnered particular interest within the semiconductor community. Although this property allows eNVMs to retain data even in the absence of a continuous power supply, it also introduces some vulnerabilities, prompting security concerns. These concerns have sparked increased interest in examining the broader security implications associated with eNVM technologies. This paper examines the security aspects of eNVMs by discussing the reasons for vulnerabilities in specific memories from an architectural point of view. Additionally, this paper extensively reviews eNVM-based security primitives, such as physically unclonable functions and true random number generators, as well as techniques like logic obfuscation. The paper also explores a broad spectrum of security threats to eNVMs, including physical attacks such as side-channel attacks, fault injection, and probing, as well as logical threats like information leakage, denial-of-service, and thermal attacks. Finally, the paper presents a study of publication trends in the eNVM domain since the early 2000s, reflecting the rising momentum and research activity in this field.
Authors:A. A. Solovykh, N. E. Rybin, I. S. Novikov, A. V. Shapeev
Title: Path-integral molecular dynamics with actively-trained and universal machine learning force fields
Abstract:
Accounting for nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) can significantly alter material properties at finite temperatures. Atomic modeling using the path-integral molecular dynamics (PIMD) method can fully account for such effects, but requires computationally efficient and accurate models of interatomic interactions. Empirical potentials are fast but may lack sufficient accuracy, whereas quantum-mechanical calculations are highly accurate but computationally expensive. Machine-learned interatomic potentials offer a solution to this challenge, providing near-quantum-mechanical accuracy while maintaining high computational efficiency compared to density functional theory (DFT) calculations. In this context, an interface was developed to integrate moment tensor potentials (MTPs) from the MLIP-2 software package into PIMD calculations using the i-PI software package. This interface was then applied to active learning of potentials and to investigate the influence of NQEs on material properties, namely the temperature dependence of lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficients, as well as radial distribution functions, for lithium hydride (LiH) and silicon (Si) systems. The results were compared with experimental data, quasi-harmonic approximation calculations, and predictions from the universal machine learning force field MatterSim. These comparisons demonstrated the high accuracy and effectiveness of the MTP-PIMD approach.
Authors:Atsuya Kusui, Susumu Hirai, Asuka Takai
Title: Development of a non-wearable support robot capable of reproducing natural standing-up movements
Abstract:
To reproduce natural standing-up motion, recent studies have emphasized the importance of coordination between the assisting robot and the human. However, many non-wearable assistive devices have struggled to replicate natural motion trajectories. While wearable devices offer better coordination with the human body, they present challenges in completely isolating mechanical and electrical hazards. To address this, we developed a novel standing-assist robot that integrates features of both wearable and non-wearable systems, aiming to achieve high coordination while maintaining safety. The device employs a four-link mechanism aligned with the human joint structure, designed to reproduce the S-shaped trajectory of the hip and the arc trajectory of the knee during natural standing-up motion. Subject-specific trajectory data were obtained using a gyroscope, and the link lengths were determined to drive the seat along the optimal path. A feedforward speed control using a stepping motor was implemented, and the reproducibility of the trajectory was evaluated based on the geometric constraints of the mechanism. A load-bearing experiment with weights fixed to the seat was conducted to assess the trajectory accuracy under different conditions. Results showed that the reproduction errors for the hip and knee trajectories remained within approximately 4 percent of the seat's total displacement, demonstrating high fidelity to the target paths. In addition, durability testing, thermal safety evaluation, and risk assessment confirmed the reliability and safety of the system for indoor use. These findings suggest that the proposed design offers a promising approach for developing assistive technologies that adapt to individual physical characteristics, with potential applications in elderly care and rehabilitation.
Authors:Juan Angelo Vargas-Fajardo, Diana Manvelyan-Stroot, Catharina Czech, Pietro Botazzoli, Fabian Duddeck
Title: Parametric Model Order Reduction by Box Clustering with Applications in Mechatronic Systems
Abstract:
High temperatures and structural deformations can compromise the functionality and reliability of new components for mechatronic systems. Therefore, high-fidelity simulations (HFS) are employed during the design process, as they enable a detailed analysis of the thermal and structural behavior of the system. However, such simulations are both computationally expensive and tedious, particularly during iterative optimization procedures. Establishing a parametric reduced order model (pROM) can accelerate the design's optimization if the model can accurately predict the behavior over a wide range of material and geometric properties. However, many existing methods exhibit limitations when applied to wide design ranges. In this work, we introduce the parametric Box Reduction (pBR) method, a matrix interpolation technique that minimizes the non-physical influence of training points due to the large parameter ranges. For this purpose, we define a new interpolation function that computes a local weight for each design variable and integrates them into the global function. Furthermore, we develop an intuitive clustering technique to select the training points for the model, avoiding numerical artifacts from distant points. Additionally, these two strategies do not require normalizing the parameter space and handle every property equally. The effectiveness of the pBR method is validated through two physical applications: structural deformation of a cantilever Timoshenko beam and heat transfer of a power module of a power converter. The results demonstrate that the pBR approach can accurately capture the behavior of mechatronic components across large parameter ranges without sacrificing computational efficiency.
Authors:Jinke Li, Yue Wu, Xiaoyan Yang
Title: A High-Performance Thermal Infrared Object Detection Framework with Centralized Regulation
Abstract:
Thermal Infrared (TIR) technology involves the use of sensors to detect and measure infrared radiation emitted by objects, and it is widely utilized across a broad spectrum of applications. The advancements in object detection methods utilizing TIR images have sparked significant research interest. However, most traditional methods lack the capability to effectively extract and fuse local-global information, which is crucial for TIR-domain feature attention. In this study, we present a novel and efficient thermal infrared object detection framework, known as CRT-YOLO, that is based on centralized feature regulation, enabling the establishment of global-range interaction on TIR information. Our proposed model integrates efficient multi-scale attention (EMA) modules, which adeptly capture long-range dependencies while incurring minimal computational overhead. Additionally, it leverages the Centralized Feature Pyramid (CFP) network, which offers global regulation of TIR features. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CRT-YOLO model significantly outperforms conventional methods for TIR image object detection. Furthermore, the ablation study provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of our proposed modules, reinforcing the potential impact of our approach on advancing the field of thermal infrared object detection.
Authors:Shun Wang, Shun-Li Shang, Zi-Kui Liu, Wenrui Hao
Title: ZENN: A Thermodynamics-Inspired Computational Framework for Heterogeneous Data-Driven Modeling
Abstract:
Traditional entropy-based methods - such as cross-entropy loss in classification problems - have long been essential tools for quantifying uncertainty and disorder in data and developing artificial intelligence algorithms. However, the rapid growth of data across various domains has introduced new challenges, particularly the integration of heterogeneous datasets with intrinsic disparities. In this paper, we extend zentropy theory into the data science domain by introducing intrinsic entropy, enabling more effective learning from heterogeneous data sources. We propose a zentropy-enhanced neural network (ZENN) that simultaneously learns both energy and intrinsic entropy components, capturing the underlying structure of multi-source data. To support this, we redesign the neural network architecture to better reflect the intrinsic properties and variability inherent in diverse datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ZENN on classification tasks and energy landscape reconstructions, showing its superior generalization capabilities and robustness-particularly in predicting high-order derivatives. As a practical application, we employ ZENN to reconstruct the Helmholtz energy landscape of Fe3Pt using data generated from DFT and capture key material behaviors, including negative thermal expansion and the critical point in the temperature-pressure space. Overall, our study introduces a novel approach for data-driven machine learning grounded in zentropy theory, highlighting ZENN as a versatile and robust deep learning framework for scientific problems involving complex, heterogeneous datasets.
Authors:Noboru Katayama, Rintaro Ishida
Title: Fault Detection Method for Power Conversion Circuits Using Thermal Image and Convolutional Autoencoder
Abstract:
A fault detection method for power conversion circuits using thermal images and a convolutional autoencoder is presented. The autoencoder is trained on thermal images captured from a commercial power module at randomly varied load currents and augmented image2 generated through image processing techniques such as resizing, rotation, perspective transformation, and bright and contrast adjustment. Since the autoencoder is trained to output images identical to input only for normal samples, it reconstructs images similar to normal ones even when the input images containing faults. A small heater is attached to the circuit board to simulate a fault on a power module, and then thermal images were captured from different angles and positions, as well as various load currents to test the trained autoencoder model. The areas under the curve (AUC) were obtained to evaluate the proposed method. The results show the autoencoder model can detect anomalies with 100% accuracy under given conditions. The influence of hyperparameters such as the number of convolutional layers and image augmentation conditions on anomaly detection accuracy was also investigated.
Authors:Seokjun Kwon, Jeongmin Shin, Namil Kim, Soonmin Hwang, Yukyung Choi
Title: Boosting Cross-spectral Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, thermal image semantic segmentation has emerged as a critical research area, owing to its ability to provide robust scene understanding under adverse visual conditions. In particular, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for thermal image segmentation can be an efficient solution to address the lack of labeled thermal datasets. Nevertheless, since these methods do not effectively utilize the complementary information between RGB and thermal images, they significantly decrease performance during domain adaptation. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on cross-spectral UDA for thermal image semantic segmentation. We first propose a novel masked mutual learning strategy that promotes complementary information exchange by selectively transferring results between each spectral model while masking out uncertain regions. Additionally, we introduce a novel prototypical self-supervised loss designed to enhance the performance of the thermal segmentation model in nighttime scenarios. This approach addresses the limitations of RGB pre-trained networks, which cannot effectively transfer knowledge under low illumination due to the inherent constraints of RGB sensors. In experiments, our method achieves higher performance over previous UDA methods and comparable performance to state-of-the-art supervised methods.
Authors:Tamilselvan Subramani, Sebastian Bartscher
Title: Predictive Digital Twins for Thermal Management Using Machine Learning and Reduced-Order Models
Abstract:
Digital twins enable real-time simulation and prediction in engineering systems. This paper presents a novel framework for predictive digital twins of a headlamp heatsink, integrating physics-based reduced-order models (ROMs) from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with supervised machine learning. A component-based ROM library, derived via proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), captures thermal dynamics efficiently. Machine learning models, including Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Neural Networks, predict optimal ROM configurations, enabling rapid digital twin updates. The Neural Network achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 54.240, outperforming other models. Quantitative comparisons of predicted and original values demonstrate high accuracy. This scalable, interpretable framework advances thermal management in automotive systems, supporting robust design and predictive maintenance.
Authors:Ruiyue Huang, Claire E. Heaney, Maarten van Reeuwijk
Title: Parameter estimation for land-surface models using machine learning libraries
Abstract:
The Neural Networks for Partial Differential Equations (NN4PDEs) approach is used to determine the parameters of a simple land-surface model using PyTorch's backpropagation engine. In order to test the inverse model, a synthetic dataset is created by running the model in forward mode with known parameter values to create soil temperature time series that can be used as observations for the inverse model. We show that it is not possible to obtain a reliable parameter estimation using a single observed soil temperature time series. Using measurements at two depths, reliable parameter estimates can be obtained although it is not possible to differentiate between latent and sensible heat fluxes. We apply the inverse model to urban flux tower data in Phoenix, United States, and show that the thermal conductivity, volumetric heat capacity, and the combined sensible-latent heat transfer coefficient can be reliably estimated using an observed value for the effective surface albedo. The resulting model accurately predicts the outgoing longwave radiation, conductive soil fluxes and the combined sensible-latent heat fluxes.
Authors:Dong Xing, Xianxun Zhu, Wei Zhou, Qika Lin, Hang Yang, Yuqing Wang
Title: Segment Any RGB-Thermal Model with Language-aided Distillation
Abstract:
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates strong instance segmentation performance across various downstream tasks. However, SAM is trained solely on RGB data, limiting its direct applicability to RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation. Given that RGB-T provides a robust solution for scene understanding in adverse weather and lighting conditions, such as low light and overexposure, we propose a novel framework, SARTM, which customizes the powerful SAM for RGB-T semantic segmentation. Our key idea is to unleash the potential of SAM while introduce semantic understanding modules for RGB-T data pairs. Specifically, our framework first involves fine tuning the original SAM by adding extra LoRA layers, aiming at preserving SAM's strong generalization and segmentation capabilities for downstream tasks. Secondly, we introduce language information as guidance for training our SARTM. To address cross-modal inconsistencies, we introduce a Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation(CMKD) module that effectively achieves modality adaptation while maintaining its generalization capabilities. This semantic module enables the minimization of modality gaps and alleviates semantic ambiguity, facilitating the combination of any modality under any visual conditions. Furthermore, we enhance the segmentation performance by adjusting the segmentation head of SAM and incorporating an auxiliary semantic segmentation head, which integrates multi-scale features for effective fusion. Extensive experiments are conducted across three multi-modal RGBT semantic segmentation benchmarks: MFNET, PST900, and FMB. Both quantitative and qualitative results consistently demonstrate that the proposed SARTM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across a variety of conditions.
Authors:Sarah Flanery, Anson Trapani, Christiana Chamon, Leyla Nazhandali
Title: Duality on the Thermodynamics of the Kirchhoff-Law-Johnson-Noise (KLJN) Secure Key Exchange Scheme
Abstract:
This study investigates a duality approach to information leak detection in the generalized Kirchhoff-Law-Johnson-Noise secure key exchange scheme proposed by Vadai, Mingesz, and Gingl (VMG-KLJN). While previous work by Chamon and Kish sampled voltages at zero-current instances, this research explores sampling currents at zero-voltage crossings. The objective is to determine if this dual approach can reveal information leaks in non-equilibrium KLJN systems. Results indicate that the duality method successfully detects information leaks, further supporting the necessity of thermal equilibrium for unconditional security in KLJN systems. Our findings confirm that the duality method successfully detects information leaks, with results closely mirroring those of Chamon and Kish, showing comparable vulnerabilities in non-equilibrium conditions. These results further support the necessity of thermal equilibrium for unconditional security in the KLJN scheme.
Authors:Youngkyu Kim, Byounghyun Yoo, Ji Young Yun, Hyeokmin Lee, Sehyeon Park, Jin Woo Moon, Eun Ji Choi
Title: Evaluation of Thermal Control Based on Spatial Thermal Comfort with Reconstructed Environmental Data
Abstract:
Achieving thermal comfort while maintaining energy efficiency is a critical objective in building system control. Conventional thermal comfort models, such as the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), rely on both environmental and personal variables. However, the use of fixed-location sensors limits the ability to capture spatial variability, which reduces the accuracy of occupant-specific comfort estimation. To address this limitation, this study proposes a new PMV estimation method that incorporates spatial environmental data reconstructed using the Gappy Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (Gappy POD) algorithm. In addition, a group PMV-based control framework is developed to account for the thermal comfort of multiple occupants. The Gappy POD method enables fast and accurate reconstruction of indoor temperature fields from sparse sensor measurements. Using these reconstructed fields and occupant location data, spatially resolved PMV values are calculated. Group-level thermal conditions are then derived through statistical aggregation methods and used to control indoor temperature in a multi-occupant living lab environment. Experimental results show that the Gappy POD algorithm achieves an average relative error below 3\% in temperature reconstruction. PMV distributions varied by up to 1.26 scale units depending on occupant location. Moreover, thermal satisfaction outcomes varied depending on the group PMV method employed. These findings underscore the importance for adaptive thermal control strategies that incorporate both spatial and individual variability, offering valuable insights for future occupant-centric building operations.
Authors:Jerome Samuel S, Puneet Kumar Patra, Md Rushdie Ibne Islam
Title: Multiscale modelling of thermally stressed superelastic polyimide
Abstract:
Many thermo-mechanical processes, such as thermal expansion and stress relaxation, originate at the atomistic scale. We develop a sequential multiscale approach to study thermally stressed superelastic polyimide to explore these effects. The continuum-scale smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model is coupled with atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) through constitutive modelling, where thermo-mechanical properties and equations of state are derived from MD simulations. The results are verified through benchmark problems of heat transfer. Finally, we analyse the insulating capabilities of superelastic polyimide by simulating the thermal response of an aluminium plate. The result shows a considerable reduction in the thermal stress, strain and temperature field development in the aluminium plate when superelastic polyimide is used as an insulator. The present work demonstrates the effectiveness of the multi-scale method in capturing thermo-mechanical interactions in superelastic polyimide.
Authors:Zihao Gong, Saikat Guha
Title: Quantum-Enhanced Change Detection and Joint Communication-Detection
Abstract:
Quick detection of transmittance changes in optical channel is crucial for secure communication. We demonstrate that pre-shared entanglement using two-mode squeezed vacuum states significantly reduces detection latency compared to classical and entanglement-augmented coherent-state probes. The change detection latency is inversely proportional to the quantum relative entropy (QRE), which goes to infinity in the absence of thermal noise, suggesting idealized instantaneous detection. However, in realistic scenarios, we show that QRE scales logarithmically with the inverse of the thermal noise mean photon number. We propose a receiver that achieves this scaling and quantify its performance gains over existing methods. Additionally, we explore the fundamental trade-off between communication capacity and change detection latency, highlighting how pre-shared entanglement enhances both.
Authors:Vallary Gupta, Ahana Sarkar, Chirag Deb, Arnab Jana
Title: Evaluating energy inefficiency in energy-poor households in India: A frontier analysis approach
Abstract:
Energy-poor households often compromise their thermal comfort and refrain from operating mechanical cooling devices to avoid high electricity bills. This is compounded by certain behavioral practices like retention of older, less efficient appliances, resulting in missed energy savings. Thus, the need to enhance efficiency becomes critical in these households. However, due to a lack of comprehensive data in India, little is understood about their electricity consumption patterns and usage efficiency. Estimating inefficiency and assessing its determinants is crucial for improving their quality of life. This study measures the inefficiency in electricity consumption due to household practices and appliances in social housing in Mumbai, India. It considers technological determinants in addition to socio-economic variables. The study employs primary data collected from rehabilitation housing and slums in Mumbai. Stochastic frontier analysis, a parametric approach, is applied to estimate indicators of electricity consumption and inefficiency. While household size and workforce participation significantly affect consumption behavior in rehabilitation housing, it is limited to the workforce in slums. The ownership of appliances, except for washing machines in slums, also exhibits considerable impacts. The mean efficiency scores of 83% and 91% for rehabilitation housing and slums, respectively, empirically quantify the potential savings achievable. Factors that positively influence inefficiency include the duration of operating refrigerators, washing machines, iron, and AC. These results hold implications for enhancing the uptake of efficient appliances in addition to accelerating energy efficiency retrofits in the region. Policies should focus on awareness and the development of appliance markets through incentives.
Authors:Akshit Gupta, Remko Uijlenhoet
Title: Using street view imagery and deep generative modeling for estimating the health of urban forests
Abstract:
Healthy urban forests comprising of diverse trees and shrubs play a crucial role in mitigating climate change. They provide several key advantages such as providing shade for energy conservation, and intercepting rainfall to reduce flood runoff and soil erosion. Traditional approaches for monitoring the health of urban forests require instrumented inspection techniques, often involving a high amount of human labor and subjective evaluations. As a result, they are not scalable for cities which lack extensive resources. Recent approaches involving multi-spectral imaging data based on terrestrial sensing and satellites, are constrained respectively with challenges related to dedicated deployments and limited spatial resolutions. In this work, we propose an alternative approach for monitoring the urban forests using simplified inputs: street view imagery, tree inventory data and meteorological conditions. We propose to use image-to-image translation networks to estimate two urban forest health parameters, namely, NDVI and CTD. Finally, we aim to compare the generated results with ground truth data using an onsite campaign utilizing handheld multi-spectral and thermal imaging sensors. With the advent and expansion of street view imagery platforms such as Google Street View and Mapillary, this approach should enable effective management of urban forests for the authorities in cities at scale.
Authors:Dekang Zhang, Dan Niu, Zhou Jin, Yichao Dong, Jingweijia Tan, Changyin Sun
Title: A Novel Frequency-Spatial Domain Aware Network for Fast Thermal Prediction in 2.5D ICs
Abstract:
In the post-Moore era, 2.5D chiplet-based ICs present significant challenges in thermal management due to increased power density and thermal hotspots. Neural network-based thermal prediction models can perform real-time predictions for many unseen new designs. However, existing CNN-based and GCN-based methods cannot effectively capture the global thermal features, especially for high-frequency components, hindering prediction accuracy enhancement. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-spatial dual domain aware prediction network (FSA-Heat) for fast and high-accuracy thermal prediction in 2.5D ICs. It integrates high-to-low frequency and spatial domain encoder (FSTE) module with frequency domain cross-scale interaction module (FCIFormer) to achieve high-to-low frequency and global-to-local thermal dissipation feature extraction. Additionally, a frequency-spatial hybrid loss (FSL) is designed to effectively attenuate high-frequency thermal gradient noise and spatial misalignments. The experimental results show that the performance enhancements offered by our proposed method are substantial, outperforming the newly-proposed 2.5D method, GCN+PNA, by considerable margins (over 99% RMSE reduction, 4.23X inference time speedup). Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that FSA-Heat also exhibits robust generalization capabilities.
Authors:Xi Tong, Xing Luo, Jiangxin Yang, Yanpeng Cao
Title: SC3EF: A Joint Self-Correlation and Cross-Correspondence Estimation Framework for Visible and Thermal Image Registration
Abstract:
Multispectral imaging plays a critical role in a range of intelligent transportation applications, including advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), traffic monitoring, and night vision. However, accurate visible and thermal (RGB-T) image registration poses a significant challenge due to the considerable modality differences. In this paper, we present a novel joint Self-Correlation and Cross-Correspondence Estimation Framework (SC3EF), leveraging both local representative features and global contextual cues to effectively generate RGB-T correspondences. For this purpose, we design a convolution-transformer-based pipeline to extract local representative features and encode global correlations of intra-modality for inter-modality correspondence estimation between unaligned visible and thermal images. After merging the local and global correspondence estimation results, we further employ a hierarchical optical flow estimation decoder to progressively refine the estimated dense correspondence maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, outperforming the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on representative RGB-T datasets. Furthermore, it also shows competitive generalization capabilities across challenging scenarios, including large parallax, severe occlusions, adverse weather, and other cross-modal datasets (e.g., RGB-N and RGB-D).
Authors:Mahdi Hasanzadeh, Kasem Khalil, Cynthia Sturton, Ahmad Patooghy
Title: HeatSense: Intelligent Thermal Anomaly Detection for Securing NoC-Enabled MPSoCs
Abstract:
Multi-Processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) are highly vulnerable to thermal attacks that manipulate dynamic thermal management systems. To counter this, we propose an adaptive real-time monitoring mechanism that detects abnormal thermal patterns in chip tiles. Our design space exploration helped identify key thermal features for an efficient anomaly detection module to be implemented at routers of network-enabled MPSoCs. To minimize hardware overhead, we employ weighted moving average (WMA) calculations and bit-shift operations, ensuring a lightweight yet effective implementation. By defining a spectrum of abnormal behaviors, our system successfully detects and mitigates malicious temperature fluctuations, reducing severe cases from 3.00°C to 1.9°C. The anomaly detection module achieves up to 82% of accuracy in detecting thermal attacks, which is only 10-15% less than top-performing machine learning (ML) models like Random Forest. However, our approach reduces hardware usage by up to 75% for logic resources and 100% for specialized resources, making it significantly more efficient than ML-based solutions. This method provides a practical, low-cost solution for resource-constrained environments, ensuring resilience against thermal attacks while maintaining system performance.
Authors:Martin Kocur, Niels Henze
Title: Investigating Environments' and Avatars' Effects on Thermal Perception in Virtual Reality to Reduce Energy Consumption
Abstract:
Understanding thermal regulation and subjective perception of temperature is crucial for improving thermal comfort and human energy consumption in times of global warming. Previous work shows that an environment's color temperature affects the experienced temperature. As virtual reality (VR) enables visual immersion, recent work suggests that a VR scene's color temperature also affects experienced temperature. In addition, virtual avatars representing thermal cues influence users' thermal perception and even the body temperature. As immersive technology becomes increasingly prevalent in daily life, leveraging thermal cues to enhance thermal comfort - without relying on actual thermal energy - presents a promising opportunity. Understanding these effects is crucial for optimizing virtual experiences and promoting sustainable energy practices. Therefore, we propose three controlled experiments to learn more about thermal effects caused by virtual worlds and avatars.
Authors:Bojja Venu, Adam Bosak, Juan Raul Padron-Griffe
Title: Procedural Multiscale Geometry Modeling using Implicit Functions
Abstract:
Materials exhibit geometric structures across mesoscopic to microscopic scales, influencing macroscale properties such as appearance, mechanical strength, and thermal behavior. Capturing and modeling these multiscale structures is challenging but essential for computer graphics, engineering, and materials science. We present a framework inspired by hypertexture methods, using implicit functions and adaptive sphere tracing to synthesize multiscale structures on the fly without precomputation. This framework models volumetric materials with particulate, fibrous, porous, and laminar structures, allowing control over size, shape, density, distribution, and orientation. We enhance structural diversity by superimposing implicit periodic functions while improving computational efficiency. The framework also supports spatially varying particulate media, particle agglomeration, and piling on convex and concave structures, such as rock formations (mesoscale), without explicit simulation. We show its potential in the appearance modeling of volumetric materials and explore how spatially varying properties influence perceived macroscale appearance. Our framework enables seamless multiscale modeling, reconstructing procedural volumetric materials from image and signed distance field (SDF) synthetic exemplars using first-order and gradient-free optimization.
Authors:Athanasios Athanasopoulos, Matúš Mihalák, Marcin Pietrasik
Title: Deep Learning Methods for Detecting Thermal Runaway Events in Battery Production Lines
Abstract:
One of the key safety considerations of battery manufacturing is thermal runaway, the uncontrolled increase in temperature which can lead to fires, explosions, and emissions of toxic gasses. As such, development of automated systems capable of detecting such events is of considerable importance in both academic and industrial contexts. In this work, we investigate the use of deep learning for detecting thermal runaway in the battery production line of VDL Nedcar, a Dutch automobile manufacturer. Specifically, we collect data from the production line to represent both baseline (non thermal runaway) and thermal runaway conditions. Thermal runaway was simulated through the use of external heat and smoke sources. The data consisted of both optical and thermal images which were then preprocessed and fused before serving as input to our models. In this regard, we evaluated three deep-learning models widely used in computer vision including shallow convolutional neural networks, residual neural networks, and vision transformers on two performance metrics. Furthermore, we evaluated these models using explainability methods to gain insight into their ability to capture the relevant feature information from their inputs. The obtained results indicate that the use of deep learning is a viable approach to thermal runaway detection in battery production lines.
Authors:Ramachandran Anantharaman, Carlos Gonzalez Rojas, Luna Artemis van Leeuwen, Leyla Özkan
Title: Estimation of Heat Transfer Coefficient in Heat Exchangers from closed-loop data using Neural Networks
Abstract:
Heat exchangers (HEXs) play a central role in process industries for thermal energy transfer. Fouling, the gradual accumulation of solids on heat transfer surfaces, causes a time-varying decrease in the overall heat transfer coefficient (U(t)), significantly impacting the efficiency of heat transfer. Good estimation and modeling of fouling (the heat transfer coefficient) will lead to better fouling mitigation strategies. This study investigates the identifiability of the time-varying $U(t)$ in HEXs from closed-loop operational data, without external excitation of reference signals or knowledge of the controller parameters. We establish that while the complete system model cannot be identified under these given constraints, the time-varying heat transfer coefficient $U(t)$ remains identifiable. Further, we propose a neural network based architecture, called (Per-PINN), for estimation and modeling the heat transfer coefficient from the closed-loop system data. This Per-PINN model is shown to perform better than the existing Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) based models for inverse parameter learning as it inherently fixes the underlying physical equations and learns only the time-varying parameter U(t).
Authors:Takahiro Ito, Kiwamu Izumi, Isao Kawano, Ikkoh Funaki, Shuichi Sato, Tomotada Akutsu, Kentaro Komori, Mitsuru Musha, Yuta Michimura, Satoshi Satoh, Takuya Iwaki, Kentaro Yokota, Kenta Goto, Katsumi Furukawa, Taro Matsuo, Toshihiro Tsuzuki, Katsuhiko Yamada, Takahiro Sasaki, Taisei Nishishita, Yuki Matsumoto, Chikako Hirose, Wataru Torii, Satoshi Ikari, Koji Nagano, Masaki Ando, Seiji Kawamura, Hidehiro Kaneda, Shinsuke Takeuchi, Shinichiro Sakai
Title: SILVIA: Ultra-precision formation flying demonstration for space-based interferometry
Abstract:
We propose SILVIA (Space Interferometer Laboratory Voyaging towards Innovative Applications), a mission concept designed to demonstrate ultra-precision formation flying between three spacecraft separated by 100 m. SILVIA aims to achieve sub-micrometer precision in relative distance control by integrating spacecraft sensors, laser interferometry, low-thrust and low-noise micro-propulsion for real-time measurement and control of distances and relative orientations between spacecraft. A 100-meter-scale mission in a near-circular low Earth orbit has been identified as an ideal, cost-effective setting for demonstrating SILVIA, as this configuration maintains a good balance between small relative perturbations and low risk for collision. This mission will fill the current technology gap towards future missions, including gravitational wave observatories such as DECIGO (DECihertz Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory), designed to detect the primordial gravitational wave background, and high-contrast nulling infrared interferometers like LIFE (Large Interferometer for Exoplanets), designed for direct imaging of thermal emissions from nearby terrestrial planet candidates. The mission concept and its key technologies are outlined, paving the way for the next generation of high-precision space-based observatories.
Authors:Emma Hannula, Arttu Häkkinen, Antti Solonen, Felipe Uribe, Jana de Wiljes, Lassi Roininen
Title: Partially stochastic deep learning with uncertainty quantification for model predictive heating control
Abstract:
Improving the energy efficiency of building heating systems is crucial for reducing global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Traditional control methods rely on static heating curves that are based solely on outdoor temperature, neglecting system state measurements, such as indoor temperature, and free heat sources, such as solar gain. A more effective strategy is model predictive control (MPC), which optimizes heating control by incorporating system state predictions based on weather forecasts, among other factors. However, current industrial MPC solutions often employ simplified physics-inspired indoor temperature models, sacrificing accuracy for robustness and interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose a partially stochastic deep learning (DL) architecture for building-specific indoor temperature modeling. Unlike most studies that evaluate model performance through simulations or limited test buildings, our experiments across a large dataset of 100 real-world buildings, covering various heating season conditions, demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms a widely used industrial physics-based model in predictive accuracy. The proposed DL architecture shows significant potential to improve thermal comfort and energy efficiency in heating MPC solutions. Although its computational cost is higher than that of the reference model, we discuss why this trade-off is manageable, even in large-scale applications. Unlike deterministic black-box approaches, the partially stochastic DL model offers a critical advantage by enabling pre-assessment of model feasibility through predictive uncertainty quantification. This work advances heating MPC, particularly for buildings with comprehensive datasets on their thermal behavior under various weather conditions.
Authors:Weizheng Zhang, Hao Pan, Lin Lu, Xiaowei Duan, Xin Yan, Ruonan Wang, Qiang Du
Title: DualMS: Implicit Dual-Channel Minimal Surface Optimization for Heat Exchanger Design
Abstract:
Heat exchangers are critical components in a wide range of engineering applications, from energy systems to chemical processing, where efficient thermal management is essential. The design objectives for heat exchangers include maximizing the heat exchange rate while minimizing the pressure drop, requiring both a large interface area and a smooth internal structure. State-of-the-art designs, such as triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS), have proven effective in optimizing heat exchange efficiency. However, TPMS designs are constrained by predefined mathematical equations, limiting their adaptability to freeform boundary shapes. Additionally, TPMS structures do not inherently control flow directions, which can lead to flow stagnation and undesirable pressure drops. This paper presents DualMS, a novel computational framework for optimizing dual-channel minimal surfaces specifically for heat exchanger designs in freeform shapes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to directly optimize minimal surfaces for two-fluid heat exchangers, rather than relying on TPMS. Our approach formulates the heat exchange maximization problem as a constrained connected maximum cut problem on a graph, with flow constraints guiding the optimization process. To address undesirable pressure drops, we model the minimal surface as a classification boundary separating the two fluids, incorporating an additional regularization term for area minimization. We employ a neural network that maps spatial points to binary flow types, enabling it to classify flow skeletons and automatically determine the surface boundary. DualMS demonstrates greater flexibility in surface topology compared to TPMS and achieves superior thermal performance, with lower pressure drops while maintaining a similar heat exchange rate under the same material cost.
Authors:Sara Ruiz-Moreno, Antonio J. Gallego, Manuel Macías, Eduardo F. Camacho
Title: Market-Oriented Flow Allocation for Thermal Solar Plants: An Auction-Based Methodology with Artificial Intelligence
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel method to optimize thermal balance in parabolic trough collector (PTC) plants. It uses a market-based system to distribute flow among loops combined with an artificial neural network (ANN) to reduce computation and data requirements. This auction-based approach balances loop temperatures, accommodating varying thermal losses and collector efficiencies. Validation across different thermal losses, optical efficiencies, and irradiance conditions-sunny, partially cloudy, and cloudy-show improved thermal power output and intercept factors compared to a no-allocation system. It demonstrates scalability and practicality for large solar thermal plants, enhancing overall performance. The method was first validated through simulations on a realistic solar plant model, then adapted and successfully tested in a 50 MW solar trough plant, demonstrating its advantages. Furthermore, the algorithms have been implemented, commissioned, and are currently operating in 13 commercial solar trough plants.
Authors:Mattia Scarpa, Francesco Pase, Ruggero Carli, Mattia Bruschetta, Franscesco Toso
Title: Data-driven Power Loss Identification through Physics-Based Thermal Model Backpropagation
Abstract:
Digital twins for power electronics require accurate power losses whose direct measurements are often impractical or impossible in real-world applications. This paper presents a novel hybrid framework that combines physics-based thermal modeling with data-driven techniques to identify and correct power losses accurately using only temperature measurements. Our approach leverages a cascaded architecture where a neural network learns to correct the outputs of a nominal power loss model by backpropagating through a reduced-order thermal model. We explore two neural architectures, a bootstrapped feedforward network, and a recurrent neural network, demonstrating that the bootstrapped feedforward approach achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency for real-time applications. Between the interconnection, we included normalization strategies and physics-guided training loss functions to preserve stability and ensure physical consistency. Experimental results show that our hybrid model reduces both temperature estimation errors (from 7.2+-6.8°C to 0.3+-0.3°C) and power loss prediction errors (from 5.4+-6.6W to 0.2+-0.3W) compared to traditional physics-based approaches, even in the presence of thermal model uncertainties. This methodology allows us to accurately estimate power losses without direct measurements, making it particularly helpful for real-time industrial applications where sensor placement is hindered by cost and physical limitations.
Authors:Chiaki Kojima, Yuya Muto, Hikaru Akutsu, Rinnosuke Shima, Yoshihiko Susuki
Title: Application of Battery Storage to Switching Predictive Control of Power Distribution Systems Including Road Heating
Abstract:
In regions with heavy snowfall, the living environment is becoming a serious problem due to heavy snow accumulation. A road heating is an electrical device which promotes snow melting by burying a heating cable as a thermal source underground in such regions. When integrating the road heating into power distribution systems, we need to optimize the flow of electric power by appropriately integrating distributed power sources and conventional power distribution equipment. In this paper, we introduce a battery storage to the power distribution system including road heating, and extend the predictive switching control of the systems due to the authors' previous study to the case where battery storage is installed. As a main result, we propose a predictive switching control that utilizes photovoltaic (PV) power generation and surplus power stored in the battery storage effectively, and achieves the reduction of distribution loss, attenuation of voltage fluctuation, and efficient snow melting, simultaneously. We verify the effectiveness of the application of battery storage through numerical simulation using actual time series data of weather conditions and active power of the PV power generation and load.
Authors:Snehamoy Chatterjee, Greg Waite, Sidike Paheding, Luke Bowman
Title: Forecasting Volcanic Radiative Power (VPR) at Fuego Volcano Using Bayesian Regularized Neural Network
Abstract:
Forecasting volcanic activity is critical for hazard assessment and risk mitigation. Volcanic Radiative Power (VPR), derived from thermal remote sensing data, serves as an essential indicator of volcanic activity. In this study, we employ Bayesian Regularized Neural Networks (BRNN) to predict future VPR values based on historical data from Fuego Volcano, comparing its performance against Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG) and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) models. The results indicate that BRNN outperforms SCG and LM, achieving the lowest mean squared error (1.77E+16) and the highest R-squared value (0.50), demonstrating its superior ability to capture VPR variability while minimizing overfitting. Despite these promising results, challenges remain in improving the model's predictive accuracy. Future research should focus on integrating additional geophysical parameters, such as seismic and gas emission data, to enhance forecasting precision. The findings highlight the potential of machine learning models, particularly BRNN, in advancing volcanic activity forecasting, contributing to more effective early warning systems for volcanic hazards.
Authors:Chengyi Wang, Ji Wang
Title: Output-Feedback Boundary Control of Thermally and Flow-Induced Vibrations in Slender Timoshenko Beams
Abstract:
This work is motivated by the engineering challenge of suppressing vibrations in turbine blades of aero engines, which often operate under extreme thermal conditions and high-Mach aerodynamic environments that give rise to complex vibration phenomena, commonly referred to as thermally-induced and flow-induced vibrations. Using Hamilton's variational principle, the system is modeled as a rotating slender Timoshenko beam under thermal and aerodynamic loads, described by a coupled system of 2*2 hyperbolic PIDEs, parabolic PDE, and ODEs, where the nonlocal terms exist in the hyperbolic PDE domain, and where the external disturbance (heat flux) flows into one boundary of the heat PDE. For the general form of such mixed systems, we present the state-feedback control design based on the PDE backstepping method, and then design an extended state observer for the unmeasurable distributed states and external disturbances using only available boundary measurements. In the resulting output-feedback closed-loop system, the state of the uncontrolled boundary, i.e., the furthest state from the control input, is proved to be exponentially convergent to zero, and all signals are proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded. Moreover, if the external disturbance vanishes, the exponential stability of the overall system is obtained. The proposed control design is validated on an aero-engine flexible blade under extreme thermal and aerodynamic conditions.
Authors:Adrian Villalobos, Iban Barrutia, Rafael Pena-Alzola, Tomislav Dragicevic, Jose I. Aizpurua
Title: Comparative analysis and evaluation of ageing forecasting methods for semiconductor devices in online health monitoring
Abstract:
Semiconductor devices, especially MOSFETs (Metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor), are crucial in power electronics, but their reliability is affected by aging processes influenced by cycling and temperature. The primary aging mechanism in discrete semiconductors and power modules is the bond wire lift-off, caused by crack growth due to thermal fatigue. The process is empirically characterized by exponential growth and an abrupt end of life, making long-term aging forecasts challenging. This research presents a comprehensive comparative assessment of different forecasting methods for MOSFET failure forecasting applications. Classical tracking, statistical forecasting and Neural Network (NN) based forecasting models are implemented along with novel Temporal Fusion Transformers (TFTs). A comprehensive comparison is performed assessing their MOSFET ageing forecasting ability for different forecasting horizons. For short-term predictions, all algorithms result in acceptable results, with the best results produced by classical NN forecasting models at the expense of higher computations. For long-term forecasting, only the TFT is able to produce valid outcomes owing to the ability to integrate covariates from the expected future conditions. Additionally, TFT attention points identify key ageing turning points, which indicate new failure modes or accelerated ageing phases.
Authors:Dilshod Nematov, Mirabbos Hojamberdiev
Title: Machine Learning - Driven Materials Discovery: Unlocking Next-Generation Functional Materials -- A minireview
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven techniques is revolutionizing materials discovery, property prediction, and material design by minimizing human intervention and accelerating scientific progress. This review provides a comprehensive overview of smart, machine learning (ML)-driven approaches, emphasizing their role in predicting material properties, discovering novel compounds, and optimizing material structures. Key methodologies ranging from deep learning, graph neural networks, and Bayesian optimization to automated generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) enable the autonomous design of materials with tailored functionalities. By leveraging AutoML frameworks (e.g., AutoGluon, TPOT, and H2O.ai), researchers can automate the model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and feature engineering, significantly improving the efficiency of materials informatics. Furthermore, the integration of AI-driven robotic laboratories and high-throughput computing has established a fully automated pipeline for rapid synthesis and experimental validation, drastically reducing the time and cost of material discovery. This review highlights real-world applications of automated ML-driven approaches in predicting mechanical, thermal, electrical, and optical properties of materials, demonstrating successful cases in superconductors, catalysts, photovoltaics, and energy storage systems. We also address key challenges, such as data quality, interpretability, and the integration of AutoML with quantum computing, which are essential for future advancements. Ultimately, the synergy between AI, automated experimentation, and computational modeling transforms the way the materials are discovered, optimized, and designed, paving the way for next-generation innovations in energy, electronics, and nanotechnology.
Authors:Abhijith M S, Sandra S
Title: Parametric Dynamic Mode Decomposition with multi-linear interpolation for prediction of thermal fields of Al2O3-water nanofluid flows at unseen parameters
Abstract:
The study proposes a data-driven model which combines the Dynamic Mode Decomposition with multi-linear interpolation to predict the thermal fields of nanofluid flows at unseen Reynolds numbers (Re) and particle volume concentrations ($ε$). The flow, considered for the study, is laminar and incompressible. The study employs an in-house Fortran-based solver to predict the thermal fields of Al$_2$O$_3$-water nanofluid flow through a two-dimensional rectangular channel, with the bottom wall subjected to a uniform heat flux. The performance of two models operating in one- and two-dimensional parametric spaces are investigated. Initially, a DMD with linear interpolation (DMD-LI) based solver is used for prediction of temperature of the nanofluid at any Re $>$ 100. The DMD-LI based model, predicts temperature fields with a maximum percentage difference of just 0.0273\%, in comparison with the CFD-based solver at Re =960, and $ε$ = 1.0\%. The corresponding difference in the average Nusselt numbers is only 0.39\%. Following that a DMD with bi-linear interpolation (DMD-BLI) based solver is used for prediction of temperature of the nanofluid at any Re $>$ 100 and $ε$ $>$ 0.5\%. The performance of two different ways of stacking the data are also examined. When compared to the CFD-based model, the DMD-BLI-based model predicts the temperature fields with a maximum percentage difference of 0.21 \%, at Re = 800 and $ε$ = 1.35\%. And the corresponding percentage difference in the average Nusselt number prediction is only 6.08\%. All the results are reported in detail. Along side the important conclusions, the future scope of the study is also listed.
Authors:Ana Sanz Cozcolluela, Yasemin Vardar
Title: Generating Multimodal Textures with a Soft Hydro-Pneumatic Haptic Ring
Abstract:
The growing adoption of extended reality, XR, has driven demand for wearable technologies that can replicate natural tactile sensations and allow users to interact freely with their surroundings using bare fingers. However, most existing wearable haptic technologies that support such free interactions can deliver sensations across limited tactile modalities. Here, we introduce a soft haptic ring and a data-driven rendering methodology to generate multimodal texture sensations. The device integrates pneumatic and hydraulic actuation to simulate roughness, thermal, and softness cues on the proximal phalanx, enabling users to explore surroundings naturally with their fingertips. The rendering methodology dynamically modulates those cues based on the user's exploratory actions. We validated our approach by conducting a user study with fifteen participants, who matched six virtual textures generated by the ring to their real counterparts and rated their perceived sensations. Participants achieved up to ninety percent accuracy in texture matching. The adjective ratings confirmed that the ring delivers distinct, perceptually rich stimuli across all rendered sensations. These findings highlight the ring's potential for immersive XR applications, offering diverse tactile feedback without restricting physical interaction.
Authors:Janis Nötzel, Pere Munar-Vallespir
Title: Infinite-fold Asymptotic Quantum Advantage in Classical Correlation Sensing
Abstract:
We study the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing between correlated thermal noise and uncorrelated thermal noise of the same average energy on $K$ detectors in asymptotic asymmetric hypothesis testing. We compare the performance of heterodyne or homodyne detection with classical post-processing, the most general quantum strategy (involving any arbitrary measurement), and a simple strategy involving a photonic chip and On-Off detection. When the average received energy per detector goes to zero, the photonic chip strategy asymptotically achieves the optimal decrease in the error, while heterodyne/homodyne measurements do not. Thus, we show that linear optics and On-Off measurement are enough to achieve better detection than classical methods when detecting correlations in thermal optical signals.
Authors:Leyang Wang, Joice Lin
Title: LaPIG: Cross-Modal Generation of Paired Thermal and Visible Facial Images
Abstract:
The success of modern machine learning, particularly in facial translation networks, is highly dependent on the availability of high-quality, paired, large-scale datasets. However, acquiring sufficient data is often challenging and costly. Inspired by the recent success of diffusion models in high-quality image synthesis and advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel framework called LLM-assisted Paired Image Generation (LaPIG). This framework enables the construction of comprehensive, high-quality paired visible and thermal images using captions generated by LLMs. Our method encompasses three parts: visible image synthesis with ArcFace embedding, thermal image translation using Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), and caption generation with LLMs. Our approach not only generates multi-view paired visible and thermal images to increase data diversity but also produces high-quality paired data while maintaining their identity information. We evaluate our method on public datasets by comparing it with existing methods, demonstrating the superiority of LaPIG.
Authors:Jun Li, Qifeng Xu, Yifan Lin, Nan Xie
Title: Suppression and Regulation of Thermal Birefringence in Optical Voltage Sensor with Isomerism Electrodes and Arbitrary Electric Field Direction Modulation
Abstract:
The insufficient stability and reliability of Optical Voltage Sensor is primarily caused by thermal stress induced birefringence. In this paper, a method based on arbitrary electric field direction modulation and isomerism electrodes is proposed to suppress or regulate it. With the aid of multi-physics Finite Element Method, Jones Matrix and the theory of photoelastic effect, it is found that metal or transparent isomerism electrodes can generate a special thermal stress distribution, which regulates the birefringence in the optical path and their induced measurement error. The experiment is conducted on a 10mm cubic bismuth germanite crystal, with cutting directions 110, -110 and 001. The experiment result shows that Cu isomerism electrodes with electric field angle of 59.9 degrees could generate 37% less birefringence error compared to parallel plate electrodes, in the temperature range from 25 degrees Celsius to 40 degrees Celsius. However, the Indium Tin Oxide electrodes with field angle of 29.6 degrees produces approximately 7 times error because of its bad ductility and thermal conduction. The proposed modeling and suppression method for birefringence is beneficial to design of high accuracy optical voltage sensor or electro-optical modulator.
Authors:Haoran Ma, Kaihan Zhang, Jiannan Cai
Title: Navigating Heat Exposure: Simulation of Route Planning Based on Visual Language Model Agents
Abstract:
Heat exposure significantly influences pedestrian routing behaviors. Existing methods such as agent-based modeling (ABM) and empirical measurements fail to account for individual physiological variations and environmental perception mechanisms under thermal stress. This results in a lack of human-centred, heat-adaptive routing suggestions. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Vision Language Model (VLM)-driven Persona-Perception-Planning-Memory (PPPM) framework that integrating street view imagery and urban network topology to simulate heat-adaptive pedestrian routing. Through structured prompt engineering on Gemini-2.0 model, eight distinct heat-sensitive personas were created to model mobility behaviors during heat exposure, with empirical validation through questionnaire survey. Results demonstrate that simulation outputs effectively capture inter-persona variations, achieving high significant congruence with observed route preferences and highlighting differences in the factors driving agents decisions. Our framework is highly cost-effective, with simulations costing 0.006USD and taking 47.81s per route. This Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) methodology advances urban climate adaptation research by enabling high-resolution simulation of thermal-responsive mobility patterns, providing actionable insights for climate-resilient urban planning.
Authors:Bo Liu, Wei Wang, Charles Moulinec, Stefano Rolfo, Marion Samler, Ehimen Iyamabo, Constantinos Katsamis, Marc Chevalier
Title: Development of a Cost-Effective Simulation Tool for Loss of Flow Accident Transients in High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors
Abstract:
The aim of this work is to further expand the capability of the coarse-grid Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach, SubChCFD, to effectively simulate transient and buoyancy-influenced flows, which are critical in accident analyses of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGRs). It has been demonstrated in our previous work that SubChCFD is highly adaptable to HTGR fuel designs and performs exceptionally well in modelling steady-state processes. In this study, the approach is extended to simulate a Loss of Flow Accident (LOFA) transient, where coolant circulation is disrupted, causing the transition from forced convection to buoyancy-driven natural circulation within the reactor core. To enable SubChCFD to capture the complex physics involved, corrections were introduced to the empirical correlations to account for the effects of flow unsteadiness, property variation and buoyancy. A 1/12th sector of the reactor core, representing the smallest symmetric unit, was modelled using a coarse mesh of approximately 60 million cells. This mesh size is about 6% of that required for a Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) model, where mesh sizes can typically reach the order of 1 billion cells for such configurations. Simulation results show that SubChCFD effectively captures the thermal hydraulic behaviours of the reactor during a LOFA transient, producing predictions in good agreement with RANS simulations while significantly reducing computational cost.
Authors:Yudhishthira Kundu, Manroop Kaur, Tripty Wig, Kriti Kumar, Pushpanjali Kumari, Vivek Puri, Manish Arora
Title: A Comparison of the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Integration Technology with Nvidia GPU-based Systems for Artificial Intelligence
Abstract:
Cerebras' wafer-scale engine (WSE) technology merges multiple dies on a single wafer. It addresses the challenges of memory bandwidth, latency, and scalability, making it suitable for artificial intelligence. This work evaluates the WSE-3 architecture and compares it with leading GPU-based AI accelerators, notably Nvidia's H100 and B200. The work highlights the advantages of WSE-3 in performance per watt and memory scalability and provides insights into the challenges in manufacturing, thermal management, and reliability. The results suggest that wafer-scale integration can surpass conventional architectures in several metrics, though work is required to address cost-effectiveness and long-term viability.
Authors:E Harshith Kumar Yadav, Rahul Narava, Anshika, Shashi Shekher Jha
Title: Balancing SoC in Battery Cells using Safe Action Perturbations
Abstract:
Managing equal charge levels in active cell balancing while charging a Li-ion battery is challenging. An imbalance in charge levels affects the state of health of the battery, along with the concerns of thermal runaway and fire hazards. Traditional methods focus on safety assurance as a trade-off between safety and charging time. Others deal with battery-specific conditions to ensure safety, therefore losing on the generalization of the control strategies over various configurations of batteries. In this work, we propose a method to learn safe battery charging actions by using a safety-layer as an add-on over a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent. The safety layer perturbs the agent's action to prevent the battery from encountering unsafe or dangerous states. Further, our Deep RL framework focuses on learning a generalized policy that can be effectively employed with varying configurations of batteries. Our experimental results demonstrate that the safety-layer based action perturbation incurs fewer safety violations by avoiding unsafe states along with learning a robust policy for several battery configurations.
Authors:Simon Malacek, José Portela, Yannick Marcus Werner, Sonja Wogrin
Title: Generating Building-Level Heat Demand Time Series by Combining Occupancy Simulations and Thermal Modeling
Abstract:
Despite various efforts, decarbonizing the heating sector remains a significant challenge. To tackle it by smart planning, the availability of highly resolved heating demand data is key. Several existing models provide heating demand only for specific applications. Typically, they either offer time series for a larger area or annual demand data on a building level, but not both simultaneously. Additionally, the diversity in heating demand across different buildings is often not considered. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel method for generating temporally resolved heat demand time series at the building level using publicly available data. The approach integrates a thermal building model with stochastic occupancy simulations that account for variability in user behavior. As a result, the tool serves as a cost-effective resource for cross-sectoral energy system planning and policy development, particularly with a focus on the heating sector. The obtained data can be used to assess the impact of renovation and retrofitting strategies, or to analyze district heating expansion. To illustrate the potential applications of this approach, we conducted a case study in Puertollano (Spain), where we prepared a dataset of heating demand with hourly resolution for each of 9,298 residential buildings. This data was then used to compare two different pathways for the thermal renovation of these buildings. By relying on publicly available data, this method can be adapted and applied to various European regions, offering broad usability in energy system optimization and analysis of decarbonization strategies.
Authors:Y A Rouzoumka, E Terreaux, C Morisseau, J. -P Ovarlez, C Ren
Title: Out-of-Distribution Radar Detection in Compound Clutter and Thermal Noise through Variational Autoencoders
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach to radar target detection using Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs). Known for their ability to learn complex distributions and identify out-ofdistribution samples, the proposed VAE architecture effectively distinguishes radar targets from various noise types, including correlated Gaussian and compound Gaussian clutter, often combined with additive white Gaussian thermal noise. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed VAE outperforms classical adaptive detectors such as the Matched Filter and the Normalized Matched Filter, especially in challenging noise conditions, highlighting its robustness and adaptability in radar applications.
Authors:Zelin Meng, Takanori Fukao
Title: RGB-Thermal Infrared Fusion for Robust Depth Estimation in Complex Environments
Abstract:
Depth estimation in complex real-world scenarios is a challenging task, especially when relying solely on a single modality such as visible light or thermal infrared (THR) imagery. This paper proposes a novel multimodal depth estimation model, RTFusion, which enhances depth estimation accuracy and robustness by integrating the complementary strengths of RGB and THR data. The RGB modality provides rich texture and color information, while the THR modality captures thermal patterns, ensuring stability under adverse lighting conditions such as extreme illumination. The model incorporates a unique fusion mechanism, EGFusion, consisting of the Mutual Complementary Attention (MCA) module for cross-modal feature alignment and the Edge Saliency Enhancement Module (ESEM) to improve edge detail preservation. Comprehensive experiments on the MS2 and ViViD++ datasets demonstrate that the proposed model consistently produces high-quality depth maps across various challenging environments, including nighttime, rainy, and high-glare conditions. The experimental results highlight the potential of the proposed method in applications requiring reliable depth estimation, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality.
Authors:Chengxin Zhang, Yujie Liu, Quan Chen
Title: Neural Network Surrogate Model for Junction Temperature and Hotspot Position in $3$D Multi-Layer High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Chiplets under Varying Thermal Conditions
Abstract:
As the demand for computational power increases, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has become a critical technology for next-generation computing systems. However, the widespread adoption of HBM presents significant thermal management challenges, particularly in multilayer through-silicon-via (TSV) stacked structures under varying thermal conditions, where accurate prediction of junction temperature and hotspot position is essential during the early design. This work develops a data-driven neural network model for the fast prediction of junction temperature and hotspot position in 3D HBM chiplets. The model, trained with a data set of $13,494$ different combinations of thermal condition parameters, sampled from a vast parameter space characterized by high-dimensional combination (up to $3^{27}$), can accurately and quickly infer the junction temperature and hotspot position for any thermal conditions in the parameter space. Moreover, it shows good generalizability for other thermal conditions not considered in the parameter space. The data set is constructed using accurate finite element solvers. This method not only minimizes the reliance on costly experimental tests and extensive computational resources for finite element analysis but also accelerates the design and optimization of complex HBM systems, making it a valuable tool for improving thermal management and performance in high-performance computing applications.
Authors:Oliver Krumpek, Ole Kroeger, Sebastian Mohr
Title: Reproducible Optical Tracking Precision: Evaluating a Static, Near-Parallel Support Structure for OptiTrack PrimeX22 Cameras
Abstract:
This paper presents the design and evaluation of a physical support structure for the OptiTrack X22 tracking systems, constructed from carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) and Invar steel. These materials were chosen for their low thermal expansion, ensuring geometric stability and rigidity necessary for accurate spatial measurements. The support system is scalable and adaptable for various applications and setups. The study further investigates the effects of camera placement and separation in near-parallel configurations on measurement accuracy and precision. Experimental results show a significant correlation between camera distance and measurement precision - closer camera setups yield higher precision. The optimized camera arrangement allowed the prototype to achieve accuracies of +/-0.74 mm along the camera's line of sight and +/-0.12 mm in orthogonal directions. The experiments show that the standard deviation of the noise on a single measurement plane orthogonal to the camera's line of sight vary between 0.02 and 0.07, indicating that the measurement noise is not constant for every point on that specific plane in the meanurement space. Details of the system's design and validation are provided to enhance reproducibility and encourage further development in areas like industrial automation and medical device tracking. By delivering a modular solution with validated accuracy, this work aims to promote innovation and practical application in precision tracking technology, facilitating broader adoption and iterative improvements. This approach enhances the accessibility and versatility of high-precision tracking technology, supporting future progress in the field.
Authors:Rundi Lu, Hao-En Li, Zhengwei Liu, Jin-Peng Liu
Title: Infinite-dimensional Extension of the Linear Combination of Hamiltonian Simulation: Theorems and Applications
Abstract:
We generalize the Linear Combination of Hamiltonian Simulation (LCHS) formula [An, Liu, Lin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 2023] to simulate time-evolution operators in infinite-dimensional spaces, including scenarios involving unbounded operators. This extension, named Inf-LCHS for short, bridges the gap between finite-dimensional quantum simulations and the broader class of infinite-dimensional quantum dynamics governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). Furthermore, we propose two sampling methods by integrating the infinite-dimensional LCHS with Gaussian quadrature schemes (Inf-LCHS-Gaussian) or Monte Carlo integration schemes (Inf-LCHS-MC). We demonstrate the applicability of the Inf-LCHS theorem to a wide range of non-Hermitian dynamics, including linear parabolic PDEs, queueing models (birth-or-death processes), Schrödinger equations with complex potentials, Lindblad equations, and black hole thermal field equations. Our analysis provides insights into simulating general linear dynamics using a finite number of quantum dynamics and includes cost estimates for the corresponding quantum algorithms.
Authors:Sudheer Mishra, Natarajan E
Title: An equal-order virtual element framework for the coupled Stokes-Temperature equation with nonlinear viscosity
Abstract:
In this work, we present and analyze a novel stabilized virtual element formulation for the coupled Stokes-Temperature equation on polygonal meshes, employing equal-order element pairs where viscosity depends on temperature. The main objective of the proposed virtual elements is to develop a stabilized virtual element problem that avoids higher-order derivative terms and bilinear forms involving velocity, pressure and temperature, thereby avoiding the coupling between virtual element pairs. Moreover, it also reduces the violation of divergence-free constraints and offers reasonable control over the gradient of temperature. We derive the stability of the continuous solution using the Banach fixed-point theorem under sufficiently small data. The stabilized coupled virtual element problem is formulated using the local projection-based stabilization methods. We demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of the stabilized discrete solution using the Brouwer fixed-point theorem and the contraction theorem under the assumption of sufficient small data by showing the well-posedness of the stabilized decoupled virtual element problems. Furthermore, we derive the error estimates with optimal convergence rates in the energy norms. We present several numerical examples to confirm the theoretical findings. Additionally, the numerical behavior of the proposed stabilized method is shown to be robust with respect to linear and non-linear thermal conductivity.
Authors:Zhan Wang, Chen Weidong, Huang Zhifeng, Md Raisul Islam, Chua Kian Jon
Title: Feature Engineering Approach to Building Load Prediction: A Case Study for Commercial Building Chiller Plant Optimization in Tropical Weather
Abstract:
In tropical countries with high humidity, air conditioning can account for up to 60% of a building's energy use. For commercial buildings with centralized systems, the efficiency of the chiller plant is vital, and model predictive control provides an effective strategy for optimizing operations through dynamic adjustments based on accurate load predictions. Artificial neural networks are effective for modelling nonlinear systems but are prone to overfitting due to their complexity. Effective feature engineering can mitigate this issue. While weather data are crucial for load prediction, they are often used as raw numerical inputs without advanced processing. Clustering features is a technique that can reduce model complexity and enhance prediction accuracy. Although previous studies have explored clustering algorithms for load prediction, none have applied them to multidimensional weather data, revealing a research gap. This study presents a cooling load prediction model that combines a neural network with Kalman filtering and K-means clustering. Applied to real world data from a commercial skyscraper in Singapore's central business district, the model achieved a 46.5% improvement in prediction accuracy. An optimal chiller sequencing strategy was also developed through genetic algorithm optimization of the predictive load, potentially saving 13.8% in energy. Finally, the study evaluated the integration of thermal energy storage into the chiller plant design, demonstrating potential reductions in capital and operational costs of 26% and 13%, respectively.
Authors:Florian Krause, Felix Schweizer, Alexandra Burger, Franziska Ludewig, Marcus Knips, Katharina Quade, Andreas Wuersig, Dirk Uwe Sauer
Title: Advancing Measurement Capabilities in Lithium-Ion Batteries: Exploring the Potential of Fiber Optic Sensors for Thermal Monitoring of Battery Cells
Abstract:
This work demonstrates the potential of fiber optic sensors for measuring thermal effects in lithium-ion batteries, using a fiber optic measurement method of Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR). The innovative application of fiber sensors allows for spatially resolved temperature measurement, particularly emphasizing the importance of monitoring not just the exterior but also the internal conditions within battery cells. Utilizing inert glass fibers as sensors, which exhibit minimal sensitivity to electric fields, opens up new pathways for their implementation in a wide range of applications, such as battery monitoring. The sensors used in this work provide real-time information along the entire length of the fiber, unlike commonly used Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors. It is shown that using the herein presented novel sensors in a temperature range of 0 to 80 degree celsius reveals a linear thermal dependency with high sensitivity and a local resolution of a few centimeters. Furthermore, this study presents preliminary findings on the potential application of fiber optic sensors in lithium-ion battery (LIB) cells, demonstrating that the steps required for battery integration do not impose any restrictive effects on thermal measurements.
Authors:Daan de Bos, Marc Serra-Garcia
Title: Learning in a Multifield Coherent Ising Machine
Abstract:
We introduce a network of coupled oscillators that can learn to solve a classification task from a set of examples -- performing both training and inference through the nonlinear evolution of the system. We accomplish this by combining three key elements to achieve learning: A long-term memory that stores learned responses, analogous to the synapses in biological brains; a short-term memory that stores the neural activations, similar to the firing patterns of neurons; and an evolution law that updates the synapses in response to novel examples, inspired by synaptic plasticity. Achieving all three elements in wave-based information processors such as metamaterials is a significant challenge. Here, we solve it by leveraging the material multistability to implement long-term memory, and harnessing symmetries and thermal noise to realize the learning rule. Our analysis reveals that the learning mechanism, although inspired by synaptic plasticity, also shares parallelisms with bacterial evolution strategies, where mutation rates increase in the presence of noxious stimuli.
Authors:Xuguang Zhang, Hexiang Zhang, Amjad Almansour, Mrityunjay Singh, Hengling Zhu, Michael C. Halbig, Yi Zheng
Title: Comprehensive Analysis of Thermal Dissipation in Lithium-Ion Battery Packs
Abstract:
Effective thermal management is critical for lithium-ion battery packs' safe and efficient operations, particularly in applications such as drones, where compact designs and varying airflow conditions present unique challenges. This study investigates the thermal performance of a 16-cell lithium-ion battery pack by optimizing cooling airflow configurations and integrating phase change materials (PCMs) for enhanced heat dissipation. Seven geometric configurations were evaluated under airflow speeds ranging from 0 to 15 m/s, reflecting the operational conditions of civilian drones. A comprehensive 3D simulation approach was used to analyze the effects of inlet and outlet configurations, airflow dynamics, and PCM phase transition behavior. Results indicate that the trapezoidal (wide-base) configuration, paired with a 5-inlet and 1-outlet setup, achieves the most balanced performance, effectively maintaining optimal operating temperatures across low and high-speed airflow conditions. PCM integration further stabilized thermal behavior, with phase change durations extending to 12.5 min under tested conditions. These findings highlight the importance of geometric optimization and material integration in advancing compact and reliable thermal management systems for energy-dense battery packs. This study provides a foundation for designing efficient cooling strategies tailored to lightweight applications such as drones and portable energy storage systems.
Authors:Guanzhou Ji, Sriram Narayanan, Azadeh Sawyer, Srinivasa Narasimhan
Title: Indoor Light and Heat Estimation from a Single Panorama
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel application for directly estimating indoor light and heat maps from captured indoor-outdoor High Dynamic Range (HDR) panoramas. In our image-based rendering method, the indoor panorama is used to estimate the 3D room layout, while the corresponding outdoor panorama serves as an environment map to infer spatially-varying light and material properties. We establish a connection between indoor light transport and heat transport and implement transient heat simulation to generate indoor heat panoramas. The sensitivity analysis of various thermal parameters is conducted, and the resulting heat maps are compared with the images captured by the thermal camera in real-world scenarios. This digital application enables automatic indoor light and heat estimation without manual inputs and cumbersome field measurements.
Authors:Yuan Xinjie, Khalid M. Mosalam
Title: Prediction of the Most Fire-Sensitive Point in Building Structures with Differentiable Agents for Thermal Simulators
Abstract:
Fire safety is crucial for ensuring the stability of building structures, yet evaluating whether a structure meets fire safety requirement is challenging. Fires can originate at any point within a structure, and simulating every potential fire scenario is both expensive and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we propose the concept of the Most Fire-Sensitive Point (MFSP) and an efficient machine learning framework for its identification. The MFSP is defined as the location at which a fire, if initiated, would cause the most severe detrimental impact on the building's stability, effectively representing the worst-case fire scenario. In our framework, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) serves as an efficient and differentiable agent for conventional Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulators by predicting the Maximum Interstory Drift Ratio (MIDR) under fire, which then guides the training and evaluation of the MFSP predictor. Additionally, we enhance our framework with a novel edge update mechanism and a transfer learning-based training scheme. Evaluations on a large-scale simulation dataset demonstrate the good performance of the proposed framework in identifying the MFSP, offering a transformative tool for optimizing fire safety assessments in structural design. All developed datasets and codes are open-sourced online.
Authors:Jacob Thrän, Tim C. Green, Robert Shorten
Title: Levelised Cost of Demand Response: Estimating the Cost-Competitiveness of Flexible Demand
Abstract:
To make well-informed investment decisions, energy system stakeholders require reliable cost frameworks for demand response (DR) and storage technologies. While the levelised cost of storage (LCOS) permits comprehensive cost comparisons between different storage technologies, no generic cost measure for the comparison of different DR schemes exists. This paper introduces the levelised cost of demand response (LCODR) which is an analogous measure to the LCOS but crucially differs from it by considering consumer reward payments. Additionally, the value factor from cost estimations of variable renewable energy is adapted to account for the variable availability of DR. The LCODRs for four direct load control (DLC) schemes and twelve storage applications are estimated and contrasted against LCOS literature values for the most competitive storage technologies. The DLC schemes are vehicle-to-grid, smart charging, smart heat pumps, and heat pumps with thermal storage. The results show that only heat pumps with thermal storage consistently outcompete storage technologies with EV-based DR schemes being competitive for some applications. The results and the underlying methodology offer a tool for energy system stakeholders to assess the competitiveness of DR schemes even with limited user data.
Authors:Hesameddin Safari, Henning Wessels
Title: Physics-Informed Surrogates for Temperature Prediction of Multi-Tracks in Laser Powder Bed Fusion
Abstract:
Modeling plays a critical role in additive manufacturing (AM), enabling a deeper understanding of underlying processes. Parametric solutions for such models are of great importance, enabling the optimization of production processes and considerable cost reductions. However, the complexity of the problem and diversity of spatio-temporal scales involved in the process pose significant challenges for traditional numerical methods. Surrogate models offer a powerful alternative by accelerating simulations and facilitating real-time monitoring and control. The present study presents an operator learning approach that relies on the deep operator network (DeepONet) and physics-informed neural networks (PINN) to predict the three-dimensional temperature distribution during melting and consolidation in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). Parametric solutions for both single-track and multi-track scenarios with respect to tool path are obtained. To address the challenges in obtaining parametric solutions for multi-track scenarios using DeepONet architecture, a sequential PINN approach is proposed to efficiently manage the increased training complexity inherent in those scenarios. The accuracy and consistency of the model are verified against finite-difference computations. The developed surrogate allows us to efficiently analyze the effect of scanning paths and laser parameters on the thermal history.
Authors:Romuald Ait-Bachir, Carlos Granero-Belinchon, Aurélie Michel, Julien Michel, Xavier Briottet, Lucas Drumetz
Title: Land Surface Temperature Super-Resolution with a Scale-Invariance-Free Neural Approach: Application to MODIS
Abstract:
Due to the trade-off between the temporal and spatial resolution of thermal spaceborne sensors, super-resolution methods have been developed to provide fine-scale Land SurfaceTemperature (LST) maps. Most of them are trained at low resolution but applied at fine resolution, and so they require a scale-invariance hypothesis that is not always adapted. Themain contribution of this work is the introduction of a Scale-Invariance-Free approach for training Neural Network (NN) models, and the implementation of two NN models, calledScale-Invariance-Free Convolutional Neural Network for Super-Resolution (SIF-CNN-SR) for the super-resolution of MODIS LST products. The Scale-Invariance-Free approach consists ontraining the models in order to provide LST maps at high spatial resolution that recover the initial LST when they are degraded at low resolution and that contain fine-scale texturesinformed by the high resolution NDVI. The second contribution of this work is the release of a test database with ASTER LST images concomitant with MODIS ones that can be usedfor evaluation of super-resolution algorithms. We compare the two proposed models, SIF-CNN-SR1 and SIF-CNN-SR2, with four state-of-the-art methods, Bicubic, DMS, ATPRK, Tsharp,and a CNN sharing the same architecture as SIF-CNN-SR but trained under the scale-invariance hypothesis. We show that SIF-CNN-SR1 outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and the other two CNN models as evaluated with LPIPS and Fourier space metrics focusing on the analysis of textures. These results and the available ASTER-MODIS database for evaluation are promising for future studies on super-resolution of LST.
Authors:Muhammad Ramzy Altahhan, Lynn Munday, Yousry Azmy
Title: Multiphysics Continuous Shape Optimization of the TAP Reactor Components
Abstract:
The Transatomic Power (TAP) reactor has an unusual design for a molten salt reactor technology, building upon the foundation laid by the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). This design introduces three key modifications to enhance efficiency and compactness: a revised fuel salt composition, an alternative moderator material, and moderator pins surrounded by the molten salt fuel. Unlike traditional solid-fueled reactors that rely on excess positive reactivity at the beginning of life, the TAP concept employs a dynamic approach. The core's design, featuring a cylindrical geometry with square assemblies of moderator rods surrounded by flowing fuel salt, provides flexibility in adjusting the moderator-to-fuel ratio during operation - using movable moderator rods - further adding criticality control capability in addition to the control rods system. Shape optimization of the core can play a crucial role in enhancing performance and efficiency. By applying multiphysics continuous shape optimization techniques to key components, such as the unit cells of the TAP reactor or its moderator assemblies, we can fine-tune the reactor's geometry to achieve optimal performance in key physics like neutronics and thermal hydraulics. We explore this aspect using the optimization module in the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework which allows for multiphysics continuous shape optimization. The results reported here illustrate the benefits of applying continuous shape optimization in the design of nuclear reactor components and can help in extending the TAP reactor's performance.
Authors:Àlex Solé, Albert Mosella-Montoro, Joan Cardona, Silvia Gómez-Coca, Daniel Aravena, Eliseo Ruiz, Javier Ruiz-Hidalgo
Title: A Cartesian Encoding Graph Neural Network for Crystal Structures Property Prediction: Application to Thermal Ellipsoid Estimation
Abstract:
In diffraction-based crystal structure analysis, thermal ellipsoids, quantified via Anisotropic Displacement Parameters (ADPs), are critical yet challenging to determine. ADPs capture atomic vibrations, reflecting thermal and structural properties, but traditional computation is often expensive. This paper introduces CartNet, a novel graph neural network (GNN) for efficiently predicting crystal properties by encoding atomic geometry into Cartesian coordinates alongside the crystal temperature. CartNet integrates a neighbour equalization technique to emphasize covalent and contact interactions, and a Cholesky-based head to ensure valid ADP predictions. We also propose a rotational SO(3) data augmentation strategy during training to handle unseen orientations. An ADP dataset with over 200,000 experimental crystal structures from the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) was curated to validate the approach. CartNet significantly reduces computational costs and outperforms existing methods in ADP prediction by 10.87%, while delivering a 34.77% improvement over theoretical approaches. We further evaluated CartNet on other datasets covering formation energy, band gap, total energy, energy above the convex hull, bulk moduli, and shear moduli, achieving 7.71% better results on the Jarvis Dataset and 13.16% on the Materials Project Dataset. These gains establish CartNet as a state-of-the-art solution for diverse crystal property predictions. Project website and online demo: https://www.ee.ub.edu/cartnet
Authors:Karthik Reddy Lyathakula, Aseem Muhammad, Sevki Cesmeci
Title: Statistical Design of Thermal Protection System Using Physics-Informed Neural Network
Abstract:
Thermal protection systems (TPS) of space vehicles are designed computationally rather than experimentally. They are validated using ground experiments, but all aspects of the flight cannot be replicated on ground. This ground-to-flight mapping introduces uncertainties which need to be accounted for while designing any thermal protection system. Thus, precise computational models along with uncertainty quantification in the models are required to design the TPS. The focus of this study is to estimate the thermal material parameters of TPS based on the target reliability requirements using statistical methods. To perform uncertainty quantification (UQ) of a system, a simulated model of the system needs to be solved many times on statistical samples, increasing the computational time and cost of the overall process. A physics-informed neural network (PINN) model is used in the analysis instead of traditional physics based numerical solutions. The accuracy of PINN is comparable to that of the numerical solution. To find the parameter distribution, sampling of the parameter space is performed using Sequential Monte- Carlo (SMC) method. The sampling method is efficient as it generates samples based on the target distribution in parallel and it also generates diverse samples for proper UQ. Combining the use of both PINN predictive model and SMC sampling, the framework can approximate the parameter distributions that satisfy the TPS design reliability constraints. The framework achieved remarkable increases in the speed of performing the reliability analysis of the TPS. This reliability analysis can be used for design optimization of the TPS based on risk analysis along with other systems of the vehicle.
Authors:Abdollah Hajalilou, Elahe Parvini, Tiago A. Morgado, Pedro Alhais Lopes, M. Estrela Melo Jorge, Marta Freitas, Mahmoud Tavakoli
Title: Replacing the Gallium Oxide Shell with Conductive Ag: Toward a Printable and Recyclable Composite for Highly Stretchable Electronics, Electromagnetic Shielding, and Thermal Interfaces
Abstract:
Liquid metal (LM)-based composites hold promise for soft electronics due to their high conductivity and fluidic nature. However, the presence of α_Ga2O3 and GaOOH layers around LM droplets impairs conductivity and performance. We tackle this issue by replacing the oxide layer with conductive silver (Ag) using an ultrasonic_assisted galvanic replacement reaction. The Ag_coated nanoparticles form aggregated, porous microparticles that are mixed with styrene_isoprene_styrene (SIS) polymers, resulting in a digitally printable composite with superior electrical conductivity and electromechanical properties compared to conventional fillers. Adding more LM enhances these properties further. The composite achieves EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) exceeding 75 dB in the X_band frequency range, even at 200 per cent strain, meeting stringent military and medical standards. It is applicable in wireless communications and Bluetooth signal blocking and as a thermal interface material (TIM). Additionally, we highlight its recyclability using a biodegradable solvent, underscoring its eco_friendly potential. This composite represents a significant advancement in stretchable electronics and EMI shielding, with implications for wearable and bioelectronic applications.
Authors:Max Sibeijn, Saeed Ahmed, Mohammad Khosravi, Tamás Keviczky
Title: Economic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of Prosumer District Heating Networks: The Extended Version
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an economic nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for district heating networks (DHNs). The proposed method features prosumers, multiple producers, and storage systems, which are essential components of 4th generation DHNs. These networks are characterized by their ability to optimize their operations, aiming to reduce supply temperatures, accommodate distributed heat sources, and leverage the flexibility provided by thermal inertia and storage, all crucial for achieving a fossil-fuel-free energy supply. Developing a smart energy management system to accomplish these goals requires detailed models of highly complex nonlinear systems and computational algorithms able to handle large-scale optimization problems. To address this, we introduce a graph-based optimization-oriented model that efficiently integrates distributed producers, prosumers, storage buffers, and bidirectional pipe flows, such that it can be implemented in a real-time MPC setting. Furthermore, we conduct several numerical experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in closed-loop. Our findings demonstrate that the MPC methods achieved up to 9% cost improvement over traditional rule-based controllers while better maintaining system constraints.
Authors:Riccardo Talami, Jonathan Wright, Bianca Howard
Title: Evaluating the effectiveness, reliability and efficiency of a multi-objective sequential optimization approach for building performance design
Abstract:
The complexity of performance-based building design stems from the evaluation of numerous candidate design options, driven by the plethora of variables, objectives, and constraints inherent in multi-disciplinary projects. This necessitates optimization approaches to support the identification of well performing designs while reducing the computational time of performance evaluation. In response, this paper proposes and evaluates a sequential approach for multi-objective design optimization of building geometry, fabric, HVAC system and controls for building performance. This approach involves sequential optimizations with optimal solutions from previous stages passed to the next. The performance of the sequential approach is benchmarked against a full factorial search, assessing its effectiveness in finding global optima, solution quality, reliability to scale and variations of problem formulations, and computational efficiency compared to the NSGA-II algorithm. 24 configurations of the sequential approach are tested on a multi-scale case study, simulating 874 to 4,147,200 design options for an office building, aiming to minimize energy demand while maintaining thermal comfort. A two-stage sequential process-(building geometry + fabric) and (HVAC system + controls) identified the same Pareto-optimal solutions as the full factorial search across all four scales and variations of problem formulations, demonstrating 100% effectiveness and reliability. This approach required 100,700 function evaluations, representing a 91.2% reduction in computational effort compared to the full factorial search. In contrast, NSGA-II achieved only 73.5% of the global optima with the same number of function evaluations. This research indicates that a sequential optimization approach is a highly efficient and robust alternative to the standard NSGA-II algorithm.
Authors:Jose Guajardo, Ali Niknejad
Title: Open-source End-to-End Digital Beamforming System Modeling
Abstract:
Digital beamforming forms the foundation for massive MIMO in 6G wireless communications. At their core, digital beamforming architectures provide key benefits such as faster beam search, interference nulling via zero-force beamforming, higher spectral capacity, and more increased flexibility. However, they generally tradeoff power consumption due to the large number of ADCs in such systems. This paper introduces an open-source MATLAB-based behavioral hardware model of a general digital beamforming system. More specifically, it models an end-to-end uplink between an arbitrary number of user elements (UEs) and an arbitrarily large base station (BS) with and without a strong interferer. This paper also presents and validates an equation-based model for the effects of interference on thermal and quantization noise. The behavioral model presented in this paper aims to deepen understanding of such digital beamforming systems to enable system designers to make optimizations. The results presented in this paper primarily center on implementations with low-resolution ADCs and, thus, focus on the effects of system parameters, including interferer strength, on quantization noise.
Authors:Mengfan Wu, Shenshen Yan, Jie Ren
Title: Hierarchy-Boosted Funnel Learning for Identifying Semiconductors with Ultralow Lattice Thermal Conductivity
Abstract:
Data-driven machine learning (ML) has demonstrated tremendous potential in material property predictions. However, the scarcity of materials data with costly property labels in the vast chemical space presents a significant challenge for ML in efficiently predicting properties and uncovering structure-property relationships. Here, we propose a novel hierarchy-boosted funnel learning (HiBoFL) framework, which is successfully applied to identify semiconductors with ultralow lattice thermal conductivity ($κ_\mathrm{L}$). By training on only a few hundred materials targeted by unsupervised learning from a pool of hundreds of thousands, we achieve efficient and interpretable supervised predictions of ultralow $κ_\mathrm{L}$, thereby circumventing large-scale brute-force \textit{ab initio} calculations without clear objectives. As a result, we provide a list of candidates with ultralow $κ_\mathrm{L}$ for potential thermoelectric applications and discover a new factor that significantly influences structural anharmonicity. This HiBoFL framework offers a novel practical pathway for accelerating the discovery of functional materials.
Authors:Meriem Chabekh, Nadhir Chougui, Delfim F. M. Torres
Title: Analysis of a Shear beam model with suspenders in thermoelasticity of type III
Abstract:
We conduct an analysis of a one-dimensional linear problem that describes the vibrations of a connected suspension bridge. In this model, the single-span roadbed is represented as a thermoelastic Shear beam without rotary inertia. We incorporate thermal dissipation into the transverse displacement equation, following Green and Naghdi's theory. Our work demonstrates the existence of a global solution by employing classical Faedo-Galerkin approximations and three a priori estimates. Furthermore, we establish exponential stability through the application of the energy method. For numerical study, we propose a spatial discretization using finite elements and a temporal discretization through an implicit Euler scheme. In doing so, we prove discrete stability properties and a priori error estimates for the discrete problem. To provide a practical dimension to our theoretical findings, we present a set of numerical simulations.
Authors:Zhongxuan Zhang, Bi Zeng, Xinyu Ni, Yimin Du
Title: BTMTrack: Robust RGB-T Tracking via Dual-template Bridging and Temporal-Modal Candidate Elimination
Abstract:
RGB-T tracking leverages the complementary strengths of RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) modalities to address challenging scenarios such as low illumination and adverse weather. However, existing methods often fail to effectively integrate temporal information and perform efficient cross-modal interactions, which constrain their adaptability to dynamic targets. In this paper, we propose BTMTrack, a novel framework for RGB-T tracking. The core of our approach lies in the dual-template backbone network and the Temporal-Modal Candidate Elimination (TMCE) strategy. The dual-template backbone effectively integrates temporal information, while the TMCE strategy focuses the model on target-relevant tokens by evaluating temporal and modal correlations, reducing computational overhead and avoiding irrelevant background noise. Building upon this foundation, we propose the Temporal Dual Template Bridging (TDTB) module, which facilitates precise cross-modal fusion through dynamically filtered tokens. This approach further strengthens the interaction between templates and the search region. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BTMTrack. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 72.3% precision rate on the LasHeR test set and competitive results on RGBT210 and RGBT234 datasets.
Authors:Changyou Geng, Dezhi Ren, Enkai Mao, Changfu Zou, Mario Vašak, Xinyi Zheng, Weiji Han
Title: Fundamental Techniques for Optimal Control of Reconfigurable Battery Systems: System Modeling and Feasible Search Space Construction
Abstract:
Reconfigurable battery systems (RBSs) are emerging as a promising solution to improving fault tolerance, charge and thermal balance, energy delivery, etc. To optimize these performance metrics of RBSs, high-dimensional nonlinear integer programming problems need to be formulated and solved. To accomplish this, it is necessary to address several critical challenges stemming from nonlinear battery characteristics, discrete switch states, dynamic system configurations, as well as the curse of dimensionality inherent in large-scale RBSs. Thus, we propose a unified modeling framework to accommodate various possible configurations of an RBS and even to cover different RBS designs and their hybrid combinations, enabling the problem formulation for the RBS optimal control and facilitating the RBS topology design.Further, to solve the formulated RBS optimal control problems, the search space is narrowed to encompass only the feasible solutions, thereby ensuring safe battery connections while substantially curtailing search efforts. These proposed techniques, focusing on unifying the system modeling and narrowing the search space, lay a solid foundation for effectively formulating and efficiently solving RBS optimal control problems. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed techniques are demonstrated by both simulation and experimental tests.
Authors:Thomas J. Smart, Bilen Emek Abali, Hans Boschker, Wolfgang Braun
Title: Deposition Rates in Thermal Laser Epitaxy: Simulation and Experiment
Abstract:
The modeling of deposition rates in Thermal Laser Epitaxy (TLE) is essential for the accurate prediction of the evaporation process and for improved dynamic process control. We demonstrate excellent agreement between experimental data and a model based on a finite element simulation that describes the temperature distribution of an elemental source when irradiated with continuous wave laser radiation. The simulation strongly depends on the thermophysical constants of the material, data of which is lacking for many elements. Effective values for the parameters may be determined with precision by means of an unambiguous reference provided by the melting point of the material, which is directly observed during the experiments. TLE may therefore be used to study the high temperature thermophysical and optical properties of the elements.
Authors:Grant Ruan, Munther A. Dahleh
Title: Temperature-Controlled Smart Charging for Electric Vehicles in Cold Climates
Abstract:
The battery performance and lifespan of electric vehicles (EVs) degrade significantly in cold climates, requiring a considerable amount of energy to heat up the EV batteries. This paper proposes a novel technology, namely temperature-controlled smart charging, to coordinate the heating/charging power and reduce the total energy use of a solar-powered EV charging station. Instead of fixing the battery temperature setpoints, we analyze the thermal dynamics and inertia of EV batteries, and decide the optimal timing and proper amount of energy allocated for heating. In addition, a temperature-sensitive charging model is formulated with consideration of dynamic charging rates as well as battery health. We further tailor acceleration algorithms for large-scale EV charging, including the reduced-order dual decomposition and vehicle rescheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed temperature-controlled smart charging is superior in capturing the flexibility value of EV batteries and making full use of the rooftop solar energy. The proposed model typically achieves a 12.5--18.4% reduction in the charging cost and a 0.4--6.8% drop in the overhead energy use for heating.
Authors:Fatemeh Hossein-Khani, Omid Akbari
Title: A Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Mapping Method to Improve the Reliability of Clustered Manycores
Abstract:
The increasing scale of manycore systems poses significant challenges in managing reliability while meeting performance demands. Simultaneously, these systems become more susceptible to different aging mechanisms such as negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI), hot carrier injection (HCI), and thermal cycling (TC), as well as the electromigration (EM) phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based task mapping method to improve the reliability of manycore systems considering the aforementioned aging mechanisms, which consists of three steps including bin packing, task-to-bin mapping, and task-to-core mapping. In the initial step, a density-based spatial application with noise (DBSCAN) clustering method is employed to compose some clusters (bins) based on the cores temperature. Then, the Q-learning algorithm is used for the two latter steps, to map the arrived task on a core such that the minimum thermal variation is occurred among all the bins. Compared to the state-of-the-art works, the proposed method is performed during runtime without requiring any parameter to be calculated offline. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated on 16, 32, and 64 cores systems using SPLASH2 and PARSEC benchmark suite applications. The results demonstrate up to 27% increase in the mean time to failure (MTTF) compared to the state-of-the-art task mapping techniques.
Authors:Dmitriy Y. Anistratov, Terry S. Haut
Title: Multilevel Method with Low-Order Equations of Mixed Types and Two Grids in Photon Energy for Thermal Radiative Transfer
Abstract:
Thermal radiative transfer (TRT) is an essential piece of physics in inertial confinement fusion, high-energy density physics, astrophysics etc. The physical models of this type of problem are defined by strongly coupled differential equations describing multiphysics phenomena. This paper presents a new nonlinear multilevel iterative method with two photon energy grids for solving the multigroup radiative transfer equation (RTE) coupled with the material energy balance equation (MEB). The multilevel system of equations of the method is formulated by means of a nonlinear projection approach. The RTE is projected over elements of phase space to derive the low-order equations of different types. The hierarchy of equations consists of (1) multigroup weighted flux equations which can be interpreted as the multigroup RTE averaged over subintervals of angular range and (2) the effective grey (one-group) equations which are spectrum averaged low-order quasidiffusion (aka variable Eddington factor) equations. The system of RTE, low-order and MEB equations is approximated by the fully implicit Euler time-integration method in which absorption coefficient and emission term are evaluated at the current time step. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate convergence of a multilevel iteration algorithm in the Fleck-Cummings test problem with Marshak wave solved with large number of photon energy groups.
Authors:Antonio Alcántara, Pablo Diaz-Cachinero, Alberto Sánchez-González, Carlos Ruiz
Title: Leveraging Neural Networks to Optimize Heliostat Field Aiming Strategies in Concentrating Solar Power Tower Plants
Abstract:
Concentrating Solar Power Tower (CSPT) plants rely on heliostat fields to focus sunlight onto a central receiver. Although simple aiming strategies, such as directing all heliostats to the receivers equator, can maximize energy collection, they often result in uneven flux distributions that lead to hotspots, thermal stresses, and reduced receiver lifetimes. This paper presents a novel, data-driven approach that integrates constraint learning, neural network-based surrogates, and mathematical optimization to overcome these challenges. The methodology learns complex heliostat-to-receiver flux interactions from simulation data, constructing a surrogate model that is embedded into a tractable optimization framework. By maximizing a tailored quality score that balances energy collection and flux uniformity, the approach yields smoothly distributed flux profiles and mitigates excessive thermal peaks. An iterative refinement process, guided by the trust region and progressive data sampling, ensures the surrogate model improves the obtained solution by exploring new spaces during the iterations. Results from a real CSPT case study demonstrate that the proposed approach surpasses conventional heuristic methods, offering flatter flux distributions and safer thermal conditions without a substantial loss in overall energy capture.
Authors:Maohua Yan, Ruicheng Wang, Ke Liu
Title: Populating cellular metamaterials on the extrema of attainable elasticity through neuroevolution
Abstract:
The trade-offs between different mechanical properties of materials pose fundamental challenges in engineering material design, such as balancing stiffness versus toughness, weight versus energy-absorbing capacity, and among the various elastic coefficients. Although gradient-based topology optimization approaches have been effective in finding specific designs and properties, they are not efficient tools for surveying the vast design space of metamaterials, and thus unable to reveal the attainable bound of interdependent material properties. Other common methods, such as parametric design or data-driven approaches, are limited by either the lack of diversity in geometry or the difficulty to extrapolate from known data, respectively. In this work, we formulate the simultaneous exploration of multiple competing material properties as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem and employ a neuroevolution algorithm to efficiently solve it. The Compositional Pattern-Producing Networks (CPPNs) is used as the generative model for unit cell designs, which provide very compact yet lossless encoding of geometry. A modified Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm is employed to evolve the CPPNs such that they create metamaterial designs on the Pareto front of the MOO problem, revealing empirical bounds of different combinations of elastic properties. Looking ahead, our method serves as a universal framework for the computational discovery of diverse metamaterials across a range of fields, including robotics, biomedicine, thermal engineering, and photonics.
Authors:Arturo Rodriguez, Ashesh Chattopadhyay, Piyush Kumar, Luis F. Rodriguez, Vinod Kumar
Title: Partition of Unity Physics-Informed Neural Networks (POU-PINNs): An Unsupervised Framework for Physics-Informed Domain Decomposition and Mixtures of Experts
Abstract:
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) commonly address ill-posed inverse problems by uncovering unknown physics. This study presents a novel unsupervised learning framework that identifies spatial subdomains with specific governing physics. It uses the partition of unity networks (POUs) to divide the space into subdomains, assigning unique nonlinear model parameters to each, which are integrated into the physics model. A vital feature of this method is a physics residual-based loss function that detects variations in physical properties without requiring labeled data. This approach enables the discovery of spatial decompositions and nonlinear parameters in partial differential equations (PDEs), optimizing the solution space by dividing it into subdomains and improving accuracy. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through applications in porous media thermal ablation and ice-sheet modeling, showcasing its potential for tackling real-world physics challenges.
Authors:Yu-Xuan Chen, Jing Sun, Bo-Qi Meng
Title: Recent development of optical electric current transformer and its obstacles
Abstract:
Conventional electromagnetic induction-based current transformers suffer from issues such as bulky and complex structures, slow response times, and low safety levels. Consequently, researchers have explored combining various sensing technologies with optical fibers to develop optical current transformers that could become the primary choice for power systems in the future. With the maturation of optoelectronic technology, optical current transformers have emerged. They offer outstanding advantages, including high sensitivity, integration, stability, and the ability to operate in complex environments. This review categorizes optical current transformers based on different principles, including all-fiber current transformers, those based on magnetostrictive effects, magneto-optic effects, and thermal effects. It also discusses their principles, structures, manufacturing techniques, and signal processing, while forecasting their future development trends.
Authors:Gaurav Sharma, P R Kumar
Title: Optimal demand response policies for inertial thermal loads under stochastic renewable sources
Abstract:
In this paper, we consider the problem of preferentially utilizing intermittent renewable power, such as wind, optimally to support thermal inertial loads in a microgrid environment. Thermal inertial loads can be programmed to preferentially consume from renewable sources. The flexibility in power consumption of inertial loads therefore can be used to absorb the fluctuations in intermittently available renewable power sources, and promote reduction of fossil fuel based costly non-renewable generation. Under a model which promotes renewable consumption by penalizing the non-renewable, but does not account for variations in the end-user requirements, the optimal solution leads to all the users' temperatures behave in a lockstep fashion, that is the power is allocated in such a fashion that all the temperatures are brought to a common value and they are kept the same after that point, resulting in synchronization among all the loads. In the first part, we showed that under a model which additionally penalizes the comfort range violation, the optimal solution is in-fact of desynchronization nature, where the temperatures are intentionally kept apart to avoid power surges resulting from simultaneous comfort violation from many loads.
Authors:N. Benjamin Murphy, Daniel Hallman, Elena Cherkaev, Kenneth M. Golden
Title: Spectral theory of effective transport for discrete uniaxial polycrystalline materials
Abstract:
We previously demonstrated that the bulk transport coefficients of uniaxial polycrystalline materials, including electrical and thermal conductivity, diffusivity, complex permittivity, and magnetic permeability, have Stieltjes integral representations involving spectral measures of self-adjoint random operators. The integral representations follow from resolvent representations of physical fields involving these self-adjoint operators, such as the electric field $\boldsymbol{E}$ and current density $\boldsymbol{J}$ associated with conductive media with local conductivity $\boldsymbolσ$ and resistivity $\boldsymbolρ$ matrices. In this article, we provide a discrete matrix analysis of this mathematical framework which parallels the continuum theory. We show that discretizations of the operators yield real-symmetric random matrices which are composed of projection matrices. We derive discrete resolvent representations for $\boldsymbol{E}$ and $\boldsymbol{J}$ involving the matrices which lead to eigenvector expansions of $\boldsymbol{E}$ and $\boldsymbol{J}$. We derive discrete Stieltjes integral representations for the components of the effective conductivity and resistivity matrices, $\boldsymbolσ^*$ and $\boldsymbolρ^*$, involving spectral measures for the real-symmetric random matrices, which are given explicitly in terms of their real eigenvalues and orthonormal eigenvectors. We provide a projection method that uses properties of the projection matrices to show that the spectral measure can be computed by much smaller matrices, which leads to a more efficient and stable numerical algorithm for the computation of bulk transport coefficients and physical fields. We demonstrate this algorithm by numerically computing the spectral measure and current density for model 2D and 3D isotropic polycrystalline media with checkerboard microgeometry.
Authors:Saksham Sharma, Akshit Raizada, Suresh Sundaram
Title: IRisPath: Enhancing Costmap for Off-Road Navigation with Robust IR-RGB Fusion for Improved Day and Night Traversability
Abstract:
Autonomous off-road navigation is required for applications in agriculture, construction, search and rescue and defence. Traditional on-road autonomous methods struggle with dynamic terrains, leading to poor vehicle control in off-road conditions. Recent deep-learning models have used perception sensors along with kinesthetic feedback for navigation on such terrains. However, this approach has out-of-domain uncertainty. Factors like change in time of day and weather impacts the performance of the model. We propose a multi modal fusion network "IRisPath" capable of using Thermal and RGB images to provide robustness against dynamic weather and light conditions. To aid further works in this domain, we also open-source a day-night dataset with Thermal and RGB images along with pseudo-labels for traversability. In order to co-register for fusion model we also develop a novel method for targetless extrinsic calibration of Thermal, LiDAR and RGB cameras with translation accuracy of +/-1.7cm and rotation accuracy of +/-0.827degrees.
Authors:Arijit Samal, Haroon R Lone
Title: Thermal Vision: Pioneering Non-Invasive Temperature Tracking in Congested Spaces
Abstract:
Non-invasive temperature monitoring of individuals plays a crucial role in identifying and isolating symptomatic individuals. Temperature monitoring becomes particularly vital in settings characterized by close human proximity, often referred to as dense settings. However, existing research on non-invasive temperature estimation using thermal cameras has predominantly focused on sparse settings. Unfortunately, the risk of disease transmission is significantly higher in dense settings like movie theaters or classrooms. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop robust temperature estimation methods tailored explicitly for dense settings. Our study proposes a non-invasive temperature estimation system that combines a thermal camera with an edge device. Our system employs YOLO models for face detection and utilizes a regression framework for temperature estimation. We evaluated the system on a diverse dataset collected in dense and sparse settings. Our proposed face detection model achieves an impressive mAP score of over 84 in both in-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations. Furthermore, the regression framework demonstrates remarkable performance with a mean square error of 0.18$^{\circ}$C and an impressive $R^2$ score of 0.96. Our experiments' results highlight the developed system's effectiveness, positioning it as a promising solution for continuous temperature monitoring in real-world applications. With this paper, we release our dataset and programming code publicly.
Authors:Simon Mielke, Anthony Stein
Title: Excretion Detection in Pigsties Using Convolutional and Transformerbased Deep Neural Networks
Abstract:
Animal excretions in form of urine puddles and feces are a significant source of emissions in livestock farming. Automated detection of soiled floor in barns can contribute to improved management processes but also the derived information can be used to model emission dynamics. Previous research approaches to determine the puddle area require manual detection of the puddle in the barn. While humans can detect animal excretions on thermal images of a livestock barn, automated approaches using thresholds fail due to other objects of the same temperature, such as the animals themselves. In addition, various parameters such as the type of housing, animal species, age, sex, weather and unknown factors can influence the type and shape of excretions. Due to this heterogeneity, a method for automated detection of excretions must therefore be not only be accurate but also robust to varying conditions. These requirements can be met by using contemporary deep learning models from the field of artificial intelligence. This work is the first to investigate the suitability of different deep learning models for the detection of excretions in pigsties, thereby comparing established convolutional architectures with recent transformer-based approaches. The detection models Faster R-CNN, YOLOv8, DETR and DAB-DETR are compared and statistically assessed on two created training datasets representing two pig houses. We apply a method derived from nested cross-validation and report on the results in terms of eight common detection metrics. Our work demonstrates that all investigated deep learning models are generally suitable for reliably detecting excretions with an average precision of over 90%. The models also show robustness on out of distribution data that possesses differences from the conditions in the training data, however, with expected slight decreases in the overall detection performance.
Authors:Yutong Chen, Daisuke Sumiyoshi, Riki Sakai, Takahiro Yamamoto, Takahiro Ueno, Jewon Oh
Title: Development of Low-Cost IoT Units for Thermal Comfort Measurement and AC Energy Consumption Prediction System
Abstract:
In response to the substantial energy consumption in buildings, the Japanese government initiated the BI-Tech (Behavioral Insights X Technology) project in 2019, aimed at promoting voluntary energy-saving behaviors through the utilization of AI and IoT technologies. Our study aimed at small and medium-sized office buildings introduces a cost-effective IoT-based BI-Tech system, utilizing the Raspberry Pi 4B+ platform for real-time monitoring of indoor thermal conditions and air conditioner (AC) set-point temperature. Employing machine learning and image recognition, the system analyzes data to calculate the PMV index and predict energy consumption changes due to temperature adjustments. The integration of mobile and desktop applications conveys this information to users, encouraging energy-efficient behavior modifications. The machine learning model achieved with an R2 value of 97%, demonstrating the system's efficiency in promoting energy-saving habits among users.
Authors:L. Klochko, M. d'Aquin, A. Togo, L. Chaput
Title: Transfer Learning for Deep Learning-based Prediction of Lattice Thermal Conductivity
Abstract:
Machine learning promises to accelerate the material discovery by enabling high-throughput prediction of desirable macro-properties from atomic-level descriptors or structures. However, the limited data available about precise values of these properties have been a barrier, leading to predictive models with limited precision or the ability to generalize. This is particularly true of lattice thermal conductivity (LTC): existing datasets of precise (ab initio, DFT-based) computed values are limited to a few dozen materials with little variability. Based on such datasets, we study the impact of transfer learning on both the precision and generalizability of a deep learning model (ParAIsite). We start from an existing model (MEGNet~\cite{Chen2019}) and show that improvements are obtained by fine-tuning a pre-trained version on different tasks. Interestingly, we also show that a much greater improvement is obtained when first fine-tuning it on a large datasets of low-quality approximations of LTC (based on the AGL model) and then applying a second phase of fine-tuning with our high-quality, smaller-scale datasets. The promising results obtained pave the way not only towards a greater ability to explore large databases in search of low thermal conductivity materials but also to methods enabling increasingly precise predictions in areas where quality data are rare.
Authors:Mohammed Riadh Berramdane, Alexandre Battiston, Michele Bardi, Nicolas Blet, Benjamin Rémy, Matthieu Urbain
Title: Deployment of ARX Models for Thermal Forecasting in Power Electronics Boards Using WBG Semiconductors
Abstract:
Facing the thermal management challenges of Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, this study highlights the use of ARX parametric models, which provide accurate temperature predictions without requiring detailed understanding of component thickness disparities or material physical properties, relying solely on experimental measurements. These parametric models emerge as a reliable alternative to FEM simulations and conventional thermal models, significantly simplifying system identification while ensuring high result accuracy.
Authors:Kota Nishida, Yoshihiro Midoh, Noriyuki Miura, Satoshi Kawakami, Jun Shiomi
Title: SecONN: An Optical Neural Network Framework with Concurrent Detection of Thermal Fault Injection Attacks
Abstract:
Silicon Photonics-based AI Accelerators (SPAAs) have been considered as promising AI accelerators achieving high energy efficiency and low latency. While many researchers focus on improving SPAAs' energy efficiency and latency, their physical security has not been sufficiently studied. This paper first proposes a threat of thermal fault injection attacks on SPAAs based on Vector-Matrix Multipliers (VMMs) utilizing Mach-Zhender Interferometers. This paper then proposes SecONN, an optical neural network framework that is capable of not only inferences but also concurrent detection of the attacks. In addition, this paper introduces a concept of Wavelength Division Perturbation (WDP) where wavelength dependent VMM results are utilized to increase detection accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves 88.7% attack-caused average misprediction recall.
Authors:Nicholas E. Pacheco, Kang Zhang, Ashley S. Reyes, Christopher J. Pacheco, Lucas Burstein, Loris Fichera
Title: Towards a Physics Engine to Simulate Robotic Laser Surgery: Finite Element Modeling of Thermal Laser-Tissue Interactions
Abstract:
This paper presents a computational model, based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), that simulates the thermal response of laser-irradiated tissue. This model addresses a gap in the current ecosystem of surgical robot simulators, which generally lack support for lasers and other energy-based end effectors. In the proposed model, the thermal dynamics of the tissue are calculated as the solution to a heat conduction problem with appropriate boundary conditions. The FEM formulation allows the model to capture complex phenomena, such as convection, which is crucial for creating realistic simulations. The accuracy of the model was verified via benchtop laser-tissue interaction experiments using agar tissue phantoms and ex-vivo chicken muscle. The results revealed an average root-mean-square error (RMSE) of less than 2 degrees Celsius across most experimental conditions.
Authors:Matteo Luigi De Pascali, Francesco Casella
Title: Steady-State Initialization of Object-Oriented Advanced Thermal Power Generation System Models with Application to the Case of the SOS-CO2 Cycle
Abstract:
The forthcoming energy transition calls for a new generation of thermal power generation systems with low- or zero-emission and highly flexible operation. Dynamic modelling and simulation is a key enabling factor in this field, as controlling such plants is a difficult task for which there is no previous experience and very short design times are expected. The steady-state initialization of those dynamic models is an essential step in the design process, but is unfortunately a difficult task which involves the numerical solution of large systems of nonlinear equations with iterative Newton methods, which is often prone to numerical failures. In this work, several strategies and methodologies are discussed to successfully achieve steady-state initialization of first-principles equation-based, object-oriented models of advanced thermal power generation systems. These are presented in the context of the Modelica modelling language, but could be applied to other equation-based, object-oriented modelling and simulation environments. Finally, the successful application of such strategies and methodologies to the SOS-CO2 advanced power generation system is presented.
Authors:Junlan Liu, Qian Yin, Mengshu He, Jun Zhou
Title: Constructing accurate machine-learned potentials and performing highly efficient atomistic simulations to predict structural and thermal properties
Abstract:
The $\text{Cu}_7\text{P}\text{S}_6$ compound has garnered significant attention due to its potential in thermoelectric applications. In this study, we introduce a neuroevolution potential (NEP), trained on a dataset generated from ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations, using the moment tensor potential (MTP) as a reference. The low root mean square errors (RMSEs) for total energy and atomic forces demonstrate the high accuracy and transferability of both the MTP and NEP. We further calculate the phonon density of states (DOS) and radial distribution function (RDF) using both machine learning potentials, comparing the results to density functional theory (DFT) calculations. While the MTP potential offers slightly higher accuracy, the NEP achieves a remarkable 41-fold increase in computational speed. These findings provide detailed microscopic insights into the dynamics and rapid Cu-ion diffusion, paving the way for future studies on Cu-based solid electrolytes and their applications in energy devices.
Authors:Miriam Asare-Baiden, Kathleen Jordan, Andrew Chung, Sharon Eve Sonenblum, Joyce C. Ho
Title: Is thermography a viable solution for detecting pressure injuries in dark skin patients?
Abstract:
Pressure injury (PI) detection is challenging, especially in dark skin tones, due to the unreliability of visual inspection. Thermography has been suggested as a viable alternative as temperature differences in the skin can indicate impending tissue damage. Although deep learning models have demonstrated considerable promise toward reliably detecting PI, the existing work fails to evaluate the performance on darker skin tones and varying data collection protocols. In this paper, we introduce a new thermal and optical imaging dataset of 35 participants focused on darker skin tones where temperature differences are induced through cooling and cupping protocols. We vary the image collection process to include different cameras, lighting, patient pose, and camera distance. We compare the performance of a small convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on either the thermal or the optical images on all skin tones. Our preliminary results suggest that thermography-based CNN is robust to data collection protocols for all skin tones.
Authors:David Shulman, Itai Dattner
Title: Adaptive Physics-Guided Neural Network
Abstract:
This paper introduces an adaptive physics-guided neural network (APGNN) framework for predicting quality attributes from image data by integrating physical laws into deep learning models. The APGNN adaptively balances data-driven and physics-informed predictions, enhancing model accuracy and robustness across different environments. Our approach is evaluated on both synthetic and real-world datasets, with comparisons to conventional data-driven models such as ResNet. For the synthetic data, 2D domains were generated using three distinct governing equations: the diffusion equation, the advection-diffusion equation, and the Poisson equation. Non-linear transformations were applied to these domains to emulate complex physical processes in image form. In real-world experiments, the APGNN consistently demonstrated superior performance in the diverse thermal image dataset. On the cucumber dataset, characterized by low material diversity and controlled conditions, APGNN and PGNN showed similar performance, both outperforming the data-driven ResNet. However, in the more complex thermal dataset, particularly for outdoor materials with higher environmental variability, APGNN outperformed both PGNN and ResNet by dynamically adjusting its reliance on physics-based versus data-driven insights. This adaptability allowed APGNN to maintain robust performance across structured, low-variability settings and more heterogeneous scenarios. These findings underscore the potential of adaptive physics-guided learning to integrate physical constraints effectively, even in challenging real-world contexts with diverse environmental conditions.
Authors:Zheng Liu, Yuan Jiang, Yumeng Li, Pingfeng Wang
Title: Physics-informed Machine Learning for Battery Pack Thermal Management
Abstract:
With the popularity of electric vehicles, the demand for lithium-ion batteries is increasing. Temperature significantly influences the performance and safety of batteries. Battery thermal management systems can effectively control the temperature of batteries; therefore, the performance and safety can be ensured. However, the development process of battery thermal management systems is time-consuming and costly due to the extensive training dataset needed by data-driven models requiring enormous computational costs for finite element analysis. Therefore, a new approach to constructing surrogate models is needed in the era of AI. Physics-informed machine learning enforces the physical laws in surrogate models, making it the perfect candidate for estimating battery pack temperature distribution. In this study, we first developed a 21700 battery pack indirect liquid cooling system with cold plates on the top and bottom with thermal paste surrounding the battery cells. Then, the simplified finite element model was built based on experiment results. Due to the high coolant flow rate, the cold plates can be considered as constant temperature boundaries, while battery cells are the heat sources. The physics-informed convolutional neural network served as a surrogate model to estimate the temperature distribution of the battery pack. The loss function was constructed considering the heat conduction equation based on the finite difference method. The physics-informed loss function helped the convergence of the training process with less data. As a result, the physics-informed convolutional neural network showed more than 15 percents improvement in accuracy compared to the data-driven method with the same training data.
Authors:Federico P. Cortese, Antonio Pievatolo
Title: Spatio-Temporal Jump Model for Urban Thermal Comfort Monitoring
Abstract:
Thermal comfort is essential for well-being in urban spaces, especially as cities face increasing heat from urbanization and climate change. Existing thermal comfort models usually overlook temporal dynamics alongside spatial dependencies. We address this problem by introducing a spatio-temporal jump model that clusters data with persistence across both spatial and temporal dimensions. This framework enhances interpretability, minimizes abrupt state changes, and easily handles missing data. We validate our approach through extensive simulations, demonstrating its accuracy in recovering the true underlying partition. When applied to hourly environmental data gathered from a set of weather stations located across the city of Singapore, our proposal identifies meaningful thermal comfort regimes, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic urban settings and suitability for real-world monitoring. The comparison of these regimes with feedback on thermal preference indicates the potential of an unsupervised approach to avoid extensive surveys.
Authors:Taemin Heo, Ruaridh Macdonald
Title: Effects of charging and discharging capabilities on trade-offs between model accuracy and computational efficiency in pumped thermal electricity storage
Abstract:
The increasing need for energy storage solutions to balance variable renewable energy sources has highlighted the potential of Pumped Thermal Electricity Storage (PTES). In this paper, we investigate the trade-offs between model accuracy and computational efficiency in PTES systems. We evaluate a range of PTES models, from physically detailed to simplified variants, focusing on their non-linear charging and discharging capabilities. Our results show that while detailed models provide the most accurate representation of PTES operation by considering mass flow rate ($\dot{m}$) and state of charge (SoC) dependencies, they come at the cost of increased computational complexity. In contrast, simplified models tend to produce overly optimistic predictions by disregarding capability constraints. Other approximated model variants offer a practical compromise, balancing computational efficiency with acceptable accuracy. In particular, models that disregard $\dot{m}$-dependency and approximate nonlinear SoC-dependency with a piecewise linear function achieve similar accuracy to more detailed models but with significantly faster computation times. Our findings offer guidance to modelers in selecting the appropriate PTES representation for their investment models.
Authors:Vibol Yem, Mattia Quartana, Zi Xin, Kazuhiro Fujitsuka, Tomohiro Amemiya
Title: v-Relax: Virtual Footbath Experiencing by Airflow and Thermal Presentation
Abstract:
Relaxation is a critical counterbalance to the demands of modern business life. Footbaths, a simple yet highly effective therapeutic practice, have been used for centuries across various cultures to promote relaxation and overall well-being. This study presents a novel approach to simulating the experience of a public footbath through the use of tactile and thermal stimulation of airflow to the calf and those on the foot soles. Our system aims to offer a realistic and immersive virtual footbath experience without the need for actual water, by controlling the temperature and airflow to mimic the sensation of soaking feet in water or a water wave. Without using actual water, our system can be more compact, highly responsive, and more reproducible. The layer of airflow is made as thin as possible by adjusting air outlet, and the Coanda effect is also considered to generate a water surface more realistic. The system can provide a multi-sensory experience, including visual and audio feedback of water flow, enhancing the relaxation and therapeutic benefits of a footbath.
Authors:Akshar Ramkumar, Mehdi Soleimanifar
Title: Mixing time of quantum Gibbs sampling for random sparse Hamiltonians
Abstract:
Providing evidence that quantum computers can efficiently prepare low-energy or thermal states of physically relevant interacting quantum systems is a major challenge in quantum information science. A newly developed quantum Gibbs sampling algorithm by Chen, Kastoryano, and Gilyén provides an efficient simulation of the detailed-balanced dissipative dynamics of non-commutative quantum systems. The running time of this algorithm depends on the mixing time of the corresponding quantum Markov chain, which has not been rigorously bounded except in the high-temperature regime. In this work, we establish a polylog(n) upper bound on its mixing time for various families of random n by n sparse Hamiltonians at any constant temperature. We further analyze how the choice of the jump operators for the algorithm and the spectral properties of these sparse Hamiltonians influence the mixing time. Our result places this method for Gibbs sampling on par with other efficient algorithms for preparing low-energy states of quantumly easy Hamiltonians.
Authors:Públio Elon Correa da Silva, Jurandy Almeida
Title: An Edge Computing-Based Solution for Real-Time Leaf Disease Classification using Thermal Imaging
Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) technologies can transform agriculture by improving crop health monitoring and management, thus improving food safety. In this paper, we explore the potential of edge computing for real-time classification of leaf diseases using thermal imaging. We present a thermal image dataset for plant disease classification and evaluate deep learning models, including InceptionV3, MobileNetV1, MobileNetV2, and VGG-16, on resource-constrained devices like the Raspberry Pi 4B. Using pruning and quantization-aware training, these models achieve inference times up to 1.48x faster on Edge TPU Max for VGG16, and up to 2.13x faster with precision reduction on Intel NCS2 for MobileNetV1, compared to high-end GPUs like the RTX 3090, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy.
Authors:Iñigo Delgado-Enales, Joshua Lizundia-Loiola, Patricia Molina-Costa, Javier Del Ser
Title: A Machine Learning Approach for the Efficient Estimation of Ground-Level Air Temperature in Urban Areas
Abstract:
The increasingly populated cities of the 21st Century face the challenge of being sustainable and resilient spaces for their inhabitants. However, climate change, among other problems, makes these objectives difficult to achieve. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon that occurs in cities, increasing their thermal stress, is one of the stumbling blocks to achieve a more sustainable city. The ability to estimate temperatures with a high degree of accuracy allows for the identification of the highest priority areas in cities where urban improvements need to be made to reduce thermal discomfort. In this work we explore the usefulness of image-to-image deep neural networks (DNNs) for correlating spatial and meteorological variables of a urban area with street-level air temperature. The air temperature at street-level is estimated both spatially and temporally for a specific use case, and compared with existing, well-established numerical models. Based on the obtained results, deep neural networks are confirmed to be faster and less computationally expensive alternative for ground-level air temperature compared to numerical models.
Authors:Yuta Tanabe, Kentaro Yaji, Kuniharu Ushijima
Title: Adjoint lattice kinetic scheme for topology optimization in fluid problems
Abstract:
This paper proposes a topology optimization method for non-thermal and thermal fluid problems using the Lattice Kinetic Scheme (LKS).LKS, which is derived from the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), requires only macroscopic values, such as fluid velocity and pressure, whereas LBM requires velocity distribution functions, thereby reducing memory requirements. The proposed method computes design sensitivities based on the adjoint variable method, and the adjoint equation is solved in the same manner as LKS; thus, we refer to it as the Adjoint Lattice Kinetic Scheme (ALKS). A key contribution of this method is the proposed approximate treatment of boundary conditions for the adjoint equation, which is challenging to apply directly due to the characteristics of LKS boundary conditions. We demonstrate numerical examples for steady and unsteady problems involving non-thermal and thermal fluids, and the results are physically meaningful and consistent with previous research, exhibiting similar trends in parameter dependencies, such as the Reynolds number. Furthermore, the proposed method reduces memory usage by up to 75% compared to the conventional LBM in an unsteady thermal fluid problem.
Authors:Hakima Bessaih, Annie Millet
Title: Rate of convergence of a semi-implicit time Euler scheme for a 2D Bénard-Boussinesq model
Abstract:
We prove that a semi-implicit time Euler scheme for the two-dimensional Bénard-Boussinesq model on the torus D converges. The rate of convergence in probability is almost 1/2 for a multiplicative noise; this relies on moment estimates in various norms for the processes and the scheme. In case of an additive noise, due to the coupling of the equations, provided that the difference on temperature between the top and bottom parts of the torus is not too big compared to the viscosity and thermal diffusivity, a strong polynomial rate of convergence (almost 1/2) is proven in $(L^2(D))^2$ for the velocity and in $L^2(D)$ for the temperature. It depends on exponential moments of the scheme; due to linear terms involving the other quantity in both evolution equations, the proof has to be done simultaneaously for both the velocity and the temperature. These rates in both cases are similar to that obtained for the Navier-Stokes equation.
Authors:Jun Takahashi, Sam Slezak, Elizabeth Crosson
Title: Rapidly mixing loop representation quantum Monte Carlo for Heisenberg models on star-like bipartite graphs
Abstract:
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have proven invaluable in condensed matter physics, particularly for studying ground states and thermal equilibrium properties of quantum Hamiltonians without a sign problem. Over the past decade, significant progress has also been made on their rigorous convergence analysis. Heisenberg antiferromagnets (AFM) with bipartite interaction graphs are a popular target of computational QMC studies due to their physical importance, but despite the apparent empirical efficiency of these simulations it remains an open question whether efficient classical approximation of the ground energy is possible in general. In this work we introduce a ground state variant of the stochastic series expansion QMC method, and for the special class of AFM on interaction graphs with an $O(1)$-bipartite component (star-like), we prove rapid mixing of the associated QMC Markov chain (polynomial time in the number of qubits) by using Jerrum and Sinclair's method of canonical paths. This is the first Markov chain analysis of a practical class of QMC algorithms with the loop representation of Heisenberg models. Our findings contribute to the broader effort to resolve the computational complexity of Heisenberg AFM on general bipartite interaction graphs.
Authors:Guangting Yu, Shiwei Lan, Kookjin Lee, Alex Mahalov
Title: The Reconstruction of the Space-Dependent Thermal Conductivity from Sparse Temperature Measurements
Abstract:
We present a novel method for reconstructing the thermal conductivity coefficient in 1D and 2D heat equations using moving sensors that dynamically traverse the domain to record sparse and noisy temperature measurements. We significantly reduce the computational cost associated with forward PDE evaluations by employing automatic differentiation, enabling a more efficient and scalable reconstruction process. This allows the inverse problem to be solved with fewer sensors and observations. Specifically, we demonstrate the successful reconstruction of thermal conductivity on the 1D circle and 2D torus, using one and four moving sensors, respectively, with their positions recorded over time. Our method incorporates sampling algorithms to compute confidence intervals for the reconstructed conductivity, improving robustness against measurement noise. Extensive numerical simulations of heat dynamics validate the efficacy of our approach, confirming both the accuracy and stability of the reconstructed thermal conductivity. Additionally, the method is thoroughly tested using large datasets from machine learning, allowing us to evaluate its performance across various scenarios and ensure its reliability. This approach provides a cost-effective and flexible solution for conductivity reconstruction from sparse measurements, making it a robust tool for solving inverse problems in complex domains.
Authors:Zhaohe Lv, Guoliang Zhao, Zhanbo Xu, Jiang Wu, Yadong Zhou, Kun Liu
Title: Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Method for Thermal Adaptive Behavior Recognition with WiFi
Abstract:
A reliable comfort model is essential to improve occupant satisfaction and reduce building energy consumption. As two types of the most common and intuitive thermal adaptive behaviors, precise recognition of dressing and undressing can effectively support thermal comfort prediction. However, traditional activity recognition suffers from shortcomings in privacy, cost, and performance. To address the above issues, this study proposes a cross-domain transfer learning method for human dressing and undressing adaptive behavior recognition with WiFi. First, we determine the activity interval by calculating the sliding variance for denoised WiFi signals. Subsequently, short-time Fourier transform and discrete wavelet transform are performed to extract action information on the basis of time-frequency analysis. Ultimately, an efficient 1D CNN pre-trained model is integrated with the SVM algorithm as a hybrid model to enhance the identification robustness in new scenarios. Experiment results show that the hybrid model based on transfer learning provides a more accurate prediction for the adaptative behavior of target subjects, achieving 96.9% and 94.9% accuracy in two cases, respectively.
Authors:Michael Huylo, Sina Taheri, Atila Novoselac
Title: Evaluation of Peak Shaving Using Thermal Energy Storage in a Validated CHP and District Energy Model
Abstract:
There is currently a large federal effort to decarbonize the country's electrical grid as part of the clean energy transition. The elimination of fossil fuel fired systems, and their replacement with intermittent renewable sources and other electric equipment will require better load management techniques to ensure a reliable grid. One strategy for maintaining electric grid reliability utilizes peak shaving. Buildings, accounting for 40% of energy use in the United States, can account for an even higher percentage of energy during peak periods driven by high air conditioning loads during the summer, especially in hotter climes such as Austin, Texas. Many previous studies have modeled the effectiveness of building HVAC demand response methods such as temperature setpoint manipulation, pre-cooling, ventilation scheduling, and thermal energy storage. Thermal storage systems, due to their larger energy capacities, have been shown to be most promising for peak shaving. However, there is a lack of work integrating chilled water energy storage models with validated microgrid-district energy system models to fully capture the dynamics of the proposed strategies. Previously, a validated system model for power generation and heating was developed for the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). A new validated model integrates the 65 MW combined heat and power plant (CHP), with the campus' 45,000 ton district cooling system, as well as two chilled water storage tanks. While the existing campus system currently utilizes an operator driven peak shaving strategy utilizing thermal storage, optimization results show that there is room for further improvement and energy savings. The presented results quantify the peak shaving in MW and provide a foundation for further analysis.
Authors:Chuxiao Meng, Conor Porter, Sina Malakpour, Garrett Mathesen, Seongyeon Yang
Title: High-Precision Real-Time Pores Detection in LPBF using Thermal Energy Density (TED) Signals
Abstract:
Pore formation during Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) has long posed challenges in metal 3D printing, significantly affecting the mechanical properties of the final product. Porosity frequently occurs because of an unstable keyhole formation, triggered by an excess laser energy. Traditional approaches for detecting pores rely heavily on CT scanning, a time-consuming and costly method unsuitable for large-scale production. In response to these limitations, we have developed a real-time pore detection method using thermal sensor data, offering a more efficient, cost-effective alternative for quality control during the LPBF process. Our method, validated against CT-scanned pore counts, provides a high degree of accuracy, achieving an R^2 value of 0.94 between the across eight sample prints. This approach also effectively tracks pore formation trends as the layer-wise printing pattern changes, providing timely insights into product quality, which may serve as important datapoints for real-time adaptive parameters optimization in the future. In contrast to prior machine learning-based techniques, which were limited by high computational costs and lacked direct validation strategy, the method intr
Authors:Wei Liang, Yiting Zhang, Ji Zhang, Erica Cochran Hameen
Title: An Expeditious Spatial Mean Radiant Temperature Mapping Framework using Visual SLAM and Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
Ensuring thermal comfort is essential for the well-being and productivity of individuals in built environments. Of the various thermal comfort indicators, the mean radiant temperature (MRT) is very challenging to measure. Most common measurement methodologies are time-consuming and not user-friendly. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel MRT measurement framework that uses visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and semantic segmentation techniques. The proposed approach follows the rule of thumb of the traditional MRT calculation method using surface temperature and view factors. However, it employs visual SLAM and creates a 3D thermal point cloud with enriched surface temperature information. The framework then implements Grounded SAM, a new object detection and segmentation tool to extract features with distinct temperature profiles on building surfaces. The detailed segmentation of thermal features not only reduces potential errors in the calculation of the MRT but also provides an efficient reconstruction of the spatial MRT distribution in the indoor environment. We also validate the calculation results with the reference measurement methodology. This data-driven framework offers faster and more efficient MRT measurements and spatial mapping than conventional methods. It can enable the direct engagement of researchers and practitioners in MRT measurements and contribute to research on thermal comfort and radiant cooling and heating systems.
Authors:Max Linnander, Dustin Goetz, Gregory Reardon, Vijay Kumar, Elliot Hawkes, Yon Visell
Title: Tactile Displays Driven by Projected Light
Abstract:
Tactile displays that lend tangible form to digital content could transform computing interactions. However, achieving the resolution, speed, and dynamic range needed for perceptual fidelity remains challenging. We present a tactile display that directly converts projected light into visible tactile patterns via a photomechanical surface populated with millimeter-scale optotactile pixels. The pixels transduce incident light into mechanical displacements through photostimulated thermal gas expansion, yielding millimeter scale displacements with response times of 2 to 100 milliseconds. Employing projected light for power transmission and addressing renders these displays highly scalable. We demonstrate optically driven displays with up to 1,511 addressable pixels -- several times more pixels than any prior tactile display attaining comparable performance. Perceptual studies confirm that these displays can reproduce diverse spatiotemporal tactile patterns with high fidelity. This research establishes a foundation for practical, versatile high-resolution tactile displays driven by light.
Authors:Alessandro Montanari, Ashok Thangarajan, Khaldoon Al-Naimi, Andrea Ferlini, Yang Liu, Ananta Narayanan Balaji, Fahim Kawsar
Title: OmniBuds: A Sensory Earable Platform for Advanced Bio-Sensing and On-Device Machine Learning
Abstract:
Sensory earables have evolved from basic audio enhancement devices into sophisticated platforms for clinical-grade health monitoring and wellbeing management. This paper introduces OmniBuds, an advanced sensory earable platform integrating multiple biosensors and onboard computation powered by a machine learning accelerator, all within a real-time operating system (RTOS). The platform's dual-ear symmetric design, equipped with precisely positioned kinetic, acoustic, optical, and thermal sensors, enables highly accurate and real-time physiological assessments. Unlike conventional earables that rely on external data processing, OmniBuds leverage real-time onboard computation to significantly enhance system efficiency, reduce latency, and safeguard privacy by processing data locally. This capability includes executing complex machine learning models directly on the device. We provide a comprehensive analysis of OmniBuds' design, hardware and software architecture demonstrating its capacity for multi-functional applications, accurate and robust tracking of physiological parameters, and advanced human-computer interaction.
Authors:Stavros Kassinos, Alessio Alexiadis
Title: Beyond Language: Applying MLX Transformers to Engineering Physics
Abstract:
Transformer Neural Networks are driving an explosion of activity and discovery in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs). In contrast, there have been only a few attempts to apply Transformers in engineering physics. Aiming to offer an easy entry point to physics-centric Transformers, we introduce a physics-informed Transformer model for solving the heat conduction problem in a 2D plate with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The model is implemented in the machine learning framework MLX and leverages the unified memory of Apple M-series processors. The use of MLX means that the models can be trained and perform predictions efficiently on personal machines with only modest memory requirements. To train, validate and test the Transformer model we solve the 2D heat conduction problem using central finite differences. Each finite difference solution in these sets is initialized with four random Dirichlet boundary conditions, a uniform but random internal temperature distribution and a randomly selected thermal diffusivity. Validation is performed in-line during training to monitor against over-fitting. The excellent performance of the trained model is demonstrated by predicting the evolution of the temperature field to steady state for the unseen test set of conditions.
Authors:Julie Keisler, Margaux Bregere
Title: Automated Spatio-Temporal Weather Modeling for Load Forecasting
Abstract:
Electricity is difficult to store, except at prohibitive cost, and therefore the balance between generation and load must be maintained at all times. Electricity is traditionally managed by anticipating demand and intermittent production (wind, solar) and matching flexible production (hydro, nuclear, coal and gas). Accurate forecasting of electricity load and renewable production is therefore essential to ensure grid performance and stability. Both are highly dependent on meteorological variables (temperature, wind, sunshine). These dependencies are complex and difficult to model. On the one hand, spatial variations do not have a uniform impact because population, industry, and wind and solar farms are not evenly distributed across the territory. On the other hand, temporal variations can have delayed effects on load (due to the thermal inertia of buildings). With access to observations from different weather stations and simulated data from meteorological models, we believe that both phenomena can be modeled together. In today's state-of-the-art load forecasting models, the spatio-temporal modeling of the weather is fixed. In this work, we aim to take advantage of the automated representation and spatio-temporal feature extraction capabilities of deep neural networks to improve spatio-temporal weather modeling for load forecasting. We compare our deep learning-based methodology with the state-of-the-art on French national load. This methodology could also be fully adapted to forecasting renewable energy production.
Authors:Youssef Mohamed, Severin Lemaignan, Arzu Guneysu, Patric Jensfelt, Christian Smith
Title: Fusion in Context: A Multimodal Approach to Affective State Recognition
Abstract:
Accurate recognition of human emotions is a crucial challenge in affective computing and human-robot interaction (HRI). Emotional states play a vital role in shaping behaviors, decisions, and social interactions. However, emotional expressions can be influenced by contextual factors, leading to misinterpretations if context is not considered. Multimodal fusion, combining modalities like facial expressions, speech, and physiological signals, has shown promise in improving affect recognition. This paper proposes a transformer-based multimodal fusion approach that leverages facial thermal data, facial action units, and textual context information for context-aware emotion recognition. We explore modality-specific encoders to learn tailored representations, which are then fused using additive fusion and processed by a shared transformer encoder to capture temporal dependencies and interactions. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset collected from participants engaged in a tangible tabletop Pacman game designed to induce various affective states. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating contextual information and multimodal fusion for affective state recognition.
Authors:Juan Gamero-Salinas, Jesús López-Fidalgo
Title: Response Surface Methodology coupled with desirability functions for multi-objective optimization: minimizing indoor overheating hours and maximizing useful daylight illuminance
Abstract:
Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and desirability functions were employed in a case study to optimize the thermal and daylight performance of a computational model of a tropical housing typology. Specifically, this approach simultaneously optimized Indoor Overheating Hours (IOH) and Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) metrics through an Overall Desirability (D). The lack of significant association between IOH and other annual daylight metrics enabled a focused optimization of IOH and UDI. Each response required only 138 simulation runs (~30 hours for 276 runs) to determine the optimal values for passive strategies: window-to-wall ratio (WWR) and roof overhang depth across four orientations, totalling eight factors. First, initial screening based on $2_V^{8-2}$ fractional factorial design, identified four key factors using stepwise and Lasso regression, narrowed down to three: roof overhang depth on the south and west, WWR on the west, and WWR on the south. Then, RSM optimization yielded an optimal solution (roof overhang: 3.78 meters, west WWR: 3.76%, south WWR: 29.3%) with a D of 0.625 (IOH: 8.33%, UDI: 79.67%). Finally, robustness analysis with 1,000 bootstrap replications provided 95% confidence intervals for the optimal values. This study optimally balances thermal comfort and daylight with few experiments using a computationally-efficient multi-objective approach.
Authors:Dina E. Abdelaleem, Hassan M. Ahmed, M. Sami Soliman, Tarek M. Said
Title: Identifying Human Indoor Daily Life Behavior employing Thermal Sensor Arrays (TSAs)
Abstract:
Daily activity monitoring systems used in households provide vital information for health status, particularly with aging residents. Multiple approaches have been introduced to achieve such goals, typically obtrusive and non-obtrusive. Amongst the obtrusive approaches are the wearable devices, and among the non-obtrusive approaches are the movement detection systems, including motion sensors and thermal sensor arrays (TSAs). TSA systems are advantageous when preserving a person's privacy and picking his precise spatial location. In this study, human daily living activities were monitored day and night, constructing the corresponding activity time series and spatial probability distribution and employing a TSA system. The monitored activities are classified into two categories: sleeping and daily activity. Results showed the possibility of distinguishing between classes regardless of day and night. The obtained sleep activity duration was compared with previous research using the same raw data. Results showed that the duration of sleep activity, on average, was 9 hours/day, and daily life activity was 7 hours/day. The person's spatial probability distribution was determined using the bivariate distribution for the monitored location. In conclusion, the results showed that sleeping activity was dominant. Our study showed that TSAs were the optimum choice when monitoring human activity. Our proposed approach tackled limitations encountered by previous human activity monitoring systems, such as preserving human privacy while knowing his precise spatial location.
Authors:J. Garcia-Echeverria, D. Musat, A. Mahsafar, K. R. Mojaver, D. Rolston, G. Cowan, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur
Title: Self-calibrated Microring Weight Function for Neuromorphic Optical Computing
Abstract:
This paper presents a microring resonator-based weight function for neuromorphic photonic applications achieving a record-high precision of 11.3 bits and accuracy of 9.3 bits for 2 Gbps input optical signals. The system employs an all-analog self-referenced proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to perform real-time temperature stabilization within a range of up to 60 degree Celsius. A self-calibrated weight function is demonstrated for a range of 6 degree Celsius with a single initial calibration and minimal accuracy and precision degradation. By monitoring the through and drop ports of the microring with variable gain transimpedance amplifiers, accurate and precise weight adjustment is achieved, ensuring optimal performance and reliability. These findings underscore the system's robustness to dynamic thermal environments, highlighting the potential for high-speed reconfigurable analog photonic networks.
Authors:Ye Guo, Chenge Gao, Cong Chen
Title: Capturing Opportunity Costs of Batteries with a Staircase Supply-Demand Function
Abstract:
In the global pursuit of carbon neutrality, the role of batteries is indispensable. They provide pivotal flexibilities to counter uncertainties from renewables, preferably by participating in electricity markets. Unlike thermal generators, however, the dominant type of cost for batteries is opportunity cost, which is more vague and challenging to represent through bids in stipulated formats. This article shows the opposite yet surprising results: The demand-supply function of an ideal battery, considering its opportunity cost, is a staircase function with no more than five segments, which is a perfect match with existing rules in many real electricity markets. The demand-supply function shifts horizontally with price forecasts and vertically with the initial SOC. These results can be generalized to imperfect batteries and numerous battery-like resources, including battery clusters, air-conditioners, and electric vehicle charging stations, although the number of segments may vary. These results pave the way for batteries to participate in electricity markets.
Authors:Khoi Phuong Dao, Juejun Hu
Title: Thermal Inverse design for resistive micro-heaters
Abstract:
This paper proposes an inverse design scheme for resistive heaters. By adjusting the spatial distribution of a binary electrical resistivity map, the scheme enables objective-driven optimization of heaters to achieve pre-defined steady-state temperature profiles. The approach can be fully automated and is computationally efficient since it does not entail extensive iterative simulations of the entire heater structure. The design scheme offers a powerful solution for resistive heater device engineering in applications spanning electronics, photonics, and microelectromechanical systems.
Authors:Nicolas Rouquette, Alessandro Pinto, Inigo Incer
Title: Early Design Exploration of Aerospace Systems Using Assume-Guarantee Contracts
Abstract:
We present a compositional approach to early modeling and analysis of complex aerospace systems based on assume-guarantee contracts. Components in a system are abstracted into assume-guarantee specifications. Performing algebraic contract operations with Pacti allows us to relate local component specifications to that of the system. Applications to two aerospace case studies (the design of spacecraft to satisfy a rendezvous mission and the design of the thermal management system of a prototypical aircraft) show that this methodology provides engineers with an agile, early analysis and exploration process.
Authors:Anshu Sharma, Basuraj Bhowmik
Title: When Fire Attacks: How does Concrete Stand up to Heat ?
Abstract:
Fire is a process that generates both light and heat, posing a significant threat to life and infrastructure. Buildings and structures are neither inherently susceptible to fire nor completely fire-resistant; their vulnerability largely depends on the specific causes of the fire, which can stem from natural events or human-induced hazards. High temperatures in structures can lead to severe health risks for those directly affected, discomfort due to smoke, and compromised safety if the structure fails to meet safety standards. Elevated temperatures can also cause significant structural damage, becoming the primary cause of casualties, economic losses, and material damage. This study aims to investigate the thermal and structural behavior of concrete beams when exposed to extreme fire conditions. It examines the effects of different temperatures on plain and reinforced concrete (PCC and RCC, respectively) using finite element method (FEM) simulations. Additionally, the study explores the performance of various concrete grades under severe conditions. The analysis reveals that higher-grade concrete exhibits greater displacement, crack width, stress, and strain but has lower thermal conductivity compared to lower-grade concrete. These elevated temperatures can induce severe stresses in the concrete, leading to expansion, spalling, and the potential failure of the structure. Reinforced concrete, on the other hand, shows lower stress concentrations and minimal strain up to 250°C. These findings contribute to the existing knowledge and support the development of improved fire safety regulations and performance-based design methodologies.
Authors:Yi Hong Teoh, Roger G. Melko
Title: Autoregressive model path dependence near Ising criticality
Abstract:
Autoregressive models are a class of generative model that probabilistically predict the next output of a sequence based on previous inputs. The autoregressive sequence is by definition one-dimensional (1D), which is natural for language tasks and hence an important component of modern architectures like recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers. However, when language models are used to predict outputs on physical systems that are not intrinsically 1D, the question arises of which choice of autoregressive sequence -- if any -- is optimal. In this paper, we study the reconstruction of critical correlations in the two-dimensional (2D) Ising model, using RNNs and transformers trained on binary spin data obtained near the thermal phase transition. We compare the training performance for a number of different 1D autoregressive sequences imposed on finite-size 2D lattices. We find that paths with long 1D segments are more efficient at training the autoregressive models compared to space-filling curves that better preserve the 2D locality. Our results illustrate the potential importance in choosing the optimal autoregressive sequence ordering when training modern language models for tasks in physics.
Authors:Burak Sevsay, Erdem Akagündüz
Title: Infrared Domain Adaptation with Zero-Shot Quantization
Abstract:
Quantization is one of the most popular techniques for reducing computation time and shrinking model size. However, ensuring the accuracy of quantized models typically involves calibration using training data, which may be inaccessible due to privacy concerns. In such cases, zero-shot quantization, a technique that relies on pretrained models and statistical information without the need for specific training data, becomes valuable. Exploring zero-shot quantization in the infrared domain is important due to the prevalence of infrared imaging in sensitive fields like medical and security applications. In this work, we demonstrate how to apply zero-shot quantization to an object detection model retrained with thermal imagery. We use batch normalization statistics of the model to distill data for calibration. RGB image-trained models and thermal image-trained models are compared in the context of zero-shot quantization. Our investigation focuses on the contributions of mean and standard deviation statistics to zero-shot quantization performance. Additionally, we compare zero-shot quantization with post-training quantization on a thermal dataset. We demonstrated that zero-shot quantization successfully generates data that represents the training dataset for the quantization of object detection models. Our results indicate that our zero-shot quantization framework is effective in the absence of training data and is well-suited for the infrared domain.
Authors:Aryan Morteza, Hosein K. Nazari, Peyman Pahlevani
Title: An IoT Framework for Building Energy Optimization Using Machine Learning-based MPC
Abstract:
This study proposes a machine learning-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach for controlling Air Handling Unit (AHU) systems by employing an Internet of Things (IoT) framework. The proposed framework utilizes an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to provide dynamic-linear thermal model parameters considering building information and disturbances in real time, thereby facilitating the practical MPC of the AHU system. The proposed framework allows users to establish new setpoints for a closed-loop control system, enabling customization of the thermal environment to meet individual needs with minimal use of the AHU. The experimental results demonstrate the cost benefits of the proposed machine-learning-based MPC-IoT framework, achieving a 57.59\% reduction in electricity consumption compared with a clock-based manual controller while maintaining a high level of user satisfaction. The proposed framework offers remarkable flexibility and effectiveness, even in legacy systems with limited building information, making it a pragmatic and valuable solution for enhancing the energy efficiency and user comfort in pre-existing structures.
Authors:Marcelo Ferreira Guimarães, Carlos Antônio Sell, Renato Parenti Turcato, Carlos Henrique Assuiti, Ricardo Custódio, Ricardo Antônio Pralon Santos
Title: Proposal of an Electronic Auditing System Applied to the Brazilian Electronic Voting Machine
Abstract:
A new system, called SELA -- Auditing Electronic System, has been developed to be applied to the Brazilian Electronic Voting Machine. The SELA was designed to use open hardware and software, making it widely known by society. The security of the auditing process is guaranteed by the application of a Fingerprint Algorithm, a Hash Function. This system is robust and requires minimal modifications to the Electronic Voting Machine. In this paper, SELA is described, and its use during the election process is analyzed. A comparison between SELA and the use of thermal printers as a secondary voting record system is also presented. The authors recommend a pilot implementation of SELA for the 2002 Brazilian Elections.
Authors:Deyu Li, Longfei Xiao, Handi Wei, Yan Li, Binghua Zhang
Title: A Noncontact Technique for Wave Measurement Based on Thermal Stereography and Deep Learning
Abstract:
The accurate measurement of the wave field and its spatiotemporal evolution is essential in many hydrodynamic experiments and engineering applications. The binocular stereo imaging technique has been widely used to measure waves. However, the optical properties of indoor water surfaces, including transparency, specular reflection, and texture absence, pose challenges for image processing and stereo reconstruction. This study proposed a novel technique that combined thermal stereography and deep learning to achieve fully noncontact wave measurements. The optical imaging properties of water in the long-wave infrared spectrum were found to be suitable for stereo matching, effectively avoiding the issues in the visible-light spectrum. After capturing wave images using thermal stereo cameras, a reconstruction strategy involving deep learning techniques was proposed to improve stereo matching performance. A generative approach was employed to synthesize a dataset with ground-truth disparity from unannotated infrared images. This dataset was then fed to a pretrained stereo neural network for fine-tuning to achieve domain adaptation. Wave flume experiments were conducted to validate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed technique. The final reconstruction results indicated great agreement and high accuracy with a mean bias of less than 2.1% compared with the measurements obtained using wave probes, suggesting that the novel technique effectively measures the spatiotemporal distribution of wave surface in hydrodynamic experiments.
Authors:An Vuong, Thinh Nguyen
Title: Perception-based multiplicative noise removal using SDEs
Abstract:
Multiplicative noise, also known as speckle or pepper noise, commonly affects images produced by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), lasers, or optical lenses. Unlike additive noise, which typically arises from thermal processes or external factors, multiplicative noise is inherent to the system, originating from the fluctuation in diffuse reflections. These fluctuations result in multiple copies of the same signal with varying magnitudes being combined. Consequently, despeckling, or removing multiplicative noise, necessitates different techniques compared to those used for additive noise removal. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using Stochastic Differential Equations based diffusion models to address multiplicative noise. We demonstrate that multiplicative noise can be effectively modeled as a Geometric Brownian Motion process in the logarithmic domain. Utilizing the Fokker-Planck equation, we derive the corresponding reverse process for image denoising. To validate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on two different datasets, comparing our approach to both classical signal processing techniques and contemporary CNN-based noise removal models. Our results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on perception-based metrics such as FID and LPIPS, while maintaining competitive performance on traditional metrics like PSNR and SSIM.
Authors:Chengyuan Li, Leran Guo, Shanfang Huang, Jian Deng
Title: Optimization and Simulation of Startup Control for Space Nuclear Power Systems with Closed Brayton Cycle based on NuHeXSys
Abstract:
This paper presents the development and optimization of a Space Nuclear Power System (SNPS) utilizing a helium-xenon gas-cooled Closed Brayton Cycle (CBC). A comprehensive dynamic system analysis code NuHeXSys (Nuclear Helium-Xenon Brayton Cycle Power System) was created, integrating non-ideal gas properties, a multi-channel thermal-hydraulic reactor core, and detailed turbo-machinery components. The innovation lies in parametrization of startup control sequence and application of an evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II) to improve control performance, significantly reducing startup time and energy consumption. Model verification shows parameter deviations within 10%, confirming its accuracy. The optimized control strategy reduced startup time by 1260 seconds and lowered external energy demand by 17%, demonstrating improved efficiency and operational stability for deep space missions. This work provides a foundation for future advancements in optimizing space nuclear power systems.
Authors:Qiao Li, Kanlun Tan, Qiao Liu, Di Yuan, Xin Li, Yunpeng Liu
Title: Progressive Domain Adaptation for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking
Abstract:
Due to the lack of large-scale labeled Thermal InfraRed (TIR) training datasets, most existing TIR trackers are trained directly on RGB datasets. However, tracking methods trained on RGB datasets suffer a significant drop-off in TIR data due to the domain shift issue. To this end, in this work, we propose a Progressive Domain Adaptation framework for TIR Tracking (PDAT), which transfers useful knowledge learned from RGB tracking to TIR tracking. The framework makes full use of large-scale labeled RGB datasets without requiring time-consuming and labor-intensive labeling of large-scale TIR data. Specifically, we first propose an adversarial-based global domain adaptation module to reduce domain gap on the feature level coarsely. Second, we design a clustering-based subdomain adaptation method to further align the feature distributions of the RGB and TIR datasets finely. These two domain adaptation modules gradually eliminate the discrepancy between the two domains, and thus learn domain-invariant fine-grained features through progressive training. Additionally, we collect a largescale TIR dataset with over 1.48 million unlabeled TIR images for training the proposed domain adaptation framework. Experimental results on five TIR tracking benchmarks show that the proposed method gains a nearly 6% success rate, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Authors:Yuki Sato, Yuto Lewis Terashima, Ruho Kondo
Title: Efficient computational homogenization via tensor train format
Abstract:
Real-world physical systems, like composite materials and porous media, exhibit complex heterogeneities and multiscale nature, posing significant computational challenges. Computational homogenization is useful for predicting macroscopic properties from the microscopic material constitution. It involves defining a representative volume element (RVE), solving governing equations, and evaluating its properties such as conductivity and elasticity. Despite its effectiveness, the approach can be computationally expensive. This study proposes a tensor-train (TT)-based asymptotic homogenization method to address these challenges. By deriving boundary value problems at the microscale and expressing them in the TT format, the proposed method estimates material properties efficiently. We demonstrate its validity and effectiveness through numerical experiments applying the proposed method for homogenization of thermal conductivity and elasticity in two- and three-dimensional materials, offering a promising solution for handling the multiscale nature of heterogeneous systems.
Authors:Marcus Corbett, Fernando Guevara Vasquez, Alexander Royzman, Guang Yang
Title: Discrete inverse problems with internal functionals
Abstract:
We study the problem of finding the resistors in a resistor network from measurements of the power dissipated by the resistors under different loads. We give sufficient conditions for local uniqueness, i.e. conditions that guarantee that the linearization of this non-linear inverse problem admits a unique solution. Our method is inspired by a method to study local uniqueness of inverse problems with internal functionals in the continuum, where the inverse problem is reformulated as a redundant system of differential equations. We use our method to derive local uniqueness conditions for other discrete inverse problems with internal functionals including a discrete analogue of the inverse Schrödinger problem and problems where the resistors are replaced by impedances and dissipated power at the zero and a positive frequency are available. Moreover, we show that the dissipated power measurements can be obtained from measurements of thermal noise induced currents.
Authors:Niklas Reich, Karsten Urban, Jürgen Vorloeper
Title: A parallel batch greedy algorithm in reduced basis methods: Convergence rates and numerical results
Abstract:
The "classical" (weak) greedy algorithm is widely used within model order reduction in order to compute a reduced basis in the offline training phase: An a posteriori error estimator is maximized and the snapshot corresponding to the maximizer is added to the basis. Since these snapshots are determined by a sufficiently detailed discretization, the offline phase is often computationally extremely costly. We suggest to replace the serial determination of one snapshot after the other by a parallel approach. In order to do so, we introduce a batch size $b$ and add $b$ snapshots to the current basis in every greedy iteration. These snapshots are computed in parallel. We prove convergence rates for this new batch greedy algorithm and compare them to those of the classical (weak) greedy algorithm in the Hilbert and Banach space case. Then, we present numerical results where we apply a (parallel) implementation of the proposed algorithm to the linear elliptic thermal block problem. We analyze the convergence rate as well as the offline and online wall-clock times for different batch sizes. We show that the proposed variant can significantly speed-up the offline phase while the size of the reduced problem is only moderately increased. The benefit of the parallel batch greedy increases for more complicated problems.
Authors:Salahudeen Mohamed, Qian Yuan, Dimitri Litvinov, Jie Gao, Ermile Gaganidze, Dmitry Terentyev, Hans-Christian Schneider, Jarir Aktaa
Title: Investigation of microstructural evolution of irradiation-induced defects in tungsten: an experimental-numerical approach
Abstract:
The hostile condition in a fusion tokomak reactor poses the main challenge in the development and design of in-vessel components such as divertor and breeding blanket due to fusion relevant irradiation conditions (14 MeV) and large thermal loads. The current work describes the employment of an integrated experimental-numerical approach to assess the microstructure evolution of dislocation loops and voids in tungsten proposed for fusion application. Cluster dynamics (CD) model is implemented and simulations are performed on the irradiated tungsten Disk shape Compact Tension (DCT) specimen used in the experimental test. TEM characterisation is performed on the DCT specimen irradiated at 400 °C and 600 °C with around 1 dpa, respectively. The dpa rate and cascade overlap rate from the experiments and SPECTRA-PKA code, respectively, are implemented in the CD model. Based on the comparison between experimental and computational results, the dose and temperature dependence of irradiation-induced defects (dislocation loops, voids, c15 clusters) are clearly observed. Trap mediated diffusion is studied and the impact of cascades with the pre-existing defects is analysed through full cascade overlap mode and the consequent influence on the defect concentration is evaluated. The exchange of self-interstitial atoms (SIAs) and the change in the size of loops through reaction between <111> and <100> loops are studied in detail by means of the transfer rate of the SIAs.
Authors:Christophe Karam, Jessy Matias, Xavier Breniere, Jocelyn Chanussot
Title: Optimizing the image correction pipeline for pedestrian detection in the thermal-infrared domain
Abstract:
Infrared imagery can help in low-visibility situations such as fog and low-light scenarios, but it is prone to thermal noise and requires further processing and correction. This work studies the effect of different infrared processing pipelines on the performance of a pedestrian detection in an urban environment, similar to autonomous driving scenarios. Detection on infrared images is shown to outperform that on visible images, but the infrared correction pipeline is crucial since the models cannot extract information from raw infrared images. Two thermal correction pipelines are studied, the shutter and the shutterless pipes. Experiments show that some correction algorithms like spatial denoising are detrimental to performance even if they increase visual quality for a human observer. Other algorithms like destriping and, to a lesser extent, temporal denoising, increase computational time, but have some role to play in increasing detection accuracy. As it stands, the optimal trade-off for speed and accuracy is simply to use the shutterless pipe with a tonemapping algorithm only, for autonomous driving applications within varied environments.
Authors:Sijie Xu, Shenyan Zong, Chang-Sheng Mei, Guofeng Shen, Yueran Zhao, He Wang
Title: Accelerated Proton Resonance Frequency-based Magnetic Resonance Thermometry by Optimized Deep Learning Method
Abstract:
Proton resonance frequency (PRF) based MR thermometry is essential for focused ultrasound (FUS) thermal ablation therapies. This work aims to enhance temporal resolution in dynamic MR temperature map reconstruction using an improved deep learning method. The training-optimized methods and five classical neural networks were applied on the 2-fold and 4-fold under-sampling k-space data to reconstruct the temperature maps. The enhanced training modules included offline/online data augmentations, knowledge distillation, and the amplitude-phase decoupling loss function. The heating experiments were performed by a FUS transducer on phantom and ex vivo tissues, respectively. These data were manually under-sampled to imitate acceleration procedures and trained in our method to get the reconstruction model. The additional dozen or so testing datasets were separately obtained for evaluating the real-time performance and temperature accuracy. Acceleration factors of 1.9 and 3.7 were found for 2 times and 4 times k-space under-sampling strategies and the ResUNet-based deep learning reconstruction performed exceptionally well. In 2-fold acceleration scenario, the RMSE of temperature map patches provided the values of 0.888 degree centigrade and 1.145 degree centigrade on phantom and ex vivo testing datasets. The DICE value of temperature areas enclosed by 43 degree centigrade isotherm was 0.809, and the Bland-Altman analysis showed a bias of -0.253 degree centigrade with the apart of plus or minus 2.16 degree centigrade. In 4 times under-sampling case, these evaluating values decreased by approximately 10%. This study demonstrates that deep learning-based reconstruction can significantly enhance the accuracy and efficiency of MR thermometry for clinical FUS thermal therapies.
Authors:Giuseppe Silano, Evangelos Rikos, Vetrivel Rajkumar, Oliver Gehrke, Tesfaye Amare Zerihun, Carmine Rodio, Riccardo Lazzari
Title: Integrating Power-to-Heat Services in Geographically Distributed Multi-Energy Systems: A Case Study from the ERIGrid 2.0 Project
Abstract:
This paper investigates the integration and validation of multi-energy systems within the H2020 ERIGrid 2.0 project, focusing on the deployment of the JaNDER software middleware and universal API (uAPI) to establish a robust, high-data-rate, and low-latency communication link between Research Infrastructures (RIs). The middleware facilitates seamless integration of RIs through specifically designed transport layers, while the uAPI provides a simplified and standardized interface to ease deployment. A motivating case study explores the provision of power-to-heat services in a local multi-energy district, involving laboratories in Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway, and analyzing their impact on electrical and thermal networks. This paper not only demonstrates the practical application of Geographically Distributed Simulations and Hardware-in-the-Loop technologies but also highlights their effectiveness in enhancing system flexibility and managing grid dynamics under various operational scenarios.
Authors:Hadeel Elayan, Samar Elmaadawy, Andrew W. Eckford, Raviraj Adve, Josep Jornet
Title: A Thermal Study of Terahertz Induced Protein Interactions
Abstract:
Proteins can be regarded as thermal nanosensors in an intra-body network. Upon being stimulated by Terahertz (THz) frequencies that match their vibrational modes, protein molecules experience resonant absorption and dissipate their energy as heat, undergoing a thermal process. This paper aims to analyze the effect of THz signaling on the protein heat dissipation mechanism. We therefore deploy a mathematical framework based on the heat diffusion model to characterize how proteins absorb THz-electromagnetic (EM) energy from the stimulating EM fields and subsequently release this energy as heat to their immediate surroundings. We also conduct a parametric study to explain the impact of the signal power, pulse duration, and interparticle distance on the protein thermal analysis. In addition, we demonstrate the relationship between the change in temperature and the opening probability of thermally-gated ion channels. Our results indicate that a controlled temperature change can be achieved in an intra-body environment by exciting protein particles at their resonant frequencies. We further verify our results numerically using COMSOL Multiphysics and introduce an experimental framework that assesses the effects of THz radiation on protein particles. We conclude that under controlled heating, protein molecules can serve as hotspots that impact thermally-gated ion channels. Through the presented work, we infer that the heating process can be engineered on different time and length scales by controlling the THz-EM signal input.
Authors:Konstantinos Vogiatzoglou, Costas Papadimitriou, Vasilis Bontozoglou, Konstantinos Ampountolas
Title: Physics-informed neural networks for parameter learning of wildfire spreading
Abstract:
Wildland fires pose a terrifying natural hazard, underscoring the urgent need to develop data-driven and physics-informed digital twins for wildfire prevention, monitoring, intervention, and response. In this direction of research, this work introduces a physics-informed neural network (PiNN) designed to learn the unknown parameters of an interpretable wildfire spreading model. The considered modeling approach integrates fundamental physical laws articulated by key model parameters essential for capturing the complex behavior of wildfires. The proposed machine learning framework leverages the theory of artificial neural networks with the physical constraints governing wildfire dynamics, including the first principles of mass and energy conservation. Training of the PiNN for physics-informed parameter identification is realized using synthetic data on the spatiotemporal evolution of one- and two-dimensional firefronts, derived from a high-fidelity simulator, as well as empirical data (ground surface thermal images) from the Troy Fire that occurred on June 19, 2002, in California. The parameter learning results demonstrate the predictive ability of the proposed PiNN in uncovering the unknown coefficients of the wildfire model in one- and two-dimensional fire spreading scenarios as well as the Troy Fire. Additionally, this methodology exhibits robustness by identifying the same parameters even in the presence of noisy data. By integrating this PiNN approach into a comprehensive framework, the envisioned physics-informed digital twin will enhance intelligent wildfire management and risk assessment, providing a powerful tool for proactive and reactive strategies.
Authors:Farzaneh Tatari, Davis Trapp, Jason Schneider, Mohsen Mirza Aligoudarzi
Title: Data-driven Thermal Modeling for Electrically Excited Synchronous Motors -- A Supervised Machine Learning Approach
Abstract:
This paper proposes a data-driven supervised machine learning (ML) for online thermal modeling of electrically excited synchronous motors (EESMs). EESMs are desired for EVs due to their high performance, efficiency, and durability at a relatively low cost. Therefore, obtaining precise EESM temperature estimations are significantly important, because online accurate temperature estimation can lead to EESM performance improvement and guaranteeing its safety and reliability. In this study, in addition to the default inputs' data, EESM losses data is leveraged to improve the performance of the proposed ML approach for thermal modeling. Exponentially weighted moving averages and standard deviations of the inputs are also incorporated in the learning process to consider the memory effect for modeling a dynamical thermal model. Using the experimental data of an EESM prototype, the performance of ordinary least squares (OLS) method is evaluated through a complete training, testing and cross-validation process. Finally, simulation results will provide the key performance metrics of OLS for EESM thermal modeling.
Authors:Yasod Ginige, Ransika Gunasekara, Darsha Hewavitharana, Manjula Ariyarathne, Ranga Rodrigo, Peshala Jayasekara
Title: Vessel Re-identification and Activity Detection in Thermal Domain for Maritime Surveillance
Abstract:
Maritime surveillance is vital to mitigate illegal activities such as drug smuggling, illegal fishing, and human trafficking. Vision-based maritime surveillance is challenging mainly due to visibility issues at night, which results in failures in re-identifying vessels and detecting suspicious activities. In this paper, we introduce a thermal, vision-based approach for maritime surveillance with object tracking, vessel re-identification, and suspicious activity detection capabilities. For vessel re-identification, we propose a novel viewpoint-independent algorithm which compares features of the sides of the vessel separately (separate side-spaces) leveraging shape information in the absence of color features. We propose techniques to adapt tracking and activity detection algorithms for the thermal domain and train them using a thermal dataset we created. This dataset will be the first publicly available benchmark dataset for thermal maritime surveillance. Our system is capable of re-identifying vessels with an 81.8% Top1 score and identifying suspicious activities with a 72.4\% frame mAP score; a new benchmark for each task in the thermal domain.
Authors:Isaac YL Lee, Thanh Nguyen-Duc, Ryo Ueno, Jesse Smith, Peter Y Chan
Title: Use of a Multiscale Vision Transformer to predict Nursing Activities Score from Low Resolution Thermal Videos in an Intensive Care Unit
Abstract:
Excessive caregiver workload in hospital nurses has been implicated in poorer patient care and increased worker burnout. Measurement of this workload in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is often done using the Nursing Activities Score (NAS), but this is usually recorded manually and sporadically. Previous work has made use of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) by using computer vision to passively derive caregiver-patient interaction times to monitor staff workload. In this letter, we propose using a Multiscale Vision Transformer (MViT) to passively predict the NAS from low-resolution thermal videos recorded in an ICU. 458 videos were obtained from an ICU in Melbourne, Australia and used to train a MViTv2 model using an indirect prediction and a direct prediction method. The indirect method predicted 1 of 8 potentially identifiable NAS activities from the video before inferring the NAS. The direct method predicted the NAS score immediately from the video. The indirect method yielded an average 5-fold accuracy of 57.21%, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of 0.865, a F1 score of 0.570 and a mean squared error (MSE) of 28.16. The direct method yielded a MSE of 18.16. We also showed that the MViTv2 outperforms similar models such as R(2+1)D and ResNet50-LSTM under identical settings. This study shows the feasibility of using a MViTv2 to passively predict the NAS in an ICU and monitor staff workload automatically. Our results above also show an increased accuracy in predicting NAS directly versus predicting NAS indirectly. We hope that our study can provide a direction for future work and further improve the accuracy of passive NAS monitoring.
Authors:Musaddiq Al Ali, Masatoshi Shimoda
Title: Concurrent Multiphysics and Multiscale Topology Optimization for Lightweight Laser-Driven Porous Actuator Systems
Abstract:
In this research, multi-physics topology optimization is employed to achieve the detailed design of a lightweight porous linear actuation mechanism that harnesses energy through laser activation. A multiscale topology optimization methodology is introduced for micro- and macroscale design, considering energy dissipation via heat convection and radiation. This investigation meticulously considers the impact of heat dissipation mechanisms, including thermal conduction, convection, and radiation. Through various numerical cases, we systematically explore the influence of micro-scale considerations on porous design and understand the effects on the topology optimization process by incorporating various microstructural systems. The results demonstrate that porous actuator designs exhibit superior performance compared to solid actuator designs. This study contributes to advancing the understanding of multiscale effects in topology optimization, paving the way for more efficient and lightweight designs in the field of laser-activated porous actuators.
Authors:Jaeik Jeong, Tai-Yeon Ku, Wan-Ki Park
Title: Time-Varying Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Energy Storage Control
Abstract:
Energy storage devices, such as batteries, thermal energy storages, and hydrogen systems, can help mitigate climate change by ensuring a more stable and sustainable power supply. To maximize the effectiveness of such energy storage, determining the appropriate charging and discharging amounts for each time period is crucial. Reinforcement learning is preferred over traditional optimization for the control of energy storage due to its ability to adapt to dynamic and complex environments. However, the continuous nature of charging and discharging levels in energy storage poses limitations for discrete reinforcement learning, and time-varying feasible charge-discharge range based on state of charge (SoC) variability also limits the conventional continuous reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a continuous reinforcement learning approach that takes into account the time-varying feasible charge-discharge range. An additional objective function was introduced for learning the feasible action range for each time period, supplementing the objectives of training the actor for policy learning and the critic for value learning. This actively promotes the utilization of energy storage by preventing them from getting stuck in suboptimal states, such as continuous full charging or discharging. This is achieved through the enforcement of the charging and discharging levels into the feasible action range. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method further maximized the effectiveness of energy storage by actively enhancing its utilization.
Authors:Serge Massar, Bortolo Matteo Mognetti
Title: Equilibrium Propagation: the Quantum and the Thermal Cases
Abstract:
Equilibrium propagation is a recently introduced method to use and train artificial neural networks in which the network is at the minimum (more generally extremum) of an energy functional. Equilibrium propagation has shown good performance on a number of benchmark tasks. Here we extend equilibrium propagation in two directions. First we show that there is a natural quantum generalization of equilibrium propagation in which a quantum neural network is taken to be in the ground state (more generally any eigenstate) of the network Hamiltonian, with a similar training mechanism that exploits the fact that the mean energy is extremal on eigenstates. Second we extend the analysis of equilibrium propagation at finite temperature, showing that thermal fluctuations allow one to naturally train the network without having to clamp the output layer during training. We also study the low temperature limit of equilibrium propagation.
Authors:Engin Uzun, Erdem Akagunduz
Title: How to Augment for Atmospheric Turbulence Effects on Thermal Adapted Object Detection Models?
Abstract:
Atmospheric turbulence poses a significant challenge to the performance of object detection models. Turbulence causes distortions, blurring, and noise in images by bending and scattering light rays due to variations in the refractive index of air. This results in non-rigid geometric distortions and temporal fluctuations in the electromagnetic radiation received by optical systems. This paper explores the effectiveness of turbulence image augmentation techniques in improving the accuracy and robustness of thermal-adapted and deep learning-based object detection models under atmospheric turbulence. Three distinct approximation-based turbulence simulators (geometric, Zernike-based, and P2S) are employed to generate turbulent training and test datasets. The performance of three state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models: RTMDet-x, DINO-4scale, and YOLOv8-x, is employed on these turbulent datasets with and without turbulence augmentation during training. The results demonstrate that utilizing turbulence-specific augmentations during model training can significantly improve detection accuracy and robustness against distorted turbulent images. Turbulence augmentation enhances performance even for a non-turbulent test set.
Authors:Mahesh Bhupati, Abhishek Mall, Anshuman Kumar, Pankaj K. Jha
Title: Deep learning-based variational autoencoder for classification of quantum and classical states of light
Abstract:
Advancements in optical quantum technologies have been enabled by the generation, manipulation, and characterization of light, with identification based on its photon statistics. However, characterizing light and its sources through single photon measurements often requires efficient detectors and longer measurement times to obtain high-quality photon statistics. Here we introduce a deep learning-based variational autoencoder (VAE) method for classifying single photon added coherent state (SPACS), single photon added thermal state (SPACS), mixed states between coherent/SPACS and thermal/SPATS of light. Our semisupervised learning-based VAE efficiently maps the photon statistics features of light to a lower dimension, enabling quasi-instantaneous classification with low average photon counts. The proposed VAE method is robust and maintains classification accuracy in the presence of losses inherent in an experiment, such as finite collection efficiency, non-unity quantum efficiency, finite number of detectors, etc. Additionally, leveraging the transfer learning capabilities of VAE enables successful classification of data of any quality using a single trained model. We envision that such a deep learning methodology will enable better classification of quantum light and light sources even in the presence of poor detection quality.
Authors:Fredrik Hagström, Vikas Garg, Fabricio Oliveira
Title: Employing Federated Learning for Training Autonomous HVAC Systems
Abstract:
Buildings account for 40% of global energy consumption. A considerable portion of building energy consumption stems from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), and thus implementing smart, energy-efficient HVAC systems has the potential to significantly impact the course of climate change. In recent years, model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been increasingly assessed for this purpose due to their ability to learn and adapt purely from experience. They have been shown to outperform classical controllers in terms of energy cost and consumption, as well as thermal comfort. However, their weakness lies in their relatively poor data efficiency, requiring long periods of training to reach acceptable policies, making them inapplicable to real-world controllers directly. In this paper, we demonstrate that using federated learning to train the reinforcement learning controller of HVAC systems can improve the learning speed, as well as improve their ability to generalize, which in turn facilitates transfer learning to unseen building environments. In our setting, a global control policy is learned by aggregating local policies trained on multiple data centers located in different climate zones. The goal of the policy is to minimize energy consumption and maximize thermal comfort. We perform experiments evaluating three different optimizers for local policy training, as well as three different federated learning algorithms against two alternative baselines. Our experiments show that these effects lead to a faster learning speed, as well as greater generalization capabilities in the federated policy compared to any individually trained policy. Furthermore, the learning stability is significantly improved, with the learning process and performance of the federated policy being less sensitive to the choice of parameters and the inherent randomness of reinforcement learning.
Authors:Shuo-Hui Li, Yao-Wen Zhang, Ding Pan
Title: Deep generative modelling of canonical ensemble with differentiable thermal properties
Abstract:
We propose a variational modelling method with differentiable temperature for canonical ensembles. Using a deep generative model, the free energy is estimated and minimized simultaneously in a continuous temperature range. At optimal, this generative model is a Boltzmann distribution with temperature dependence. The training process requires no dataset, and works with arbitrary explicit density generative models. We applied our method to study the phase transitions (PT) in the Ising and XY models, and showed that the direct-sampling simulation of our model is as accurate as the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, but more efficient. Moreover, our method can give thermodynamic quantities as differentiable functions of temperature akin to an analytical solution. The free energy aligns closely with the exact one to the second-order derivative, so this inclusion of temperature dependence enables the otherwise biased variational model to capture the subtle thermal effects at the PTs. These findings shed light on the direct simulation of physical systems using deep generative models
Authors:Anirudh Narayan D, Akshat Johar, Divye Kalra, Bhavya Ardeshna, Ankur Bhattacharjee
Title: Machine Learning based prediction of Vanadium Redox Flow Battery temperature rise under different charge-discharge conditions
Abstract:
Accurate prediction of battery temperature rise is very essential for designing an efficient thermal management scheme. In this paper, machine learning (ML) based prediction of Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) thermal behavior during charge-discharge operation has been demonstrated for the first time. Considering different currents with a specified electrolyte flow rate, the temperature of a kW scale VRFB system is studied through experiments. Three different ML algorithms; Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Extreme Gradient Boost (XGBoost) have been used for the prediction work. The training and validation of ML algorithms have been done by the practical dataset of a 1kW 6kWh VRFB storage under 40A, 45A, 50A and 60A charge-discharge currents and 10 L min-1 of flow rate. A comparative analysis among the ML algorithms is done in terms of performance metrics such as correlation coefficient (R2), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). It is observed that XGBoost shows the highest accuracy in prediction of around 99%. The ML based prediction results obtained in this work can be very useful for controlling the VRFB temperature rise during operation and act as indicator for further development of an optimized thermal management system.
Authors:Guosheng Lu, Zile Fang, Jiaju Tian, Haowen Huang, Yuelong Xu, Zhuolin Han, Yaoming Kang, Can Feng, Zhigang Zhao
Title: GAN-HA: A generative adversarial network with a novel heterogeneous dual-discriminator network and a new attention-based fusion strategy for infrared and visible image fusion
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to preserve thermal radiation information from infrared images while integrating texture details from visible images. Thermal radiation information is mainly expressed through image intensities, while texture details are typically expressed through image gradients. However, existing dual-discriminator generative adversarial networks (GANs) often rely on two structurally identical discriminators for learning, which do not fully account for the distinct learning needs of infrared and visible image information. To this end, this paper proposes a novel GAN with a heterogeneous dual-discriminator network and an attention-based fusion strategy (GAN-HA). Specifically, recognizing the intrinsic differences between infrared and visible images, we propose, for the first time, a novel heterogeneous dual-discriminator network to simultaneously capture thermal radiation information and texture details. The two discriminators in this network are structurally different, including a salient discriminator for infrared images and a detailed discriminator for visible images. They are able to learn rich image intensity information and image gradient information, respectively. In addition, a new attention-based fusion strategy is designed in the generator to appropriately emphasize the learned information from different source images, thereby improving the information representation ability of the fusion result. In this way, the fused images generated by GAN-HA can more effectively maintain both the salience of thermal targets and the sharpness of textures. Extensive experiments on various public datasets demonstrate the superiority of GAN-HA over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms while showcasing its higher potential for practical applications.
Authors:Chase Urasaki, Frances Zhu, Michael Bottom, Miguel Nunes, Aidan Walk
Title: Jitter Characterization of the HyTI Satellite
Abstract:
The Hyperspectral Thermal Imager (HyTI) is a technology demonstration mission that will obtain high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution long-wave infrared images of Earth's surface from a 6U cubesat. HyTI science requires that the pointing accuracy of the optical axis shall not exceed 2.89 arcsec over the 0.5 ms integration time due to microvibration effects (known as jitter). Two sources of vibration are a cryocooler that is added to maintain the detector at 68 K and three orthogonally placed reaction wheels that are a part of the attitude control system. Both of these parts will introduce vibrations that are propagated through to the satellite structure while imaging. Typical methods of characterizing and measuring jitter involve complex finite element methods and specialized equipment and setups. In this paper, we describe a novel method of characterizing jitter for small satellite systems that is low-cost and minimally modifies the subject's mass distribution. The metrology instrument is comprised of a laser source, a small mirror mounted via a 3D printed clamp to a jig, and a lateral effect position-sensing detector. The position-sensing detector samples 1000 Hz and can measure displacements as little as 0.15 arcsec at distances of one meter. This paper provides an experimental procedure that incrementally analyzes vibratory sources to establish causal relationships between sources and the vibratory modes they create. We demonstrate the capabilities of this metrology system and testing procedure on HyTI in the Hawaii Space Flight Lab's clean room. Results include power spectral density plots that show fundamental and higher-order vibratory modal frequencies. Results from metrology show that jitter from reaction wheels meets HyTI system requirements within 3$σ$.
Authors:Jiajian Luo, Jaeho Lee
Title: Machine Learning-Assisted Thermoelectric Cooling for On-Demand Multi-Hotspot Thermal Management
Abstract:
Thermoelectric coolers (TECs) offer a promising solution for direct cooling of local hotspots and active thermal management in advanced electronic systems. However, TECs present significant trade-offs among spatial cooling, heating and power consumption. The optimization of TECs requires extensive simulations, which are impractical for managing actual systems with multiple hotspots under spatial and temporal variations. In this study, we present a novel machine learning-assisted optimization algorithm for thermoelectric coolers that can achieve global optimal temperature by individually controlling TEC units based on real-time multi-hotspot conditions across the entire domain. We train a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a combination of the Inception module and multi-task learning (MTL) approach to comprehend the coupled thermal-electrical physics underlying the system and attain accurate predictions for both temperature and power consumption with and without TECs. Due to the intricate interaction among passive thermal gradient, Peltier effect and Joule effect, a local optimal TEC control experiences spatial temperature trade-off which may not lead to a global optimal solution. To address this issue, we develop a backtracking-based optimization algorithm using the machine learning model to iterate all possible TEC assignments for attaining global optimal solutions. For any m by n matrix with NHS hotspots (n, m <= 10, 0<= NHS <= 20), our algorithm is capable of providing 52.4% peak temperature reduction and its corresponding TEC array control within an average of 1.64 seconds while iterating through tens of temperature predictions behind-the-scenes. This represents a speed increase of over three orders of magnitude compared to traditional FEM strategies which take approximately 27 minutes.
Authors:Juan Camilo Mejía-Fragoso, Manuel A. Florez, Rocío Bernal-Olaya
Title: Predicting the Geothermal Gradient in Colombia: a Machine Learning Approach
Abstract:
Accurate determination of the geothermal gradient is critical for assessing the geothermal energy potential of a given region. Of particular interest is the case of Colombia, a country with abundant geothermal resources. A history of active oil and gas exploration and production has left drilled boreholes in different geological settings, providing direct measurements of the geothermal gradient. Unfortunately, large regions of the country where geothermal resources might exist lack such measurements. Indirect geophysical measurements are costly and difficult to perform at regional scales. Computational thermal models could be constructed, but they require very detailed knowledge of the underlying geology and uniform sampling of subsurface temperatures to be well-constrained. We present an alternative approach that leverages recent advances in supervised machine learning and available direct measurements to predict the geothermal gradient in regions where only global-scale geophysical datasets and course geological knowledge are available. We find that a Gradient Boosted Regression Tree algorithm yields optimal predictions and extensively validate the trained model. We show that predictions of our model are within 12% accuracy and that independent measurements performed by other authors agree well with our model. Finnally, we present a geothermal gradient map for Colombia that highlights regions where futher exploration and data collection should be performed.
Authors:Sanghyeon Nam, Hyejin Lee, Youngki Kim, Kyoung hyun Kwak, Kyoungseok Han
Title: Hierarchical Climate Control Strategy for Electric Vehicles with Door-Opening Consideration
Abstract:
This study proposes a novel climate control strategy for electric vehicles (EVs) by addressing door-opening interruptions, an overlooked aspect in EV thermal management. We create and validate an EV simulation model that incorporates door-opening scenarios. Three controllers are compared using the simulation model: (i) a hierarchical non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) with a unique coolant dividing layer and a component for cabin air inflow regulation based on door-opening signals; (ii) a single MPC controller; and (iii) a rule-based controller. The hierarchical controller outperforms, reducing door-opening temperature drops by 46.96% and 51.33% compared to single layer MPC and rule-based methods in the relevant section. Additionally, our strategy minimizes the maximum temperature gaps between the sections during recovery by 86.4% and 78.7%, surpassing single layer MPC and rule-based approaches, respectively. We believe that this result opens up future possibilities for incorporating the thermal comfort of passengers across all sections within the vehicle.
Authors:Ioannis Alamanos, George P. Moustris, Costas S. Tzafestas
Title: Localization and Offline Mapping of High-Voltage Substations in Rough Terrain Using a Ground Vehicle
Abstract:
This paper proposes an efficient hybrid localization framework for the autonomous navigation of an unmanned ground vehicle in uneven or rough terrain, as well as techniques for detailed processing of 3D point cloud data. The framework is an extended version of FAST-LIO2 algorithm aiming at robust localization in known point cloud maps using Lidar and inertial data. The system is based on a hybrid scheme which allows the robot to not only localize in a pre-built map, but concurrently perform simultaneous localization and mapping to explore unknown scenes, and build extended maps aligned with the existing map. Our framework has been developed for the task of autonomous ground inspection of high-voltage electrical substations residing in rough terrain. We present the application of our algorithm in field trials, using a pre-built map of the substation, but also analyze techniques that aim to isolate the ground and its traversable regions, to allow the robot to approach points of interest within the map and perform inspection tasks using visual and thermal data.
Authors:Qiming Wang, Yongqiang Bai, Hongxing Song
Title: Middle Fusion and Multi-Stage, Multi-Form Prompts for Robust RGB-T Tracking
Abstract:
RGB-T tracking, a vital downstream task of object tracking, has made remarkable progress in recent years. Yet, it remains hindered by two major challenges: 1) the trade-off between performance and efficiency; 2) the scarcity of training data. To address the latter challenge, some recent methods employ prompts to fine-tune pre-trained RGB tracking models and leverage upstream knowledge in a parameter-efficient manner. However, these methods inadequately explore modality-independent patterns and disregard the dynamic reliability of different modalities in open scenarios. We propose M3PT, a novel RGB-T prompt tracking method that leverages middle fusion and multi-modal and multi-stage visual prompts to overcome these challenges. We pioneer the use of the adjustable middle fusion meta-framework for RGB-T tracking, which could help the tracker balance the performance with efficiency, to meet various demands of application. Furthermore, based on the meta-framework, we utilize multiple flexible prompt strategies to adapt the pre-trained model to comprehensive exploration of uni-modal patterns and improved modeling of fusion-modal features in diverse modality-priority scenarios, harnessing the potential of prompt learning in RGB-T tracking. Evaluating on 6 existing challenging benchmarks, our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art prompt fine-tuning methods while maintaining great competitiveness against excellent full-parameter fine-tuning methods, with only 0.34M fine-tuned parameters.
Authors:Nazmul Hasan, Apurba Kumar Saha, Andrew Wessman, Mohammed Shafae
Title: Machine Learning-based Layer-wise Detection of Overheating Anomaly in LPBF using Photodiode Data
Abstract:
Overheating anomaly detection is essential for the quality and reliability of parts produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM). In this research, we focus on the detection of overheating anomalies using photodiode sensor data. Photodiode sensors can collect high-frequency data from the melt pool, reflecting the process dynamics and thermal history. Hence, the proposed method offers a machine learning (ML) framework to utilize photodiode sensor data for layer-wise detection of overheating anomalies. In doing so, three sets of features are extracted from the raw photodiode data: MSMM (mean, standard deviation, median, maximum), MSQ (mean, standard deviation, quartiles), and MSD (mean, standard deviation, deciles). These three datasets are used to train several ML classifiers. Cost-sensitive learning is used to handle the class imbalance between the "anomalous" layers (affected by overheating) and "nominal" layers in the benchmark dataset. To boost detection accuracy, our proposed ML framework involves utilizing the majority voting ensemble (MVE) approach. The proposed method is demonstrated using a case study including an open benchmark dataset of photodiode measurements from an LPBF specimen with deliberate overheating anomalies at some layers. The results from the case study demonstrate that the MSD features yield the best performance for all classifiers, and the MVE classifier (with a mean F1-score of 0.8654) surpasses the individual ML classifiers. Moreover, our machine learning methodology achieves superior results (9.66% improvement in mean F1-score) in detecting layer-wise overheating anomalies, surpassing the existing methods in the literature that use the same benchmark dataset.
Authors:Nandana Menon, Amrita Basak
Title: Multi-fidelity surrogate with heterogeneous input spaces for modeling melt pools in laser-directed energy deposition
Abstract:
Multi-fidelity (MF) modeling is a powerful statistical approach that can intelligently blend data from varied fidelity sources. This approach finds a compelling application in predicting melt pool geometry for laser-directed energy deposition (L-DED). One major challenge in using MF surrogates to merge a hierarchy of melt pool models is the variability in input spaces. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel approach for constructing an MF surrogate for predicting melt pool geometry by integrating models of varying complexity, that operate on heterogeneous input spaces. The first thermal model incorporates five input parameters i.e., laser power, scan velocity, powder flow rate, carrier gas flow rate, and nozzle height. In contrast, the second thermal model can only handle laser power and scan velocity. A mapping is established between the heterogeneous input spaces so that the five-dimensional space can be morphed into a pseudo two-dimensional space. Predictions are then blended using a Gaussian process-based co-kriging method. The resulting heterogeneous multi-fidelity Gaussian process (Het-MFGP) surrogate not only improves predictive accuracy but also offers computational efficiency by reducing evaluations required from the high-dimensional, high-fidelity thermal model. The results underscore the benefits of employing Het-MFGP for modeling melt pool behavior in L-DED. The framework successfully demonstrates how to leverage multimodal data and handle scenarios where certain input parameters may be difficult to model or measure.
Authors:Rodrigo L. S. Silva, Clemens Verhoosel, Erik Quaeghebeur
Title: Bayesian estimation and uncertainty quantification of a temperature-dependent thermal conductivity
Abstract:
We consider the problem of estimating a temperature-dependent thermal conductivity model (curve) from temperature measurements. We apply a Bayesian estimation approach that takes into account measurement errors and limited prior information of system properties. The approach intertwines system simulation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We investigate the impact of assuming different model classes - cubic polynomials and piecewise linear functions - their parametrization, and different types of prior information - ranging from uninformative to informative. Piecewise linear functions require more parameters (conductivity values) to be estimated than the four parameters (coefficients or conductivity values) needed for cubic polynomials. The former model class is more flexible, but the latter requires less MCMC samples. While parametrizing polynomials with coefficients may feel more natural, it turns out that parametrizing them using conductivity values is far more natural for the specification of prior information. Robust estimation is possible for all model classes and parametrizations, as long as the prior information is accurate or not too informative. Gaussian Markov random field priors are especially well-suited for piecewise linear functions.
Authors:Sachiraj Mishra, A Rajmohan Dora, Tusaradri Mohapatra, Colin Benjamin
Title: Andreev reflection mediated $Δ_T$ noise
Abstract:
Quantum noise plays a pivotal role in understanding quantum transport phenomena, including current correlations and wave-particle duality. A recent focus in this domain is $Δ_T$ noise, which arises due to a finite temperature difference in the absence of charge current at zero voltage bias. This paper investigates $Δ_T$ noise in mesoscopic hybrid junctions with insulators, where the average charge current is zero at zero voltage bias, through the measurement of quantum shot noise, i.e., $Δ_T$ noise. Notably, we find that the $Δ_T$ noise in metal-insulator-superconductor junctions is significantly larger than in metal-insulator-metal junctions. Furthermore, our results reveal that $Δ_T$ noise initially increases with barrier strength, peaks, and then decreases, while it shows a steady increase with temperature bias, highlighting the nuanced interplay between barrier characteristics and thermal gradients.
Authors:Mohammad J. Aljubran, Roland N. Horne
Title: Thermal Earth Model for the Conterminous United States Using an Interpolative Physics-Informed Graph Neural Network (InterPIGNN)
Abstract:
This study presents a data-driven spatial interpolation algorithm based on physics-informed graph neural networks used to develop national temperature-at-depth maps for the conterminous United States. The model was trained to approximately satisfy the three-dimensional heat conduction law by simultaneously predicting subsurface temperature, surface heat flow, and rock thermal conductivity. In addition to bottomhole temperature measurements, we incorporated other physical quantities as model inputs, such as depth, geographic coordinates, elevation, sediment thickness, magnetic anomaly, gravity anomaly, gamma-ray flux of radioactive elements, seismicity, and electric conductivity. We constructed surface heat flow, and temperature and thermal conductivity predictions for depths of 0-7 km at an interval of 1 km with spatial resolution of 18 km$^2$ per grid cell. Our model showed superior temperature, surface heat flow and thermal conductivity mean absolute errors of 4.8° C, 5.817 mW/m$^2$ and 0.022 W/(C-m)$, respectively. The predictions were visualized in two-dimensional spatial maps across the modeled depths. This thorough modeling of the Earth's thermal processes is crucial to understanding subsurface phenomena and exploiting natural underground resources.
Authors:Jungmin Kim, Nanfang Yu, Zongfu Yu
Title: Compute-first optical detection for noise-resilient visual perception
Abstract:
In the context of visual perception, the optical signal from a scene is transferred into the electronic domain by detectors in the form of image data, which are then processed for the extraction of visual information. In noisy and weak-signal environments such as thermal imaging for night vision applications, however, the performance of neural computing tasks faces a significant bottleneck due to the inherent degradation of data quality upon noisy detection. Here, we propose a concept of optical signal processing before detection to address this issue. We demonstrate that spatially redistributing optical signals through a properly designed linear transformer can enhance the detection noise resilience of visual perception tasks, as benchmarked with the MNIST classification. Our idea is supported by a quantitative analysis detailing the relationship between signal concentration and noise robustness, as well as its practical implementation in an incoherent imaging system. This compute-first detection scheme can pave the way for advancing infrared machine vision technologies widely used for industrial and defense applications.
Authors:Alon Hillel-Tuch, Aspen Olmstead
Title: Physical Memory Attacks and a Memory Safe Management System for Memory Defense
Abstract:
Programming errors, defective hardware components (such as hard disk spindle defects), and environmental hazards can lead to invalid memory operations. In addition, less predictable forms of environmental stress, such as radiation, thermal influence, and energy fluctuations, can induce hardware faults. Sometimes, a soft error can occur instead of a complete failure, such as a bit-flip. The 'natural' factors that can cause bit-flips are replicable through targeted attacks that result in significant compromises, including full privileged system access. Existing physical defense solutions have consistently been circumvented shortly after deployment. We will explore the concept of a novel software-based low-level layer that can protect vulnerable memory targeted by physical attack vectors related to bit-flip vulnerabilities.
Authors:Jiali Wang, Yang Tang, Luca Schenato
Title: Humans-in-the-Building: Getting Rid of Thermostats for Optimal Thermal Comfort Control in Energy Management Systems
Abstract:
Given the widespread attention to individual thermal comfort, coupled with significant energy-saving potential inherent in energy management systems for optimizing indoor environments, this paper aims to introduce advanced "Humans-in-the-building" control techniques to redefine the paradigm of indoor temperature design. Firstly, we innovatively redefine the role of individuals in the control loop, establishing a model for users' thermal comfort and constructing discomfort signals based on individual preferences. Unlike traditional temperature-centric approaches, "thermal comfort control" prioritizes personalized comfort. Then, considering the diversity among users, we propose a novel method to determine the optimal indoor temperature range, thus minimizing discomfort for various users and reducing building energy consumption. Finally, the efficacy of the "thermal comfort control" approach is substantiated through simulations conducted using Matlab.
Authors:Pascal Mossier, Steven Jöns, Simone Chiocchetti, Andrea D. Beck, Claus-Dieter Munz
Title: Numerical Simulation of Phase Transition with the Hyperbolic Godunov-Peshkov-Romenski Model
Abstract:
In this paper, a thermodynamically consistent solution of the interfacial Riemann problem for the first-order hyperbolic continuum model of Godunov, Peshkov and Romenski (GPR model) is presented. In the presence of phase transition, interfacial physics are governed by molecular interaction on a microscopic scale, beyond the scope of the macroscopic continuum model in the bulk phases. The developed two-phase Riemann solvers tackle this multi-scale problem, by incorporating a local thermodynamic model to predict the interfacial entropy production. Using phenomenological relations of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, interfacial mass and heat fluxes are derived from the entropy production and provide closure at the phase boundary. We employ the proposed Riemann solvers in an efficient sharp interface level-set Ghost-Fluid framework to provide coupling conditions at phase interfaces under phase transition. As a single-phase benchmark, a Rayleigh-Bénard convection is studied to compare the hyperbolic thermal relaxation formulation of the GPR model against the hyperbolic-parabolic Euler-Fourier system. The novel interfacial Riemann solvers are validated against molecular dynamics simulations of evaporating shock tubes with the Lennard-Jones shifted and truncated potential. On a macroscopic scale, evaporating shock tubes are computed for the material n-Dodecane and compared against Euler-Fourier results. Finally, the efficiency and robustness of the scheme is demonstrated with shock-droplet interaction simulations that involve both phase transfer and surface tension, while featuring severe interface deformations.
Authors:Pedram Rabiee, Mohammad Hassan Saidi
Title: Implementation of Linear Parameter Varying System to Investigate the Impact of Varying Flow Rate on the Lithium-ion Batteries Thermal Management System Performance
Abstract:
Battery thermal management system is an indispensable part of the electric vehicles working with Lithium-ion batteries. Accordingly, lithium-ion batteries modeling, battery heat generation, and thermal management are the main focus of researchers and car manufacturers. To fulfill the need of manufacturers in the design process, a faster model than time-consuming Computational Fluid Dynamics models (CFD) is required. Reduced Order Models (ROM) address this requirement to maintain the accuracy of CFD models while could be compiled faster. Linear Time Invariant (LTI) reduced order model has been used in the literature; however, due to the limitation of LTI system, considering the constant flow rate for the cooling fluid, a Linear Parameter Varying system with three scheduling parameters was developed in this study. It is shown that LPV system results could fit accurately to CFD results in conditions that LTI system cannot maintain accuracy. Moreover, it is shown that applying varying water flow rates could result in a smoother temperature profile.
Authors:G. Leidi, R. Andrassy, W. Barsukow, J. Higl, P. V. F. Edelmann, F. K. Röpke
Title: Performance of high-order Godunov-type methods in simulations of astrophysical low Mach number flows
Abstract:
High-order Godunov methods for gas dynamics have become a standard tool for simulating different classes of astrophysical flows. Their accuracy is mostly determined by the spatial interpolant used to reconstruct the pair of Riemann states at cell interfaces and by the Riemann solver that computes the interface fluxes. In most Godunov-type methods, these two steps can be treated independently, so that many different schemes can in principle be built from the same numerical framework. In this work, we use our fully compressible Seven-League Hydro (SLH) code to test the accuracy of six reconstruction methods and three approximate Riemann solvers on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) problems involving subsonic flows only. We consider Mach numbers in the range from $10^{-3}$ to $10^{-1}$ in a well-posed, 2D, Kelvin--Helmholtz instability problem and a 3D turbulent convection zone that excites internal gravity waves in an overlying stable layer. We find that (i) there is a spread of almost four orders of magnitude in computational cost per fixed accuracy between the methods tested in this study, with the most performant method being a combination of a "low-dissipation" Riemann solver and a sextic reconstruction scheme, (ii) the low-dissipation solver always outperforms conventional Riemann solvers on a fixed grid when the reconstruction scheme is kept the same, (iii) in simulations of turbulent flows, increasing the order of spatial reconstruction reduces the characteristic dissipation length scale achieved on a given grid even if the overall scheme is only second order accurate, (iv) reconstruction methods based on slope-limiting techniques tend to generate artificial, high-frequency acoustic waves during the evolution of the flow, (v) unlimited reconstruction methods introduce oscillations in the thermal stratification near the convective boundary, where the entropy gradient is steep.
Authors:Hualin Zhan, Viqar Ahmad, Azul Mayon, Grace Tabi, Anh Dinh Bui, Zhuofeng Li, Daniel Walter, Hieu Nguyen, Klaus Weber, Thomas White, Kylie Catchpole
Title: Physics-based material parameters extraction from perovskite experiments via Bayesian optimization
Abstract:
The ability to extract material parameters of perovskite from quantitative experimental analysis is essential for rational design of photovoltaic and optoelectronic applications. However, the difficulty of this analysis increases significantly with the complexity of the theoretical model and the number of material parameters for perovskite. Here we use Bayesian optimization to develop an analysis platform that can extract up to 8 fundamental material parameters of an organometallic perovskite semiconductor from a transient photoluminescence experiment, based on a complex full physics model that includes drift-diffusion of carriers and dynamic defect occupation. An example study of thermal degradation reveals that the carrier mobility and trap-assisted recombination coefficient are reduced noticeably, while the defect energy level remains nearly unchanged. The reduced carrier mobility can dominate the overall effect on thermal degradation of perovskite solar cells by reducing the fill factor, despite the opposite effect of the reduced trap-assisted recombination coefficient on increasing the fill factor. In future, this platform can be conveniently applied to other experiments or to combinations of experiments, accelerating materials discovery and optimization of semiconductor materials for photovoltaics and other applications.
Authors:C. Erdogan, T. Bode, P. Junker
Title: An energy-based material model for the simulation of shape memory alloys under complex boundary value problems
Abstract:
Shape memory alloys are remarkable 'smart' materials used in a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from aerospace to robotics, thanks to their unique thermomechanical coupling capabilities. Given the complex properties of shape memory alloys, which are largely influenced by thermal and mechanical loads, as well as their loading history, predicting their behavior can be challenging. Consequently, there exists a pronounced demand for an efficient material model to simulate the behavior of these alloys. This paper introduces a material model rooted in Hamilton's principle. The key advantages of the presented material model encompass a more accurate depiction of the internal variable evolution and heightened robustness. As such, the proposed material model signifies an advancement in the realistic and efficient simulation of shape memory alloys.
Authors:Ilias Boulbarj, Bouklouze Abdelaziz, Yousra El Alami, Douzi Samira, Douzi Hassan
Title: Unmasking honey adulteration : a breakthrough in quality assurance through cutting-edge convolutional neural network analysis of thermal images
Abstract:
Honey, a natural product generated from organic sources, is widely recognized for its revered reputation. Nevertheless, honey is susceptible to adulteration, a situation that has substantial consequences for both the well-being of the general population and the financial well-being of a country. Conventional approaches for detecting honey adulteration are often associated with extensive time requirements and restricted sensitivity. This paper presents a novel approach to address the aforementioned issue by employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for the classification of honey samples based on thermal images. The use of thermal imaging technique offers a significant advantage in detecting adulterants, as it can reveal differences in temperature in honey samples caused by variations in sugar composition, moisture levels, and other substances used for adulteration. To establish a meticulous approach to categorizing honey, a thorough dataset comprising thermal images of authentic and tainted honey samples was collected. Several state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were trained and optimized using the dataset that was gathered. Within this set of models, there exist pre-trained models such as InceptionV3, Xception, VGG19, and ResNet that have exhibited exceptional performance, achieving classification accuracies ranging from 88% to 98%. Furthermore, we have implemented a more streamlined and less complex convolutional neural network (CNN) model, outperforming comparable models with an outstanding accuracy rate of 99%. This simplification offers not only the sole advantage of the model, but it also concurrently offers a more efficient solution in terms of resources and time. This approach offers a viable way to implement quality control measures in the honey business, so guaranteeing the genuineness and safety of this valuable organic commodity.
Authors:Muhammad Zeshan Alam, Sousso kelowani, Mohamed Elsaeidy
Title: Trade-off Between Spatial and Angular Resolution in Facial Recognition
Abstract:
Ensuring robustness in face recognition systems across various challenging conditions is crucial for their versatility. State-of-the-art methods often incorporate additional information, such as depth, thermal, or angular data, to enhance performance. However, light field-based face recognition approaches that leverage angular information face computational limitations. This paper investigates the fundamental trade-off between spatio-angular resolution in light field representation to achieve improved face recognition performance. By utilizing macro-pixels with varying angular resolutions while maintaining the overall image size, we aim to quantify the impact of angular information at the expense of spatial resolution, while considering computational constraints. Our experimental results demonstrate a notable performance improvement in face recognition systems by increasing the angular resolution, up to a certain extent, at the cost of spatial resolution.
Authors:Marco Baldan, Paolo Di Barba
Title: Energy-based PINNs for solving coupled field problems: concepts and application to the multi-objective optimal design of an induction heater
Abstract:
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are neural networks (NNs) that directly encode model equations, like Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), in the network itself. While most of the PINN algorithms in the literature minimize the local residual of the governing equations, there are energy-based approaches that take a different path by minimizing the variational energy of the model. We show that in the case of the steady thermal equation weakly coupled to magnetic equation, the energy-based approach displays multiple advantages compared to the standard residual-based PINN: it is more computationally efficient, it requires a lower order of derivatives to compute, and it involves less hyperparameters. The analyzed benchmark problems are the single- and multi-objective optimal design of an inductor for the controlled heating of a graphite plate. The optimized device is designed involving a multi-physics problem: a time-harmonic magnetic problem and a steady thermal problem. For the former, a deep neural network solving the direct problem is supervisedly trained on Finite Element Analysis (FEA) data. In turn, the solution of the latter relies on a hypernetwork that takes as input the inductor geometry parameters and outputs the model weights of an energy-based PINN (or ePINN). Eventually, the ePINN predicts the temperature field within the graphite plate.
Authors:Lina Morkunaite, Justas Kardoka, Darius Pupeikis, Paris Fokaides, Vangelis Angelakis
Title: Digital Twin for Grey Box modeling of Multistory residential building thermal dynamics
Abstract:
Buildings energy efficiency is a widely researched topic, which is rapidly gaining popularity due to rising environmental concerns and the need for energy independence. In Northern Europe heating energy alone accounts for up to 70 percent of the total building energy consumption. Industry 4.0 technologies such as IoT, big data, cloud computing and machine learning, along with the creation of predictive and proactive digital twins, can help to reduce this number. However, buildings thermal dynamics is a very complex process that depends on many variables. As a result, commonly used physics-based white box models are time-consuming and require vast expertise. On the contrary, black box forecasting models, which rely primarily on building energy consumption data, lack fundamental insights and hinder re-use. In this study we propose an architecture to facilitate grey box modelling of building thermal dynamics while integrating real time IoT data with 3D representation of buildings. The architecture is validated in a case study creating a digital twin platform that enables users to define the thermal dynamics of buildings based on physical laws and real data, thus facilitating informed decision making for the best heating energy optimization strategy. Also, the created user interface enables stakeholders such as facility managers, energy providers or governing bodies to analyse, compare and evaluate buildings thermal dynamics without extensive expertise or time resources.
Authors:Zhenyi Zhang, Shengbo Ma, Zhennan Zhou
Title: Uncertainty Quantification of Phase Transition Problems with an Injection Boundary
Abstract:
We develop an enthalpy-based modeling and computational framework to quantify uncertainty in Stefan problems with an injection boundary. Inspired by airfoil icing studies, we consider a system featuring an injection boundary inducing domain changes and a free boundary separating phases, resulting in two types of moving boundaries. Our proposed enthalpy-based formulation seamlessly integrates thermal diffusion across the domain with energy fluxes at the boundaries, addressing a modified injection condition for boundary movement. Uncertainty then stems from random variations in the injection boundary. The primary focus of our Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) centers on investigating the effects of uncertainty on free boundary propagation. Through mapping to a reference domain, we derive an enthalpy-based numerical scheme tailored to the transformed coordinate system, facilitating a simple and efficient simulation. Numerical and UQ studies in one and two dimensions validate the proposed model and the extended enthalpy method. They offer intriguing insights into ice accretion and other multiphysics processes involving phase transitions.
Authors:Aytekin Erdogan, Erdem Akagündüz
Title: FuseFormer: A Transformer for Visual and Thermal Image Fusion
Abstract:
Due to the lack of a definitive ground truth for the image fusion problem, the loss functions are structured based on evaluation metrics, such as the structural similarity index measure (SSIM). However, in doing so, a bias is introduced toward the SSIM and, consequently, the input visual band image. The objective of this study is to propose a novel methodology for the image fusion problem that mitigates the limitations associated with using classical evaluation metrics as loss functions. Our approach integrates a transformer-based multi-scale fusion strategy that adeptly addresses local and global context information. This integration not only refines the individual components of the image fusion process but also significantly enhances the overall efficacy of the method. Our proposed method follows a two-stage training approach, where an auto-encoder is initially trained to extract deep features at multiple scales in the first stage. For the second stage, we integrate our fusion block and change the loss function as mentioned. The multi-scale features are fused using a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers. The CNNs are utilized to capture local features, while the Transformer handles the integration of general context features. Through extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets, our proposed method, along with the novel loss function definition, demonstrates superior performance compared to other competitive fusion algorithms.
Authors:Marie-Christine Paré, Vasken Dermardiros, Antoine Lesage-Landry
Title: Efficient Data-Driven MPC for Demand Response of Commercial Buildings
Abstract:
Model predictive control (MPC) has been shown to significantly improve the energy efficiency of buildings while maintaining thermal comfort. Data-driven approaches based on neural networks have been proposed to facilitate system modelling. However, such approaches are generally nonconvex and result in computationally intractable optimization problems. In this work, we design a readily implementable energy management method for small commercial buildings. We then leverage our approach to formulate a real-time demand bidding strategy. We propose a data-driven and mixed-integer convex MPC which is solved via derivative-free optimization given a limited computational time of 5 minutes to respect operational constraints. We consider rooftop unit heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems with discrete controls to accurately model the operation of most commercial buildings. Our approach uses an input convex recurrent neural network to model the thermal dynamics. We apply our approach in several demand response (DR) settings, including a demand bidding, a time-of-use, and a critical peak rebate program. Controller performance is evaluated on a state-of-the-art building simulation. The proposed approach improves thermal comfort while reducing energy consumption and cost through DR participation, when compared to other data-driven approaches or a set-point controller.
Authors:Jerome Droniou, Mohamed Laaziri, Roland Masson
Title: Discretisations of mixed-dimensional Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical models preserving energy estimates
Abstract:
In this study, we explore mixed-dimensional Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical (THM) models in fractured porous media accounting for Coulomb frictional contact at matrix fracture interfaces. The simulation of such models plays an important role in many applications such as hydraulic stimulation in deep geothermal systems and assessing induced seismic risks in CO2 storage. We first extend to the mixed-dimensional framework the thermodynamically consistent THM models derived in [16] based on first and second principles of thermodynamics. Two formulations of the energy equation will be considered based either on energy conservation or on the entropy balance, assuming a vanishing thermo-poro-elastic dissipation. Our focus is on space time discretisations preserving energy estimates for both types of formulations and for a general single phase fluid thermodynamical model. This is achieved by a Finite Volume discretisation of the non-isothermal flow based on coercive fluxes and a tailored discretisation of the non-conservative convective terms. It is combined with a mixed Finite Element formulation of the contact-mechanical model with face-wise constant Lagrange multipliers accounting for the surface tractions, which preserves the dissipative properties of the contact terms. The discretisations of both THM formulations are investigated and compared in terms of convergence, accuracy and robustness on 2D test cases. It includes a Discrete Fracture Matrix model with a convection dominated thermal regime, and either a weakly compressible liquid or a highly compressible gas thermodynamical model.
Authors:Clémentine Courtès, Matthieu Boileau, Raphaël Côte, Paul-Antoine Hervieux, Giovanni Manfredi
Title: Micromagnetic simulations of the size dependence of the Curie temperature in ferromagnetic nanowires and nanolayers
Abstract:
We solve the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation in the finite-temperature regime, where thermal fluctuations are modeled by a random magnetic field whose variance is proportional to the temperature. By rescaling the temperature proportionally to the computational cell size $Δx$ ($T \to T\,Δx/a_{\text{eff}}$, where $a_{\text{eff}}$ is the lattice constant) [M. B. Hahn, J. Phys. Comm., 3:075009, 2019], we obtain Curie temperatures $T_{\text{C}}$ that are in line with the experimental values for cobalt, iron and nickel. For finite-sized objects such as nanowires (1D) and nanolayers (2D), the Curie temperature varies with the smallest size $d$ of the system. We show that the difference between the computed finite-size $T_{\text{C}}$ and the bulk $T_{\text{C}}$ follows a power-law of the type: $(ξ_0/d)^λ$, where $ξ_0$ is the correlation length at zero temperature, and $λ$ is a critical exponent. We obtain values of $ξ_0$ in the nanometer range, also in accordance with other simulations and experiments. The computed critical exponent is close to $λ=2$ for all considered materials and geometries. This is the expected result for a mean-field approach, but slightly larger than the values observed experimentally.
Authors:Oliver Bendel, Emanuel Graf, Kevin Bollier
Title: The HAPPY HEDGEHOG Project
Abstract:
Semi-autonomous machines, autonomous machines and robots inhabit closed, semi-closed and open environments, more structured environments like the household or more unstructured environments like cultural landscapes or the wilderness. There they encounter domestic animals, farm animals, working animals, and wild animals. These creatures could be disturbed, displaced, injured, or killed by the machines. Within the context of machine ethics and social robotics, the School of Business FHNW developed several design studies and prototypes for animal-friendly machines, which can be understood as moral and social machines in the spirit of these disciplines. In 2019-20, a team led by the main author developed a prototype robot lawnmower that can recognize hedgehogs, interrupt its work for them and thus protect them. Every year many of these animals die worldwide because of traditional service robots. HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH), as the invention is called, could be a solution to this problem. This article begins by providing an introduction to the background. Then it focuses on navigation (where the machine comes across certain objects that need to be recognized) and thermal and image recognition (with the help of machine learning) of the machine. It also presents obvious weaknesses and possible improvements. The results could be relevant for an industry that wants to market their products as animal-friendly machines.
Authors:Walid Guettala, Ali Sayah, Laid Kahloul, Ahmed Tibermacine
Title: Real Time Human Detection by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Abstract:
One of the most important problems in computer vision and remote sensing is object detection, which identifies particular categories of diverse things in pictures. Two crucial data sources for public security are the thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing multi-scenario photos and videos produced by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Due to the small scale of the target, complex scene information, low resolution relative to the viewable videos, and dearth of publicly available labeled datasets and training models, their object detection procedure is still difficult. A UAV TIR object detection framework for pictures and videos is suggested in this study. The Forward-looking Infrared (FLIR) cameras used to gather ground-based TIR photos and videos are used to create the ``You Only Look Once'' (YOLO) model, which is based on CNN architecture. Results indicated that in the validating task, detecting human object had an average precision at IOU (Intersection over Union) = 0.5, which was 72.5\%, using YOLOv7 (YOLO version 7) state of the art model \cite{1}, while the detection speed around 161 frames per second (FPS/second). The usefulness of the YOLO architecture is demonstrated in the application, which evaluates the cross-detection performance of people in UAV TIR videos under a YOLOv7 model in terms of the various UAVs' observation angles. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of object detection from TIR pictures and videos using deep-learning models is supported favorably by this work.
Authors:Soyed Tuhin Ahmed, Mehdi B. tahoori
Title: Concurrent Self-testing of Neural Networks Using Uncertainty Fingerprint
Abstract:
Neural networks (NNs) are increasingly used in always-on safety-critical applications deployed on hardware accelerators (NN-HAs) employing various memory technologies. Reliable continuous operation of NN is essential for safety-critical applications. During online operation, NNs are susceptible to single and multiple permanent and soft errors due to factors such as radiation, aging, and thermal effects. Explicit NN-HA testing methods cannot detect transient faults during inference, are unsuitable for always-on applications, and require extensive test vector generation and storage. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the \emph{uncertainty fingerprint} approach representing the online fault status of NN. Furthermore, we propose a dual head NN topology specifically designed to produce uncertainty fingerprints and the primary prediction of the NN in \emph{a single shot}. During the online operation, by matching the uncertainty fingerprint, we can concurrently self-test NNs with up to $100\%$ coverage with a low false positive rate while maintaining a similar performance of the primary task. Compared to existing works, memory overhead is reduced by up to $243.7$ MB, multiply and accumulate (MAC) operation is reduced by up to $10000\times$, and false-positive rates are reduced by up to $89\%$.
Authors:Kaitlyn Wang, Yufang Jin
Title: Mapping Walnut Water Stress with High Resolution Multispectral UAV Imagery and Machine Learning
Abstract:
Effective monitoring of walnut water status and stress level across the whole orchard is an essential step towards precision irrigation management of walnuts, a significant crop in California. This study presents a machine learning approach using Random Forest (RF) models to map stem water potential (SWP) by integrating high-resolution multispectral remote sensing imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights with weather data. From 2017 to 2018, five flights of an UAV equipped with a seven-band multispectral camera were conducted over a commercial walnut orchard, paired with concurrent ground measurements of sampled walnut plants. The RF regression model, utilizing vegetation indices derived from orthomosaiced UAV imagery and weather data, effectively estimated ground-measured SWPs, achieving an $R^2$ of 0.63 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.80 bars. The integration of weather data was particularly crucial for consolidating data across various flight dates. Significant variables for SWP estimation included wind speed and vegetation indices such as NDVI, NDRE, and PSRI.A reduced RF model excluding red-edge indices of NDRE and PSRI, demonstrated slightly reduced accuracy ($R^2$ = 0.54). Additionally, the RF classification model predicted water stress levels in walnut trees with 85% accuracy, surpassing the 80% accuracy of the reduced classification model. The results affirm the efficacy of UAV-based multispectral imaging combined with machine learning, incorporating thermal data, NDVI, red-edge indices, and weather data, in walnut water stress estimation and assessment. This methodology offers a scalable, cost-effective tool for data-driven precision irrigation management at an individual plant level in walnut orchards.
Authors:Raul Guedert, Daniella L. L. S. Andrade, Jéssica Rodrigues, Guilherme B. Pintarelli, Daniela O. H. Suzuki
Title: Dynamic model of tissue electroporation on the basis of biological dispersion and Joule heating
Abstract:
Electroporation is a complex, iterative, and nonlinear phenomenon that is often studied by numerical simulations. In recent years, tissue electroporation simulations have been performed using static models. However, the results of a static model simulation are restricted to a fixed protocol signature of the pulsed electric field. This paper describes a novel dynamic model of tissue electroporation that also includes tissue dispersion and temperature to allow time-domain simulations. We implemented the biological dispersion of potato tubers and thermal analysis in a commercial finite element method software. A cell electroporation model was adapted to account for the increase in tissue conductivity. The model yielded twelve parameters, divided into three dynamic states of electroporation. Thermal analysis describes the dependence of tissue conductivity on temperature. The model parameters were evaluated using experiments with vegetal tissue (Solanum tuberosum) under electrochemotherapy protocols. The proposed model can accurately predict the conductivity of tissue under electroporation from 10 kV/m to 100 kV/m. A negligible thermal effect was observed at 100 kV/m, with a 0.89 °C increase. We believe that the proposed model is suitable for describing the electroporation current on a tissue scale and also for providing a hint on the effects on the cell membrane.
Authors:Stefan M. Goetz, Ricardo Lizana F., Sebastian Rivera
Title: Hairpin Motors for Electromobility: Twists and Bends of a Technological Breakthrough that Initially Arrived A Century Too Soon
Abstract:
There is currently a major trend to hairpin-winding motors for small and medium drives with increased power, specifically more torque density in the automotive industry. Practically all large players in the field either already use this winding technology or have announced doing so soon. However, hairpins, bar windings, and other segmented winding techniques are not purely a material and production issue. Instead their application to small drives influences all aspects of the design of machines, which are currently explored and studied by the industry. These range from not obvious gaps in the theory, parameter studies for maxima of efficiency, possible as well as advantageous winding schemes, thermal design, and ways to control ac losses to specific materials and process difficulties. Despite the apparent novelty of the trend, however, designers could revisit a widely forgotten knowledge base of more than 100 years for many of those questions. This old knowledge base and the understanding that many recently presented concepts have been developed earlier may speed up the technological development and appear to be a key to further innovation. Instead, many problems need to be solved again and technologies re-invented. Furthermore, as this technology has recently become merely industry-driven, a substantial portion of the information and technological developments are not available to the public -- a state that to our eyes may harm the innovation capacity of the drives community.
Authors:Minwoo Shin, Minjee Seo, Seonaeng Cho, Juil Park, Joon Ho Kwon, Deukhee Lee, Kyungho Yoon
Title: PhysRFANet: Physics-Guided Neural Network for Real-Time Prediction of Thermal Effect During Radiofrequency Ablation Treatment
Abstract:
Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a widely used minimally invasive technique for ablating solid tumors. Achieving precise personalized treatment necessitates feedback information on in situ thermal effects induced by the RFA procedure. While computer simulation facilitates the prediction of electrical and thermal phenomena associated with RFA, its practical implementation in clinical settings is hindered by high computational demands. In this paper, we propose a physics-guided neural network model, named PhysRFANet, to enable real-time prediction of thermal effect during RFA treatment. The networks, designed for predicting temperature distribution and the corresponding ablation lesion, were trained using biophysical computational models that integrated electrostatics, bio-heat transfer, and cell necrosis, alongside magnetic resonance (MR) images of breast cancer patients. Validation of the computational model was performed through experiments on ex vivo bovine liver tissue. Our model demonstrated a 96% Dice score in predicting the lesion volume and an RMSE of 0.4854 for temperature distribution when tested with foreseen tumor images. Notably, even with unforeseen images, it achieved a 93% Dice score for the ablation lesion and an RMSE of 0.6783 for temperature distribution. All networks were capable of inferring results within 10 ms. The presented technique, applied to optimize the placement of the electrode for a specific target region, holds significant promise in enhancing the safety and efficacy of RFA treatments.
Authors:Huibert A. J. van Riessen, Yasemin Vardar
Title: Relocating thermal stimuli to the proximal phalanx may not affect vibrotactile sensitivity on the fingertip
Abstract:
Wearable devices that relocate tactile feedback from fingertips can enable users to interact with their physical world augmented by virtual effects. While studies have shown that relocating same-modality tactile stimuli can influence the one perceived at the fingertip, the interaction of cross-modal tactile stimuli remains unclear. Here, we investigate how thermal cues applied on the index finger's proximal phalanx affect vibrotactile sensitivity at the fingertip of the same finger when employed at varying contact pressures. We designed a novel wearable device that can deliver thermal stimuli at adjustable contact pressures on the proximal phalanx. Utilizing this device, we measured the detection thresholds of fifteen participants for 250 Hz sinusoidal vibration applied on the fingertip while concurrently applying constant cold and warm stimuli at high and low contact pressures to the proximal phalanx. Our results revealed no significant differences in detection thresholds across conditions. These preliminary findings suggest that applying constant thermal stimuli to other skin locations does not affect fingertip vibrotactile sensitivity, possibly due to perceptual adaptation. However, the influence of dynamic multisensory tactile stimuli remains an open question for future research.
Authors:Jihoon Chung, Nastaran Shahmansouri, Rhys Goldstein, James Stoddart, John Locke
Title: Sustainability through Optimal Design of Buildings for Natural Ventilation using Updated Comfort and Occupancy Models
Abstract:
This paper explores the benefits of incorporating natural ventilation (NV) simulation into a generative process of designing residential buildings to improve energy efficiency and indoor thermal comfort. Our proposed workflow uses the Wave Function Collapse algorithm to generate a diverse set of plausible floor plans. It also includes post-COVID occupant presence models while incorporating adaptive comfort models. We conduct four sets of experiments using the workflow, and the simulated results suggest that multi-mode cooling strategies combining conventional air conditioning with NV can often significantly reduce energy use while introducing only slight reductions in thermal comfort.
Authors:Vincent Taboga, Hanane Dagdougui
Title: A Distributed ADMM-based Deep Learning Approach for Thermal Control in Multi-Zone Buildings under Demand Response Events
Abstract:
The increasing electricity use and reliance on intermittent renewable energy sources challenge power grid management during peak demand, making Demand Response programs and energy conservation measures essential. This research combines distributed optimization using ADMM with deep learning models to plan indoor temperature setpoints effectively. A two-layer hierarchical structure is used, with a central building coordinator at the upper layer and local controllers at the thermal zone layer. The coordinator must limit the building's maximum power by translating the building's total power to local power targets for each zone. Local controllers can modify the temperature setpoints to meet the local power targets. While most algorithms are either centralized or require prior knowledge about the building's structure, our approach is distributed and fully data-driven. The proposed algorithm, called Distributed Planning Networks, is designed to be both adaptable and scalable to many types of buildings, tackling two of the main challenges in the development of such systems. The proposed approach is tested on an 18-zone building modeled in EnergyPlus. The algorithm successfully manages Demand Response peak events.
Authors:Anthony Sirico, Daniel R Herber
Title: Iterative Classification of Graph-Set-Based Designs (IC-GSBD) for the Down-Selection of Aircraft Thermal Management Systems
Abstract:
In this paper, we present Iterative Classification of Graph-Set-Based Design (IC-GSBD), a framework utilizing graph-based techniques with geometric deep learning (GDL) integrated within a set-based design (SBD) approach for the classification and down-selection complex engineering systems represented by graphs. We demonstrate this approach on aircraft thermal management systems (TMSs) utilizing previous datasets created using an enumeration or brute-force graph generation procedure to represent novel aircraft TMSs as graphs. However, as with many enumerative approaches, combinatorial explosion limits its efficacy in many real-world problems, particularly when simulations and optimization must be performed on the many (automatically-generated) physics models. Therefore, the approach uses the directed graphs representing aircraft TMSs and GDL to predict on a subset of the graph-based dataset through graph classification. This paper's findings demonstrate that incorporating additional graph-based features using principle component analysis (PCA) enhances GDL model performance, achieving an accuracy of 98% for determining a graph's compilability and simulatability while using only 5% of the data for training. By applying iterative classification methods, we also successfully segmented the total set of graphs into more specific groups with an average inclusion of 75.5 of the top 100 highest-performing graphs, achieved by training on 40% of the data.
Authors:Pere Izquierdo Gomez, Miguel E. Lopez Gajardo, Nenad Mijatovic, Tomislav Dragicevic
Title: A Self-Commissioning Edge Computing Method for Data-Driven Anomaly Detection in Power Electronic Systems
Abstract:
Ensuring the reliability of power electronic converters is a matter of great importance, and data-driven condition monitoring techniques are cementing themselves as an important tool for this purpose. However, translating methods that work well in controlled lab environments to field applications presents significant challenges, notably because of the limited diversity and accuracy of the lab training data. By enabling the use of field data, online machine learning can be a powerful tool to overcome this problem, but it introduces additional challenges in ensuring the stability and predictability of the training processes. This work presents an edge computing method that mitigates these shortcomings with minimal additional memory usage, by employing an autonomous algorithm that prioritizes the storage of training samples with larger prediction errors. The method is demonstrated on the use case of a self-commissioning condition monitoring system, in the form of a thermal anomaly detection scheme for a variable frequency motor drive, where the algorithm self-learned to distinguish normal and anomalous operation with minimal prior knowledge. The obtained results, based on experimental data, show a significant improvement in prediction accuracy and training speed, when compared to equivalent models trained online without the proposed data selection process.
Authors:P. Martínez-Lera, M. De Corato
Title: A finite element method for stochastic diffusion equations using fluctuating hydrodynamics
Abstract:
We present a finite element approach for diffusion problems with thermal fluctuations based on a fluctuating hydrodynamics model. The governing transport equations are stochastic partial differential equations with a fluctuating forcing term. We propose a discrete formulation of the stochastic forcing term that has the correct covariance matrix up to a standard discretization error. Furthermore, to obtain a numerical solution with spatial correlations that converge to those of the continuum equation, we derive a linear mapping to transform the finite element solution into an equivalent discrete solution that is free from the artificial correlations introduced by the spatial discretization. The method is validated by applying it to two diffusion problems: a second-order diffusion equation and a fourth-order diffusion equation. The theoretical (continuum) solution to the first case presents spatially decorrelated fluctuations, while the second case presents fluctuations correlated over a finite length. In both cases, the numerical solution presents a structure factor that approximates well the continuum one.
Authors:Takiah Ebbs-Picken, David A. Romero, Carlos M. Da Silva, Cristina H. Amon
Title: Deep encoder-decoder hierarchical convolutional neural networks for conjugate heat transfer surrogate modeling
Abstract:
Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) analyses are vital for the design of many energy systems. However, high-fidelity CHT numerical simulations are computationally intensive, which limits their applications such as design optimization, where hundreds to thousands of evaluations are required. In this work, we develop a modular deep encoder-decoder hierarchical (DeepEDH) convolutional neural network, a novel deep-learning-based surrogate modeling methodology for computationally intensive CHT analyses. Leveraging convective temperature dependencies, we propose a two-stage temperature prediction architecture that couples velocity and temperature fields. The proposed DeepEDH methodology is demonstrated by modeling the pressure, velocity, and temperature fields for a liquid-cooled cold-plate-based battery thermal management system with variable channel geometry. A computational mesh and CHT formulation of the cold plate is created and solved using the finite element method (FEM), generating a dataset of 1,500 simulations. Our performance analysis covers the impact of the novel architecture, separate DeepEDH models for each field, output geometry masks, multi-stage temperature field predictions, and optimizations of the hyperparameters and architecture. Furthermore, we quantify the influence of the CHT analysis' thermal boundary conditions on surrogate model performance, highlighting improved temperature model performance with higher heat fluxes. Compared to other deep learning neural network surrogate models, such as U-Net and DenseED, the proposed DeepEDH architecture for CHT analyses exhibits up to a 65% enhancement in the coefficient of determination $R^{2}$. (*Due to the notification of arXiv "The Abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920 characters", the appeared Abstract is shortened. For the full Abstract, please download the Article.)
Authors:Gayan Lankeshwara, Rahul Sharma, M. R. Alam, Ruifeng Yan, Tapan K. Saha
Title: Development and Validation of a Dynamic Operating Envelopes-enabled Demand Response Scheme in Low-voltage Distribution Networks
Abstract:
Dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) offer an attractive solution for maintaining network integrity amidst increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in low-voltage (LV) networks. Currently, the focus of DOEs primarily revolves around active power exports of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) generation, often neglecting the impact of demand response (DR). This paper presents a two-stage, coordinated approach for residential DR participation in electricity markets under the DOE framework. In the first stage, the distribution network service provider (DNSP) adopts a convex hull technique to establish DOEs at each customer point-of-connection (POC). In the second stage, the demand response aggregator (DRA) utilises DOEs assigned by the DNSP to develop a hierarchical control scheme for tracking a load set-point signal without jeopardising network statutory limits. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in a practical setting, software-in-the-loop (SIL) tests are performed in a grid simulator, considering a real residential feeder with realistic household load and generation profiles. Simulation validations suggest that the DRA can provide precise DR while honouring network statutory limits and maintaining end-user thermal comfort. Furthermore, the overall approach is compliant with the market dispatch interval and preserves end-user data privacy.
Authors:Xingzhao Jia, Zhongqiu Zhao, Changlei Dongye, Zhao Zhang
Title: All in One: RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T Salient Object Detection
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify the most attractive objects within an image. Depending on the type of data being detected, SOD can be categorized into various forms, including RGB, RGB-D (Depth), RGB-T (Thermal) and light field SOD. Previous researches have focused on saliency detection with individual data type. If the RGB-D SOD model is forced to detect RGB-T data it will perform poorly. We propose an innovative model framework that provides a unified solution for the salient object detection task of three types of data (RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T). The three types of data can be handled in one model (all in one) with the same weight parameters. In this framework, the three types of data are concatenated in an ordered manner within a single input batch, and features are extracted using a transformer network. Based on this framework, we propose an efficient lightweight SOD model, namely AiOSOD, which can detect any RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T data with high speed (780FPS for RGB data, 485FPS for RGB-D or RGB-T data). Notably, with only 6.25M parameters, AiOSOD achieves excellent performance on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T datasets.
Authors:Mehdi Hojatmadani, Samantha Shepard, Kristen Salomon, Kyle Reed
Title: A Controlled Study on Evaluation of Thermal Stimulation Influence on Affective Measures of Uninformed Individuals
Abstract:
Although the relationship between temperature and emotional states has been investigated in the field of haptics, it remains unknown if, or in what direction, temperature affects emotional states. We approach this question at the intersection of haptics and psychology using a custom-built thermal device and emotional responses based on photos from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) library. Unlike past research, this study incorporates deception and a control (i.e., neutral temperature) condition. One hundred and twenty naive subjects reported their emotional responses to fifty-six images varying on normative arousal and valence ratings while being exposed to a cool~(30°C), neutral (33°C), or warm (36°C) temperature applied to the upper back. Participants exposed to warm temperatures reported higher arousal ratings in some image categories than participants exposed to neutral or cool temperatures. Valence ratings were decreased in warm conditions compared to neutral conditions. The emotion wheel was used as a complementary method of affective response measurement, and exploratory analysis methods were implemented. Although the valence and arousal showed statistical significance, the emotion wheel results did not demonstrate any significant differences between the temperature conditions.
Authors:Guang Yang, Yuan-Bin Liu, Lei Yang, Bing-Yang Cao
Title: Machine-Learned Atomic Cluster Expansion Potentials for Fast and Quantum-Accurate Thermal Simulations of Wurtzite AlN
Abstract:
Using the atomic cluster expansion (ACE) framework, we develop a machine learning interatomic potential for fast and accurately modelling the phonon transport properties of wurtzite aluminum nitride. The predictive power of the ACE potential against density functional theory (DFT) is demonstrated across a broad range of properties of w-AlN, including ground-state lattice parameters, specific heat capacity, coefficients of thermal expansion, bulk modulus, and harmonic phonon dispersions. Validation of lattice thermal conductivity is further carried out by comparing the ACE-predicted values to the DFT calculations and experiments, exhibiting the overall capability of our ACE potential in sufficiently describing anharmonic phonon interactions. As a practical application, we perform a lattice dynamics analysis using the potential to unravel the effects of biaxial strains on thermal conductivity and phonon properties of w-AlN, which is identified as a significant tuning factor for near-junction thermal design of w-AlN-based electronics.
Authors:Ahmet Ozkan Ozer, Ibrahim Khalilullah, Uthman Rasaq
Title: The Exponential Stabilization of a Heat and Piezoelectric Beam Interaction with Static or Hybrid Feedback Controllers
Abstract:
This study investigates a strongly-coupled system of partial differential equations (PDE) governing heat transfer in a copper rod, longitudinal vibrations, and total charge accumulation at electrodes within a magnetizable piezoelectric beam. Conducted within the transmission line framework, the analysis reveals profound interactions between traveling electromagnetic and mechanical waves in magnetizable piezoelectric beams, despite disparities in their velocities. Findings suggest that in the open-loop scenario, the interaction of heat and beam dynamics lacks exponential stability solely considering thermal effects. To confront this challenge, two types of boundary-type state feedback controllers are proposed: (i) employing static feedback controllers entirely and (ii) adopting a hybrid approach wherein the electrical controller dynamically enhances system dynamics. In both cases, solutions of the PDE systems demonstrate exponential stability through meticulously formulated Lyapunov functions with diverse multipliers. The proposed proof technique establishes a robust foundation for demonstrating the exponential stability of Finite-Difference-based model reductions as the discretization parameter approaches zero.
Authors:Yagyank Srivastava, Ankit Jain
Title: End-to-end Material Thermal Conductivity Prediction through Machine Learning
Abstract:
We investigated the accelerated prediction of the thermal conductivity of materials through end- to-end structure-based approaches employing machine learning methods. Due to the non-availability of high-quality thermal conductivity data, we first performed high-throughput calculations based on first principles and the Boltzmann transport equation for 225 materials, effectively more than doubling the size of the existing dataset. We assessed the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning models for thermal conductivity prediction on this expanded dataset and observed that all these models suffered from overfitting. To address this issue, we introduced a novel graph-based neural network model, which demonstrated more consistent and regularized performance across all evaluated datasets. Nevertheless, the best mean absolute percentage error achieved on the test dataset remained in the range of 50-60%. This suggests that while these models are valuable for expediting material screening, their current accuracy is still limited.
Authors:Augusto Gómez Eguíluz, Ignacio Rañó, Sonya A. Coleman, T. Martin McGinnity
Title: A multi-modal approach to continuous material identification through tactile sensing
Abstract:
Tactile sensing has recently been used in robotics for object identification, grasping, and material recognition. Most material recognition approaches use vibration information from a tactile exploration, typically above one second long, to identify the material. This work proposes a tactile multi-modal (vibration and thermal) material identification approach based on recursive Bayesian estimation. Through the frequency response of the vibration induced by the material and thermal features, like an estimate of the thermal power loss of the finger, we show that it is possible to identify materials in less than half a second. Moreover, a comparison between the use of vibration only and multi-modal identification shows that both recognition time and classification errors are reduced by adding thermal information.
Authors:Prosenjit Chatterjee, ANK Zaman
Title: Thermal Face Image Classification using Deep Learning Techniques
Abstract:
Thermal images have various applications in security, medical and industrial domains. This paper proposes a practical deep-learning approach for thermal image classification. Accurate and efficient classification of thermal images poses a significant challenge across various fields due to the complex image content and the scarcity of annotated datasets. This work uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, specifically ResNet-50 and VGGNet-19, to extract features from thermal images. This work also applied Kalman filter on thermal input images for image denoising. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Authors:Julian Fritzsch, Philippe Jacquod
Title: Stabilizing Large-Scale Electric Power Grids with Adaptive Inertia
Abstract:
The stability of AC power grids relies on ancillary services that mitigate frequency fluctuations. The electromechanical inertia of large synchronous generators is currently the only resource to absorb frequency disturbances on sub-second time scales. Replacing standard thermal power plants with inertialess new renewable sources of energy (NRE) therefore jeopardizes grid stability against e.g. sudden power generation losses. To guarantee system stability and compensate the lack of electromechanical inertia in grids with large penetrations of NREs, virtual synchronous generators, that emulate conventional generators, have been proposed. Here, we propose a novel control scheme for virtual synchronous generators, where the provided inertia is large at short times -- thereby absorbing faults as efficiently as conventional generators -- but decreases over a tunable time scale to prevent coherent frequency oscillations from setting in. We evaluate the performance of this adaptive inertia scheme under sudden power losses in large-scale transmission grids. We find that it systematically outperforms conventional, electromechanical inertia and that it is more stable than previously suggested schemes. Numerical simulations show how a quasi-optimal geographical distribution of adaptive inertia devices not only absorbs local faults efficiently, but also significantly increases the damping of inter-area oscillations. Our results show that the proposed adaptive inertia control scheme is an excellent solution to strengthen grid stability in future low-inertia power grids with large penetrations of NREs.
Authors:Jonathan Tammer Eweis-LaBolle, Chuanning Zhao, Yoonjin Won, Ramin Bostanabad
Title: Multi-fidelity Design of Porous Microstructures for Thermofluidic Applications
Abstract:
As modern electronic devices are increasingly miniaturized and integrated, their performance relies more heavily on effective thermal management. Two-phase cooling methods enhanced by porous surfaces, which capitalize on thin-film evaporation atop structured porous surfaces, are emerging as potential solutions. In such porous structures, the optimum heat dissipation capacity relies on two competing objectives that depend on mass and heat transfer. The computational costs of evaluating these objectives, the high dimensionality of the design space which a voxelated microstructure representation, and the manufacturability constraints hinder the optimization process for thermal management. We address these challenges by developing a data-driven framework for designing optimal porous microstructures for cooling applications. In our framework we leverage spectral density functions (SDFs) to encode the design space via a handful of interpretable variables and, in turn, efficiently search it. We develop physics-based formulas to quantify the thermofluidic properties and feasibility of candidate designs via offline simulations. To decrease the reliance on expensive simulations, we generate multi-fidelity data and build emulators to find Pareto-optimal designs. We apply our approach to a canonical problem on evaporator wick design and obtain fin-like topologies in the optimal microstructures which are also characteristics often observed in industrial applications.
Authors:Samuel Y W Low, Simone D'Amico
Title: Precise Distributed Satellite Navigation: Differential GPS with Sensor-Coupling for Integer Ambiguity Resolution
Abstract:
Precise relative navigation is a critical enabler for distributed satellites to achieve new mission objectives impossible for a monolithic spacecraft. Carrier phase differential GPS (CDGPS) with integer ambiguity resolution (IAR) is a promising means of achieving cm-level accuracy for high-precision Rendezvous, Proximity-Operations and Docking (RPOD), In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) as well as satellite formation flying and swarming. However, IAR is sensitive to received GPS signal noise, especially under severe multi-path or high thermal noise. This paper proposes a sensor-fusion approach to achieve IAR under such conditions in two coupling stages. A loose coupling stage fuses through an Extended Kalman Filter the CDGPS measurements with on-board sensor measurements such as range from cross-links, and vision-based bearing angles. A second tight-coupling stage augments the cost function of the integer weighted least-squares minimization with a soft constraint function using noise-weighted observed-minus-computed residuals from these external sensor measurements. Integer acceptance tests are empirically modified to reflect added constraints. Partial IAR is applied to graduate integer fixing. These proposed techniques are packaged into flight-capable software, with ground truths simulated by the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory's S3 library using state-of-the-art force modelling with relevant sources of errors, and validated in two scenarios: (1) a high multi-path scenario involving rendezvous and docking in low Earth orbit, and (2) a high thermal noise scenario relying only on GPS side-lobe signals during proximity operations in geostationary orbit. This study demonstrates successful IAR in both cases, using the proposed sensor-fusion approach, thus demonstrating potential for high-precision state estimation under adverse signal-to-noise conditions.
Authors:Zhihao Ge, Dandan Xu
Title: Analysis of multiphysics finite element method for quasi-static thermo-poroelasticity with a nonlinear convective transport term
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a multiphysics finite element method for a quasi-static thermo-poroelasticity model with a nonlinear convective transport term. To design some stable numerical methods and reveal the multi-physical processes of deformation, diffusion and heat, we introduce three new variables to reformulate the original model into a fluid coupled problem. Then, we introduce an Newton's iterative algorithm by replacing the convective transport term with $\nabla T^{i}\cdot(\bm{K}\nabla p^{i-1})$, $\nabla T^{i-1}\cdot(\bm{K}\nabla p^{i})$ and $\nabla T^{i-1}\cdot(\bm{K}\nabla p^{i-1})$, and apply the Banach fixed point theorem to prove the convergence of the proposed method. Then, we propose a multiphysics finite element method with Newton's iterative algorithm, which is equivalent to a stabilized method, can effectively overcome the numerical oscillation caused by the nonlinear thermal convection term. Also, we prove that the fully discrete multiphysics finite element method has an optimal convergence order. Finally, we draw conclusions to summarize the main results of this paper.
Authors:Artem K. Pimachev, Manoj Settipalli, Sanghamitra Neogi
Title: FluxGAN: A Physics-Aware Generative Adversarial Network Model for Generating Microstructures That Maintain Target Heat Flux
Abstract:
We propose a physics-aware generative adversarial network model, FluxGAN, capable of simultaneously generating high-quality images of large microstructures and description of their thermal properties. During the training phase, the model learns about the relationship between the local structural features and the physical processes, such as the heat flux in the microstructures, due to external temperature gradients. Once trained, the model generates new structural and associated heat flux environments, bypassing the computationally expensive modeling. Our model provides a cost effective and efficient approach over conventional modeling techniques, such as the finite element method (FEM), for describing the thermal properties of microstructures. The conventional approach requires computational modeling that scales with the size of the microstructure model, therefore limiting the simulation to a given size, resolution, and complexity of the model. In contrast, the FluxGAN model uses synthesis-by-part approach and generates arbitrary large size images at low computational cost. We demonstrate that the model can be utilized to generate designs of thermal sprayed coatings that satisfies target thermal properties. Furthermore, the model is capable of generating coating microstructures and physical processes in three-dimensional (3D) domain after being trained on two-dimensional (2D) examples. Our approach has the potential to transform the design and optimization of thermal sprayed coatings for various applications, including high-temperature and long-duration operation of gas turbines for aircraft or ground-based power generators.
Authors:Cheryne Jonay, Tianci Zhou
Title: A Physical Theory of Two-stage Thermalization
Abstract:
One indication of thermalization time is subsystem entanglement reaching thermal values. Recent studies on local quantum circuits reveal two exponential stages with decay rates $r_1$ and $r_2$ of the purity before and after thermalization. We provide an entanglement membrane theory interpretation, with $r_1$ corresponding to the domain wall free energy. Circuit geometry can lead to $r_1 < r_2$, producing a ``phantom eigenvalue". Competition between the domain wall and magnon leads to $r_2 < r_1$ when the magnon prevails. However, when the domain wall wins, this mechanism provides a practical approach for measuring entanglement growth through local correlation functions.
Authors:Seyed Mo Mirvakili, Ehsan Haghighat, Douglas Sim
Title: Machine Learning-Enabled Precision Position Control and Thermal Regulation in Advanced Thermal Actuators
Abstract:
With their unique combination of characteristics - an energy density almost 100 times that of human muscle, and a power density of 5.3 kW/kg, similar to a jet engine's output - Nylon artificial muscles stand out as particularly apt for robotics applications. However, the necessity of integrating sensors and controllers poses a limitation to their practical usage. Here we report a constant power open-loop controller based on machine learning. We show that we can control the position of a nylon artificial muscle without external sensors. To this end, we construct a mapping from a desired displacement trajectory to a required power using an ensemble encoder-style feed-forward neural network. The neural controller is carefully trained on a physics-based denoised dataset and can be fine-tuned to accommodate various types of thermal artificial muscles, irrespective of the presence or absence of hysteresis.
Authors:Vikram Goel, Soha Aslam, Sejal Dua
Title: Optimization of Tritium Breeding Ratio in a DT and DD Submersion Tokamak Fusion Reactor
Abstract:
The mass of stars is enough to confine a plasma to fuse light atoms, but this is not possible to engineer on Earth. Fortunately, nuclear engineering can rely on the magnetic confinement of a plasma using superconducting coils so long as the Tritium Breeding Ratio (TBR) is optimized. This paper will investigate some of the materials which can increase the rate at which Tritium is produced within the breeding blanket layer of Submersion Tokamak reactors, a design that uses magnetic confinement of a plasma in the shape of a torus to execute nuclear fusion. Using the Paramak Python module to model several geometries and OpenMC to run a simulation, it can be observed how neutron multipliers, enrichment, and the neutron energy spectrum affect TBR. This experiment will mainly observe different material choices that have been considered and their TBR based on their cross sections, dose rate, thermal properties and safety. By altering the neutron energy spectrum to account for DD and DT plasma, the difference in these compounds' Tritium breeding efficacy is noted. Neutron energy spectra are an important factor in optimising the TBR levels as the neutrons generated by the fusion reactions in the plasma interact with the breeder material in the blanket and produce tritium through the reaction with Lithium. Since Tritium is a rare isotope of hydrogen that is used as fuel in fusion reactions and has a short half-life, it is essential to produce tritium within the fusion reactor itself. Without the tritium breeding capability, it would not be feasible to generate energy via fusion. A TBR greater than unity indicates that the reactor can generate more tritium than it consumes, ensuring self-sufficiency in the tritium inventory. Since Tritium is the most reliable and efficient fuel for these reactors, optimising the TBR is of paramount importance in the long road to commercialization of nuclear fusion.
Authors:Ung Hee Lee, Tor Shepherd, Sangbae Kim, Avik De, Hao Su, Robert Gregg, Luke Mooney, Elliott Rouse
Title: How to Model Brushless Electric Motors for the Design of Lightweight Robotic Systems
Abstract:
A key step in the development of lightweight, high performance robotic systems is the modeling and selection of permanent magnet brushless direct current (BLDC) electric motors. Typical modeling analyses are completed a priori, and provide insight for properly sizing a motor for an application, specifying the required operating voltage and current, as well as assessing the thermal response and other design attributes (e.g.transmission ratio). However, to perform these modeling analyses, proper information about the motor's characteristics are needed, which are often obtained from manufacturer datasheets. Through our own experience and communications with manufacturers, we have noticed a lack of clarity and standardization in modeling BLDC motors, compounded by vague or inconsistent terminology used in motor datasheets. The purpose of this tutorial is to concisely describe the governing equations for BLDC motor analyses used in the design process, as well as highlight potential errors that can arise from incorrect usage. We present a power-invariant conversion from phase and line-to-line reference frames to a familiar q-axis DC motor representation, which provides a ``brushed'' analogue of a three phase BLDC motor that is convenient for analysis and design. We highlight potential errors including incorrect calculations of winding resistive heat loss, improper estimation of motor torque via the motor's torque constant, and incorrect estimation of the required bus voltage or resulting angular velocity limitations. A unified and condensed set of governing equations is available for designers in the Appendix. The intent of this work is to provide a consolidated mathematical foundation for modeling BLDC motors that addresses existing confusion and fosters high performance designs of future robotic systems.
Authors:Florian Jäger, Oliver Bertram, Sascha M. Lübbe, Alexander H. Bismark, Jan Rosenberg, Lukas Bartscht
Title: Battery-Electric Powertrain System Design for the HorizonUAM Multirotor Air Taxi Concept
Abstract:
The work presented herein has been conducted within the DLR internal research project HorizonUAM, which encompasses research within numerous areas related to urban air mobility. One of the project goals was to develop a safe and certifiable onboard system concept. This paper aims to present the conceptual propulsion system architecture design for an all-electric battery-powered multirotor electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle. Therefore, a conceptual design method was developed that provides a structured approach for designing the safe multirotor propulsion architecture. Based on the concept of operation the powertrain system was initially predefined, iteratively refined based on the safety assessment and validated through component sizing and simulations. The analysis was conducted within three system groups that were developed in parallel: the drivetrain, the energy supply and the thermal management system. The design process indicated that a pure quadcopter propulsion system can merely be designed reasonably for meeting the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) reliability specifications. By adding two push propellers and implementing numerous safety as well as passivation measures the reliability specifications defined by EASA could finally be fulfilled. The subsequent system simulations also verified that the system architecture is capable of meeting the requirements of the vehicle concept of operations. However, further work is required to extend the safety analysis to additional system components as the thermal management system or the battery management system and to reduce propulsion system weight.
Authors:Gangadhara Boregowda, Panchatcharam Mariappan
Title: Optimization of probe separation distance and cooling time in multi-probe cryoablation technique by arranging probes in triangular and square pattern-A computational approach
Abstract:
Cryoablation is a minimally invasive and efficient therapy option for liver cancer. Liquid nitrogen was used to kill the unwanted cells via freezing. One of the challenges of cryosurgery is to destroy the complete tumor without damaging the surrounding healthy cells when the tumor is large. To overcome this challenge, multi-cryoprobes were arranged in a polygonal pattern to create a uniform cooling and optimum ablation zone in the tissue. Single, three, and four cryoprobes were placed in the center, triangle, and square patterns to analyze the temperature profile and ablation zone. The results showed that tissue will freeze quickly when cryoprobes are placed in a square pattern. After the treatment of 600 seconds, $99\%$, $96\%$, and $31\%$ of the tumor were killed using four, three, and single cryoprobes, respectively. One of the difficulties in the multi-probe technique is choosing the probe separation distance and cooling time. The volume of the ablation zone, the thermal damage to healthy cells, and the volume of tumor cells killed during the treatment for different probe separation distances of 10 mm, 15 mm, and 20 mm are analyzed. Compared to other settings, a multi-probe technique destroys the entire tumor with the least harm to healthy cells when probes are arranged in a square pattern with a 15 mm space between them.
Authors:Zeynep Duygu Tekler, Yue Lei, Xilei Dai, Adrian Chong
Title: Enhancing personalised thermal comfort models with Active Learning for improved HVAC controls
Abstract:
Developing personalised thermal comfort models to inform occupant-centric controls (OCC) in buildings requires collecting large amounts of real-time occupant preference data. This process can be highly intrusive and labour-intensive for large-scale implementations, limiting the practicality of real-world OCC implementations. To address this issue, this study proposes a thermal preference-based HVAC control framework enhanced with Active Learning (AL) to address the data challenges related to real-world implementations of such OCC systems. The proposed AL approach proactively identifies the most informative thermal conditions for human annotation and iteratively updates a supervised thermal comfort model. The resulting model is subsequently used to predict the occupants' thermal preferences under different thermal conditions, which are integrated into the building's HVAC controls. The feasibility of our proposed AL-enabled OCC was demonstrated in an EnergyPlus simulation of a real-world testbed supplemented with the thermal preference data of 58 study occupants. The preliminary results indicated a significant reduction in overall labelling effort (i.e., 31.0%) between our AL-enabled OCC and conventional OCC while still achieving a slight increase in energy savings (i.e., 1.3%) and thermal satisfaction levels above 98%. This result demonstrates the potential for deploying such systems in future real-world implementations, enabling personalised comfort and energy-efficient building operations.
Authors:Alexis B. Rey-Boué, N. F. Guerrero-Rodríguez, Johannes Stöckl, Thomas I. Strasser
Title: Frequency-adaptive control of a three-phase single-stage grid-connected photovoltaic system under grid voltage sags
Abstract:
The low-voltage ride-through service is carried out in this paper according to the voltage profile described by the IEC 61400-21 European normative when short-duration voltage sags happen, and some instantaneous reactive power is delivered to the grid in accordance with the Spanish grid code; the mandatory limitation of the amplitude of the three-phase inverter currents to its nominal value is carried out with a novel control strategy, in which a certain amount of instantaneous constant active power can also be delivered to the grid when small or moderate voltage sags happen. A Multiple second order generalized integrator frequency-locked loop synchronization algorithm is employed in order to estimate the system frequency without harmonic distortions, as well as to output the positive- and the negative- sequence of the α\b{eta} quantities of the three-phase grid voltages when balanced and unbalanced voltage sags happen in a frequency-adaptive scheme. The current control is carried out in the stationary reference frame, which guarantees the cancellation of the harmonic distortions in the utility grid currents using a Harmonic compensation structure, and the implementation of a constant active power control in order to protect the DC link capacitor from thermal stresses avoiding the appearance of large harmonic distortions at twice the fundamental frequency in the DC link voltage. A case study of a three-phase single-stage grid-connected PV system with a maximum apparent power about 500 kVA is tested with several simulations using MATLAB/SIMULINK firstly, and secondly, with some experiments using the Controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) simulation technique for several types of voltage sags in order to do the final validation of the control algorithms.
Authors:Xin Wang, Bumsoo Park, Robert G. Landers, Sandipan Mishra, Douglas A. Bristow
Title: Control-Oriented Modeling and Layer-to-Layer Spatial Control of Powder Bed Fusion Processes
Abstract:
Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) is an important Additive Manufacturing (AM) process that is seeing widespread utilization. However, due to inherent process variability, it is still very costly and time consuming to certify the process and the part. This has led researchers to conduct numerous studies in process modeling, in-situ monitoring and feedback control to better understand the PBF process and decrease variations, thereby making the process more repeatable. In this study, we develop a layer-to-layer, spatial, control-oriented thermal PBF model. This model enables a framework for capturing spatially-driven thermal effects and constructing layer-to-layer spatial controllers that do not suffer from inherent temporal delays. Further, this framework is amenable to voxel-level monitoring and characterization efforts. System output controllability is analyzed and output controllability conditions are determined. A spatial Iterative Learning Controller (ILC), constructed using the spatial modeling framework, is implemented in two experiments, one where the path and part geometry are layer-invariant and another where the path and part geometry change each layer. The results illustrate the ability of the controller to thermally regulate the entire part, even at corners that tend to overheat and even as the path and part geometry change each layer.
Authors:Patryk Lipka-Bartosik, Martí Perarnau-Llobet, Nicolas Brunner
Title: Thermodynamic Computing via Autonomous Quantum Thermal Machines
Abstract:
We develop a physics-based model for classical computation based on autonomous quantum thermal machines. These machines consist of few interacting quantum bits (qubits) connected to several environments at different temperatures. Heat flows through the machine are here exploited for computing. The process starts by setting the temperatures of the environments according to the logical input. The machine evolves, eventually reaching a non-equilibrium steady state, from which the output of the computation can be determined via the temperature of an auxilliary finite-size reservoir. Such a machine, which we term a ``thermodynamic neuron'', can implement any linearly-separable function, and we discuss explicitly the cases of NOT, 3-MAJORITY and NOR gates. In turn, we show that a network of thermodynamic neurons can perform any desired function. We discuss the close connection between our model and artificial neurons (perceptrons), and argue that our model provides an alternative physics-based analogue implementation of neural networks, and more generally a platform for thermodynamic computing.
Authors:Shreyas Goyal, Jagath C. Rajapakse
Title: Self-supervised learning for hotspot detection and isolation from thermal images
Abstract:
Hotspot detection using thermal imaging has recently become essential in several industrial applications, such as security applications, health applications, and equipment monitoring applications. Hotspot detection is of utmost importance in industrial safety where equipment can develop anomalies. Hotspots are early indicators of such anomalies. We address the problem of hotspot detection in thermal images by proposing a self-supervised learning approach. Self-supervised learning has shown potential as a competitive alternative to their supervised learning counterparts but their application to thermography has been limited. This has been due to lack of diverse data availability, domain specific pre-trained models, standardized benchmarks, etc. We propose a self-supervised representation learning approach followed by fine-tuning that improves detection of hotspots by classification. The SimSiam network based ensemble classifier decides whether an image contains hotspots or not. Detection of hotspots is followed by precise hotspot isolation. By doing so, we are able to provide a highly accurate and precise hotspot identification, applicable to a wide range of applications. We created a novel large thermal image dataset to address the issue of paucity of easily accessible thermal images. Our experiments with the dataset created by us and a publicly available segmentation dataset show the potential of our approach for hotspot detection and its ability to isolate hotspots with high accuracy. We achieve a Dice Coefficient of 0.736, the highest when compared with existing hotspot identification techniques. Our experiments also show self-supervised learning as a strong contender of supervised learning, providing competitive metrics for hotspot detection, with the highest accuracy of our approach being 97%.
Authors:Matthias A. Cremon, Jacques Franc, Francois P. Hamon
Title: Constrained Pressure-Temperature Residual (CPTR) Preconditioner Performance for Large-Scale Thermal CO2 Injection Simulation
Abstract:
This work studies the performance of a novel preconditioner, designed for thermal reservoir simulation cases and recently introduced in Roy et al. (2020) and Cremon et al. (2020), on large-scale thermal CO2 injection cases. For Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) projects, injecting CO2 under supercritical conditions is typically tens of degrees colder than the reservoir temperature. Thermal effects can have a significant impact on the simulation results, but they also add many challenges for the solvers. More specifically, the usual combination of an iterative linear solver (such as GMRES) and the Constrained Pressure Residual (CPR) physics-based block-preconditioner is known to perform rather poorly or fail to converge when thermal effects play a significant role. The Constrained Pressure-Temperature Residual (CPTR) preconditioner retains the 2x2 block structure (elliptic/hyperbolic) of CPR but includes the temperature in the elliptic subsystem. The elliptic subsystem is now formed by two equations, and is dealt with by the system-solver of BoomerAMG (from the HYPRE library). Then a global smoother, ILU(0), is applied to the full system to handle the local, hyperbolic temperature fronts. We implemented CPTR in the multi-physics solver GEOS and present results on various large-scale thermal CCS simulation cases, including both Cartesian and fully unstructured meshes, up to tens of millions of degrees of freedom. The CPTR preconditioner severely reduces the number of GMRES iterations and the runtime, with cases timing out in 24h with CPR now requiring a few hours with CPTR. We present strong scaling results using hundreds of CPU cores for multiple cases, and show close to linear scaling. CPTR is also virtually insensitive to the thermal Peclet number (which compares advection and diffusion effects) and is suitable to any thermal regime.
Authors:Tshimankinda Jerome Ngoy, Mike Nkongolo
Title: Software-based signal compression algorithm for ROM-stored electrical cables
Abstract:
This project introduces a groundbreaking approach to address the challenge of periodic signal compression. By proposing a novel adaptive coding method, coupled with hardware-assisted data compression, we have developed a new architecture model tailored for efficient data compression. The selected compression scheme has demonstrated remarkable results, showcasing reduced memory communication volume and power consumption in the cache memory path of benchmark systems. With a reduction range of 4.2% to 35.2%, this innovation paves the way for affordable smart sensing, monitoring, diagnostics, and protection in emerging low-cost device types. Consequently, this cutting-edge technology enhances electrical signal compression and contributes to grid improvement. Additionally, we explore the novel application of harnessing wasted thermal energy in the Read-Only Memory (ROM) using thermoelectricity (TE). This approach captures the excess thermal energy, converting it into electrical energy through optimized supercapacitor charging, resulting in efficient energy utilization. This innovation intersects the fields of embedded systems, data compression, energy efficiency, and smart grid technology.
Authors:Juan Sandino, Peter A. Caccetta, Conrad Sanderson, Frederic Maire, Felipe Gonzalez
Title: Reducing Object Detection Uncertainty from RGB and Thermal Data for UAV Outdoor Surveillance
Abstract:
Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost platforms with flexible hardware configurations, as well as an increasing number of autonomous capabilities, including take-off, landing, object tracking and obstacle avoidance. However, little attention has been paid to how UAVs deal with object detection uncertainties caused by false readings from vision-based detectors, data noise, vibrations, and occlusion. In most situations, the relevance and understanding of these detections are delegated to human operators, as many UAVs have limited cognition power to interact autonomously with the environment. This paper presents a framework for autonomous navigation under uncertainty in outdoor scenarios for small UAVs using a probabilistic-based motion planner. The framework is evaluated with real flight tests using a sub 2 kg quadrotor UAV and illustrated in victim finding Search and Rescue (SAR) case study in a forest/bushland. The navigation problem is modelled using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and solved in real time onboard the small UAV using Augmented Belief Trees (ABT) and the TAPIR toolkit. Results from experiments using colour and thermal imagery show that the proposed motion planner provides accurate victim localisation coordinates, as the UAV has the flexibility to interact with the environment and obtain clearer visualisations of any potential victims compared to the baseline motion planner. Incorporating this system allows optimised UAV surveillance operations by diminishing false positive readings from vision-based object detectors.
Authors:Tonghui Zou, Lei Chen
Title: LadleNet: A Two-Stage UNet for Infrared Image to Visible Image Translation Guided by Semantic Segmentation
Abstract:
The translation of thermal infrared (TIR) images into visible light (VI) images plays a critical role in enhancing model performance and generalization capability, particularly in various fields such as registration and fusion of TIR and VI images. However, current research in this field faces challenges of insufficiently realistic image quality after translation and the difficulty of existing models in adapting to unseen scenarios. In order to develop a more generalizable image translation architecture, we conducted an analysis of existing translation architectures. By exploring the interpretability of intermediate modalities in existing translation architectures, we found that the intermediate modality in the image translation process for street scene images essentially performs semantic segmentation, distinguishing street images based on background and foreground patterns before assigning color information. Based on these principles, we propose an improved algorithm based on U-net called LadleNet. This network utilizes a two-stage U-net concatenation structure, consisting of Handle and Bowl modules. The Handle module is responsible for constructing an abstract semantic space, while the Bowl module decodes the semantic space to obtain the mapped VI image. Due to the characteristic of semantic segmentation, the Handle module has strong extensibility. Therefore, we also propose LadleNet+, which replaces the Handle module in LadleNet with a pre-trained DeepLabv3+ network, enabling the model to have a more powerful capability in constructing semantic space. The proposed methods were trained and tested on the KAIST dataset, followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis. Compared to existing methods, LadleNet and LadleNet+ achieved an average improvement of 12.4% and 15.2% in SSIM metrics, and 37.9% and 50.6% in MS-SSIM metrics, respectively.
Authors:Guilong Peng, Senshan Sun, Zhenwei Xu, Juxin Du, Yangjun Qin, Swellam W. Sharshir, A. W. Kandel, A. E. Kabeel, Nuo Yang
Title: The effect of dataset size and the process of big data mining for investigating solar-thermal desalination by using machine learning
Abstract:
Machine learning's application in solar-thermal desalination is limited by data shortage and inconsistent analysis. This study develops an optimized dataset collection and analysis process for the representative solar still. By ultra-hydrophilic treatment on the condensation cover, the dataset collection process reduces the collection time by 83.3%. Over 1,000 datasets are collected, which is nearly one order of magnitude larger than up-to-date works. Then, a new interdisciplinary process flow is proposed. Some meaningful results are obtained that were not addressed by previous studies. It is found that Radom Forest might be a better choice for datasets larger than 1,000 due to both high accuracy and fast speed. Besides, the dataset range affects the quantified importance (weighted value) of factors significantly, with up to a 115% increment. Moreover, the results show that machine learning has a high accuracy on the extrapolation prediction of productivity, where the minimum mean relative prediction error is just around 4%. The results of this work not only show the necessity of the dataset characteristics' effect but also provide a standard process for studying solar-thermal desalination by machine learning, which would pave the way for interdisciplinary study.
Authors:Hameedah Sultan, Smruti R. Sarangi
Title: VarSim: A Fast Process Variation-aware Thermal Modeling Methodology Using Green's Functions
Abstract:
Despite temperature rise being a first-order design constraint, traditional thermal estimation techniques have severe limitations in modeling critical aspects affecting the temperature in modern-day chips. Existing thermal modeling techniques often ignore the effects of parameter variation, which can lead to significant errors. Such methods also ignore the dependence of conductivity on temperature and its variation. Leakage power is also incorporated inadequately by state-of-the-art techniques. Thermal modeling is a process that has to be repeated at least thousands of times in the design cycle, and hence speed is of utmost importance. To overcome these limitations, we propose VarSim, an ultrafast thermal simulator based on Green's functions. Green's functions have been shown to be faster than the traditional finite difference and finite element-based approaches but have rarely been employed in thermal modeling. Hence we propose a new Green's function-based method to capture the effects of leakage power as well as process variation analytically. We provide a closed-form solution for the Green's function considering the effects of variation on the process, temperature, and thermal conductivity. In addition, we propose a novel way of dealing with the anisotropicity introduced by process variation by splitting the Green's functions into shift-variant and shift-invariant components. Since our solutions are analytical expressions, we were able to obtain speedups that were several orders of magnitude over and above state-of-the-art proposals with a mean absolute error limited to 4% for a wide range of test cases. Furthermore, our method accurately captures the steady-state as well as the transient variation in temperature.
Authors:Mahmoud Abdulsalam, Nabil Aouf
Title: TransPose: A Transformer-based 6D Object Pose Estimation Network with Depth Refinement
Abstract:
As demand for robotics manipulation application increases, accurate vision-based 6D pose estimation becomes essential for autonomous operations. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based approaches for pose estimation have been previously introduced. However, the quest for better performance still persists especially for accurate robotics manipulation. This quest extends to the Agri-robotics domain. In this paper, we propose TransPose, an improved Transformer-based 6D pose estimation with a depth refinement module. The architecture takes in only an RGB image as input with no additional supplementing modalities such as depth or thermal images. The architecture encompasses an innovative lighter depth estimation network that estimates depth from an RGB image using feature pyramid with an up-sampling method. A transformer-based detection network with additional prediction heads is proposed to directly regress the object's centre and predict the 6D pose of the target. A novel depth refinement module is then used alongside the predicted centers, 6D poses and depth patches to refine the accuracy of the estimated 6D pose. We extensively compared our results with other state-of-the-art methods and analysed our results for fruit-picking applications. The results we achieved show that our proposed technique outperforms the other methods available in the literature.
Authors:Abbas Türkoğlu, Erdem Akagündüz
Title: EANet: Enhanced Attribute-based RGBT Tracker Network
Abstract:
Tracking objects can be a difficult task in computer vision, especially when faced with challenges such as occlusion, changes in lighting, and motion blur. Recent advances in deep learning have shown promise in challenging these conditions. However, most deep learning-based object trackers only use visible band (RGB) images. Thermal infrared electromagnetic waves (TIR) can provide additional information about an object, including its temperature, when faced with challenging conditions. We propose a deep learning-based image tracking approach that fuses RGB and thermal images (RGBT). The proposed model consists of two main components: a feature extractor and a tracker. The feature extractor encodes deep features from both the RGB and the TIR images. The tracker then uses these features to track the object using an enhanced attribute-based architecture. We propose a fusion of attribute-specific feature selection with an aggregation module. The proposed methods are evaluated on the RGBT234 \cite{LiCLiang2018} and LasHeR \cite{LiLasher2021} datasets, which are the most widely used RGBT object-tracking datasets in the literature. The results show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art RGBT object trackers on these datasets, with a relatively smaller number of parameters.
Authors:Lu Wan, Xiaobing Dai, Torsten Welfonder, Ekaterina Petrova, Pieter Pauwels
Title: Semi-automated Thermal Envelope Model Setup for Adaptive Model Predictive Control with Event-triggered System Identification
Abstract:
To reach carbon neutrality in the middle of this century, smart controls for building energy systems are urgently required. Model predictive control (MPC) demonstrates great potential in improving the performance of heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, whereas its wide application in the building sector is impeded by the considerable manual efforts involved in setting up the control-oriented model. To facilitate the system identification (SI) of the building envelope as well as the configuration of the MPC algorithms with less human intervention, a semantic-assisted control framework is proposed in this paper. We first integrate different data sources required by the MPC algorithms such as the building topology, HVAC systems, sensor data stream and control settings in the form of a knowledge graph and then employ the data to set up the MPC algorithm automatically. Moreover, an event-triggered SI scheme is designed, to ensure the computational efficiency and accuracy of the MPC algorithm simultaneously. The proposed method is validated via simulations. The results demonstrate the practical relevance and effectiveness of the proposed semantics-assisted MPC framework with event-triggered learning of system dynamics.
Authors:Dean Wang, Paul K. Romano
Title: Termination of Picard Iteration for Coupled Neutronics/Thermal-Hydraulics Simulations
Abstract:
In this paper, we consider the coupled N/TH problem, in which the termination criterion for the neutronics iteration adopts an adaptive tolerance with respect to the fuel temperature residual at each Picard iteration. We refer to this coupling scheme as the inexact Picard iteration method. Fourier analysis is performed to investigate how the convergence behavior of Picard iteration is influenced by the inexact neutronics solution. It is found that if the convergence of the inner neutronics iteration is slow, Picard coupling may become unstable unless a tighter tolerance is used for the neutronics iteration. Nevertheless, our analysis indicates that a certain amount of over-solving is necessary for maintaining the stability of Picard iteration if the iterative solution of the subproblem is not fast enough. However, this issue has not been addressed in the previous studies.
Authors:Yasmin SarcheshmehPour, Tommi Ryyppo, Victor Mukherjee, Alex Jung
Title: Design of Induction Machines using Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
The design of induction machine is a challenging task due to different electromagnetic and thermal constraints. Quick estimation of machine's dimensions is important in the sales tool to provide quick quotations to customers based on specific requirements. The key part of this process is to select different design parameters like length, diameter, tooth tip height and winding turns to achieve certain torque, current and temperature of the machine. Electrical machine designers, with their experience know how to alter different machine design parameters to achieve a customer specific operation requirements. We propose a reinforcement learning algorithm to design a customised induction motor. The neural network model is trained off-line by simulating different instances of of electrical machine design game with a reward or penalty function when a good or bad design choice is made. The results demonstrate that the suggested method automates electrical machine design without applying any human engineering knowledge.
Authors:Ángel F. García-Fernández, Jimin Xiao
Title: Trajectory Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture filter for traffic monitoring using a drone
Abstract:
This paper proposes a multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithm for traffic monitoring using a drone equipped with optical and thermal cameras. Object detections on the images are obtained using a neural network for each type of camera. The cameras are modelled as direction-of-arrival (DOA) sensors. Each DOA detection follows a von-Mises Fisher distribution, whose mean direction is obtain by projecting a vehicle position on the ground to the camera. We then use the trajectory Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture filter (TPMBM), which is a Bayesian MOT algorithm, to optimally estimate the set of vehicle trajectories. We have also developed a parameter estimation algorithm for the measurement model. We have tested the accuracy of the resulting TPMBM filter in synthetic and experimental data sets.
Authors:Quanjie Wang, Jie Zhang, Vladimir Chernysh, Xiangjun Liu
Title: Phonon dynamic behaviors induced by amorphous interlayer at heterointerfaces
Abstract:
Interface impedes heat flow in heterostructures and the interfacial thermal resistance (ITR) has become a critical issue for thermal dissipation in electronic devices. To explore the mechanism leading to the ITR, in this work, the dynamic behaviors of phonons passing through the GaN/AlN interface with an amorphous interlayer is investigated by using phonon wave packet simulation. It is found the amorphous interlayer significantly impedes phonon transport across the interface, and leads to remarkable phonon mode conversions, such as LA$\rightarrow$TA, TA$\rightarrow$LA, and LA$\rightarrow$TO conversion. However, due to mode conversion and inelastic scattering, we found a portion of high-frequency TA phonons, which are higher than the cut-off frequency and cannot transmit across the ideal sharp interface, can partially transmit across the amorphous interlayer, which introduces additional thermal transport channels through the interface and has positive effect on interfacial thermal conductance. According to phonon transmission coefficient, it is found the ITR increases with increasing of amorphous interlayer thickness L. The phonon transmission coefficient exhibits an obvious oscillation behavior, which is attributed to the multiple phonon scattering in the amorphous interlayer, and the oscillation period is further revealed to be consistent with the theoretical prediction by the two-beam interference equation. In addition, obvious phonon frequency shifts and phonon energy localization phenomena were observed in the amorphous interlayer. Finally, to improve phonon transmission, the interface morphology was further optimized via the annealing reconstruction technique, which results in re-crystallization of the amorphous interlayer and the decrease of ITR by ~21% as L=2 nm.
Authors:Ryan L. Mann, Romy M. Minko
Title: Algorithmic Cluster Expansions for Quantum Problems
Abstract:
We establish a general framework for developing approximation algorithms for a class of counting problems. Our framework is based on the cluster expansion of abstract polymer models formalism of Kotecký and Preiss. We apply our framework to obtain efficient algorithms for (1) approximating probability amplitudes of a class of quantum circuits close to the identity, (2) approximating expectation values of a class of quantum circuits with operators close to the identity, (3) approximating partition functions of a class of quantum spin systems at high temperature, and (4) approximating thermal expectation values of a class of quantum spin systems at high temperature with positive-semidefinite operators. Further, we obtain hardness of approximation results for approximating probability amplitudes of quantum circuits and partition functions of quantum spin systems. This establishes a computational complexity transition for these problems and shows that our algorithmic conditions are optimal under complexity-theoretic assumptions. Finally, we show that our algorithmic condition is almost optimal for expectation values and optimal for thermal expectation values in the sense of zero freeness.
Authors:Akash Singh, Yumeng Li
Title: Reliable machine learning potentials based on artificial neural network for graphene
Abstract:
Graphene is one of the most researched two dimensional (2D) material due to its unique combination of mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. Special 2D structure of graphene enables it to exhibit a wide range of peculiar material properties like high Young's modulus, high specific strength etc. which are critical for myriad of applications including light weight structural materials, multi-functional coating and flexible electronics. It is quite challenging and costly to experimentally investigate graphene/graphene based nanocomposites, computational simulations such as molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are widely adopted for understanding the microscopic origins of their unique properties. However, disparate results were reported from computational studies, especially MD simulations using various empirical inter-atomic potentials. In this work, an artificial neural network based interatomic potential has been developed for graphene to represent the potential energy surface based on first principle calculations. The developed machine learning potential (MLP) facilitates high fidelity MD simulations to approach the accuracy of ab initio methods but with a fraction of computational cost, which allows larger simulation size/length, and thereby enables accelerated discovery/design of graphene-based novel materials. Lattice parameter, coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), Young's modulus and yield strength are estimated using machine learning accelerated MD simulations (MLMD), which are compared to experimental/first principle calculations from previous literatures. It is demonstrated that MLMD can capture the dominating mechanism governing CTE of graphene, including effects from lattice parameter and out of plane rippling.
Authors:Ramakrishnan Thirumalaisamy, Kaustubh Khedkar, Pieter Ghysels, Amneet Pal Singh Bhalla
Title: An effective preconditioning strategy for volume penalized incompressible/low Mach multiphase flow solvers
Abstract:
The volume penalization (VP) or the Brinkman penalization (BP) method is a diffuse interface method for simulating multiphase fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems in ocean engineering and/or phase change problems in thermal sciences. The method relies on a penalty factor (which is inversely related to body's permeability $κ$) that must be large to enforce rigid body velocity in the solid domain. When the penalty factor is large, the discrete system of equations becomes stiff and difficult to solve numerically. In this paper, we propose a projection method-based preconditioning strategy for solving volume penalized (VP) incompressible and low-Mach Navier-Stokes equations. The projection preconditioner enables the monolithic solution of the coupled velocity-pressure system in both single phase and multiphase flow settings. In this approach, the penalty force is treated implicitly, which is allowed to take arbitrary large values without affecting the solver's convergence rate or causing numerical stiffness/instability. It is made possible by including the penalty term in the pressure Poisson equation. Solver scalability under grid refinement is demonstrated. A manufactured solution in a single phase setting is used to determine the spatial accuracy of the penalized solution. Second-order pointwise accuracy is achieved for both velocity and pressure solutions. Two multiphase fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems from the ocean engineering literature are also simulated to evaluate the solver's robustness and performance. The proposed solver allows us to investigate the effect of $κ$ on the motion of the contact line over the surface of the immersed body. It also allows us to investigate the dynamics of the free surface of a solidifying metal
Authors:Jordi Vila-Pérez, Ngoc Cuong Nguyen, Jaume Peraire
Title: A high-order discontinuous Galerkin approach for physics-based thermospheric modeling
Abstract:
The accurate prediction of aerodynamic drag on satellites orbiting in the upper atmosphere is critical to the operational success of modern space technologies, such as satellite-based communication or navigation systems, which have become increasingly popular in the last few years due to the deployment of constellations of satellites in low-Earth orbit. As a result, physics-based models of the ionosphere and thermosphere have emerged as a necessary tool for the prediction of atmospheric outputs under highly variable space weather conditions. This paper proposes a high-fidelity approach for physics-based space weather modeling based on the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations using a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method, combined with a matrix-free strategy suitable for high-performance computing on GPU architectures. The approach consists of a thermospheric model that describes a chemically frozen neutral atmosphere in non-hydrostatic equilibrium driven by the external excitation of the Sun. A novel set of variables is considered to treat the low densities present in the upper atmosphere and to accommodate the wide range of scales present in the problem. At the same time, and unlike most existing approaches, radial and angular directions are treated in a non-segregated approach. The study presents a set of numerical examples that demonstrate the accuracy of the approximation and validate the current approach against observational data along a satellite orbit, including estimates of established empirical and physics-based models of the ionosphere-thermosphere system. Finally, a 1D radial derivation of the physics-based model is presented and utilized for conducting a parametric study of the main thermal quantities under various solar conditions.
Authors:Ron Dabora, Emeka Abakasanga
Title: On the Capacity of Communication Channels with Memory and Sampled Additive Cyclostationary Gaussian Noise: Full Version with Detailed Proofs
Abstract:
In this work we study the capacity of interference-limited channels with memory. These channels model non-orthogonal communications scenarios, such as the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scenario and underlay cognitive communications, in which the interference from other communications signals is much stronger than the thermal noise. Interference-limited communications is expected to become a very common scenario in future wireless communications systems, such as 5G, WiFi6, and beyond. As communications signals are inherently cyclostationary in continuous time (CT), then after sampling at the receiver, the discrete-time (DT) received signal model contains the sampled desired information signal with additive sampled CT cyclostationary noise. The sampled noise can be modeled as either a DT cyclostationary process or a DT almost-cyclostationary process, where in the latter case the resulting channel is not information-stable. In a previous work we characterized the capacity of this model for the case in which the DT noise is memoryless. In the current work we come closer to practical scenarios by modelling the resulting DT noise as a finite-memory random process. The presence of memory requires the development of a new set of tools for analyzing the capacity of channels with additive non-stationary noise which has memory. Our results show, for the first time, the relationship between memory, sampling frequency synchronization and capacity, for interference-limited communications. The insights from our work provide a link between the analog and the digital time domains, which has been missing in most previous works on capacity analysis. Thus, our results can help improving spectral efficiency and suggest optimal transceiver designs for future communications paradigms.
Authors:Vahid Reza Nafisi, Roshanak Ghods
Title: A Telecare System for Use in Traditional Persian Medicine
Abstract:
Persian Medicine (PM) uses wrist temperature/humidity and pulse to determine a person's health status and temperament. However, the diagnosis may depend on the physician's interpretation, hindering the combination of PM with modern medical methods. This study proposes a system for measuring pulse signals and temperament detection based on PM. The system uses recorded thermal distribution, a temperament questionnaire, and a customized pulse measurement device. The collected data can be sent to a physician via a telecare system for interpretation and prescription of medications. The system was clinically implemented for patient care, assessed the temperaments of 34 participants, and recorded thermal images of the wrist, back of the hand, and entire face. The study suggests that a customized device for measuring pulse waves and other criteria based on PM can be incorporated into a telemedicine system, reducing the dependency on PM specialists for diagnosis.
Authors:Mahla Abdolahnejad, Justin Lee, Hannah Chan, Alex Morzycki, Olivier Ethier, Anthea Mo, Peter X. Liu, Joshua N. Wong, Colin Hong, Rakesh Joshi
Title: Boundary Attention Mapping (BAM): Fine-grained saliency maps for segmentation of Burn Injuries
Abstract:
Burn injuries can result from mechanisms such as thermal, chemical, and electrical insults. A prompt and accurate assessment of burns is essential for deciding definitive clinical treatments. Currently, the primary approach for burn assessments, via visual and tactile observations, is approximately 60%-80% accurate. The gold standard is biopsy and a close second would be non-invasive methods like Laser Doppler Imaging (LDI) assessments, which have up to 97% accuracy in predicting burn severity and the required healing time. In this paper, we introduce a machine learning pipeline for assessing burn severities and segmenting the regions of skin that are affected by burn. Segmenting 2D colour images of burns allows for the injured versus non-injured skin to be delineated, clearly marking the extent and boundaries of the localized burn/region-of-interest, even during remote monitoring of a burn patient. We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify four severities of burns. We built a saliency mapping method, Boundary Attention Mapping (BAM), that utilises this trained CNN for the purpose of accurately localizing and segmenting the burn regions from skin burn images. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline through extensive experiments and evaluations using two datasets; 1) A larger skin burn image dataset consisting of 1684 skin burn images of four burn severities, 2) An LDI dataset that consists of a total of 184 skin burn images with their associated LDI scans. The CNN trained using the first dataset achieved an average F1-Score of 78% and micro/macro- average ROC of 85% in classifying the four burn severities. Moreover, a comparison between the BAM results and LDI results for measuring injury boundary showed that the segmentations generated by our method achieved 91.60% accuracy, 78.17% sensitivity, and 93.37% specificity.
Authors:Simon Carter, Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, Helmut H. Strey
Title: Parameter estimation from an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with measurement noise
Abstract:
This article aims to investigate the impact of noise on parameter fitting for an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, focusing on the effects of multiplicative and thermal noise on the accuracy of signal separation. To address these issues, we propose algorithms and methods that can effectively distinguish between thermal and multiplicative noise and improve the precision of parameter estimation for optimal data analysis. Specifically, we explore the impact of both multiplicative and thermal noise on the obfuscation of the actual signal and propose methods to resolve them. First, we present an algorithm that can effectively separate thermal noise with comparable performance to Hamilton Monte Carlo (HMC) but with significantly improved speed. We then analyze multiplicative noise and demonstrate that HMC is insufficient for isolating thermal and multiplicative noise. However, we show that, with additional knowledge of the ratio between thermal and multiplicative noise, we can accurately distinguish between the two types of noise when provided with a sufficiently large sampling rate or an amplitude of multiplicative noise smaller than thermal noise. Thus, we demonstrate the mechanism underlying an otherwise counterintuitive phenomenon: when multiplicative noise dominates the noise spectrum, one can successfully estimate the parameters for such systems after adding additional white noise to shift the noise balance.
Authors:Chenhang Cui, Jinyu Xie, Yechenhao Yang
Title: Bright Channel Prior Attention for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Abstract:
Multispectral methods have gained considerable attention due to their promising performance across various fields. However, most existing methods cannot effectively utilize information from two modalities while optimizing time efficiency. These methods often prioritize accuracy or time efficiency, leaving room for improvement in their performance. To this end, we propose a new method bright channel prior attention for enhancing pedestrian detection in low-light conditions by integrating image enhancement and detection within a unified framework. The method uses the V-channel of the HSV image of the thermal image as an attention map to trigger the unsupervised auto-encoder for visible light images, which gradually emphasizes pedestrian features across layers. Moreover, we utilize unsupervised bright channel prior algorithms to address light compensation in low light images. The proposed method includes a self-attention enhancement module and a detection module, which work together to improve object detection. An initial illumination map is estimated using the BCP, guiding the learning of the self-attention map from the enhancement network to obtain more informative representation focused on pedestrians. The extensive experiments show effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through.
Authors:Reza Nematirad, M. M. Ardehali, Amir Khorsandi
Title: Optimization of Residential Demand Response Program Cost with Consideration for Occupants Thermal Comfort and Privacy
Abstract:
Residential consumers can use the demand response program (DRP) if they can utilize the home energy management system (HEMS), which reduces consumer costs by automatically adjusting air conditioning (AC) setpoints and shifting some appliances to off-peak hours. If HEMS knows occupancy status, consumers can gain more economic benefits and thermal comfort. However, for the building occupancy status, direct sensing is costly, inaccurate, and intrusive for residents. So, forecasting algorithms could serve as an effective alternative. The goal of this study is to present a non-intrusive, accurate, and cost-effective approach, to develop a multi-objective simulation model for the application of DRPs in a smart residential house, where (a) electrical load demand reduction, (b) adjustment in thermal comfort (AC) temperature setpoints, and (c) , worst cases scenario approach is very conservative. Because that is unlikely all uncertain parameters take their worst values at all times. So, the flexible robust counterpart optimization along with uncertainty budgets is developed to consider uncertainty realistically. Simulated results indicate that considering uncertainty increases the costs by 36 percent and decreases the AC temperature setpoints. Besides, using DRPs reduces demand by shifting some appliance operations to off-peak hours and lowers costs by 13.2 percent.
Authors:Zhaojian Liang, Jingyi Wang, Liang An, Yang Wang, Meng Ni, Mengying Li
Title: Characteristic time of transient response of solid oxide cells (SOCs) to changes in voltage/current: from theory to applications
Abstract:
The intermittency of solar and wind power can be addressed by integrating them with Solid Oxide Cells (SOCs). This study delves into the transient characteristics of SOCs and their dependence on dynamic heat and mass transfer processes. Non-dimensional analysis was used to identify influential parameters, followed by a 3-D numerical simulation-based parametric analysis to examine the dynamic gaseous and thermal responses of SOCs with varying dimensions, material properties, and operating conditions. For the first time, we proposed characteristic times to describe the relationship between SOC transients and multiple parameters. These characteristic times represent the overall heat and mass transfer rats in SOCs. Their effectiveness was validated against literature and demonstrated potential in characterizing the transient characteristics of other electrochemical cells. Besides, two examples are provided to illustrate how the characteristic times facilitate SOC design and control at minimal computational cost.
Authors:Hikaru Hoshino, T. John Koo, Yun-Chung Chu, Yoshihiko Susuki
Title: Model Predictive Control of Smart Districts Participating in Frequency Regulation Market: A Case Study of Using Heating Network Storage
Abstract:
Flexibility provided by Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units in district heating networks is an important means to cope with increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy resources, and various methods have been proposed to exploit thermal storage tanks installed in these networks. This paper studies a novel problem motivated by an example of district heating and cooling networks in Japan, where high-temperature steam is used as the heating medium. In steam-based networks, storage tanks are usually absent, and there is a strong need to utilize thermal inertia of the pipeline network as storage. However, this type of use of a heating network directly affects the operating condition of the network, and assuring safety and supply quality at the use side is an open problem. To address this, we formulate a novel control problem to utilize CHP units in frequency regulation market while satisfying physical constraints on a steam network described by a nonlinear model capturing dynamics of heat flows and heat accumulation in the network. Furthermore, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework is proposed to solve this problem. By consistently combining several nonlinear control techniques, a computationally efficient MPC controller is obtained and shown to work in real-time.
Authors:Raul Castilla-Arquillo, Anthony Mandow, Carlos J. Perez-del-Pulgar, Cesar Alvarez-Llamas, Jose M. Vadillo, Javier Laserna
Title: Thermal Vision for Soil Assessment in a Multipurpose Environmental Chamber under Martian Conditions towards Robot Navigation
Abstract:
Soil assessment is important for mobile robot planning and navigation on natural and planetary environments. Terramechanic characteristics can be inferred from the thermal behaviour of soils under the influence of sunlight using remote sensors such as Long-Wave Infrared cameras. However, this behaviour is greatly affected by the low atmospheric pressures of planets such as Mars, so practical models are needed to relate robot remote sensing data on Earth to target planetary exploration conditions. This article proposes a general framework based on multipurpose environmental chambers to generate representative diurnal cycle dataset pairs that can be useful to relate the thermal behaviour of a soil on Earth to the corresponding behaviour under planetary pressure conditions using remote sensing. Furthermore, we present an application of the proposed framework to generate datasets using the UMA-Laserlab chamber, which can replicate the atmospheric \ch{CO2} composition of Mars. In particular, we analyze the thermal behaviour of four soil samples of different granularity by comparing replicated Martian surface conditions and their Earth's diurnal cycle equivalent. Results indicate a correlation between granularity and thermal inertia that is consistent with available Mars surface measurements recorded by rovers. The resulting dataset pairs, consisting of representative diurnal cycle thermal images with heater, air, and subsurface temperatures, have been made available for the scientific community.
Authors:Maomao Hu, Ram Rajagopal, Jacques A. de Chalendar
Title: Empirical Exploration of Zone-by-zone Energy Flexibility: a Non-intrusive Load Disaggregation Approach for Commercial Buildings
Abstract:
Building energy flexibility has been increasingly demonstrated as a cost-effective solution to respond to the needs of energy networks, including electric grids and district cooling and heating systems, improving the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. Adjusting zonal temperature set-points is one of the most promising measures to unlock the energy flexibility potential of central air conditioning systems in complex commercial buildings. However, most existing studies focused on quantifying the energy flexibility on the building level since only building-level energy consumption is normally metered in commercial buildings. This study aims to investigate the impacts of temperature set-point adjustment strategies on zone-level thermal and energy performance by developing a non-intrusive data-driven load disaggregation method (i.e., a virtual zonal power meter). Three university buildings in Northern California were selected to test the proposed load disaggregation method. We found that heterogeneities of energy use and energy flexibility existed across not only buildings but also air handling units (AHUs) and zones. Moreover, a small number of zones accounted for a large amount of energy use and energy flexibility; and the most energy-intensive zones are not necessarily the most energy-flexible zones. For the three tested buildings, the top 30% most energy-intensive zones accounted for around 60% of the total energy use; and the top 30% most energy-flexible zones provided around 80% of the total energy flexibility. The proposed method enables the electric grid or district energy system operators to regard the controlled energy-flexible entities as a fleet of AHUs or zones instead of a fleet of buildings and helps unlock the possibility for targeted demand flexibility strategies that balance zone-by-zone energy reduction with zone-by-zone costs to occupants.
Authors:Giuseppe Rizzelli, Pablo Torres-Ferrera, Fabrizio Forghieri, Roberto Gaudino
Title: An Analytical Model for Performance Estimation in High-Capacity IMDD Systems
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an analytical model to estimate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the output of an adaptive equalizer in intensity modulation and direct detection (IMDD) optical transmission systems affected by shot noise, thermal noise, relative intensity noise (RIN), chromatic dispersion (CD) and bandwidth limitations. We develop the model as an extension of a previously presented one, and then we test its accuracy by sweeping the main parameters of a 4-PAM-based communication system such as RIN coefficient, extinction ratio, CD coefficient and equalizer memory. Our findings show a remarkable agreement between time-domain simulations and analytical results, with SNR discrepancies below 0.1 dB in most cases, for both feed-forward and decision-feedback equalization. We consider that the proposed model is a powerful tool for the numerical design of strongly band-limited IMDD systems using receiver equalization, as it happens in most of modern and future M-PAM solutions for short reach and access systems.
Authors:Dr Alexandre Canet, Prof Meysam Qadrdan
Title: Quantification of flexibility from the thermal mass of residential buildings in England and Wales
Abstract:
The increased integration of variable renewable generation into the power systems, along with the phase-out of fossil-based power stations, necessitate procuring more flexibility from the demand sectors. The electrification of the residential heat sector is an option to decarbonise the heat sector in the United Kingdom. The inherent flexibility that is available in the residential heat sector, in the form of the thermal inertia of buildings, is expected to play an important role in supporting the critical task of short-term balancing of electricity supply and demand. This paper proposes a method for characterising the locally aggregated flexibility envelope from the electrified residential heat sector, considering the most influential factors including outdoor and indoor temperature, thermal mass and heat loss of dwellings. Applying the method to England and Wales as a case study, demonstrated a significant potential for a temporary reduction of electricity demand for heating even during cold weather. Total electricity demand reductions of approximately 25 GW to 85 GW were shown to be achievable for the outdoor temperature of 10 degreeC and -5 degreeC, respectively. Improving the energy performance of the housing stock in England and Wales was shown to reduce the magnitude of available flexibility to approximately 18 GW to 60 GW for the outdoor temperature of 10 degreeC and -5 degreeC, respectively. This is due to the use of smaller size heat pumps in the more efficient housing stock. However, the impact of the buildings' retrofit on their thermal mass and consequently on the duration of the flexibility provision is uncertain.
Authors:Berkcan Ustun, Ahmet Kagan Kaya, Ezgi Cakir Ayerden, Fazil Altinel
Title: Spectral Transfer Guided Active Domain Adaptation For Thermal Imagery
Abstract:
The exploitation of visible spectrum datasets has led deep networks to show remarkable success. However, real-world tasks include low-lighting conditions which arise performance bottlenecks for models trained on large-scale RGB image datasets. Thermal IR cameras are more robust against such conditions. Therefore, the usage of thermal imagery in real-world applications can be useful. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) allows transferring information from a source domain to a fully unlabeled target domain. Despite substantial improvements in UDA, the performance gap between UDA and its supervised learning counterpart remains significant. By picking a small number of target samples to annotate and using them in training, active domain adaptation tries to mitigate this gap with minimum annotation expense. We propose an active domain adaptation method in order to examine the efficiency of combining the visible spectrum and thermal imagery modalities. When the domain gap is considerably large as in the visible-to-thermal task, we may conclude that the methods without explicit domain alignment cannot achieve their full potential. To this end, we propose a spectral transfer guided active domain adaptation method to select the most informative unlabeled target samples while aligning source and target domains. We used the large-scale visible spectrum dataset MS-COCO as the source domain and the thermal dataset FLIR ADAS as the target domain to present the results of our method. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art active domain adaptation methods. The code and models are publicly available.
Authors:Henglin Pu, Xingqi Wu
Title: Investigating Skin Temperature-Based Overheating in mmWave Smartphones Power and Thermal Models for Optimal Non-Throttling Performance
Abstract:
5G mmWave, as a revolutionary cellular technology, holds monumental potential for innovations in many academic and industrial areas. However, widespread adoption of this technology is hindered by the severe overheating issues experienced by current Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) mmWave smartphones. This study aims to identify the root causes of device skin temperature related throttling during 5G transmission, and to quantify power reduction required to prevent such throttling in a given ambient temperature. The key insight of our paper is leveraging the power model and thermal model of mmWave smartphone to acquire the quantitative relationship among power consumption, ambient temperature and device skin temperature. This approach allows us to determine the extent of power reduction required to prevent throttling under specific ambient temperature conditions.
Authors:Shashikiran Venkatesha, Ranjani Parthasarathi
Title: Enhancement in Reliability for Multi-core system consisting of One Instruction Cores
Abstract:
Rapid CMOS device size reduction resulted in billions of transistors on a chip have led to integration of many cores leading to many challenges such as increased power dissipation, thermal dissipation, occurrence of transient faults and permanent faults. The mitigation of transient faults and permanent faults at the core level has become an important design parameter in a multi-core scenario. Core level techniques is a redundancy-based fault mitigation technique that improves the lifetime reliability of multi-core systems. In an asymmetric multi-core system, the smaller cores provide fault tolerance to larger cores is a core level fault mitigation technique that has gained momentum and focus from many researchers. The paper presents an economical, asymmetric multi-core system with one instruction cores (MCSOIC). The term Hardware Cost Estimation signifies power and area estimation for MCS-OIC. In MCSOIC, OIC is a warm standby redundant core. OICs provide functional support to conventional cores for shorter periods of time. To evaluate the idea, different configurations of MCSOIC is synthesized using FPGA and ASIC. The maximum power overhead and maximum area overhead are 0.46% and 11.4% respectively. The behavior of OICs in MCS-OIC is modelled using a One-Shot System (OSS) model for reliability analysis. The model parameters namely, readiness, wakeup probability and start-up-strategy for OSS are mapped to the multi-core systems with OICs. Expressions for system reliability is derived. System reliability is estimated for special cases.
Authors:Natalia Kowalczyk, Jacek Rumiński
Title: Mask Detection and Classification in Thermal Face Images
Abstract:
Face masks are recommended to reduce the transmission of many viruses, especially SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, the automatic detection of whether there is a mask on the face, what type of mask is worn, and how it is worn is an important research topic. In this work, the use of thermal imaging was considered to analyze the possibility of detecting (localizing) a mask on the face, as well as to check whether it is possible to classify the type of mask on the face. The previously proposed dataset of thermal images was extended and annotated with the description of a type of mask and a location of a mask within a face. Different deep learning models were adapted. The best model for face mask detection turned out to be the Yolov5 model in the "nano" version, reaching mAP higher than 97% and precision of about 95%. High accuracy was also obtained for mask type classification. The best results were obtained for the convolutional neural network model built on an autoencoder initially trained in the thermal image reconstruction problem. The pretrained encoder was used to train a classifier which achieved an accuracy of 91%.
Authors:Hannes Fassold, Karlheinz Gutjahr, Anna Weber, Roland Perko
Title: A real-time algorithm for human action recognition in RGB and thermal video
Abstract:
Monitoring the movement and actions of humans in video in real-time is an important task. We present a deep learning based algorithm for human action recognition for both RGB and thermal cameras. It is able to detect and track humans and recognize four basic actions (standing, walking, running, lying) in real-time on a notebook with a NVIDIA GPU. For this, it combines state of the art components for object detection (Scaled YoloV4), optical flow (RAFT) and pose estimation (EvoSkeleton). Qualitative experiments on a set of tunnel videos show that the proposed algorithm works robustly for both RGB and thermal video.
Authors:Daicong Da, Wei Chen
Title: Two-scale data-driven design for heat manipulation
Abstract:
Data-driven methods have gained increasing attention in computational mechanics and design. This study investigates a two-scale data-driven design for thermal metamaterials with various functionalities. To address the complexity of multiscale design, the design variables are chosen as the components of the homogenized thermal conductivity matrix originating from the lower scale unit cells. Multiple macroscopic functionalities including thermal cloak, thermal concentrator, thermal rotator/inverter, and their combinations, are achieved using the developed approach. Sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the effect of each design variable on the desired functionalities, which is then incorporated into topology optimization. Geometric extraction demonstrates an excellent matching between the optimized homogenized conductivity and the extraction from the constructed database containing both architecture and property information. The designed heterostructures exhibit multiple thermal meta-functionalities that can be applied to a wide range of heat transfer fields from personal computers to aerospace engineering.
Authors:Clémentine Helfenstein-Didier, Amira Dhouib, Florent Favre, Jonathan Pascal, Patrick Baert
Title: Exploring Crossmodal Interaction of Tactile and Visual Cues on Temperature Perception in Virtual Reality: a Preliminary Study
Abstract:
VEs are typically limited to visual and auditory cues; however, recent results show that multiple sensory modalities increase the immersion. In this study, an experimental protocol is proposed to recreate multiple tactile, in particular thermal, sensations in VR. The aim is twofold: (1) studying the performance of different devices for creating warm and cold sensations with regards to their efficiency and acoustic disturbance; and (2) investigating the interdependency between visual and tactile stimuli in the perception of temperature. 14 participants performed two experimental studies. Our results show no acoustic disturbance of the materials used. Spot projector is more efficient than fan heater to create a warm sensation; fan + water spray is more efficient than fan alone to create cold sensation. Moreover, no significant contribution of visual cue on the thermal perception was found except for the extremely cold simulation (snow visualization and thermal stimulation performed with fan + water spray).
Authors:Xinxin Zhang, Dike Li, Jianqin Zhu, Zhi Tao, Lu Qiu
Title: Rapid online solution of inverse heat transfer problem by ANN-based extended Kalman smoothing algorithm
Abstract:
Digital twin is a modern technology for many advanced applications. To construct a digital twin of a thermal system, it is required to make online estimations of unknown time-varying boundary conditions from sensor measured data, which needs to solve inverse heat transfer problems (IHTPs). However, a fast and accurate solution is challenging since the measured data is normally contaminated with noise and the traditional method to solve IHTP involves significant amount of calculations. Therefore, in this work, a rapid yet robust inversion algorithm called ANN-based extended Kalman smoothing algorithm is developed to realize the online prediction of desired parameter based on the measurements. The fast prediction is realized by replacing the conventional CFD-based state transfer models in extended Kalman smoothing algorithm with pre-trained ANN. Then, a two-dimensional internal convective heat transfer problem was employed as the case study to test the algorithm. The results have proved that the proposed algorithm is a computational-light and robust approach for solving IHTPs. The proposed algorithm can achieve estimation of unknown boundary conditions with a dimensionless average error of 0.0580 under noisy temperature measurement with a standard deviation of 10 K with a drastic reduction of computational cost compared to the conventional approach. Moreover, the effects of training data, location of sensor, future time step selection on the performance of prediction are investigated.
Authors:Trent J. Sakakini, Justin P. Koeln
Title: Switched Moving Boundary Modeling of Phase Change Thermal Energy Storage Systems
Abstract:
Thermal Energy Storage (TES) devices, which leverage the constant-temperature thermal capacity of the latent heat of a Phase Change Material (PCM), provide benefits to a variety of thermal management systems by decoupling the absorption and rejection of thermal energy. While performing a role similar to a battery in an electrical system, it is critical to know when to charge (freeze) and discharge (melt) the TES to maximize the capabilities and efficiency of the overall system. Therefore, control-oriented models of TES are needed to predict the behavior of the TES and make informed control decisions. While existing modeling approaches divide the TES in to multiple sections using a Fixed Grid (FG) approach, this paper proposes a switched Moving Boundary (MB) model that captures the key dynamics of the TES with significantly fewer dynamic states. Specifically, a graph-based modeling approach is used to model the heat flow through the TES and a MB approach is used to model the time-varying liquid and solid regions of the TES. Additionally, a Finite State Machine (FSM) is used to switch between four different modes of operation based on the State-of-Charge (SOC) of the TES. Numerical simulations comparing the proposed approach with a more traditional FG approach show that the MB model is capable of accurately modeling the behavior of the FG model while using far fewer states, leading to five times faster simulations.
Authors:Sandra Staudt, Viktor Unterberger, Markus Gölles, Michael Wernhart, René Rieberer, Martin Horn
Title: Control-oriented modeling of a LiBr/H2O absorption heat pumping device and experimental validation
Abstract:
Absorption heat pumping devices (AHPDs, comprising absorption heat pumps and chillers) are devices that use thermal energy instead of electricity to generate heating and cooling, thereby facilitating the use of waste heat and renewable energy sources such as solar or geothermal energy. Despite this benefit, widespread use of AHPDs is still limited. One reason for this is partly unsatisfactory control performance under varying operating conditions, which can result in poor modulation and part load capability. A promising approach to tackle this issue is using dynamic, model-based control strategies, whose effectiveness, however, strongly depend on the model being used. This paper therefore focuses on the derivation of a viable dynamic model to be used for such model-based control strategies for AHPDs such as state feedback or model-predictive control. The derived model is experimentally validated, showing good modeling accuracy. Its modeling accuracy is also compared to alternative model versions, that contain other heat transfer correlations, as a benchmark. Although the derived model is mathematically simple, it does have the structure of a nonlinear differential-algebraic system of equations. To obtain an even simpler model structure, linearization at an operating point is discussed to derive a model in linear state space representation. The experimental validation shows that the linear model does have slightly worse steady-state accuracy, but that the dynamic accuracy seems to be almost unaffected by the linearization. The presented new modeling approach is considered suitable to be used as a basis for the design of advanced, model-based control strategies, ultimately aiming to improve the modulation and part load capability of AHPDs.
Authors:Wei Xingxing, Yu Jie, Huang Yao
Title: Physically Adversarial Infrared Patches with Learnable Shapes and Locations
Abstract:
Owing to the extensive application of infrared object detectors in the safety-critical tasks, it is necessary to evaluate their robustness against adversarial examples in the real world. However, current few physical infrared attacks are complicated to implement in practical application because of their complex transformation from digital world to physical world. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a physically feasible infrared attack method called "adversarial infrared patches". Considering the imaging mechanism of infrared cameras by capturing objects' thermal radiation, adversarial infrared patches conduct attacks by attaching a patch of thermal insulation materials on the target object to manipulate its thermal distribution. To enhance adversarial attacks, we present a novel aggregation regularization to guide the simultaneous learning for the patch' shape and location on the target object. Thus, a simple gradient-based optimization can be adapted to solve for them. We verify adversarial infrared patches in different object detection tasks with various object detectors. Experimental results show that our method achieves more than 90\% Attack Success Rate (ASR) versus the pedestrian detector and vehicle detector in the physical environment, where the objects are captured in different angles, distances, postures, and scenes. More importantly, adversarial infrared patch is easy to implement, and it only needs 0.5 hours to be constructed in the physical world, which verifies its effectiveness and efficiency.
Authors:Zhipeng Chang, Ruiling Ma, Wenliang Jia
Title: Pedestrain detection for low-light vision proposal
Abstract:
The demand for pedestrian detection has created a challenging problem for various visual tasks such as image fusion. As infrared images can capture thermal radiation information, image fusion between infrared and visible images could significantly improve target detection under environmental limitations. In our project, we would approach by preprocessing our dataset with image fusion technique, then using Vision Transformer model to detect pedestrians from the fused images. During the evaluation procedure, a comparison would be made between YOLOv5 and the revised ViT model performance on our fused images
Authors:Daniel S. Finn, Matthew G. Knepley, Joseph V. Pusztay, Mark F. Adams
Title: A Numerical Study of Landau Damping with PETSc-PIC
Abstract:
We present a study of the standard plasma physics test, Landau damping, using the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) algorithm. The Landau damping phenomenon consists of the damping of small oscillations in plasmas without collisions. In the PIC method, a hybrid discretization is constructed with a grid of finitely supported basis functions to represent the electric, magnetic and/or gravitational fields, and a distribution of delta functions to represent the particle field. Approximations to the dispersion relation are found to be inadequate in accurately calculating values for the electric field frequency and damping rate when parameters of the physical system, such as the plasma frequency or thermal velocity, are varied. We present a full derivation and numerical solution for the dispersion relation, and verify the PETSC-PIC numerical solutions to the Vlasov-Poisson for a large range of wave numbers and charge densities.
Authors:Yinuo Noah Yao, Perry Harabin, Morad Behandish, Ilenia Battiato
Title: Non-intrusive Hybrid Scheme for Multiscale Heat Transfer: Thermal Runaway in a Battery Pack
Abstract:
Accurate analytical and numerical modeling of multiscale systems is a daunting task. The need to properly resolve spatial and temporal scales spanning multiple orders of magnitude pushes the limits of both our theoretical models as well as our computational capabilities. Rigorous upscaling techniques enable efficient computation while bounding/tracking errors and helping to make informed cost-accuracy tradeoffs. The biggest challenges arise when the applicability conditions of upscaled models break down. Here, we present a non-intrusive two-way (iterative bottom-up top-down) coupled hybrid model, applied to thermal runaway in battery packs, that combines fine-scale and upscaled equations in the same numerical simulation to achieve predictive accuracy while limiting computational costs. First, we develop two methods with different orders of accuracy to enforce continuity at the coupling boundary. Then, we derive weak (i.e., variational) formulations of the fine-scale and upscaled governing equations for finite element (FE) discretization and numerical implementation in FEniCS. We demonstrate that hybrid simulations can accurately predict the average temperature fields within error bounds determined a priori by homogenization theory. Finally, we demonstrate the computational efficiency of the hybrid algorithm against fine-scale simulations.
Authors:Saviz Mowlavi, Ken Kamrin
Title: Detecting hidden structures from a static loading experiment: topology optimization meets physics-informed neural networks
Abstract:
Most noninvasive imaging techniques utilize electromagnetic or acoustic waves originating from multiple locations and directions to identify hidden geometrical structures. Surprisingly, it is also possible to image hidden voids and inclusions buried within an object using a single static thermal or mechanical loading experiment by observing the response of the exposed surface of the body, but this problem is challenging to invert. Although physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown promise as a simple-yet-powerful tool for problem inversion, they have not yet been applied to imaging problems with a priori unknown topology. Here, we introduce a topology optimization framework based on PINNs that identifies concealed geometries using exposed surface data from a single loading experiment, without prior knowledge of the number or types of shapes. We allow for arbitrary solution topology by representing the geometry using a material density field combined with a novel eikonal regularization technique. We validate our framework by detecting the number, locations, and shapes of hidden voids and inclusions in many example cases, in both 2D and 3D, and we demonstrate the method's robustness to noise and sparsity in the data. Our methodology opens a pathway for PINNs to solve geometry optimization problems in engineering.
Authors:Daniel Hübner, Fabian Wein, Michael Stingl
Title: Two-Scale Optimization of Graded Lattice Structures respecting Buckling on Micro- and Macroscale
Abstract:
Interest in components with detailed structures increased with the progress in advanced manufacturing techniques in recent years. Parts with graded lattice elements can provide interesting mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties compared to parts where only coarse features are included. One of these improvements is better global buckling resistance of the component. However, thin features are prone to local buckling. Normally, analyses with high computational effort are conducted on high-resolution finite element meshes to optimize parts with good global and local stability. Until recently, works focused only on either global or local buckling behavior. We use two-scale optimization based on asymptotic homogenization of elastic properties and local buckling behavior to reduce the effort of full-scale analyses. For this, we present an approach for concurrent local and global buckling optimization of parameterized graded lattice structures. It is based on a worst-case model for the homogenized buckling load factor, which acts as a safeguard against pure local buckling. Cross-modes residing on both scales are not detected. We support our theory with numerical examples and validations on dehomogenized designs, which show the capabilities of our method, and discuss the advantages and limitations of the worst-case model.
Authors:SungKu Kang, Kunind Sharma, Maharshi Pathak, Emily Casavant, Katherine Bassett, Misha Pavel, David Fannon, Michael Kane
Title: Toward A Dynamic Comfort Model for Human-Building Interaction in Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings: Supported by Field Data
Abstract:
Controlling building electric loads could alleviate the increasing grid strain caused by the adoption of renewables and electrification. However, current approaches that automatically setback thermostats on the hottest day compromise their efficacy by neglecting human-building interaction (HBI). This study aims to define challenges and opportunities for developing engineering models of HBI to be used in the design of controls for grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs). Building system and measured and just-in-time surveyed psychophysiological data were collected from 41 participants in 20 homes from April-September. ASHRAE Standard 55 thermal comfort models for building design were evaluated with these data. Increased error bias was observed with increasing spatiotemporal temperature variations. Unsurprising, considering these models neglect such variance, but questioning their suitability for GEBs controlling thermostat setpoints, and given the observed 4°F intra-home spatial temperature variation. The results highlight opportunities for reducing these biases in GEBs through a paradigm shift to modeling discomfort instead of comfort, increasing use of low-cost sensors, and models that account for the observed dynamic occupant behavior: of the thermostat setpoint overrides made with 140-minutes of a previous setpoint change, 95% of small changes ( 2°F) were made with 120-minutes, while 95% of larger changes ( 10°F) were made within only 70-minutes.
Authors:Swapnil Kumar, Sundar V Atre
Title: Design and optimization of brake disc using Multi-Objective genetic algorithm
Abstract:
Design calculation and analysis have been performed for the brake disc along with the design calculations for the brake caliper for the system optimization, and design of experiments have been implemented for the brake disc in order to optimize the performance of the braking system. Ventilated disc brake with an outer diameter of 175 mm has been used for the system level analysis and 83 % performance efficiency has been achieved after all the proper validations and analysis. Stainless Steel (SS-410) material configuration has been considered for the disc brake and performance enhancement of ventilated disc brake has been carried out using Matlab, Ansys, and Solidworks. The brake disc is going to be deployed as a common brake disc in the rear part of the All-terrain vehicle, and is responsible for providing effective rear wheel locking, and piaggio double piston fixed calipers have satisfied the piston diameter for the wheel locking conditions at rear wheels with DOT-4 Brake fluid in the master cylinder in order to provide the effective braking. The rear disc brake is fixed on the gearbox output shaft and a caliper mount is welded on a rear member of the roll cage. A mathematical model has been formulated for carrying out Multi-objective genetic algorithm optimization, which has resulted, a newly designed brake disc is optimum in terms of weight, factor of safety, thermal dissipation, equivalent stress, vibration with enhanced airflow behavior. Converged residual plots have been obtained in computational fluid dynamics simulation by using 2nd-degree order to validate the CFD models, and in order to meet the frequency of rear disc brake to firing frequency of engine, design constraints of the brake disc have been optimized in terms of vibration along with considering the other parameters.
Authors:Patryk Lipka-Bartosik, Christopher T. Chubb, Joseph M. Renes, Marco Tomamichel, Kamil Korzekwa
Title: Quantum dichotomies and coherent thermodynamics beyond first-order asymptotics
Abstract:
We address the problem of exact and approximate transformation of quantum dichotomies in the asymptotic regime, i.e., the existence of a quantum channel $\mathcal E$ mapping $ρ_1^{\otimes n}$ into $ρ_2^{\otimes R_nn}$ with an error $ε_n$ (measured by trace distance) and $σ_1^{\otimes n}$ into $σ_2^{\otimes R_n n}$ exactly, for a large number $n$. We derive second-order asymptotic expressions for the optimal transformation rate $R_n$ in the small, moderate, and large deviation error regimes, as well as the zero-error regime, for an arbitrary pair $(ρ_1,σ_1)$ of initial states and a commuting pair $(ρ_2,σ_2)$ of final states. We also prove that for $σ_1$ and $σ_2$ given by thermal Gibbs states, the derived optimal transformation rates in the first three regimes can be attained by thermal operations. This allows us, for the first time, to study the second-order asymptotics of thermodynamic state interconversion with fully general initial states that may have coherence between different energy eigenspaces. Thus, we discuss the optimal performance of thermodynamic protocols with coherent inputs and describe three novel resonance phenomena allowing one to significantly reduce transformation errors induced by finite-size effects. What is more, our result on quantum dichotomies can also be used to obtain, up to second-order asymptotic terms, optimal conversion rates between pure bipartite entangled states under local operations and classical communication.
Authors:Markus Sudmanns, Athanasios P. Iliopoulos, Andrew J. Birnbaum, John G. Michopoulos, Jaafar A. El-Awady
Title: Modeling the evolution of representative dislocation structures under high thermo-mechanical conditions during Additive Manufacturing of Alloys
Abstract:
Mesoscale simulations of discrete defects in metals provide an ideal framework to investigate the micro-scale mechanisms governing the plastic deformation under high thermal and mechanical loading conditions. To bridge size and time-scale while limiting computational effort, typically the concept of representative volume elements (RVEs) is employed. This approach considers the microstructure evolution in a volume that is representative of the overall material behavior. However, in settings with complex thermal and mechanical loading histories careful consideration of the impact of modeling constraints in terms of time scale and simulation domain on predicted results is required. We address the representation of heterogeneous dislocation structure formation in simulation volumes using the example of residual stress formation during cool-down of laser powder-bed fusion (LPBF) of AISI 316L stainless steel. This is achieved by a series of large-scale three-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD) simulations assisted by thermo-mechanical finite element modeling of the LPBF process. Our results show that insufficient size of periodic simulation domains can result in dislocation patterns that reflect the boundaries of the primary cell. More pronounced dislocation interaction observed for larger domains highlight the significance of simulation domain constraints for predicting mechanical properties. We formulate criteria that characterize representative volume elements by capturing the conformity of the dislocation structure to the bulk material. This work provides a basis for future investigations of heterogeneous microstructure formation in mesoscale simulations of bulk material behavior.
Authors:Hongbin Sun, Xinmei Sun, Lei Kou, Benfa Zhang, Xiaodan Zhu
Title: Optimal scheduling of park-level integrated energy system considering ladder-type carbon trading mechanism and flexible load
Abstract:
In an attempt to improve the utilization efficiency of multi-energy coupling in park-level integrated energy system (PIES), promote wind power consumption and reduce carbon emissions, a low-carbon economic operation optimization model of PIES integrating flexible load and carbon trading mechanism is constructed. Firstly, according to the characteristics of load response, the demand response is divided into four types: which can be shifted, transferred, reduced and replaced. Secondly, the PIES basic architecture is given by considering the combined heat and power generation coupling equipment, new energy and flexible load in the park. Finally, introducing the ladder-type carbon trading mechanism into the system and minimize the total operating cost, the low-carbon economic operation optimization model of PIES is established. The YALMIP toolbox and CPLEX solver are used to solve the example, the simulation results show that the participation of electrical and thermal coupled scheduling and flexible electric or thermal loads can significantly reduce the system operating cost, reduce the load peak-to-valley difference and relieve peak power consumption pressure.
Authors:Kanisius Karyono, Badr M. Abdullah, Alison J. Cotgrave, Ana Bras, Jeff Cullen
Title: Developing the Reliable Shallow Supervised Learning for Thermal Comfort using ASHRAE RP-884 and ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II
Abstract:
The artificial intelligence (AI) system designer for thermal comfort faces insufficient data recorded from the current user or overfitting due to unreliable training data. This work introduces the reliable data set for training the AI subsystem for thermal comfort. This paper presents the control algorithm based on shallow supervised learning, which is simple enough to be implemented in the Internet of Things (IoT) system for residential usage using ASHRAE RP-884 and ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II. No training data for thermal comfort is available as reliable as this dataset, but the direct use of this data can lead to overfitting. This work offers the algorithm for data filtering and semantic data augmentation for the ASHRAE database for the supervised learning process. Overfitting always becomes a problem due to the psychological aspect involved in the thermal comfort decision. The method to check the AI system based on the psychrometric chart against overfitting is presented. This paper also assesses the most important parameters needed to achieve human thermal comfort. This method can support the development of reinforced learning for thermal comfort.
Authors:James Ballow, Soumyabrata Dey
Title: Real-Time Hand Gesture Identification in Thermal Images
Abstract:
Hand gesture-based human-computer interaction is an important problem that is well explored using color camera data. In this work we proposed a hand gesture detection system using thermal images. Our system is capable of handling multiple hand regions in a frame and process it fast for real-time applications. Our system performs a series of steps including background subtraction-based hand mask generation, k-means based hand region identification, hand segmentation to remove the forearm region, and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based gesture classification. Our work introduces two novel algorithms, bubble growth and bubble search, for faster hand segmentation. We collected a new thermal image data set with 10 gestures and reported an end-to-end hand gesture recognition accuracy of 97%.
Authors:Bruno Avritzer, Todd Brun
Title: Quantum Steganography via Coherent and Fock State Encoding in an Optical Medium
Abstract:
Steganography is an alternative to cryptography, where information is protected by secrecy -- being disguised as innocent communication or noise -- rather than being scrambled. In this work we develop schemes for steganographic communication using Fock and coherent states in optical channels based on disguising the communications as thermal noise. We derive bounds on their efficiency in the case of an all-powerful eavesdropper, and provide explicit methods of encoding and error correction for the noiseless channel case.
Authors:Ayhan Aktas, A. Anil Demircali, Riccardo Secoli, Burak Temelkuran, F. Rodriguez y Baena
Title: Towards a Procedure Optimised Steerable Microcatheter for Deep Seated Neurosurgery
Abstract:
In recent years, the steerable needles have attracted significant interest in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). Amongst these, the flexible Programmable-bevel tip needle (PBN) concept has successfully achieved an in-vivo demonstration to evaluate the feasibility of Convection Enhanced Delivery (CED) of chemotherapeutics within the ovine model, with a 2.5 mm PBN prototype. However, further size reduction is necessary for other diagnostic and therapeutic procedures involving deep-seated tissue structures. Since PBNs have a complex cross-section geometry, standard production methods, such as extrusion, fails as the outer diameter is reduced further. This paper presents our first attempt to demonstrate a new manufacturing method for the PBN that employs thermal drawing technology. Experimental characterisation tests were performed for the 2.5 mm PBN and a new 1.3 mm Thermally Drawn (TD) PBN prototype described here. The results show that thermal drawing presents a significant advantage in miniaturising complex needle structures. However, the steering behaviour is affected due to the choice of material in this first attempt, a limitation which will be addressed in future work.
Authors:Min-Ha Oh, Young-Hwan Kim, Seung-Min Lee, Gyeong-Seok Hwang, Kyung-Sub Kim, Jae-Young Bae, Ju-Young Kim, Ju-Yong Lee, Yu-Chan Kim, Sang Yup Kim, Seung-Kyun Kang
Title: Lifetime-configurable soft robots via photodegradable silicone elastomer composites
Abstract:
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during operation and rapidly degrade under specific external stimulation, present the opportunity to self-direct the disappearance of temporary robots. This study proposes soft robots and materials that exhibit excellent mechanical stretchability and can degrade under ultraviolet (UV) light by mixing a fluoride-generating diphenyliodonium hexafluorophosphate (DPI-HFP) with a silicone resin. Spectroscopic analysis revealed the mechanism of Si-O-Si backbone cleavage using fluoride ion (F-), which was generated from UV exposed DPI-HFP. Furthermore, photo-differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) based thermal analysis indicated increased decomposition kinetics at increased temperatures. Additionally, we demonstrated a robotics application of this composite by fabricating a gaiting robot. The integration of soft electronics, including strain sensors, temperature sensors, and photodetectors, expanded the robotic functionalities. This study provides a simple yet novel strategy for designing lifecycle mimicking soft robotics that can be applied to reduce soft robotics waste, explore hazardous areas where retrieval of robots is impossible, and ensure hardware security with on-demand destructive material platforms.
Authors:Wasiue Ahmed, Mokhi Maan Siddiqui, Faheemullah Shaikh
Title: Impact of Thermal Variability on SOC Estimation Algorithms
Abstract:
While the efficiency of renewable energy components like inverters and PV panels is at an all-time high, there are still research gaps for batteries. Lithium-ion batteries have a lot of potential, but there are still some problems that need fixing, such as thermal management. Because of this, the battery management system accomplishes its goal. In order for a battery management system (BMS) to function properly, it must make accurate estimates of all relevant parameters, including state of health, state of charge, and temperature; however, for the purposes of this article, we will only discuss SOC. The goal of this article is to estimate the SOC of a lithium-ion battery at different temperatures. Comparing the Extended Kalam filter algorithm to coulomb counting at various temperatures concludes this exhaustive investigation. The graphene battery has the highest SOC when operated at the optimal temperature, as determined by extensive analysis and correlation between SOC and temperature is not linear
Authors:Hamed Hani, Afsaneh Mojra
Title: Thermal Analysis of Malignant Brain Tumors by Employing a Morphological Differentiation-Based Method in Conjunction with Artificial Neural Network
Abstract:
In this study, a morphological differentiation-based method has been introduced which employs temperature distribution on the tissue surface to detect brain tumor's malignancy. According to the common tumor CT scans, two different scenarios have been implemented to describe irregular shape of the malignant tumor. In the first scenario, tumor has been considered as a polygon base prism and in the second one, it has been considered as a star-shaped base prism. By increasing the number of sides of the polygon or wings of the star, degree of the malignancy has been increased. Constant heat generation has been considered for the tumor and finite element analysis has been conducted by the ABAQUS software linked with a PYTHON script on both tumor models to study temperature variations on the top tissue surface. This temperature distribution has been characterized by 10 parameters. In each scenario, 98 sets of these parameters has been used as inputs of a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and number of sides or wings has been selected to be the output. The RBFNN has been trained to identify malignancy of tumor based on its morphology. According to the RBFNN results, the proposed method has been capable of differentiating between benign and malignant tumors and estimating the degree of malignancy with high accuracy
Authors:Yang Yang, Kaixiong Xu, Kaizheng Wang
Title: Cascaded information enhancement and cross-modal attention feature fusion for multispectral pedestrian detection
Abstract:
Multispectral pedestrian detection is a technology designed to detect and locate pedestrians in Color and Thermal images, which has been widely used in automatic driving, video surveillance, etc. So far most available multispectral pedestrian detection algorithms only achieved limited success in pedestrian detection because of the lacking take into account the confusion of pedestrian information and background noise in Color and Thermal images. Here we propose a multispectral pedestrian detection algorithm, which mainly consists of a cascaded information enhancement module and a cross-modal attention feature fusion module. On the one hand, the cascaded information enhancement module adopts the channel and spatial attention mechanism to perform attention weighting on the features fused by the cascaded feature fusion block. Moreover, it multiplies the single-modal features with the attention weight element by element to enhance the pedestrian features in the single-modal and thus suppress the interference from the background. On the other hand, the cross-modal attention feature fusion module mines the features of both Color and Thermal modalities to complement each other, then the global features are constructed by adding the cross-modal complemented features element by element, which are attentionally weighted to achieve the effective fusion of the two modal features. Finally, the fused features are input into the detection head to detect and locate pedestrians. Extensive experiments have been performed on two improved versions of annotations (sanitized annotations and paired annotations) of the public dataset KAIST. The experimental results show that our method demonstrates a lower pedestrian miss rate and more accurate pedestrian detection boxes compared to the comparison method. Additionally, the ablation experiment also proved the effectiveness of each module designed in this paper.
Authors:G. Baxevani, V. Harmandaris, E. Kalligiannaki, I. Tsantili
Title: Bottom-up transient time models in coarse-graining molecular systems
Abstract:
This work presents a systematic methodology for describing the transient dynamics of coarse-grained molecular systems inferred from all-atom simulated data. We suggest Langevin-type dynamics where the coarse-grained interaction potential depends explicitly on time to efficiently approximate the transient coarse-grained dynamics. We apply the path-space force matching approach at the transient dynamics regime to learn the proposed model parameters. In particular, we parameterize the coarse-grained potential both with respect to the pair distance of the CG particles and the time, and we obtain an evolution model that is explicitly time-dependent. Moreover, we follow a data-driven approach to estimate the friction kernel, given by appropriate correlation functions directly from the underlying all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. To explore and validate the proposed methodology we study a benchmark system of a moving particle in a box. We examine the suggested model's effectiveness in terms of the system's correlation time and find that the model can approximate well the transient time regime of the system, depending on the correlation time of the system. As a result, in the less correlated case, it can represent the dynamics for a longer time interval. We present an extensive study of our approach to a realistic high-dimensional water molecular system. Posing the water system initially out of thermal equilibrium we collect trajectories of all-atom data for the, empirically estimated, transient time regime. Then, we infer the suggested model and strengthen the model's validity by comparing it with simplified Markovian models.
Authors:Ying Zhang, Zhiqiang Zhao, Zhuo Feng
Title: SF-SGL: Solver-Free Spectral Graph Learning from Linear Measurements
Abstract:
This work introduces a highly-scalable spectral graph densification framework (SGL) for learning resistor networks with linear measurements, such as node voltages and currents. We show that the proposed graph learning approach is equivalent to solving the classical graphical Lasso problems with Laplacian-like precision matrices. We prove that given $O(\log N)$ pairs of voltage and current measurements, it is possible to recover sparse $N$-node resistor networks that can well preserve the effective resistance distances on the original graph. In addition, the learned graphs also preserve the structural (spectral) properties of the original graph, which can potentially be leveraged in many circuit design and optimization tasks. To achieve more scalable performance, we also introduce a solver-free method (SF-SGL) that exploits multilevel spectral approximation of the graphs and allows for a scalable and flexible decomposition of the entire graph spectrum (to be learned) into multiple different eigenvalue clusters (frequency bands). Such a solver-free approach allows us to more efficiently identify the most spectrally-critical edges for reducing various ranges of spectral embedding distortions. Through extensive experiments for a variety of real-world test cases, we show that the proposed approach is highly scalable for learning sparse resistor networks without sacrificing solution quality. We also introduce a data-driven EDA algorithm for vectorless power/thermal integrity verifications to allow estimating worst-case voltage/temperature (gradient) distributions across the entire chip by leveraging a few voltage/temperature measurements.
Authors:Mahsa Doosthosseini, Mahdi Khajeh Talkhoncheh, Jeffrey L. Silberberg, Sandy Weininger, Hamed Ghods
Title: Hybrid Cathode Lithium Battery Discharge Simulation for Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators Using a Coupled Electro-Thermal Dynamic Model
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD)'s load on its lithium battery power sources through a coupled electro-thermal dynamic model simulation. ICDs are one of the effective treatments available to significantly improve survival of patients with fatal arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) disorders. Using a lithium battery power source, this life-saving device sends electrical shocks or pulses to regulate the heartbeat. The service life and reliability of an ICD is primarily expressed by its battery's lifespan and performance. In this paper we investigate the terminal voltage, depth of discharge (DOD) and temperature dynamics of the implantable lithium battery with a combined cathode material, namely carbon-monofluoride and silver vanadium oxide (Li/CFx-SVO). Modeling the implantable batteries characteristics is a well-established topic in literature; however, to the best of the author's knowledge, the impact of the high-energy shocks (defibrillation) and low-energy device power supply (housekeeping) on the ICD's battery operation is relatively less-explored. Our analysis reveals that the battery terminal voltage is primarily affected by small but continuous housekeeping discharge current in the range of uA, rather than intermittent high defibrillation current demand in the range of several amps. The results can be used to improve the device design control and operation, thus extending the service life in patients and reducing the need for invasive replacement surgery.
Authors:Xingchen Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
Title: Self-Supervised RGB-T Tracking with Cross-Input Consistency
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a self-supervised RGB-T tracking method. Different from existing deep RGB-T trackers that use a large number of annotated RGB-T image pairs for training, our RGB-T tracker is trained using unlabeled RGB-T video pairs in a self-supervised manner. We propose a novel cross-input consistency-based self-supervised training strategy based on the idea that tracking can be performed using different inputs. Specifically, we construct two distinct inputs using unlabeled RGB-T video pairs. We then track objects using these two inputs to generate results, based on which we construct our cross-input consistency loss. Meanwhile, we propose a reweighting strategy to make our loss function robust to low-quality training samples. We build our tracker on a Siamese correlation filter network. To the best of our knowledge, our tracker is the first self-supervised RGB-T tracker. Extensive experiments on two public RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed training strategy is effective. Remarkably, despite training only with a corpus of unlabeled RGB-T video pairs, our tracker outperforms seven supervised RGB-T trackers on the GTOT dataset.
Authors:Leonard Göke, Jens Weibezahn, Mario Kendziorski
Title: How flexible electrification can integrate fluctuating renewables
Abstract:
To phase-out fossil fuels, energy systems must shift to renewable electricity as the main source of primary energy. In this paper, we analyze how electrification can support the integration of fluctuating renewables, like wind and PV, and mitigate the need for storage and thermal backup plants. Using a cost minimizing model for system planning, we find substantial benefits of electricity demand in heating, transport, and industry adapting to supply. In Germany, flexible demand halves the residual peak-load and the residual demand and reduces excess generation by 80%. Flexible operation of electrolyzers has the most significant impact accounting for 42% of the reduction in residual peak-load and 59% in residual demand. District heating networks and BEVs also provide substantial flexibility, while the contribution of space and process heating is negligible. The results are robust to restrictions on the expansion of the transmission grid.
Authors:Dimitri Rothermel, Thomas Schuster
Title: Development of a photothermal measurement model to determine layer thickness of multi-layered coating systems with unknown thermal properties
Abstract:
In this article, a general model for 1D thermal wave interference is derived for multi-layered coating systems on a thermally thick substrate using the same principles as for the well established one-layered and two-layered coating cases. Using the lock-in thermography principle, an illumination source modulates the surface of those systems periodically by a planar, sinusoidal wave form with a fixed frequency. The coating systems absorb the optical energy on its surface and convert it into thermal energy, resulting in the propagation of a spatially and temporally periodic thermal wave with the same frequency. These thermal waves, originating at the surface, are reflected and transmitted at each interface leading to infinitely many wave trains that need to be tracked in order to formulate the final surface temperature as a superposition of all these waves. The heat transfer inside the object depends on the layer thickness of each coating, but also on the thermal properties of each layer material. The goal is to have a mathematical and physical model which describes the phase angle data measured by an infrared camera. Having these data, the main objective of this paper is to determine the thickness of each coating layer. In practice, the thermal properties of the layers usually are unknown, which makes the process even more difficult. For that reason, this article presents a concept to determine the thermal properties in advance.
Authors:Victor H. Aristizabal-Tique, Marcela Henao-Perez, Diana Carolina Lopez-Medina, Renato Zambrano-Cruz, Gloria Diaz-Londoñod
Title: Facial Thermal and Blood Perfusion Patterns of Human Emotions: Proof-of-Concept
Abstract:
In this work, a preliminary study of proof-of-concept was conducted to evaluate the performance of the thermographic and blood perfusion data when emotions of positive and negative valence are applied, where the blood perfusion data are obtained from the thermographic data. The images were obtained for baseline, positive, and negative valence according to the protocol of the Geneva Affective Picture Database. Absolute and percentage differences of average values of the data between the valences and the baseline were calculated for different regions of interest (forehead, periorbital eyes, cheeks, nose and upper lips). For negative valence, a decrease in temperature and blood perfusion was observed in the regions of interest, and the effect was greater on the left side than on the right side. In positive valence, the temperature and blood perfusion increased in some cases, showing a complex pattern. The temperature and perfusion of the nose was reduced for both valences, which is indicative of the arousal dimension. The blood perfusion images were found to be greater contrast; the percentage differences in the blood perfusion images are greater than those obtained in thermographic images. Moreover, the blood perfusion images, and vasomotor answer are consistent, therefore, they can be a better biomarker than thermographic analysis in identifying emotions.
Authors:Moritz Frahm, Thomas Dengiz, Philipp Zwickel, Heiko Maaß, Jörg Matthes, Veit Hagenmeyer
Title: Occupant-Oriented Demand Response with Multi-Zone Thermal Building Control
Abstract:
In future energy systems with high shares of renewable energy sources, the electricity demand of buildings has to react to the fluctuating electricity generation in view of stability. As buildings consume one-third of global energy and almost half of this energy accounts for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, HVAC are suitable for shifting their electricity consumption in time. To this end, intelligent control strategies are necessary as the conventional control of HVAC is not optimized for the actual demand of occupants and the current situation in the electricity grid. In this paper, we present the novel multi-zone controller Price Storage Control (PSC) that not only considers room-individual Occupants' Thermal Satisfaction (OTS), but also the available energy storage, and energy prices. The main feature of PSC is that it does not need a building model or forecasts of future demands to derive the control actions for multiple rooms in a building. For comparison, we use an ideal, error-free Model Predictive Control (MPC), a simplified variant without storage consideration (PC), and a conventional hysteresis-based two-point control. We evaluate the four controllers in a multi-zone environment for heating a building in winter and consider two different scenarios that differ in how much the permitted temperatures vary. In addition, we compare the impact of model parameters with high and low thermal capacitance. The results show that PSC strongly outperforms the conventional control approach in both scenarios and for both parameters. For high capacitance, it leads to 22 % costs reduction while the ideal MPC achieves cost reductions of more than 39 %. Considering that PSC does not need any building model or forecast, as opposed to MPC, the results support the suitability of our developed control strategy for controlling HVAC systems in future energy systems.
Authors:Kai Zhu, Shunchuan Yang
Title: A Transient Electrical-Thermal Co-Simulation Method with LTS for Multiscale Structures
Abstract:
In this article, an efficient transient electricalthermal co-simulation method based on the finite element method (FEM) and the discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) method is developed for electrical-thermal coupling analysis of multiscale structures. Two Independent meshes are adopted by the steady electrical analysis and the transient thermal simulation to avoid redundant overhead. In order to enhance the feasibility and efficiency of solving multiscale and sophisticated structures, a local time stepping (LTS) technique coupled with an interpolation method is incorporated into the co-simulation method. Several numerical examples from simple structures to complex multiscale PDN structures are carried out to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method by comparing with the COMSOL. Finally, two practical numerical examples are considered to confirm the performance of the proposed method for complex and multiscale structures.
Authors:Angela Busheska, Nara Almeida, Nicholas Sabella, Eudes de A. Rocha
Title: Machine Learning and Thermography Applied to the Detection and Classification of Cracks in Building
Abstract:
Due to the environmental impacts caused by the construction industry, repurposing existing buildings and making them more energy-efficient has become a high-priority issue. However, a legitimate concern of land developers is associated with the buildings' state of conservation. For that reason, infrared thermography has been used as a powerful tool to characterize these buildings' state of conservation by detecting pathologies, such as cracks and humidity. Thermal cameras detect the radiation emitted by any material and translate it into temperature-color-coded images. Abnormal temperature changes may indicate the presence of pathologies, however, reading thermal images might not be quite simple. This research project aims to combine infrared thermography and machine learning (ML) to help stakeholders determine the viability of reusing existing buildings by identifying their pathologies and defects more efficiently and accurately. In this particular phase of this research project, we've used an image classification machine learning model of Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to differentiate three levels of cracks in one particular building. The model's accuracy was compared between the MSX and thermal images acquired from two distinct thermal cameras and fused images (formed through multisource information) to test the influence of the input data and network on the detection results.
Authors:Laura Bragante Corssac, Juliano Araujo Wickboldt
Title: A Digital Twin-based Smart Home: A Proof of Concept Study
Abstract:
A Digital Twin is a virtual system that can fully describe a physical one. It constantly receives data from its counterpart's sensors, consults external sources, and obtains manual inputs from its stakeholders. The DT uses all this information to make various computations, such as analyses, predictions, and simulations, and then possibly sends the results back to the physical system. Domotics, or Smart Home Technologies, brings intelligence and comfort to a house by automating some of its functions. Although the research on both themes is vast, there are few implementations of Smart Homes based on Digital Twin technologies, and this work aims to prove that residences can also benefit from this concept. We implement two different use cases showing that a two-way connection between a home and its virtual counterpart can provide its owners with analyses and simulation-based automation. The first study case allows the user to visualize their home appliances' past and present state concerning their energy consumption. Based on heating simulations, the second determines the best time to turn on a heater to increase the home's thermal comfort and reduce energy usage.
Authors:Bert Herteleer, Anastasios Kladas, Gofran Chowdhury, Francky Catthoor, Jan Cappelle
Title: Investigating methods to improve photovoltaic thermal models at second-to-minute timescales
Abstract:
This paper presents a range of methods to improve the accuracy of equation-based thermal models of PV modules at second-to-minute timescales. We present an RC-equivalent conceptual model for PV modules, where wind effects are captured. We show how the thermal time constant $τ$ of PV modules can be determined from measured data, and subsequently used to make static thermal models dynamic by applying the Exponential Weighted Mean (EWM) approach to irradiance and wind signals. On average, $τ$ is $6.3 \pm 1~$min for fixed-mount PV systems. Based on this conceptual model, the Filter- EWM - Mean Bias Error correction (FEM) methodology is developed. We propose two thermal models, WM1 and WM2, and compare these against the models of Ross, Sandia, and Faiman on twenty-four datasets of fifteen sites, with time resolutions ranging from 1$~$s to 1$~$h, the majority of these at 1$~$min resolution. The FEM methodology is shown to reduce model errors (RMSE and MAE) on average for all sites and models versus the standard steady-state equivalent by -1.1$~$K and -0.75$~$K respectively.
Authors:Evan S. Gawlik, François Gay-Balmaz
Title: Variational and thermodynamically consistent finite element discretization for heat conducting viscous fluids
Abstract:
Respecting the laws of thermodynamics is crucial for ensuring that numerical simulations of dynamical systems deliver physically relevant results. In this paper, we construct a structure-preserving and thermodynamically consistent finite element method and time-stepping scheme for heat conducting viscous fluids, with general state equations. The method is deduced by discretizing a variational formulation for nonequilibrium thermodynamics that extends Hamilton's principle for fluids to systems with irreversible processes. The resulting scheme preserves the balance of energy and mass to machine precision, as well as the second law of thermodynamics, both at the spatially and temporally discrete levels. The method is shown to apply both with insulated and prescribed heat flux boundary conditions, as well as with prescribed temperature boundary conditions. We illustrate the properties of the scheme with the Rayleigh-Bénard thermal convection. While the focus is on heat conducting viscous fluids, the proposed discrete variational framework paves the way to a systematic construction of thermodynamically consistent discretizations of continuum systems.
Authors:Kunal Bhagat, Shiva Rudraraju
Title: A numerical investigation of dimensionless numbers characterizing meltpool morphology of the laser powder bed fusion process
Abstract:
Microstructure evolution in metal additive manufacturing (AM) is a complex multi-physics and multi-scale problem. Understanding the impact of AM process conditions on the microstructure evolution and the resulting mechanical properties of the printed part is an active area of research. At the meltpool scale, the thermo-fluidic governing equations have been extensively modeled in the literature to understand the meltpool conditions and the thermal gradients in its vicinity. In many phenomena governed by partial differential equations, dimensional analysis and identification of important dimensionless numbers can provide significant insights into the process dynamics. In this context, a novel strategy using dimensional analysis and the method of linear least squares regression to numerically investigate the thermo-fluidic governing equations of the Laser Powder Bed Fusion AM process is presented in this work. First, the governing equations are solved using the Finite Element Method, and the model predictions are validated by comparing with experimentally estimated cooling rates, and with numerical results from the literature. Then, through dimensional analysis, an important dimensionless quantity - interpreted as a measure of heat absorbed by the powdered material and the meltpool, is identified. This dimensionless measure of heat absorbed, along with classical dimensionless quantities such as Peclet, Marangoni, and Stefan numbers, is used to investigate advective transport in the meltpool for different alloys. Further, the framework is used to study the variations of thermal gradients and the solidification cooling rate. Important correlations linking meltpool morphology and microstructure evolution related variables with classical dimensionless numbers are the key contribution of this work.
Authors:Kiran Bhaskar, Ajith Kumar, James Bunce, Jacob Pressman, Neil Burkell, Christopher D. Rahn
Title: Data-Driven Thermal Anomaly Detection in Large Battery Packs
Abstract:
The early detection and tracing of anomalous operations in battery packs are critical to improving performance and ensuring safety. This paper presents a data-driven approach for online anomaly detection in battery packs that uses real-time voltage and temperature data from multiple Li-ion battery cells. Mean-based residuals are generated for cell groups and evaluated using Principal Component Analysis. The evaluated residuals are then thresholded using a cumulative sum control chart to detect anomalies. The mild external short circuits associated with cell balancing are detected in the voltage signals and necessitate voltage retraining after balancing. Temperature residuals prove to be critical, enabling anomaly detection of module balancing events within 14 min that are unobservable from the voltage residuals. Statistical testing of the proposed approach is performed on the experimental data from a battery electric locomotive injected with model-based anomalies. The proposed anomaly detection approach has a low false-positive rate and accurately detects and traces the synthetic voltage and temperature anomalies. The performance of the proposed approach compared with direct thresholding of mean-based residuals shows a 56% faster detection time, 42% fewer false negatives, and 60% fewer missed anomalies while maintaining a comparable false-positive rate.
Authors:Berkay Kaplan, Jingyu Qian, Israel J Lopez-Toledo, Carl A. Gunter
Title: A Tagging Solution to Discover IoT Devices in Apartments
Abstract:
The number of IoT devices in smart homes is increasing. This broad adoption facilitates users' lives, but it also brings problems. One such issue is that some IoT devices may invade users' privacy. Some reasons for this invasion can stem from obscure data collection practices or hidden devices. Specific IoT devices can exist out of sight and still collect user data to send to third parties via the Internet. Owners can easily forget the location or even the existence of these devices, especially if the owner is a landlord who manages several properties. The landlord-owner scenario creates multi-user problems as designers build machines for single users. We developed tags that use wireless protocols, buzzers, and LED lighting to lead users to solve the issue of device discovery in shared spaces and accommodate multi-user scenarios. They are attached to IoT devices inside a unit during their installation to be later discovered by a tenant. These tags have similar functionalities as the popular Tile models or Airtag, but our tags have different features based on our privacy use case. Our tags do not require pairing; multiple users can interact with them through our Android application. Although researchers developed several other tools, such as thermal cameras or virtual reality (VR), for discovering devices in environments, they have not used wireless protocols as a solution. We measured specific performance metrics of our tags to analyze their feasibility for this problem. We also conducted a user study to measure the participants' comfort levels while finding objects with our tags attached. Our results indicate that wireless tags can be viable for device tracking in residential properties.
Authors:David F. Fouhey, Richard E. L. Higgins, Spiro K. Antiochos, Graham Barnes, Marc L. DeRosa, J. Todd Hoeksema, K. D. Leka, Yang Liu, Peter W. Schuck, Tamas I. Gombosi
Title: Large-Scale Spatial Cross-Calibration of Hinode/SOT-SP and SDO/HMI
Abstract:
We investigate the cross-calibration of the Hinode/SOT-SP and SDO/HMI instrument meta-data, specifically the correspondence of the scaling and pointing information. Accurate calibration of these datasets gives the correspondence needed by inter-instrument studies and learning-based magnetogram systems, and is required for physically-meaningful photospheric magnetic field vectors. We approach the problem by robustly fitting geometric models on correspondences between images from each instrument's pipeline. This technique is common in computer vision, but several critical details are required when using scanning slit spectrograph data like Hinode/SOT-SP. We apply this technique to data spanning a decade of the Hinode mission. Our results suggest corrections to the published Level 2 Hinode/SOT-SP data. First, an analysis on approximately 2,700 scans suggests that the reported pixel size in Hinode/SOT-SP Level 2 data is incorrect by around 1%. Second, analysis of over 12,000 scans show that the pointing information is often incorrect by dozens of arcseconds with a strong bias. Regression of these corrections indicates that thermal effects have caused secular and cyclic drift in Hinode/SOT-SP pointing data over its mission. We offer two solutions. First, direct co-alignment with SDO/HMI data via our procedure can improve alignments for many Hinode/SOT-SP scans. Second, since the pointing errors are predictable, simple post-hoc corrections can substantially improve the pointing. We conclude by illustrating the impact of this updated calibration on derived physical data products needed for research and interpretation. Among other things, our results suggest that the pointing errors induce a hemispheric bias in estimates of radial current density.
Authors:Samuel F. Potter, Stefano Bertone, Norbert Schörghofer, Erwan Mazarico
Title: Fast hierarchical low-rank view factor matrices for thermal irradiance on planetary surfaces
Abstract:
We present an algorithm for compressing the radiosity view factor model commonly used in radiation heat transfer and computer graphics. We use a format inspired by the hierarchical off-diagonal low rank format, where elements are recursively partitioned using a quadtree or octree and blocks are compressed using a sparse singular value decomposition -- the hierarchical matrix is assembled using dynamic programming. The motivating application is time-dependent thermal modeling on vast planetary surfaces, with a focus on permanently shadowed craters which receive energy through indirect irradiance. In this setting, shape models are comprised of a large number of triangular facets which conform to a rough surface. At each time step, a quadratic number of triangle-to-triangle scattered fluxes must be summed; that is, as the sun moves through the sky, we must solve the same view factor system of equations for a potentially unlimited number of time-varying righthand sides. We first conduct numerical experiments with a synthetic spherical cap-shaped crater, where the equilibrium temperature is analytically available. We also test our implementation with triangle meshes of planetary surfaces derived from digital elevation models recovered by orbiting spacecrafts. Our results indicate that the compressed view factor matrix can be assembled in quadratic time, which is comparable to the time it takes to assemble the full view matrix itself. Memory requirements during assembly are reduced by a large factor. Finally, for a range of compression tolerances, the size of the compressed view factor matrix and the speed of the resulting matrix vector product both scale linearly (as opposed to quadratically for the full matrix), resulting in orders of magnitude savings in processing time and memory space.
Authors:Daniela Pagnani, Łukasz H. Kocewiak, Jesper Hjerrild, Frede Blaabjerg, Claus Leth Bak
Title: Integrating Black Start Capabilities into Offshore Wind Farms by Grid-Forming Batteries
Abstract:
Power systems are currently experiencing a transition towards decarbonisation of electrical generation through large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources. These are gradually replacing conventional thermal power plants which today are the main providers of black start (BS) services. Consequently, in case of a total/partial blackout, conventional black-start resources are not ready for operation. Offshore wind farms (OWFs), with their large capacity and fast controllers, have potential as novel BS units. This new service introduces a need for a new design for wind power systems to be able to fulfil the black start requirements for non-traditional generation units. In this paper, challenges, and possible solutions in integrating BS services into OWFs will be presented. A first challenge is represented by the implementation of a BS unit. The BS unit should be capable of firstly forming the wind farm power island and withstanding transient phenomena due to energisation. There could be several different solutions, e.g., the integration of grid-forming converters in the wind farm design which could be battery energy storage systems (BESSs). In this paper, specific challenges are analysed using simulations on a wind farm equipped with a grid-forming BESS, and the proposed solutions discussed. It can be concluded that a hybrid system comprised of a BESS and an OWF, in combination with novel technologies such as grid-forming control, soft-charging, etc. represents a feasible proposal for being able to provide BS services with OWFs.
Authors:Alireza Masoumi, Mohammad Ravandi, Manouchehr Salehi
Title: A modified bond-based peridynamics model without limitations on elastic properties
Abstract:
This study proposes a novel Modified Bond-Based PeriDynamic (MBB-PD) model based on the bonds' classification. This classification of bonds is performed on the basis of the equivalent hypothetical local strains and falls into three categories of horizontal normal, vertical normal, and shear bonds. While the classical Bond-Based PD (BB-PD) considers only the stretch of bonds, all components of the bonds' strains are taken into account in the proposed model.A local imaginary element is considered around each bond to estimate the true strains of each bond. The constitutive relations are derived from equating the strain energies of the bonds' deformations to the Classical Continuum Mechanics (CCM) strain energies for a generalized combined loading condition. A novel critical stretch criterion and critical angle criterion are proposed to predict the failure of normal and shear strain bonds, respectively.It is also shown that, unlike the classical BB-PD, the proposed model does not impose any limitations on the value of Poisson's ratio. The model is verified by investigating some intact plane stress and plane strain problems under mechanical and thermal loadings. Moreover, the deformation and damage contours and the corresponding stress-strain responses are presented for different problems with pre-existing defects and validated with the eXtended Finite Element method's (XFEM) analysis.
Authors:Simon Axelrod, Eugene Shakhnovich, Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli
Title: Thermal half-lives of azobenzene derivatives: virtual screening based on intersystem crossing using a machine learning potential
Abstract:
Molecular photoswitches are the foundation of light-activated drugs. A key photoswitch is azobenzene, which exhibits trans-cis isomerism in response to light. The thermal half-life of the cis isomer is of crucial importance, since it controls the duration of the light-induced biological effect. Here we introduce a computational tool for predicting the thermal half-lives of azobenzene derivatives. Our automated approach uses a fast and accurate machine learning potential trained on quantum chemistry data. Building on well-established earlier evidence, we argue that thermal isomerization proceeds through rotation mediated by intersystem crossing, and incorporate this mechanism into our automated workflow. We use our approach to predict the thermal half-lives of 19,000 azobenzene derivatives. We explore trends and tradeoffs between barriers and absorption wavelengths, and open-source our data and software to accelerate research in photopharmacology.
Authors:Karim Cherifi, Philipp Schulze, Volker Mehrmann, Leo Goßlau, Pascal Lünnemann
Title: Hierarchical modeling for an industrial implementation of a Digital Twin for electrical drives
Abstract:
Digital twins have become popular for their ability to monitor and optimize a process or a machine, ideally through its complete life cycle using simulations and sensor data. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of accurate and real-time simulations for digital twins in the context of electrical machines. To build such a digital twin involves not only computational models for the electromagnetic aspects, but also mechanical and thermal effects need to be taken into account. We address mathematical tools that can be employed to carry out the required simulations based on physical laws as well as surrogate or data-driven models. One of those tools is a model hierarchy of very fine to very coarse models as well as reduced order models for obtaining real-time simulations. The required software tools to carry out simulations in the digital twin are also discussed. The simulation models are implemented in a pipeline that allows for the automatic modeling of new machines and the automatic configuration of new digital twins. Finally, the overall implemented digital twin is tested and implemented in a physical demonstrator.
Authors:Adam Wunderlich, Jack Sklar
Title: Data-Driven Modeling of Noise Time Series with Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks
Abstract:
Random noise arising from physical processes is an inherent characteristic of measurements and a limiting factor for most signal processing and data analysis tasks. Given the recent interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs) for data-driven modeling, it is important to determine to what extent GANs can faithfully reproduce noise in target data sets. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation that aims to shed light on this issue for time series. Namely, we assess two general-purpose GANs for time series that are based on the popular deep convolutional GAN (DCGAN) architecture, a direct time-series model and an image-based model that uses a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) data representation. The GAN models are trained and quantitatively evaluated using distributions of simulated noise time series with known ground-truth parameters. Target time series distributions include a broad range of noise types commonly encountered in physical measurements, electronics, and communication systems: band-limited thermal noise, power law noise, shot noise, and impulsive noise. We find that GANs are capable of learning many noise types, although they predictably struggle when the GAN architecture is not well suited to some aspects of the noise, e.g., impulsive time-series with extreme outliers. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities and potential limitations of current approaches to time-series GANs and highlight areas for further research. In addition, our battery of tests provides a useful benchmark to aid the development of deep generative models for time series.
Authors:Scott R. Jeen, Alessandro Abate, Jonathan M. Cullen
Title: Low Emission Building Control with Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
Heating and cooling systems in buildings account for 31% of global energy use, much of which are regulated by Rule Based Controllers (RBCs) that neither maximise energy efficiency nor minimise emissions by interacting optimally with the grid. Control via Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to significantly improve building energy efficiency, but existing solutions require access to building-specific simulators or data that cannot be expected for every building in the world. In response, we show it is possible to obtain emission-reducing policies without such knowledge a priori--a paradigm we call zero-shot building control. We combine ideas from system identification and model-based RL to create PEARL (Probabilistic Emission-Abating Reinforcement Learning) and show that a short period of active exploration is all that is required to build a performant model. In experiments across three varied building energy simulations, we show PEARL outperforms an existing RBC once, and popular RL baselines in all cases, reducing building emissions by as much as 31% whilst maintaining thermal comfort. Our source code is available online via https://enjeeneer.io/projects/pearl/
Authors:Jorn M. Reniers, David A. Howey
Title: Digital twin of a MWh-scale grid battery system for efficiency and degradation analysis
Abstract:
Large-scale grid-connected lithium-ion batteries are increasingly being deployed to support renewable energy roll-out on the power grid. These battery systems consist of thousands of individual cells and various ancillary systems for monitoring and control. Although many studies have focused on the behaviour of single lithium-ion cells, the impact of system design choices and ancillary system controls on long-term degradation and efficiency of system, containing thousands of cells, has rarely been considered in detail. Here, we simulate a 1 MWh grid battery system consisting of 18900 individual cells, each represented by a separate electrochemical model, as well as the thermal management system and power electronic converters. Simulations of the impact of cell-to-cell variability, thermal effects, and degradation effects were run for up to 10000 cycles and 10 years. It is shown that electrical contact resistances and cell-to-cell variations in initial capacity and resistance have a smaller effect on performance than previously thought. Instead, the variation in degradation rate of individual cells dominates the system behaviour over the lifetime. The importance of careful thermal management system control is demonstrated, with proportional control improving overall efficiency by 5 %-pts over on-off methods, also increasing the total usable energy of the battery by 5 %-pts after 10 years.
Authors:Ian Seet, Thomas E. Ouldridge, Jonathan P. K. Doye
Title: Simulation of reversible molecular mechanical logic gates and circuits
Abstract:
Landauer's principle places a fundamental lower limit on the work required to perform a logically irreversible operation. Logically reversible gates provide a way to avoid these work costs, and also simplify the task of making the computation as a whole thermodynamically reversible. The inherent reversibility of mechanical logic gates would make them good candidates for the design of practical logically reversible computing systems if not for the relatively large size and mass of such systems. In this paper, we outline the design and simulation of reversible molecular mechanical logic gates that come close to the limits of thermodynamic reversibility even under the effects of thermal noise, and outline associated circuit components from which arbitrary combinatorial reversible circuits can be constructed and simulated. We demonstrate that isolated components can be operated in a thermodynamically reversible manner, and explore the complexities of combining components to implement more complex computations. Finally, we demonstrate a method to construct arbitrarily large reversible combinatorial circuits using multiple external controls and signal boosters with a working half-adder circuit.
Authors:Tyler Chen, Yu-Chen Cheng
Title: Numerical computation of the equilibrium-reduced density matrix for strongly coupled open quantum systems
Abstract:
We describe a numerical algorithm for approximating the equilibrium-reduced density matrix and the effective (mean force) Hamiltonian for a set of system spins coupled strongly to a set of bath spins when the total system (system+bath) is held in canonical thermal equilibrium by weak coupling with a "super-bath". Our approach is a generalization of now standard typicality algorithms for computing the quantum expectation value of observables of bare quantum systems via trace estimators and Krylov subspace methods. In particular, our algorithm makes use of the fact that the reduced system density, when the bath is measured in a given random state, tends to concentrate about the corresponding thermodynamic averaged reduced system density. Theoretical error analysis and numerical experiments are given to validate the accuracy of our algorithm. Further numerical experiments demonstrate the potential of our approach for applications including the study of quantum phase transitions and entanglement entropy for long-range interaction systems.
Authors:Adam Bertsch, Michael R. Collette, Shawn A. Dawson, Si D. Hammond, Ian Karlin, M. Scott McKinley, Kevin Pedretti, Robert N. Rieben, Brian S. Ryujin, Arturo Vargas, Kenneth Weiss
Title: Understanding Power and Energy Utilization in Large Scale Production Physics Simulation Codes
Abstract:
Power is an often-cited reason for the move to advanced architectures on the path to Exascale computing. This is due to practical considerations related to delivering enough power to successfully site and operate these machines, as well as concerns about energy usage while running large simulations. Since obtaining accurate power measurements can be challenging, it may be tempting to use the processor thermal design power (TDP) as a surrogate due to its simplicity and availability. However, TDP is not indicative of typical power usage while running simulations. Using commodity and advanced technology systems at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Labs, we performed a series of experiments to measure power and energy usage in running simulation codes. These experiments indicate that large scale Lawrence Livermore simulation codes are significantly more efficient than a simple processor TDP model might suggest.
Authors:Aviral Chharia, Nishi Mehta, Shivam Gupta, Shivam Prajapati
Title: Recent Trends in Artificial Intelligence-inspired Electronic Thermal Management
Abstract:
The rise of computation-based methods in thermal management has gained immense attention in recent years due to the ability of deep learning to solve complex 'physics' problems, which are otherwise difficult to be approached using conventional techniques. Thermal management is required in electronic systems to keep them from overheating and burning, enhancing their efficiency and lifespan. For a long time, numerical techniques have been employed to aid in the thermal management of electronics. However, they come with some limitations. To increase the effectiveness of traditional numerical approaches and address the drawbacks faced in conventional approaches, researchers have looked at using artificial intelligence at various stages of the thermal management process. The present study discusses in detail, the current uses of deep learning in the domain of 'electronic' thermal management.
Authors:Wangkun Jia, Ming-C. Cheng
Title: A Methodology for Thermal Simulation of Interconnects Enabled by Model Reduction with Material Property Variation
Abstract:
A thermal simulation methodology is developed for interconnects enabled by a data-driven learning algorithm accounting for variations of material properties, heat sources and boundary conditions (BCs). The methodology is based on the concepts of model order reduction and domain decomposition to construct a multi-block approach. A generic block model is built to represent a group of interconnect blocks that are used to wire standard cells in the integrated circuits (ICs). The blocks in this group possess identical geometry with various metal/via routings. The data-driven model reduction method is thus applied to learn material property variations induced by different metal/via routings in the blocks, in addition to the variations of heat sources and BCs. The approach is investigated in two very different settings. It is first applied to thermal simulation of a single interconnect block with similar BCs to those in the training of the generic block. It is then implemented in multi-block thermal simulation of a FinFET IC, where the interconnect structure is partitioned into several blocks each modeled by the generic block model. Accuracy of the generic block model is examined in terms of the metal/via routings, BCs and thermal discontinuities at the block interfaces.
Authors:Jianqiao Mao, Grammenos Ryan
Title: Interpreting Machine Learning Models for Room Temperature Prediction in Non-domestic Buildings
Abstract:
An ensuing challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the perceived difficulty in interpreting sophisticated machine learning models, whose ever-increasing complexity makes it hard for such models to be understood, trusted and thus accepted by human beings. The lack, if not complete absence, of interpretability for these so-called black-box models can lead to serious economic and ethical consequences, thereby hindering the development and deployment of AI in wider fields, particularly in those involving critical and regulatory applications. Yet, the building services industry is a highly-regulated domain requiring transparency and decision-making processes that can be understood and trusted by humans. To this end, the design and implementation of autonomous Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems for the automatic but concurrently interpretable optimisation of energy efficiency and room thermal comfort is of topical interest. This work therefore presents an interpretable machine learning model aimed at predicting room temperature in non-domestic buildings, for the purpose of optimising the use of the installed HVAC system. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed model can accurately forecast room temperatures eight hours ahead in real-time by taking into account historical RT information, as well as additional environmental and time-series features. In this paper, an enhanced feature engineering process is conducted based on the Exploratory Data Analysis results. Furthermore, beyond the commonly used Interpretable Machine Learning techniques, we propose a Permutation Feature-based Frequency Response Analysis (PF-FRA) method for quantifying the contributions of the different predictors in the frequency domain. Based on the generated reason codes, we find that the historical RT feature is the dominant factor that has most impact on the model prediction.
Authors:Suranjan Goswami, Satish Kumar Singh, and Bidyut B. Chaudhuri
Title: A Novel Deep Learning Method for Thermal to Annotated Thermal-Optical Fused Images
Abstract:
Thermal Images profile the passive radiation of objects and capture them in grayscale images. Such images have a very different distribution of data compared to optical colored images. We present here a work that produces a grayscale thermo-optical fused mask given a thermal input. This is a deep learning based pioneering work since to the best of our knowledge, there exists no other work on thermal-optical grayscale fusion. Our method is also unique in the sense that the deep learning method we are proposing here works on the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain instead of the gray level domain. As a part of this work, we also present a new and unique database for obtaining the region of interest in thermal images based on an existing thermal visual paired database, containing the Region of Interest on 5 different classes of data. Finally, we are proposing a simple low cost overhead statistical measure for identifying the region of interest in the fused images, which we call as the Region of Fusion (RoF). Experiments on the database show encouraging results in identifying the region of interest in the fused images. We also show that they can be processed better in the mixed form rather than with only thermal images.
Authors:Hamza Anwar, Aashrith Vishwanath, Apurva Chunodkar, Qadeer Ahmed
Title: Comprehensive Energy Footprint Benchmarking of Strong Parallel Electrified Powertrain
Abstract:
This work presents comprehensive energy management and in-depth energy footprint analysis of an electrified strong parallel commercial vehicle. We use the PS3 framework, validated real-world powertrain system models, and Pareto-optimal analysis to optimize fuel consumption and harmful pollutant emissions. The approach involves dynamic optimization of 13 states and 4 control levers with complex interactions between multiple subsystems for a parallel hybrid electric pick-up and delivery truck. These subsystems exhibit thermal, electrical, and mechanical dynamics at different time scales, and contain kinematic and combinatorial constraints, integer- and real-valued variables, interpolated look-up tables, and data maps. A Pareto-optimal solution is found by carefully optimizing fuel and NOx emissions to understand the energy footprint of the electrified powertrain. The presented results exhibit rich analysis and complex interactions among the powertrain subsystems to unearth a 7% improvement in its fuel consumption and 29% pollutant NOx reduction when compared to solution from a coarsely modeled powertrain system.
Authors:Meghavin Bhatasana, Amy Marconnet
Title: Machine-Learning Assisted Optimization Strategies for Phase Change Materials Embedded within Electronic Packages
Abstract:
Leveraging the latent heat of phase change materials (PCMs) can reduce the peak temperatures and transient variations in temperature in electronic devices. But as the power levels increase, the thermal conduction pathway from the heat source to the heat sink limits the effectiveness of these systems. In this work, we evaluate embedding the PCM within the silicon device layer of an electronic device to minimize the thermal resistance between the source and the PCM to minimize this thermal resistance and enhance the thermal performance of the device. The geometry and material properties of the embedded PCM regions are optimized using a combination of parametric and machine learning algorithms. For a fixed geometry, considering commercially available materials, Solder 174 significantly outperforms other organic and metallic PCMs. Also with a fixed geometry, the optimal melting points to minimize the peak temperature is higher than the optimal melting point to minimize the amplitude of the transient temperature oscillation, and both optima increase with increasing heater power. Extending beyond conventional optimization strategies, genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization with and without neural network surrogate models are used to enable optimization of many geometric and material properties. For the test case evaluated, the optimized geometries and properties are similar between all ML-assisted algorithms, but the computational time depends on the technique. Ultimately, the optimized design with embedded phase change materials reduces the maximum temperature rise by 19% and the fluctuations by up to 88% compared to devices without PCM.
Authors:Peng Jingchao, Zhao Haitao, Hu Zhengwei, Zhuang Yi, Wang Bofan
Title: Siamese Infrared and Visible Light Fusion Network for RGB-T Tracking
Abstract:
Due to the different photosensitive properties of infrared and visible light, the registered RGB-T image pairs shot in the same scene exhibit quite different characteristics. This paper proposes a siamese infrared and visible light fusion Network (SiamIVFN) for RBG-T image-based tracking. SiamIVFN contains two main subnetworks: a complementary-feature-fusion network (CFFN) and a contribution-aggregation network (CAN). CFFN utilizes a two-stream multilayer convolutional structure whose filters for each layer are partially coupled to fuse the features extracted from infrared images and visible light images. CFFN is a feature-level fusion network, which can cope with the misalignment of the RGB-T image pairs. Through adaptively calculating the contributions of infrared and visible light features obtained from CFFN, CAN makes the tracker robust under various light conditions. Experiments on two RGB-T tracking benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SiamIVFN has achieved state-of-the-art performance. The tracking speed of SiamIVFN is 147.6FPS, the current fastest RGB-T fusion tracker.
Authors:Suleyman Yildiz, Murat Uzunca, Bulent Karasozen
Title: Energy preserving reduced-order modelling of thermal shallow water equation
Abstract:
In this paper, Hamiltonian and energy preserving reduced-order models are developed for the rotating thermal shallow water equation (RTSWE) in the non-canonical Hamiltonian form with the state-dependent Poisson matrix. The high fidelity full solutions are obtained by discretizing the RTSWE in space with skew-symmetric finite-differences, that preserve the Hamiltonian structure. The resulting skew-gradient system is integrated in time with the energy preserving average vector field (AVF) method. The reduced-order model (ROM) is constructed in the same way as the full order model (FOM), preserving the reduced skew-symmetric structure and integrating in time with the AVF method. Relying on structure-preserving discretizations in space and time and applying proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with the Galerkin projection, an energy preserving reduced order model (ROM) is constructed. The nonlinearities in the ROM are computed by applying the discrete empirical interpolation (DEIM) method to reduce the computational cost. The computation of the reduced-order solutions is accelerated further by the use of tensor techniques. The overall procedure yields a clear separation of the offline and online computational cost of the reduced solutions. The accuracy and computational efficiency of the ROMs are demonstrated for a numerical test problem. Preservation of the energy (Hamiltonian), and other conserved quantities, i.e. mass, buoyancy, and total vorticity show that the reduced-order solutions ensure the long-term stability of the solutions while exhibiting several orders of magnitude computational speedup over the FOM.
Authors:Julian Rice, Wenwei Xu, Andrew August
Title: Analyzing Koopman approaches to physics-informed machine learning for long-term sea-surface temperature forecasting
Abstract:
Accurately predicting sea-surface temperature weeks to months into the future is an important step toward long term weather forecasting. Standard atmosphere-ocean coupled numerical models provide accurate sea-surface forecasts on the scale of a few days to a few weeks, but many important weather systems require greater foresight. In this paper we propose machine-learning approaches sea-surface temperature forecasting that are accurate on the scale of dozens of weeks. Our approach is based in Koopman operator theory, a useful tool for dynamical systems modelling. With this approach, we predict sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico up to 180 days into the future based on a present image of thermal conditions and three years of historical training data. We evaluate the combination of a basic Koopman method with a convolutional autoencoder, and a newly proposed "consistent Koopman" method, in various permutations. We show that the Koopman approach consistently outperforms baselines, and we discuss the utility of our additional assumptions and methods in this sea-surface temperature domain.
Authors:Elizabeth Crosson, Samuel Slezak
Title: Classical Simulation of High Temperature Quantum Ising Models
Abstract:
We consider generalized quantum Ising models, including those which could describe disordered materials or quantum annealers, and we prove that for all temperatures above a system-size independent threshold the path integral Monte Carlo method based on worldline heat-bath updates always mixes to stationarity in time $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ for an $n$ qubit system, and therefore provides a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the partition function. This result holds whenever the temperature is greater than four plus twice the maximum interaction degree (valence) over all qubits, measured in units of the local coupling strength. For example, this implies that the classical simulation of the thermal state of a superconducting device modeling a frustrated quantum Ising model with maximum valence of 6 and coupling strengths of 1 GHz is always possible at temperatures above 800 mK. Despite the quantum system being at high temperature, the classical spin system resulting from the quantum-to-classical mapping contains strong couplings which cause the single-site Glauber dynamics to mix slowly, therefore this result depends on the use of worldline updates (which are a form of cluster updates that can be implemented efficiently). This result places definite constraints on the temperatures required for a quantum advantage in analog quantum simulation with various NISQ devices based on equilibrium states of quantum Ising models.
Authors:David Rower, Misha Padidar, Paul J. Atzberger
Title: Surface Fluctuating Hydrodynamics Methods for the Drift-Diffusion Dynamics of Particles and Microstructures within Curved Fluid Interfaces
Abstract:
We introduce fluctuating hydrodynamics approaches on surfaces for capturing the drift-diffusion dynamics of particles and microstructures immersed within curved fluid interfaces of spherical shape. We take into account the interfacial hydrodynamic coupling, traction coupling with the surrounding bulk fluid, and thermal fluctuations. For fluid-structure interactions, we introduce Immersed Boundary Methods (IBM) and related Stochastic Eulerian-Lagrangian Methods (SELM) for curved surfaces. We use these approaches to investigate the statistics of surface fluctuating hydrodynamics and microstructures. For velocity autocorrelations, we find characteristic power-law scalings $τ^{-1}$, $τ^{-2}$, and plateaus can emerge. This depends on the physical regime associated with the geometry, surface viscosity, and bulk viscosity. This differs from the characteristic $τ^{-3/2}$ scaling for bulk three dimensional fluids. We develop theory explaining these observed power-laws associated with time-scales for dissipation within the fluid interface and coupling to the surrounding fluid. We then use our introduced methods to investigate a few example systems and roles of hydrodynamic coupling and thermal fluctuations including for the kinetics of passive particles and active microswimmers in curved fluid interfaces.
Authors:Hacene Mellah, Kamel Eddine Hemsas, Rachid Taleb
Title: Intelligent Sensor Based Bayesian Neural Network for Combined Parameters and States Estimation of a Brushed DC Motor
Abstract:
The objective of this paper is to develop an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to estimate simultaneously, parameters and state of a brushed DC machine. The proposed ANN estimator is novel in the sense that his estimates simultaneously temperature, speed and rotor resistance based only on the measurement of the voltage and current inputs. Many types of ANN estimators have been designed by a lot of researchers during the last two decades. Each type is designed for a specific application. The thermal behavior of the motor is very slow, which leads to large amounts of data sets. The standard ANN use often Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with Levenberg-Marquardt Backpropagation (LMBP), among the limits of LMBP in the case of large number of data, so the use of MLP based on LMBP is no longer valid in our case. As solution, we propose the use of Cascade-Forward Neural Network (CFNN) based Bayesian Regulation backpropagation (BRBP). To test our estimator robustness a random white-Gaussian noise has been added to the sets. The proposed estimator is in our viewpoint accurate and robust.
Authors:Guanyu Gao, Jie Li, Yonggang Wen
Title: Energy-Efficient Thermal Comfort Control in Smart Buildings via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is extremely energy-consuming, accounting for 40% of total building energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to design some energy-efficient building thermal control policies which can reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while maintaining the comfort of the occupants. However, implementing such a policy is challenging, because it involves various influencing factors in a building environment, which are usually hard to model and may be different from case to case. To address this challenge, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based framework for energy optimization and thermal comfort control in smart buildings. We formulate the building thermal control as a cost-minimization problem which jointly considers the energy consumption of HVAC and the thermal comfort of the occupants. To solve the problem, we first adopt a deep neural network based approach for predicting the occupants' thermal comfort, and then adopt Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG) for learning the thermal control policy. To evaluate the performance, we implement a building thermal control simulation system and evaluate the performance under various settings. The experiment results show that our method can improve the thermal comfort prediction accuracy, and reduce the energy consumption of HVAC while improving the occupants' thermal comfort.
Authors:Yao Yao, Peichao Zhang, Sijie Chen
Title: Aggregating Large-Scale Generalized Energy Storages to Participate in Energy Market and Regulation Market
Abstract:
This paper proposes a concept of generalized energy storage (GES) to facilitate the integration of large-scale heterogeneous flexible resources with electric/thermal energy storage capacity to participate in multiple markets. First, a generalized state variable referred to as degree of satisfaction (DoS) is defined, and dynamic models with a unified form are derived for different types of GESs. Second, a real-time market-based coordination framework is proposed to facilitate control, and ensure user privacy and device security. Demand curves of different GESs are then developed based on DoS to express their demand urgencies as well as flexibilities. Furthermore, a low-dimensional aggregate dynamic model of a GES cluster is derived thanks to the DoS-equality control feature provided by the design of demand curve. At last, an optimization model for a large-scale GESs to participate in both the energy market and regulation market is established based on the aggregate model. Simulations results demonstrate that the optimization algorithm could effectively reduce the total cost of an aggregator. Additionally, the proposed coordination method has high tracking accuracy and could well satisfy users' diversified power demand.
Authors:Jeongeun Son, Yuncheng Du
Title: Model-based Stochastic Fault Detection and Diagnosis for Lithium-ion Batteries
Abstract:
Lithium-ion battery (Li-ion) is becoming the dominant energy storage solution in many applications such as hybrid electric and electric vehicles, due to its higher energy density and longer life cycle. For these applications, the battery should perform reliably and pose no safety threats. However, the performance of Li-ion batteries can be affected by abnormal thermal behaviors, defined as faults. It is essential to develop reliable thermal management system to accurately predict and monitor thermal behaviors of Li-ion battery. Using the first-principle models of batteries, this work presents a stochastic fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) algorithm to identify two particular faults in the Li-ion battery cells, using easily measured quantities such as temperatures. Models of Li-ion battery are typically derived from the underlying physical phenomena. To make model tractable and useful, it is common to make simplifications during model development, which may consequently introduce mismatch between models and battery cells. Further, FDD algorithms can be affected by uncertainty, which may originate from either intrinsic time varying phenomena or model calibration with noisy data. A two-step FDD algorithm is developed in this work to correct model of Li-ion battery cells and to identify faulty operations from a normal operating condition. An iterative optimization problem is proposed to correct the model by incorporating the errors between measured quantities and model predictions, which is followed by an optimization-based FDD to provide a probabilistic description of the occurrence of possible faults, while taking the uncertainty into account. The two-step stochastic FDD algorithm in this work is shown to be efficient in terms of fault detection rate for both individual and simultaneous faults in Li-ion batteries, as compared to Monte Carlo (MC) simulations.
Authors:Philipp Birken, Tobias Gleim, Detlef Kuhl, Andreas Meister
Title: Fast Solvers for Unsteady Thermal Fluid Structure Interaction
Abstract:
We consider time dependent thermal fluid structure interaction. The respective models are the compressible Navier-Stokes equations and the nonlinear heat equation. A partitioned coupling approach via a Dirichlet-Neumann method and a fixed point iteration is employed. As a refence solver a previously developed efficient time adaptive higher order time integration scheme is used. To improve upon this, we work on reducing the number of fixed point coupling iterations. Thus, first widely used vector extrapolation methods for convergence acceleration of the fixed point iteration are tested. In particular, Aitken relaxation, minimal polynomial extrapolation (MPE) and reduced rank extrapolation (RRE) are considered. Second, we explore the idea of extrapolation based on data given from the time integration and derive such methods for SDIRK2. While the vector extrapolation methods have no beneficial effects, the extrapolation methods allow to reduce the number of fixed point iterations further by up to a factor of two with linear extrapolation performing better than quadratic.
Authors:Pat Plunkett, Jon Hu, Chris Siefert, Paul J. Atzberger
Title: Spatially Adaptive Stochastic Methods for Fluid-Structure Interactions Subject to Thermal Fluctuations in Domains with Complex Geometries
Abstract:
We develop stochastic mixed finite element methods for spatially adaptive simulations of fluid-structure interactions when subject to thermal fluctuations. To account for thermal fluctuations, we introduce a discrete fluctuation-dissipation balance condition to develop compatible stochastic driving fields for our discretization. We perform analysis that shows our condition is sufficient to ensure results consistent with statistical mechanics. We show the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution is invariant under the stochastic dynamics of the semi-discretization. To generate efficiently the required stochastic driving fields, we develop a Gibbs sampler based on iterative methods and multigrid to generate fields with $O(N)$ computational complexity. Our stochastic methods provide an alternative to uniform discretizations on periodic domains that rely on Fast Fourier Transforms. To demonstrate in practice our stochastic computational methods, we investigate within channel geometries having internal obstacles and no-slip walls how the mobility/diffusivity of particles depends on location. Our methods extend the applicability of fluctuating hydrodynamic approaches by allowing for spatially adaptive resolution of the mechanics and for domains that have complex geometries relevant in many applications.
Authors:Gil Tabak, Paul J. Atzberger
Title: Systematic Stochastic Reduction of Inertial Fluid-Structure Interactions subject to Thermal Fluctuations
Abstract:
We investigate the dynamics of elastic microstructures within a fluid that are subjected to thermal fluctuations. We perform analysis to obtain systematically simplified descriptions of the mechanics in the limiting regimes when (i) the coupling forces that transfer momentum between the fluid and microstructures is strong, (ii) the mass of the microstructures is small relative to the displaced mass of the fluid, and (iii) the response to stresses results in hydrodynamics that relax rapidly to a quasi-steady-state relative to the motions of the microstructure. We derive effective equations using a singular perturbation analysis of the Backward Kolmogorov equations of the stochastic process. Our continuum mechanics description is based on the Stochastic Eulerian Lagrangian Method (SELM) which provides a framework for approximation of the fluid-structure interactions when subject to thermal fluctuations.
Authors:Stephen Whitelam
Title: Training thermodynamic computers by gradient descent
Abstract:
We show how to adjust the parameters of a thermodynamic computer by gradient descent in order to perform a desired computation at a specified observation time. Within a digital simulation of a thermodynamic computer, training proceeds by maximizing the probability with which the computer would generate an idealized dynamical trajectory. The idealized trajectory is designed to reproduce the activations of a neural network trained to perform the desired computation. This teacher-student scheme results in a thermodynamic computer whose finite-time dynamics enacts a computation analogous to that of the neural network. The parameters identified in this way can be implemented in the hardware realization of the thermodynamic computer, which will perform the desired computation automatically, driven by thermal noise. We demonstrate the method on a standard image-classification task, and estimate the thermodynamic advantage -- the ratio of energy costs of the digital and thermodynamic implementations -- to exceed seven orders of magnitude. Our results establish gradient descent as a viable training method for thermodynamic computing, enabling application of the core methodology of machine learning to this emerging field.
Authors:Yuhong Lu
Title: RLBind: Adversarial-Invariant Cross-Modal Alignment for Unified Robust Embeddings
Abstract:
Unified multi-modal encoders that bind vision, audio, and other sensors into a shared embedding space are attractive building blocks for robot perception and decision-making. However, on-robot deployment exposes the vision branch to adversarial and natural corruptions, making robustness a prerequisite for safety. Prior defenses typically align clean and adversarial features within CLIP-style encoders and overlook broader cross-modal correspondence, yielding modest gains and often degrading zero-shot transfer. We introduce RLBind, a two-stage adversarial-invariant cross-modal alignment framework for robust unified embeddings. Stage 1 performs unsupervised fine-tuning on clean-adversarial pairs to harden the visual encoder. Stage 2 leverages cross-modal correspondence by minimizing the discrepancy between clean/adversarial features and a text anchor, while enforcing class-wise distributional alignment across modalities. Extensive experiments on Image, Audio, Thermal, and Video data show that RLBind consistently outperforms the LanguageBind backbone and standard fine-tuning baselines in both clean accuracy and norm-bounded adversarial robustness. By improving resilience without sacrificing generalization, RLBind provides a practical path toward safer multi-sensor perception stacks for embodied robots in navigation, manipulation, and other autonomy settings.
Authors:Alejandro D. Mousist
Title: ASTREA: Introducing Agentic Intelligence for Orbital Thermal Autonomy
Abstract:
This paper presents ASTREA, the first agentic system deployed on flight-heritage hardware (TRL 9) for autonomous spacecraft operations. Using thermal control as a representative use case, we integrate a resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) agent with a reinforcement learning controller in an asynchronous architecture tailored for space-qualified platforms. Ground experiments show that LLM-guided supervision improves thermal stability and reduces violations, confirming the feasibility of combining semantic reasoning with adaptive control under hardware constraints. However, on-orbit validation aboard the International Space Station (ISS) reveals performance degradation caused by inference latency mismatched with the rapid thermal cycles characteristic of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. These results highlight both the opportunities and current limitations of agentic LLM-based systems in real flight environments, providing practical design guidelines for future space autonomy.
Authors:Eric Guiffo Kaigom
Title: Deep Generative and Discriminative Digital Twin endowed with Variational Autoencoder for Unsupervised Predictive Thermal Condition Monitoring of Physical Robots in Industry 6.0 and Society 6.0
Abstract:
Robots are unrelentingly used to achieve operational efficiency in Industry 4.0 along with symbiotic and sustainable assistance for the work-force in Industry 5.0. As resilience, robustness, and well-being are required in anti-fragile manufacturing and human-centric societal tasks, an autonomous anticipation and adaption to thermal saturation and burns due to motors overheating become instrumental for human safety and robot availability. Robots are thereby expected to self-sustain their performance and deliver user experience, in addition to communicating their capability to other agents in advance to ensure fully automated thermally feasible tasks, and prolong their lifetime without human intervention. However, the traditional robot shutdown, when facing an imminent thermal saturation, inhibits productivity in factories and comfort in the society, while cooling strategies are hard to implement after the robot acquisition. In this work, smart digital twins endowed with generative AI, i.e., variational autoencoders, are leveraged to manage thermally anomalous and generate uncritical robot states. The notion of thermal difficulty is derived from the reconstruction error of variational autoencoders. A robot can use this score to predict, anticipate, and share the thermal feasibility of desired motion profiles to meet requirements from emerging applications in Industry 6.0 and Society 6.0.
Authors:Aryan Gupta
Title: Assessing the Limits of Graph Neural Networks for Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium Prediction: A Cryogenic Mixture Case Study
Abstract:
Accurate and fast thermophysical models are needed to embed vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) calculations in design, optimization, and control loops for cryogenic mixtures. This study asks whether a structure-aware graph neural network (GNN; DimeNet++) trained on GERG-2008/CoolProp data can act as a practical surrogate for an equation of state (EoS). We generate a ternary dataset over 90-200 K and pressures to 100 bar, curate it with a 15% density filter (reducing 5,200 states to 1,516), and pair each state with a lightweight molecular-dynamics snapshot to supply structural features. The model is trained in two stages; pretraining on residual Helmholtz energy followed by pressure fine-tuning with a stability penalty; and evaluated via single-phase interpolation tests, solver-free derivative-quality diagnostics, an audited VLE driver, and a latency benchmark. Within its regime, the GNN interpolates single-phase properties reasonably well; however, the VLE driver accepts no GNN equilibria on tested binaries (all plotted VLE points are CoolProp fallback or the solver fails), and diagnostic probes reveal jagged P(V|T) paths and thermal-stability flags concentrated in dense/cold regions, indicating insufficient derivative smoothness/consistency for robust equilibrium solving. An end-to-end timing comparison shows no single-phase speed advantage relative to CoolProp (tens of milliseconds vs sub-millisecond). We conclude that, as configured, the surrogate in this study is not solver-ready for VLE and offers no runtime benefit; its value is methodological, delineating failure modes and pointing to remedies such as physics-informed training signals and targeted coverage near phase boundaries.
Authors:Seyd Teymoor Seydi
Title: Deep Learning-Based Burned Area Mapping Using Bi-Temporal Siamese Networks and AlphaEarth Foundation Datasets
Abstract:
Accurate and timely mapping of burned areas is crucial for environmental monitoring, disaster management, and assessment of climate change. This study presents a novel approach to automated burned area mapping using the AlphaEArth dataset combined with the Siamese U-Net deep learning architecture. The AlphaEArth Dataset, comprising high-resolution optical and thermal infrared imagery with comprehensive ground-truth annotations, provides an unprecedented resource for training robust burned area detection models. We trained our model with the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) dataset in the contiguous US and evaluated it with 17 regions cross in Europe. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble approach achieves superior performance with an overall accuracy of 95%, IoU of 0.6, and F1-score of 74% on the test dataset. The model successfully identifies burned areas across diverse ecosystems with complex background, showing particular strength in detecting partially burned vegetation and fire boundaries and its transferability and high generalization in burned area mapping. This research contributes to the advancement of automated fire damage assessment and provides a scalable solution for global burn area monitoring using the AlphaEarth dataset.
Authors:Ioannis Krikidis
Title: Tesla meets Helstrom: a Wireless-Powered Quantum Optical System
Abstract:
This letter investigates a novel wireless-powered quantum optical communication system, in which a batteryless quantum transmitter harvests energy from a classical radio-frequency source to transmit quantum coherent states. The transmission employs M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) modulation over an optical channel impaired by thermal noise, and the fundamental detection performance is evaluated using the Helstrom bound. An optimization framework is proposed that jointly determines the optimal quantum measurement and the energy-harvesting time fraction to maximize the effective rate under a block time constraint. Analytical expressions are derived for special cases, while semidefinite programming techniques are employed for the general M-PSK scenario. Numerical results validate the unimodal nature of the effective rate function and demonstrate the impact of the optimal design parameters.
Authors:Serra Aksoy
Title: Benchmarking Vision Transformers and CNNs for Thermal Photovoltaic Fault Detection with Explainable AI Validation
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence deployment for automated photovoltaic (PV) monitoring faces interpretability barriers that limit adoption in energy infrastructure applications. While deep learning achieves high accuracy in thermal fault detection, validation that model decisions align with thermal physics principles remains lacking, creating deployment hesitancy where understanding model reasoning is critical. This study provides a systematic comparison of convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0) and vision transformers (ViT-Tiny, Swin-Tiny) for thermal PV fault detection, using XRAI saliency analysis to assess alignment with thermal physics principles. This represents the first systematic comparison of CNNs and vision transformers for thermal PV fault detection with physics-validated interpretability. Evaluation on 20,000 infrared images spanning normal operation and 11 fault categories shows that Swin Transformer achieves the highest performance (94% binary accuracy; 73% multiclass accuracy) compared to CNN approaches. XRAI analysis reveals that models learn physically meaningful features, such as localized hotspots for cell defects, linear thermal paths for diode failures, and thermal boundaries for vegetation shading, consistent with expected thermal signatures. However, performance varies significantly across fault types: electrical faults achieve strong detection (F1-scores >0.90) while environmental factors like soiling remain challenging (F1-scores 0.20-0.33), indicating limitations imposed by thermal imaging resolution. The thermal physics-guided interpretability approach provides methodology for validating AI decision-making in energy monitoring applications, addressing deployment barriers in renewable energy infrastructure.
Authors:Mahmoud Dhimish
Title: HOTSPOT-YOLO: A Lightweight Deep Learning Attention-Driven Model for Detecting Thermal Anomalies in Drone-Based Solar Photovoltaic Inspections
Abstract:
Thermal anomaly detection in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems is essential for ensuring operational efficiency and reducing maintenance costs. In this study, we developed and named HOTSPOT-YOLO, a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model that integrates an efficient convolutional neural network backbone and attention mechanisms to improve object detection. This model is specifically designed for drone-based thermal inspections of PV systems, addressing the unique challenges of detecting small and subtle thermal anomalies, such as hotspots and defective modules, while maintaining real-time performance. Experimental results demonstrate a mean average precision of 90.8%, reflecting a significant improvement over baseline object detection models. With a reduced computational load and robustness under diverse environmental conditions, HOTSPOT-YOLO offers a scalable and reliable solution for large-scale PV inspections. This work highlights the integration of advanced AI techniques with practical engineering applications, revolutionizing automated fault detection in renewable energy systems.
Authors:Theodore V. Gortsas
Title: Numerical solution of the time fractional nonlinear Fisher-KPP diffusion-reaction equation using the local domain boundary element method
Abstract:
The Fisher-KPP partial differential equation has been employed in science to model various biological, chemical, and thermal phenomena. Time fractional extensions of Fisher's equation have also appeared in the literature, aiming to model systems with memory. The solution of the time fractional Fisher-KPP equation is challenging due to the interplay between the nonlinearity and the nonlocality imposed by the fractional derivatives. An accurate method that for the solution of time fractional diffusion problems is the Boundary Element Method (BEM). The conventional BEM has a high computational cost and memory requirements since it leads to dense coefficient matrices. For nonlinear transient problems, its efficiency is further reduced due to the appearance of volume integrals. In the present work an extension of the recently proposed Local Domain Boundary Element Method (LD-BEM) is presented for the solution of nonlinear time fractional Fisher-KPP problems. The implemented numerical method is used to examine various two-dimensional problems related to the Fisher-KPP equation using different definitions of the fractional derivative.
Authors:Orhan Gazi
Title: SNR Optimization for Common Emitter Amplifier
Abstract:
In this paper we investigate the effects of the thermal noise of the base resistance of common emitter amplifier (CEA) on the output SNR, and we show that a first order Butterworth filter at the output of the CEA significantly improves output SNR significantly and supress the performances of higher order Butterworth, Chebyshev I, II and elliptic filters. We propose a formula for the selection of cut-off frequency of analog filters for given orders to achieve significant SNR improvement at CEA output. Considering the filter complexity and output SNR improvement, we can conclude that the first order Butterworth filter outperforms Chebyshev I, II and elliptic filters.
Authors:Sebastian Barros Elgueta
Title: From Cell Towers to Satellites: A 2040 Blueprint for Urban-Grade Direct-to-Device Mobile Networks
Abstract:
In 2023, satellite and mobile networks crossed a historic threshold: standard smartphones, using unmodified 3GPP protocols, connected directly to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This first wave of direct-to-device (D2D) demonstrations validated the physical feasibility of satellite-based mobile access. However, these systems remain fallback-grade--rural-only, bandwidth-limited, and fully dependent on Earth-based mobile cores for identity, session, and policy control. This paper asks a more ambitious question: Can a complete mobile network, including radio access, core functions, traffic routing, and content delivery, operate entirely from orbit? And can it deliver sustained, urban-grade service in the world's densest cities? We present the first end-to-end system architecture for a fully orbital telco, integrating electronically steered phased arrays with 1000-beam capacity, space-based deployment of 5G core functions (UPF, AMF), and inter-satellite laser mesh backhaul. We analyze spectral efficiency, beam capacity, and link budgets under dense urban conditions, accounting for path loss, Doppler, and multipath. Simulations show that rooftop and line-of-sight users can sustain 64-QAM throughput, while street-level access is feasible with relay or assisted beam modes. The paper outlines the remaining constraints, power, thermal dissipation, compute radiation hardening, and regulatory models, and demonstrates that these are engineering bottlenecks, not physical limits. Finally, we propose a staged 15-year roadmap from today's fallback D2D systems to autonomous orbital overlays delivering 50-100 Mbps to handhelds in megacities, with zero reliance on terrestrial infrastructure.
Authors:Eldar Knar
Title: Apology of Green Digitalization in the Context of Information and Climate Feedback Theory
Abstract:
Amid accelerated digitalization, not only is the scale of data processing and storage increasing, but so too is the associated infrastructure load on the climate. Current climate models and environmental protocols almost entirely overlook the impact of information and communication technologies on the thermal and energy balance of the biosphere. This paper proposes the theory of information and climate feedback (ICF) as a new nonlinear model describing the loop of digitalization, energy consumption, the thermal footprint, the climatic response, and the vulnerability of digital infrastructure. The system is formalized via differential equations with delays and parameters of sensitivity, greenness, and phase stability. A multiscenario numerical analysis, phase reconstructions, and thermal cartography were conducted. Critical regimes, including digital overheating, fluctuational instability, and infrastructural collapse in the absence of adaptive measures, were identified. The paper concludes with the proposal of an international agreement titled the Green Digital Accord and a set of metrics for sustainable digitalization. This work integrates climatology, information technologies, and the political economy of sustainability.
Authors:Roy Elkayam
Title: Predictive Modeling of Effluent Temperature in SAT Systems Using Ambient Meteorological Data: Implications for Infiltration Management
Abstract:
Accurate prediction of effluent temperature in recharge basins is essential for optimizing the Soil Aquifer Treatment (SAT) process, as temperature directly influences water viscosity and infiltration rates. This study develops and evaluates predictive models for effluent temperature in the upper recharge layer of a Shafdan SAT system recharge basin using ambient meteorological data. Multiple linear regression (MLR), neural networks (NN), and random forests (RF) were tested for their predictive accuracy and interpretability. The MLR model, preferred for its operational simplicity and robust performance, achieved high predictive accuracy (R2 = 0.86-0.87) and was used to estimate effluent temperatures over a 10-year period. Results highlight pronounced seasonal temperature cycles and the importance of topsoil temperature in governing the thermal profile of the infiltrating effluent. The study provides practical equations for real-time monitoring and long-term planning of SAT operations.
Authors:Ali Peivandizadeh
Title: A Theoretical Framework for Virtual Power Plant Integration with Gigawatt-Scale AI Data Centers: Multi-Timescale Control and Stability Analysis
Abstract:
The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has created gigawatt-scale data centers that fundamentally challenge power system operation, exhibiting power fluctuations exceeding 500 MW within seconds and millisecond-scale variations of 50-75% of thermal design power. This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that reconceptualizes Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to accommodate these extreme dynamics through a four-layer hierarchical control architecture operating across timescales from 100 microseconds to 24 hours. We develop control mechanisms and stability criteria specifically tailored to converter-dominated systems with pulsing megawatt-scale loads. We prove that traditional VPP architectures, designed for aggregating distributed resources with response times of seconds to minutes, cannot maintain stability when confronted with AI data center dynamics exhibiting slew rates exceeding 1,000 MW/s at gigawatt scale. Our framework introduces: (1) a sub-millisecond control layer that interfaces with data center power electronics to actively dampen power oscillations; (2) new stability criteria incorporating protection system dynamics, demonstrating that critical clearing times reduce from 150 ms to 83 ms for gigawatt-scale pulsing loads; and (3) quantified flexibility characterization showing that workload deferability enables 30% peak reduction while maintaining AI service availability above 99.95%. This work establishes the mathematical foundations necessary for the stable integration of AI infrastructure that will constitute 50-70% of data center electricity consumption by 2030.
Authors:Shahbaz Hussain
Title: Green Economic Load Dispatch: A Review and Implementation
Abstract:
The economic dispatch of generators is a major concern in thermal power plants that governs the share of each generating unit with an objective of minimizing fuel cost by fulfilling load demand. This problem is not as simple as it looks because of system constraints that cannot be neglected practically. Moreover, increased awareness of clean technology imposes another important limit on the emission of pollutants obtained from burning of fossil fuels. Classical optimization methods lack the ability of solving such a complex and multi-objective problem. Hence, various modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques based on evolution and social behaviour of organisms are being used to solve such problems because they are easier to implement, give accurate results and take less computational time. In this work, a study is done on most of the contemporary basic AI techniques being used in literature for power systems in general and combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) in particular. The dispatch problem is implemented on IEEE 30-bus benchmarked system in MATLAB for different load demands considering all gases (COX, NOX and SOX) using particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) and their results are compared with each other.
Authors:Atahan Karagoz
Title: Energentic Intelligence: From Self-Sustaining Systems to Enduring Artificial Life
Abstract:
This paper introduces Energentic Intelligence, a class of autonomous systems defined not by task performance, but by their capacity to sustain themselves through internal energy regulation. Departing from conventional reward-driven paradigms, these agents treat survival-maintaining functional operation under fluctuating energetic and thermal conditions-as the central objective. We formalize this principle through an energy-based utility function and a viability-constrained survival horizon, and propose a modular architecture that integrates energy harvesting, thermal regulation, and adaptive computation into a closed-loop control system. A simulated environment demonstrates the emergence of stable, resource-aware behavior without external supervision. Together, these contributions provide a theoretical and architectural foundation for deploying autonomous agents in resource-volatile settings where persistence must be self-regulated and infrastructure cannot be assumed.
Authors:Panagiotis Kakosimos
Title: Reliable Thermal Monitoring of Electric Machines through Machine Learning
Abstract:
The electrification of powertrains is rising as the objective for a more viable future is intensified. To ensure continuous and reliable operation without undesirable malfunctions, it is essential to monitor the internal temperatures of machines and keep them within safe operating limits. Conventional modeling methods can be complex and usually require expert knowledge. With the amount of data collected these days, it is possible to use information models to assess thermal behaviors. This paper investigates artificial intelligence techniques for monitoring the cooling efficiency of induction machines. Experimental data was collected under specific operating conditions, and three machine-learning models have been developed. The optimal configuration for each approach was determined through rigorous hyperparameter searches, and the models were evaluated using a variety of metrics. The three solutions performed well in monitoring the condition of the machine even under transient operation, highlighting the potential of data-driven methods in improving the thermal management.
Authors:John J. Bird
Title: Graph Percolation as Decision Threshold for Risk Management in Cross-Country Thermal Soaring
Abstract:
Long range flight by fixed-wing aircraft without propulsion systems can be accomplished by "soaring" -- exploiting randomly located updrafts to gain altitude which is expended in gliding flight. As the location of updrafts is uncertain and cannot be determined except through in situ observation, aircraft exploiting this energy source are at risk of failing to find a subsequent updraft. Determining when an updraft must be exploited to continue flight is essential to managing risk and optimizing speed. Graph percolation offers a theoretical explanation for this risk, and a framework for evaluating it using information available to the operator of a soaring aircraft in flight. The utility of graph percolation as a risk measure is examined by analyzing flight logs from human soaring pilots. This analysis indicates that in sport soaring pilots rarely operate in a condition which does not satisfy graph percolation, identifies an apparent desired minimum node degree, and shows that pilots accept reduced climb rates in order to maintain percolation.
Authors:Tomáš Roubíček
Title: Time discretization in convected linearized thermo-visco-elastodynamics at large displacements
Abstract:
The fully-implicit time discretization (i.e. the backward Euler formula) is applied to compressible nonlinear dynamical models of thermo-viscoelastic solids in the Eulerian description, i.e. in the actual deforming configuration, formulated in terms of rates. The Kelvin-Voigt rheology or also, in the deviatoric part, the Jeffreys rheology (covering creep or plasticity) are considered, using the additive Green-Naghdi's decomposition of total strain into the elastic and the inelastic strains formulated in terms of (objective) rates exploiting the Zaremba-Jaumann time derivative. A linearized convective model at large displacements is considered, focusing on the case where the internal energy additively splits the (convex) mechanical and the thermal parts. The time-discrete suitably regularized scheme is devised. The numerical stability and, considering the multipolar 2nd-grade viscosity, also convergence towards weak solutions are proved, exploiting the convexity of the kinetic energy when written in terms of linear momentum instead of velocity and estimating the temperature gradient from the entropy-like inequality.
Authors:Hassan Irshad Bhatti
Title: On-chip calibration of Microscale-Thermocouples for Precise Temperature Measurement
Abstract:
Precise temperature measurement at micro/nanoscale is crucial across various domains including physical sciences, chemical processes, industrial production, medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, electronics, and biology. Micro/nanoscale thermal mapping requires precise techniques such as thermocouples, resistance-based devices, infrared thermography, optical interferometry, Raman thermometry, and Time domain-thermoreflectance (TDTR) method. Each method has its advantages and limitations, emphasizing the importance of selecting the appropriate technique. Among these methods, micro-thin film thermocouples (TFTCs) offer a compelling solution due to their direct contact-based temperature measurements, minimal surface preparation requirements, lower cost, and robustness against environmental factors. Thermocouples work on the well-established Seebeck effect, where a voltage is generated proportional to the temperature difference between two points. However, at micro/nanoscale, the Seebeck coefficients of thermocouples differ from those in bulk materials, requiring experimental calibration for precise measurements. To address this, we introduce an on-chip characterization platform with a differential temperature measurement setup on a borosilicate glass substrate. This platform utilizes a microheater as a localized heat source to elevate the temperature at the hot junction of the TFTC while maintaining the cold junction at ambient conditions. Numerical simulations are employed to engineer both the microheater and TFTC junction for precise temperature control. The functionality of this platform is validated by fabricating TFTCs using standard fabrication processes and measuring the TFTC response to determine the differential Seebeck coefficient of a Platinum-Chromium TFTC Junction. The calculated sensitivity of Pt/Cr TFTCs using this calibration method is 19.23 +- 0.405 μV/C.
Authors:Alexei V. Tkachenko
Title: Thermodynamic bounds on energy use in Deep Neural Networks
Abstract:
While Landauer's principle sets a fundamental energy limit for irreversible digital computation, we show that Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) implemented on analog physical substrates can operate under markedly different thermodynamic constraints. We distinguish between two classes of analog systems: dynamic and quasi-static. In dynamic systems, energy dissipation arises from neuron resets, with a lower bound governed by Landauer's principle. To analyse a quasi-static analog platform, we construct an explicit mapping of a generic feedforward DNN onto a physical system described by a model Hamiltonian. In this framework, inference can proceed reversibly, with no minimum free energy cost imposed by thermodynamics. We further analyze the training process in quasi-static analog networks and derive a fundamental lower bound on its energy cost, rooted in the interplay between thermal and statistical noise. Our results suggest that while analog implementations can outperform digital ones during inference, the thermodynamic cost of training scales similarly in both paradigms.
Authors:Fabien Casenave
Title: Learning large scale industrial physics simulations
Abstract:
In an industrial group like Safran, numerical simulations of physical phenomena are integral to most design processes. At Safran's corporate research center, we enhance these processes by developing fast and reliable surrogate models for various physics. We focus here on two technologies developed in recent years. The first is a physical reduced-order modeling method for non-linear structural mechanics and thermal analysis, used for calculating the lifespan of high-pressure turbine blades and performing heat analysis of high-pressure compressors. The second technology involves learning physics simulations with non-parameterized geometrical variability using classical machine learning tools, such as Gaussian process regression. Finally, we present our contributions to the open-source and open-data community.
Authors:Karthik Reddy Lyathakula
Title: Statistical Design of Thermal Protection System Using Physics-Informed Machine learning
Abstract:
Estimating the material properties of thermal protection films is crucial for their effective design and application, particularly in high-temperature environments. This work presents a novel approach to determine the properties using uncertainty quantification simulations. We quantify uncertainty in the material properties for effective insulation by proposing a Bayesian distribution for them. Sampling from this distribution is performed using Monte Carlo simulations, which require repeatedly solving the predictive thermal model. To address the computational inefficiency of conventional numerical simulations, we develop a parametric Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) to solve the heat transfer problem. The proposed PINN significantly reduces computational time while maintaining accuracy, as verified against traditional numerical solutions. Additionally, we used the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method to enable vectorized and parallel computations, further enhancing computational speedup. Our results demonstrate that integrating MCMC with PINN decreases computational time substantially compared to using standard numerical methods. Moreover, combining the SMC method with PINN yields multifold computational speedup, making this approach highly effective for the rapid and accurate estimation of material properties.
Authors:Qasim Khan
Title: An Efficient Approach to Fractional Analysis for Non-Linear Coupled Thermo-Elastic Systems
Abstract:
Nonlinear thermoelastic systems play a crucial role in understanding thermal conductivity, stresses, elasticity, and temperature interactions. This research focuses on finding solutions to these systems in their fractional forms, which is a significant aspect of the study. We consider various proposed models related to fractional thermoelasticity and derive results through sophisticated methodologies. Numerical simulations are conducted for both fractional and integer order thermoelastic coupled systems, with results presented in tables and graphs. The graphs indicate a close correspondence between the approximate and exact solutions. The solutions obtained demonstrate convergence for both fractional and integer order problems, ensuring accurate modeling. Furthermore, the tables confirm that greater accuracy can be achieved by increasing the number of terms in the series of solutions.
Authors:David J Poland
Title: Enhanced Quantile Regression with Spiking Neural Networks for Long-Term System Health Prognostics
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel predictive maintenance framework centered on Enhanced Quantile Regression Neural Networks EQRNNs, for anticipating system failures in industrial robotics. We address the challenge of early failure detection through a hybrid approach that combines advanced neural architectures. The system leverages dual computational stages: first implementing an EQRNN optimized for processing multi-sensor data streams including vibration, thermal, and power signatures, followed by an integrated Spiking Neural Network SNN, layer that enables microsecond-level response times. This architecture achieves notable accuracy rates of 92.3\% in component failure prediction with a 90-hour advance warning window. Field testing conducted on an industrial scale with 50 robotic systems demonstrates significant operational improvements, yielding a 94\% decrease in unexpected system failures and 76\% reduction in maintenance-related downtimes. The framework's effectiveness in processing complex, multi-modal sensor data while maintaining computational efficiency validates its applicability for Industry 4.0 manufacturing environments.
Authors:Dev Shah
Title: UbiTouch: Towards a Universal Touch Interface
Abstract:
Touch is one of the most intuitive ways for humans to interact with the world, and as we advance toward a ubiquitous computing environment where technology seamlessly integrates into daily life, natural interaction methods are essential. This paper introduces UbiTouch, a system leveraging thermal imaging to detect touch interactions on arbitrary surfaces. By employing a single thermal camera, UbiTouch differentiates between hovering and touch, detects multi-finger input, and completes trajectory tracking. Our approach emphasizes the use of lightweight, low-computation algorithms that maintain robust detection accuracy through innovative vision-based processing. UbiTouch aims to enable scalable, sustainable, and adaptable interaction systems for diverse applications, particularly with regards to on-human sensing.
Authors:Osama A. Marzouk
Title: Hydrogen Utilization as a Plasma Source for Magnetohydrodynamic Direct Power Extraction (MHD-DPE)
Abstract:
This study explores the suitability of hydrogen-based plasma in direct power extraction (DPE) as a non-conventional electricity generation method. We apply computational modeling and principles in physics and chemistry to estimate different thermal and electric properties of a water-vapor/nitrogen/cesium-vapor (H2O/N2/Cs) gas mixture with different levels of cesium (Cs) at a fixed temperature of 2300 K (2026.85 °C). This gas mixture and temperature are selected because they resemble the stoichiometric combustion of hydrogen with air, followed by the addition of the alkali metal element cesium to allow ionization, thus converting the gas mixture into electrically conducting plasma. We vary the cesium mole fraction in the gas mixture by two orders of magnitude, from a minute amount of 0.0625% (1/1600) to a major amount of 16% (0.16). We use these results to further estimate the theoretical upper limit of the electric power output from a unit volume of a high-speed magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) channel, with the plasma accelerated inside it to twice the local speed of sound (Mach number 2) while subject to an applied magnetic field of 5 T (5 teslas). We report that there is an optimum cesium mole fraction of 3%, at which the power output is maximized. Per 1 m3 of plasma volume, the estimated theoretical electric power generation at 1 atm (101.325 kPa) pressure of the hydrogen-combustion mixture is extraordinarily high at 360 MW/m3, and the plasma electric conductivity is 17.5 S/m. This estimated power generation even reaches an impressive level of 1.15 GW/m3 (11500 MW/m3) if the absolute pressure can be decreased to 0.0625 atm (6.333 kPa), at which the electric conductivity exceeds 55 S/m (more than 10 times the electric conductivity of seawater).
Authors:Ranran Yang
Title: Strategic Optimization and Demand Response for Thermal Load Management in Multi-Regional Integrated Energy Systems: A Stackelberg Game Approach
Abstract:
In the context of high fossil fuel consumption and inefficiency within China's energy systems, effective demand-side management is essential. This study examines the thermal characteristics of various building types across different functional areas, utilizing the concept of body coefficient to integrate their unique structural and energy use traits into a demand response framework supported by real-time pricing. We developed a Stackelberg game-based bi-level optimization model that captures the dynamic interplay of costs and benefits between integrated energy providers and users. This model is formulated into a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and linearized with the Big M method, subsequently solved using MATLAB and CPLEX. This approach enables distinctive management of heating loads in public and residential areas, optimizing energy efficiency while balancing the interests of both providers and users. Furthermore, the study explores how the proportion of different area types affects the potential for reducing heat loads, providing insights into the scalability and effectiveness of demand response strategies in integrated energy systems. This analysis not only highlights the economic benefits of such strategies but also their potential in reducing dependency on traditional energy sources, thus contributing to more sustainable energy system practices.
Authors:Ali Safa
Title: Rotational Odometry using Ultra Low Resolution Thermal Cameras
Abstract:
This letter provides what is, to the best of our knowledge, a first study on the applicability of ultra-low-resolution thermal cameras for providing rotational odometry measurements to navigational devices such as rovers and drones. Our use of an ultra-low-resolution thermal camera instead of other modalities such as an RGB camera is motivated by its robustness to lighting conditions, while being one order of magnitude less cost-expensive compared to higher-resolution thermal cameras. After setting up a custom data acquisition system and acquiring thermal camera data together with its associated rotational speed label, we train a small 4-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for regressing the rotational speed from the thermal data. Experiments and ablation studies are conducted for determining the impact of thermal camera resolution and the number of successive frames on the CNN estimation precision. Finally, our novel dataset for the study of low-resolution thermal odometry is openly released with the hope of benefiting future research.
Authors:Saurabh Dixit
Title: Investigations of effect of temperature and strain dependent material properties on thermoelastic damping -- A generalized 3-D finite element formulation
Abstract:
A comprehensive 3-D finite element formulation for the coupled thermoelastic system is proposed based on the Total Lagrangian framework to study the thermoelastic damping (TED) in small scale structures. The proposed formulation takes into account geometric nonlinearity because of large deformation and material nonlinearity where material parameters are functions of temperature and strain field. Using the proposed finite element formulation, the TED quality factor is obtained for 1-D rod undergoing longitudinal vibrations using the eigenvalue analysis. We first validate the accuracy of the finite element implementation with previously known theoretical and numerical results. Subsequently we demonstrate the utility of the proposed numerical framework to study the effect of geometric nonlinearity, temperature and strain dependent material nonlinearity on the thermoelastic damping.In addition, the effect of internal/ external heating and different thermal boundary conditions on TED is discussed
Authors:Jakub Rydzewski
Title: Spectral Map for Slow Collective Variables, Markovian Dynamics, and Transition State Ensembles
Abstract:
Understanding the behavior of complex molecular systems is a fundamental problem in physical chemistry. To describe the long-time dynamics of such systems, which is responsible for their most informative characteristics, we can identify a few slow collective variables (CVs) while treating the remaining fast variables as thermal noise. This enables us to simplify the dynamics and treat it as diffusion in a free-energy landscape spanned by slow CVs, effectively rendering the dynamics Markovian. Our recent statistical learning technique, spectral map [Rydzewski, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2023, 14, 22, 5216-5220], explores this strategy to learn slow CVs by maximizing a spectral gap of a transition matrix. In this work, we introduce several advancements into our framework, using a high-dimensional reversible folding process of a protein as an example. We implement an algorithm for coarse-graining Markov transition matrices to partition the reduced space of slow CVs kinetically and use it to define a transition state ensemble. We show that slow CVs learned by spectral map closely approach the Markovian limit for an overdamped diffusion. We demonstrate that coordinate-dependent diffusion coefficients only slightly affect the constructed free-energy landscapes. Finally, we present how spectral map can be used to quantify the importance of features and compare slow CVs with structural descriptors commonly used in protein folding. Overall, we demonstrate that a single slow CV learned by spectral map can be used as a physical reaction coordinate to capture essential characteristics of protein folding.
Authors:Akshansh Mishra
Title: Biomimetic Machine Learning approach for prediction of mechanical properties of Additive Friction Stir Deposited Aluminum alloys based walled structures
Abstract:
This study presents a novel approach to predicting mechanical properties of Additive Friction Stir Deposited (AFSD) aluminum alloy walled structures using biomimetic machine learning. The research combines numerical modeling of the AFSD process with genetic algorithm-optimized machine learning models to predict von Mises stress and logarithmic strain. Finite element analysis was employed to simulate the AFSD process for five aluminum alloys: AA2024, AA5083, AA5086, AA7075, and AA6061, capturing complex thermal and mechanical interactions. A dataset of 200 samples was generated from these simulations. Subsequently, Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF) regression models, optimized using genetic algorithms, were developed to predict key mechanical properties. The GA-RF model demonstrated superior performance in predicting both von Mises stress (R square = 0.9676) and logarithmic strain (R square = 0.7201). This innovative approach provides a powerful tool for understanding and optimizing the AFSD process across multiple aluminum alloys, offering insights into material behavior under various process parameters.
Authors:Stefan Metzger
Title: A convergent augmented SAV scheme for stochastic Cahn--Hilliard equations with dynamic boundary conditions describing contact line tension
Abstract:
We augment a thermodynamically consistent diffuse interface model for the description of line tension phenomena by multiplicative stochastic noise to capture the effects of thermal fluctuations and establish the existence of pathwise unique (stochastically) strong solutions. By starting from a fully discrete linear finite element scheme, we do not only prove the well-posedness of the model, but also provide a practicable and convergent scheme for its numerical treatment. Conceptually, our discrete scheme relies on a recently developed augmentation of the scalar auxiliary variable approach, which reduces the requirements on the time regularity of the solution. By showing that fully discrete solutions to this scheme satisfy an energy estimate, we obtain first uniform regularity results. Establishing Nikolskii estimates with respect to time, we are able to show convergence towards pathwise unique martingale solutions by applying Jakubowski's generalization of Skorokhod's theorem. Finally, a generalization of the Gyöngy--Krylov characterization of convergence in probability provides convergence towards strong solutions and thereby completes the proof.
Authors:Osama A. Marzouk
Title: Estimated electric conductivities of thermal plasma for air-fuel combustion and oxy-fuel combustion with potassium or cesium seeding
Abstract:
A complete model for estimating the electric conductivity of combustion product gases, with added cesium (Cs) or potassium (K) vapor for ionization, is presented. Neutral carrier gases serve as the bulk fluid that carries the seed material, as well as the electrons generated by the partial thermal (equilibrium) ionization of the seed alkali metal. The model accounts for electron-neutral scattering, as well as electron-ion and electron-electron scattering. The model is tested through comparison with published data. The model is aimed at being utilized for the plasma within magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) channels, where direct power extraction from passing electrically conducting plasma gas enables electric power generation. The thermal ionization model is then used to estimate the electric conductivity of seeded combustion gases under complete combustion of three selected fuels, namely: hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4), and carbon (C). For each of these three fuels, two options for the oxidizer were applied, namely: air (21 % molecular oxygen, 79 % molecular nitrogen by mole), and pure oxygen (oxy-combustion). Two types of seeds (with 1 % mole fraction, based on the composition before ionization) were also applied for each of the six combinations of (fuel-oxidizer), leading to a total of 12 different MHD plasma cases. For each of these cases, the electric conductivity was computed for a range of temperatures from 2000 K to 3000 K. The smallest estimated electric conductivity was 0.35 S/m for oxy-hydrogen combustion at 2000 K, with potassium seeding. The largest estimated electric conductivity was 180.30 S/m for oxy-carbon combustion at 3000 K, with cesium seeding. At 2000 K, replacing potassium with cesium causes a gain in the electric conductivity by a multiplicative gain factor of about 3.6 regardless of the fuel and oxidizer. This gain factor declines to between 1.77 and 2.07 at 3000 K.
Authors:brandon Curtis Colelough
Title: Enhanced Thermal Management in High-Temperature Applications: Design and Optimization of a Water-Cooled Forced Convection System in a Hollow Cuboid Vapour Chamber Using COMSOL and MATLAB
Abstract:
This report details the design and optimisation of a water-cooled forced convection heat dissipation system for use in high-temperature applications (ranges between 700 degrees - 1000 degrees K). A hollow cuboid vapour chamber model was investigated. The space within the hollow cuboid was used as the design space. COMSOL, a FEM software product was used to solve for the physical parameters of each geometry for the heat dissipation system design space. COMSOL in conjunction with MATLAB was used for the parametric and density-based topology optimisation of the geometric design in the design space. The goal of the optimization is the minimisation of a temperature gradient over the design space. This allows the heat to be evenly spread throughout the designed mesh which allows for more effective cooling. To reduce the computational time needed to solve and optimise each geometry in 3D, a 2D representation was created for the front and rear faces of the hollow cuboid setup. These 2D face designs were then extrapolated into 3D over the length of the hollow cube and COMSOL was used to find a solution for each model. This report also proposes a use case for this system wherein it would be used in conjunction with MGA and thermometric technology within coal-fired power stations for the extraction and storage of waste heat for later use.
Authors:Jinzi Mac Huang
Title: Covering convection with thermal blankets: fluid-structure interactions in thermal convection
Abstract:
The continental plates of Earth are known to drift over a geophysical timescale, and their interactions have lead to some of the most spectacular geoformations of our planet while also causing natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic activity. Understanding the dynamics of interacting continental plates is thus significant. In this work, we present a fluid mechanical investigation of the plate motion, interaction, and dynamics. Through numerical experiments, we examine the coupling between a convective fluid and plates floating on top of it. With physical modeling, we show the coupling is both mechanical and thermal, leading to the thermal blanket effect: the floating plate is not only transported by the fluid flow beneath, it also prevents the heat from leaving the fluid, leading to a convective flow that further affects the plate motion. By adding several plates to such a coupled fluid-structure interaction, we also investigate how floating plates interact with each other and show that, under proper conditions, small plates can converge into a supercontinent.
Authors:Jaime Mora-Paz
Title: High-order transient multidimensional simulation of a thermo-electro-chemo-mechanical model for Lithium-ion batteries
Abstract:
We build a transient multidimensional multiphysical model based on continuum theories, involving the coupled mechanical, thermal and electrochemical phenomena occurring simultaneously in the discharge or charge of lithium-ion batteries. The process delivers a system of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations. Besides initial and boundary conditions, we highlight the treatment of the electrode-electrolyte interface condition, which corresponds to a Butler-Volmer reaction kinetics equation. We present the derivation of the strong and weak forms of the model, as well as the discretization procedure in space and in time. The discretized model is computationally solved in two dimensions by means of a finite element method that employs $hp$ layered meshes, along with staggered second order semi-implicit time integration. The expected error estimate is of higher order than any other similar work, both in space and in time. A representative battery cell geometry, under distinct operating scenarios, is simulated. The numerical results show that the full model allows for important additional insights to be drawn than when caring only for the electrochemical coupling. Considering the multiphysics becomes more important as the applied current is increased, whether for discharge or for charge. Our full model provides battery design professionals with a valuable tool to optimize designs and advance the energy storage industry.
Authors:Savinay Nagendra
Title: Thermal Analysis for NVIDIA GTX480 Fermi GPU Architecture
Abstract:
In this project, we design a four-layer (Silicon|TIM|Silicon|TIM), 3D floor plan for NVIDIA GTX480 Fermi GPU architecture and compare heat dissipation and power trends for matrix multiplication and Needleman-Wunsch kernels. First, cuda kernels for the two algorithms are written. These kernels are compiled and executed with the GPGPU Simulator to extract power logs for varying tensor sizes. These power logs are converted to ptrace files with an automation script written in Python. The 3D floor plan, along with the generated ptrace files are given to HotSpot, which generates thermal heat maps to show heat dissipation for various components of the Fermi architecture. These heat dissipation trends for both the kernels are observed for multiple tensor sizes to draw qualitative conclusions. The behavioral and execution patterns of both kernels are also observed with these varying heat dissipation trends. With this project, we observe that an increase in tensor size results in an increase of heat dissipation in components of the Fermi Architecture. However, the temperature of the chip remains saturated after a particular tensor size and remains constant thereafter. Heat dissipation is non-uniform with smaller tensor sizes, and becomes more uniform after a certain tensor size. This means, that after a particular tensor size, more cores of the architecture get activated in the computations, thereby resulting in an almost constant temperature. We also observe that Needleman Wunsch uses more data movement between DRAM and caches, thereby showing higher heat dissipation patterns in DRAMs when compared to Matrix multiplication for the same tensor size. Our observations are in accordance with the theoretical concepts behind the working of the two algorithms, thereby making our results consistent.
Authors:Philippe-André Luneau
Title: Conservative Surrogate Models for Optimization with the Active Subspace Method
Abstract:
We are interested in building low-dimensional surrogate models to reduce optimization costs, while having theoretical guarantees that the optimum will satisfy the constraints of the full-size model, by making conservative approximations. The surrogate model is constructed using a Gaussian process regression (GPR). To ensure conservativeness, two new approaches are proposed: the first one using bootstrapping, and the second one using concentration inequalities. Those two techniques are based on a stochastic argument and thus will only enforce conservativeness up to a user-defined probability threshold. The method has applications in the context of optimization using the active subspace method for dimensionality reduction of the objective function and the constraints, addressing recorded issues about constraint violations. The resulting algorithms are tested on a toy optimization problem in thermal design.
Authors:Simon-Christian Klein
Title: Stabilizing DG Methods Using Dafermos' Entropy Rate Criterion: III -- Unstructured Grids
Abstract:
The approach presented in the second installment of this series is extended to multidimensional systems of conservation laws that are approximated via a Discontinuous Galerkin method on unstructured (triangular) grids. Special attention is paid to predicting the entropy dissipation from boundaries. The resulting schemes are free of tunable viscosity parameters and tested on the Euler equations. The trinity of testcases is the spreading of thermal energy from a point source, transsonic and supersonic flows around airfoils, and supersonic air inlets.
Authors:Neelakantan Padmanabhan
Title: A Transient Thermal Model for Power Electronics Systems
Abstract:
An equation based reduced order model applicable to generalized heat equation and thermal simulations of power electronics systems developed in commercial CFD tools, is presented in this work. The model considers the physics of heat transfer between multiple objects in different mediums and presents a set of equations that can be applied to a wide range of heat transfer scenarios including conduction, natural and forced convection problems. A few case studies including heat transfer in a power electronic system are simulated in Ansys Icepak and the temperatures from the simulations are compared with the temperatures predicted by the models. The models are observed to be highly accurate when compared with the simulations. The predictive model described in this work reduces large complex simulations down to a few parameters which tremendously improves the computation speed, uses very low physical disk space and enables fast evaluation of thermal performance of the system for any changes in the input parameters.
Authors:Hong Qin
Title: Advanced fuel fusion, phase space engineering, and structure-preserving geometric algorithms
Abstract:
Non-thermal advanced fuel fusion trades the requirement of a large amount of recirculating tritium in the system for that of large recirculating power. Phase space engineering technologies utilizing externally injected electromagnetic fields can be applied to meet the challenge of maintaining non-thermal particle distributions at a reasonable cost. The physical processes of the phase space engineering are studied from a theoretical and algorithmic perspective. It is emphasized that the operational space of phase space engineering is limited by the underpinning symplectic dynamics of charged particles. The phase space incompressibility according to the Liouville theorem is just one of many constraints, and Gromov's non-squeezing theorem determines the minimum footprints of the charged particles on every conjugate phase space plane. In this sense and level of sophistication, the mathematical abstraction of phase space engineering is symplectic topology. To simulate the processes of phase space engineering, such as the Maxwell demon and electromagnetic energy extraction, and to accurately calculate the minimum footprints of charged particles, recently developed structure-preserving geometric algorithms can be used. The family of algorithms conserves exactly, on discretized spacetime, symplecticity and thus incompressibility, non-squeezability, and symplectic capacities. The algorithms apply to the dynamics of charged particles under the influence of external electromagnetic fields as well as the charged particle-electromagnetic field system governed by the Vlasov-Maxwell equations.
Authors:Bardia Yousefi
Title: Distribution-based Low-rank Embedding
Abstract:
The early detection of breast abnormalities is a matter of critical significance. Notably, infrared thermography has emerged as a valuable tool in breast cancer screening and clinical breast examination (CBE). Measuring heterogeneous thermal patterns is the key to incorporating computational dynamic thermography, which can be achieved by matrix factorization techniques. These approaches focus on extracting the predominant thermal patterns from the entire thermal sequence. Yet, the task of singling out the dominant image that effectively represents the prevailing temporal changes remains a challenging pursuit within the field of computational thermography. In this context, we propose applying James-Stein for eigenvector (JSE) and Weibull embedding approaches, as two novel strategies in response to this challenge. The primary objective is to create a low-dimensional (LD) representation of the thermal data stream. This LD approximation serves as the foundation for extracting thermomics and training a classification model with optimized hyperparameters, for early breast cancer detection. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various embedding adjuncts to matrix factorization methods. The results of the proposed method indicate an enhancement in the projection of the predominant basis vector, yielding classification accuracy of 81.7% (+/-5.2%) using Weibull embedding, which outperformed other embedding approaches we proposed previously. In comparison analysis, Sparse PCT and Deep SemiNMF showed the highest accuracies having 80.9% and 78.6%, respectively. These findings suggest that JSE and Weibull embedding techniques substantially help preserve crucial thermal patterns as a biomarker leading to improved CBE and enabling the very early detection of breast cancer.
Authors:Ertugrul Basar
Title: Noise Modulation
Abstract:
Instead of treating the noise as a detrimental effect, can we use it as an information carrier? In this letter, we provide the conceptual and mathematical foundations of wireless communication utilizing noise and random signals in general. Mainly, the concept of noise modulation (NoiseMod) is introduced to cover information transmission by both thermal noise and externally generated noise signals. The performance of underlying NoiseMod schemes is evaluated under both additive white Gaussian and fading channels and alternative NoiseMod designs exploiting non-coherent detection and time diversity are proposed. Extensive numerical and computer simulation results are presented to validate our designs and theoretical derivations.
Authors:Ertugrul Basar
Title: Kirchhoff Meets Johnson: In Pursuit of Unconditionally Secure Communication
Abstract:
Noise: an enemy to be dealt with and a major factor limiting communication system performance. However, what if there is gold in that garbage? In conventional engineering, our focus is primarily on eliminating, suppressing, combating, or even ignoring noise and its detrimental impacts. Conversely, could we exploit it similarly to biology, which utilizes noise-alike carrier signals to convey information? In this context, the utilization of noise, or noise-alike signals in general, has been put forward as a means to realize unconditionally secure communication systems in the future. In this tutorial article, we begin by tracing the origins of thermal noise-based communication and highlighting one of its significant applications for ensuring unconditionally secure networks: the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) secure key exchange scheme. We then delve into the inherent challenges tied to secure communication and discuss the imperative need for physics-based key distribution schemes in pursuit of unconditional security. Concurrently, we provide a concise overview of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes and draw comparisons with their KLJN-based counterparts. Finally, extending beyond wired communication loops, we explore the transmission of noise signals over-the-air and evaluate their potential for stealth and secure wireless communication systems.
Authors:Laszlo B. Kish
Title: Crypto analysis of the key distribution scheme using noise-free resistances
Abstract:
Known key exchange schemes offering information-theoretic (unconditional) security are complex and costly to implement. Nonetheless, they remain the only known methods for achieving unconditional security in key exchange. Therefore, the explorations for simpler solutions for information-theoretic security are highly justified. Lin et al. [1] proposed an interesting hardware key distribution scheme that utilizes thermal-noise-free resistances and DC voltages. A crypto analysis of this system is presented. It is shown that, if Eve gains access to the initial shared secret at any time in the past or future, she can successfully crack all the generated keys in the past and future, even retroactively, using passively obtained and recorded voltages and currents. Therefore, the scheme is not a secure key exchanger, but it is rather a key expander with no more information entropy than the originally shared secret at the beginning. We also point out that the proposed defense methods against active attacks do not function when the original shared secret is compromised because then the communication cannot be efficiently authenticated. However, they do work when an unconditionally secure key exchanger is applied to enable the authenticated communication protocol.
Authors:James Baker
Title: The Heat is On: Thermal Facial Landmark Tracking
Abstract:
Facial landmark tracking for thermal images requires tracking certain important regions of subjects' faces, using images from thermal images, which omit lighting and shading, but show the temperatures of their subjects. The fluctuations of heat in particular places reflect physiological changes like bloodflow and perspiration, which can be used to remotely gauge things like anxiety and excitement. Past work in this domain has been limited to only a very limited set of architectures and techniques. This work goes further by trying a comprehensive suit of various models with different components, such as residual connections, channel and feature-wise attention, as well as the practice of ensembling components of the network to work in parallel. The best model integrated convolutional and residual layers followed by a channel-wise self-attention layer, requiring less than 100K parameters.
Authors:Md Azim Khan
Title: Visible to Thermal image Translation for improving visual task in low light conditions
Abstract:
Several visual tasks, such as pedestrian detection and image-to-image translation, are challenging to accomplish in low light using RGB images. Heat variation of objects in thermal images can be used to overcome this. In this work, an end-to-end framework, which consists of a generative network and a detector network, is proposed to translate RGB image into Thermal ones and compare generated thermal images with real data. We have collected images from two different locations using the Parrot Anafi Thermal drone. After that, we created a two-stream network, preprocessed, augmented, the image data, and trained the generator and discriminator models from scratch. The findings demonstrate that it is feasible to translate RGB training data to thermal data using GAN. As a result, thermal data can now be produced more quickly and affordably, which is useful for security and surveillance applications.
Authors:Luca Ambrogioni
Title: The statistical thermodynamics of generative diffusion models: Phase transitions, symmetry breaking and critical instability
Abstract:
Generative diffusion models have achieved spectacular performance in many areas of machine learning and generative modeling. While the fundamental ideas behind these models come from non-equilibrium physics, variational inference and stochastic calculus, in this paper we show that many aspects of these models can be understood using the tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using this reformulation, we show that generative diffusion models undergo second-order phase transitions corresponding to symmetry breaking phenomena. We show that these phase-transitions are always in a mean-field universality class, as they are the result of a self-consistency condition in the generative dynamics. We argue that the critical instability that arises from the phase transitions lies at the heart of their generative capabilities, which are characterized by a set of mean-field critical exponents. Finally, we show that the dynamic equation of the generative process can be interpreted as a stochastic adiabatic transformation that minimizes the free energy while keeping the system in thermal equilibrium.
Authors:Tiwei Wei
Title: High Efficiency Polymer based Direct Multi-jet Impingement Cooling Solution for High Power Devices
Abstract:
Liquid jet impingement cooling is an efficient cooling technique where the liquid coolant is directly ejected from nozzles on the chip backside resulting in a high cooling efficiency due to the absence of the TIM and the lateral temperature gradient. In literature, several Si-fabrication based impingement coolers with nozzle diameters of a few distributed returns or combination of micro-channels and impingement nozzles. The drawback of this Si processing of the cooler is the high fabrication cost. Other fabrication methods for nozzle diameters for ceramic and metal. Low cost fabrication methods, including injection molding and 3D printing have been introduced for much larger nozzle diameters (mm range) with larger cooler dimensions. These dimensions and processes are however not compatible with the chip packaging process flow. This PhD focuses on the modeling, design, fabrication and characterization of a micro-scale liquid impingement cooler using advanced, yet cost efficient, fabrication techniques. The main objectives are: (a) development of a modeling methodology to optimize the cooler geometry; (b) exploring low cost fabrication methods for the package level impingement jet cooler; (c) experimental thermal and hydraulic characterization and analysis of the fabricated coolers; (d) applying the direct impingement jet cooling solutions to different applications.
Authors:Saidi Olayinka Olalere
Title: Analysis of Vibration and Thermal of a Modeled Circuit Board of Automated External Defibrillator (AED) Medical Device
Abstract:
In this research, the AED was modeled with the Ansys 2020 workbench and calibrated based on static and dynamic loading to verify the static displacement with the first set of five frequencies obtained based on the un-prestressed conditions. With modification, using the prestressed analysis, the next set of frequencies obtained gives an improved result with 0.0003 percent error difference between each frequency. The modeled Circuit board was used to examine the vibration and dynamic analysis for the rigid board. Likewise, the thermal analysis was conducted on the modeled Circuit board with the heat source as the battery and the rate of dissipation of heat around the board and its effect on the circuit components.
Authors:Akshansh Mishra
Title: Supervised Machine Learning and Physics based Machine Learning approach for prediction of peak temperature distribution in Additive Friction Stir Deposition of Aluminium Alloy
Abstract:
Additive friction stir deposition (AFSD) is a novel solid-state additive manufacturing technique that circumvents issues of porosity, cracking, and properties anisotropy that plague traditional powder bed fusion and directed energy deposition approaches. However, correlations between process parameters, thermal profiles, and resulting microstructure in AFSD remain poorly understood. This hinders process optimization for properties. This work employs a framework combining supervised machine learning (SML) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to predict peak temperature distribution in AFSD from process parameters. Eight regression algorithms were implemented for SML modeling, while four PINNs leveraged governing equations for transport, wave propagation, heat transfer, and quantum mechanics. Across multiple statistical measures, ensemble techniques like gradient boosting proved superior for SML, with lowest MSE of 165.78. The integrated ML approach was also applied to classify deposition quality from process factors, with logistic regression delivering robust accuracy. By fusing data-driven learning and fundamental physics, this dual methodology provides comprehensive insights into tailoring microstructure through thermal management in AFSD. The work demonstrates the power of bridging statistical and physics-based modeling for elucidating AM process-property relationships.
Authors:Qian Xu
Title: Fusion of Infrared and Visible Images based on Spatial-Channel Attentional Mechanism
Abstract:
In the study, we present AMFusionNet, an innovative approach to infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF), harnessing the power of multiple kernel sizes and attention mechanisms. By assimilating thermal details from infrared images with texture features from visible sources, our method produces images enriched with comprehensive information. Distinct from prevailing deep learning methodologies, our model encompasses a fusion mechanism powered by multiple convolutional kernels, facilitating the robust capture of a wide feature spectrum. Notably, we incorporate parallel attention mechanisms to emphasize and retain pivotal target details in the resultant images. Moreover, the integration of the multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) loss function refines network training, optimizing the model for IVIF task. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of quality and quantity. The performance metrics on publicly available datasets also show significant improvement
Authors:James Cheung
Title: On the Approximation of Operator-Valued Riccati Equations in Hilbert Spaces
Abstract:
In this work, we present an abstract theory for the approximation of operator-valued Riccati equations posed on Hilbert spaces. It is demonstrated here that the error of the approximate solution to the operator-valued Riccati equation is bounded above by the approximation error of the governing semigroup, under the assumption of boundedness on the semigroup and compactness on the coefficient operators. One significant outcome of this result is the correct prediction of optimal convergence for finite element approximations of the operator-valued Riccati equations for when the governing semigroup involves parabolic, as well as hyperbolic processes. We derive the abstract theory for the time-dependent and time-independent operator-valued Riccati equations in the first part of this work. In the second part, we derive optimal error estimates for the finite element approximation of the functional gain associated with model weakly damped wave and thermal LQR control systems. These theoretical claims are then corroborated with computational evidence.
Authors:Maxim Polyakov
Title: Computational modeling to determine the physical characteristics of biological tissues for medical diagnosis
Abstract:
Timely diagnosis of breast cancer is an important task. This type of breast cancer is one of the most common diseases. The method of microwave radiothermometry is a promising direction for solving this problem. The method is based on measuring internal temperature of biological tissues in microwave frequency range. Computer simulations are used to improve the quality of diagnostics. Computer models make it possible to evaluate the effect of heat release in a malignant tumor on the thermal dynamics inside the mammary gland. It is necessary to build personalized models, taking into account the individual nature of the internal structure of the mammary gland in each patient. One of the problems is the determination of biophysical characteristics of biological components. Methods for determining these characteristics using computer simulations are proposed. The coefficient of thermal conductivity and specific heat of biological tissues are determined from known temperature distributions. Finding the physical parameters for a quasihomogeneous biological tissue is the first approximation for solving this problem. The least squares method is used as a solution method. The results obtained are in good agreement with previously known exact solutions, which indicates the applicability of this method for solving this class of problems. The efficiency of using parallel technologies in solving the inverse problem is investigated and the applicability of Open MP technology is demonstrated.
Authors:Alejandro D. Mousist
Title: Autonomous Payload Thermal Control
Abstract:
In small satellites there is less room for heat control equipment, scientific instruments, and electronic components. Furthermore, the near proximity of electronic components makes power dissipation difficult, with the risk of not being able to control the temperature appropriately, reducing component lifetime and mission performance. To address this challenge, taking advantage of the advent of increasing intelligence on board satellites, an autonomous thermal control tool that uses deep reinforcement learning is proposed for learning the thermal control policy onboard. The tool was evaluated in a real space edge processing computer that will be used in a demonstration payload hosted in the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment results show that the proposed framework is able to learn to control the payload processing power to maintain the temperature under operational ranges, complementing traditional thermal control systems.
Authors:Markus J. Buehler
Title: MeLM, a generative pretrained language modeling framework that solves forward and inverse mechanics problems
Abstract:
We report a flexible multi-modal mechanics language model, MeLM, applied to solve various nonlinear forward and inverse problems, that can deal with a set of instructions, numbers and microstructure data. The framework is applied to various examples including bio-inspired hierarchical honeycomb design, carbon nanotube mechanics, and protein unfolding. In spite of the flexible nature of the model-which allows us to easily incorporate diverse materials, scales, and mechanical features-it performs well across disparate forward and inverse tasks. Based on an autoregressive attention-model, MeLM effectively represents a large multi-particle system consisting of hundreds of millions of neurons, where the interaction potentials are discovered through graph-forming self-attention mechanisms that are then used to identify relationships from emergent structures, while taking advantage of synergies discovered in the training data. We show that the model can solve complex degenerate mechanics design problems and determine novel material architectures across a range of hierarchical levels, providing an avenue for materials discovery and analysis. Looking beyond the demonstrations reported in this paper, we discuss other opportunities in applied mechanics and general considerations about the use of large language models in modeling, design, and analysis that can span a broad spectrum of material properties from mechanical, thermal, optical, to electronic.
Authors:Juan Zuluaga-Gomez
Title: Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Machine Learning Techniques
Abstract:
Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases in women's life; thus, the early and accurate diagnosis plays a key role in reducing the risk of death in a patient's life. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social, and cultural issues. Latest advances in computational tools, infrared cameras and devices for bio-impedance quantification, have given a chance to emerge other reference techniques like thermography, infrared thermography, electrical impedance tomography and biomarkers found in blood tests, therefore being faster, reliable and cheaper than other methods. In the last two decades, the techniques mentioned above have been considered as parallel and extended approaches for breast cancer diagnosis, as well many authors concluded that false positives and false negatives rates are significantly reduced. Moreover, when a screening method works together with a computational technique, it generates a "computer-aided diagnosis" system. The present work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three techniques mentioned earlier, suggested machine learning techniques to breast cancer diagnosis, thus, describing the benefits of some methods in relation with other ones, such as, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, deep and convolutional neural networks. With this, we studied several hyperparameters optimization approaches with parzen tree optimizers to improve the performance of baseline models. An exploratory data analysis for each database and a benchmark of convolutional neural networks for the database of thermal images are presented. The benchmark process, reviews image classification techniques with convolutional neural networks, like, Resnet50, NasNetmobile, InceptionResnet and Xception.
Authors:Hossam O. Ahmed
Title: Coarse Grained FLS-based Processor with Prognostic Malfunction Feature for UAM Drones using FPGA
Abstract:
Many overall safety factors need to be considered in the next generation of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems and addressing these can become the anchor point for such technology to reach consent for worldwide application. On the other hand, fulfilling the safety requirements from an exponential increase of prolific UAM systems, is extremely complicated, and requires careful consideration of a variety of issues. One of the key goals of these Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) is the requirement to support the launch and control of hundreds of thousands of these advanced drones in the air simultaneously. Given the impracticalities of training the corresponding number of expert pilots, achieving this goal can only be realized through safe operation in either fullautonomous or semi-autonomous modes. According to many recent studies, the majority of flight accidents are concentrated on the last three stages of a flight trip, which include the Initial Approach, Final Approach, and Landing Phases of an airplane trip. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel decentralized processing system for enhancing the safety factors during the critical phases of Vertical and/or Short Take-Off and Landing (V/STOL) drones. This has been achieved by adopting several processing and control algorithms such as an Open Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) integrated with a Flight Rules Unit (FRU), FIR filters, and a novel Prognostic Malfunction processing unit. After applying several optimization techniques, this novel coarse-grained Autonomous Landing Guidance Assistance System (ALGAS3) processing architecture has been optimized to achieve a maximum computational processing performance of 70.82 Giga Operations per Second (GOPS). Also, the proposed ALGAS3 system shows an ultra-low dynamic thermal power dissipation (I/O and core) of 145.4 mW which is ideal for mobile avionic systems using INTEL 5CGXFC9D6F27C7 FPGA chip.
Authors:Svenja Yvonne Schött
Title: Thermal Feedback for Transparency in Human-Robot Interaction
Abstract:
Robots can support humans in tedious tasks, as well as provide social support. However, the decision-making and behavior of robots is not always clear to the human interaction partner. In this work, we discuss the opportunity of using thermal feedback as an additional modality to create transparent interactions. We then present scenarios where thermal feedback is incorporated into the interaction e.g. to unobtrusively communicate the behavior of the robot. We highlight the limitations and challenges of temperature-based feedback, which can be explored in future research.
Authors:Arash Mousaei
Title: Improving Energy Management of Hybrid Electric Vehicles by Considering Battery Electric-Thermal Model
Abstract:
This article proposes an offline Energy Management System (EMS) for Parallel Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). Dividing the torque between the Electric Motor (EM) and the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) requires a suitable EMS. Batteries are vital to HEVs and significantly impact overall vehicle cost and performance. High temperature and high battery State of Charge (SOC) are the main factors that accelerate battery aging. SOC is the most critical state variable in EMS and was usually considered the only dynamic variable in previous studies. For simplicity, the battery temperature was often assumed to be constant, and the effect of EMS on temperature change was neglected. In this paper, we first apply Dynamic Programming (DP) to a PHEV without considering battery temperature variations. Then, the battery model is improved by modeling the cooling system to take into account temperature variations and show how neglecting the thermal dynamics of the battery in EMS is impractical. Finally, by integrating battery temperature as a state variable in the optimization problem, a new EMS is proposed to control battery temperature and SOC variation. Simulation results of the tested vehicle show that the proposed method controls battery charge and temperature. The proposed EMS method prevents uncontrolled fluctuations in battery temperature and reduces its deterioration rate.
Authors:Serge Kernbach
Title: On mesoscale thermal dynamics of para- and ortho- isomers of water
Abstract:
This work describes experiments on thermal dynamics of pure H2O excited by hydrodynamic cavitation, which has been reported to facilitate the spin conversion of para- and ortho-isomers at water interfaces. Previous measurements by NMR and capillary methods of excited samples demonstrated changes of proton density by 12-15%, the surface tension up to 15.7%, which can be attributed to a non-equilibrium para-/ortho- ratio. Beside these changes, we also expect a variation of heat capacity. Experiments use a differential calorimetric approach with two devices: one with an active thermostat for diathermic measurements, another is fully passive for long-term measurements. Samples after excitation are degassed at -0.09MPa and thermally equalized in a water bath. Conducted attempts demonstrated changes in the heat capacity of experimental samples by 4.17%--5.72% measured in the transient dynamics within 60 min after excitation, which decreases to 2.08% in the steady-state dynamics 90-120 min after excitation. Additionally, we observed occurrence of thermal fluctuations at the level of 10^-3 C relative temperature on 20-40 min mesoscale dynamics and a long-term increase of such fluctuations in experimental samples. Obtained results are reproducible in both devices and are supported by previously published outcomes on four-photon scattering spectra in the range from -1.5 to 1.5 cm^-1 and electrochemical reactivity in CO2 and H2O2 pathways. Based on these results, we propose a hypothesis about ongoing spin conversion process on mesoscopic scales under weak influx of energy caused by thermal, EM or geomagnetic factors; this enables explaining electrochemical and thermal anomalies observed in long-term measurements.
Authors:Dean Wang
Title: Stability Analysis of Picard Iteration for Coupled Neutronics/Thermal-Hydraulics Simulations
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a formal Fourier analysis (FA) of Picard iteration for the coupled neutronics/thermal hydraulics (N/TH) problem and derive theoretical predictions for the spectral radius of Picard iteration for such coupled calculations as a function of the temperature difference between the fuel and coolant, temperature coefficients of cross sections (i.e., Doppler feedback), scattering ratio, and core height. An optimal underrelaxation factor is also derived based on the Fourier analysis.
Authors:Gabriel Stoltz
Title: Error estimates and variance reduction for nonequilibrium stochastic dynamics
Abstract:
Equilibrium properties in statistical physics are obtained by computing averages with respect to Boltzmann-Gibbs measures, sampled in practice using ergodic dynamics such as the Langevin dynamics. Some quantities however cannot be computed by simply sampling the Boltzmann-Gibbs measure, in particular transport coefficients, which relate the current of some physical quantity of interest to the forcing needed to induce it. For instance, a temperature difference induces an energy current, the proportionality factor between these two quantities being the thermal conductivity. From an abstract point of view, transport coefficients can also be considered as some form of sensitivity analysis with respect to an added forcing to the baseline dynamics. There are various numerical techniques to estimate transport coefficients, which all suffer from large errors, in particular large statistical errors. This contribution reviews the most popular methods, namely the Green-Kubo approach where the transport coefficient is expressed as some time-integrated correlation function, and the approach based on longtime averages of the stochastic dynamics perturbed by an external driving (so-called nonequilibrium molecular dynamics). In each case, the various sources of errors are made precise, in particular the bias related to the time discretization of the underlying continuous dynamics, and the variance of the associated Monte Carlo estimators. Some recent alternative techniques to estimate transport coefficients are also discussed.
Authors:Kalyana B. Nakshatrala
Title: Modeling thermal regulation in thin vascular systems: A mathematical analysis
Abstract:
Mimicking vascular systems in living beings, designers have realized microvascular composites to achieve thermal regulation and other functionalities, such as electromagnetic modulation, sensing, and healing. Such material systems avail circulating fluids through embedded vasculatures to accomplish the mentioned functionalities that benefit various aerospace, military, and civilian applications. Although heat transfer is a mature field, control of thermal characteristics in synthetic microvascular systems via circulating fluids is new, and a theoretical underpinning is lacking. What will benefit designers are predictive mathematical models and an in-depth qualitative understanding of vascular-based active cooling/heating. So, the central focus of this paper is to address the remarked knowledge gap. \emph{First}, we present a reduced-order model with broad applicability, allowing the inlet temperature to differ from the ambient temperature. \emph{Second}, we apply mathematical analysis tools to this reduced-order model and reveal many heat transfer properties of fluid-sequestered vascular systems. We derive point-wise properties (minimum, maximum, and comparison principles) and global properties (e.g., bounds on performance metrics such as the mean surface temperature and thermal efficiency). These newfound results deepen our understanding of active cooling/heating and propel the perfecting of thermal regulation systems.
Authors:Julien Moatti
Title: A structure preserving hybrid finite volume scheme for semi-conductor models with magnetic field on general meshes
Abstract:
We are interested in the discretisation of a drift-diffusion system in the framework of hybrid finite volume (HFV) methods on general polygonal/polyhedral meshes. The system under study is composed of two anisotropic and nonlinear convection-diffusion equations with nonsymmetric tensors, coupled with a Poisson equation and describes in particular semiconductor devices immersed in a magnetic field. We introduce a new scheme based on an entropy-dissipation relation and prove that the scheme admits solutions with values in admissible sets - especially, the computed densities remain positive. Moreover, we show that the discrete solutions to the scheme converge exponentially fast in time towards the associated discrete thermal equilibrium. Several numerical tests confirm our theoretical results. Up to our knowledge, this scheme is the first one able to discretise anisotropic drift-diffusion systems while preserving the bounds on the densities.
Authors:Dmitriy Y. Anistratov
Title: Nonlinear Iterative Projection Methods with Multigrid in Photon Frequency for Thermal Radiative Transfer
Abstract:
This paper presents nonlinear iterative methods for the fundamental thermal radiative transfer (TRT) model defined by the time-dependent multifrequency radiative transfer (RT) equation and the material energy balance (MEB) equation. The iterative methods are based on the nonlinear projection approach and use multiple grids in photon frequency. They are formulated by the high-order RT equation on a given grid in photon frequency and low-order moment equations on a hierarchy of frequency grids. The material temperature is evaluated in the subspace of the lowest dimensionality from the MEB equation coupled to the effective grey low-order equations. The algorithms apply various multigrid cycles to visit frequency grids. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate convergence of the multigrid iterative algorithms in TRT problems with large number of photon frequency groups.
Authors:Paul J. Atzberger
Title: Spatially Adaptive Stochastic Multigrid Methods for Fluid-Structure Systems with Thermal Fluctuations
Abstract:
In microscopic mechanical systems interactions between elastic structures are often mediated by the hydrodynamics of a solvent fluid. At microscopic scales the elastic structures are also subject to thermal fluctuations. Stochastic numerical methods are developed based on multigrid which allow for the efficient computation of both the hydrodynamic interactions in the presence of walls and the thermal fluctuations. The presented stochastic multigrid approach provides efficient real-space numerical methods for generating the required stochastic driving fields with long-range correlations consistent with statistical mechanics. The presented approach also allows for the use of spatially adaptive meshes in resolving the hydrodynamic interactions. Numerical results are presented which show the methods perform in practice with a computational complexity of O(N log(N)).