Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.

Optimality-Preserving Decomposition for Scalable QAOA in Natural-Language-Guided Multi-Drone Assignment

As multi-drone fleets scale, zone assignment rapidly evolves into an intractable NP-hard combinatorial problem that overwhelms classical exhaustive search. While quantum optimization promises to shatter these classical bottlenecks, mapping complex spatial tasks from human intent to restricted quantum hardware remains a severe challenge. To bridge this gap, we present an end-to-end framework integrating a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) front-end with a highly scalable, domain-specific quantum-classical backend. The front-end utilizes Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to translate free-form natural language instructions into structurally robust Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) constraints without false negatives. To overcome the strict qubit limits of near-term quantum devices, our framework features a novel constraint-preserving graph partitioner and a compressed separator-based dynamic programming (DP) merge. By structurally encoding constraints via W-state initialization and XY-mixers in Conditional Value-at-Risk Quantum Approximate Optimization (CVaR-QAOA), the pipeline stays highly compact. Empirical results demonstrate that this architecture circumvents classical scaling walls, recovering the global optimum on 100% of idealized oracle cases and 96.3% under real QAOA sampling, enabling natural-language-guided task allocation at previously intractable scales.

LAEI: Layered Autonomous Edge Intelligence Framework for Robust UAV Swarm Operations

Autonomous UAV swarms require scalable coordination mechanisms that maintain mission performance under limited communication, environmental uncertainty, and component failures. Centralized approaches provide global coordination but suffer from communication bottlenecks and single-node vulnerabilities, whereas fully decentralized methods often lack mission-level consistency. This paper presents Layered Autonomous Edge Intelligence (LAEI), a UAV-swarm framework that combines onboard learned policies with lightweight mission-level supervision. Each UAV performs local perception, obstacle avoidance, and action selection onboard, while the supervisory layer provides adaptive goal reassignment, fault-aware recovery, and context-dependent policy guidance without directly controlling low-level actions. LAEI further incorporates recovery strategies, including dynamic reassociation, backup supervisory support, and fallback local autonomy, to maintain mission continuity under representative failure scenarios. We evaluate LAEI in simulated UAV-swarm scenarios using mission completion time, collision rate, and coverage efficiency. The results show that LAEI reduces mission completion time and improves operational efficiency while maintaining collision-aware distributed UAV-level decision-making.

Beyond Learning: A Training-Free Alternative to Model Adaptation

Despite the continuous research and evolution of language models, they sometimes underperform previous versions. Existing approaches to overcome these challenges are resource-intensive, highlighting the need for alternatives that enable immediate action. We assume that each language model has a local module inside that is suitable for a specific function. First, this work identifies a set of modules showing consistent and local activation changes under an inference workload through activation-based analysis. Subsequently, we transplant an internal module that is properly activated for a specific task into the target model, leading to immediate and measurable functional changes without additional training or fine-tuning. To experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the transplant technique, we quantify the relationship between transplant strength and performance improvement under different conditions for two language models. In the cross-generation setting, we find that transplanting activation-selected modules can substantially improve the underperforming model, reaching up to twice the target baseline and achieving gap-based recovery above 100%. Moreover, in transplant experiments between a base model and its instruction-tuned counterpart, transplantation improves the underperforming model toward the stronger baseline, yielding up to about 2.33 times the target baseline with gap-based recovery reaching up to 100% in the best case. These results show that meaningful capacity transfer can be realized through the implantation of highly localized modules implied by language models. Overall, this work provides empirical evidence for task-localized modularity in language models and presents a new research area: model transplantation.

Contrastive Domain Generalization for Cross-Instrument Molecular Identification in Mass Spectrometry

Identifying molecules from mass spectrometry (MS) data remains a fundamental challenge due to the semantic gap between physical spectral peaks and underlying chemical structures. Existing deep learning approaches often treat spectral matching as a closed-set recognition task, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen molecular scaffolds. To overcome this limitation, we propose a cross-modal alignment framework that directly maps mass spectra into the chemically meaningful molecular structure embedding space of a pretrained chemical language model. On a strict scaffold-disjoint benchmark, our model achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 42.2% in fixed 256-way zero-shot retrieval and demonstrates strong generalization under a global retrieval setting. Moreover, the learned embedding space demonstrates strong chemical coherence, reaching 95.4% accuracy in 5-way 5-shot molecular re-identification. These results suggest that explicitly integrating physical spectral resolution with molecular structure embedding is key to solving the generalization bottleneck in molecular identification from MS data.

Conditional Generative Framework with Peak-Aware Attention for Robust Chemical Detection under Interferences

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is a widely used analytical method for chemical substance detection, but measurement reliability tends to deteriorate in the presence of interfering substances. In particular, interfering substances cause nonspecific peaks, residence time shifts, and increased background noise, resulting in reduced sensitivity and false alarms. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose an artificial intelligence discrimination framework based on a peak-aware conditional generative model to improve the reliability of GC-MS measurements under interference conditions. The framework is learned with a novel peak-aware mechanism that highlights the characteristic peaks of GC-MS data, allowing it to generate important spectral features more faithfully. In addition, chemical and solvent information is encoded in a latent vector embedded with it, allowing a conditional generative adversarial neural network (CGAN) to generate a synthetic GC-MS signal consistent with the experimental conditions. This generates an experimental dataset that assumes indirect substance situations in chemical substance data, where acquisition is limited without conducting real experiments. These data are used for the learning of AI-based GC-MS discrimination models to help in accurate chemical substance discrimination. We conduct various quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the generated simulated data to verify the validity of the proposed framework. We also verify how the generative model improves the performance of the AI discrimination framework. Representatively, the proposed method is shown to consistently achieve cosine similarity and Pearson correlation coefficient values above 0.9 while preserving peak number diversity and reducing false alarms in the discrimination model.

From Numbers to Prompts: A Cognitive Symbolic Transition Mechanism for Lightweight Time-Series Forecasting

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in time series prediction tasks, but their substantial computational and memory requirements limit deployment on lightweight platforms. In this paper, we propose the Symbolic Transition Mechanism (STM) a novel framework that bridges numeric time series data and language models through symbolic abstraction and prompt engineering. STM transforms continuous time series values into symbol tokens with quantization techniques based on human cognitive structures, and captures temporal dynamics through structured transformations of symbols, enabling fast engineering based predictions in which language models focus on critical parts of time series data. STM is a general purpose mechanisms that ensure the integrity of backbone language models, but they significantly improve their efficiency by inferring the dynamic and structured patterns inherent in time series data. We evaluated STM on various time series datasets, paired with four small language models (SLM) with limited computational environments. For all models, STM achieves error reductions of up to 69% in MAE and 90% in MSE compared to the default backbone SLM without STM. These results demonstrate the potential of STM as an efficient, adaptable layer for symbol-driven time series prediction using foundation models. The accuracy improvements were made at negligible resource costs, with maximum GPU memory of the base model increasing by approximately 0.06% and latency overhead increasing by only 0.64%.