Spatiotemporal Wildfire Prediction and Reinforcement Learning for Helitack Suppression

Wildfires are growing in frequency and intensity, devastating ecosystems and communities while causing billions of dollars in suppression costs and economic damage annually in the U.S. Traditional wildfire management is mostly reactive, addressing fires only after they are detected. We introduce \textit{FireCastRL}, a proactive artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines wildfire forecasting with intelligent suppression strategies. Our framework first uses a deep spatiotemporal model to predict wildfire ignition. For high-risk predictions, we deploy a pre-trained reinforcement learning (RL) agent to execute real-time suppression tactics with helitack units inside a physics-informed 3D simulation. The framework generates a threat assessment report to help emergency responders optimize resource allocation and planning. In addition, we are publicly releasing a large-scale, spatiotemporal dataset containing $\mathbf{9.5}$ million samples of environmental variables for wildfire prediction. Our work demonstrates how deep learning and RL can be combined to support both forecasting and tactical wildfire response. More details can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/firecastrl.

Attention-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning and Clustering for Interpretable Sepsis Treatment

Sepsis remains one of the leading causes of mortality in intensive care units, where timely and accurate treatment decisions can significantly impact patient outcomes. In this work, we propose an interpretable decision support framework. Our system integrates four core components: (1) a clustering-based stratification module that categorizes patients into low, intermediate, and high-risk groups upon ICU admission, using clustering with statistical validation; (2) a synthetic data augmentation pipeline leveraging variational autoencoders (VAE) and diffusion models to enrich underrepresented trajectories such as fluid or vasopressor administration; (3) an offline reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained using Advantage Weighted Regression (AWR) with a lightweight attention encoder and supported by an ensemble models for conservative, safety-aware treatment recommendations; and (4) a rationale generation module powered by a multi-modal large language model (LLM), which produces natural-language justifications grounded in clinical context and retrieved expert knowledge. Evaluated on the MIMIC-III and eICU datasets, our approach achieves high treatment accuracy while providing clinicians with interpretable and robust policy recommendations.

Rig-Aware 3D Reconstruction of Vehicle Undercarriages using Gaussian Splatting

Inspecting the undercarriage of used vehicles is a labor-intensive task that requires inspectors to crouch or crawl underneath each vehicle to thoroughly examine it. Additionally, online buyers rarely see undercarriage photos. We present an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes a three-camera rig to capture videos of the undercarriage as the vehicle drives over it, and produces an interactive 3D model of the undercarriage. The 3D model enables inspectors and customers to rotate, zoom, and slice through the undercarriage, allowing them to detect rust, leaks, or impact damage in seconds, thereby improving both workplace safety and buyer confidence. Our primary contribution is a rig-aware Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline specifically designed to overcome the challenges of wide-angle lens distortion and low-parallax scenes. Our method overcomes the challenges of wide-angle lens distortion and low-parallax scenes by integrating precise camera calibration, synchronized video streams, and strong geometric priors from the camera rig. We use a constrained matching strategy with learned components, the DISK feature extractor, and the attention-based LightGlue matcher to generate high-quality sparse point clouds that are often unattainable with standard SfM pipelines. These point clouds seed the Gaussian splatting process to generate photorealistic undercarriage models that render in real-time. Our experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our design choices are essential to achieve state-of-the-art quality.