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Francesco Carbone

Publications and source records attributed to Francesco Carbone.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Exploring 2D turbulent properties in anisotropic and disordered Fourier space: Insights into inverse cascades and universal superdiffusion from randomly sampled triadic interaction

Two-dimensional turbulent properties are investigated within a ``low-density'' Galerkin-truncated system, with a focus on both Eulerian and Lagrangian characteristics. In particular, an ordered pseudo-logarithmic and a disordered distribution of {active (i.e. resonant)} triads has been sampled in Fourier space, allowing for a tunable degree of anisotropy and ``triadic density'', enabling investigation into their effects on the inverse energy cascade and particle pairs diffusion. Despite the non-uniform and anisotropic mesh in the Fourier space, this reduced model successfully captures 2D turbulence scaling laws and maintains integral energy cascade properties. It consistently reveals the classical double-cascade: a $k^{-5/3}$ inverse cascade at large scales and a $k^{-3}$ direct cascade at small scales, observed across all configurations. Furthermore, while anisotropy, controlled via angular sampling, significantly impacts the vorticity field organization and the efficiency of the inverse energy flux, the system's diffusive properties exhibit a Richardson superdiffusive scaling, $\ell^2(t)\sim t^3$, for particle pair separation. The prescribed spectral anisotropy affects the Lagrangian eddy diffusivity, enhancing diffusion along one direction for short timescales. Conversely, for longer times, particles become uncorrelated, and the separation distance degenerates into the classical Brownian scaling, $\ell^2(t)\sim t$. The observed $t^3$ pair-dispersion indicates that the retained spectral interactions sustain super-ballistic separation, while anisotropy mainly affects the dispersion amplitude without modifying the scaling.

physics.flu-dyn

Cybernaut: Towards Reliable Web Automation

The emergence of AI-driven web automation through Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities for optimizing digital workflows. However, deploying such systems within industry's real-world environments presents four core challenges: (1) ensuring consistent execution, (2) accurately identifying critical HTML elements, (3) meeting human-like accuracy in order to automate operations at scale and (4) the lack of comprehensive benchmarking data on internal web applications. Existing solutions are primarily tailored for well-designed, consumer-facing websites (e.g., Amazon.com, Apple.com) and fall short in addressing the complexity of poorly-designed internal web interfaces. To address these limitations, we present Cybernaut, a novel framework to ensure high execution consistency in web automation agents designed for robust enterprise use. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) generator that converts user demonstrations into reliable automation instructions for linear browsing tasks, (2) a high-precision HTML DOM element recognition system tailored for the challenge of complex web interfaces, and (3) a quantitative metric to assess execution consistency. The empirical evaluation on our internal benchmark demonstrates that using our framework enables a 23.2% improvement (from 72% to 88.68%) in task execution success rate over the browser_use. Cybernaut identifies consistent execution patterns with 84.7% accuracy, enabling reliable confidence assessment and adaptive guidance during task execution in real-world systems. These results highlight Cybernaut's effectiveness in enterprise-scale web automation and lay a foundation for future advancements in web automation.

cs.SE

SOP-Bench: Complex Industrial SOPs for Evaluating LLM Agents

LLM-based agents struggle to execute complex, multi-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are fundamental to industrial automation. Existing benchmarks fail to capture the procedural complexity and tool orchestration demands of real-world workflows. We introduce SOP-Bench, a benchmark of 2,000+ tasks from human expert-authored SOPs across 12 business domains (healthcare, logistics, finance, content moderation, etc.). Using a human-AI collaborative framework, experts crafted authentic SOPs while AI generated artifacts (tools, APIs, datasets), all human-validated, yielding realistic tasks with executable interfaces and ground-truth outputs. SOP-Bench serves as a research enabler for systematically investigating agent architectures, model capabilities, and deployment considerations across diverse procedural tasks. We demonstrate its utility through illustrative experiments with a subset of frontier models across Function-Calling (FC) and ReAct agents, revealing critical insights. For example, (1) newer models do not guarantee better performance - Claude 4 family outperforms Claude 4.5 family on ReAct tasks (Claude 4 Opus: 72.4% vs. Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 63.3% task success rate), demonstrating that production upgrades require validation; (2) no single model-agent combination dominates: best performances range from 57% to 100% depending on domain. These examples illustrate how SOP-Bench enables isolating and studying specific dimensions of agent performance without costly production experiments. Our goal is not to rank model capabilities or build optimal agents, but to provide a rigorous evaluation framework that enables the researchers and practitioners to systematically investigate agent design choices, model selection, and deployment strategies. We release the benchmark at https://github.com/amazon-science/sop-bench.

cs.AI

Route to chaos and resonant triads interaction in a truncated Rotating Nonlinear shallow-water model

The route to chaos and phase dynamics in a rotating shallow-water model were rigorously examined using a five-mode Galerkin truncated system with complex variables. This system is valuable for investigating how large/meso-scales destabilize and evolve into chaos. Two distinct transitions into chaotic behaviour were identified as energy levels increased. The initial transition occurs through bifurcations following the Feigenbaum sequence. The subsequent transition, at higher energy levels, shows a shift from quasi-periodic states to chaotic regimes. The first chaotic state is mainly due to inertial forces governing nonlinear interactions. The second chaotic state arises from the increased significance of free surface elevation in the dynamics. A novel reformulation using phase and amplitude representations for each truncated variable revealed that phase components exhibit a temporal piece-wise locking behaviour, maintaining a constant value for a prolonged interval before an abrupt transition of $\pm\pi$, while amplitudes remain chaotic. It was observed that phase stability duration decreases with increased energy, leading to chaos in phase components at high energy levels. This is attributed to the nonlinear term in the equations, where phase components are introduced through linear combinations of triads with different modes. When locking durations vary across modes, the dynamics result in a stochastic interplay of multiple $\pi$ phase shifts, creating a stochastic dynamic within the coupled phase triads, observable even at minimal energy injections.

nlin.CD

Election Manipulation in Social Networks with Single-Peaked Agents

Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue for the robustness of our democracy. Analyzing and understanding how such manipulations may occur is crucial to the design of effective countermeasures to these practices. Many studies have observed that, in general, to design an optimal manipulation is usually a computationally hard task. Nevertheless, literature on bribery in voting and election manipulation has frequently observed that most hardness results melt down when one focuses on the setting of (nearly) single-peaked agents, i.e., when each voter has a preferred candidate (usually, the one closer to her own belief) and preferences of remaining candidates are inversely proportional to the distance between the candidate position and the voter's belief. Unfortunately, no such analysis has been done for election manipulations run in social networks. In this work, we try to close this gap: specifically, we consider a setting for election manipulation that naturally raises (nearly) single-peaked preferences, and we evaluate the complexity of election manipulation problem in this setting: while most of the hardness and approximation results still hold, we will show that single-peaked preferences allow to design simple, efficient and effective heuristics for election manipulation.

cs.GT

Does Turbulence along the Coronal Current Sheet Drive Ion Cyclotron Waves?

Evidence for the presence of ion cyclotron waves, driven by turbulence, at the boundaries of the current sheet is reported in this paper. By exploiting the full potential of the joint observations performed by Parker Solar Probe and the Metis coronagraph on board Solar Orbiter, local measurements of the solar wind can be linked with the large-scale structures of the solar corona. The results suggest that the dynamics of the current sheet layers generates turbulence, which in turn creates a sufficiently strong temperature anisotropy to make the solar-wind plasma unstable to anisotropy-driven instabilities such as the Alfvén ion-cyclotron, mirror-mode, and firehose instabilities. The study of the polarization state of high-frequency magnetic fluctuations reveals that ion cyclotron waves are indeed present along the current sheet, thus linking the magnetic topology of the remotely imaged coronal source regions with the wave bursts observed in situ. The present results may allow improvement of state-of-the-art models based on the ion cyclotron mechanism, providing new insights into the processes involved in coronal heating.

astro-ph.SR

Observation of Magnetic Switchback in the Solar Corona

Switchbacks are sudden, large radial deflections of the solar wind magnetic field, widely revealed in interplanetary space by the Parker Solar Probe. The switchbacks' formation mechanism and sources are still unresolved, although candidate mechanisms include Alfvénic turbulence, shear-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, interchange reconnection, and geometrical effects related to the Parker spiral. This Letter presents observations from the Metis coronagraph onboard Solar Orbiter of a single large propagating S-shaped vortex, interpreted as first evidence of a switchback in the solar corona. It originated above an active region with the related loop system bounded by open-field regions to the East and West. Observations, modeling, and theory provide strong arguments in favor of the interchange reconnection origin of switchbacks. Metis measurements suggest that the initiation of the switchback may also be an indicator of the origin of slow solar wind.

astro-ph.SR

Extreme wave runup on a vertical cliff

Wave impact and run-up onto vertical obstacles are among the most important phenomena which must be taken into account in the design of coastal structures. From linear wave theory, we know that the wave amplitude on a vertical wall is twice the incident wave amplitude with weakly nonlinear theories bringing small corrections to this result. In this present study, however, we show that certain simple wave groups may produce much higher run-ups than previously predicted, with particular incident wave frequencies resulting in run up heights exceeding the initial wave amplitude by a factor of 5, suggesting that the notion of the design wave used in coastal structure design may need to be revisited. The results presented in this study can be considered as a note of caution for practitioners, on one side, and as a challenging novel material for theoreticians who work in the field of extreme wave - coastal structure interaction.

physics.class-ph

Arbitrary-order Hilbert spectral analysis and intermittency in solar wind density fluctuations

The properties of inertial and kinetic range solar wind turbulence have been investigated with the arbitrary-order Hilbert spectral analysis method, applied to high-resolution density measurements. Due to the small sample size, and to the presence of strong non-stationary behavior and large-scale structures, the classical structure function analysis fails to detect power law behavior in the inertial range, and may underestimate the scaling exponents. However, the Hilbert spectral method provides an optimal estimation of the scaling exponents, which have been found to be close to those for velocity fluctuations in fully developed hydrodynamic turbulence. At smaller scales, below the proton gyroscale, the system loses its intermittent multiscaling properties, and converges to a monofractal process. The resulting scaling exponents, obtained at small scales, are in good agreement with those of classical fractional Brownian motion, indicating a long-term memory in the process, and the absence of correlations around the spectral break scale. These results provide important constraints on models of kinetic range turbulence in the solar wind.

physics.space-ph

On the statistical properties of turbulent energy transfer rate in the inner Heliosphere

The transfer of energy from large to small scales in solar wind turbulence is an important ingredient of the longstanding question about the mechanism of the interplanetary plasma heating. Previous studies have shown that magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is statistically compatible with the observed solar wind heating as it expands in the heliosphere. However, in order to understand which processes contribute to the plasma heating, it is necessary to have a local description of the energy flux across scales. To this aim, it is customary to use indicators such as the magnetic field partial variance of increments (PVI), which is associated with the local, relative, scale-dependent magnetic energy. A more complete evaluation of the energy transfer should also include other terms, related to velocity and cross-helicity. This is achieved here by introducing a proxy for the local, scale dependent turbulent energy transfer rate epsilon_Dt(t), based on the third-order moment scaling law for MHD turbulence. Data from Helios 2 are used to determine the statistical properties of such a proxy in comparison with the magnetic and velocity fields PVI, and the correlation with local solar wind heating is computed. PVI and epsilon_Dt(t) are generally well correlated, however epsilon_Dt(t) is a very sensitive proxy that can exhibit large amplitude values, both positive and negative, even for low amplitude peaks in the PVI. Furthermore, epsilon_Dt(t) is very well correlated with local increases of temperature when large amplitude bursts of energy transfer are localized, thus suggesting an important role played by this proxy in the study of plasma energy dissipation.

physics.space-ph

Macroscopic dynamics of incoherent soliton ensembles: soliton-gas kinetics and direct numerical modeling

We undertake a detailed comparison of the results of direct numerical simulations of the integrable soliton gas dynamics with the analytical predictions inferred from the exact solutions of the relevant kinetic equation for solitons. We use the KdV soliton gas as a simplest analytically accessible model yielding major insight into the general properties of soliton gases in integrable systems. Two model problems are considered: (i) the propagation of a `trial' soliton through a one-component `cold' soliton gas consisting of randomly distributed solitons of approximately the same amplitude; and (ii) collision of two cold soliton gases of different amplitudes (soliton gas shock tube problem) leading to the formation of an incoherend dispersive shock wave. In both cases excellent agreement is observed between the analytical predictions of the soliton gas kinetics and the direct numerical simulations. Our results confirm relevance of the kinetic equation for solitons as a quantitatively accurate model for macroscopic non-equilibrium dynamics of incoherent soliton ensembles.

nlin.PS