Overview

Digital twins are computational counterparts of physical assets, people, or broader systems, updated with observations to represent their changing state and test possible actions. Approaches range from physics-based simulation and data assimilation to machine-learning surrogates, hybrid models, generative agents, and reinforcement learning for control. Applications span manufacturing, infrastructure, transportation, healthcare, energy, and social systems, where twins can support forecasting, maintenance, safety testing, and personalized decisions. A central challenge is ensuring that a twin remains calibrated and trustworthy as conditions change, while balancing fidelity, uncertainty, computation, privacy, and validation against real-world outcomes.

Latest papers

255 papers36 papers in the last four weeks, up 16% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Mar 28, 2026

Autonomous Agent-Orchestrated Digital Twins (AADT): Leveraging the OpenClaw Framework for State Synchronization in Rare Genetic Disorders

Background: Medical Digital Twins (MDTs) are computational representations of individual patients that integrate clinical, genomic, and physiological data to support diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome prediction. However, most MDTs remain static or passively updated, creating a critical synchronization gap, especially in rare genetic disorders where phenotypes, genomic interpretations, and care guidelines evolve over time. Methods: We propose an agent-orchestrated digital twin framework using OpenClaw's proactive "heartbeat" mechanism and modular Agent Skills. This Autonomous Agent-orchestrated Digital Twin (AADT) system continuously monitors local and external data streams (e.g., patient-reported phenotypes and updates in variant classification databases) and executes automated workflows for data ingestion, normalization, state updates, and trigger-based analysis. Results: A prototype implementation demonstrates that agent orchestration can continuously synchronize MDT states with both longitudinal phenotype updates and evolving genomic knowledge. In rare disease settings, this enables earlier diagnosis and more accurate modeling of disease progression. We present two case studies, including variant reinterpretation and longitudinal phenotype tracking, highlighting how AADTs support timely, auditable updates for both research and clinical care. Conclusion: The AADT framework addresses the key bottleneck of real-time synchronization in MDTs, enabling scalable and continuously updated patient models. We also discuss data security considerations and mitigation strategies through human-in-the-loop system design.
Mar 27, 2026

GLU: Global-Local-Uncertainty Fusion for Scalable Spatiotemporal Reconstruction and Forecasting

Digital twins of complex physical systems are expected to infer unobserved states from sparse measurements and predict their evolution in time, yet these two functions are typically treated as separate tasks. Here we present GLU, a Global-Local-Uncertainty framework that formulates sparse reconstruction and dynamic forecasting as a unified state-representation problem and introduces a structured latent assembly to both tasks. The central idea is to build a structured latent state that combines a global summary of system-level organization, local tokens anchored to available measurements, and an uncertainty-driven importance field that weights observations according to the physical informativeness. For reconstruction, GLU uses importance-aware adaptive neighborhood selection to retrieve locally relevant information while preserving global consistency and allowing flexible query resolution on arbitrary geometries. Across a suite of challenging benchmarks, GLU consistently improves reconstruction fidelity over reduced-order, convolutional, neural operator, and attention-based baselines, better preserving multi-scale structures. For forecasting, a hierarchical Leader-Follower Dynamics module evolves the latent state with substantially reduced memory growth, maintains stable rollout behavior and delays error accumulation in nonlinear dynamics. On a realistic turbulent combustion dataset, it further preserves not only sharp fronts and broadband structures in multiple physical fields, but also their cross-channel thermo-chemical couplings. Scalability tests show that these gains are achieved with substantially lower memory growth than comparable attention-based baselines. Together, these results establish GLU as a flexible and computationally practical paradigm for sparse digital twins.
Mar 26, 2026

Toward Actionable Digital Twins for Radiation-Based Imaging and Therapy: Mathematical Formulation, Modular Workflow, and an OpenKBP-Based Dose-Surrogate Prototype

Digital twins for radiation-based imaging and therapy are most useful when they assimilate patient data, quantify predictive uncertainty, and support clinically constrained decisions. This paper presents a modular framework for actionable digital twins in radiation-based imaging and therapy and instantiates its reproducible open-data component using the \openkbpfull{} benchmark. The framework couples PatientData, Model, Solver, Calibration, and Decision modules and formalizes latent-state updating, uncertainty propagation, and chance-constrained action selection. As an initial implementation, we build a GPU-ready PyTorch/MONAI reimplementation of the \openkbp{} starter pipeline: an 11-channel, 19.2M-parameter 3D U-Net trained with a masked loss over the feasible region and equipped with Monte Carlo dropout for voxel-wise epistemic uncertainty. To emulate the update loop on a static benchmark, we introduce decoder-only proxy recalibration and illustrate uncertainty-aware virtual-therapy evaluation using DVH-based and biological utilities. A complete three-fraction loop including recalibration, Monte Carlo inference, and spatial optimization executes in 10.3s. On the 100-patient test set, the model achieved mean dose and DVH scores of 2.65 and 1.82Gy, respectively, with 0.58~s mean inference time per patient. The \openkbp{} case study thus serves as a reproducible test bed for dose prediction, uncertainty propagation, and proxy closed-loop adaptation, while future institutional studies will address longitudinal calibration with delivered-dose logs and repeat imaging.
Mar 26, 2026

On Integrating Resilience and Human Oversight into LLM-Assisted Modeling Workflows for Digital Twins

LLM-assisted modeling holds the potential to rapidly build executable Digital Twins of complex systems from only coarse descriptions and sensor data. However, resilience to LLM hallucination, human oversight, and real-time model adaptability remain challenging and often mutually conflicting requirements. We present three critical design principles for integrating resilience and oversight into such workflows, derived from insights gained through our work on FactoryFlow - an open-source LLM-assisted framework for building simulation-based Digital Twins of manufacturing systems. First, orthogonalize structural modeling and parameter fitting. Structural descriptions (components, interconnections) are LLM-translated from coarse natural language to an intermediate representation (IR) with human visualization and validation, which is algorithmically converted to the final model. Parameter inference, in contrast, operates continuously on sensor data streams with expert-tunable controls. Second, restrict the model IR to interconnections of parameterized, pre-validated library components rather than monolithic simulation code, enabling interpretability and error-resilience. Third, and most important, is to use a density-preserving IR. When IR descriptions expand dramatically from compact inputs hallucination errors accumulate proportionally. We present the case for Python as a density-preserving IR : loops express regularity compactly, classes capture hierarchy and composition, and the result remains highly readable while exploiting LLMs strong code generation capabilities. A key contribution is detailed characterization of LLM-induced errors across model descriptions of varying detail and complexity, revealing how IR choice critically impacts error rates. These insights provide actionable guidance for building resilient and transparent LLM-assisted simulation automation workflows.
Mar 26, 2026

Ultra-fast Traffic Nowcasting and Control via Differentiable Agent-based Simulation

Traffic digital twins, which inform policymakers of effective interventions based on large-scale, high-fidelity computational models calibrated to real-world traffic, hold promise for addressing societal challenges in our rapidly urbanizing world. However, conventional fine-grained traffic simulations are non-differentiable and typically rely on inefficient gradient-free optimization, making calibration for real-world applications computationally infeasible. Here we present a differentiable agent-based traffic simulator that enables ultra-fast model calibration, traffic nowcasting, and control on large-scale networks. We develop several differentiable computing techniques for simulating individual vehicle movements, including stochastic decision-making and inter-agent interactions, while ensuring that entire simulation trajectories remain end-to-end differentiable for efficient gradient-based optimization. On the large-scale Chicago road network, with over 10,000 calibration parameters, our model simulates more than one million vehicles at 173 times real-time speed. This ultra-fast simulation, together with efficient gradient-based optimization, enables us to complete model calibration using the previous 30 minutes of traffic data in 455 s, provide a one-hour-ahead traffic nowcast in 21 s, and solve the resulting traffic control problem in 728 s. This yields a full calibration--nowcast--control loop in under 20 minutes, leaving about 40 minutes of lead time for implementing interventions. Our work thus provides a practical computational basis for realizing traffic digital twins.
Mar 25, 2026

KitchenTwin: Semantically and Geometrically Grounded 3D Kitchen Digital Twins

Embodied AI training and evaluation require object-centric digital twin environments with accurate metric geometry and semantic grounding. Recent transformer-based feedforward reconstruction methods can efficiently predict global point clouds from sparse monocular videos, yet these geometries suffer from inherent scale ambiguity and inconsistent coordinate conventions. This mismatch prevents the reliable fusion of these dimensionless point cloud predictions with locally reconstructed object meshes. We propose a novel scale-aware 3D fusion framework that registers visually grounded object meshes with transformer-predicted global point clouds to construct metrically consistent digital twins. Our method introduces a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-guided geometric anchor mechanism that resolves this fundamental coordinate mismatch by recovering an accurate real-world metric scale. To fuse these networks, we propose a geometry-aware registration pipeline that explicitly enforces physical plausibility through gravity-aligned vertical estimation, Manhattan-world structural constraints, and collision-free local refinement. Experiments on real indoor kitchen environments demonstrate improved cross-network object alignment and geometric consistency for downstream tasks, including multi-primitive fitting and metric measurement. We additionally introduce an open-source indoor digital twin dataset with metrically scaled scenes and semantically grounded and registered object-centric mesh annotations.
Mar 25, 2026

Physics-Informed Neural Network Digital Twin for Dynamic Tray-Wise Modeling of Distillation Columns under Transient Operating Conditions

Digital twin technology, when combined with physics-informed machine learning with simulation results of Aspen, offers transformative capabilities for industrial process monitoring, control, and optimization. In this work, the proposed model presents a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) digital twin framework for the dynamic, tray-wise modeling of binary distillation columns operating under transient conditions. The architecture of the proposed model embeds fundamental thermodynamic constraints, including vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) described by modified Raoult's law, tray-level mass and energy balances, and the McCabe-Thiele graphical methodology directly into the neural network loss function via physics residual terms. The model is trained and evaluated on a high-fidelity synthetic dataset of 961 timestamped measurements spanning 8 hours of transient operation, generated in Aspen HYSYS for a binary HX/TX distillation system comprising 16 sensor streams. An adaptive loss-weighting scheme balances the data fidelity and physics consistency objectives during training. Compared to five data-driven baselines (LSTM, vanilla MLP, GRU, Transformer, DeepONet), the proposed PINN achieves an RMSE of 0.00143 for HX mole fraction prediction (R^2 = 0.9887), representing a 44.6% reduction over the best data-only baseline, while strictly satisfying thermodynamic constraints. Tray-wise temperature and composition profiles predicted under transient perturbations demonstrate that the digital twin accurately captures column dynamics including feed tray responses, reflux ratio variations, and pressure transients. These results establish the proposed PINN digital twin as a robust foundation for real-time soft sensing, model-predictive control, and anomaly detection in industrial distillation processes.
Mar 24, 2026

Digital Twin-Assisted Measurement Design and Channel Statistics Prediction

Prediction of wireless channels and their statistics is a fundamental procedure for ensuring performance guarantees in wireless systems. Statistical radio maps powered by Gaussian processes (GPs) offer flexible, non-parametric frameworks, but their performance depends critically on the choice of mean and covariance functions. These are typically learned from dense measurements without exploiting environmental geometry. Digital twins (DTs) of wireless environments leverage computational power to incorporate geometric information; however, they require costly calibration to accurately capture material and propagation characteristics. This work introduces a hybrid channel prediction framework that leverages uncalibrated DTs derived from open-source maps to extract geometry-induced prior information for GP prediction. These structural priors are fused with a small number of channel measurements, enabling data-efficient prediction of channel statistics across the entire environment. By exploiting the uncertainty quantification inherent to GPs, the framework supports principled measurement selection by identifying informative probing locations under resource constraints. Through this integration of imperfect DTs with statistical learning, the proposed method reduces measurement overhead, improves prediction accuracy, and establishes a practical approach for resource-efficient wireless channel prediction.
Mar 24, 2026

Instrument-Splatting++: Towards Controllable Surgical Instrument Digital Twin Using Gaussian Splatting

High-quality and controllable digital twins of surgical instruments are critical for Real2Sim in robot-assisted surgery, as they enable realistic simulation, synthetic data generation, and perception learning under novel poses. We present Instrument-Splatting++, a monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework that reconstructs surgical instruments as a fully controllable Gaussian asset with high fidelity. Our pipeline starts with part-wise geometry pretraining that injects CAD priors into Gaussian primitives and equips the representation with part-aware semantic rendering. Built on the pretrained model, we propose a semantics-aware pose estimation and tracking (SAPET) method to recover per-frame 6-DoF pose and joint angles from unposed endoscopic videos, where a gripper-tip network trained purely from synthetic semantics provides robust supervision and a loose regularization suppresses singular articulations. Finally, we introduce Robust Texture Learning (RTL), which alternates pose refinement and robust appearance optimization, mitigating pose noise during texture learning. The proposed framework can perform pose estimation and learn realistic texture from unposed videos. We validate our method on sequences extracted from EndoVis17/18, SAR-RARP, and an in-house dataset, showing superior photometric quality and improved geometric accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate a downstream keypoint detection task where unseen-pose data augmentation from our controllable instrument Gaussian improves performance.
Mar 23, 2026

Adversarial Vulnerabilities in Neural Operator Digital Twins: Gradient-Free Attacks on Nuclear Thermal-Hydraulic Surrogates

Operator learning models are rapidly emerging as the predictive core of digital twins for nuclear and energy systems, promising real-time field reconstruction from sparse sensor measurements. Yet their robustness to adversarial perturbations remains uncharacterized, a critical gap for deployment in safety-critical systems. Here we show that neural operators are acutely vulnerable to extremely sparse (fewer than 1% of inputs), physically plausible perturbations that exploit their sensitivity to boundary conditions. Using gradient-free differential evolution across four operator architectures, we demonstrate that minimal modifications trigger catastrophic prediction failures, increasing relative L2L_2 error from ∼\sim1.5% (validated accuracy) to 37-63% while remaining completely undetectable by standard validation metrics. Notably, 100% of successful single-point attacks pass z-score anomaly detection. We introduce the effective perturbation dimension deffd_{\text{eff}}, a Jacobian-based diagnostic that, together with sensitivity magnitude, yields a two-factor vulnerability model explaining why architectures with extreme sensitivity concentration (POD-DeepONet, deff≈1d_{\text{eff}} \approx 1) are not necessarily the most exploitable, since low-rank output projections cap maximum error, while moderate concentration with sufficient amplification (S-DeepONet, deff≈4d_{\text{eff}} \approx 4) produces the highest attack success. Gradient-free search outperforms gradient-based alternatives (PGD) on architectures with gradient pathologies, while random perturbations of equal magnitude achieve near-zero success rates, confirming that the discovered vulnerabilities are structural. Our findings expose a previously overlooked attack surface in operator learning models and establish that these models require robustness guarantees beyond standard validation before deployment.
Mar 19, 2026

Cyber-Resilient Digital Twins: Discriminating Attacks for Safe Critical Infrastructure Control

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) face growing threats from cyber-attacks that exploit sensor and control vulnerabilities. Digital Twin (DT) technology can detect anomalies via predictive modelling, but current methods cannot distinguish attack types and often rely on costly full-system shutdowns. This paper presents i-SDT (intelligent Self-Defending DT), combining hydraulically-regularized predictive modelling, multi-class attack discrimination, and adaptive resilient control. Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) with differentiable conservation constraints capture nominal dynamics and improve robustness to adversarial manipulations. A recurrent residual encoder with Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) separates normal operation from single- and multi-stage attacks in latent space. When attacks are confirmed, Model Predictive Control (MPC) uses uncertainty-aware DT predictions to keep operations safe without shutdown. Evaluation on SWaT and WADI datasets shows major gains in detection accuracy, 44.1% fewer false alarms, and 56.3% lower operational costs in simulation-in-the-loop evaluation. with sub-second inference latency confirming real-time feasibility on plant-level workstations, i-SDT advances autonomous cyber-physical defense while maintaining operational resilience.
Mar 19, 2026

PlanTwin: Privacy-Preserving Planning Abstractions for Cloud-Assisted LLM Agents

Cloud-hosted large language models (LLMs) have become the de facto planners in agentic systems, coordinating tools and guiding execution over local environments. In many deployments, however, the environment being planned over is private, containing source code, files, credentials, and metadata that cannot be exposed to the cloud. Existing solutions address adjacent concerns, such as execution isolation, access control, or confidential inference, but they do not control what cloud planners observe during planning: within the permitted scope, raw environment state is still exposed. We introduce PlanTwin, a privacy-preserving architecture for cloud-assisted planning without exposing raw local context. The key idea is to project the real environment into a planning-oriented digital twin: a schema-constrained and de-identified abstract graph that preserves planning-relevant structure while removing reconstructable details. The cloud planner operates solely on this sanitized twin through a bounded capability interface, while a local gatekeeper enforces safety policies and cumulative disclosure budgets. We further formalize the privacy-utility trade-off as a capability granularity problem, define architectural privacy goals using (k,δ)(k,δ)-anonymity and εε-unlinkability, and mitigate compositional leakage through multi-turn disclosure control. We implement PlanTwin as middleware between local agents and cloud planners and evaluate it on 60 agentic tasks across ten domains with four cloud planners. PlanTwin achieves full sensitive-item non-disclosure (SND = 1.0) while maintaining planning quality close to full-context systems: three of four planners achieve PQS >0.79> 0.79, and the full pipeline incurs less than 2.2% utility loss.
Mar 18, 2026

Multisource human-in-the-loop digital twin testbed for connected and autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic flow

In the emerging mixed traffic environments, Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have to interact with surrounding human-driven vehicles (HDVs). This paper introduces MSH-MCCT (Multi-Source Human-in-the-Loop Mixed Cloud Control Testbed), a novel CAV testbed that captures complex interactions between various CAVs and HDVs. Utilizing the Mixed Digital Twin concept, which combines Mixed Reality with Digital Twin, MSH-MCCT integrates physical, virtual, and mixed platforms, along with multi-source control inputs. Bridged by the mixed platform, MSH-MCCT allows human drivers and CAV algorithms to operate both physical and virtual vehicles within multiple fields of view. Particularly, this testbed facilitates the coexistence and real-time interaction of physical and virtual CAVs & HDVs, significantly enhancing the experimental flexibility and scalability. Experiments on vehicle platooning in mixed traffic showcase the potential of MSH-MCCT to conduct CAV testing with multi-source real human drivers in the loop through driving simulators of diverse fidelity. The videos for the experiments are available at our project website: https://dongjh20.github.io/MSH-MCCT.
Mar 18, 2026

From Virtual Environments to Real-World Trials: Emerging Trends in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving technologies have achieved significant advances in recent years, yet their real-world deployment remains constrained by data scarcity, safety requirements, and the need for generalization across diverse environments. In response, synthetic data and virtual environments have emerged as powerful enablers, offering scalable, controllable, and richly annotated scenarios for training and evaluation. This survey presents a comprehensive review of recent developments at the intersection of autonomous driving, simulation technologies, and synthetic datasets. We organize the landscape across three core dimensions: (i) the use of synthetic data for perception and planning, (ii) digital twin-based simulation for system validation, and (iii) domain adaptation strategies bridging synthetic and real-world data. We also highlight the role of vision-language models and simulation realism in enhancing scene understanding and generalization. A detailed taxonomy of datasets, tools, and simulation platforms is provided, alongside an analysis of trends in benchmark design. Finally, we discuss critical challenges and open research directions, including Sim2Real transfer, scalable safety validation, cooperative autonomy, and simulation-driven policy learning, that must be addressed to accelerate the path toward safe, generalizable, and globally deployable autonomous driving systems.
Mar 18, 2026

From Optimizable to Interactable: Mixed Digital Twin-Empowered Testing of Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation Systems

Sufficient testing under corner cases is critical for the long-term operation of vehicle-infrastructure cooperation systems (VICS). However, existing corner-case generation methods are primarily AI-driven, and VICS testing under corner cases is typically limited to simulation. In this paper, we introduce an L5 ''Interactable'' level to the VICS digital twin (VICS-DT) taxonomy, extending beyond the conventional L4 ''Optimizable'' level. We further propose an L5-level VICS testing framework, IMPACT (Interactive Mixed-digital-twin Paradigm for Advanced Cooperative vehicle-infrastructure Testing). By enabling direct human interactions with VICS entities, IMPACT incorporates highly uncertain and unpredictable human behaviors into the testing loop, naturally generating high-quality corner cases that complement AI-based methods. Furthermore, the mixedDT-enabled ''Physical-Virtual Action Interaction'' facilitates safe VICS testing under corner cases, incorporating real-world environments and entities rather than purely in simulation. Finally, we implement IMPACT on the I-VIT (Interactive Vehicle-Infrastructure Testbed), and experiments demonstrate its effectiveness. The experimental videos are available at our project website: https://dongjh20.github.io/IMPACT.
Mar 18, 2026

From Digital Twins to World Models:Opportunities, Challenges, and Applications for Mobile Edge General Intelligence

The rapid evolution toward 6G and beyond communication systems is accelerating the convergence of digital twins and world models at the network edge. Traditional digital twins provide high-fidelity representations of physical systems and support monitoring, analysis, and offline optimization. However, in highly dynamic edge environments, they face limitations in autonomy, adaptability, and scalability. This paper presents a systematic survey of the transition from digital twins to world models and discusses its role in enabling edge general intelligence (EGI). First, the paper clarifies the conceptual differences between digital twins and world models and highlights the shift from physics-based, centralized, and system-centric replicas to data-driven, decentralized, and agent-centric internal models. This discussion helps readers gain a clear understanding of how this transition enables more adaptive, autonomous, and resource-efficient intelligence at the network edge. The paper reviews the design principles, architectures, and key components of world models, including perception, latent state representation, dynamics learning, imagination-based planning, and memory. In addition, it examines the integration of world models and digital twins in wireless EGI systems and surveys emerging applications in integrated sensing and communications, semantic communication, air-ground networks, and low-altitude wireless networks. Finally, this survey provides a systematic roadmap and practical insights for designing world-model-driven edge intelligence systems in wireless and edge computing environments. It also outlines key research challenges and future directions toward scalable, reliable, and interoperable world models for edge-native agentic AI.
Mar 17, 2026

ManiTwin: Scaling Data-Generation-Ready Digital Object Dataset to 100K

Learning in simulation provides a useful foundation for scaling robotic manipulation capabilities. However, this paradigm often suffers from a lack of data-generation-ready digital assets, in both scale and diversity. In this work, we present ManiTwin, an automated and efficient pipeline for generating data-generation-ready digital object twins. Our pipeline transforms a single image into simulation-ready and semantically annotated 3D asset, enabling large-scale robotic manipulation data generation. Using this pipeline, we construct ManiTwin-100K, a dataset containing 100K high-quality annotated 3D assets. Each asset is equipped with physical properties, language descriptions, functional annotations, and verified manipulation proposals. Experiments demonstrate that ManiTwin provides an efficient asset synthesis and annotation workflow, and that ManiTwin-100K offers high-quality and diverse assets for manipulation data generation, random scene synthesis, and VQA data generation, establishing a strong foundation for scalable simulation data synthesis and policy learning. Our webpage is available at https://manitwin.github.io/.
Mar 16, 2026

Elder-Sim: A Psychometrically Validated Platform for Personality-Stable Elderly Digital Twins

Background: LLMs enable patient-facing conversational agents, creating a pathway toward digital twins that capture older adults' lived experiences and behavioral responses across time. A central barrier is personality drift -- inconsistent trait expression across repeated interactions -- which undermines reliability of generated trajectories and intervention-response simulation in geriatric care. Objective: To develop ELDER-SIM, a multi-role elderly-care conversational platform for building personality-stable digital twin agents, and to propose a psychometric validation framework for quantifying personality consistency in LLM-based agents. Methods: ELDER-SIM was implemented via n8n workflow orchestration with local LLM inference (Ollama/vLLM), integrating (1) Big Five (OCEAN) trait specifications, (2) a Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram (CCD) grounded in Beck's CBT framework, and (3) a MySQL-based long-term memory module. Ablation studies across four conditions -- Baseline, +Memory, +CCD, and +LoRA (fine-tuned on 19,717 instruction pairs from CHARLS) -- were evaluated via Cronbach's αα, ICC, and role discrimination accuracy. Results: Reliability was acceptable to excellent across conditions (Cronbach's αα: 0.70--0.94; ICC: 0.85--0.96). Role discrimination improved from 83.3% (Baseline) to 88.9% (+Memory), 94.4% (+CCD), and 97.2% (+LoRA). CCD produced the largest consistency gain (mean αα 0.702→\to0.892), while LoRA achieved the highest overall consistency (αα 0.940; ICC 0.958). Conclusions: ELDER-SIM provides a psychometrically validated approach for constructing personality-consistent elderly digital twin agents. Structured cognitive modeling and domain adaptation reduce personality drift, supporting reliable longitudinal simulation for elderly mental health care and reproducible in silico evaluation before clinical deployment.
Mar 14, 2026

Traffic and weather driven hybrid digital twin for bridge monitoring

A hybrid digital twin framework is presented for bridge condition monitoring using existing traffic cameras and weather APIs, reducing reliance on dedicated sensor installations. The approach is demonstrated on the Peace Bridge (99 years in service) under high traffic demand and harsh winter exposure. The framework fuses three near-real-time streams: YOLOv8 computer vision from a bridge-deck camera estimates vehicle counts, traffic density, and load proxies; a Lighthill--Whitham--Richards (LWR) model propagates density ρ(x,t)ρ(x,t) and detects deceleration-driven shockwaves linked to repetitive loading and fatigue accumulation; and weather APIs provide deterioration drivers including temperature cycling, freeze-thaw activity, precipitation-related corrosion potential, and wind effects. Monte Carlo simulation quantifies uncertainty across traffic-environment scenarios, while Random Forest models map fused features to fatigue indicators and maintenance classification. The framework demonstrates utilizing existing infrastructure for cost-effective predictive maintenance of aging, high-traffic bridges in harsh climates.
Mar 13, 2026

MotionAnymesh: Physics-Grounded Articulation for Simulation-Ready Digital Twins

Converting static 3D meshes into interactable articulated assets is crucial for embodied AI and robotic simulation. However, existing zero-shot pipelines struggle with complex assets due to a critical lack of physical grounding. Specifically, ungrounded Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently suffer from kinematic hallucinations, while unconstrained joint estimation inevitably leads to catastrophic mesh inter-penetration during physical simulation. To bridge this gap, we propose MotionAnymesh, an automated zero-shot framework that seamlessly transforms unstructured static meshes into simulation-ready digital twins. Our method features a kinematic-aware part segmentation module that grounds VLM reasoning with explicit SP4D physical priors, effectively eradicating kinematic hallucinations. Furthermore, we introduce a geometry-physics joint estimation pipeline that combines robust type-aware initialization with physics-constrained trajectory optimization to rigorously guarantee collision-free articulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionAnymesh significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both geometric precision and dynamic physical executability, providing highly reliable assets for downstream applications.
Mar 12, 2026

Articulat3D: Reconstructing Articulated Digital Twins From Monocular Videos with Geometric and Motion Constraints

Building high-fidelity digital twins of articulated objects from visual data remains a central challenge. Existing approaches depend on multi-view captures of the object in discrete, static states, which severely constrains their real-world scalability. In this paper, we introduce Articulat3D, a novel framework that constructs such digital twins from casually captured monocular videos by jointly enforcing explicit 3D geometric and motion constraints. We first propose Motion Prior-Driven Initialization, which leverages 3D point tracks to exploit the low-dimensional structure of articulated motion. By modeling scene dynamics with a compact set of motion bases, we facilitate soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly moving groups. Building on this initialization, we introduce Geometric and Motion Constraints Refinement, which enforces physically plausible articulation through learnable kinematic primitives parameterized by a joint axis, a pivot point, and per-frame motion scalars, yielding reconstructions that are both geometrically accurate and temporally coherent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Articulat3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and real-world casually captured monocular videos, significantly advancing the feasibility of digital twin creation under uncontrolled real-world conditions. Our project page is available at https://maxwell-zhao.github.io/Articulat3D/.
Mar 12, 2026

Gen-Fab: A Variation-Aware Generative Model for Predicting Fabrication Variations in Nanophotonic Devices

Silicon photonic devices often exhibit fabrication-induced variations such as over-etching, underetching, and corner rounding, which can significantly alter device performance. These variations are non-uniform and are influenced by feature size and shape. Accurate digital twins are therefore needed to predict the range of possible fabricated outcomes for a given design. In this paper, we introduce Gen-Fab, a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) based on Pix2Pix to predict and model uncertainty in photonic fabrication outcomes. The proposed method takes a design layout (in GDS format) as input and produces diverse high-resolution predictions similar to scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of fabricated devices, capturing the range of process variations at the nanometer scale. To enable one-to-many mapping, we inject a latent noise vector at the model bottleneck. We compare Gen-Fab against three baselines: (1) a deterministic U-Net predictor, (2) an inference-time Monte Carlo Dropout U-Net, and (3) an ensemble of varied U-Nets. Evaluations on an out-of-distribution dataset of fabricated photonic test structures demonstrate that Gen-Fab outperforms all baselines in both accuracy and uncertainty modeling. An additional distribution shift analysis further confirms its strong generalization to unseen fabrication geometries. Gen-Fab achieves the highest intersection-over-union (IoU) score of 89.8%, outperforming the deterministic U-Net (85.3%), the MC-Dropout U-Net (83.4%), and varying U-Nets (85.8%). It also better aligns with the distribution of real fabrication outcomes, achieving lower Kullback-Leibler divergence and Wasserstein distance.
Mar 11, 2026

LLM-Augmented Digital Twin for Policy Evaluation in Short-Video Platforms

Short-video platforms are closed-loop, human-in-the-loop ecosystems where platform policy, creator incentives, and user behavior co-evolve. This feedback structure makes counterfactual policy evaluation difficult in production, especially for long-horizon and distributional outcomes. The challenge is amplified as platforms deploy AI tools that change what content enters the system, how agents adapt, and how the platform operates. We propose a large language model (LLM)-augmented digital twin for short-video platforms, with a modular four-twin architecture (User, Content, Interaction, Platform) and an event-driven execution layer that supports reproducible experimentation. Platform policies are implemented as pluggable components within the Platform Twin, and LLMs are integrated as optional, schema-constrained decision services (e.g., persona generation, content captioning, campaign planning, trend prediction) that are routed through a unified optimizer. This design enables scalable simulations that preserve closed-loop dynamics while allowing selective LLM adoption, enabling the study of platform policies, including AI-enabled policies, under realistic feedback and constraints.
Mar 11, 2026

Taming Vision Priors for Data Efficient mmWave Channel Modeling

Accurately modeling millimeter-wave (mmWave) propagation is essential for real-time AR and autonomous systems. Differentiable ray tracing offers a physics-grounded solution but still facing deployment challenges due to its over-reliance on exhaustive channel measurements or brittle, hand-tuned scene models for material properties. We present VisRFTwin, a scalable and data-efficient digital-twin framework that integrates vision-derived material priors with differentiable ray tracing. Multi-view images from commodity cameras are processed by a frozen Vision-Language Model to extract dense semantic embeddings, which are translated into initial estimates of permittivity and conductivity for scene surfaces. These priors initialize a Sionna-based differentiable ray tracer, which rapidly calibrates material parameters via gradient descent with only a few dozen sparse channel soundings. Once calibrated, the association between vision features and material parameters is retained, enabling fast transfer to new scenarios without repeated calibration. Evaluations across three real-world scenarios, including office interiors, urban canyons, and dynamic public spaces show that VisRFTwin reduces channel measurement needs by up to 10×\times while achieving a 59% lower median delay spread error than pure data-driven deep learning methods.
Mar 9, 2026

Optimizing Reinforcement Learning Training over Digital Twin Enabled Multi-fidelity Networks

In this paper, we investigate a novel digital network twin (DNT) assisted deep learning (DL) model training framework. In particular, we consider a physical network where a base station (BS) uses several antennas to serve multiple mobile users, and a DNT that is a virtual representation of the physical network. The BS must adjust its antenna tilt angles to optimize the data rates of all users. Due to user mobility, the BS may not be able to accurately track network dynamics such as wireless channels and user mobilities. Hence, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach is used to dynamically adjust the antenna tilt angles. To train the RL, we can use data collected from the physical network and the DNT. The data collected from the physical network is more accurate but incurs more communication overhead compared to the data collected from the DNT. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the ratio of data collected from the physical network and the DNT to improve the training of the RL model. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem whose goal is to jointly optimize the tilt angle adjustment policy and the data collection strategy, aiming to maximize the data rates of all users while constraining the time delay introduced by collecting data from the physical network. To solve this problem, we propose a hierarchical RL framework that integrates robust adversarial loss and proximal policy optimization (PPO). Simulation results show that our proposed method reduces the physical network data collection delay by up to 28.01% and 1x compared to a hierarchical RL that uses vanilla PPO as the first level RL, and the baseline that uses robust-RL at the first level and selects the data collection ratio randomly.
Mar 7, 2026

A Lightweight Digital-Twin-Based Framework for Edge-Assisted Vehicle Tracking and Collision Prediction

Vehicle tracking, motion estimation, and collision prediction are fundamental components of traffic safety and management in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Many recent approaches rely on computationally intensive prediction models, which limits their practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper presents a lightweight digital-twin-based framework for vehicle tracking and spatiotemporal collision prediction that relies solely on object detection, without requiring complex trajectory prediction networks. The framework is implemented and evaluated in Quanser Interactive Labs (QLabs), a high-fidelity digital twin of an urban traffic environment that enables controlled and repeatable scenario generation. A YOLO-based detector is deployed on simulated edge cameras to localize vehicles and extract frame-level centroid trajectories. Offline path maps are constructed from multiple traversals and indexed using K-D trees to support efficient online association between detected vehicles and road segments. During runtime, consistent vehicle identifiers are maintained, vehicle speed and direction are estimated from the temporal evolution of path indices, and future positions are predicted accordingly. Potential collisions are identified by analyzing both spatial proximity and temporal overlap of predicted future trajectories. Our experimental results across diverse simulated urban scenarios show that the proposed framework predicts approximately 88% of collision events prior to occurrence while maintaining low computational overhead suitable for edge deployment. Rather than introducing a computationally intensive prediction model, this work introduces a lightweight digital-twin-based solution for vehicle tracking and collision prediction, tailored for real-time edge deployment in ITS.
Mar 7, 2026

Bi-directional digital twin prototype anchoring with multi-periodicity learning for few-shot fault diagnosis

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for ensuring the safety and reliability of industrial machinery. However, traditional IFD methods rely heavily on abundant labeled data for training, which is often difficult to obtain in practical industrial environments. Constructing a digital twin (DT) of the physical asset to obtain simulation data has therefore become a promising alternative. Nevertheless, existing DT-assisted diagnosis methods mainly transfer diagnostic knowledge through domain adaptation techniques, which still require a considerable amount of unlabeled data from the target asset. To address the challenges in few-shot scenarios where only extremely limited samples are available, a bi-directional DT prototype anchoring method with multi-periodicity learning is proposed. Specifically, a framework involving meta-training in the DT virtual space and test-time adaptation in the physical space is constructed for reliable few-shot model adaptation for the target asset. A bi-directional twin-domain prototype anchoring strategy with covariance-guided augmentation for adaptation is further developed to improve the robustness of prototype estimation. In addition, a multi-periodicity feature learning module is designed to capture the intrinsic periodic characteristics within current signals. A DT of an asynchronous motor is built based on finite element method, and experiments are conducted under multiple few-shot settings and three working conditions. Comparative and ablation studies demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method for few-shot fault diagnosis.
Mar 6, 2026

Your Reviews Replicate You: LLM-Based Agents as Customer Digital Twins for Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is a cornerstone of market research for estimating consumer preferences; however, traditional methods face persistent challenges regarding time, cost, and respondent fatigue. To address these limitations, this study proposes a framework that utilizes large language model (LLM)-based "customer digital twins (CDT)" as virtual respondents. We identified active users within the Reddit community and aggregated their comprehensive review histories to construct individualized vector databases. By integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with prompt engineering, this study developed customer agents capable of dynamically retrieving and reasoning upon their specific past preferences and constraints. These customer agents, called CDTs, performed pairwise comparison tasks on product profiles generated via fractional factorial design, and the resulting choice data was analyzed to estimate part-worth utilities by logistic regression. Empirical validation demonstrates that these CDTs predict the preferences of actual users with 87.73% accuracy. Furthermore, a case study on the computer monitor category successfully quantified trade-offs between attributes such as panel type and resolution, deriving preference structures consistent with market realities. Ultimately, this study contributes to marketing research by presenting a scalable alternative that significantly improves both agility and cost-efficiency to traditional methods.
Mar 5, 2026

Physically Accurate Differentiable Inverse Rendering for Radio Frequency Digital Twin

Digital twins, virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming system design across industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) systems has been limited by the non-differentiable nature of conventional RF simulators. The visibility of propagation paths causes severe discontinuities, and differentiable rendering techniques from computer graphics cannot easily transfer due to point-source antennas and dominant specular reflections. In this paper, we present RFDT, a physically based differentiable RF simulation framework that enables gradient-based interaction between virtual and physical worlds. RFDT resolves discontinuities with a physically grounded edge-diffraction transition function, and mitigates non-convexity from Fourier-domain processing through a signal domain transform surrogate. Our implementation demonstrates RFDT's ability to accurately reconstruct digital twins from real RF measurements. Moreover, RFDT can augment diverse downstream applications, such as test-time adaptation of machine learning-based RF sensing and physically constrained optimization of communication systems.
Mar 5, 2026

GaussTwin: Unified Simulation and Correction with Gaussian Splatting for Robotic Digital Twins

Digital twins promise to enhance robotic manipulation by maintaining a consistent link between real-world perception and simulation. However, most existing systems struggle with the lack of a unified model, complex dynamic interactions, and the real-to-sim gap, which limits downstream applications such as model predictive control. Thus, we propose GaussTwin, a real-time digital twin that combines position-based dynamics with discrete Cosserat rod formulations for physically grounded simulation, and Gaussian splatting for efficient rendering and visual correction. By anchoring Gaussians to physical primitives and enforcing coherent SE(3) updates driven by photometric error and segmentation masks, GaussTwin achieves stable prediction-correction while preserving physical fidelity. Through experiments in both simulation and on a Franka Research 3 platform, we show that GaussTwin consistently improves tracking accuracy and robustness compared to shape-matching and rigid-only baselines, while also enabling downstream tasks such as push-based planning. These results highlight GaussTwin as a step toward unified, physically meaningful digital twins that can support closed-loop robotic interaction and learning.