Daily Papers

The widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased the importance of demand response in smart grids. This paper proposes a two-layer demand response optimization framework for EV users and aggregators, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to balance electricity supply and demand and optimize energy utilization during EV charging. The upper-layer model, focusing on the aggregator, aims to maximize profits by adjusting retail electricity prices. The lower-layer model targets EV users, using LLMs to simulate charging demands under varying electricity prices and optimize both costs and user comfort. The study employs a multi-threaded LLM decision generator to dynamically analyze user behavior, charging preferences, and psychological factors. The framework utilizes the PSO method to optimize electricity prices, ensuring user needs are met while increasing aggregator profits. Simulation results show that the proposed model improves EV charging efficiency, alleviates peak power loads, and stabilizes smart grid operations.

Price responsiveness is a major feature of end use customers (EUCs) that participate in demand response (DR) programs, and has been conventionally modeled with static demand functions, which take the electricity price as the input and the aggregate energy consumption as the output. This, however, neglects the inherent temporal correlation of the EUC behaviors, and may result in large errors when predicting the actual responses of EUCs in real-time pricing (RTP) programs. In this paper, we propose a dynamical DR model so as to capture the temporal behavior of the EUCs. The states in the proposed dynamical DR model can be explicitly chosen, in which case the model can be represented by a linear function or a multi-layer feedforward neural network, or implicitly chosen, in which case the model can be represented by a recurrent neural network or a long short-term memory unit network. In both cases, the dynamical DR model can be learned from historical price and energy consumption data. Numerical simulation illustrated how the states are chosen and also showed the proposed dynamical DR model significantly outperforms the static ones.

We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of many local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the rewards of both the global and the local agents. Such problems find many applications, e.g. demand response, EV charging, queueing, etc. In this setting, scalability has been a long-standing challenge due to the size of the state/action space which can be exponential in the number of agents. This work proposes the SUB-SAMPLE-Q algorithm where the global agent subsamples kleq n local agents to compute an optimal policy in time that is only exponential in k, providing an exponential speedup from standard methods that are exponential in n. We show that the learned policy converges to the optimal policy in the order of O(1/k+epsilon_{k,m}) as the number of sub-sampled agents k increases, where epsilon_{k,m} is the Bellman noise. We also conduct numerical simulations in a demand-response setting and a queueing setting.

Model predictive control (MPC)-based energy management systems (EMS) are essential for ensuring optimal, secure, and stable operation in microgrids with high penetrations of distributed energy resources. However, due to the high computational cost for the decision-making, the conventional MPC-based EMS typically adopts a simplified integrated-bus power balance model. While this simplification is effective for small networks, large-scale systems require a more detailed branch flow model to account for the increased impact of grid power losses and security constraints. This work proposes an efficient and reliable MPC-based EMS that incorporates power-loss effects and grid-security constraints. %, while adaptively shaping the battery power profile in response to online renewable inputs, achieving reduced operational costs. It enhances system reliability, reduces operational costs, and shows strong potential for online implementation due to its reduced computational effort. Specifically, a second-order cone program (SOCP) branch flow relaxation is integrated into the constraint set, yielding a convex formulation that guarantees globally optimal solutions with high computational efficiency. Owing to the radial topology of the microgrid, this relaxation is practically tight, ensuring equivalence to the original problem. Building on this foundation, an online demand response (DR) module is designed to further reduce the operation cost through peak shaving. To the best of our knowledge, no prior MPC-EMS framework has simultaneously modeled losses and security constraints while coordinating flexible loads within a unified architecture. The developed framework enables secure operation with effective peak shaving and reduced total cost. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on 10-bus, 18-bus, and 33-bus systems.

Large language models (LLMs) propel the prosperity of interactive AI applications showcased by ChatGPT that demand timely response of inference services. However, LLM inference is computation intensive and memory intensive, and improper parameter configuration at LLM platforms may exacerbate the inference time. In this paper, we analyze the impact of LLM output token distribution on the inference queueing delay, where the max-token clipping and the batched inference are considered. By formulating an M/G/1 model, we observe that enforcing a maximum output token limit on a very small fraction of inference requests can significantly reduce the queueing delay, and our model facilitates the selection of the optimal limit. For the batch inference, we model the service process as a bulk queue in which the batch processing time is affected by the batch size and the maximum token size inside this batch jointly. The queueing delays of the batching of all buffered requests (dynamic batching), the batching of constant number of requests (fixed batching), and the batching without intra-batch waiting (elastic batching) are derived. Experimental results show that our mathematical models coincide with the event-driven simulations well.

Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust protection, particularly against adversarial jailbreaks. While deliberative safety reasoning alignment offers deeper alignment for defending against sophisticated attacks, effectively implanting such reasoning capability in SLMs with limited capabilities remains an open challenge. Moreover, safety reasoning incurs significant computational overhead as models apply reasoning to nearly all queries, making it impractical for resource-constrained edge deployment scenarios that demand rapid responses. We propose EASE, a novel framework that enables practical and Efficient safety Alignment for Small languagE models. Our approach first identifies the optimal safety reasoning teacher that can effectively distill safety reasoning capabilities to SLMs. We then align models to selectively activate safety reasoning for dangerous adversarial jailbreak queries while providing direct responses to straightforward malicious queries and general helpful tasks. This selective mechanism enables small models to maintain robust safety guarantees against sophisticated attacks while preserving computational efficiency for benign interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that EASE reduces jailbreak attack success rates by up to 17% compared to shallow alignment methods while reducing inference overhead by up to 90% compared to deliberative safety reasoning alignment, making it practical for SLMs real-world edge deployments.

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have expanded the capabilities of embodied intelligence. However, significant challenges remain in real-time decision-making in complex 3D environments, which demand second-level responses, high-resolution perception, and tactical reasoning under dynamic conditions. To advance the field, we introduce CombatVLA, an efficient VLA model optimized for combat tasks in 3D action role-playing games(ARPGs). Specifically, our CombatVLA is a 3B model trained on video-action pairs collected by an action tracker, where the data is formatted as action-of-thought (AoT) sequences. Thereafter, CombatVLA seamlessly integrates into an action execution framework, allowing efficient inference through our truncated AoT strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that CombatVLA not only outperforms all existing models on the combat understanding benchmark but also achieves a 50-fold acceleration in game combat. Moreover, it has a higher task success rate than human players. We will open-source all resources, including the action tracker, dataset, benchmark, model weights, training code, and the implementation of the framework at https://combatvla.github.io/.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown potential in qualitative tasks where easily defined performance measures are lacking. However, there are drawbacks when RLHF is commonly used to optimize for average human preferences, especially in generative tasks that demand diverse model responses. Meanwhile, Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms excel at identifying diverse and high-quality solutions but often rely on manually crafted diversity metrics. This paper introduces Quality Diversity through Human Feedback (QDHF), a novel approach that progressively infers diversity metrics from human judgments of similarity among solutions, thereby enhancing the applicability and effectiveness of QD algorithms in complex and open-ended domains. Empirical studies show that QDHF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in automatic diversity discovery and matches the efficacy of QD with manually crafted diversity metrics on standard benchmarks in robotics and reinforcement learning. Notably, in open-ended generative tasks, QDHF substantially enhances the diversity of text-to-image generation from a diffusion model and is more favorably received in user studies. We conclude by analyzing QDHF's scalability, robustness, and quality of derived diversity metrics, emphasizing its strength in open-ended optimization tasks. Code and tutorials are available at https://liding.info/qdhf.

Gender-neutral translation (GNT) that avoids biased and undue binary assumptions is a pivotal challenge for the creation of more inclusive translation technologies. Advancements for this task in Machine Translation (MT), however, are hindered by the lack of dedicated parallel data, which are necessary to adapt MT systems to satisfy neutral constraints. For such a scenario, large language models offer hitherto unforeseen possibilities, as they come with the distinct advantage of being versatile in various (sub)tasks when provided with explicit instructions. In this paper, we explore this potential to automate GNT by comparing MT with the popular GPT-4 model. Through extensive manual analyses, our study empirically reveals the inherent limitations of current MT systems in generating GNTs and provides valuable insights into the potential and challenges associated with prompting for neutrality.

In recent years, the demand for hyperspectral imaging devices has grown significantly, driven by their ability of capturing high-resolution spectral information. Among the several possible optical designs for acquiring hyperspectral images, there is a growing interest in interferometric spectral imaging systems based on division of aperture. These systems have the advantage of capturing snapshot acquisitions while maintaining a compact design. However, they require a careful calibration to operate properly. In this work, we present the interferometer response characterization algorithm (IRCA), a robust three-step procedure designed to characterize the transmittance response of multi-aperture imaging spectrometers based on the interferometry of Fabry-Perot. Additionally, we propose a formulation of the image formation model for such devices suitable to estimate the parameters of interest by considering the model under various regimes of finesse. The proposed algorithm processes the image output obtained from a set of monochromatic light sources and refines the results using nonlinear regression after an ad-hoc initialization. Through experimental analysis conducted on four different prototypes from the Image SPectrometer On Chip (ImSPOC) family, we validate the performance of our approach for characterization. The associated source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/danaroth83/irca.

Metamaterials with functional responses can exhibit varying properties under different conditions (e.g., wave-based responses or deformation-induced property variation). This work addresses the rapid inverse design of such metamaterials to meet target qualitative functional behaviors, a challenge due to its intractability and non-unique solutions. Unlike data-intensive and non-interpretable deep-learning-based methods, we propose the Random-forest-based Interpretable Generative Inverse Design (RIGID), a single-shot inverse design method for fast generation of metamaterial designs with on-demand functional behaviors. RIGID leverages the interpretability of a random forest-based "designrightarrowresponse" forward model, eliminating the need for a more complex "responserightarrowdesign" inverse model. Based on the likelihood of target satisfaction derived from the trained random forest, one can sample a desired number of design solutions using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We validate RIGID on acoustic and optical metamaterial design problems, each with fewer than 250 training samples. Compared to the genetic algorithm-based design generation approach, RIGID generates satisfactory solutions that cover a broader range of the design space, allowing for better consideration of additional figures of merit beyond target satisfaction. This work offers a new perspective on solving on-demand inverse design problems, showcasing the potential for incorporating interpretable machine learning into generative design under small data constraints.

Writing effective rebuttals is a high-stakes task that demands more than linguistic fluency, as it requires precise alignment between reviewer intent and manuscript details. Current solutions typically treat this as a direct-to-text generation problem, suffering from hallucination, overlooked critiques, and a lack of verifiable grounding. To address these limitations, we introduce RebuttalAgent, the first multi-agents framework that reframes rebuttal generation as an evidence-centric planning task. Our system decomposes complex feedback into atomic concerns and dynamically constructs hybrid contexts by synthesizing compressed summaries with high-fidelity text while integrating an autonomous and on-demand external search module to resolve concerns requiring outside literature. By generating an inspectable response plan before drafting, RebuttalAgent ensures that every argument is explicitly anchored in internal or external evidence. We validate our approach on the proposed RebuttalBench and demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms strong baselines in coverage, faithfulness, and strategic coherence, offering a transparent and controllable assistant for the peer review process. Code will be released.

With the booming demand for machine learning applications, it has been recognized that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale with the growing data volumes and application needs in our digital world. In response to this demand, several automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks have been developed to fill the gap of human expertise by automating the process of building machine learning pipelines. Each framework comes with different heuristics-based design decisions. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of the performance characteristics of six popular AutoML frameworks, namely, AutoWeka, AutoSKlearn, TPOT, Recipe, ATM, and SmartML, across 100 data sets from established AutoML benchmark suites. Our experimental evaluation considers different aspects for its comparison, including the performance impact of several design decisions, including time budget, size of search space, meta-learning, and ensemble construction. The results of our study reveal various interesting insights that can significantly guide and impact the design of AutoML frameworks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in language understanding and reasoning. Evaluating and analyzing their logical reasoning abilities has therefore become essential. However, existing datasets and benchmarks are often limited to overly simplistic, unnatural, or contextually constrained examples. In response to the growing demand, we introduce SmartyPat-Bench, a challenging, naturally expressed, and systematically labeled benchmark derived from real-world high-quality Reddit posts containing subtle logical fallacies. Unlike existing datasets and benchmarks, it provides more detailed annotations of logical fallacies and features more diverse data. To further scale up the study and address the limitations of manual data collection and labeling - such as fallacy-type imbalance and labor-intensive annotation - we introduce SmartyPat, an automated framework powered by logic programming-based oracles. SmartyPat utilizes Prolog rules to systematically generate logically fallacious statements, which are then refined into fluent natural-language sentences by LLMs, ensuring precise fallacy representation. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that SmartyPat produces fallacies comparable in subtlety and quality to human-generated content and significantly outperforms baseline methods. Finally, experiments reveal nuanced insights into LLM capabilities, highlighting that while excessive reasoning steps hinder fallacy detection accuracy, structured reasoning enhances fallacy categorization performance.

Interactive Generative Video (IGV) has emerged as a crucial technology in response to the growing demand for high-quality, interactive video content across various domains. In this paper, we define IGV as a technology that combines generative capabilities to produce diverse high-quality video content with interactive features that enable user engagement through control signals and responsive feedback. We survey the current landscape of IGV applications, focusing on three major domains: 1) gaming, where IGV enables infinite exploration in virtual worlds; 2) embodied AI, where IGV serves as a physics-aware environment synthesizer for training agents in multimodal interaction with dynamically evolving scenes; and 3) autonomous driving, where IGV provides closed-loop simulation capabilities for safety-critical testing and validation. To guide future development, we propose a comprehensive framework that decomposes an ideal IGV system into five essential modules: Generation, Control, Memory, Dynamics, and Intelligence. Furthermore, we systematically analyze the technical challenges and future directions in realizing each component for an ideal IGV system, such as achieving real-time generation, enabling open-domain control, maintaining long-term coherence, simulating accurate physics, and integrating causal reasoning. We believe that this systematic analysis will facilitate future research and development in the field of IGV, ultimately advancing the technology toward more sophisticated and practical applications.

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

In recent advancements in Conversational Large Language Models (LLMs), a concerning trend has emerged, showing that many new base LLMs experience a knowledge reduction in their foundational capabilities following Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). This process often leads to issues such as forgetting or a decrease in the base model's abilities. Moreover, fine-tuned models struggle to align with user preferences, inadvertently increasing the generation of toxic outputs when specifically prompted. To overcome these challenges, we adopted an innovative approach by completely bypassing SFT and directly implementing Harmless Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Our method not only preserves the base model's general capabilities but also significantly enhances its conversational abilities, while notably reducing the generation of toxic outputs. Our approach holds significant implications for fields that demand a nuanced understanding and generation of responses, such as customer service. We applied this methodology to Mistral, the most popular base model, thereby creating Mistral-Plus. Our validation across 11 general tasks demonstrates that Mistral-Plus outperforms similarly sized open-source base models and their corresponding instruct versions. Importantly, the conversational abilities of Mistral-Plus were significantly improved, indicating a substantial advancement over traditional SFT models in both safety and user preference alignment.

Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demand substantial computational resources for inference as the growth of their multimodal Key-Value (KV) cache, in response to increasing input lengths, challenges memory and time efficiency. Unlike single-modality LLMs that manage only textual contexts, the KV cache of long-context MLLMs includes representations from multiple images with temporal and spatial relationships and related textual contexts. The predominance of image tokens means traditional optimizations for LLMs' KV caches are unsuitable for multimodal long-context settings, and no prior works have addressed this challenge. In this work, we introduce LOOK-M, a pioneering, fine-tuning-free approach that efficiently reduces the multimodal KV cache size while maintaining performance comparable to a full cache. We observe that during prompt prefill, the model prioritizes more textual attention over image features, and based on the multimodal interaction observation, a new proposed text-prior method is explored to compress the KV cache. Furthermore, to mitigate the degradation of image contextual information, we propose several compensatory strategies using KV pairs merging. LOOK-M demonstrates that with a significant reduction in KV Cache memory usage, such as reducing it by 80% in some cases, it not only achieves up to 1.5x faster decoding but also maintains or even enhances performance across a variety of long context multimodal tasks.

In conversational AI research, there's a noticeable trend towards developing models with a larger number of parameters, exemplified by models like ChatGPT. While these expansive models tend to generate increasingly better chat responses, they demand significant computational resources and memory. This study explores a pertinent question: Can a combination of smaller models collaboratively achieve comparable or enhanced performance relative to a singular large model? We introduce an approach termed "blending", a straightforward yet effective method of integrating multiple chat AIs. Our empirical evidence suggests that when specific smaller models are synergistically blended, they can potentially outperform or match the capabilities of much larger counterparts. For instance, integrating just three models of moderate size (6B/13B paramaeters) can rival or even surpass the performance metrics of a substantially larger model like ChatGPT (175B+ paramaters). This hypothesis is rigorously tested using A/B testing methodologies with a large user base on the Chai research platform over a span of thirty days. The findings underscore the potential of the "blending" strategy as a viable approach for enhancing chat AI efficacy without a corresponding surge in computational demands.

Customer service is how companies interface with their customers. It can contribute heavily towards the overall customer satisfaction. However, high-quality service can become expensive, creating an incentive to make it as cost efficient as possible and prompting most companies to utilize AI-powered assistants, or "chat bots". On the other hand, human-to-human interaction is still desired by customers, especially when it comes to complex scenarios such as disputes and sensitive topics like bill payment. This raises the bar for customer service agents. They need to accurately understand the customer's question or concern, identify a solution that is acceptable yet feasible (and within the company's policy), all while handling multiple conversations at once. In this work, we introduce "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) as an add-on feature to an agent-facing customer service interface. AMA allows agents to ask questions to a large language model (LLM) on demand, as they are handling customer conversations -- the LLM provides accurate responses in real-time, reducing the amount of context switching the agent needs. In our internal experiments, we find that agents using AMA versus a traditional search experience spend approximately 10% fewer seconds per conversation containing a search, translating to millions of dollars of savings annually. Agents that used the AMA feature provided positive feedback nearly 80% of the time, demonstrating its usefulness as an AI-assisted feature for customer care.

We present SciArena, an open and collaborative platform for evaluating foundation models on scientific literature tasks. Unlike traditional benchmarks for scientific literature understanding and synthesis, SciArena engages the research community directly, following the Chatbot Arena evaluation approach of community voting on model comparisons. By leveraging collective intelligence, SciArena offers a community-driven evaluation of model performance on open-ended scientific tasks that demand literature-grounded, long-form responses. The platform currently supports 23 open-source and proprietary foundation models and has collected over 13,000 votes from trusted researchers across diverse scientific domains. We analyze the data collected so far and confirm that the submitted questions are diverse, aligned with real-world literature needs, and that participating researchers demonstrate strong self-consistency and inter-annotator agreement in their evaluations. We discuss the results and insights based on the model ranking leaderboard. To further promote research in building model-based automated evaluation systems for literature tasks, we release SciArena-Eval, a meta-evaluation benchmark based on our collected preference data. The benchmark measures the accuracy of models in judging answer quality by comparing their pairwise assessments with human votes. Our experiments highlight the benchmark's challenges and emphasize the need for more reliable automated evaluation methods.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on factoid question answering, they are still prone to hallucination and untruthful responses, particularly when tasks demand information outside their parametric knowledge. Indeed, truthfulness requires more than accuracy -- models must also recognize uncertainty and abstain when unsure to avoid hallucinations. This presents a fundamental challenge for existing methods: approaches that optimize for accuracy often amplify hallucinations, while those that encourage abstention can become overly conservative, sacrificing correct answers. Both extremes ultimately compromise truthfulness. In this work, we present TruthRL, a general reinforcement learning (RL) framework that directly optimizes the truthfulness of LLMs. Specifically, we implement TruthRL using GRPO with a simple yet effective ternary reward that distinguishes correct answers, hallucinations, and abstentions. It incentivizes models to reduce hallucinations not only by providing correct responses, but also by enabling abstention when uncertain, thereby improving truthfulness. Extensive experiments across four knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that, compared to vanilla RL, TruthRL significantly reduces hallucinations by 28.9% and improves truthfulness by 21.1%, with consistent gains across various backbone models (e.g., Qwen, Llama) under both retrieval and non-retrieval setups. In-depth ablation study demonstrates that vanilla accuracy-driven methods, such as supervised fine-tuning or RL with a binary reward, struggle to balance factual correctness and uncertainty. In contrast, our proposed truthfulness-driven TruthRL achieves strong performance in both accuracy and truthfulness, underscoring the importance of learning objective design for developing truthful LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in the medical domain, achieving strong performance on several benchmarks. However, they continue to underperform in real-world medical scenarios, which often demand stronger context-awareness, i.e., the ability to recognize missing or critical details (e.g., user identity, medical history, risk factors) and provide safe, helpful, and contextually appropriate responses. To address this issue, we propose Multifaceted Self-Refinement (MuSeR), a data-driven approach that enhances LLMs' context-awareness along three key facets (decision-making, communication, and safety) through self-evaluation and refinement. Specifically, we first design a attribute-conditioned query generator that simulates diverse real-world user contexts by varying attributes such as role, geographic region, intent, and degree of information ambiguity. An LLM then responds to these queries, self-evaluates its answers along three key facets, and refines its responses to better align with the requirements of each facet. Finally, the queries and refined responses are used for supervised fine-tuning to reinforce the model's context-awareness ability. Evaluation results on the latest HealthBench dataset demonstrate that our method significantly improves LLM performance across multiple aspects, with particularly notable gains in the context-awareness axis. Furthermore, by incorporating knowledge distillation with the proposed method, the performance of a smaller backbone LLM (e.g., Qwen3-32B) surpasses its teacher model, achieving a new SOTA across all open-source LLMs on HealthBench (63.8%) and its hard subset (43.1%). Code and dataset will be released at https://muser-llm.github.io.

Millions of smart meters have been deployed worldwide, collecting the total power consumed by individual households. Based on these data, electricity suppliers offer their clients energy monitoring solutions to provide feedback on the consumption of their individual appliances. Historically, such estimates have relied on statistical methods that use coarse-grained total monthly consumption and static customer data, such as appliance ownership. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the problem of disaggregating a household's collected total power consumption to retrieve the consumed power for individual appliances. Current state-of-the-art (SotA) solutions for NILM are based on deep-learning (DL) and operate on subsequences of an entire household consumption reading. However, the non-stationary nature of real-world smart meter data leads to a drift in the data distribution within each segmented window, which significantly affects model performance. This paper introduces NILMFormer, a Transformer-based architecture that incorporates a new subsequence stationarization/de-stationarization scheme to mitigate the distribution drift and that uses a novel positional encoding that relies only on the subsequence's timestamp information. Experiments with 4 real-world datasets show that NILMFormer significantly outperforms the SotA approaches. Our solution has been deployed as the backbone algorithm for EDF's (Electricit\'e De France) consumption monitoring service, delivering detailed insights to millions of customers about their individual appliances' power consumption. This paper appeared in KDD 2025.

Heat pumps are essential for decarbonizing residential heating but consume substantial electrical energy, impacting operational costs and grid demand. Many systems run inefficiently due to planning flaws, operational faults, or misconfigurations. While optimizing performance requires skilled professionals, labor shortages hinder large-scale interventions. However, digital tools and improved data availability create new service opportunities for energy efficiency, predictive maintenance, and demand-side management. To support research and practical solutions, we present an open-source dataset of electricity consumption from 1,408 households with heat pumps and smart electricity meters in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, recorded at 15-minute and daily resolutions between 2018-11-03 and 2024-03-21. The dataset includes household metadata, weather data from 8 stations, and ground truth data from 410 field visit protocols collected by energy consultants during system optimizations. Additionally, the dataset includes a Python-based data loader to facilitate seamless data processing and exploration.

The proposed IncidentResponseGPT framework - a novel system that applies generative artificial intelligence (AI) to potentially enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of traffic incident response. This model allows for synthesis of region-specific incident response guidelines and generates incident response plans adapted to specific area, aiming to expedite decision-making for traffic management authorities. This approach aims to accelerate incident resolution times by suggesting various recommendations (e.g. optimal rerouting strategies, estimating resource needs) to minimize the overall impact on the urban traffic network. The system suggests specific actions, including dynamic lane closures, optimized rerouting and dispatching appropriate emergency resources. IncidentResponseGPT employs the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank generated response plans based on criteria like impact minimization and resource efficiency based on their proximity to an human-proposed solution.

As smart grids (SG) increasingly rely on advanced technologies like sensors and communication systems for efficient energy generation, distribution, and consumption, they become enticing targets for sophisticated cyberattacks. These evolving threats demand robust security measures to maintain the stability and resilience of modern energy systems. While extensive research has been conducted, a comprehensive exploration of proactive cyber defense strategies utilizing Deep Learning (DL) in {SG} remains scarce in the literature. This survey bridges this gap, studying the latest DL techniques for proactive cyber defense. The survey begins with an overview of related works and our distinct contributions, followed by an examination of SG infrastructure. Next, we classify various cyber defense techniques into reactive and proactive categories. A significant focus is placed on DL-enabled proactive defenses, where we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of DL approaches, highlighting their roles and relevance in the proactive security of SG. Subsequently, we analyze the most significant DL-based methods currently in use. Further, we explore Moving Target Defense, a proactive defense strategy, and its interactions with DL methodologies. We then provide an overview of benchmark datasets used in this domain to substantiate the discourse.{ This is followed by a critical discussion on their practical implications and broader impact on cybersecurity in Smart Grids.} The survey finally lists the challenges associated with deploying DL-based security systems within SG, followed by an outlook on future developments in this key field.

Electrification of vehicles is a potential way of reducing fossil fuel usage and thus lessening environmental pollution. Electric Vehicles (EVs) of various types for different transport modes (including air, water, and land) are evolving. Moreover, different EV user groups (commuters, commercial or domestic users, drivers) may use different charging infrastructures (public, private, home, and workplace) at various times. Therefore, usage patterns and energy demand are very stochastic. Characterizing and forecasting the charging demand of these diverse EV usage profiles is essential in preventing power outages. Previously developed data-driven load models are limited to specific use cases and locations. None of these models are simultaneously adaptive enough to transfer knowledge of day-ahead forecasting among EV charging sites of diverse locations, trained with limited data, and cost-effective. This article presents a location-based load forecasting of EV charging sites using a deep Multi-Quantile Temporal Convolutional Network (MQ-TCN) to overcome the limitations of earlier models. We conducted our experiments on data from four charging sites, namely Caltech, JPL, Office-1, and NREL, which have diverse EV user types like students, full-time and part-time employees, random visitors, etc. With a Prediction Interval Coverage Probability (PICP) score of 93.62\%, our proposed deep MQ-TCN model exhibited a remarkable 28.93\% improvement over the XGBoost model for a day-ahead load forecasting at the JPL charging site. By transferring knowledge with the inductive Transfer Learning (TL) approach, the MQ-TCN model achieved a 96.88\% PICP score for the load forecasting task at the NREL site using only two weeks of data.

Driven by advancements in sensing and computing, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based methods have demonstrated significant potential in effectively tackling distribution system restoration (DSR) challenges under uncertain operational scenarios. However, the data-intensive nature of DRL poses obstacles in achieving satisfactory DSR solutions for large-scale, complex distribution systems. Inspired by the transformative impact of emerging foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), across various domains, this paper explores an innovative approach harnessing LLMs' powerful computing capabilities to address scalability challenges inherent in conventional DRL methods for solving DSR. To our knowledge, this study represents the first exploration of foundation models, including LLMs, in revolutionizing conventional DRL applications in power system operations. Our contributions are twofold: 1) introducing a novel LLM-powered Physics-Informed Decision Transformer (PIDT) framework that leverages LLMs to transform conventional DRL methods for DSR operations, and 2) conducting comparative studies to assess the performance of the proposed LLM-powered PIDT framework at its initial development stage for solving DSR problems. While our primary focus in this paper is on DSR operations, the proposed PIDT framework can be generalized to optimize sequential decision-making across various power system operations.

As energy systems transform to rely on renewable energy and electrification, they encounter stronger year-to-year variability in energy supply and demand. However, most infrastructure planning is based on a single weather year, resulting in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we optimize energy infrastructure for a European energy system designed for net-zero CO_2 emissions in 62 different weather years. Subsequently, we fix the capacity layouts and simulate their operation in every weather year, to evaluate resource adequacy and CO_2 emissions abatement. We show that interannual weather variability causes variation of pm10\% in total system cost. The most expensive capacity layout obtains the lowest net CO_2 emissions but not the highest resource adequacy. Instead, capacity layouts designed with years including compound weather events result in a more robust and cost-effective design. Deploying CO_2-emitting backup generation is a cost-effective robustness measure, which only increase CO_2 emissions marginally as the average CO_2 emissions remain less than 1\% of 1990 levels. Our findings highlight how extreme weather years drive investments in robustness measures, making them compatible with all weather conditions within six decades of historical weather data.

Smart home energy management systems help the distribution grid operate more efficiently and reliably, and enable effective penetration of distributed renewable energy sources. These systems rely on robust forecasting, optimization, and control/scheduling algorithms that can handle the uncertain nature of demand and renewable generation. This paper proposes an advanced ML algorithm, called Recurrent Trend Predictive Neural Network based Forecast Embedded Scheduling (rTPNN-FES), to provide efficient residential demand control. rTPNN-FES is a novel neural network architecture that simultaneously forecasts renewable energy generation and schedules household appliances. By its embedded structure, rTPNN-FES eliminates the utilization of separate algorithms for forecasting and scheduling and generates a schedule that is robust against forecasting errors. This paper also evaluates the performance of the proposed algorithm for an IoT-enabled smart home. The evaluation results reveal that rTPNN-FES provides near-optimal scheduling 37.5 times faster than the optimization while outperforming state-of-the-art forecasting techniques.

As a telecom provider, our company has a critical mission to maintain telecom services even during power outages. To accomplish the mission, it is essential to maintain the power of the telecom base stations. Here we consider a solution where electric vehicles (EVs) directly supply power to base stations by traveling to their locations. The goal is to find EV routes that minimize both the total travel distance of all EVs and the number of downed base stations. In this paper, we formulate this routing problem as a new variant of the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) and propose a solver that combines a rule-based vehicle selector and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based node selector. The rule of the vehicle selector ensures the exact environmental states when the selected EV starts to move. In addition, the node selection by the RL model enables fast route generation, which is critical in emergencies. We evaluate our solver on both synthetic datasets and real datasets. The results show that our solver outperforms baselines in terms of the objective value and computation time. Moreover, we analyze the generalization and scalability of our solver, demonstrating the capability toward unseen settings and large-scale problems. Check also our project page: https://ntt-dkiku.github.io/rl-evrpeps.

Accurate electricity load forecasting is essential for grid stability, resource optimization, and renewable energy integration. While transformer-based deep learning models like TimeGPT have gained traction in time-series forecasting, their effectiveness in long-term electricity load prediction remains uncertain. This study evaluates forecasting models ranging from classical regression techniques to advanced deep learning architectures using data from the ESD 2025 competition. The dataset includes two years of historical electricity load data, alongside temperature and global horizontal irradiance (GHI) across five sites, with a one-day-ahead forecasting horizon. Since actual test set load values remain undisclosed, leveraging predicted values would accumulate errors, making this a long-term forecasting challenge. We employ (i) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction and (ii) frame the task as a regression problem, using temperature and GHI as covariates to predict load for each hour, (iii) ultimately stacking 24 models to generate yearly forecasts. Our results reveal that deep learning models, including TimeGPT, fail to consistently outperform simpler statistical and machine learning approaches due to the limited availability of training data and exogenous variables. In contrast, XGBoost, with minimal feature engineering, delivers the lowest error rates across all test cases while maintaining computational efficiency. This highlights the limitations of deep learning in long-term electricity forecasting and reinforces the importance of model selection based on dataset characteristics rather than complexity. Our study provides insights into practical forecasting applications and contributes to the ongoing discussion on the trade-offs between traditional and modern forecasting methods.

Hydrogen-electrical microgrids are increasingly assuming an important role on the pathway toward decarbonization of energy and transportation systems. This paper studies networked hydrogen-electrical microgrids planning (NHEMP), considering a critical but often-overlooked issue, i.e., the demand-inducing effect (DIE) associated with infrastructure development decisions. Specifically, higher refueling capacities will attract more refueling demand of hydrogen-powered vehicles (HVs). To capture such interactions between investment decisions and induced refueling demand, we introduce a decision-dependent uncertainty (DDU) set and build a trilevel stochastic-robust formulation. The upper-level determines optimal investment strategies for hydrogen-electrical microgrids, the lower-level optimizes the risk-aware operation schedules across a series of stochastic scenarios, and, for each scenario, the middle-level identifies the "worst" situation of refueling demand within an individual DDU set to ensure economic feasibility. Then, an adaptive and exact decomposition algorithm, based on Parametric Column-and-Constraint Generation (PC&CG), is customized and developed to address the computational challenge and to quantitatively analyze the impact of DIE. Case studies on an IEEE exemplary system validate the effectiveness of the proposed NHEMP model and the PC&CG algorithm. It is worth highlighting that DIE can make an important contribution to the economic benefits of NHEMP, yet its significance will gradually decrease when the main bottleneck transits to other system restrictions.

For industrial control, developing high-performance controllers with few samples and low technical debt is appealing. Foundation models, possessing rich prior knowledge obtained from pre-training with Internet-scale corpus, have the potential to be a good controller with proper prompts. In this paper, we take HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) building control as an example to examine the ability of GPT-4 (one of the first-tier foundation models) as the controller. To control HVAC, we wrap the task as a language game by providing text including a short description for the task, several selected demonstrations, and the current observation to GPT-4 on each step and execute the actions responded by GPT-4. We conduct series of experiments to answer the following questions: 1)~How well can GPT-4 control HVAC? 2)~How well can GPT-4 generalize to different scenarios for HVAC control? 3) How different parts of the text context affect the performance? In general, we found GPT-4 achieves the performance comparable to RL methods with few samples and low technical debt, indicating the potential of directly applying foundation models to industrial control tasks.

This study assesses air quality (AQ) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the rapid expansion of data centers in Texas, a major hub due to infrastructure, electricity markets, and business conditions. AQ impacts were separated from GHG emissions to clarify sources, regulations, and mitigation strategies. Electricity consumption and cooling systems dominate GHG emissions, with a 10 megawatt data center generating about 37,668 metric tons CO2 annually, while construction materials and IT equipment add substantial embodied emissions. Local AQ impacts, often overlooked, arise from diesel backup generators, construction equipment, and commuting. Generator testing alone can emit about 12 metric tons of NOx annually per facility, worsening ozone issues in regions such as Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Mitigation strategies include advanced cooling, renewable energy procurement, cleaner backup power (fuel cells, batteries), sustainable construction, and standardized reporting. ERCOT forecasts project 39 to 78 gigawatts of new data center load by 2030, potentially leading to 170 to 205 million metric tons of annual CO2 emissions. Aggressive adoption of renewables and advanced technologies could cut emissions by 50 to 80 percent, avoiding 85 to 165 million metric tons of CO2. The study identifies research and policy gaps, including the need for cumulative air dispersion modeling, AQ-specific regulations, and mandatory efficiency standards. Findings underscore the importance of aligning Texas digital infrastructure growth with environmental and community health protections.

Urgent care clinics and emergency departments around the world periodically suffer from extended wait times beyond patient expectations due to inadequate staffing levels. These delays have been linked with adverse clinical outcomes. Previous research into forecasting demand this domain has mostly used a collection of statistical techniques, with machine learning approaches only now beginning to emerge in recent literature. The forecasting problem for this domain is difficult and has also been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic which has introduced an additional complexity to this estimation due to typical demand patterns being disrupted. This study explores the ability of machine learning methods to generate accurate patient presentations at two large urgent care clinics located in Auckland, New Zealand. A number of machine learning algorithms were explored in order to determine the most effective technique for this problem domain, with the task of making forecasts of daily patient demand three months in advance. The study also performed an in-depth analysis into the model behaviour in respect to the exploration of which features are most effective at predicting demand and which features are capable of adaptation to the volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. The results showed that ensemble-based methods delivered the most accurate and consistent solutions on average, generating improvements in the range of 23%-27% over the existing in-house methods for estimating the daily demand.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimizing decision-making in complex systems under uncertainty, an essential challenge in real-world settings, particularly in the context of the energy transition. A representative example is remote microgrids that supply power to communities disconnected from the main grid. Enabling the energy transition in such systems requires coordinated control of renewable sources like wind turbines, alongside fuel generators and batteries, to meet demand while minimizing fuel consumption and battery degradation under exogenous and intermittent load and wind conditions. These systems must often conform to extensive regulations and complex operational constraints. To ensure that RL agents respect these constraints, it is crucial to provide interpretable guarantees. In this paper, we introduce Shielded Controller Units (SCUs), a systematic and interpretable approach that leverages prior knowledge of system dynamics to ensure constraint satisfaction. Our shield synthesis methodology, designed for real-world deployment, decomposes the environment into a hierarchical structure where each SCU explicitly manages a subset of constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SCUs on a remote microgrid optimization task with strict operational requirements. The RL agent, equipped with SCUs, achieves a 24% reduction in fuel consumption without increasing battery degradation, outperforming other baselines while satisfying all constraints. We hope SCUs contribute to the safe application of RL to the many decision-making challenges linked to the energy transition.

The widespread adoption of dynamic Time-of-Use (dToU) electricity tariffs requires accurately identifying households that would benefit from such pricing structures. However, the use of real consumption data poses serious privacy concerns, motivating the adoption of synthetic alternatives. In this study, we conduct a comparative evaluation of four synthetic data generation methods, Wasserstein-GP Generative Adversarial Networks (WGAN), Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN), Diffusion Models, and Gaussian noise augmentation, under different synthetic regimes. We assess classification utility, distribution fidelity, and privacy leakage. Our results show that architectural design plays a key role: diffusion models achieve the highest utility (macro-F1 up to 88.2%), while CTGAN provide the strongest resistance to reconstruction attacks. These findings highlight the potential of structured generative models for developing privacy-preserving, data-driven energy systems.

Motivated by the operational problems in click and collect systems, such as curbside pickup programs, we study a joint admission control and capacity allocation problem. We consider a system where arriving customers have preferred service delivery times and gauge the service quality based on the service provider's ability to complete the service as close as possible to the preferred time. Customers can be of different priority classes, and their priority may increase as they wait longer in the queue. The service provider can reject customers upon their arrival if the system is overloaded or outsource the service (alternatively work overtime) when the capacity is not enough. The service provider's goal is to find the minimum-cost admission and capacity allocation policy to dynamically decide when to serve and whom to serve. We model this problem as a Markov Decision Process. Our structural results partially characterize a set of suboptimal solutions, and we develop solution methods using these results. We also develop a problem-specific approximation method that is based on state aggregation to overcome the computational challenges. We present extensive computational results and discuss the impact of problem parameters on the optimal policy.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in utilizing machine learning for accurate classification of power quality events (PQEs). However, most of these studies are performed assuming an ideal situation, while in reality, we can have measurement noise, DC offset, and variations in the voltage signal's amplitude and frequency. Building on the prior PQE classification works using deep learning, this paper proposes a deep-learning framework that leverages attention-enabled Transformers as a tool to accurately classify PQEs under the aforementioned considerations. The proposed framework can operate directly on the voltage signals with no need for a separate feature extraction or calculation phase. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms recently proposed learning-based techniques. It can accurately classify PQEs under the aforementioned conditions with an accuracy varying between 99.81%-91.43% depending on the signal-to-noise ratio, DC offsets, and variations in the signal amplitude and frequency.

We present a large real-world dataset obtained from monitoring a smart company facility over the course of six years, from 2018 to 2023. The dataset includes energy consumption data from various facility areas and components, energy production data from a photovoltaic system and a combined heat and power plant, operational data from heating and cooling systems, and weather data from an on-site weather station. The measurement sensors installed throughout the facility are organized in a hierarchical metering structure with multiple sub-metering levels, which is reflected in the dataset. The dataset contains measurement data from 72 energy meters, 9 heat meters and a weather station. Both raw and processed data at different processing levels, including labeled issues, is available. In this paper, we describe the data acquisition and post-processing employed to create the dataset. The dataset enables the application of a wide range of methods in the domain of energy management, including optimization, modeling, and machine learning to optimize building operations and reduce costs and carbon emissions.

Electrification of heavy-duty vehicles places substantial stress on distribution grids, and Charging Energy Hubs (CEHs) mitigate these impacts by integrating charging infrastructure with renewable energy sources and battery storage. Optimal sizing of CEH components is therefore a critical investment decision, yet challenging because design choices depend strongly on operational dynamics. This work presents a mixed-integer linear programming model for the optimal sizing of CEH components, using a co-design approach that jointly optimizes component sizing and operational decisions. A case study for a heavy-duty fleet demonstrates the effectiveness of the method for cost-efficient, scalable, and grid-compliant CEH planning.

Accurate power load forecasting is essential for the efficient operation and planning of electrical grids, particularly given the increased variability and complexity introduced by renewable energy sources. This paper introduces GAT-LSTM, a hybrid model that combines Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. A key innovation of the model is the incorporation of edge attributes, such as line capacities and efficiencies, into the attention mechanism, enabling it to dynamically capture spatial relationships grounded in grid-specific physical and operational constraints. Additionally, by employing an early fusion of spatial graph embeddings and temporal sequence features, the model effectively learns and predicts complex interactions between spatial dependencies and temporal patterns, providing a realistic representation of the dynamics of power grids. Experimental evaluations on the Brazilian Electricity System dataset demonstrate that the GAT-LSTM model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving reductions of 21. 8% in MAE, 15. 9% in RMSE and 20. 2% in MAPE. These results underscore the robustness and adaptability of the GAT-LSTM model, establishing it as a powerful tool for applications in grid management and energy planning.

Computing is still under a significant threat from ransomware, which necessitates prompt action to prevent it. Ransomware attacks can have a negative impact on how smart grids, particularly digital substations. In addition to examining a ransomware detection method using artificial intelligence (AI), this paper offers a ransomware attack modeling technique that targets the disrupted operation of a digital substation. The first, binary data is transformed into image data and fed into the convolution neural network model using federated learning. The experimental findings demonstrate that the suggested technique detects ransomware with a high accuracy rate.