Short-Term Electricity-Load Forecasting (STELF) refers to the prediction of the immediate demand (in the next few hours to several days) for the power system. Various external factors, such as weather changes and the emergence of new electricity consumption scenarios, can impact electricity demand, causing load data to fluctuate and become non-linear, which increases the complexity and difficulty of STELF. In the past decade, deep learning has been applied to STELF, modeling and predicting electricity demand with high accuracy, and contributing significantly to the development of STELF. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on deep-learning-based STELF over the past ten years. It examines the entire forecasting process, including data pre-processing, feature extraction, deep-learning modeling and optimization, and results evaluation. This paper also identifies some research challenges and potential research directions to be further investigated in future work.

This is the second manuscript in a two-part series that uses diagnostic testing to understand the connection between prevalence (i.e. number of elements in a class), uncertainty quantification (UQ), and classification theory. Part I considered the context of supervised machine learning (ML) and established a duality between prevalence and the concept of relative conditional probability. The key idea of that analysis was to train a family of discriminative classifiers by minimizing a sum of prevalence-weighted empirical risk functions. The resulting outputs can be interpreted as relative probability level-sets, which thereby yield uncertainty estimates in the class labels. This procedure also demonstrated that certain discriminative and generative ML models are equivalent. Part II considers the extent to which these results can be extended to tasks in unsupervised learning through recourse to ideas in linear algebra. We first observe that the distribution of an impure population, for which the class of a corresponding sample is unknown, can be parameterized in terms of a prevalence. This motivates us to introduce the concept of linearly independent populations, which have different but unknown prevalence values. Using this, we identify an isomorphism between classifiers defined in terms of impure and pure populations. In certain cases, this also leads to a nonlinear system of equations whose solution yields the prevalence values of the linearly independent populations, fully realizing unsupervised learning as a generalization of supervised learning. We illustrate our methods in the context of synthetic data and a research-use-only SARS-CoV-2 enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).

Reasoning about real-life events is a unifying challenge in AI and NLP that has profound utility in a variety of domains, while fallacy in high-stake applications could be catastrophic. Able to work with diverse text in these domains, large language models (LLMs) have proven capable of answering questions and solving problems. However, I show that end-to-end LLMs still systematically fail to reason about complex events, and they lack interpretability due to their black-box nature. To address these issues, I propose three general approaches to use LLMs in conjunction with a structured representation of events. The first is a language-based representation involving relations of sub-events that can be learned by LLMs via fine-tuning. The second is a semi-symbolic representation involving states of entities that can be predicted and leveraged by LLMs via few-shot prompting. The third is a fully symbolic representation that can be predicted by LLMs trained with structured data and be executed by symbolic solvers. On a suite of event reasoning tasks spanning common-sense inference and planning, I show that each approach greatly outperforms end-to-end LLMs with more interpretability. These results suggest manners of synergy between LLMs and structured representations for event reasoning and beyond.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its variants have gained popularity as effective methods for solving multi-step reasoning problems using pretrained large language models (LLMs). In this work, we analyze CoT prompting from a statistical estimation perspective, providing a comprehensive characterization of its sample complexity. To this end, we introduce a multi-step latent variable model that encapsulates the reasoning process, where the latent variable encodes the task information. Under this framework, we demonstrate that when the pretraining dataset is sufficiently large, the estimator formed by CoT prompting is equivalent to a Bayesian estimator. This estimator effectively solves the multi-step reasoning problem by aggregating a posterior distribution inferred from the demonstration examples in the prompt. Moreover, we prove that the statistical error of the CoT estimator can be decomposed into two main components: (i) a prompting error, which arises from inferring the true task using CoT prompts, and (ii) the statistical error of the pretrained LLM. We establish that, under appropriate assumptions, the prompting error decays exponentially to zero as the number of demonstrations increases. Additionally, we explicitly characterize the approximation and generalization errors of the pretrained LLM. Notably, we construct a transformer model that approximates the target distribution of the multi-step reasoning problem with an error that decreases exponentially in the number of transformer blocks. Our analysis extends to other variants of CoT, including Self-Consistent CoT, Tree-of-Thought, and Selection-Inference, offering a broad perspective on the efficacy of these methods. We also provide numerical experiments to validate the theoretical findings.

This report introduces xGen-MM (also known as BLIP-3), a framework for developing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). The framework comprises meticulously curated datasets, a training recipe, model architectures, and a resulting suite of LMMs. xGen-MM, short for xGen-MultiModal, expands the Salesforce xGen initiative on foundation AI models. Our models undergo rigorous evaluation across a range of tasks, including both single and multi-image benchmarks. Our pre-trained base model exhibits strong in-context learning capabilities and the instruction-tuned model demonstrates competitive performance among open-source LMMs with similar model sizes. In addition, we introduce a safety-tuned model with DPO, aiming to mitigate harmful behaviors such as hallucinations and improve safety. We open-source our models, curated large-scale datasets, and our fine-tuning codebase to facilitate further advancements in LMM research. Associated resources will be available on our project page above.

Text classification, a classic task in natural language processing (NLP), involves assigning predefined categories to textual data and is crucial for applications ranging from sentiment analysis to spam detection. This thesis advances text classification by harnessing the intrinsic knowledge of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to address three challenging scenarios: distractor selection for multiple-choice cloze questions, improving robustness for prompt-based zero-shot text classification, and demonstration selection for retrieval-based in-context learning. Firstly, we focus on selecting distractors for multiple-choice cloze questions, ensuring that they are misleading yet incorrect. We assess the relationship between human experts' annotations (accept/reject) and various features, including context-free features (e.g., word frequency) and context-sensitive features (e.g., conditional probabilities of fillin-the-blank words). We utilize pretrained embeddings and follow annotation instructions for context-free feature design, and we find that using contextualized word representations from PLMs as features drastically improves performance over traditional feature-based models, even rivaling human performance (Chapter 3).

More refined resource management and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning is a critical goal of wireless communication technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel Business-Centric Network (BCN) aimed at enabling scalable QoS provisioning, based on a cross-layer framework that captures the relationship between application, transport parameters, and channels. We investigate both continuous flow and event-driven flow models, presenting key QoS metrics such as throughput, delay, and reliability. By jointly considering power and bandwidth allocation, transmission parameters, and AP network topology across layers, we optimize weighted resource efficiency with statistical QoS provisioning. To address the coupling among parameters, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, which is Collaborative Optimization among Heterogeneous Actors with Experience Sharing (COHA-ES). Power and sub-channel (SC) Actors representing multiple APs are jointly optimized under the unified guidance of a common critic. Additionally, we introduce a novel multithreaded experience-sharing mechanism to accelerate training and enhance rewards. Extensive comparative experiments validate the effectiveness of our DRL framework in terms of convergence and efficiency. Moreover, comparative analyses demonstrate the comprehensive advantages of the BCN structure in enhancing both spectral and energy efficiency.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for fine-tuning foundation models using distributed data in a privacy-preserving manner. Under limited computational resources, clients often find it more practical to fine-tune a selected subset of layers, rather than the entire model, based on their task-specific data. In this study, we provide a thorough theoretical exploration of selective layer fine-tuning in FL, emphasizing a flexible approach that allows the clients to adjust their selected layers according to their local data and resources. We theoretically demonstrate that the layer selection strategy has a significant impact on model convergence in two critical aspects: the importance of selected layers and the heterogeneous choices across clients. Drawing from these insights, we further propose a strategic layer selection method that utilizes local gradients and regulates layer selections across clients. The extensive experiments on both image and text datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy compared with several baselines, highlighting its advances in identifying critical layers that adapt to the client heterogeneity and training dynamics in FL.

Stochastic Network Optimization (SNO) concerns scheduling in stochastic queueing systems. It has been widely studied in network theory. Classical SNO algorithms require network conditions to be stationary with time, which fails to capture the non-stationary components in many real-world scenarios. Many existing algorithms also assume knowledge of network conditions before decision, which rules out applications where unpredictability presents. Motivated by these issues, we consider Adversarial Network Optimization (ANO) under bandit feedback. Specifically, we consider the task of *i)* maximizing some unknown and time-varying utility function associated to scheduler's actions, where *ii)* the underlying network is a non-stationary multi-hop one whose conditions change arbitrarily with time, and *iii)* only bandit feedback (effect of actually deployed actions) is revealed after decisions. Our proposed `UMO2` algorithm ensures network stability and also matches the utility maximization performance of any "mildly varying" reference policy up to a polynomially decaying gap. To our knowledge, no previous ANO algorithm handled multi-hop networks or achieved utility guarantees under bandit feedback, whereas ours can do both. Technically, our method builds upon a novel integration of online learning into Lyapunov analyses: To handle complex inter-dependencies among queues in multi-hop networks, we propose meticulous techniques to balance online learning and Lyapunov arguments. To tackle the learning obstacles due to potentially unbounded queue sizes, we design a new online linear optimization algorithm that automatically adapts to loss magnitudes. To maximize utility, we propose a bandit convex optimization algorithm with novel queue-dependent learning rate scheduling that suites drastically varying queue lengths. Our new insights in online learning can be of independent interest.

Accurately predicting the geographic ranges of species is crucial for assisting conservation efforts. Traditionally, range maps were manually created by experts. However, species distribution models (SDMs) and, more recently, deep learning-based variants offer a potential automated alternative. Deep learning-based SDMs generate a continuous probability representing the predicted presence of a species at a given location, which must be binarized by setting per-species thresholds to obtain binary range maps. However, selecting appropriate per-species thresholds to binarize these predictions is non-trivial as different species can require distinct thresholds. In this work, we evaluate different approaches for automatically identifying the best thresholds for binarizing range maps using presence-only data. This includes approaches that require the generation of additional pseudo-absence data, along with ones that only require presence data. We also propose an extension of an existing presence-only technique that is more robust to outliers. We perform a detailed evaluation of different thresholding techniques on the tasks of binary range estimation and large-scale fine-grained visual classification, and we demonstrate improved performance over existing pseudo-absence free approaches using our method.