Binary human choice feedback is widely used in interactive preference learning for its simplicity, but it provides limited information about preference strength. To overcome this limitation, we leverage human response times, which inversely correlate with preference strength, as complementary information. Our work integrates the EZ-diffusion model, which jointly models human choices and response times, into preference-based linear bandits. We introduce a computationally efficient utility estimator that reformulates the utility estimation problem using both choices and response times as a linear regression problem. Theoretical and empirical comparisons with traditional choice-only estimators reveal that for queries with strong preferences ("easy" queries), choices alone provide limited information, while response times offer valuable complementary information about preference strength. As a result, incorporating response times makes easy queries more useful. We demonstrate this advantage in the fixed-budget best-arm identification problem, with simulations based on three real-world datasets, consistently showing accelerated learning when response times are incorporated.

Recent breakthroughs of large language models (LLMs) have exhibited superior capability across major industries and stimulated multi-hundred-billion-dollar investment in AI-centric data centers in the next 3-5 years. This, in turn, bring the increasing concerns on sustainability and AI-related energy usage. However, there is a largely overlooked issue as challenging and critical as AI model and infrastructure efficiency: the disruptive dynamic power consumption behaviour. With fast, transient dynamics, AI infrastructure features ultra-low inertia, sharp power surge and dip, and a significant peak-idle power ratio. The power scale covers from several hundred watts to megawatts, even to gigawatts. These never-seen-before characteristics make AI a very unique load and pose threats to the power grid reliability and resilience. To reveal this hidden problem, this paper examines the scale of AI power consumption, analyzes AI transient behaviour in various scenarios, develops high-level mathematical models to depict AI workload behaviour and discusses the multifaceted challenges and opportunities they potentially bring to existing power grids. Observing the rapidly evolving machine learning (ML) and AI technologies, this work emphasizes the critical need for interdisciplinary approaches to ensure reliable and sustainable AI infrastructure development, and provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners to tackle such challenges.

This work presents a detailed case study on using Generative AI (GenAI) to develop AI surrogates for simulation models in fusion energy research. The scope includes the methodology, implementation, and results of using GenAI to assist in model development and optimization, comparing these results with previous manually developed models.

The Orienteering Problem (OP) is a well-studied routing problem that has been extended to incorporate uncertainties, reflecting stochastic or dynamic travel costs, prize-collection costs, and prizes. Existing approaches may, however, be inefficient in real-world applications due to insufficient modeling knowledge and initially unknowable parameters in online scenarios. Thus, we propose the Uncertain and Dynamic Orienteering Problem (UDOP), modeling travel costs as distributions with unknown and time-variant parameters. UDOP also associates uncertain travel costs with dynamic prizes and prize-collection costs for its objective and budget constraints. To address UDOP, we develop an ADaptive Approach for Probabilistic paThs - ADAPT, that iteratively performs 'execution' and 'online planning' based on an initial 'offline' solution. The execution phase updates system status and records online cost observations. The online planner employs a Bayesian approach to adaptively estimate power consumption and optimize path sequence based on safety beliefs. We evaluate ADAPT in a practical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) charging scheduling problem for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks. The UAV must optimize its path to recharge sensor nodes efficiently while managing its energy under uncertain conditions. ADAPT maintains comparable solution quality and computation time while offering superior robustness. Extensive simulations show that ADAPT achieves a 100% Mission Success Rate (MSR) across all tested scenarios, outperforming comparable heuristic-based and frequentist approaches that fail up to 70% (under challenging conditions) and averaging 67% MSR, respectively. This work advances the field of OP with uncertainties, offering a reliable and efficient approach for real-world applications in uncertain and dynamic environments.

Accurately estimating forest biomass is crucial for global carbon cycle modelling and climate change mitigation. Tree height, a key factor in biomass calculations, can be measured using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology. This study applies machine learning to extract forest height data from two SAR products: Single Look Complex (SLC) images and tomographic cubes, in preparation for the ESA Biomass Satellite mission. We use the TomoSense dataset, containing SAR and LiDAR data from Germany's Eifel National Park, to develop and evaluate height estimation models. Our approach includes classical methods, deep learning with a 3D U-Net, and Bayesian-optimized techniques. By testing various SAR frequencies and polarimetries, we establish a baseline for future height and biomass modelling. Best-performing models predict forest height to be within 2.82m mean absolute error for canopies around 30m, advancing our ability to measure global carbon stocks and support climate action.

Fuzzy General Grey Cognitive Map (FGGCM) and Fuzzy Grey Cognitive Map (FGCM) are extensions of Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) in terms of uncertainty. FGGCM allows for the processing of general grey number with multiple intervals, enabling FCM to better address uncertain situations. Although the convergence of FCM and FGCM has been discussed in many literature, the convergence of FGGCM has not been thoroughly explored. This paper aims to fill this research gap. First, metrics for the general grey number space and its vector space is given and proved using the Minkowski inequality. By utilizing the characteristic that Cauchy sequences are convergent sequences, the completeness of these two space is demonstrated. On this premise, utilizing Banach fixed point theorem and Browder-Gohde-Kirk fixed point theorem, combined with Lagrange's mean value theorem and Cauchy's inequality, deduces the sufficient conditions for FGGCM to converge to a unique fixed point when using tanh and sigmoid functions as activation functions. The sufficient conditions for the kernels and greyness of FGGCM to converge to a unique fixed point are also provided separately. Finally, based on Web Experience and Civil engineering FCM, designed corresponding FGGCM with sigmoid and tanh as activation functions by modifying the weights to general grey numbers. By comparing with the convergence theorems of FCM and FGCM, the effectiveness of the theorems proposed in this paper was verified. It was also demonstrated that the convergence theorems of FCM are special cases of the theorems proposed in this paper. The study for convergence of FGGCM is of great significance for guiding the learning algorithm of FGGCM, which is needed for designing FGGCM with specific fixed points, lays a solid theoretical foundation for the application of FGGCM in fields such as control, prediction, and decision support systems.

This paper presents a novel conversational AI-enabled active ideation interface as a creative idea-generation tool to assist novice designers in mitigating the initial latency and ideation bottlenecks that are commonly observed. It is a dynamic, interactive, and contextually responsive approach, actively involving a large language model (LLM) from the domain of natural language processing (NLP) in artificial intelligence (AI) to produce multiple statements of potential ideas for different design problems. Integrating such AI models with ideation creates what we refer to as an Active Ideation scenario, which helps foster continuous dialogue-based interaction, context-sensitive conversation, and prolific idea generation. A pilot study was conducted with thirty novice designers to generate ideas for given problems using traditional methods and the new CAI-based interface. The key parameters of fluency, novelty, and variety were used to compare the outcomes qualitatively by a panel of experts. The findings demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed tool for generating prolific, diverse and novel ideas. The interface was enhanced by incorporating a prompt-engineered structured dialogue style for each ideation stage to make it uniform and more convenient for the designers. The resulting responses of such a structured CAI interface were found to be more succinct and aligned towards the subsequent design stage, namely conceptualization. The paper thus established the rich potential of using Generative AI (Gen-AI) for the early ill-structured phase of the creative product design process.

The increasing use of machine learning (ML) models in signal processing has raised concerns about their environmental impact, particularly during resource-intensive training phases. In this study, we present a novel methodology for normalizing energy consumption across different hardware platforms to facilitate fair and consistent comparisons. We evaluate different normalization strategies by measuring the energy used to train different ML architectures on different GPUs, focusing on audio tagging tasks. Our approach shows that the number of reference points, the type of regression and the inclusion of computational metrics significantly influences the normalization process. We find that the appropriate selection of two reference points provides robust normalization, while incorporating the number of floating-point operations and parameters improves the accuracy of energy consumption predictions. By supporting more accurate energy consumption evaluation, our methodology promotes the development of environmentally sustainable ML practices.

Deep generative models (DGMs) have proven to be powerful in generating realistic data samples. Their capability to learn the underlying distribution of a dataset enable them to generate synthetic data samples that closely resemble the original training dataset, thus addressing the challenge of data scarcity. In this work, we investigated the capabilities of DGMs by developing a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) model to augment the critical heat flux (CHF) measurement data that was used to generate the 2006 Groeneveld lookup table. To determine how this approach compared to traditional methods, a fine-tuned deep neural network (DNN) regression model was created and evaluated with the same dataset. Both the CVAE and DNN models achieved small mean absolute relative errors, with the CVAE model maintaining more favorable results. To quantify the uncertainty in the model's predictions, uncertainty quantification (UQ) was performed with repeated sampling of the CVAE model and ensembling of the DNN model. Following UQ, the DNN ensemble notably improved performance when compared to the baseline DNN model, while the CVAE model achieved similar results to its non-UQ results. The CVAE model was shown to have significantly less variability and a higher confidence after assessment of the prediction-wise relative standard deviations. Evaluating domain generalization, both models achieved small mean error values when predicting both inside and outside the training domain, with predictions outside the training domain showing slightly larger errors. Overall, the CVAE model was comparable to the DNN regression model in predicting CHF values but with better uncertainty behavior.

Simulation stands as a cornerstone for safe and efficient autonomous driving development. At its core a simulation system ought to produce realistic, reactive, and controllable traffic patterns. In this paper, we propose ProSim, a multimodal promptable closed-loop traffic simulation framework. ProSim allows the user to give a complex set of numerical, categorical or textual prompts to instruct each agent's behavior and intention. ProSim then rolls out a traffic scenario in a closed-loop manner, modeling each agent's interaction with other traffic participants. Our experiments show that ProSim achieves high prompt controllability given different user prompts, while reaching competitive performance on the Waymo Sim Agents Challenge when no prompt is given. To support research on promptable traffic simulation, we create ProSim-Instruct-520k, a multimodal prompt-scenario paired driving dataset with over 10M text prompts for over 520k real-world driving scenarios. We will release code of ProSim as well as data and labeling tools of ProSim-Instruct-520k at https://ariostgx.github.io/ProSim.