Energy
A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Algorithms for Electricity Price Forecasting with LIME-Based Interpretability
Zhao, Xuanyi, Ding, Jiawen, Huang, Xueting, Zhang, Yibo
With the rapid development of electricity markets, price volatility has significantly increased, making accurate forecasting crucial for power system operations and market decisions. Traditional linear models cannot capture the complex nonlinear characteristics of electricity pricing, necessitating advanced machine learning approaches. This study compares eight machine learning models using Spanish electricity market data, integrating consumption, generation, and meteorological variables. The models evaluated include linear regression, ridge regression, decision tree, KNN, random forest, gradient boosting, SVR, and XGBoost. Results show that KNN achieves the best performance with R^2 of 0.865, MAE of 3.556, and RMSE of 5.240. To enhance interpretability, LIME analysis reveals that meteorological factors and supply-demand indicators significantly influence price fluctuations through nonlinear relationships. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of machine learning models in electricity price forecasting while improving decision transparency through interpretability analysis.
Energy-Aware Data-Driven Model Selection in LLM-Orchestrated AI Systems
Smirnova, Daria, Nasiri, Hamid, Adamska, Marta, Yu, Zhengxin, Garraghan, Peter
As modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more advanced and capable, they can leverage a wide range of tools and models to perform complex tasks. Today, the task of orchestrating these models is often performed by Large Language Models (LLMs) that rely on qualitative descriptions of models for decision-making. However, the descriptions provided to these LLM-based orchestrators do not reflect true model capabilities and performance characteristics, leading to suboptimal model selection, reduced accuracy, and increased energy costs. In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of LLM-based orchestration limitations and propose GUIDE, a new energy-aware model selection framework that accounts for performance-energy trade-offs by incorporating quantitative model performance characteristics in decision-making. Experimental results demonstrate that GUIDE increases accuracy by 0.90%-11.92% across various evaluated tasks, and achieves up to 54% energy efficiency improvement, while reducing orchestrator model selection latency from 4.51 s to 7.2 ms.
PIANO: Physics-informed Dual Neural Operator for Precipitation Nowcasting
Chin, Seokhyun, Park, Junghwan, Cho, Woojin
Precipitation nowcasting, key for early warning of disasters, currently relies on computationally expensive and restrictive methods that limit access to many countries. To overcome this challenge, we propose precipitation nowcasting using satellite imagery with physics constraints for improved accuracy and physical consistency. We use a novel physics-informed dual neural operator (PIANO) structure to enforce the fundamental equation of advection-diffusion during training to predict satellite imagery using a PINN loss. Then, we use a generative model to convert satellite images to radar images, which are used for precipitation nowcasting. Compared to baseline models, our proposed model shows a notable improvement in moderate (4mm/h) precipitation event prediction alongside short-term heavy (8mm/h) precipitation event prediction. It also demonstrates low seasonal variability in predictions, indicating robustness for generalization. This study suggests the potential of the PIANO and serves as a good baseline for physics-informed precipitation nowcasting.
Opening the Sim-to-Real Door for Humanoid Pixel-to-Action Policy Transfer
Xue, Haoru, He, Tairan, Wang, Zi, Ben, Qingwei, Xiao, Wenli, Luo, Zhengyi, Da, Xingye, Castañeda, Fernando, Shi, Guanya, Sastry, Shankar, Fan, Linxi "Jim", Zhu, Yuke
Recent progress in GPU-accelerated, photorealistic simulation has opened a scalable data-generation path for robot learning, where massive physics and visual randomization allow policies to generalize beyond curated environments. Building on these advances, we develop a teacher-student-bootstrap learning framework for vision-based humanoid loco-manipulation, using articulated-object interaction as a representative high-difficulty benchmark. Our approach introduces a staged-reset exploration strategy that stabilizes long-horizon privileged-policy training, and a GRPO-based fine-tuning procedure that mitigates partial observability and improves closed-loop consistency in sim-to-real RL. Trained entirely on simulation data, the resulting policy achieves robust zero-shot performance across diverse door types and outperforms human teleoperators by up to 31.7% in task completion time under the same whole-body control stack. This represents the first humanoid sim-to-real policy capable of diverse articulated loco-manipulation using pure RGB perception.
The Silence that Speaks: Neural Estimation via Communication Gaps
Aggarwal, Shubham, Maity, Dipankar, Başar, Tamer
Accurate remote state estimation is a fundamental component of many autonomous and networked dynamical systems, where multiple decision-making agents interact and communicate over shared, bandwidth-constrained channels. These communication constraints introduce an additional layer of complexity, namely, the decision of when to communicate. This results in a fundamental trade-off between estimation accuracy and communication resource usage. Traditional extensions of classical estimation algorithms (e.g., the Kalman filter) treat the absence of communication as 'missing' information. However, silence itself can carry implicit information about the system's state, which, if properly interpreted, can enhance the estimation quality even in the absence of explicit communication. Leveraging this implicit structure, however, poses significant analytical challenges, even in relatively simple systems. In this paper, we propose CALM (Communication-Aware Learning and Monitoring), a novel learning-based framework that jointly addresses the dual challenges of communication scheduling and estimator design. Our approach entails learning not only when to communicate but also how to infer useful information from periods of communication silence. We perform comparative case studies on multiple benchmarks to demonstrate that CALM is able to decode the implicit coordination between the estimator and the scheduler to extract information from the instances of 'silence' and enhance the estimation accuracy.
Shielded Controller Units for RL with Operational Constraints Applied to Remote Microgrids
Nekoei, Hadi, Massé, Alexandre Blondin, Hassani, Rachid, Chandar, Sarath, Mai, Vincent
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.
Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking: Unifying Intents, Semantics, and Intelligence
Chen, Shutong, Liao, Qi, Aijaz, Adnan, Deng, Yansha
6G services are evolving toward goal-oriented and AI-native communication, which are expected to deliver transformative societal benefits across various industries and promote energy sustainability. Yet today's networking architectures, built on complete decoupling of the applications and the network, cannot expose or exploit high-level goals, limiting their ability to adapt intelligently to service needs. This work introduces Goal-Oriented Multi-Agent Semantic Networking (GoAgentNet), a new architecture that elevates communication from data exchange to goal fulfilment. GoAgentNet enables applications and the network to collaborate by abstracting their functions into multiple collaborative agents, and jointly orchestrates multi-agent sensing, networking, computation, and control through semantic computation and cross-layer semantic networking, allowing the entire architecture to pursue unified application goals. We first outline the limitations of legacy network designs in supporting 6G services, based on which we highlight key enablers of our GoAgentNet design. Then, through three representative 6G usage scenarios, we demonstrate how GoAgentNet can unlock more efficient and intelligent services. We further identify unique challenges faced by GoAgentNet deployment and corresponding potential solutions. A case study on robotic fault detection and recovery shows that our GoAgentNet architecture improves energy efficiency by up to 99% and increases the task success rate by up to 72%, compared with the existing networking architectures without GoAgentNet, which underscores its potential to support scalable and sustainable 6G systems.
Chain of Unit-Physics: A Primitive-Centric Approach to Scientific Code Synthesis
Agentic large language models are proposed as autonomous code generators for scientific computing, yet their reliability in high-stakes problems remains unclear. Developing computational scientific software from natural-language queries remains challenging broadly due to (a) sparse representation of domain codes during training and (b) the limited feasibility of RLHF with a small expert community. To address these limitations, this work conceptualizes an inverse approach to code design, embodied in the Chain of Unit-Physics framework: a first-principles (or primitives)-centric, multi-agent system in which human expert knowledge is encoded as unit-physics tests that explicitly constrain code generation. The framework is evaluated on a nontrivial combustion task, used here as a representative benchmark for scientific problem with realistic physical constraints. Closed-weight systems and code-focused agentic variants fail to produce correct end-to-end solvers, despite tool and web access, exhibiting four recurrent error classes: interface (syntax/API) hallucinations, overconfident assumptions, numerical/physical incoherence, and configuration fragility. Open-weight models with chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding reduce interface errors but still yield incorrect solutions. On the benchmark task, the proposed framework converges within 5-6 iterations, matches the human-expert implementation (mean error of $3.1\times10^{-3}$ %), with a $\sim$33.4 % faster runtime and a $\sim$30 % efficient memory usage at a cost comparable to mid-sized commercial APIs, yielding a practical template for physics-grounded scientific code generation. As datasets and models evolve, zero-shot code accuracy will improve; however, the Chain of Unit-Physics framework goes further by embedding first-principles analysis that is foundational to scientific codes.
Robust Probabilistic Load Forecasting for a Single Household: A Comparative Study from SARIMA to Transformers on the REFIT Dataset
Probabilistic forecasting is essential for modern risk management, allowing decision-makers to quantify uncertainty in critical systems. This paper tackles this challenge using the volatile REFIT household dataset, which is complicated by a large structural data gap. We first address this by conducting a rigorous comparative experiment to select a Seasonal Imputation method, demonstrating its superiority over linear interpolation in preserving the data's underlying distribution. We then systematically evaluate a hierarchy of models, progressing from classical baselines (SARIMA, Prophet) to machine learning (XGBoost) and advanced deep learning architectures (LSTM). Our findings reveal that classical models fail to capture the data's non-linear, regime-switching behavior. While the LSTM provided the most well-calibrated probabilistic forecast, the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) emerged as the superior all-round model, achieving the best point forecast accuracy (RMSE 481.94) and producing safer, more cautious prediction intervals that effectively capture extreme volatility.
A Novel MDP Decomposition Framework for Scalable UAV Mission Planning in Complex and Uncertain Environments
Quamar, Md Muzakkir, Nasir, Ali, ELFerik, Sami
This paper presents a scalable and fault-tolerant framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission management in complex and uncertain environments. The proposed approach addresses the computational bottleneck inherent in solving large-scale Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) by introducing a two-stage decomposition strategy. In the first stage, a factor-based algorithm partitions the global MDP into smaller, goal-specific sub-MDPs by leveraging domain-specific features such as goal priority, fault states, spatial layout, and energy constraints. In the second stage, a priority-based recombination algorithm solves each sub-MDP independently and integrates the results into a unified global policy using a meta-policy for conflict resolution. Importantly, we present a theoretical analysis showing that, under mild probabilistic independence assumptions, the combined policy is provably equivalent to the optimal global MDP policy. Our work advances artificial intelligence (AI) decision scalability by decomposing large MDPs into tractable subproblems with provable global equivalence. The proposed decomposition framework enhances the scalability of Markov Decision Processes, a cornerstone of sequential decision-making in artificial intelligence, enabling real-time policy updates for complex mission environments. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating orders-of-magnitude reduction in computation time without sacrificing mission reliability or policy optimality. The proposed framework establishes a practical and robust foundation for scalable decision-making in real-time UAV mission execution.