Energy
Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification with Anchored Ensembles for Robust EV Power Consumption Prediction
Farhani, Ghazal, Rahman, Taufiq, Humphries, Kieran
Accurate EV power estimation underpins range prediction and energy management, yet practitioners need both point accuracy and trustworthy uncertainty. We propose an anchored-ensemble Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a Student-t likelihood that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Anchoring imposes a Gaussian weight prior (MAP training), yielding posterior-like diversity without test-time sampling, while the t-head provides heavy-tailed robustness and closed-form prediction intervals. Using vehicle-kinematic time series (e.g., speed, motor RPM), our model attains strong accuracy: RMSE 3.36 +/- 1.10, MAE 2.21 +/- 0.89, R-squared = 0.93 +/- 0.02, explained variance 0.93 +/- 0.02, and delivers well-calibrated uncertainty bands with near-nominal coverage. Against competitive baselines (Student-t MC dropout; quantile regression with/without anchoring), our method matches or improves log-scores while producing sharper intervals at the same coverage. Crucially for real-time deployment, inference is a single deterministic pass per ensemble member (or a weight-averaged collapse), eliminating Monte Carlo latency. The result is a compact, theoretically grounded estimator that couples accuracy, calibration, and systems efficiency, enabling reliable range estimation and decision-making for production EV energy management.
AUTO-Explorer: Automated Data Collection for GUI Agent
Guo, Xiangwu, Gao, Difei, Shou, Mike Zheng
Recent advancements in GUI agents have significantly expanded their ability to interpret natural language commands to manage software interfaces. However, acquiring GUI data remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often involve designing automated agents that browse URLs from the Common Crawl, using webpage HTML to collect screenshots and corresponding annotations, including the names and bounding boxes of UI elements. However, this method is difficult to apply to desktop software or some newly launched websites not included in the Common Crawl. While we expect the model to possess strong generalization capabilities to handle this, it is still crucial for personalized scenarios that require rapid and perfect adaptation to new software or websites. To address this, we propose an automated data collection method with minimal annotation costs, named Auto-Explorer. It incorporates a simple yet effective exploration mechanism that autonomously parses and explores GUI environments, gathering data efficiently. Additionally, to assess the quality of exploration, we have developed the UIXplore benchmark. This benchmark creates environments for explorer agents to discover and save software states. Using the data gathered, we fine-tune a multimodal large language model (MLLM) and establish a GUI element grounding testing set to evaluate the effectiveness of the exploration strategies. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of Auto-Explorer, showing that our method can quickly enhance the capabilities of an MLLM in explored software.
Whole-Body Control With Terrain Estimation of A 6-DoF Wheeled Bipedal Robot
Wen, Cong, Li, Yunfei, Liu, Kexin, Qiu, Yixin, Liao, Xuanhong, Wang, Tianyu, Liu, Dingchuan, Zhang, Tao, Lyu, Ximin
Wheeled bipedal robots have garnered increasing attention in exploration and inspection. However, most research simplifies calculations by ignoring leg dynamics, thereby restricting the robot's full motion potential. Additionally, robots face challenges when traversing uneven terrain. To address the aforementioned issue, we develop a complete dynamics model and design a whole-body control framework with terrain estimation for a novel 6 degrees of freedom wheeled bipedal robot. This model incorporates the closed-loop dynamics of the robot and a ground contact model based on the estimated ground normal vector. We use a LiDAR inertial odometry framework and improved Principal Component Analysis for terrain estimation. Task controllers, including PD control law and LQR, are employed for pose control and centroidal dynamics-based balance control, respectively. Furthermore, a hierarchical optimization approach is used to solve the whole-body control problem. We validate the performance of the terrain estimation algorithm and demonstrate the algorithm's robustness and ability to traverse uneven terrain through both simulation and real-world experiments.
ArtReg: Visuo-Tactile based Pose Tracking and Manipulation of Unseen Articulated Objects
Murali, Prajval Kumar, Kaboli, Mohsen
Robots operating in real-world environments frequently encounter unknown objects with complex structures and articulated components, such as doors, drawers, cabinets, and tools. The ability to perceive, track, and manipulate these objects without prior knowledge of their geometry or kinematic properties remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. In this work, we present a novel method for visuo-tactile-based tracking of unseen objects (single, multiple, or articulated) during robotic interaction without assuming any prior knowledge regarding object shape or dynamics. Our novel pose tracking approach termed ArtReg (stands for Articulated Registration) integrates visuo-tactile point clouds in an unscented Kalman Filter formulation in the SE(3) Lie Group for point cloud registration. ArtReg is used to detect possible articulated joints in objects using purposeful manipulation maneuvers such as pushing or hold-pulling with a two-robot team. Furthermore, we leverage ArtReg to develop a closed-loop controller for goal-driven manipulation of articulated objects to move the object into the desired pose configuration. We have extensively evaluated our approach on various types of unknown objects through real robot experiments. We also demonstrate the robustness of our method by evaluating objects with varying center of mass, low-light conditions, and with challenging visual backgrounds. Furthermore, we benchmarked our approach on a standard dataset of articulated objects and demonstrated improved performance in terms of pose accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our experiments indicate that robust and accurate pose tracking leveraging visuo-tactile information enables robots to perceive and interact with unseen complex articulated objects (with revolute or prismatic joints).
Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Fair and Efficient Urban Traffic Optimization
Shit, Rathin Chandra, Subudhi, Sharmila
The optimization of urban traffic is threatened by the complexity of achieving a balance between transport efficiency and the maintenance of privacy, as well as the equitable distribution of traffic based on socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Current centralized traffic management schemes invade user location privacy and further entrench traffic disparity by offering disadvantaged route suggestions, whereas current federated learning frameworks do not consider fairness constraints in multi-objective traffic settings. This study presents a privacy-preserving federated learning framework, termed FedFair-Traffic, that jointly and simultaneously optimizes travel efficiency, traffic fairness, and differential privacy protection. This is the first attempt to integrate three conflicting objectives to improve urban transportation systems. The proposed methodology enables collaborative learning between related vehicles with data locality by integrating Graph Neural Networks with differential privacy mechanisms ($ε$-privacy guarantees) and Gini coefficient-based fair constraints using multi-objective optimization. The framework uses federated aggregation methods of gradient clipping and noise injection to provide differential privacy and optimize Pareto-efficient solutions for the efficiency-fairness tradeoff. Real-world comprehensive experiments on the METR-LA traffic dataset showed that FedFair-Traffic can reduce the average travel time by 7\% (14.2 minutes) compared with their centralized baselines, promote traffic fairness by 73\% (Gini coefficient, 0.78), and offer high privacy protection (privacy score, 0.8) with an 89\% reduction in communication overhead. These outcomes demonstrate that FedFair-Traffic is a scalable privacy-aware smart city infrastructure with possible use-cases in metropolitan traffic flow control and federated transportation networks.
COTN: A Chaotic Oscillatory Transformer Network for Complex Volatile Systems under Extreme Conditions
Tang, Boyan, Zeng, Yilong, Ren, Xuanhao, Xiao, Peng, Zhao, Yuhan, Lee, Raymond, Wu, Jianghua
Abstract--Accurate prediction of financial and electricity markets, especially under extreme conditions, remains a significant challenge due to their intrinsic nonlinearity, rapid fluctuations, and chaotic patterns. T o address these limitations, we propose the Chaotic Oscillatory Transformer Network (COTN). COTN innovatively combines a Transformer architecture with a novel Lee Oscillator activation function, processed through Max-over-Time pooling and a λ-gating mechanism. This design is specifically tailored to effectively capture chaotic dynamics and improve responsiveness during periods of heightened volatility, where conventional activation functions (e.g., ReLU, GELU) tend to saturate. Furthermore, COTN incorporates an Autoencoder Self-Regressive (ASR) module to detect and isolate abnormal market patterns, such as sudden price spikes or crashes, thereby preventing corruption of the core prediction process and enhancing robustness. Extensive experiments across electricity spot markets and financial markets demonstrate the practical applicability and resilience of COTN. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models like Informer by up to 17% and traditional statistical methods like GARCH by as much as 40%. These results underscore COTN's effectiveness in navigating real-world market uncertainty and complexity, offering a powerful tool for forecasting highly volatile systems under duress.
Constraint-Informed Active Learning for End-to-End ACOPF Optimization Proxies
Li, Miao, Klamkin, Michael, Van Hentenryck, Pascal, Li, Wenting, Bent, Russell
Abstract--This paper studies optimization proxies--machine learning (ML) models trained to efficiently predict optimal solutions for AC Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) problems. While promising, optimization proxy performance heavily depends on training data quality. T o address this limitation, this paper introduces a novel active sampling framework for ACOPF optimization proxies designed to generate realistic and diverse training data. The framework actively explores varied, flexible problem specifications reflecting plausible operational realities. More importantly, the approach uses optimization-specific quantities (active constraint sets) that better capture the salient features of an ACOPF that lead to the optimal solution. Numerical results show superior generalization over existing sampling methods with an equivalent training budget, significantly advancing the state-of-practice for trustworthy ACOPF optimization proxies.
Beyond Resolution: Multi-Scale Weather and Climate Data for Alpine Renewable Energy in the Digital Twin Era -- First Evaluations and Recommendations
Schicker, Irene, Bügelmayer-Blaschek, Marianne, Lexer, Annemarie, Baier, Katharina, Hasel, Kristofer, Gazzaneo, Paolo
When Austrian hydropower produc null on plummeted by 44% in early 2025 due to reduced snowpack, it exposed a cri null cal vulnerability: standard meteorological and climatological datasets systema null cally fail in mountain region s that hold untapped renewable poten null al. This perspec null ves paper evaluates emerging solu null ons to the Alpine energy -climate data gap, analyzing datasets from global reanalyses (ERA5, 31 km) to kilometre-scale Digital Twins (Climate DT, Extremes DT, 4.4 km), regional reanalyses (ARA, 2.5 km), and next-genera null on AI weather predic null on models (AIFS, 31 km). The mul null - resolu null on assessment reveals that no single dataset excels universally: coarse reanalyses provide essen null al climatologies but miss valley-scale processes, while Digital Twins resolve Alpine dynamics yet remain computa null onally demanding. Effec null ve energy planning therefore requires strategic dataset combina null ons validated against energy -relevant indices such as popula null on -weighted extremes, wind-gust return periods, and Alpine-adjusted storm thresholds. A key fron null er is sub -hourly (10-15 min) temporal resolu null on to match grid - opera null on needs. Six evidence - based recommenda null ons outline pathways f or bridging spa null al and temporal scales. As renewable deployment expands globally into complex terrain, the Alpine region offers transferable perspec null ves for tackling iden null cal forecas null ng and climate analysis challenges in mountainous regions worldwide.
A Feedback-Control Framework for Efficient Dataset Collection from In-Vehicle Data Streams
Reis, Philipp, Rigoll, Philipp, Steinhauser, Christian, Langner, Jacob, Sax, Eric
Modern AI systems are increasingly constrained not by model capacity but by the quality and diversity of their data. Despite growing emphasis on data-centric AI, most datasets are still gathered in an open-loop manner which accumulates redundant samples without feedback from the current coverage. This results in inefficient storage, costly labeling, and limited generalization. To address this, this paper introduces Feedback Control Data Collection (FCDC), a paradigm that formulates data collection as a closed-loop control problem. FCDC continuously approximates the state of the collected data distribution using an online probabilistic model and adaptively regulates sample retention using based on feedback signals such as likelihood and Mahalanobis distance. Through this feedback mechanism, the system dynamically balances exploration and exploitation, maintains dataset diversity, and prevents redundancy from accumulating over time. In addition to demonstrating the controllability of FCDC on a synthetic dataset that converges toward a uniform distribution under Gaussian input assumption, experiments on real data streams show that FCDC produces more balanced datasets by 25.9% while reducing data storage by 39.8%. These results demonstrate that data collection itself can be actively controlled, transforming collection from a passive pipeline stage into a self-regulating, feedback-driven process at the core of data-centric AI.
Universal Spectral Tokenization via Self-Supervised Panchromatic Representation Learning
Shen, Jeff, Lanusse, Francois, Parker, Liam Holden, Liu, Ollie, Hehir, Tom, Sarra, Leopoldo, Meyer, Lucas, Bowles, Micah, Wagner-Carena, Sebastian, Wagner-Carena, Sebastian, Qu, Helen, Golkar, Siavash, Bietti, Alberto, Bourfoune, Hatim, Cassereau, Nathan, Cornette, Pierre, Hirashima, Keiya, Krawezik, Geraud, Ohana, Ruben, Lourie, Nicholas, McCabe, Michael, Morel, Rudy, Mukhopadhyay, Payel, Pettee, Mariel, Blancard, Bruno Régaldo-Saint, Cho, Kyunghyun, Cranmer, Miles, Ho, Shirley
Sequential scientific data span many resolutions and domains, and unifying them into a common representation is a key step toward developing foundation models for the sciences. Astronomical spectra exemplify this challenge: massive surveys have collected millions of spectra across a wide range of wavelengths and resolutions, yet analyses remain fragmented across spectral domains (e.g., optical vs. infrared) and object types (e.g., stars vs. galaxies), limiting the ability to pool information across datasets. We present a deep learning model that jointly learns from heterogeneous spectra in a self-supervised manner. Our universal spectral tokenizer processes spectra from a variety of object types and resolutions directly on their native wavelength grids, producing intrinsically aligned, homogeneous, and physically meaningful representations that can be efficiently adapted to achieve competitive performance across a range of downstream tasks. For the first time, we demonstrate that a single model can unify spectral data across resolutions and domains, suggesting that our model can serve as a powerful building block for foundation models in astronomy -- and potentially extend to other scientific domains with heterogeneous sequential data, such as climate and healthcare.