The financial domain has proven to be a fertile source of challenging machine learning problems across a variety of tasks including prediction, clustering, and classification. Researchers can access an abundance of time-series data and even modest performance improvements can be translated into significant additional value. In this work, we consider the use of case-based reasoning for an important task in this domain, by using historical stock returns time-series data for industry sector classification. We discuss why time-series data can present some significant representational challenges for conventional case-based reasoning approaches, and in response, we propose a novel representation based on stock returns embeddings, which can be readily calculated from raw stock returns data. We argue that this representation is well suited to case-based reasoning and evaluate our approach using a large-scale public dataset for the industry sector classification task, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over several baselines using more conventional representations.

It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely fast escape responses when a predator is sensed by performing explosive curved jumps. Here, we present a design and build prototypes of a combustion-driven underwater soft robot, the "copebot", that, like copepods, is able to accurately reach nearby predefined locations in space within a single curved jump. Because of an improved thrust force transmission unit, causing a large initial acceleration peak (850 Bodylength*s-2), the copebot is 8 times faster than previous combustion-driven underwater soft robots, whilst able to perform a complete 360{\deg} rotation during the jump. Thrusts generated by the copebot are tested to quantitatively determine the actuation performance, and parametric studies are conducted to investigate the sensitivities of the input parameters to the kinematic performance of the copebot. We demonstrate the utility of our design by building a prototype that rapidly jumps out of the water, accurately lands on its feet on a small platform, wirelessly transmits data, and jumps back into the water. Our copebot design opens the way toward high-performance biomimetic robots for multifunctional applications.

The increasing scale of alternating current and direct current (AC/DC) hybrid systems necessitates a faster power flow analysis tool than ever. This letter thus proposes a specific physics-guided graph neural network (PG-GNN). The tailored graph modelling of AC and DC grids is firstly advanced to enhance the topology adaptability of the PG-GNN. To eschew unreliable experience emulation from data, AC/DC physics are embedded in the PG-GNN using duality. Augmented Lagrangian method-based learning scheme is then presented to help the PG-GNN better learn nonconvex patterns in an unsupervised label-free manner. Multi-PG-GNN is finally conducted to master varied DC control modes. Case study shows that, relative to the other 7 data-driven rivals, only the proposed method matches the performance of the model-based benchmark, also beats it in computational efficiency beyond 10 times.

In this work, we focus on the inverse medium scattering problem (IMSP), which aims to recover unknown scatterers based on measured scattered data. Motivated by the efficient direct sampling method (DSM) introduced in [23], we propose a novel direct sampling-based deep learning approach (DSM-DL)for reconstructing inhomogeneous scatterers. In particular, we use the U-Net neural network to learn the relation between the index functions and the true contrasts. Our proposed DSM-DL is computationally efficient, robust to noise, easy to implement, and able to naturally incorporate multiple measured data to achieve high-quality reconstructions. Some representative tests are carried out with varying numbers of incident waves and different noise levels to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate the promising benefits of combining deep learning techniques with the DSM for IMSP.

Through prompting, large-scale pre-trained models have become more expressive and powerful, gaining significant attention in recent years. Though these big models have zero-shot capabilities, in general, labeled data are still required to adapt them to downstream tasks. To overcome this critical limitation, we propose an unsupervised fine-tuning framework to directly fine-tune the model or prompt on the unlabeled target data. We demonstrate how to apply our method to both language-augmented vision and masked-language models by aligning the discrete distributions extracted from the prompts and target data. To verify our approach's applicability, we conduct extensive experiments on image classification, sentiment analysis, and natural language inference tasks. Across 13 image-related tasks and 15 language-related ones, the proposed approach achieves consistent improvements over the baselines.

Generally, system operators conduct the economic operation of power systems in an open-loop predict-then-optimize process: the renewable energy source (RES) availability and system reserve requirements are first predicted; given the predictions, system operators solve optimization models such as unit commitment (UC) to determine the economical operation plans accordingly. However, such an open-loop process could essentially compromise the operation economics because its predictors myopically seek to improve the immediate statistical prediction errors instead of the ultimate operation cost. To this end, this paper presents a closed-loop predict-and-optimize framework, offering a prescriptive UC to improve the operation economics. First, a bilevel mixed-integer programming model is leveraged to train cost-oriented predictors tailored for optimal system operations: the upper level trains the RES and reserve predictors based on their induced operation cost; the lower level, with given predictions, mimics the system operation process and feeds the induced operation cost back to the upper level. Furthermore, the embeddability of the trained predictors grants a prescriptive UC model, which simultaneously provides RES-reserve predictions and UC decisions with enhanced operation economics. Finally, numerical case studies using real-world data illustrate the potential economic and practical advantages of prescriptive UC over deterministic, robust, and stochastic UC models.

Energy Efficiency of a wireless sensor network (WSN) relies on its main characteristics, including hop-number, user's location, allocated power, and relay. Identifying nodes, which have more impact on these characteristics, is, however, subject to a substantial computational overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, we proposed an active learning approach to address the computational overhead of identifying critical nodes in a WSN. The proposed approach can overcome biasing in identifying non-critical nodes and needs much less effort in fine-tuning to adapt to the dynamic nature of WSN. This method benefits from the cooperation of clustering and classification modules to iteratively decrease the required number of data in a typical supervised learning scenario and to increase the accuracy in the presence of uninformative examples, i.e., non-critical nodes. Experiments show that the proposed method has more flexibility, compared to the state-of-the-art, to be employed in large scale WSN environments, the fifth-generation mobile networks (5G), and massively distributed IoT (i.e., sensor networks), where it can prolong the network lifetime.

Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is a promising candidate for next-generation memory devices due to its high speed, low power consumption, and excellent scalability. Metal oxides are commonly used as the oxide layer in RRAM devices due to their high dielectric constant and stability. However, to further improve the performance of RRAM devices, recent research has focused on integrating artificial intelligence (AI). AI can be used to optimize the performance of RRAM devices, while RRAM can also power AI as a hardware accelerator and in neuromorphic computing. This review paper provides an overview of the combination of metal oxides-based RRAM and AI, highlighting recent advances in these two directions. We discuss the use of AI to improve the performance of RRAM devices and the use of RRAM to power AI. Additionally, we address key challenges in the field and provide insights into future research directions

Electricity price prediction plays a vital role in energy storage system (ESS) management. Current prediction models focus on reducing prediction errors but overlook their impact on downstream decision-making. So this paper proposes a decision-focused electricity price prediction approach for ESS arbitrage to bridge the gap from the downstream optimization model to the prediction model. The decision-focused approach aims at utilizing the downstream arbitrage model for training prediction models. It measures the difference between actual decisions under the predicted price and oracle decisions under the true price, i.e., decision error, by regret, transforms it into the tractable surrogate regret, and then derives the gradients to predicted price for training prediction models. Based on the prediction and decision errors, this paper proposes the hybrid loss and corresponding stochastic gradient descent learning method to learn prediction models for prediction and decision accuracy. The case study verifies that the proposed approach can efficiently bring more economic benefits and reduce decision errors by flattening the time distribution of prediction errors, compared to prediction models for only minimizing prediction errors.

We consider a certifiable object pose estimation problem, where -- given a partial point cloud of an object -- the goal is to not only estimate the object pose, but also to provide a certificate of correctness for the resulting estimate. Our first contribution is a general theory of certification for end-to-end perception models. In particular, we introduce the notion of $\zeta$-correctness, which bounds the distance between an estimate and the ground truth. We show that $\zeta$-correctness can be assessed by implementing two certificates: (i) a certificate of observable correctness, that asserts if the model output is consistent with the input data and prior information, (ii) a certificate of non-degeneracy, that asserts whether the input data is sufficient to compute a unique estimate. Our second contribution is to apply this theory and design a new learning-based certifiable pose estimator. We propose C-3PO, a semantic-keypoint-based pose estimation model, augmented with the two certificates, to solve the certifiable pose estimation problem. C-3PO also includes a keypoint corrector, implemented as a differentiable optimization layer, that can correct large detection errors (e.g. due to the sim-to-real gap). Our third contribution is a novel self-supervised training approach that uses our certificate of observable correctness to provide the supervisory signal to C-3PO during training. In it, the model trains only on the observably correct input-output pairs, in each training iteration. As training progresses, we see that the observably correct input-output pairs grow, eventually reaching near 100% in many cases. Our experiments show that (i) standard semantic-keypoint-based methods outperform more recent alternatives, (ii) C-3PO further improves performance and significantly outperforms all the baselines, and (iii) C-3PO's certificates are able to discern correct pose estimates.