Energy
Make It Long, Keep It Fast: End-to-End 10k-Sequence Modeling at Billion Scale on Douyin
Guan, Lin, Yang, Jia-Qi, Zhao, Zhishan, Zhang, Beichuan, Sun, Bo, Luo, Xuanyuan, Ni, Jinan, Li, Xiaowen, Qi, Yuhang, Fan, Zhifang, Wang, Hangyu, Chen, Qiwei, Cheng, Yi, Zhang, Feng, Yang, Xiao
Short-video recommenders such as Douyin must exploit extremely long user histories without breaking latency or cost budgets. We present an end-to-end system that scales long-sequence modeling to 10k-length histories in production. First, we introduce Stacked Target-to-History Cross Attention (STCA), which replaces history self-attention with stacked cross-attention from the target to the history, reducing complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length and enabling efficient end-to-end training. Second, we propose Request Level Batching (RLB), a user-centric batching scheme that aggregates multiple targets for the same user/request to share the user-side encoding, substantially lowering sequence-related storage, communication, and compute without changing the learning objective. Third, we design a length-extrapolative training strategy -- train on shorter windows, infer on much longer ones -- so the model generalizes to 10k histories without additional training cost. Across offline and online experiments, we observe predictable, monotonic gains as we scale history length and model capacity, mirroring the scaling law behavior observed in large language models. Deployed at full traffic on Douyin, our system delivers significant improvements on key engagement metrics while meeting production latency, demonstrating a practical path to scaling end-to-end long-sequence recommendation to the 10k regime.
Are Time-Indexed Foundation Models the Future of Time Series Imputation?
Naour, Etienne Le, Nabil, Tahar, Petralia, Adrien, Agoua, Ghislain
Foundation models for time series imputation remain largely unexplored. Recently, two such models, TabPFN-TS and MoTM, have emerged. These models share a common philosophy that places them within the family of time-indexed foundation models. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of these models for zero-shot imputation, which enables missing value recovery without retraining across a wide range of scenarios. We conduct extensive univariate experiments across 33 out-of-domain datasets (approximately 1.3M imputation windows) and evaluate their ability to integrate covariates at inference time to improve accuracy without fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate that time-indexed foundation models are a powerful and practical step toward achieving general-purpose, zero-shot imputation for real-world time series.
IoT-based Fresh Produce Supply Chain Under Uncertainty: An Adaptive Optimization Framework
Seth, Chirag, Pirnia, Mehrdad, Bookbinder, James H
Fruits and vegetables form a vital component of the global economy; however, their distribution poses complex logistical challenges due to high perishability, supply fluctuations, strict quality and safety standards, and environmental sensitivity. In this paper, we propose an adaptive optimization model that accounts for delays, travel time, and associated temperature changes impacting produce shelf life, and compare it against traditional approaches such as Robust Optimization, Distributionally Robust Optimization, and Stochastic Programming. Additionally, we conduct a series of computational experiments using Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data to evaluate the performance of our proposed model. Our study demonstrates that the proposed adaptive model achieves a higher shelf life, extending it by over 18\% compared to traditional optimization models, by dynamically mitigating temperature deviations through a temperature feedback mechanism. The promising results demonstrate the potential of this approach to improve both the freshness and efficiency of logistics systems an aspect often neglected in previous works.
Policy Gradient-Based EMT-in-the-Loop Learning to Mitigate Sub-Synchronous Control Interactions
Mukherjee, Sayak, Hossain, Ramij R., Chatterjee, Kaustav, Nekkalapu, Sameer, Elizondo, Marcelo
This paper explores the development of learning-based tunable control gains using EMT-in-the-loop simulation framework (e.g., PSCAD interfaced with Python-based learning modules) to address critical sub-synchronous oscillations. Since sub-synchronous control interactions (SSCI) arise from the mis-tuning of control gains under specific grid configurations, effective mitigation strategies require adaptive re-tuning of these gains. Such adaptiveness can be achieved by employing a closed-loop, learning-based framework that considers the grid conditions responsible for such sub-synchronous oscillations. This paper addresses this need by adopting methodologies inspired by Markov decision process (MDP) based reinforcement learning (RL), with a particular emphasis on simpler deep policy gradient methods with additional SSCI-specific signal processing modules such as down-sampling, bandpass filtering, and oscillation energy dependent reward computations. Our experimentation in a real-world event setting demonstrates that the deep policy gradient based trained policy can adaptively compute gain settings in response to varying grid conditions and optimally suppress control interaction-induced oscillations.
A Unified Stochastic Mechanism Underlying Collective Behavior in Ants, Physical Systems, and Robotic Swarms
Yin, Lianhao, Yu, Haiping, Spino, Pascal, Rus, Daniela
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by entropy maximization, yet do not achieve collective objectives. Despite this analogy, no unified framework exists to explain the stochastic behavior in both biological and physical systems. Here, we present empirical evidence from \textit{Formica polyctena} ants that reveals a shared statistical mechanism underlying both systems: maximization under different energy function constraints. We further demonstrate that robotic swarms governed by this principle can exhibit scalable, decentralized cooperation, mimicking physical phase-like behaviors with minimal individual computation. These findings established a unified stochastic model linking biological, physical, and robotic swarms, offering a scalable principle for designing robust and intelligent swarm robotics.
wa-hls4ml: A Benchmark and Surrogate Models for hls4ml Resource and Latency Estimation
Hawks, Benjamin, Weitz, Jason, Demler, Dmitri, Tame-Narvaez, Karla, Plotnikov, Dennis, Rahimifar, Mohammad Mehdi, Rahali, Hamza Ezzaoui, Therrien, Audrey C., Sproule, Donovan, Khoda, Elham E, Smith, Keegan A., Marroquin, Russell, Di Guglielmo, Giuseppe, Tran, Nhan, Duarte, Javier, Loncar, Vladimir
As machine learning (ML) is increasingly implemented in hardware to address real-time challenges in scientific applications, the development of advanced toolchains has significantly reduced the time required to iterate on various designs. These advancements have solved major obstacles, but also exposed new challenges. For example, processes that were not previously considered bottlenecks, such as hardware synthesis, are becoming limiting factors in the rapid iteration of designs. To mitigate these emerging constraints, multiple efforts have been undertaken to develop an ML-based surrogate model that estimates resource usage of ML accelerator architectures. We introduce wa-hls4ml, a benchmark for ML accelerator resource and latency estimation, and its corresponding initial dataset of over 680,000 fully connected and convolutional neural networks, all synthesized using hls4ml and targeting Xilinx FPGAs. The benchmark evaluates the performance of resource and latency predictors against several common ML model architectures, primarily originating from scientific domains, as exemplar models, and the average performance across a subset of the dataset. Additionally, we introduce GNN- and transformer-based surrogate models that predict latency and resources for ML accelerators. We present the architecture and performance of the models and find that the models generally predict latency and resources for the 75% percentile within several percent of the synthesized resources on the synthetic test dataset.
Millions endure power cuts in Ukraine as Russia strikes more energy sites
Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Most regions of Ukraine are undergoing scheduled power outages amid a new wave of attacks on energy sites by Russian drones and missiles. Ukrenergo, the state-run electricity transmission systems operator in Ukraine, said the blackouts will last at least until the end of Monday as repairs are conducted on infrastructure damaged over the weekend and demand remains high as the onset of winter approaches. According to Ukraine's military, Russian forces used two air-launched ballistic missiles, five surface-to-air guided missiles and 67 drones, including those of Iranian design, during their attacks overnight into Monday. The Ukrainian army did not report shooting down any of the missiles, but it said 52 of the drones were intercepted and the remaining 15 conducted strikes on nine locations.
AI power use forecast finds the industry far off track to net zero
Several large tech firms that are active in AI have set goals to hit net zero by 2030, but a new forecast of the energy and water required to run large data centres shows they're unlikely to meet those targets As the AI industry rapidly expands, questions about the environmental impact of data centres are coming to the forefront - and a new forecast warns the industry is unlikely to meet net zero targets by 2030. Fengqi You at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues modelled how much energy, water and carbon today's leading AI servers could use by 2030, taking into account different growth scenarios and possible data centre locations within the United States. They combined projected chip supply, server power usage and cooling efficiency with state-by-state electrical grid data to conduct their analysis. While not every AI company has set a net zero target, some larger tech firms that are active in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and Meta have set goals with a deadline of 2030. "The rapid growth of AI computing is basically reshaping everything," says You. "We're trying to understand how, as a sector grows, what's going to be the impact?"
Graph Learning
Xia, Feng, Peng, Ciyuan, Ren, Jing, Febrinanto, Falih Gozi, Luo, Renqiang, Saikrishna, Vidya, Yu, Shuo, Kong, Xiangjie
Graph learning has rapidly evolved into a critical subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Its development began with early graph-theoretic methods, gaining significant momentum with the advent of graph neural networks (GNNs). Over the past decade, progress in scalable architectures, dynamic graph modeling, multimodal learning, generative AI, explainable AI (XAI), and responsible AI has broadened the applicability of graph learning to various challenging environments. Graph learning is significant due to its ability to model complex, non-Euclidean relationships that traditional machine learning struggles to capture, thus better supporting real-world applications ranging from drug discovery and fraud detection to recommender systems and scientific reasoning. However, challenges like scalability, generalization, heterogeneity, interpretability, and trustworthiness must be addressed to unlock its full potential. This survey provides a comprehensive introduction to graph learning, focusing on key dimensions including scalable, temporal, multimodal, generative, explainable, and responsible graph learning. We review state-of-the-art techniques for efficiently handling large-scale graphs, capturing dynamic temporal dependencies, integrating heterogeneous data modalities, generating novel graph samples, and enhancing interpretability to foster trust and transparency. We also explore ethical considerations, such as privacy and fairness, to ensure responsible deployment of graph learning models. Additionally, we identify and discuss emerging topics, highlighting recent integration of graph learning and other AI paradigms and offering insights into future directions. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of graph learning.