Energy
Dark Energy Survey Year 3 results: Simulation-based $w$CDM inference from weak lensing and galaxy clustering maps with deep learning. I. Analysis design
Thomsen, A., Bucko, J., Kacprzak, T., Ajani, V., Fluri, J., Refregier, A., Anbajagane, D., Castander, F. J., Ferté, A., Gatti, M., Jeffrey, N., Alarcon, A., Amon, A., Bechtol, K., Becker, M. R., Bernstein, G. M., Campos, A., Rosell, A. Carnero, Chang, C., Chen, R., Choi, A., Crocce, M., Davis, C., DeRose, J., Dodelson, S., Doux, C., Eckert, K., Elvin-Poole, J., Everett, S., Fosalba, P., Gruen, D., Harrison, I., Herner, K., Huff, E. M., Jarvis, M., Kuropatkin, N., Leget, P. -F., MacCrann, N., McCullough, J., Myles, J., Navarro-Alsina, A., Pandey, S., Porredon, A., Prat, J., Raveri, M., Rodriguez-Monroy, M., Rollins, R. P., Roodman, A., Rykoff, E. S., Sánchez, C., Secco, L. F., Sheldon, E., Shin, T., Troxel, M. A., Tutusaus, I., Varga, T. N., Weaverdyck, N., Wechsler, R. H., Yanny, B., Yin, B., Zhang, Y., Zuntz, J., Allam, S., Andrade-Oliveira, F., Bacon, D., Blazek, J., Brooks, D., Camilleri, R., Carretero, J., Cawthon, R., da Costa, L. N., Pereira, M. E. da Silva, Davis, T. M., De Vicente, J., Desai, S., Doel, P., García-Bellido, J., Gutierrez, G., Hinton, S. R., Hollowood, D. L., Honscheid, K., James, D. J., Kuehn, K., Lahav, O., Lee, S., Marshall, J. L., Mena-Fernández, J., Menanteau, F., Miquel, R., Muir, J., Ogando, R. L. C., Malagón, A. A. Plazas, Sanchez, E., Cid, D. Sanchez, Sevilla-Noarbe, I., Smith, M., Suchyta, E., Swanson, M. E. C., Thomas, D., To, C., Tucker, D. L.
Data-driven approaches using deep learning are emerging as powerful techniques to extract non-Gaussian information from cosmological large-scale structure. This work presents the first simulation-based inference (SBI) pipeline that combines weak lensing and galaxy clustering maps in a realistic Dark Energy Survey Year 3 (DES Y3) configuration and serves as preparation for a forthcoming analysis of the survey data. We develop a scalable forward model based on the CosmoGridV1 suite of N-body simulations to generate over one million self-consistent mock realizations of DES Y3 at the map level. Leveraging this large dataset, we train deep graph convolutional neural networks on the full survey footprint in spherical geometry to learn low-dimensional features that approximately maximize mutual information with target parameters. These learned compressions enable neural density estimation of the implicit likelihood via normalizing flows in a ten-dimensional parameter space spanning cosmological $w$CDM, intrinsic alignment, and linear galaxy bias parameters, while marginalizing over baryonic, photometric redshift, and shear bias nuisances. To ensure robustness, we extensively validate our inference pipeline using synthetic observations derived from both systematic contaminations in our forward model and independent Buzzard galaxy catalogs. Our forecasts yield significant improvements in cosmological parameter constraints, achieving $2-3\times$ higher figures of merit in the $Ω_m - S_8$ plane relative to our implementation of baseline two-point statistics and effectively breaking parameter degeneracies through probe combination. These results demonstrate the potential of SBI analyses powered by deep learning for upcoming Stage-IV wide-field imaging surveys.
Promoting Sustainable Web Agents: Benchmarking and Estimating Energy Consumption through Empirical and Theoretical Analysis
Krupp, Lars, Geißler, Daniel, Banwari, Vishal, Lukowicz, Paul, Karolus, Jakob
Web agents, like OpenAI's Operator and Google's Project Mariner, are powerful agentic systems pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLM). They can autonomously interact with the internet at the user's behest, such as navigating websites, filling search masks, and comparing price lists. Though web agent research is thriving, induced sustainability issues remain largely unexplored. To highlight the urgency of this issue, we provide an initial exploration of the energy and $CO_2$ cost associated with web agents from both a theoretical -via estimation- and an empirical perspective -by benchmarking. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy, and that more energy consumed does not necessarily equate to better results. We highlight a lack of transparency regarding disclosing model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. Our work contributes towards a change in thinking of how we evaluate web agents, advocating for dedicated metrics measuring energy consumption in benchmarks.
Temporal Action Selection for Action Chunking
Weng, Yueyang, Zhang, Xiaopeng, Mu, Yongjin, Zhu, Yingcong, Li, Yanjie, Liu, Qi
Action chunking is a widely adopted approach in Learning from Demonstration (LfD). By modeling multi-step action chunks rather than single-step actions, action chunking significantly enhances modeling capabilities for human expert policies. However, the reduced decision frequency restricts the utilization of recent observations, degrading reactivity - particularly evident in the inadequate adaptation to sensor noise and dynamic environmental changes. Existing efforts to address this issue have primarily resorted to trading off reactivity against decision consistency, without achieving both. To address this limitation, we propose a novel algorithm, Temporal Action Selector (TAS), which caches predicted action chunks from multiple timesteps and dynamically selects the optimal action through a lightweight selector network. TAS achieves balanced optimization across three critical dimensions: reactivity, decision consistency, and motion coherence. Experiments across multiple tasks with diverse base policies show that TAS significantly improves success rates - yielding an absolute gain of up to 73.3%. Furthermore, integrating TAS as a base policy with residual reinforcement learning (RL) substantially enhances training efficiency and elevates the performance plateau. Experiments in both simulation and physical robots confirm the method's efficacy.
GraspView: Active Perception Scoring and Best-View Optimization for Robotic Grasping in Cluttered Environments
Wang, Shenglin, Dai, Mingtong, Su, Jingxuan, Liu, Lingbo, Chen, Chunjie, Wu, Xinyu, Lin, Liang
Robotic grasping is a fundamental capability for autonomous manipulation, yet remains highly challenging in cluttered environments where occlusion, poor perception quality, and inconsistent 3D reconstructions often lead to unstable or failed grasps. Conventional pipelines have widely relied on RGB-D cameras to provide geometric information, which fail on transparent or glossy objects and degrade at close range. We present GraspView, an RGB-only robotic grasping pipeline that achieves accurate manipulation in cluttered environments without depth sensors. Our framework integrates three key components: (i) global perception scene reconstruction, which provides locally consistent, up-to-scale geometry from a single RGB view and fuses multi-view projections into a coherent global 3D scene; (ii) a render-and-score active perception strategy, which dynamically selects next-best-views to reveal occluded regions; and (iii) an online metric alignment module that calibrates VGGT predictions against robot kinematics to ensure physical scale consistency. Building on these tailor-designed modules, GraspView performs best-view global grasping, fusing multi-view reconstructions and leveraging GraspNet for robust execution. Experiments on diverse tabletop objects demonstrate that GraspView significantly outperforms both RGB-D and single-view RGB baselines, especially under heavy occlusion, near-field sensing, and with transparent objects. These results highlight GraspView as a practical and versatile alternative to RGB-D pipelines, enabling reliable grasping in unstructured real-world environments.
A Reinforced Evolution-Based Approach to Multi-Resource Load Balancing
This is the accepted version of the paper published in Journal of Theoretical & Applied Information Technology Vol 4 No 8 (2008) . ABSTRACT This paper presents a reinforced genetic approach to a defined d - resource system optimization problem . The classical evolution schema was ineffective due to a very strict feasibility function in the studied problem. Hence, the presented strategy has introduced several modifications and adaptations to standard genetic routines, e.g.: a migration operator which is an analogy to the biological random genetic drift. INTRODUCTION A funda mental goal in computer science is to provide an algorithm which would determine an optimal solution in acceptable time. Computational Complexity Theory is the field which studies the efficiency of computation; its major goals are to find efficient algorit hms for natural problems or to show that no efficient solutions exist. NP - hard (Nondeterministic Polynomial - time hard), represents a class of problems which are'at least as difficult as problems in NP' [7] [19] . NP - complete problems can be solve d by means of exhaustive search.
Accelerating scientific discovery with the common task framework
Kutz, J. Nathan, Battaglia, Peter, Brenner, Michael, Carlberg, Kevin, Hagberg, Aric, Ho, Shirley, Hoyer, Stephan, Lange, Henning, Lipson, Hod, Mahoney, Michael W., Noe, Frank, Welling, Max, Zanna, Laure, Zhu, Francis, Brunton, Steven L.
Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are transforming and empowering the characterization and control of dynamic systems in the engineering, physical, and biological sciences. These emerging modeling paradigms require comparative metrics to evaluate a diverse set of scientific objectives, including forecasting, state reconstruction, generalization, and control, while also considering limited data scenarios and noisy measurements. We introduce a common task framework (CTF) for science and engineering, which features a growing collection of challenge data sets with a diverse set of practical and common objectives. The CTF is a critically enabling technology that has contributed to the rapid advance of ML/AI algorithms in traditional applications such as speech recognition, language processing, and computer vision. There is a critical need for the objective metrics of a CTF to compare the diverse algorithms being rapidly developed and deployed in practice today across science and engineering.
TwIST: Rigging the Lottery in Transformers with Independent Subnetwork Training
Menezes, Michael, Su, Barbara, Feng, Xinze, Farhat, Yehya, Shili, Hamza, Kyrillidis, Anastasios
We introduce TwIST, a distributed training framework for efficient large language model (LLM) sparsification. TwIST trains multiple subnetworks in parallel, periodically aggregates their parameters, and resamples new subnetworks during training. This process identifies high-quality subnetworks ("golden tickets") without requiring post-training procedures such as calibration or Hessian-based recovery. As a result, TwIST enables zero-cost pruning at deployment time while achieving perplexity competitive with state-of-the-art post-training sparsification methods. The benefits are most pronounced under aggressive sparsity (e.g., 50%+), where TwIST significantly outperforms baseline methods; for example, reaching 23.14 PPL compared to 31.64 for the closest prior approach. Unlike unstructured pruning, TwIST produces structured, dense matrices that offer practical inference speedups and memory reductions on commodity hardware (e.g., CPUs) that do not support efficient sparse computation. TwIST provides an efficient training-time path to deployable sparse LLMs without additional fine-tuning or recovery overhead.
SolarCrossFormer: Improving day-ahead Solar Irradiance Forecasting by Integrating Satellite Imagery and Ground Sensors
Schubnel, Baptiste, Simeunović, Jelena, Tissier, Corentin, Alet, Pierre-Jean, Carrillo, Rafael E.
Abstract--Accurate day-ahead forecasts of solar irradiance are required for the large-scale integration of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems into the power grid. However, current forecasting solutions lack the temporal and spatial resolution required by system operators. In this paper, we introduce SolarCrossFormer, a novel deep learning model for day-ahead irradiance forecasting, that combines satellite images and time series from a ground-based network of meteorological stations. SolarCrossFormer uses novel graph neural networks to exploit the inter-and intra-modal correlations of the input data and improve the accuracy and resolution of the forecasts. It generates probabilistic forecasts for any location in Switzerland with a 15-minute resolution for horizons up to 24 hours ahead. It can incorporate new time-series data without retraining the model and, additionally, it can produce forecasts for locations without input data by using only their coordinates. Experimental results over a dataset of one year and 127 locations across Switzerland show that SolarCrossFormer yield a normalized mean absolute error of 6.1 % over the forecasting horizon. The results are competitive with those achieved by a commercial numerical weather prediction service. HE growing capacity of solar power sources poses a challenge for distribution system operators, balance group managers and traders due to the inherent variability of solar power. Therefore, accurate short to medium-term forecasting of local solar production is essential [1]. However, existing solutions often lack in spatial and temporal resolution at the forecasting horizon required by system operators.
GENIAL: Generative Design Space Exploration via Network Inversion for Low Power Algorithmic Logic Units
Bouvier, Maxence, Amaudruz, Ryan, Arnold, Felix, Andri, Renzo, Cavigelli, Lukas
As AI workloads proliferate, optimizing arithmetic units is becoming increasingly important for reducing the footprint of digital systems. Conventional design flows, which often rely on manual or heuristic-based optimization, are limited in their ability to thoroughly explore the vast design space. In this paper, we introduce GENIAL, a machine learning-based framework for the automatic generation and optimization of arithmetic units, with a focus on multipliers. At the core of GENIAL is a Transformer-based surrogate model trained in two stages, involving self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised finetuning, to robustly forecast key hardware metrics such as power and area from abstracted design representations. By inverting the surrogate model, GENIAL efficiently searches for new operand encodings that directly minimize power consumption in arithmetic units for specific input data distributions. Extensive experiments on large datasets demonstrate that GENIAL is consistently more sample efficient than other methods, and converges faster towards optimized designs. This enables deployment of a high-effort logic synthesis optimization flow in the loop, improving the accuracy of the surrogate model. Notably, GENIAL automatically discovers encodings that achieve up to 18% switching activity savings within multipliers on representative AI workloads compared with the conventional two's complement. We also demonstrate the versatility of our approach by achieving significant improvements on Finite State Machines, highlighting GENIAL's applicability for a wide spectrum of logic functions. Together, these advances mark a significant step toward automated Quality-of-Results-optimized combinational circuit generation for digital systems.
Learning Dynamics of RNNs in Closed-Loop Environments
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on neuroscience-inspired tasks offer powerful models of brain computation. However, typical training paradigms rely on open-loop, supervised settings, whereas real-world learning unfolds in closed-loop environments. Here, we develop a mathematical theory describing the learning dynamics of linear RNNs trained in closed-loop contexts. We first demonstrate that two otherwise identical RNNs, trained in either closed- or open-loop modes, follow markedly different learning trajectories. To probe this divergence, we analytically characterize the closed-loop case, revealing distinct stages aligned with the evolution of the training loss. Specifically, we show that the learning dynamics of closed-loop RNNs, in contrast to open-loop ones, are governed by an interplay between two competing objectives: short-term policy improvement and long-term stability of the agent-environment interaction. Finally, we apply our framework to a realistic motor control task, highlighting its broader applicability. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of modeling closed-loop dynamics in a biologically plausible setting.