Energy
Multimodal Large Language Model Framework for Safe and Interpretable Grid-Integrated EVs
Carvalho, Jean Douglas, Kenji, Hugo, Saber, Ahmad Mohammad, Melo, Glaucia, Santos, Max Mauro Dias, Kundur, Deepa
The integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into smart grids presents unique opportunities to enhance both transportation systems and energy networks. However, ensuring safe and interpretable interactions between drivers, vehicles, and the surrounding environment remains a critical challenge. This paper presents a multi-modal large language model (LLM)-based framework to process multimodal sensor data - such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and vehicular telemetry - and generate natural-language alerts for drivers. The framework is validated using real-world data collected from instrumented vehicles driving on urban roads, ensuring its applicability to real-world scenarios. By combining visual perception (YOLOv8), geocoded positioning, and CAN bus telemetry, the framework bridges raw sensor data and driver comprehension, enabling safer and more informed decision-making in urban driving scenarios. Case studies using real data demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in generating context-aware alerts for critical situations, such as proximity to pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. This paper highlights the potential of LLMs as assistive tools in e-mobility, benefiting both transportation systems and electric networks by enabling scalable fleet coordination, EV load forecasting, and traffic-aware energy planning. Index Terms - Electric vehicles, visual perception, large language models, YOLOv8, semantic segmentation, CAN bus, prompt engineering, smart grid.
In-memory Training on Analog Devices with Limited Conductance States via Multi-tile Residual Learning
Li, Jindan, Wu, Zhaoxian, Liu, Gaowen, Gokmen, Tayfun, Chen, Tianyi
Analog in-memory computing (AIMC) accelerators enable efficient deep neural network computation directly within memory using resistive crossbar arrays, where model parameters are represented by the conductance states of memristive devices. However, effective in-memory training typically requires at least 8-bit conductance states to match digital baselines. Realizing such fine-grained states is costly and often requires complex noise mitigation techniques that increase circuit complexity and energy consumption. In practice, many promising memristive devices such as ReRAM offer only about 4-bit resolution due to fabrication constraints, and this limited update precision substantially degrades training accuracy. To enable on-chip training with these limited-state devices, this paper proposes a \emph{residual learning} framework that sequentially learns on multiple crossbar tiles to compensate the residual errors from low-precision weight updates. Our theoretical analysis shows that the optimality gap shrinks with the number of tiles and achieves a linear convergence rate. Experiments on standard image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art in-memory analog training strategies under limited-state settings, while incurring only moderate hardware overhead as confirmed by our cost analysis.
Improved Robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Control of Time-Varying Systems by Bounded Extremum Seeking
Saxena, Shaifalee, Williams, Alan, Fierro, Rafael, Scheinker, Alexander
In this paper, we study the use of robust model independent bounded extremum seeking (ES) feedback control to improve the robustness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controllers for a class of nonlinear time-varying systems. DRL has the potential to learn from large datasets to quickly control or optimize the outputs of many-parameter systems, but its performance degrades catastrophically when the system model changes rapidly over time. Bounded ES can handle time-varying systems with unknown control directions, but its convergence speed slows down as the number of tuned parameters increases and, like all local adaptive methods, it can get stuck in local minima. We demonstrate that together, DRL and bounded ES result in a hybrid controller whose performance exceeds the sum of its parts with DRL taking advantage of historical data to learn how to quickly control a many-parameter system to a desired setpoint while bounded ES ensures its robustness to time variations. We present a numerical study of a general time-varying system and a combined ES-DRL controller for automatic tuning of the Low Energy Beam Transport section at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center linear particle accelerator.
Litespark Technical Report: High-Throughput, Energy-Efficient LLM Training Framework
Dade, Nii Osae Osae, Rahat, Moinul Hossain
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is plagued by long training times and massive energy consumption, with modern models requiring months of computation and gigawatt-hours of electricity. In light of these challenges,we introduce Litespark, a novel pre-training framework that addresses these inefficiencies through targeted optimizations to transformer attention and MLP layers. Our approach combines architectural improvements with algorithmic enhancements to maximize Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) while maintaining compatibility with standard transformer implementations. Comprehensive benchmarking on 3B and 30B parameter Llama models using the SlimPajama-627B dataset demonstrates substantial performance gains: 2x-6x training throughput improvement and $55\%-83$% energy consumption reduction across multi-node H200 GPU clusters. These optimizations are model- and hardware-agnostic, enabling broad applicability across transformer architectures and extending to post-training phases including supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization.
Extreme value forecasting using relevance-based data augmentation with deep learning models
Hua, Junru, Ahluwalia, Rahul, Chandra, Rohitash
Data augmentation with generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been popular for class imbalance problems, mainly for pattern classification and computer vision-related applications. Extreme value forecasting is a challenging field that has various applications from finance to climate change problems. In this study, we present a data augmentation framework for extreme value forecasting. In this framework, our focus is on forecasting extreme values using deep learning models in combination with data augmentation models such as GANs and synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). We use deep learning models such as convolutional long short-term memory (Conv-LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BD-LSTM) networks for multistep ahead prediction featuring extremes. We investigate which data augmentation models are the most suitable, taking into account the prediction accuracy overall and at extreme regions, along with computational efficiency. We also present novel strategies for incorporating data augmentation, considering extreme values based on a relevance function. Our results indicate that the SMOTE-based strategy consistently demonstrated superior adaptability, leading to improved performance across both short- and long-horizon forecasts. Conv-LSTM and BD-LSTM exhibit complementary strengths: the former excels in periodic, stable datasets, while the latter performs better in chaotic or non-stationary sequences.
Federated Spatiotemporal Graph Learning for Passive Attack Detection in Smart Grids
Agha, Bochra Al, Tajeddine, Razane
Abstract--Smart grids are exposed to passive eavesdropping, where attackers listen silently to communication links. Although no data is actively altered, such reconnaissance can reveal grid topology, consumption patterns, and operational behavior, creating a gateway to more severe targeted attacks. Detecting this threat is difficult because the signals it produces are faint, short-lived, and often disappear when traffic is examined by a single node or along a single timeline. This paper introduces a graph-centric, multimodal detector that fuses physical-layer (Channel State Information (CSI), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)) and behavioral (latency, Packet Error Rate (PER), event context) indicators over ego-centric star subgraphs and short temporal windows to detect passive attacks. T o capture stealthy perturbations, a two-stage encoder is introduced: graph convolution aggregates spatial context across ego-centric star subgraphs, while a bidirectional GRU models short-term temporal dependencies. The encoder transforms heterogeneous features into a unified spatio-temporal representation suitable for classification. Training occurs in a federated learning setup under FedProx, improving robustness to heterogeneous local raw data and contributing to the trustworthiness of decentralized training; raw measurements remain on client devices. The model achieves a testing accuracy of 98.32% per-timestep (F1 The results demonstrate that combining spatial and temporal context enables reliable detection of stealthy reconnaissance while maintaining low false-positive rates, making the approach suitable for non-IID federated smart-grid deployments. Smart grids [1] define new energy systems constructed on the notion of bidirectional communication between consumers and utilities. They enable the management of real-time data across distributed nodes. However, this open communication exposes the grid to significant risks of passive attacks, which pose a threat to privacy, trust, and stability [2].
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Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,319
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? One person was killed and about 30 others injured after two Russian drones struck trains at a station in Ukraine's northern Sumy region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of "terrorism", while Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow deliberately targeted civilians during the attack.
Data centers in space? Jeff Bezos says it's possible
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos speaks at the main panel of Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Italy, on Friday. TURIN - Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted on Friday gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy meant they would eventually outperform those based on Earth. Speaking at the Italian Tech Week in Turin, Bezos also compared the surge in artificial intelligence to the internet boom of the early 2000s, urging optimism despite the risk of speculative bubbles. The concept of orbital data centers has gained traction among tech giants as those on Earth have driven up demand for electricity and water to cool their servers. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.