Energy
UrbanGraph: Physics-Informed Spatio-Temporal Dynamic Heterogeneous Graphs for Urban Microclimate Prediction
Xin, Weilin, Huang, Chenyu, Li, Peilin, Zhong, Jing, Yao, Jiawei
With rapid urbanization, predicting urban microclimates has become critical, as it affects building energy demand and public health risks. However, existing generative and homogeneous graph approaches fall short in capturing physical consistency, spatial dependencies, and temporal variability. To address this, we introduce UrbanGraph, a physics-informed framework integrating heterogeneous and dynamic spatio-temporal graphs. It encodes key physical processes -- vegetation evapotranspiration, shading, and convective diffusion -- while modeling complex spatial dependencies among diverse urban entities and their temporal evolution. We evaluate UrbanGraph on UMC4/12, a physics-based simulation dataset covering diverse urban configurations and climates. Results show that UrbanGraph improves $R^2$ by up to 10.8% and reduces FLOPs by 17.0% over all baselines, with heterogeneous and dynamic graphs contributing 3.5% and 7.1% gains. Our dataset provides the first high-resolution benchmark for spatio-temporal microclimate modeling, and our method extends to broader urban heterogeneous dynamic computing tasks.
Navigating the Synchrony-Stability Frontier in Adaptive Chatbots
Adaptive chatbots that mimic a user's linguistic style can build rapport and engagement, yet unconstrained mimicry risks an agent that feels unstable or sycophantic. We present a computational evaluation framework that makes the core design tension explicit: balancing moment-to-moment linguistic synchrony against long-term persona stability. Using an 8-dimensional style vector and a closed-loop "base+delta" prompting architecture, we simulate and compare explicit adaptation policies - Uncapped, Cap, Exponential Moving Average (EMA), Dead-Band, and Hybrids - on a human-log dataset. Our analysis maps a clear Pareto frontier: bounded policies achieve substantial gains in stability at a modest cost to synchrony. For example, a Hybrid (EMA+Cap) raises stability from 0.542 to 0.878 (+62%) while reducing synchrony by only 17%. We confirm this trade-off through large-scale replications on three public corpora (DailyDialog, Persona-Chat, EmpatheticDialogues) and LLM-in-the-loop validation across two model families. Furthermore, we quantify "prompt legibility," showing that frontier policies reduce instruction churn and cut jarring register flips (major tone changes) from 0.254 to 0.092, yielding systems that are easier to reason about and maintain. Taken together, our framework provides a general evaluation harness for style adaptation; a systematic ablation that identifies Pareto-efficient policies; robust validation across diverse datasets and models; and novel legibility metrics linking policy choices to system maintainability.
Which Rewards Matter? Reward Selection for Reinforcement Learning under Limited Feedback
Chaudhari, Shreyas, Zhang, Renhao, Thomas, Philip S., da Silva, Bruno Castro
The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to computational or financial constraints, particularly when relying on human feedback. When reinforcement learning must proceed with limited feedback -- only a fraction of samples get rewards labeled -- a fundamental question arises: which samples should be labeled to maximize policy performance? We formalize this problem of reward selection for reinforcement learning from limited feedback (RLLF), introducing a new problem formulation that facilitates the study of strategies for selecting impactful rewards. Two types of selection strategies are investigated: (i) heuristics that rely on reward-free information such as state visitation and partial value functions, and (ii) strategies pre-trained using auxiliary evaluative feedback. We find that critical subsets of rewards are those that (1) guide the agent along optimal trajectories, and (2) support recovery toward near-optimal behavior after deviations. Effective selection methods yield near-optimal policies with significantly fewer reward labels than full supervision, establishing reward selection as a powerful paradigm for scaling reinforcement learning in feedback-limited settings.
Adaptive and Resource-efficient Agentic AI Systems for Mobile and Embedded Devices: A Survey
Liu, Sicong, Wu, Weiye, Xu, Xiangrui, Li, Teng, Pang, Bowen, Guo, Bin, Yu, Zhiwen
Foundation models have reshaped AI by unifying fragmented architectures into scalable backbones with multimodal reasoning and contextual adaptation. In parallel, the long-standing notion of AI agents, defined by the sensing-decision-action loop, is entering a new paradigm: with FMs as their cognitive core, agents transcend rule-based behaviors to achieve autonomy, generalization, and self-reflection. This dual shift is reinforced by real-world demands such as autonomous driving, robotics, virtual assistants, and GUI agents, as well as ecosystem advances in embedded hardware, edge computing, mobile deployment platforms, and communication protocols that together enable large-scale deployment. Yet this convergence collides with reality: while applications demand long-term adaptability and real-time interaction, mobile and edge deployments remain constrained by memory, energy, bandwidth, and latency. This creates a fundamental tension between the growing complexity of FMs and the limited resources of deployment environments. This survey provides the first systematic characterization of adaptive, resource-efficient agentic AI systems. We summarize enabling techniques into elastic inference, test-time adaptation, dynamic multimodal integration, and agentic AI applications, and identify open challenges in balancing accuracy-latency-communication trade-offs and sustaining robustness under distribution shifts. We further highlight future opportunities in algorithm-system co-design, cognitive adaptation, and collaborative edge deployment. By mapping FM structures, cognition, and hardware resources, this work establishes a unified perspective toward scalable, adaptive, and resource-efficient agentic AI. We believe this survey can help readers to understand the connections between enabling technologies while promoting further discussions on the fusion of agentic intelligence and intelligent agents.
FSDENet: A Frequency and Spatial Domains based Detail Enhancement Network for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation
Fu, Jiahao, Yu, Yinfeng, Wang, Liejun
To fully leverage spatial information for remote sensing image segmentation and address semantic edge ambiguities caused by grayscale variations (e.g., shadows and low-contrast regions), we propose the Frequency and Spatial Domains based Detail Enhancement Network (FSDENet). Our framework employs spatial processing methods to extract rich multi-scale spatial features and fine-grained semantic details. By effectively integrating global and frequency-domain information through the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in global mappings, the model's capability to discern global representations under grayscale variations is significantly strengthened. Additionally, we utilize Haar wavelet transform to decompose features into high- and low-frequency components, leveraging their distinct sensitivity to edge information to refine boundary segmentation. The model achieves dual-domain synergy by integrating spatial granularity with frequency-domain edge sensitivity, substantially improving segmentation accuracy in boundary regions and grayscale transition zones. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that FSDENet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four widely adopted datasets: LoveDA, Vaihingen, Potsdam, and iSAID.
A Visual Diagnostics Framework for District Heating Data: Enhancing Data Quality for AI-Driven Heat Consumption Prediction
Christensen, Kristoffer, Jรธrgensen, Bo Nรธrregaard, Ma, Zheng Grace
High-quality data is a prerequisite for training reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in the energy domain. In district heating networks, sensor and metering data often suffer from noise, missing values, and temporal inconsistencies, which can significantly degrade model performance. This paper presents a systematic approach for evaluating and improving data quality using visual diagnostics, implemented through an interactive web-based dashboard. The dashboard employs Python-based visualization techniques, including time series plots, heatmaps, box plots, histograms, correlation matrices, and anomaly-sensitive KPIs such as skewness and anomaly detection based on the modified z-scores. These tools al-low human experts to inspect and interpret data anomalies, enabling a human-in-the-loop strategy for data quality assessment. The methodology is demonstrated on a real-world dataset from a Danish district heating provider, covering over four years of hourly data from nearly 7000 meters. The findings show how visual analytics can uncover systemic data issues and, in the future, guide data cleaning strategies that enhance the accuracy, stability, and generalizability of Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit models for heat demand forecasting. The study contributes to a scalable, generalizable framework for visual data inspection and underlines the critical role of data quality in AI-driven energy management systems.
Solar PV Installation Potential Assessment on Building Facades Based on Vision and Language Foundation Models
Liu, Ruyu, Zhuang, Dongxu, Zhang, Jianhua, Abate, Arega Getaneh, Nielsen, Per Sieverts, Wang, Ben, Liu, Xiufeng
Building facades represent a significant untapped resource for solar energy generation in dense urban environments, yet assessing their photovoltaic (PV) potential remains challenging due to complex geometries and semantic com ponents. This study introduces SF-SPA (Semantic Facade Solar-PV Assessment), an automated framework that transforms street-view photographs into quantitative PV deployment assessments. The approach combines com puter vision and artificial intelligence techniques to address three key challenges: perspective distortion correction, semantic understanding of facade elements, and spatial reasoning for PV layout optimization. Our four-stage pipeline processes images through geometric rectification, zero-shot semantic segmentation, Large Language Model (LLM) guided spatial reasoning, and energy simulation. Validation across 80 buildings in four countries demonstrates ro bust performance with mean area estimation errors of 6.2% ± 2.8% compared to expert annotations. The auto mated assessment requires approximately 100 seconds per building, a substantial gain in efficiency over manual methods. Simulated energy yield predictions confirm the method's reliability and applicability for regional poten tial studies, urban energy planning, and building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) deployment. Code is available at: https:github.com/CodeAXu/Solar-PV-Installation
Ultra-Fast Language Generation via Discrete Diffusion Divergence Instruct
Zheng, Haoyang, Liu, Xinyang, Kong, Cindy Xiangrui, Jiang, Nan, Hu, Zheyuan, Luo, Weijian, Deng, Wei, Lin, Guang
Fast and high-quality language generation is the holy grail that people pursue in the age of AI. In this work, we introduce Discrete Diffusion Divergence Instruct (DiDi-Instruct), a training-based method that initializes from a pre-trained (masked) discrete diffusion language model (dLLM) and distills a few-step student for fast generation. The resulting DiDi-Instruct model achieves comparable or superior performance to its dLLM teacher and the GPT-2 baseline while enabling up to 64$\times$ acceleration. The theoretical foundation of DiDi-Instruct is a novel framework based on integral KL-divergence minimization, which yields a practical training algorithm. We further introduce grouped reward normalization, intermediate-state matching, and the reward-guided ancestral sampler that significantly improve training stability, model coverage, and inference quality. On OpenWebText, DiDi-Instruct achieves perplexity from 62.2 (8 NFEs) to 18.4 (128 NFEs), which outperforms prior accelerated dLLMs and GPT-2 baseline. These gains come with a negligible entropy loss (around $1\%$) and reduce additional training wall-clock time by more than $20\times$ compared to competing dLLM distillation methods. We further validate the robustness and effectiveness of DiDi-Instruct through extensive ablation studies, model scaling, and the generation of discrete protein sequences. In conclusion, DiDi-Instruct is an efficient yet effective distillation method, enabling language generation in the blink of an eye. We will release both code and models at github.com/haoyangzheng-ai/didi-instruct.
REAL: Reading Out Transformer Activations for Precise Localization in Language Model Steering
Zhan, Li-Ming, Liu, Bo, Xie, Chengqiang, Cao, Jiannong, Wu, Xiao-Ming
Inference-time steering aims to alter a large language model's (LLM's) responses without changing its parameters, but a central challenge is identifying the internal modules that most strongly govern the target behavior. Existing approaches often rely on simplistic cues or ad hoc heuristics, leading to suboptimal or unintended effects. We introduce REAL, a framework for identifying behavior-relevant modules (attention heads or layers) in Transformer models. For each module, REAL trains a vector-quantized autoencoder (VQ-AE) on its hidden activations and uses a shared, learnable codebook to partition the latent space into behavior-relevant and behavior-irrelevant subspaces. REAL quantifies a module's behavioral relevance by how well its VQ-AE encodings discriminate behavior-aligned from behavior-violating responses via a binary classification metric; this score guides both module selection and steering strength. We evaluate REAL across eight LLMs from the Llama and Qwen families and nine datasets spanning truthfulness enhancement, open-domain QA under knowledge conflicts, and general alignment tasks. REAL enables more effective inference-time interventions, achieving an average relative improvement of 20% (up to 81.5%) over the ITI method on truthfulness steering. In addition, the modules selected by REAL exhibit strong zero-shot generalization in cross-domain truthfulness-steering scenarios.
Adaptive Diffusion Constrained Sampling for Bimanual Robot Manipulation
Tong, Haolei, Zhang, Yuezhe, Lueth, Sophie, Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Coordinated multi-arm manipulation requires satisfying multiple simultaneous geometric constraints across high-dimensional configuration spaces, which poses a significant challenge for traditional planning and control methods. In this work, we propose Adaptive Diffusion Constrained Sampling (ADCS), a generative framework that flexibly integrates both equality (e.g., relative and absolute pose constraints) and structured inequality constraints (e.g., proximity to object surfaces) into an energy-based diffusion model. Equality constraints are modeled using dedicated energy networks trained on pose differences in Lie algebra space, while inequality constraints are represented via Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) and encoded into learned constraint embeddings, allowing the model to reason about complex spatial regions. A key innovation of our method is a Transformer-based architecture that learns to weight constraint-specific energy functions at inference time, enabling flexible and context-aware constraint integration. Moreover, we adopt a two-phase sampling strategy that improves precision and sample diversity by combining Langevin dynamics with resampling and density-aware re-weighting. Experimental results on dual-arm manipulation tasks show that ADCS significantly improves sample diversity and generalization across settings demanding precise coordination and adaptive constraint handling.