Energy
Recurrent Deep Differentiable Logic Gate Networks
Bührer, Simon, Plesner, Andreas, Aczel, Till, Wattenhofer, Roger
While differentiable logic gates have shown promise in feedforward networks, their application to sequential modeling remains unexplored. This paper presents the first implementation of Recurrent Deep Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (RDDLGN), combining Boolean operations with recurrent architectures for sequence-to-sequence learning. Evaluated on WMT'14 English-German translation, RDDLGN achieves 5.00 BLEU and 30.9\% accuracy during training, approaching GRU performance (5.41 BLEU) and graceful degradation (4.39 BLEU) during inference. This work establishes recurrent logic-based neural computation as viable, opening research directions for FPGA acceleration in sequential modeling and other recursive network architectures.
LLMs for Resource Allocation: A Participatory Budgeting Approach to Inferring Preferences
Damle, Sankarshan, Faltings, Boi
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to handle complex decision-making tasks, yet their ability to perform structured resource allocation remains underexplored. Evaluating their reasoning is also difficult due to data contamination and the static nature of existing benchmarks. We present a dual-purpose framework leveraging Participatory Budgeting (PB) both as (i) a practical setting for LLM-based resource allocation and (ii) an adaptive benchmark for evaluating their reasoning capabilities. We task LLMs with selecting project subsets under feasibility (e.g., budget) constraints via three prompting strategies: greedy selection, direct optimization, and a hill-climbing-inspired refinement. We benchmark LLMs' allocations against a utility-maximizing oracle. Interestingly, we also test whether LLMs can infer structured preferences from natural-language voter input or metadata, without explicit votes. By comparing allocations based on inferred preferences to those from ground-truth votes, we evaluate LLMs' ability to extract preferences from open-ended input. Our results underscore the role of prompt design and show that LLMs hold promise for mechanism design with unstructured inputs.
AGI for the Earth, the path, possibilities and how to evaluate intelligence of models that work with Earth Observation Data?
Valipour, Mojtaba, Zheng, Kelly, Lowman, James, Szabados, Spencer, Gartner, Mike, Braswell, Bobby
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is closer than ever to becoming a reality, sparking widespread enthusiasm in the research community to collect and work with various modalities, including text, image, video, and audio. Despite recent efforts, satellite spectral imagery, as an additional modality, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. This area presents unique challenges, but also holds great promise in advancing the capabilities of AGI in understanding the natural world. In this paper, we argue why Earth Observation data is useful for an intelligent model, and then we review existing benchmarks and highlight their limitations in evaluating the generalization ability of foundation models in this domain. This paper emphasizes the need for a more comprehensive benchmark to evaluate earth observation models. To facilitate this, we propose a comprehensive set of tasks that a benchmark should encompass to effectively assess a model's ability to understand and interact with Earth observation data.
PASG: A Closed-Loop Framework for Automated Geometric Primitive Extraction and Semantic Anchoring in Robotic Manipulation
Zhu, Zhihao, Zheng, Yifan, Pan, Siyu, Jin, Yaohui, Mu, Yao
The fragmentation between high-level task semantics and low-level geometric features remains a persistent challenge in robotic manipulation. While vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in generating affordance-aware visual representations, the lack of semantic grounding in canonical spaces and reliance on manual annotations severely limit their ability to capture dynamic semantic-affordance relationships. To address these, we propose Primitive-Aware Semantic Grounding (PASG), a closed-loop framework that introduces: (1) Automatic primitive extraction through geometric feature aggregation, enabling cross-category detection of keypoints and axes; (2) VLM-driven semantic anchoring that dynamically couples geometric primitives with functional affordances and task-relevant description; (3) A spatial-semantic reasoning benchmark and a fine-tuned VLM (Qwen2.5VL-PA). We demonstrate PASG's effectiveness in practical robotic manipulation tasks across diverse scenarios, achieving performance comparable to manual annotations. PASG achieves a finer-grained semantic-affordance understanding of objects, establishing a unified paradigm for bridging geometric primitives with task semantics in robotic manipulation.
A 3DGS-Diffusion Self-Supervised Framework for Normal Estimation from a Single Image
Liang, Yanxing, Wang, Yinghui, Yang, Jinlong, Li, Wei
The lack of spatial dimensional information remains a challenge in normal estimation from a single image. Recent diffusion-based methods have demonstrated significant potential in 2D-to-3D implicit mapping, they rely on data-driven statistical priors and miss the explicit modeling of light-surface interaction, leading to multi-view normal direction conflicts. Moreover, the discrete sampling mechanism of diffusion models causes gradient discontinuity in differentiable rendering reconstruction modules, preventing 3D geometric errors from being backpropagated to the normal generation network, thereby forcing existing methods to depend on dense normal annotations. This paper proposes SINGAD, a novel Self-supervised framework from a single Image for Normal estimation via 3D GAussian splatting guided Diffusion. By integrating physics-driven light-interaction modeling and a differentiable rendering-based reprojection strategy, our framework directly converts 3D geometric errors into normal optimization signals, solving the challenges of multi-view geometric inconsistency and data dependency. Specifically, the framework constructs a light-interaction-driven 3DGS reparameterization model to generate multi-scale geometric features consistent with light transport principles, ensuring multi-view normal consistency. A cross-domain feature fusion module is designed within a conditional diffusion model, embedding geometric priors to constrain normal generation while maintaining accurate geometric error propagation. Furthermore, a differentiable 3D reprojection loss strategy is introduced for self-supervised optimization that minimizes geometric error between the reconstructed and input image, eliminating dependence on annotated normal datasets. Quantitative evaluations on the Google Scanned Objects dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across multiple metrics.
From Imperfect Signals to Trustworthy Structure: Confidence-Aware Inference from Heterogeneous and Reliability-Varying Utility Data
Li, Haoran, Mai, Lihao, Guo, Muhao, Wu, Jiaqi, Weng, Yang, Sun, Yannan, Liu, Ce Jimmy
Accurate distribution grid topology is essential for reliable modern grid operations. However, real-world utility data originates from multiple sources with varying characteristics and levels of quality. In this work, developed in collaboration with Oncor Electric Delivery, we propose a scalable framework that reconstructs a trustworthy grid topology by systematically integrating heterogeneous data. We observe that distribution topology is fundamentally governed by two complementary dimensions: the spatial layout of physical infrastructure (e.g., GIS and asset metadata) and the dynamic behavior of the system in the signal domain (e.g., voltage time series). When jointly leveraged, these dimensions support a complete and physically coherent reconstruction of network connectivity. To address the challenge of uneven data quality without compromising observability, we introduce a confidence-aware inference mechanism that preserves structurally informative yet imperfect inputs, while quantifying the reliability of each inferred connection for operator interpretation. This soft handling of uncertainty is tightly coupled with hard enforcement of physical feasibility: we embed operational constraints, such as transformer capacity limits and radial topology requirements, directly into the learning process. Together, these components ensure that inference is both uncertainty-aware and structurally valid, enabling rapid convergence to actionable, trustworthy topologies under real-world deployment conditions. The proposed framework is validated using data from over 8000 meters across 3 feeders in Oncor's service territory, demonstrating over 95% accuracy in topology reconstruction and substantial improvements in confidence calibration and computational efficiency relative to baseline methods.
Risk Analysis Techniques for Governed LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
Reid, Alistair, O'Callaghan, Simon, Carroll, Liam, Caetano, Tiberio
Organisations are starting to adopt LLM-based AI agents, with their deployments naturally evolving from single agents towards interconnected, multi-agent networks. Yet a collection of safe agents does not guarantee a safe collection of agents, as interactions between agents over time create emergent behaviours and induce novel failure modes. This means multi-agent systems require a fundamentally different risk analysis approach than that used for a single agent. This report addresses the early stages of risk identification and analysis for multi-agent AI systems operating within governed environments where organisations control their agent configurations and deployment. In this setting, we examine six critical failure modes: cascading reliability failures, inter-agent communication failures, monoculture collapse, conformity bias, deficient theory of mind, and mixed motive dynamics. For each, we provide a toolkit for practitioners to extend or integrate into their existing frameworks to assess these failure modes within their organisational contexts. Given fundamental limitations in current LLM behavioural understanding, our approach centres on analysis validity, and advocates for progressively increasing validity through staged testing across stages of abstraction and deployment that gradually increases exposure to potential negative impacts, while collecting convergent evidence through simulation, observational analysis, benchmarking, and red teaming. This methodology establishes the groundwork for robust organisational risk management as these LLM-based multi-agent systems are deployed and operated.
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Electric Power Industry Customer Support
Chan, Hei Yu, Ho, Kuok Tou, Ma, Chenglong, Si, Yujing, Lin, Hok Lai, Lam, Sa Lei
Many AI customer service systems use standard NLP pipelines or finetuned language models, which often fall short on ambiguous, multi-intent, or detail-specific queries. This case study evaluates recent techniques: query rewriting, RAG Fusion, keyword augmentation, intent recognition, and context reranking, for building a robust customer support system in the electric power domain. We compare vector-store and graph-based RAG frameworks, ultimately selecting the graph-based RAG for its superior performance in handling complex queries. We find that query rewriting improves retrieval for queries using non-standard terminology or requiring precise detail. RAG Fusion boosts performance on vague or multifaceted queries by merging multiple retrievals. Reranking reduces hallucinations by filtering irrelevant contexts. Intent recognition supports the decomposition of complex questions into more targeted sub-queries, increasing both relevance and efficiency. In contrast, keyword augmentation negatively impacts results due to biased keyword selection. Our final system combines intent recognition, RAG Fusion, and reranking to handle disambiguation and multi-source queries. Evaluated on both a GPT-4-generated dataset and a real-world electricity provider FAQ dataset, it achieves 97.9% and 89.6% accuracy respectively, substantially outperforming baseline RAG models.
iTFKAN: Interpretable Time Series Forecasting with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network
Liang, Ziran, An, Rui, Fan, Wenqi, Rao, Yanghui, Liang, Yuxuan
As time evolves, data within specific domains exhibit predictability that motivates time series forecasting to predict future trends from historical data. However, current deep forecasting methods can achieve promising performance but generally lack interpretability, hindering trustworthiness and practical deployment in safety-critical applications such as auto-driving and healthcare. In this paper, we propose a novel interpretable model, iTFKAN, for credible time series forecasting. iTFKAN enables further exploration of model decision rationales and underlying data patterns due to its interpretability achieved through model symbolization. Besides, iTFKAN develops two strategies, prior knowledge injection, and time-frequency synergy learning, to effectively guide model learning under complex intertwined time series data. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that iTFKAN can achieve promising forecasting performance while simultaneously possessing high interpretive capabilities.