Energy
Efficiency Is Not Enough: A Critical Perspective of Environmentally Sustainable AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous, so much so it has been argued that "AI … is becoming an infrastructure that many services of today and tomorrow will depend upon."25 Current progress in the field of AI is spearheaded by machine learning (ML) techniques such as deep learning, which has rendered many tasks previously thought to be out of reach of AI more or less solved. The past decades have seen an exponential rise in the amount of compute used by ML systems,29 which has led to a subsequent rise in energy consumption and carbon emissions.17,23,37 Beyond carbon emissions, increased production and use of the hardware infrastructure needed for ML is potentially exacerbating broader environmental impacts.15 While on the one hand ML systems can be used for making progress toward the sustainable development goals (SDGs),27,34 on the other hand the factors mentioned here limit the sustainability of ML from an environmental perspective.
Japan's power demand may grow by up to 40% by 2050
Japan's electricity demand is projected to grow by up to 40% from the 2019 level in 2050, if the wider use of generative artificial intelligence spurs the construction of more data centers, an industry organization said Wednesday. The Organization for Cross-Regional Coordination of Transmission Operators, which coordinates electricity supply and demand across Japan, warned in a report that supply shortages may occur even if nuclear power reactors and aging thermal power plants are rebuilt. The organization, which comprises power utilities nationwide, suggested several scenarios for electricity supply and demand in 2040 and 2050. According to the report, power demand is estimated to rise to between 900 billion and 1.1 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2040 and between 950 billion and 1.25 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2050, higher than the 2019 demand of 880 billion kilowatt-hours. Even if power companies make significant progress in replacing their nuclear and thermal power plants with newer models, the country's electricity supply is expected to fall short of demand by up to 23 million kilowatts in 2050.
MNN-AECS: Energy Optimization for LLM Decoding on Mobile Devices via Adaptive Core Selection
Huang, Zhengxiang, Niu, Chaoyue, Wang, Zhaode, Xue, Jiarui, Zhang, Hanming, Wang, Yugang, Xin, Zewei, Jiang, Xiaotang, Lv, Chengfei, Wu, Fan, Chen, Guihai
As the demand for on-device Large Language Model (LLM) inference grows, energy efficiency has become a major concern, especially for battery-limited mobile devices. Our analysis shows that the memory-bound LLM decode phase dominates energy use, and yet most existing works focus on accelerating the prefill phase, neglecting energy concerns. We introduce Adaptive Energy-Centric Core Selection (AECS) and integrate it into MNN to create the energy-efficient version, MNN-AECS, the first engine-level system solution without requiring root access or OS modifications for energy-efficient LLM decoding. MNN-AECS is designed to reduce LLM decoding energy while keeping decode speed within an acceptable slowdown threshold by dynamically selecting low-power CPU cores. MNN-AECS is evaluated across 5 Android and 2 iOS devices on 5 popular LLMs of various sizes. Compared to original MNN, MNN-AECS cuts down energy use by 23% without slowdown averaged over all 7 devices and 4 datasets. Against other engines, including llama.cpp, executorch, mllm, and MediaPipe, MNN-AECS delivers 39% to 78% energy saving and 12% to 363% speedup on average.
Secure Energy Transactions Using Blockchain Leveraging AI for Fraud Detection and Energy Market Stability
Khan, Md Asif Ul Hoq, Islam, MD Zahedul, Ahmed, Istiaq, Rabbi, Md Masud Karim, Anonna, Farhana Rahman, Zeeshan, MD Abdul Fahim, Ridoy, Mehedi Hasan, Chowdhury, Bivash Ranjan, Rabbi, Md Nazmul Shakir, Sadnan, GM Alamin
Peer-to-peer trading and the move to decentralized grids have reshaped the energy markets in the United States. Notwithstanding, such developments lead to new challenges, mainly regarding the safety and authenticity of energy trade. This study aimed to develop and build a secure, intelligent, and efficient energy transaction system for the decentralized US energy market. This research interlinks the technological prowess of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) in a novel way to solve long-standing challenges in the distributed energy market, specifically those of security, fraudulent behavior detection, and market reliability. The dataset for this research is comprised of more than 1.2 million anonymized energy transaction records from a simulated peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange network emulating real-life blockchain-based American microgrids, including those tested by LO3 Energy and Grid+ Labs. Each record contains detailed fields of transaction identifier, timestamp, energy volume (kWh), transaction type (buy/sell), unit price, prosumer/consumer identifier (hashed for privacy), smart meter readings, geolocation regions, and settlement confirmation status. The dataset also includes system-calculated behavior metrics of transaction rate, variability of energy production, and historical pricing patterns. The system architecture proposed involves the integration of two layers, namely a blockchain layer and artificial intelligence (AI) layer, each playing a unique but complementary function in energy transaction securing and market intelligence improvement. The machine learning models used in this research were specifically chosen for their established high performance in classification tasks, specifically in the identification of energy transaction fraud in decentralized markets.
Neuromorphic Wireless Split Computing with Resonate-and-Fire Neurons
Wu, Dengyu, Chen, Jiechen, Poor, H. Vincent, Rajendran, Bipin, Simeone, Osvaldo
Neuromorphic computing offers an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep learning accelerators for real-time time-series processing. However, many edge applications, such as wireless sensing and audio recognition, generate streaming signals with rich spectral features that are not effectively captured by conventional leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons. This paper investigates a wireless split computing architecture that employs resonate-and-fire (RF) neurons with oscillatory dynamics to process time-domain signals directly, eliminating the need for costly spectral pre-processing. By resonating at tunable frequencies, RF neurons extract time-localized spectral features while maintaining low spiking activity. This temporal sparsity translates into significant savings in both computation and transmission energy. Assuming an OFDM-based analog wireless interface for spike transmission, we present a complete system design and evaluate its performance on audio classification and modulation classification tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed RF-SNN architecture achieves comparable accuracy to conventional LIF-SNNs and ANNs, while substantially reducing spike rates and total energy consumption during inference and communication.
SEED: A Structural Encoder for Embedding-Driven Decoding in Time Series Prediction with LLMs
Li, Fengze, Wang, Yue, Liu, Yangle, Huang, Ming, Hong, Dou, Ma, Jieming
Multivariate time series forecasting requires models to simultaneously capture variable-wise structural dependencies and generalize across diverse tasks. While structural encoders are effective in modeling feature interactions, they lack the capacity to support semantic-level reasoning or task adaptation. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) possess strong generalization capabilities but remain incompatible with raw time series inputs. This gap limits the development of unified, transferable prediction systems. Therefore, we introduce SEED, a structural encoder for embedding-driven decoding, which integrates four stages: a token-aware encoder for patch extraction, a projection module that aligns patches with language model embeddings, a semantic reprogramming mechanism that maps patches to task-aware prototypes, and a frozen language model for prediction. This modular architecture decouples representation learning from inference, enabling efficient alignment between numerical patterns and semantic reasoning. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent improvements over strong baselines, and comparative studies on various datasets confirm SEED's role in addressing the structural-semantic modeling gap.
A Visualization Framework for Exploring Multi-Agent-Based Simulations Case Study of an Electric Vehicle Home Charging Ecosystem
Christensen, Kristoffer, Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard, Ma, Zheng Grace
Multi-agent-based simulations (MABS) of electric vehicle (EV) home charging ecosystems generate large, complex, and stochastic time-series datasets that capture interactions between households, grid infrastructure, and energy markets. These interactions can lead to unexpected system-level events, such as transformer overloads or consumer dissatisfaction, that are difficult to detect and explain through static post-processing. This paper presents a modular, Python-based dashboard framework, built using Dash by Plotly, that enables efficient, multi-level exploration and root-cause analysis of emergent behavior in MABS outputs. The system features three coordinated views (System Overview, System Analysis, and Consumer Analysis), each offering high-resolution visualizations such as time-series plots, spatial heatmaps, and agent-specific drill-down tools. A case study simulating full EV adoption with smart charging in a Danish residential network demonstrates how the dashboard supports rapid identification and contextual explanation of anomalies, including clustered transformer overloads and time-dependent charging failures. The framework facilitates actionable insight generation for researchers and distribution system operators, and its architecture is adaptable to other distributed energy resources and complex energy systems.
Elucidated Rolling Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Weather Forecasting
Cachay, Salva Rühling, Aittala, Miika, Kreis, Karsten, Brenowitz, Noah, Vahdat, Arash, Mardani, Morteza, Yu, Rose
Diffusion models are a powerful tool for probabilistic forecasting, yet most applications in high-dimensional chaotic systems predict future snapshots one-by-one. This common approach struggles to model complex temporal dependencies and fails to explicitly account for the progressive growth of uncertainty inherent to such systems. While rolling diffusion frameworks, which apply increasing noise to forecasts at longer lead times, have been proposed to address this, their integration with state-of-the-art, high-fidelity diffusion techniques remains a significant challenge. We tackle this problem by introducing Elucidated Rolling Diffusion Models (ERDM), the first framework to successfully unify a rolling forecast structure with the principled, performant design of Elucidated Diffusion Models (EDM). To do this, we adapt the core EDM components-its noise schedule, network preconditioning, and Heun sampler-to the rolling forecast setting. The success of this integration is driven by three key contributions: (i) a novel loss weighting scheme that focuses model capacity on the mid-range forecast horizons where determinism gives way to stochasticity; (ii) an efficient initialization strategy using a pre-trained EDM for the initial window; and (iii) a bespoke hybrid sequence architecture for robust spatiotemporal feature extraction under progressive denoising. On 2D Navier-Stokes simulations and ERA5 global weather forecasting at 1.5^\circ resolution, ERDM consistently outperforms key diffusion-based baselines, including conditional autoregressive EDM. ERDM offers a flexible and powerful general framework for tackling diffusion-based sequence generation problems where modeling escalating uncertainty is paramount. Code is available at: https://github.com/salvaRC/erdm
Scalable Machine Learning Algorithms using Path Signatures
The interface between stochastic analysis and machine learning is a rapidly evolving field, with path signatures - iterated integrals that provide faithful, hierarchical representations of paths - offering a principled and universal feature map for sequential and structured data. Rooted in rough path theory, path signatures are invariant to reparameterization and well-suited for modelling evolving dynamics, long-range dependencies, and irregular sampling - common challenges in real-world time series and graph data. This thesis investigates how to harness the expressive power of path signatures within scalable machine learning pipelines. It introduces a suite of models that combine theoretical robustness with computational efficiency, bridging rough path theory with probabilistic modelling, deep learning, and kernel methods. Key contributions include: Gaussian processes with signature kernel-based covariance functions for uncertainty-aware time series modelling; the Seq2Tens framework, which employs low-rank tensor structure in the weight space for scalable deep modelling of long-range dependencies; and graph-based models where expected signatures over graphs induce hypo-elliptic diffusion processes, offering expressive yet tractable alternatives to standard graph neural networks. Further developments include Random Fourier Signature Features, a scalable kernel approximation with theoretical guarantees, and Recurrent Sparse Spectrum Signature Gaussian Processes, which combine Gaussian processes, signature kernels, and random features with a principled forgetting mechanism for multi-horizon time series forecasting with adaptive context length. We hope this thesis serves as both a methodological toolkit and a conceptual bridge, and provides a useful reference for the current state of the art in scalable, signature-based learning for sequential and structured data.
Explaining deep neural network models for electricity price forecasting with XAI
Pesenti, Antoine, OSullivan, Aidan
Electricity markets are highly complex, involving lots of interactions and complex dependencies that make it hard to understand the inner workings of the market and what is driving prices. Econometric methods have been developed for this, white-box models, however, they are not as powerful as deep neural network models (DNN). In this paper, we use a DNN to forecast the price and then use XAI methods to understand the factors driving the price dynamics in the market. The objective is to increase our understanding of how different electricity markets work. To do that, we apply explainable methods such as SHAP and Gradient, combined with visual techniques like heatmaps (saliency maps) to analyse the behaviour and contributions of various features across five electricity markets. We introduce the novel concepts of SSHAP values and SSHAP lines to enhance the complex representation of high-dimensional tabular models.