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 Energy


Algorithmic Control Improves Residential Building Energy and EV Management when PV Capacity is High but Battery Capacity is Low

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Efficient energy management in prosumer households is key to alleviating grid stress in an energy transition marked by electric vehicles (EV), renewable energies and battery storage. However, it is unclear how households optimize prosumer EV charging. Here we study real-world data from 90 households on fixed-rate electricity tariffs in German-speaking countries to investigate the potential of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and other control approaches (Rule-Based, Model Predictive Control) to manage the dynamic and uncertain environment of Home Energy Management (HEM) and optimize household charging patterns. The DRL agent efficiently aligns charging of EV and battery storage with photovoltaic (PV) surplus. We find that frequent EV charging transactions, early EV connections and PV surplus increase optimization potential. A detailed analysis of nine households (1 hour resolution, 1 year) demonstrates that high battery capacity facilitates self optimization; in this case further algorithmic control shows little value. In cases with relatively low battery capacity, algorithmic control with DRL improves energy management and cost savings by a relevant margin. This result is further corroborated by our simulation of a synthetic household. We conclude that prosumer households with optimization potential would profit from DRL, thus benefiting also the full electricity system and its decarbonization.


Evaluating the Energy-Efficiency of the Code Generated by LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As the quality of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) improves, their adoption in the software industry for automated code generation continues to grow. Researchers primarily focus on enhancing the functional correctness of the generated code while commonly overlooking its energy efficiency and environmental impact. This paper investigates the energy efficiency of the code generated by 20 popular LLMs for 878 programming problems of varying difficulty levels and diverse algorithmic categories selected from the LeetCode platform by comparing them against canonical human-written solutions. Although LLMs can produce functionally correct results in most cases, our findings show that the performance and energy efficiency of LLM-produced solutions are often far below those of human-written solutions. Among the studied LLMs, DeepSeek-v3 and GPT-4o generate the most energy-efficient code, whereas Grok-2 and Gemini-1.5-Pro are among the least energy-efficient models. On average, human-generated canonical solutions are approximately 1.17 times more energy efficient than DeepSeek-v3, 1.21 times more energy efficient than GPT-4o, and over 2 times more energy efficient than Grok-2 and Gemini-1.5-Pro. For specific algorithmic groups such as dynamic programming, backtracking, and bit manipulation, LLM-generated code can consume up to 450 times more energy than human-generated canonical solutions.


PCDCNet: A Surrogate Model for Air Quality Forecasting with Physical-Chemical Dynamics and Constraints

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Air quality forecasting (AQF) is critical for public health and environmental management, yet remains challenging due to the complex interplay of emissions, meteorology, and chemical transformations. Traditional numerical models, such as CMAQ and WRF-Chem, provide physically grounded simulations but are computationally expensive and rely on uncertain emission inventories. Deep learning models, while computationally efficient, often struggle with generalization due to their lack of physical constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose PCDCNet, a surrogate model that integrates numerical modeling principles with deep learning. PCDCNet explicitly incorporates emissions, meteorological influences, and domain-informed constraints to model pollutant formation, transport, and dissipation. By combining graph-based spatial transport modeling, recurrent structures for temporal accumulation, and representation enhancement for local interactions, PCDCNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 72-hour station-level PM2.5 and O3 forecasting while significantly reducing computational costs. Furthermore, our model is deployed in an online platform, providing free, real-time air quality forecasts, demonstrating its scalability and societal impact. By aligning deep learning with physical consistency, PCDCNet offers a practical and interpretable solution for AQF, enabling informed decision-making for both personal and regulatory applications.


Mixture of Low Rank Adaptation with Partial Parameter Sharing for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-task forecasting has become the standard approach for time-series forecasting (TSF). However, we show that it suffers from an Expressiveness Bottleneck, where predictions at different time steps share the same representation, leading to unavoidable errors even with optimal representations. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage framework: first, pre-train a foundation model for one-step-ahead prediction; then, adapt it using step-specific LoRA modules.This design enables the foundation model to handle any number of forecast steps while avoiding the expressiveness bottleneck. We further introduce the Mixture-of-LoRA (MoLA) model, which employs adaptively weighted LoRA experts to achieve partial parameter sharing across steps. This approach enhances both efficiency and forecasting performance by exploiting interdependencies between forecast steps. Experiments show that MoLA significantly improves model expressiveness and outperforms state-of-the-art time-series forecasting methods. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoLA-BC92.


Closed-Loop Visuomotor Control with Generative Expectation for Robotic Manipulation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite significant progress in robotics and embodied AI in recent years, deploying robots for long-horizon tasks remains a great challenge. Majority of prior arts adhere to an open-loop philosophy and lack real-time feedback, leading to error accumulation and undesirable robustness. A handful of approaches have endeavored to establish feedback mechanisms leveraging pixel-level differences or pre-trained visual representations, yet their efficacy and adaptability have been found to be constrained. Inspired by classic closed-loop control systems, we propose CLOVER, a closed-loop visuomotor control framework that incorporates feedback mechanisms to improve adaptive robotic control. CLOVER consists of a text-conditioned video diffusion model for generating visual plans as reference inputs, a measurable embedding space for accurate error quantification, and a feedback-driven controller that refines actions from feedback and initiates replans as needed.


Offline Oracle-Efficient Learning for Contextual MDPs via Layerwise Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivated by the recent discovery of a statistical and computational reduction from contextual bandits to offline regression \citep{simchi2020bypassing}, we address the general (stochastic) Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) problem with horizon H (as known as CMDP with H layers). In this paper, we introduce a reduction from CMDPs to offline density estimation under the realizability assumption, i.e., a model class \mathcal{M} containing the true underlying CMDP is provided in advance. We develop an efficient, statistically near-optimal algorithm requiring only O(H \log T) calls to an offline density estimation algorithm (or oracle) across all T rounds. This number can be further reduced to O(H \log \log T) if T is known in advance. Our results mark the first efficient and near-optimal reduction from CMDPs to offline density estimation without imposing any structural assumptions on the model class.


WFCRL: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Wind Farm Control

Neural Information Processing Systems

The wind farm control problem is challenging, since conventional model-based control strategies require tractable models of complex aerodynamical interactions between the turbines and suffer from the curse of dimension when the number of turbines increases. Recently, model-free and multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches have been used to address this challenge. In this article, we introduce WFCRL (Wind Farm Control with Reinforcement Learning), the first suite of multi-agent reinforcement learning environments for the wind farm control problem. WFCRL frames a cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problem: each turbine is an agent and can learn to adjust its yaw, pitch or torque to maximize the common objective (e.g. the total power production of the farm). WFCRL also offers turbine load observations that will allow to optimize the farm performance while limiting turbine structural damages.



Moving Off-the-Grid: Scene-Grounded Video Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current vision models typically maintain a fixed correspondence between their representation structure and image space.Each layer comprises a set of tokens arranged "on-the-grid," which biases patches or tokens to encode information at a specific spatio(-temporal) location. In this work we present Moving Off-the-Grid (MooG), a self-supervised video representation model that offers an alternative approach, allowing tokens to move "off-the-grid" to better enable them to represent scene elements consistently, even as they move across the image plane through time. We find that a simple self-supervised objective--next frame prediction--trained on video data, results in a set of latent tokens which bind to specific scene structures and track them as they move. We demonstrate the usefulness of MooG's learned representation both qualitatively and quantitatively by training readouts on top of the learned representation on a variety of downstream tasks. We show that MooG can provide a strong foundation for different vision tasks when compared to "on-the-grid" baselines.


Conjugate Bayesian Two-step Change Point Detection for Hawkes Process

Neural Information Processing Systems

The Bayesian two-step change point detection method is popular for the Hawkes process due to its simplicity and intuitiveness. However, the non-conjugacy between the point process likelihood and the prior requires most existing Bayesian two-step change point detection methods to rely on non-conjugate inference methods. These methods lack analytical expressions, leading to low computational efficiency and impeding timely change point detection. To address this issue, this work employs data augmentation to propose a conjugate Bayesian two-step change point detection method for the Hawkes process, which proves to be more accurate and efficient. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to baseline methods. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to explore the robustness of our method concerning various hyperparameters.