Energy
iVR-GS: Inverse Volume Rendering for Explorable Visualization via Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting
Tang, Kaiyuan, Yao, Siyuan, Wang, Chaoli
In volume visualization, users can interactively explore the three-dimensional data by specifying color and opacity mappings in the transfer function (TF) or adjusting lighting parameters, facilitating meaningful interpretation of the underlying structure. However, rendering large-scale volumes demands powerful GPUs and high-speed memory access for real-time performance. While existing novel view synthesis (NVS) methods offer faster rendering speeds with lower hardware requirements, the visible parts of a reconstructed scene are fixed and constrained by preset TF settings, significantly limiting user exploration. This paper introduces inverse volume rendering via Gaussian splatting (iVR-GS), an innovative NVS method that reduces the rendering cost while enabling scene editing for interactive volume exploration. Specifically, we compose multiple iVR-GS models associated with basic TFs covering disjoint visible parts to make the entire volumetric scene visible. Each basic model contains a collection of 3D editable Gaussians, where each Gaussian is a 3D spatial point that supports real-time scene rendering and editing. We demonstrate the superior reconstruction quality and composability of iVR-GS against other NVS solutions (Plenoxels, CCNeRF, and base 3DGS) on various volume datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/TouKaienn/iVR-GS.
Generating ensembles of spatially-coherent in-situ forecasts using flow matching
Landry, David, Monteleoni, Claire, Charantonis, Anastase
We propose a machine-learning-based methodology for in-situ weather forecast postprocessing that is both spatially coherent and multivariate. Compared to previous work, our Flow MAtching Postprocessing (FMAP) better represents the correlation structures of the observations distribution, while also improving marginal performance at the stations. FMAP generates forecasts that are not bound to what is already modeled by the underlying gridded prediction and can infer new correlation structures from data. The resulting model can generate an arbitrary number of forecasts from a limited number of numerical simulations, allowing for low-cost forecasting systems. A single training is sufficient to perform postprocessing at multiple lead times, in contrast with other methods which use multiple trained networks at generation time. This work details our methodology, including a spatial attention transformer backbone trained within a flow matching generative modeling framework. FMAP shows promising performance in experiments on the EUPPBench dataset, forecasting surface temperature and wind gust values at station locations in western Europe up to five-day lead times.
Near-Driven Autonomous Rover Navigation in Complex Environments: Extensions to Urban Search-and-Rescue and Industrial Inspection
Shrestha, Dhadkan, Bhattarai, Lincoln
This paper explores the use of an extended neuroevolutionary approach, based on NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), for autonomous robots in dynamic environments associated with hazardous tasks like firefighting, urban search-and-rescue (USAR), and industrial inspections. Building on previous research, it expands the simulation environment to larger and more complex settings, demonstrating NEAT's adaptability across different applications. By integrating recent advancements in NEAT and reinforcement learning, the study uses modern simulation frameworks for realism and hybrid algorithms for optimization. Experimental results show that NEAT-evolved controllers achieve success rates comparable to state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods, with superior structural adaptability. The agents reached ~80% success in outdoor tests, surpassing baseline models. The paper also highlights the benefits of transfer learning among tasks and evaluates the effectiveness of NEAT in complex 3D navigation. Contributions include evaluating NEAT for diverse autonomous applications and discussing real-world deployment considerations, emphasizing the approach's potential as an alternative or complement to deep reinforcement learning in autonomous navigation tasks.
Fried Parameter Estimation from Single Wavefront Sensor Image with Artificial Neural Networks
Smith, Jeffrey, Fujii, Taisei, Cranney, Jesse, Gretton, Charles
Atmospheric turbulence degrades the quality of astronomical observations in ground-based telescopes, leading to distorted and blurry images. Adaptive Optics (AO) systems are designed to counteract these effects, using atmospheric measurements captured by a wavefront sensor to make real-time corrections to the incoming wavefront. The Fried parameter, r0, characterises the strength of atmospheric turbulence and is an essential control parameter for optimising the performance of AO systems and more recently sky profiling for Free Space Optical (FSO) communication channels. In this paper, we develop a novel data-driven approach, adapting machine learning methods from computer vision for Fried parameter estimation from a single Shack-Hartmann or pyramid wavefront sensor image. Using these data-driven methods, we present a detailed simulation-based evaluation of our approach using the open-source COMPASS AO simulation tool to evaluate both the Shack-Hartmann and pyramid wavefront sensors. Our evaluation is over a range of guide star magnitudes, and realistic noise, atmospheric and instrument conditions. Remarkably, we are able to develop a single network-based estimator that is accurate in both open and closed-loop AO configurations. Our method accurately estimates the Fried parameter from a single WFS image directly from AO telemetry to a few millimetres. Our approach is suitable for real time control, exhibiting 0.83ms r0 inference times on retail NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU hardware, and thereby demonstrating a compelling economic solution for use in real-time instrument control.
Plasma State Monitoring and Disruption Characterization using Multimodal VAEs
Poels, Yoeri, Pau, Alessandro, Donner, Christian, Romanelli, Giulio, Sauter, Olivier, Venturini, Cristina, Menkovski, Vlado, team, the TCV, team, the WPTE
When a plasma disrupts in a tokamak, significant heat and electromagnetic loads are deposited onto the surrounding device components. These forces scale with plasma current and magnetic field strength, making disruptions one of the key challenges for future devices. Unfortunately, disruptions are not fully understood, with many different underlying causes that are difficult to anticipate. Data-driven models have shown success in predicting them, but they only provide limited interpretability. On the other hand, large-scale statistical analyses have been a great asset to understanding disruptive patterns. In this paper, we leverage data-driven methods to find an interpretable representation of the plasma state for disruption characterization. Specifically, we use a latent variable model to represent diagnostic measurements as a low-dimensional, latent representation. We build upon the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework, and extend it for (1) continuous projections of plasma trajectories; (2) a multimodal structure to separate operating regimes; and (3) separation with respect to disruptive regimes. Subsequently, we can identify continuous indicators for the disruption rate and the disruptivity based on statistical properties of measurement data. The proposed method is demonstrated using a dataset of approximately 1600 TCV discharges, selecting for flat-top disruptions or regular terminations. We evaluate the method with respect to (1) the identified disruption risk and its correlation with other plasma properties; (2) the ability to distinguish different types of disruptions; and (3) downstream analyses. For the latter, we conduct a demonstrative study on identifying parameters connected to disruptions using counterfactual-like analysis. Overall, the method can adequately identify distinct operating regimes characterized by varying proximity to disruptions in an interpretable manner.
Optimized Cloud Resource Allocation Using Genetic Algorithms for Energy Efficiency and QoS Assurance
Panggabean, Caroline, C, Devaraj Verma, Gogoi, Bhagyashree, Limbu, Ranju, Sarker, Rhythm
Caroline Panggabean Department of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka carolinepgabean@gmail.com ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009 - 0004 - 9964 - 7986 Ranju Limbu Department of CSE (AIM) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka 21btlca002 @jainuniversity.ac.in Dr. Devaraj Verma C Department of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka c.devaraj@jainuniversity.ac.in ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000 - 0002 - 1504 - 4263 Rhythm Sarker Department of CSE (AIML) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka 21btrca065 @jainuniversity.ac.in Bhagyashree Gogoi Department of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka 21btlca001 @ jainuniver s ity.ac.in Abstract -- Cloud computing environments demand dynamic and efficient resource management to ensure optimal performance, reduced energy consumption, and adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) - based approach for Virtual Machine (VM) placement and consol idation, aiming to minimize power usage while maintaining QoS constraints. The proposed method dynamically adjusts VM allocation based on real - time workload variations, outperforming traditional heuristics such as First Fit Decreasing (FFD) and Best Fit De creasing (BFD). Experimental results show notable reductions in energy consumption, VM migrations, SLA violation rates, and execution time.
Energy Considerations of Large Language Model Inference and Efficiency Optimizations
Fernandez, Jared, Na, Clara, Tiwari, Vashisth, Bisk, Yonatan, Luccioni, Sasha, Strubell, Emma
As large language models (LLMs) scale in size and adoption, their computational and environmental costs continue to rise. Prior benchmarking efforts have primarily focused on latency reduction in idealized settings, often overlooking the diverse real-world inference workloads that shape energy use. In this work, we systematically analyze the energy implications of common inference efficiency optimizations across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads, including conversational AI and code generation. We introduce a modeling approach that approximates real-world LLM workflows through a binning strategy for input-output token distributions and batch size variations. Our empirical analysis spans software frameworks, decoding strategies, GPU architectures, online and offline serving settings, and model parallelism configurations. We show that the effectiveness of inference optimizations is highly sensitive to workload geometry, software stack, and hardware accelerators, demonstrating that naive energy estimates based on FLOPs or theoretical GPU utilization significantly underestimate real-world energy consumption. Our findings reveal that the proper application of relevant inference efficiency optimizations can reduce total energy use by up to 73% from unoptimized baselines. These insights provide a foundation for sustainable LLM deployment and inform energy-efficient design strategies for future AI infrastructure.
Advancing CMA-ES with Learning-Based Cooperative Coevolution for Scalable Optimization
Guo, Hongshu, Qiu, Wenjie, Ma, Zeyuan, Zhang, Xinglin, Zhang, Jun, Gong, Yue-Jiao
Recent research in Cooperative Coevolution~(CC) have achieved promising progress in solving large-scale global optimization problems. However, existing CC paradigms have a primary limitation in that they require deep expertise for selecting or designing effective variable decomposition strategies. Inspired by advancements in Meta-Black-Box Optimization, this paper introduces LCC, a pioneering learning-based cooperative coevolution framework that dynamically schedules decomposition strategies during optimization processes. The decomposition strategy selector is parameterized through a neural network, which processes a meticulously crafted set of optimization status features to determine the optimal strategy for each optimization step. The network is trained via the Proximal Policy Optimization method in a reinforcement learning manner across a collection of representative problems, aiming to maximize the expected optimization performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LCC not only offers certain advantages over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of optimization effectiveness and resource consumption, but it also exhibits promising transferability towards unseen problems.
Cooperative Task Offloading through Asynchronous Deep Reinforcement Learning in Mobile Edge Computing for Future Networks
Liu, Yuelin, Li, Haiyuan, Vasilakos, Xenofon, Hussain, Rasheed, Simeonidou, Dimitra
Cooperative Task Offloading through Asynchronous Deep Reinforcement Learning in Mobile Edge Computing for Future Networks Y uelin Liu, Haiyuan Li, Xenofon V asilakos, Rasheed Hussain, and Dimitra Simeonidou High Performance Networks (HPN) Research Group, Smart Internet Lab, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Email: { name }. {surname}@bristol.ac.uk Abstract --Future networks (including 6G) are poised to accelerate the realisation of Internet of Everything. The latter will imply a high demand for computational resources to support new services. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising solution that enables offloading computation-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers from the end-user devices, thereby reducing latency and energy consumption . Nevertheless, relying solely on a single MEC server for task offloading can lead to uneven resource utilisation and suboptimal performance in complex scenarios. Additionally, traditional task offloading strategies specialise in centralised policy decisions, which unavoidably entails extreme transmission latency and reach computational bottleneck. T o address these gaps, we propose a latency-efficient and energy-efficient Cooperative T ask Offloading framework with Transformer-driven Prediction (CTO-TP), leveraging asynchronous multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to address these challenges. This approach fosters edge-edge cooperation and decreases the synchronous waiting time by performing asynchronous training, optimis-ing task offloading, and resource allocation across distributed networks. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed CTO-TP algorithm reduces up to 80% overall system latency and 87% energy consumption compared to the baseline schemes.
Dargana: fine-tuning EarthPT for dynamic tree canopy mapping from space
Smith, Michael J., Fleming, Luke, Geach, James E., Roberts, Ryan J., Kalaitzis, Freddie, Banister, James
Aspia Space A BSTRACT We present Dargana, a fine-tuned variant of the EarthPT time-series foundation model that achieves specialisation using < 3% of its pre-training data volume and 5% of its pre-training compute. Dargana is fine-tuned to generate regularly updated classification of tree canopy cover at 10 m resolution, distinguishing conifer and broadleaved tree types. Using Cornwall, UK, as a test case, the model achieves a pixel-level ROC-AUC of 0.98 and a PR-AUC of 0.83 on unseen satellite imagery. Dargana can identify fine structures like hedgerows and coppice below the training sample limit, and can track temporal changes to canopy cover such as new woodland establishment. Our results demonstrate how pre-trained Large Observation Models like EarthPT can be specialised for granular, dynamic land cover monitoring from space, providing a valuable, scalable tool for natural capital management and conservation.