Energy
MB-ORES: A Multi-Branch Object Reasoner for Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing
Radouane, Karim, Azzag, Hanane, lebbah, Mustapha
We propose a unified framework that integrates object detection (OD) and visual grounding (VG) for remote sensing (RS) imagery. To support conventional OD and establish an intuitive prior for VG task, we fine-tune an open-set object detector using referring expression data, framing it as a partially supervised OD task. In the first stage, we construct a graph representation of each image, comprising object queries, class embeddings, and proposal locations. Then, our task-aware architecture processes this graph to perform the VG task. The model consists of: (i) a multi-branch network that integrates spatial, visual, and categorical features to generate task-aware proposals, and (ii) an object reasoning network that assigns probabilities across proposals, followed by a soft selection mechanism for final referring object localization. Our model demonstrates superior performance on the OPT-RSVG and DIOR-RSVG datasets, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods while retaining classical OD capabilities. The code will be available in our repository: https://github.com/rd20karim/
DebFlow: Automating Agent Creation via Agent Debate
Su, Jinwei, Xia, Yinghui, Shi, Ronghua, Wang, Jianhui, Huang, Jianuo, Wang, Yijin, Shi, Tianyu, Jingsong, Yang, He, Lewei
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential and impressive performance in automating the generation and optimization of workflows. However, existing approaches are marked by limited reasoning capabilities, high computational demands, and significant resource requirements. To address these issues, we propose DebFlow, a framework that employs a debate mechanism to optimize workflows and integrates reflexion to improve based on previous experiences. We evaluated our method across six benchmark datasets, including HotpotQA, MATH, and ALFWorld. Our approach achieved a 3\% average performance improvement over the latest baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in diverse problem domains. In particular, during training, our framework reduces resource consumption by 37\% compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we performed ablation studies. Removing the Debate component resulted in a 4\% performance drop across two benchmark datasets, significantly greater than the 2\% drop observed when the Reflection component was removed. These findings strongly demonstrate the critical role of Debate in enhancing framework performance, while also highlighting the auxiliary contribution of reflexion to overall optimization.
DiffScale: Continuous Downscaling and Bias Correction of Subseasonal Wind Speed Forecasts using Diffusion Models
Springenberg, Maximilian, Otero, Noelia, Xue, Yuxin, Ma, Jackie
Renewable resources are strongly dependent on local and large-scale weather situations. Skillful subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts -- beyond two weeks and up to two months -- can offer significant socioeconomic advantages to the energy sector. This study aims to enhance wind speed predictions using a diffusion model with classifier-free guidance to downscale S2S forecasts of surface wind speed. We propose DiffScale, a diffusion model that super-resolves spatial information for continuous downscaling factors and lead times. Leveraging weather priors as guidance for the generative process of diffusion models, we adopt the perspective of conditional probabilities on sampling super-resolved S2S forecasts. We aim to directly estimate the density associated with the target S2S forecasts at different spatial resolutions and lead times without auto-regression or sequence prediction, resulting in an efficient and flexible model. Synthetic experiments were designed to super-resolve wind speed S2S forecasts from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) from a coarse resolution to a finer resolution of ERA5 reanalysis data, which serves as a high-resolution target. The innovative aspect of DiffScale lies in its flexibility to downscale arbitrary scaling factors, enabling it to generalize across various grid resolutions and lead times -without retraining the model- while correcting model errors, making it a versatile tool for improving S2S wind speed forecasts. We achieve a significant improvement in prediction quality, outperforming baselines up to week 3.
CITRAS: Covariate-Informed Transformer for Time Series Forecasting
Yamaguchi, Yosuke, Suemitsu, Issei, Wei, Wenpeng
Covariates play an indispensable role in practical time series forecasting, offering rich context from the past and sometimes extending into the future. However, their availability varies depending on the scenario, and situations often involve multiple target variables simultaneously. Moreover, the cross-variate dependencies between them are multi-granular, with some covariates having a short-term impact on target variables and others showing long-term correlations. This heterogeneity and the intricate dependencies arising in covariate-informed forecasting present significant challenges to existing deep models. To address these issues, we propose CITRAS, a patch-based Transformer that flexibly leverages multiple targets and covariates covering both the past and the future forecasting horizon. While preserving the strong autoregressive capabilities of the canonical Transformer, CITRAS introduces two novel mechanisms in patch-wise cross-variate attention: Key-Value (KV) Shift and Attention Score Smoothing. KV Shift seamlessly incorporates future known covariates into the forecasting of target variables based on their concurrent dependencies. Additionally, Attention Score Smoothing transforms locally accurate patch-wise cross-variate dependencies into global variate-level dependencies by smoothing the past series of attention scores. Experimentally, CITRAS achieves state-of-the-art performance in both covariate-informed and multivariate forecasting, demonstrating its versatile ability to leverage cross-variate dependency for improved forecasting accuracy.
Accelerating High-Efficiency Organic Photovoltaic Discovery via Pretrained Graph Neural Networks and Generative Reinforcement Learning
Qiu, Jiangjie, Lam, Hou Hei, Hu, Xiuyuan, Li, Wentao, Fu, Siwei, Zeng, Fankun, Zhang, Hao, Wang, Xiaonan
Organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials offer a promising avenue toward cost-effective solar energy utilization. However, optimizing donor-acceptor (D-A) combinations to achieve high power conversion efficiency (PCE) remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a framework that integrates large-scale pretraining of graph neural networks (GNNs) with a GPT-2 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 2)-based reinforcement learning (RL) strategy to design OPV molecules with potentially high PCE. This approach produces candidate molecules with predicted efficiencies approaching 21\%, although further experimental validation is required. Moreover, we conducted a preliminary fragment-level analysis to identify structural motifs recognized by the RL model that may contribute to enhanced PCE, thus providing design guidelines for the broader research community. To facilitate continued discovery, we are building the largest open-source OPV dataset to date, expected to include nearly 3,000 donor-acceptor pairs. Finally, we discuss plans to collaborate with experimental teams on synthesizing and characterizing AI-designed molecules, which will provide new data to refine and improve our predictive and generative models.
AutoML Algorithms for Online Generalized Additive Model Selection: Application to Electricity Demand Forecasting
Das, Keshav, Keisler, Julie, Brรฉgรจre, Margaux, Durand, Amaury
Electricity demand forecasting is key to ensuring that supply meets demand lest the grid would blackout. Reliable short-term forecasts may be obtained by combining a Generalized Additive Models (GAM) with a State-Space model (Obst et al., 2021), leading to an adaptive (or online) model. A GAM is an over-parameterized linear model defined by a formula and a state-space model involves hyperparameters. Both the formula and adaptation parameters have to be fixed before model training and have a huge impact on the model's predictive performance. We propose optimizing them using the DRAGON package of Keisler (2025), originally designed for neural architecture search. This work generalizes it for automated online generalized additive model selection by defining an efficient modeling of the search space (namely, the space of the GAM formulae and adaptation parameters). Its application to short-term French electricity demand forecasting demonstrates the relevance of the approach
Carbon Footprint Evaluation of Code Generation through LLM as a Service
Vartziotis, Tina, Schmidt, Maximilian, Dasoulas, George, Dellatolas, Ippolyti, Attademo, Stefano, Le, Viet Dung, Wiechmann, Anke, Hoffmann, Tim, Keckeisen, Michael, Kotsopoulos, Sotirios
Due to increased computing use, data centers consume and emit a lot of energy and carbon. These contributions are expected to rise as big data analytics, digitization, and large AI models grow and become major components of daily working routines. To reduce the environmental impact of software development, green (sustainable) coding and claims that AI models can improve energy efficiency have grown in popularity. Furthermore, in the automotive industry, where software increasingly governs vehicle performance, safety, and user experience, the principles of green coding and AI-driven efficiency could significantly contribute to reducing the sector's environmental footprint. We present an overview of green coding and metrics to measure AI model sustainability awareness. This study introduces LLM as a service and uses a generative commercial AI language model, GitHub Copilot, to auto-generate code. Using sustainability metrics to quantify these AI models' sustainability awareness, we define the code's embodied and operational carbon.
Simple Feedfoward Neural Networks are Almost All You Need for Time Series Forecasting
Sun, Fan-Keng, Wu, Yu-Cheng, Boning, Duane S.
Time series data are everywhere -- from finance to healthcare -- and each domain brings its own unique complexities and structures. While advanced models like Transformers and graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained popularity in time series forecasting, largely due to their success in tasks like language modeling, their added complexity is not always necessary. In our work, we show that simple feedforward neural networks (SFNNs) can achieve performance on par with, or even exceeding, these state-of-the-art models, while being simpler, smaller, faster, and more robust. Our analysis indicates that, in many cases, univariate SFNNs are sufficient, implying that modeling interactions between multiple series may offer only marginal benefits. Even when inter-series relationships are strong, a basic multivariate SFNN still delivers competitive results. We also examine some key design choices and offer guidelines on making informed decisions. Additionally, we critique existing benchmarking practices and propose an improved evaluation protocol. Although SFNNs may not be optimal for every situation (hence the ``almost'' in our title) they serve as a strong baseline that future time series forecasting methods should always be compared against.
Quantum-Assisted Machine Learning Models for Enhanced Weather Prediction
Sakhuja, Saiyam, Siyanwal, Shivanshu, Tiwari, Abhishek, Britant, null, Kashyap, Savita
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) presents as a revolutionary approach to weather forecasting by using quantum computing to improve predictive modeling capabilities. In this study, we apply QML models, including Quantum Gated Recurrent Units (QGRUs), Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), Quantum Long Short-Term Memory(QLSTM), Variational Quantum Circuits(VQCs), and Quantum Support Vector Machines(QSVMs), to analyze meteorological time-series data from the ERA5 dataset. Our methodology includes preprocessing meteorological features, implementing QML architectures for both classification and regression tasks. The results demonstrate that QML models can achieve reasonable accuracy in both prediction and classification tasks, particularly in binary classification. However, challenges such as quantum hardware limitations and noise affect scalability and generalization. This research provides insights into the feasibility of QML for weather prediction, paving the way for further exploration of hybrid quantum-classical frameworks to enhance meteorological forecasting.
Design and Experimental Validation of an Autonomous USV for Sensor Fusion-Based Navigation in GNSS-Denied Environments
Cohen-Salmon, Samuel, Klein, Itzik
This paper presents the design, development, and experimental validation of MARVEL, an autonomous unmanned surface vehicle built for real-world testing of sensor fusion-based navigation algorithms in GNSS-denied environments. MARVEL was developed under strict constraints of cost-efficiency, portability, and seaworthiness, with the goal of creating a modular, accessible platform for high-frequency data acquisition and experimental learning. It integrates electromagnetic logs, Doppler velocity logs, inertial sensors, and real-time kinematic GNSS positioning. MARVEL enables real-time, in-situ validation of advanced navigation and AI-driven algorithms using redundant, synchronized sensors. Field experiments demonstrate the system's stability, maneuverability, and adaptability in challenging sea conditions. The platform offers a novel, scalable approach for researchers seeking affordable, open-ended tools to evaluate sensor fusion techniques under real-world maritime constraints.