Energy
Learned Compression for Compressed Learning
Jacobellis, Dan, Yadwadkar, Neeraja J.
Modern sensors produce increasingly rich streams of high-resolution data. Due to resource constraints, machine learning systems discard the vast majority of this information via resolution reduction. Compressed-domain learning allows models to operate on compact latent representations, allowing higher effective resolution for the same budget. However, existing compression systems are not ideal for compressed learning. Linear transform coding and end-to-end learned compression systems reduce bitrate, but do not uniformly reduce dimensionality; thus, they do not meaningfully increase efficiency. Generative autoencoders reduce dimensionality, but their adversarial or perceptual objectives lead to significant information loss. To address these limitations, we introduce WaLLoC (Wavelet Learned Lossy Compression), a neural codec architecture that combines linear transform coding with nonlinear dimensionality-reducing autoencoders. WaLLoC sandwiches a shallow, asymmetric autoencoder and entropy bottleneck between an invertible wavelet packet transform. Across several key metrics, WaLLoC outperforms the autoencoders used in state-of-the-art latent diffusion models. WaLLoC does not require perceptual or adversarial losses to represent high-frequency detail, providing compatibility with modalities beyond RGB images and stereo audio. WaLLoC's encoder consists almost entirely of linear operations, making it exceptionally efficient and suitable for mobile computing, remote sensing, and learning directly from compressed data. We demonstrate WaLLoC's capability for compressed-domain learning across several tasks, including image classification, colorization, document understanding, and music source separation. Our code, experiments, and pre-trained audio and image codecs are available at https://ut-sysml.org/walloc
Training Physical Neural Networks for Analog In-Memory Computing
Sakemi, Yusuke, Okamoto, Yuji, Morie, Takashi, Nobukawa, Sou, Hosomi, Takeo, Aihara, Kazuyuki
Deep learning is a state-of-the-art methodology in numerous domains, including image recognition, natural language processing, and data generation [1]. The discovery of scaling laws in deep learning models [2, 3] has motivated the development of increasingly larger models, commonly referred to as foundation models [4, 5, 6]. Recent studies have shown that reasoning tasks can be improved through iterative computations during the inference phase [7]. While computational power continues to be a major driver of artificial intelligence (AI) advancements, the associated costs remain a significant barrier to broader adoption across diverse industries [8, 9]. This issue is especially critical in edge AI systems, where energy consumption is constrained by the limited capacity of batteries, making the need for more efficient computation paramount [10]. One promising strategy to enhance energy efficiency is fabricating dedicated hardware. Since matrixvector multiplication is the computational core in deep learning, parallelization greatly enhances computational efficiency [11]. Moreover, in data-driven applications such as deep learning, a substantial portion of power consumption is due to data movement between the processor and memory, commonly referred to as the von Neumann bottleneck [12].
Align, Generate, Learn: A Novel Closed-Loop Framework for Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning
Rojas, Mateo Alejandro, Carranza, Rafael
Cross-lingual in-context learning (XICL) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for leveraging large language models (LLMs) to tackle multilingual tasks, especially for low-resource languages. However, existing approaches often rely on external retrievers or task-specific fine-tuning, limiting their scalability and generalizability. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework that harnesses the generative capabilities of LLMs to internally select and utilize task-relevant examples. Our method introduces two key objectives: a retrieval-generation alignment loss to optimize the quality of selected examples and a semantic coherence loss to ensure cross-lingual consistency. Through extensive experiments on multilingual benchmarks, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Further analysis highlights its robustness across diverse language families and its ability to generalize to unseen tasks. Human evaluations confirm the superior fluency, relevance, and semantic correctness of outputs generated by our method. This work provides a scalable, effective, and generalizable solution for cross-lingual in-context learning.
Improving the Reliability of Cable Broadband Networks via Proactive Network Maintenance
Hu, Jiyao, Zhou, Zhenyu, Yang, Xiaowei
Cable broadband networks are one of the few "last-mile" broadband technologies widely available in the U.S. Unfortunately, they have poor reliability after decades of deployment. The cable industry proposed a framework called Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) to diagnose the cable networks. However, there is little public knowledge or systematic study on how to use these data to detect and localize cable network problems. Existing tools in the public domain have prohibitive high false-positive rates. In this paper, we propose CableMon, the first public-domain system that applies machine learning techniques to PNM data to improve the reliability of cable broadband networks. CableMon tackles two key challenges faced by cable ISPs: accurately detecting failures, and distinguishing whether a failure occurs within a network or at a subscriber's premise. CableMon uses statistical models to generate features from time series data and uses customer trouble tickets as hints to infer abnormal/failure thresholds for these generated features. Further, CableMon employs an unsupervised learning model to group cable devices sharing similar anomalous patterns and effectively identify impairments that occur inside a cable network and impairments occur at a subscriber's premise, as these two different faults require different types of technical personnel to repair them. We use eight months of PNM data and customer trouble tickets from an ISP and experimental deployment to evaluate CableMon's performance. Our evaluation results show that CableMon can effectively detect and distinguish failures from PNM data and outperforms existing public-domain tools.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for Internet of Robotic Things
Ni, Wanli, Luo, Ruyu, Zhang, Xinran, Wang, Peng, Wang, Wen, Tian, Hui
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Internet of Things, multi-robot systems are progressively acquiring human-like environmental perception and understanding capabilities, empowering them to complete complex tasks through autonomous decision-making and interaction. However, the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) faces significant challenges in terms of spectrum resources, sensing accuracy, communication latency, and energy supply. To address these issues, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided IoRT network is proposed to enhance the overall performance of robotic communication, sensing, computation, and energy harvesting. In the case studies, by jointly optimizing parameters such as transceiver beamforming, robot trajectories, and RIS coefficients, solutions based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and multi-objective optimization are proposed to solve problems such as beamforming design, path planning, target sensing, and data aggregation. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed solutions in improve communication quality, sensing accuracy, computation error, and energy efficiency of RIS-aided IoRT networks.
GainAdaptor: Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion with Dual Actors for Adaptable and Energy-Efficient Walking on Various Terrains
Kim, Mincheol, Kwon, Nahyun, Kim, Jung-Yup
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as an innovative solution for controlling legged robots in challenging environments using minimalist architectures. Traditional control methods for legged robots, such as inverse dynamics, either directly manage joint torques or use proportional-derivative (PD) controllers to regulate joint positions at a higher level. In case of DRL, direct torque control presents significant challenges, leading to a preference for joint position control. However, this approach necessitates careful adjustment of joint PD gains, which can limit both adaptability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose GainAdaptor, an adaptive gain control framework that autonomously tunes joint PD gains to enhance terrain adaptability and energy efficiency. The framework employs a dual-actor algorithm to dynamically adjust the PD gains based on varying ground conditions. By utilizing a divided action space, GainAdaptor efficiently learns stable and energy-efficient locomotion. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments conducted on a Unitree Go1 robot, demonstrating improved locomotion performance across diverse terrains.
Auto-Regressive Moving Diffusion Models for Time Series Forecasting
Gao, Jiaxin, Cao, Qinglong, Chen, Yuntian
Time series forecasting (TSF) is essential in various domains, and recent advancements in diffusion-based TSF models have shown considerable promise. However, these models typically adopt traditional diffusion patterns, treating TSF as a noise-based conditional generation task. This approach neglects the inherent continuous sequential nature of time series, leading to a fundamental misalignment between diffusion mechanisms and the TSF objective, thereby severely impairing performance. To bridge this misalignment, and inspired by the classic Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) theory, which views time series as continuous sequential progressions evolving from previous data points, we propose a novel Auto-Regressive Moving Diffusion (ARMD) model to first achieve the continuous sequential diffusion-based TSF. Unlike previous methods that start from white Gaussian noise, our model employs chain-based diffusion with priors, accurately modeling the evolution of time series and leveraging intermediate state information to improve forecasting accuracy and stability. Specifically, our approach reinterprets the diffusion process by considering future series as the initial state and historical series as the final state, with intermediate series generated using a sliding-based technique during the forward process. This design aligns the diffusion model's sampling procedure with the forecasting objective, resulting in an unconditional, continuous sequential diffusion TSF model. Extensive experiments conducted on seven widely used datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing diffusion-based TSF models. Our code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/daxin007/ARMD.
A second-order-like optimizer with adaptive gradient scaling for deep learning
Bolte, Jérôme, Boustany, Ryan, Pauwels, Edouard, Purica, Andrei
In this empirical article, we introduce INNAprop, an optimization algorithm that combines the INNA method with the RMSprop adaptive gradient scaling. After giving geometrical insights, we evaluate INNAprop on CIFAR-10, Food101, and ImageNet with ResNets, VGG, DenseNet, and ViT, and on GPT-2 (OpenWeb-Text) train from scratch and with LoRA fine-tuning (E2E). INNAprop consistently matches or outperforms AdamW both in training speed and accuracy, with minimal hyperparameter tuning in large-scale settings. As deep learning models grow in size, massive computational resources are needed for training, representing significant challenges in terms of financial costs, energy consumption, and processing time (Susnjak et al., 2024; Varoquaux et al., 2024). According to the UN's Environment Programme Training, the Big Tech sector produced between two and three percent of the world's carbon emissions in 2021; some estimations for the year 2023 go beyond 4%, see the latest Stand.earth For instance, training GPT-3 is estimated to require 1,287 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, equivalent to the annual usage of over 100 U.S. households (Anthony et al., 2020; Patterson et al., 2021). Similarly, the financial cost of specialized hardware and cloud computing is extremely high. OpenAI claimed that the training cost for GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023) exceeded 100 million dollars.
Distributed Intelligent System Architecture for UAV-Assisted Monitoring of Wind Energy Infrastructure
Svystun, Serhii, Melnychenko, Oleksandr, Radiuk, Pavlo, Savenko, Oleg, Lysyi, Andrii
With the rapid development of green energy, the efficiency and reliability of wind turbines are key to sustainable renewable energy production. For that reason, this paper presents a novel intelligent system architecture designed for the dynamic collection and real-time processing of visual data to detect defects in wind turbines. The system employs advanced algorithms within a distributed framework to enhance inspection accuracy and efficiency using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with integrated visual and thermal sensors. An experimental study conducted at the "Staryi Sambir-1" wind power plant in Ukraine demonstrates the system's effectiveness, showing a significant improvement in defect detection accuracy (up to 94%) and a reduction in inspection time per turbine (down to 1.5 hours) compared to traditional methods. The results show that the proposed intelligent system architecture provides a scalable and reliable solution for wind turbine maintenance, contributing to the durability and performance of renewable energy infrastructure.
Symmetry-Constrained Generation of Diverse Low-Bandgap Molecules with Monte Carlo Tree Search
Subramanian, Akshay, Damewood, James, Nam, Juno, Greenman, Kevin P., Singhal, Avni P., Gómez-Bombarelli, Rafael
Organic optoelectronic materials are a promising avenue for next-generation electronic devices due to their solution processability, mechanical flexibility, and tunable electronic properties. In particular, near-infrared (NIR) sensitive molecules have unique applications in night-vision equipment and biomedical imaging. Molecular engineering has played a crucial role in developing non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) such as the Y-series molecules, which have significantly improved the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of solar cells and enhanced spectral coverage in the NIR region. However, systematically designing molecules with targeted optoelectronic properties while ensuring synthetic accessibility remains a challenge. To address this, we leverage structural priors from domain-focused, patent-mined datasets of organic electronic molecules using a symmetry-aware fragment decomposition algorithm and a fragment-constrained Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) generator. Our approach generates candidates that retain symmetry constraints from the patent dataset, while also exhibiting red-shifted absorption, as validated by TD-DFT calculations.