Heating and lighting buildings requires a vast amount of energy: 18% of all global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Contributing to the problem is the fact that many buildings' HVAC systems are outdated and slow to respond to weather changes, which can lead to severe energy waste. Some scientists and technologists are hoping that AI can solve that problem. At the moment, much attention has been drawn to the energy-intensive nature of AI itself: Microsoft, for instance, acknowledged that its AI development has imperiled their climate goals. But some experts argue that AI can also be part of the solution by helping make large buildings more energy-efficient.

The ability to reconstruct high-fidelity fluid flow fields from sparse sensor measurement is critical for many science and engineering applications, but remains a huge challenge. This challenge is caused by the large difference between the dimensions of the state space and the observational space, making the operator that provides the mapping from the state space to the observational space ill-conditioned and non-invertible. As a result, deriving the forward map from the observational space to the state space as the inverse of the measurement operator is nearly impossible. While traditional methods, including sparse optimization, data assimilation, or machine learning based regressive reconstruction, are available, they often struggle with generalization and computational efficiency, particularly when non-uniform or varying discretization of the domain are considered. In this work, we propose FLRONet, a novel operator learning framework designed to reconstruct full-state flow fields from sparse sensor measurements in space and time. FLRONet utilizes a branch-trunk architecture, where the branch network integrates sensor observations from multiple time instances, and the trunk network encodes the entire temporal domain. This design allows FLRONet to achieve highly accurate, discretization-independent reconstructions at any time within the observation window. Although the popular three-dimensional Fourier Neural Operator offers similar functionalities, our results show that FLRONet surpasses it in both accuracy and efficiency. FLRONet not only achieves superior performance in approximating the true operator but also exhibits significantly faster inference at high-fidelity discretizations.

Oil spills in the ocean pose severe environmental risks, making early detection essential. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based oil spill segmentation offers robust monitoring under various conditions but faces challenges due to the limited labeled data and inherent speckle noise in SAR imagery. To address these issues, we propose (i) a diffusion-based Data Augmentation and Knowledge Distillation (DAKD) pipeline and (ii) a novel SAR oil spill segmentation network, called SAROSS-Net. In our DAKD pipeline, we present a diffusion-based SAR-JointNet that learns to generate realistic SAR images and their labels for segmentation, by effectively modeling joint distribution with balancing two modalities. The DAKD pipeline augments the training dataset and distills knowledge from SAR-JointNet by utilizing generated soft labels (pixel-wise probability maps) to supervise our SAROSS-Net. The SAROSS-Net is designed to selectively transfer high-frequency features from noisy SAR images, by employing novel Context-Aware Feature Transfer blocks along skip connections. We demonstrate our SAR-JointNet can generate realistic SAR images and well-aligned segmentation labels, providing the augmented data to train SAROSS-Net with enhanced generalizability. Our SAROSS-Net trained with the DAKD pipeline significantly outperforms existing SAR oil spill segmentation methods with large margins.

Simulation has become a crucial tool for Building Energy Optimization (BEO) as it enables the evaluation of different design and control strategies at a low cost. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms can leverage large-scale simulations to learn optimal control from vast amounts of data without supervision, particularly under the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Unfortunately, the lack of open and standardized tools has hindered the widespread application of ML and RL to BEO. To address this issue, this paper presents Sinergym, an open-source Python-based virtual testbed for large-scale building simulation, data collection, continuous control, and experiment monitoring. Sinergym provides a consistent interface for training and running controllers, predefined benchmarks, experiment visualization and replication support, and comprehensive documentation in a ready-to-use software library. This paper 1) highlights the main features of Sinergym in comparison to other existing frameworks, 2) describes its basic usage, and 3) demonstrates its applicability for RL-based BEO through several representative examples. By integrating simulation, data, and control, Sinergym supports the development of intelligent, data-driven applications for more efficient and responsive building operations, aligning with the objectives of digital twin technology.

The Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) simulates complex interactions between the coupled Earth and human systems, providing valuable insights into the co-evolution of land, water, and energy sectors under different future scenarios. Understanding the sensitivities and drivers of this multisectoral system can lead to more robust understanding of the different pathways to particular outcomes. The interactions and complexity of the coupled human-Earth systems make GCAM simulations costly to run at scale - a requirement for large ensemble experiments which explore uncertainty in model parameters and outputs. A differentiable emulator with similar predictive power, but greater efficiency, could provide novel scenario discovery and analysis of GCAM and its outputs, requiring fewer runs of GCAM. As a first use case, we train a neural network on an existing large ensemble that explores a range of GCAM inputs related to different relative contributions of energy production sources, with a focus on wind and solar. We complement this existing ensemble with interpolated input values and a wider selection of outputs, predicting 22,528 GCAM outputs across time, sectors, and regions. We report a median $R^2$ score of 0.998 for the emulator's predictions and an $R^2$ score of 0.812 for its input-output sensitivity.

Grasping is essential in robotic manipulation, yet challenging due to object and gripper diversity and real-world complexities. Traditional analytic approaches often have long optimization times, while data-driven methods struggle with unseen objects. This paper formulates the problem as a rigid shape matching between gripper and object, which optimizes with Annealed Stein Iterative Closest Point (AS-ICP) and leverages GPU-based parallelization. By incorporating the gripper's tool center point and the object's center of mass into the cost function and using a signed distance field of the gripper for collision checking, our method achieves robust grasps with low computational time. Experiments with the Kinova KG3 gripper show an 87.3% success rate and 0.926 s computation time across various objects and settings, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

Quadratic programming (QP) forms a crucial foundation in optimization, encompassing a broad spectrum of domains and serving as the basis for more advanced algorithms. Consequently, as the scale and complexity of modern applications continue to grow, the development of efficient and reliable QP algorithms is becoming increasingly vital. In this context, this paper introduces a novel deep learning-aided distributed optimization architecture designed for tackling large-scale QP problems. First, we combine the state-of-the-art Operator Splitting QP (OSQP) method with a consensus approach to derive DistributedQP, a new method tailored for network-structured problems, with convergence guarantees to optimality. Subsequently, we unfold this optimizer into a deep learning framework, leading to DeepDistributedQP, which leverages learned policies to accelerate reaching to desired accuracy within a restricted amount of iterations. Our approach is also theoretically grounded through Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayes theory, providing generalization bounds on the expected optimality gap for unseen problems. The proposed framework, as well as its centralized version DeepQP, significantly outperform their standard optimization counterparts on a variety of tasks such as randomly generated problems, optimal control, linear regression, transportation networks and others. Notably, DeepDistributedQP demonstrates strong generalization by training on small problems and scaling to solve much larger ones (up to 50K variables and 150K constraints) using the same policy. Moreover, it achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements in wall-clock time compared to OSQP. The certifiable performance guarantees of our approach are also demonstrated, ensuring higher-quality solutions over traditional optimizers.

Accurate predictions and uncertainty quantification (UQ) are essential for decision-making in risk-sensitive fields such as system safety modeling. Deep ensembles (DEs) are efficient and scalable methods for UQ in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs); however, their performance is limited when constructed by simply retraining the same DNN multiple times with randomly sampled initializations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method that combines Bayesian optimization (BO) with DE, referred to as BODE, to enhance both predictive accuracy and UQ. We apply BODE to a case study involving a Densely connected Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) trained on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data to predict eddy viscosity in sodium fast reactor thermal stratification modeling. Compared to a manually tuned baseline ensemble, BODE estimates total uncertainty approximately four times lower in a noise-free environment, primarily due to the baseline's overestimation of aleatoric uncertainty. Specifically, BODE estimates aleatoric uncertainty close to zero, while aleatoric uncertainty dominates the total uncertainty in the baseline ensemble. We also observe a reduction of more than 30% in epistemic uncertainty. When Gaussian noise with standard deviations of 5% and 10% is introduced into the data, BODE accurately fits the data and estimates uncertainty that aligns with the data noise. These results demonstrate that BODE effectively reduces uncertainty and enhances predictions in data-driven models, making it a flexible approach for various applications requiring accurate predictions and robust UQ.

We carry out a series of experiments to test large language models' multi-hop reasoning ability from three aspects: selecting and combining external knowledge, dealing with non-sequential reasoning tasks and generalising to data samples with larger numbers of hops. We test the GPT-3.5 model on four reasoning benchmarks with Chain-of-Thought prompting (and its variations). Our results reveal that despite the amazing performance achieved by large language models on various reasoning tasks, models still suffer from severe drawbacks which shows a large gap with humans.

Wind power forecasting plays a critical role in modern energy systems, facilitating the integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid. Accurate prediction of wind energy output is essential for managing the inherent intermittency of wind power, optimizing energy dispatch, and ensuring grid stability. This paper proposes the use of Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based predictive models that leverage climate datasets, including wind speed, atmospheric pressure, temperature, and other meteorological variables, to improve the accuracy of wind power simulations. In particular, we focus on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) datasets, which provide climate projections, as inputs for training the DNN models. These models aim to capture the complex nonlinear relationships between the CMIP-based climate data and actual wind power generation at wind farms located in Germany. Our study compares various DNN architectures, specifically Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Transformer-enhanced LSTM models, to identify the best configuration among these architectures for climate-aware wind power simulation. The implementation of this framework involves the development of a Python package (CADNN) designed to support multiple tasks, including statistical analysis of the climate data, data visualization, preprocessing, DNN training, and performance evaluation. We demonstrate that the DNN models, when integrated with climate data, significantly enhance forecasting accuracy. This climate-aware approach offers a deeper understanding of the time-dependent climate patterns that influence wind power generation, providing more accurate predictions and making it adaptable to other geographical regions.