Dynamic pricing is a promising strategy to address the challenges of smart charging, as traditional time-of-use (ToU) rates and stationary pricing (SP) do not dynamically react to changes in operating conditions, reducing revenue for charging station (CS) vendors and affecting grid stability. Previous studies evaluated single objectives or linear combinations of objectives for EV CS pricing solutions, simplifying trade-offs and preferences among objectives. We develop a novel formulation for the dynamic pricing problem by addressing multiple conflicting objectives efficiently instead of solely focusing on one objective or metric, as in earlier works. We find optimal trade-offs or Pareto solutions efficiently using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithms (NSGA) II and NSGA III. A dynamic pricing model quantifies the relationship between demand and price while simultaneously solving multiple conflicting objectives, such as revenue, quality of service (QoS), and peak-to-average ratios (PAR). A single method can only address some of the above aspects of dynamic pricing comprehensively. We present a three-part dynamic pricing approach using a Bayesian model, multi-objective optimization, and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) using pseudo-weight vectors. To address the research gap in CS pricing, our method selects solutions using revenue, QoS, and PAR metrics simultaneously. Two California charging sites' real-world data validates our approach.

Generative language models hallucinate. That is, at times, they generate factually flawed responses. These inaccuracies are particularly insidious because the responses are fluent and well-articulated. We focus on the task of Grounded Answer Generation (part of Generative IR), which aims to produce direct answers to a user's question based on results retrieved from a search engine. We address hallucination by adapting an existing genetic generation approach with a new 'balanced fitness function' consisting of a cross-encoder model for relevance and an n-gram overlap metric to promote grounding. Our balanced fitness function approach quadruples the grounded answer generation accuracy while maintaining high relevance.

Designing synthetically accessible molecules and recommending analogs to unsynthesizable molecules are important problems for accelerating molecular discovery. We reconceptualize both problems using ideas from program synthesis. Drawing inspiration from syntax-guided synthesis approaches, we decouple the syntactic skeleton from the semantics of a synthetic tree to create a bilevel framework for reasoning about the combinatorial space of synthesis pathways. Given a molecule we aim to generate analogs for, we iteratively refine its skeletal characteristics via Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations over the space of syntactic skeletons. Given a black-box oracle to optimize, we formulate a joint design space over syntactic templates and molecular descriptors and introduce evolutionary algorithms that optimize both syntactic and semantic dimensions synergistically. Our key insight is that once the syntactic skeleton is set, we can amortize over the search complexity of deriving the program's semantics by training policies to fully utilize the fixed horizon Markov Decision Process imposed by the syntactic template. We demonstrate performance advantages of our bilevel framework for synthesizable analog generation and synthesizable molecule design. Notably, our approach offers the user explicit control over the resources required to perform synthesis and biases the design space towards simpler solutions, making it particularly promising for autonomous synthesis platforms.

With the development of code generation techniques, selecting the correct code solution from multiple candidate solutions has become a crucial task. This study proposes AutoTest, a novel technique that combines automated test case generation with code solution execution to optimize the selection process using an evolutionary genetic algorithm. Firstly, AutoTest utilizes large pre-trained language models such as codegen-16B, code-davinci-002, and incoder-6B to provide code solutions and their corresponding test cases. Then, by executing the code solutions and evaluating their performance on the test cases, a consensus set is formed. Fine-grained ranking is achieved through the selection, mutation, and crossover mechanisms based on the evolutionary genetic algorithm, with the adjustment of alpha and beta parameters. Finally, the best code solution is chosen. AutoTest demonstrates significant performance improvements on the HumanEval benchmark test. The HumanEval dataset consists of 164 programming problems, and AutoTest achieves approximately a 10% improvement over the baseline method in terms of pass@1 score.

High-level robot skills represent an increasingly popular paradigm in robot programming. However, configuring the skills' parameters for a specific task remains a manual and time-consuming endeavor. Existing approaches for learning or optimizing these parameters often require numerous real-world executions or do not work in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we propose MuTT, a novel encoder-decoder transformer architecture designed to predict environment-aware executions of robot skills by integrating vision, trajectory, and robot skill parameters. Notably, we pioneer the fusion of vision and trajectory, introducing a novel trajectory projection. Furthermore, we illustrate MuTT's efficacy as a predictor when combined with a model-based robot skill optimizer. This approach facilitates the optimization of robot skill parameters for the current environment, without the need for real-world executions during optimization. Designed for compatibility with any representation of robot skills, MuTT demonstrates its versatility across three comprehensive experiments, showcasing superior performance across two different skill representations.

Abstract--Within the context of intelligent manufacturing, industrial robots have a pivotal function. Nonetheless, extended operational periods cause a decline in their absolute positioning accuracy, preventing them from meeting high precision. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel robot algorithm that combines an adaptive and momental bound algorithm with decoupled weight decay (AdaModW), which has three-fold ideas: a) adopting an adaptive moment estimation (Adam) algorithm to achieve a high convergence rate, b) introducing a hyperparameter into the Adam algorithm to define the length of memory, effectively addressing the issue of the abnormal learning rate, and c) interpolating a weight decay coefficient to improve its generalization. Numerous experiments on an HRS-JR680 industrial robot show that the presented algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in robot calibration performance. Thus, in light of its reliability, this algorithm provides an efficient way to address robot calibration concerns.

Google Vizier has performed millions of optimizations and accelerated numerous research and production systems at Google, demonstrating the success of Bayesian optimization as a large-scale service. Over multiple years, its algorithm has been improved considerably, through the collective experiences of numerous research efforts and user feedback. In this technical report, we discuss the implementation details and design choices of the current default algorithm provided by Open Source Vizier. Our experiments on standardized benchmarks reveal its robustness and versatility against well-established industry baselines on multiple practical modes.

This work builds off the manifold-constrained Gaussian process inference (MAGI) method for Bayesian parameter inference and trajectory reconstruction of ODE-based dynamical systems, focusing primarily on sparse and noisy data conditions. First, we introduce Pilot MAGI (pMAGI), a novel methodological upgrade on the base MAGI method that confers significantly-improved numerical stability, parameter inference, and trajectory reconstruction. Second, we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, how one can combine MAGI-based methods with dynamical systems theory to provide probabilistic classifications of whether a system is stable or chaotic. Third, we demonstrate how pMAGI performs favorably in many settings against much more computationally-expensive and overparameterized methods. Fourth, we introduce Pilot MAGI Sequential Prediction (PMSP), a novel method building upon pMAGI that allows one to predict the trajectory of ODE-based dynamical systems multiple time steps into the future, given only sparse and noisy observations. We show that PMSP can output accurate future predictions even on chaotic dynamical systems and significantly outperform PINN-based methods. Overall, we contribute to the literature two novel methods, pMAGI and PMSP, that serve as Bayesian, uncertainty-quantified competitors to the Physics-Informed Neural Network.

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of research on algorithms and control methods for distributed collaborative robots. However, the emergence of collective behavior in a swarm is still difficult to predict and control. Nevertheless, human interaction with the swarm helps render the swarm more predictable and controllable, as human operators can utilize intuition or knowledge that is not always available to the swarm. Therefore, this paper designs the Dynamic Visualization Research Platform for Multimodal Human-Swarm Interaction (DVRP-MHSI), which is an innovative open system that can perform real-time dynamic visualization and is specifically designed to accommodate a multitude of interaction modalities (such as brain-computer, eye-tracking, electromyographic, and touch-based interfaces), thereby expediting progress in human-swarm interaction research. Specifically, the platform consists of custom-made low-cost omnidirectional wheeled mobile robots, multitouch screens and two workstations. In particular, the mutitouch screens can recognize human gestures and the shapes of objects placed on them, and they can also dynamically render diverse scenes. One of the workstations processes communication information within robots and the other one implements human-robot interaction methods. The development of DVRP-MHSI frees researchers from hardware or software details and allows them to focus on versatile swarm algorithms and human-swarm interaction methods without being limited to fixed scenarios, tasks, and interfaces. The effectiveness and potential of the platform for human-swarm interaction studies are validated by several demonstrative experiments.

Recent research in Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) have shown that meta-trained neural networks can effectively guide the design of black-box optimizers, significantly reducing the need for expert tuning and delivering robust performance across complex problem distributions. Despite their success, a paradox remains: MetaBBO still rely on human-crafted Exploratory Landscape Analysis features to inform the meta-level agent about the low-level optimization progress. To address the gap, this paper proposes Neural Exploratory Landscape Analysis (NeurELA), a novel framework that dynamically profiles landscape features through a two-stage, attention-based neural network, executed in an entirely end-to-end fashion. NeurELA is pre-trained over a variety of MetaBBO algorithms using a multi-task neuroevolution strategy. Extensive experiments show that NeurELA achieves consistently superior performance when integrated into different and even unseen MetaBBO tasks and can be efficiently fine-tuned for further performance boost. This advancement marks a pivotal step in making MetaBBO algorithms more autonomous and broadly applicable.