Predicting electric vehicle (EV) charging events is crucial for load scheduling and energy management, promoting seamless transportation electrification and decarbonization. While prior studies have focused on EV charging demand prediction, primarily for public charging stations using historical charging data, home charging prediction is equally essential. However, existing prediction methods may not be suitable due to the unavailability of or limited access to home charging data. To address this research gap, inspired by the concept of non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), we develop a home charging prediction method using historical smart meter data. Different from NILM detecting EV charging that has already occurred, our method provides predictive information of future EV charging occurrences, thus enhancing its utility for charging management. Specifically, our method, leverages a self-attention mechanism-based transformer model, employing a ``divide-conquer'' strategy, to process historical meter data to effectively and learn EV charging representation for charging occurrence prediction. Our method enables prediction at one-minute interval hour-ahead. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving consistently high accuracy of over 96.81\% across different prediction time spans. Notably, our method achieves high prediction performance solely using smart meter data, making it a practical and suitable solution for grid operators.

Continual Learning (CL) focuses on learning from dynamic and changing data distributions while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Various methods have been developed to address the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, including regularization-based, Bayesian-based, and memory-replay-based techniques. However, these methods lack a unified framework and common terminology for describing their approaches. This research aims to bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive and overarching framework that encompasses and reconciles these existing methodologies. Notably, this new framework is capable of encompassing established CL approaches as special instances within a unified and general optimization objective. An intriguing finding is that despite their diverse origins, these methods share common mathematical structures. This observation highlights the compatibility of these seemingly distinct techniques, revealing their interconnectedness through a shared underlying optimization objective. Moreover, the proposed general framework introduces an innovative concept called refresh learning, specifically designed to enhance the CL performance. This novel approach draws inspiration from neuroscience, where the human brain often sheds outdated information to improve the retention of crucial knowledge and facilitate the acquisition of new information. In essence, refresh learning operates by initially unlearning current data and subsequently relearning it. It serves as a versatile plug-in that seamlessly integrates with existing CL methods, offering an adaptable and effective enhancement to the learning process. Extensive experiments on CL benchmarks and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed refresh learning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/joey-wang123/CL-refresh-learning}.

Difficulties in replication and reproducibility of empirical evidences in machine learning research have become a prominent topic in recent years. Ensuring that machine learning research results are sound and reliable requires reproducibility, which verifies the reliability of research findings using the same code and data. This promotes open and accessible research, robust experimental workflows, and the rapid integration of new findings. Evaluating the degree to which research publications support these different aspects of reproducibility is one goal of the present work. For this we introduce an ontology of reproducibility in machine learning and apply it to methods for graph neural networks. Building on these efforts we turn towards another critical challenge in machine learning, namely the curse of dimensionality, which poses challenges in data collection, representation, and analysis, making it harder to find representative data and impeding the training and inference processes. Using the closely linked concept of geometric intrinsic dimension we investigate to which extend the used machine learning models are influenced by the intrinsic dimension of the data sets they are trained on.

Controlling hand exoskeletons to assist individuals with grasping tasks poses a challenge due to the difficulty in understanding user intentions. We propose that most daily grasping tasks during activities of daily living (ADL) can be deduced by analyzing object geometries (simple and complex) from 3D point clouds. The study introduces PointGrasp, a real-time system designed for identifying household scenes semantically, aiming to support and enhance assistance during ADL for tailored end-to-end grasping tasks. The system comprises an RGB-D camera with an inertial measurement unit and a microprocessor integrated into a tendon-driven soft robotic glove. The RGB-D camera processes 3D scenes at a rate exceeding 30 frames per second. The proposed pipeline demonstrates an average RMSE of 0.8 $\pm$ 0.39 cm for simple and 0.11 $\pm$ 0.06 cm for complex geometries. Within each mode, it identifies and pinpoints reachable objects. This system shows promise in end-to-end vision-driven robotic-assisted rehabilitation manual tasks.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are trained to minimize the rendering loss of predicted viewpoints. However, the photometric loss often does not provide enough information to disambiguate between different possible geometries yielding the same image. Previous work has thus incorporated depth supervision during NeRF training, leveraging dense predictions from pre-trained depth networks as pseudo-ground truth. While these depth priors are assumed to be perfect once filtered for noise, in practice, their accuracy is more challenging to capture. This work proposes a novel approach to uncertainty in depth priors for NeRF supervision. Instead of using custom-trained depth or uncertainty priors, we use off-the-shelf pretrained diffusion models to predict depth and capture uncertainty during the denoising process. Because we know that depth priors are prone to errors, we propose to supervise the ray termination distance distribution with Earth Mover's Distance instead of enforcing the rendered depth to replicate the depth prior exactly through L2-loss. Our depth-guided NeRF outperforms all baselines on standard depth metrics by a large margin while maintaining performance on photometric measures.

We introduce Neural Parameter Regression (NPR), a novel framework specifically developed for learning solution operators in Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Tailored for operator learning, this approach surpasses traditional DeepONets (Lu et al., 2021) by employing Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN, Raissi et al., 2019) techniques to regress Neural Network (NN) parameters. By parametrizing each solution based on specific initial conditions, it effectively approximates a mapping between function spaces. Our method enhances parameter efficiency by incorporating low-rank matrices, thereby boosting computational efficiency and scalability. The framework shows remarkable adaptability to new initial and boundary conditions, allowing for rapid fine-tuning and inference, even in cases of out-of-distribution examples.

Deep neural networks have revolutionized many fields, but their black-box nature also occasionally prevents their wider adoption in fields such as healthcare and finance, where interpretable and explainable models are required. The recent development of Neural Additive Models (NAMs) is a significant step in the direction of interpretable deep learning for tabular datasets. In this paper, we propose a new subclass of NAMs that use a single-layer neural network construction of the Gaussian process via random Fourier features, which we call Gaussian Process Neural Additive Models (GP-NAM). GP-NAMs have the advantage of a convex objective function and number of trainable parameters that grows linearly with feature dimensionality. It suffers no loss in performance compared to deeper NAM approaches because GPs are well-suited for learning complex non-parametric univariate functions. We demonstrate the performance of GP-NAM on several tabular datasets, showing that it achieves comparable or better performance in both classification and regression tasks with a large reduction in the number of parameters.

We propose MetaEMG, a meta-learning approach for fast adaptation in intent inferral on a robotic hand orthosis for stroke. One key challenge in machine learning for assistive and rehabilitative robotics with disabled-bodied subjects is the difficulty of collecting labeled training data. Muscle tone and spasticity often vary significantly among stroke subjects, and hand function can even change across different use sessions of the device for the same subject. We investigate the use of meta-learning to mitigate the burden of data collection needed to adapt high-capacity neural networks to a new session or subject. Our experiments on real clinical data collected from five stroke subjects show that MetaEMG can improve the intent inferral accuracy with a small session- or subject-specific dataset and very few fine-tuning epochs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formulate intent inferral on stroke subjects as a meta-learning problem and demonstrate fast adaptation to a new session or subject for controlling a robotic hand orthosis with EMG signals.

This paper considers the problem of distributed learning (DL) in the presence of stragglers. For this problem, DL methods based on gradient coding have been widely investigated, which redundantly distribute the training data to the workers to guarantee convergence when some workers are stragglers. However, these methods require the workers to transmit real-valued vectors during the process of learning, which induces very high communication burden. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel DL method based on 1-bit gradient coding (1-bit GCDL), where 1-bit data encoded from the locally computed gradients are transmitted by the workers to reduce the communication overhead. We theoretically provide the convergence guarantees of the proposed method for both the convex loss functions and nonconvex loss functions. It is shown empirically that 1-bit GC-DL outperforms the baseline methods, which attains better learning performance under the same communication overhead.

Overheating anomaly detection is essential for the quality and reliability of parts produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM). In this research, we focus on the detection of overheating anomalies using photodiode sensor data. Photodiode sensors can collect high-frequency data from the melt pool, reflecting the process dynamics and thermal history. Hence, the proposed method offers a machine learning (ML) framework to utilize photodiode sensor data for layer-wise detection of overheating anomalies. In doing so, three sets of features are extracted from the raw photodiode data: MSMM (mean, standard deviation, median, maximum), MSQ (mean, standard deviation, quartiles), and MSD (mean, standard deviation, deciles). These three datasets are used to train several ML classifiers. Cost-sensitive learning is used to handle the class imbalance between the "anomalous" layers (affected by overheating) and "nominal" layers in the benchmark dataset. To boost detection accuracy, our proposed ML framework involves utilizing the majority voting ensemble (MVE) approach. The proposed method is demonstrated using a case study including an open benchmark dataset of photodiode measurements from an LPBF specimen with deliberate overheating anomalies at some layers. The results from the case study demonstrate that the MSD features yield the best performance for all classifiers, and the MVE classifier (with a mean F1-score of 0.8654) surpasses the individual ML classifiers. Moreover, our machine learning methodology achieves superior results (9.66% improvement in mean F1-score) in detecting layer-wise overheating anomalies, surpassing the existing methods in the literature that use the same benchmark dataset.