A modular deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is introduced to facilitate the process of deploying various architectures of RNNs, and to automatically compute derivatives for gradient-based learning methods. The modularity leads to a set of new architectures, one of which includes feedforward inter-layer connections. By adding feedforward inter-layer connections in a multi-layer RNN, it is observed that the capability of the RNN to learn and model high-order dynamics and nonlinearities is significantly improved. The problem of vanishing/exploding gradient in space for a multilayer RNN is also alleviated using feedforward connections. These results are demonstrated using a quadrotor case study, for which a model of the altitude dynamics is learned with our particular network structure, while existing methods are unable to generalize as quickly or at all.
Human mobility predictability concerns the best prediction performance attainable from a given target and input information, but its ground truth is not directly observable on real mobility data. We present BER-PEF, a Bayes-error-rate-based framework that converts BER estimation into mobility predictability estimation and provides a unified protocol for comparing estimators without observable ground truth. The framework maps symbolic sequences, numeric trajectories, contextual features, and learned representations into a common feature--label space, then evaluates estimator outputs along controlled perturbation curves against a shared predictability reference interval by measuring deviations below the interval, above the interval, and across the full interval. Experiments on Foursquare NYC and TKY, GeoLife, and T-Drive show that several BER-based estimators achieve lower reference discrepancy than existing predictability methods on symbolic sequences and numeric trajectories, while their estimates track changes in empirical prediction performance under perturbation. Additional analyses show that contextual inputs and multiple structured representations can be evaluated under the same protocol, and that aggregating evidence across multiple perturbation levels provides a more reliable basis for estimator selection than relying on a single unperturbed observation. BER-PEF therefore offers a unified and verifiable path for evaluating predictability estimators on heterogeneous mobility data when ground-truth predictability is unavailable.
En Xu, Jingtao Ding, Zhiwen Yu et al.· 0 citations
This study examines the ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict the risk of weather-related forced outages in the distribution grid in a zero-shot framework, without labeled training data. The problem is formulated as a binary severity classification task across three forecast horizons (3h, 6h, 12h), using six years of outage records and high-resolution weather data for a utility service area in central Texas. Four zero-shot LLMs are benchmarked against two supervised classifiers across two input configurations: one using current weather observations and the other using weather forecast data. Results show that supervised models outperform LLMs on macro-F1 and precision, while newer LLM generations achieve competitive scores. Beyond accuracy, LLMs offer complementary strengths in actionable reasoning and geographic scalability, suggesting that combining them with supervised models may be the best practice.
Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) has become an important part of integrated sensing and communications, paving the way for a range of context-aware services. However, most existing Wi-Fi-based HAR systems rely on deep learning (DL) models that are computationally and memory intensive in both training and inference, which poses significant challenges for real-world deployment. Conventional training requires simultaneous updates of millions of parameters, leading to prohibitive memory consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum-assisted memory-efficient training framework (Q-MET) designed to improve efficiency in both training and inference. Q-MET utilizes a hybrid quantum classical neural network to indirectly generate parameters for HAR models, significantly reducing the trainable parameter count compared to direct optimization. To further support the deployment on resource-constrained devices, we integrate structured pruning during the training phase. Experimental results demonstrate that Q-MET achieves a 90% to 95% reduction in trainable parameters compared with conventional backpropagation-based DL training while maintaining or even exceeding classical classification accuracy. Additionally, Q-MET supports lightweight inference through structured pruning, achieving 75% to 85% model sparsity with less than 2% loss in classification accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first quantum-assisted approach to simultaneously tackle memory inefficiencies in both the training and inference stages of HAR systems.
To Truong An, Jie Zhang, Guolin Yin et al.· 0 citations
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Aerodynamic surrogate models trained on high-fidelity CFD data reproduce numerical predictions of both scalar outputs and entire fields accurately, yet their predictive fidelity is limited by systematic discrepancies between CFD and experimental observations. We present an experimentally grounded correction framework that adapts a CFD-trained deep learning surrogate using wind-tunnel PSP measurements. A Geotransolver surrogate trained on 2,300 high-fidelity CFD simulations of the NASA CRM wing-body configuration, spanning geometric variation, Mach 0.70-0.85, and angles of attack 0 to 4 degrees, reproduces the CFD integrated aerodynamic forces and pitching moment to R2 > 0.99 but does not match the experimental data. To incorporate experimental information without retraining the surrogate, a correction network is trained on spatially registered PSP measurements at two freestream Mach numbers (0.70 and 0.85) across the same angle-of-attack range, learning the discrepancy between the surrogate-predicted and experimentally measured surface-pressure distributions. At Mach 0.85 the correction substantially improves agreement with PSP, particularly at the wing suction peak, shock location, and subsequent pressure recovery, reducing both the magnitude of the prediction error and the fraction of wetted surface on which it exceeds 0.05 in Cp, and it does so from a limited experimental dataset without modifying the pretrained surrogate parameters. On held-out angles of attack the grounded surrogate agrees with measurement to within 2.3-2.7% of the measured Cp range, and outperforms direct interpolation between the measured conditions at every state tested. Experimental measurements can therefore ground a large-scale simulation-trained surrogate by learning systematic CFD-to-experiment discrepancies while preserving its generalization capability and computational efficiency.
Existing post-hoc explainers for machine learning classifiers primarily focus on feature attribution, assigning importance scores to individual features. While valuable, this approach struggles to articulate the complex, combinatorial patterns that often drive a model's decision-making process. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ProToMEx, a new paradigm for explainability that leverages Probabilistic Topic Models (PTMs). Our model-agnostic framework learns latent ''topics'' that represent distinct, high-level reasons for a classification, moving beyond simple feature importance to reveal underlying semantic structures. ProToMEx naturally provides both global explanations of a model's overall behaviour and local explanations that can disentangle multiple co-existing reasons for a specific prediction. We demonstrate empirically that ProToMEx not only produces explanations of comparable fidelity to popular methods like SHAP and LIME but also drastically reduces the amortised computational cost of generating local explanations, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Specifically, we show that ProToMEx is ~30-40x faster than SHAP and LIME over standardised tabular datasets and synthetic datasets.
Athina Georgara, Adarsh Valoor, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn· 0 citations
Latent world models have become increasingly popular as a method to predict and plan in latent space rather than pixel space. Recent architectures, such as LeWorldModel (LeWM), jointly train the encoder and predictor using regularization techniques like SIGReg to prevent representation collapse. Even with such regularization preventing representation collapse, we identify a new world model failure mode of \textit{physical representation laziness}, particularly noted in highly dynamic environments. For these lazy cases, the learned latent states do not collapse but nonetheless fail to represent key physical properties, causing ubiquitous downstream planning failure. To resolve this issue, we propose training-time auxiliary supervision with a lightweight "Fourier auxiliary head", which enforces physically-informed structuring of the latent space with no additional inference-time cost and can be generalized to any environment. Experimentally, we show that the auxiliary head substantially improves planning success rates in dynamic environments where the baseline LeWM exhibits physical representation laziness. It also leads to modest improvements in other environments, even when the baseline does not exhibit physical representation laziness. We further observe superior planning performance being accompanied by higher latent space correlations with key physical properties, indicating both the ability of our method to physically structure latent states and the potential planning-side benefit to the learned representation being physically structured. We also see in low-data regimes, auxiliary supervision is particularly impactful in increasing success rate. These findings support the use of our Fourier auxiliary head method to improve both overall success rate and data efficiency, while avoiding representation laziness in latent world models.
Penghao Zhu, Salvatore Penachio, Kaustav Mukherjee et al.· 0 citations
Time series forecasting (TSF) is evolving toward multimodal and agentic settings, yet using foundation models remains uneconomical in resource-constrained scenarios, where compact, specialized forecasters are more desirable. However, lightweight forecasters typically require substantial training data, limiting their use in domains with scarce, slowly accumulated, or privacy-sensitive time series. To address this dilemma, we investigate the challenging problem of few-shot learning for lightweight forecasters. We propose MetaCaster, a meta-harness-optimized multi-agent framework that uses agentic data generation to automatically train specialized lightweight forecasters from only a few examples and textual contexts. Our work highlights a new TSF paradigm in which agents act not as forecasters but as intermediary engineers that prepare efficient, task-specific forecasters for deployment. Experiments on 18 datasets, 23 state-of-the-art lightweight forecasters, and 14 baselines demonstrate that MetaCaster achieves both data efficiency and computational efficiency while maintaining high-quality TSF performance.
ChengAo Shen, Wenchao Yu, Fangyu Wu et al.· 0 citations
Rising energy demand, fossil fuel depletion and climate change highlight the need for more efficient energy production and consumption. Offshore oil and gas platforms face challenges related to inefficient energy use, system failures, accessibility and environmental impact. Machine learning (ML) offers opportunities to improve the safety, sustainability and efficiency of these systems; however, previous research has largely focused on increasing oil production rather than reducing energy consumption on platforms. This study investigates the use of ML and search algorithms to improve diesel efficiency on an offshore oil platform. Data collected over 18 months from a platform in Scotland were analysed, focusing on four diesel generators as the primary diesel-consuming equipment. Following exploratory data analysis and outlier detection, regression models were developed to predict daily diesel consumption for different generator power loads. Multiple Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Networks achieved the best predictive performance compared with Extra Trees Regression, Extreme Gradient Boosting and Random Forest. Search algorithms were then used to identify combinations of generator power loads that minimised daily diesel consumption. The results showed an average diesel saving of 27% per day compared with the worst daily power-load combinations, equivalent to approximately 24,000 litres/day. These findings demonstrate significant opportunities for improving energy efficiency on offshore oil platforms using ML-based optimisation.
Khivishta Boodhoo, Josh Plumbly, Nicholas Watson· 0 citations
An accurate estimation of the state of health (SOH) underpins safe and optimized use of the battery system. Although compelling, data-driven SOH estimation models typically require large amounts of high-quality labeled cycling data, while in practice such labels are often sparse in both quantity and coverage. Therefore, in this work, we propose a degradation-aligned self-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on a convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model, which learns aging-consistent representations from unlabeled data through a cycle-order ranking objective as the pretext task for pretraining, thereby enabling robust SOH estimation after fine-tuning on sparsely labeled data. Test results showcase that the proposed ranking-based SSL approach proves to endow the pretrained model with degradation awareness from unlabeled data, and after fine-tuning the model can carry out accurate, robust SOH estimation, even when only an extremely limited amount of 1% of unevenly distributed labeled training data is available, where the MAE of 1.718% and RMSE of 2.329% can be achieved on the test cell. In addition, in-depth analyses are presented regarding the influences of label distribution and cross-cell robustness. We believe this work could shed new light on label-efficient SOH estimation of lithium-ion batteries, addressing a practical need in battery management.
Large language models produce fluent, confident, factually wrong output. Existing taxonomies classify these failures by output type -- intrinsic versus extrinsic, faithfulness versus factuality -- but say nothing about which computational component produced a given failure. We ask what would be required to attribute an individual hallucination to a specific component of the decoder-only stack. We treat three components -- self-attention's associative retrieval, the maximum-likelihood pretraining objective, and autoregressive commitment under exposure bias -- as candidate failure surfaces, justify their separability rather than assuming it, and specify an attribution procedure requiring only sampling access: an ordered set of three interventions on prefix, context, and frequency competition, together with a validation design based on independent annotation and a classifier baseline. We state five falsifiable predictions and identify competing accounts each would discriminate against. We analyse how instruction tuning, RLHF, DPO, retrieval augmentation, scale, and calibration bear on the argument. We execute a direct, pre-registered test of the commitment prediction (P3) across three model families: substituting a correct continuation at the point of divergence reduces downstream failing claims by 46.7 percentage points relative to baseline (p<10^-9). However, a wrong-fact substitution reduces errors at a statistically indistinguishable rate, and the model answers correctly in isolation on only 2.2% of items where substitution succeeded -- a genuine partial result rather than a confirmation. Dataset pathologies amplify each component without originating failure independently, supporting an asymmetric-dependence claim: components are necessary intermediaries for data-induced failure, but data defects are not necessary for component-induced failure.
This work investigates the ``small-vs-large gap'', where repeating on fewer samples can lead to compute saving during training compared to using a larger dataset. This is observed across algorithmic tasks, architectures and optimizers and cannot be explained using prior theory. We argue that the speedup comes from appropriate layer-wise growth enabled by sampling biases, which is more pronounced when the dataset size is smaller. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from various interventions. Our results suggest that using a smaller dataset with more repetitions is not just a fallback strategy under data scarcity, but can be proactively leveraged as a favorable inductive biases for optimization, particularly in reasoning tasks.
Jingwen Liu, Ezra Edelman, Surbhi Goel et al.· 0 citations
A weeklong summer workshop brought higher education faculty to campus to explore how AI and machine learning materials can be adapted for their classrooms.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
