Appliance Level Short-term Load Forecasting via Recurrent Neural Network

Accurate load forecasting is critical for electricity market operations and other real-time decision-making tasks in power systems. This paper considers the short-term load forecasting (STLF) problem for residential customers within a community. Existing STLF work mainly focuses on forecasting the aggregated load for either a feeder system or a single customer, but few efforts have been made on forecasting the load at individual appliance level. In this work, we present an STLF algorithm for efficiently predicting the power consumption of individual electrical appliances. The proposed method builds upon a powerful recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture in deep learning, termed as long short-term memory (LSTM). As each appliance has uniquely repetitive consumption patterns, the patterns of prediction error will be tracked such that past prediction errors can be used for improving the final prediction performance. Numerical tests on real-world load datasets demonstrate the improvement of the proposed method over existing LSTM-based method and other benchmark approaches.

Scalable Learning for Optimal Load Shedding Under Power Grid Emergency Operations

Effective and timely responses to unexpected contingencies are crucial for enhancing the resilience of power grids. Given the fast, complex process of cascading propagation, corrective actions such as optimal load shedding (OLS) are difficult to attain in large-scale networks due to the computation complexity and communication latency issues. This work puts forth an innovative learning-for-OLS approach by constructing the optimal decision rules of load shedding under a variety of potential contingency scenarios through offline neural network (NN) training. Notably, the proposed NN-based OLS decisions are fully decentralized, enabling individual load centers to quickly react to the specific contingency using readily available local measurements. Numerical studies on the IEEE 14-bus system have demonstrated the effectiveness of our scalable OLS design for real-time responses to severe grid emergency events.

FaceScape: 3D Facial Dataset and Benchmark for Single-View 3D Face Reconstruction

In this paper, we present a large-scale detailed 3D face dataset, FaceScape, and the corresponding benchmark to evaluate single-view facial 3D reconstruction. By training on FaceScape data, a novel algorithm is proposed to predict elaborate riggable 3D face models from a single image input. FaceScape dataset provides 18,760 textured 3D faces, captured from 938 subjects and each with 20 specific expressions. The 3D models contain the pore-level facial geometry that is also processed to be topologically uniformed. These fine 3D facial models can be represented as a 3D morphable model for rough shapes and displacement maps for detailed geometry. Taking advantage of the large-scale and high-accuracy dataset, a novel algorithm is further proposed to learn the expression-specific dynamic details using a deep neural network. The learned relationship serves as the foundation of our 3D face prediction system from a single image input. Different than the previous methods, our predicted 3D models are riggable with highly detailed geometry under different expressions. We also use FaceScape data to generate the in-the-wild and in-the-lab benchmark to evaluate recent methods of single-view face reconstruction. The accuracy is reported and analyzed on the dimensions of camera pose and focal length, which provides a faithful and comprehensive evaluation and reveals new challenges. The unprecedented dataset, benchmark, and code have been released to the public for research purpose.

On the Sample Complexity of Decentralized Linear Quadratic Regulator with Partially Nested Information Structure

We study the problem of control policy design for decentralized state-feedback linear quadratic control with a partially nested information structure, when the system model is unknown. We propose a model-based learning solution, which consists of two steps. First, we estimate the unknown system model from a single system trajectory of finite length, using least squares estimation. Next, based on the estimated system model, we design a control policy that satisfies the desired information structure. We show that the suboptimality gap between our control policy and the optimal decentralized control policy (designed using accurate knowledge of the system model) scales linearly with the estimation error of the system model. Using this result, we provide an end-to-end sample complexity result for learning decentralized controllers for a linear quadratic control problem with a partially nested information structure.

Risk-Aware Learning for Scalable Voltage Optimization in Distribution Grids

Real-time coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs) is crucial for regulating the voltage profile in distribution grids. By capitalizing on a scalable neural network (NN) architecture, machine learning tools can attain decentralized DER decisions by minimizing the average loss of prediction. This paper aims to improve these learning-enabled approaches by accounting for the potential risks associated with reactive power prediction and voltage deviation. Specifically, we advocate to measure such risks using the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) loss based on the worst-case samples only, which could lead to the learning efficiency issue. To tackle this issue, we propose to accelerate the training process under the CVaR loss objective by selecting the mini-batches that are more likely to contain the worst-case samples of interest. Numerical tests using real-world data on the IEEE 123-bus test case have demonstrated the computation and safety improvements of the proposed risk-aware learning algorithm for decentralized DER decision making in distribution systems.

Dependency Induction Through the Lens of Visual Perception

Most previous work on grammar induction focuses on learning phrasal or dependency structure purely from text. However, because the signal provided by text alone is limited, recently introduced visually grounded syntax models make use of multimodal information leading to improved performance in constituency grammar induction. However, as compared to dependency grammars, constituency grammars do not provide a straightforward way to incorporate visual information without enforcing language-specific heuristics. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised grammar induction model that leverages word concreteness and a structural vision-based heuristic to jointly learn constituency-structure and dependency-structure grammars. Our experiments find that concreteness is a strong indicator for learning dependency grammars, improving the direct attachment score (DAS) by over 50\% as compared to state-of-the-art models trained on pure text. Next, we propose an extension of our model that leverages both word concreteness and visual semantic role labels in constituency and dependency parsing. Our experiments show that the proposed extension outperforms the current state-of-the-art visually grounded models in constituency parsing even with a smaller grammar size.

REFINE: Random RangE FInder for Network Embedding

Network embedding approaches have recently attracted considerable interest as they learn low-dimensional vector representations of nodes. Embeddings based on the matrix factorization are effective but they are usually computationally expensive due to the eigen-decomposition step. In this paper, we propose a Random RangE FInder based Network Embedding (REFINE) algorithm, which can perform embedding on one million of nodes (YouTube) within 30 seconds in a single thread. REFINE is 10x faster than ProNE, which is 10-400x faster than other methods such as LINE, DeepWalk, Node2Vec, GraRep, and Hope. Firstly, we formulate our network embedding approach as a skip-gram model, but with an orthogonal constraint, and we reformulate it into the matrix factorization problem. Instead of using randomized tSVD (truncated SVD) as other methods, we employ the Randomized Blocked QR decomposition to obtain the node representation fast. Moreover, we design a simple but efficient spectral filter for network enhancement to obtain higher-order information for node representation. Experimental results prove that REFINE is very efficient on datasets of different sizes (from thousand to million of nodes/edges) for node classification, while enjoying a good performance.

CIGLI: Conditional Image Generation from Language & Image

Multi-modal generation has been widely explored in recent years. Current research directions involve generating text based on an image or vice versa. In this paper, we propose a new task called CIGLI: Conditional Image Generation from Language and Image. Instead of generating an image based on text as in text-image generation, this task requires the generation of an image from a textual description and an image prompt. We designed a new dataset to ensure that the text description describes information from both images, and that solely analyzing the description is insufficient to generate an image. We then propose a novel language-image fusion model which improves the performance over two established baseline methods, as evaluated by quantitative (automatic) and qualitative (human) evaluations. The code and dataset is available at https://github.com/vincentlux/CIGLI.

Data-driven Modeling for Distribution Grids Under Partial Observability

Accurately modeling power distribution grids is crucial for designing effective monitoring and decision making algorithms. This paper addresses the partial observability issue of data-driven distribution modeling in order to improve the accuracy of line parameter estimation. Inspired by the sparse changes in residential loads, we advocate to regularize the group sparsity of the unobservable injections in a bi-linear estimation problem. The alternating minimization scheme of guaranteed convergence is proposed to take advantage of convex subproblems with efficient solutions. Numerical results using real-world load data on the single-phase equivalent of the IEEE 123-bus test case have demonstrated the accuracy improvements of the proposed solution over existing work for both parameter estimation and voltage modeling.

Efficient Representation for Electric Vehicle Charging Station Operations using Reinforcement Learning

Effectively operating electrical vehicle charging station (EVCS) is crucial for enabling the rapid transition of electrified transportation. To solve this problem using reinforcement learning (RL), the dimension of state/action spaces scales with the number of EVs and is thus very large and time-varying. This dimensionality issue affects the efficiency and convergence properties of generic RL algorithms. We develop aggregation schemes that are based on the emergency of EV charging, namely the laxity value. A least-laxity first (LLF) rule is adopted to consider only the total charging power of the EVCS which ensures the feasibility of individual EV schedules. In addition, we propose an equivalent state aggregation that can guarantee to attain the same optimal policy. Based on the proposed representation, policy gradient method is used to find the best parameters for the linear Gaussian policy . Numerical results have validated the performance improvement of the proposed representation approaches in attaining higher rewards and more effective policies as compared to existing approximation based approach.