Decentralized Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning based State-of-Charge Balancing Strategy for Distributed Energy Storage System

This paper develops a Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Dec-MARL) method to solve the SoC balancing problem in the distributed energy storage system (DESS). First, the SoC balancing problem is formulated into a finite Markov decision process with action constraints derived from demand balance, which can be solved by Dec-MARL. Specifically, the first-order average consensus algorithm is utilized to expand the observations of the DESS state in a fully-decentralized way, and the initial actions (i.e., output power) are decided by the agents (i.e., energy storage units) according to these observations. In order to get the final actions in the allowable range, a counterfactual demand balance algorithm is proposed to balance the total demand and the initial actions. Next, the agents execute the final actions and get local rewards from the environment, and the DESS steps into the next state. Finally, through the first-order average consensus algorithm, the agents get the average reward and the expended observation of the next state for later training. By the above procedure, Dec-MARL reveals outstanding performance in a fully-decentralized system without any expert experience or constructing any complicated model. Besides, it is flexible and can be extended to other decentralized multi-agent systems straightforwardly. Extensive simulations have validated the effectiveness and efficiency of Dec-MARL.

Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs to memorize long history. We design a novel decoupled network architecture with the original backbone LLM frozen as a memory encoder and an adaptive residual side-network as a memory retriever and reader. Such a decoupled memory design can easily cache and update long-term past contexts for memory retrieval without suffering from memory staleness. Enhanced with memory-augmented adaptation training, LongMem can thus memorize long past context and use long-term memory for language modeling. The proposed memory retrieval module can handle unlimited-length context in its memory bank to benefit various downstream tasks. Typically, LongMem can enlarge the long-form memory to 65k tokens and thus cache many-shot extra demonstration examples as long-form memory for in-context learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong long-context models on ChapterBreak, a challenging long-context modeling benchmark, and achieves remarkable improvements on memory-augmented in-context learning over LLMs. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in helping language models to memorize and utilize long-form contents. Our code is open-sourced at https://aka.ms/LongMem.

Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding

Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques -- task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy in various tasks, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific LMs.

Model-Generated Pretraining Signals Improves Zero-Shot Generalization of Text-to-Text Transformers

This paper explores the effectiveness of model-generated signals in improving zero-shot generalization of text-to-text Transformers such as T5. We study various designs to pretrain T5 using an auxiliary model to construct more challenging token replacements for the main model to denoise. Key aspects under study include the decoding target, the location of the RTD head, and the masking pattern. Based on these studies, we develop a new model, METRO-T0, which is pretrained using the redesigned ELECTRA-Style pretraining strategies and then prompt-finetuned on a mixture of NLP tasks. METRO-T0 outperforms all similar-sized baselines on prompted NLP benchmarks, such as T0 Eval and MMLU, and rivals the state-of-the-art T0-11B model with only 8% of its parameters. Our analysis on model's neural activation and parameter sensitivity reveals that the effectiveness of METRO-T0 stems from more balanced contribution of parameters and better utilization of their capacity. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/gonglinyuan/metro_t0.

Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-domain Question Answering

The retrieval model is an indispensable component for real-world knowledge-intensive tasks, e.g., open-domain question answering (ODQA). As separate retrieval skills are annotated for different datasets, recent work focuses on customized methods, limiting the model transferability and scalability. In this work, we propose a modular retriever where individual modules correspond to key skills that can be reused across datasets. Our approach supports flexible skill configurations based on the target domain to boost performance. To mitigate task interference, we design a novel modularization parameterization inspired by sparse Transformer. We demonstrate that our model can benefit from self-supervised pretraining on Wikipedia and fine-tuning using multiple ODQA datasets, both in a multi-task fashion. Our approach outperforms recent self-supervised retrievers in zero-shot evaluations and achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuned retrieval performance on NQ, HotpotQA and OTT-QA.

Bridging Discrete and Backpropagation: Straight-Through and Beyond

Backpropagation, the cornerstone of deep learning, is limited to computing gradients solely for continuous variables. This limitation hinders various research on problems involving discrete latent variables. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach for approximating the gradient of parameters involved in generating discrete latent variables. First, we examine the widely used Straight-Through (ST) heuristic and demonstrate that it works as a first-order approximation of the gradient. Guided by our findings, we propose a novel method called ReinMax, which integrates Heun's Method, a second-order numerical method for solving ODEs, to approximate the gradient. Our method achieves second-order accuracy without requiring Hessian or other second-order derivatives. We conduct experiments on structured output prediction and unsupervised generative modeling tasks. Our results show that \ours brings consistent improvements over the state of the art, including ST and Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax. Implementations are released at https://github.com/microsoft/ReinMax.

Pre-training Transformers for Knowledge Graph Completion

Learning transferable representation of knowledge graphs (KGs) is challenging due to the heterogeneous, multi-relational nature of graph structures. Inspired by Transformer-based pretrained language models' success on learning transferable representation for texts, we introduce a novel inductive KG representation model (iHT) for KG completion by large-scale pre-training. iHT consists of a entity encoder (e.g., BERT) and a neighbor-aware relational scoring function both parameterized by Transformers. We first pre-train iHT on a large KG dataset, Wikidata5M. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on matched evaluations, with a relative improvement of more than 25% in mean reciprocal rank over previous SOTA models. When further fine-tuned on smaller KGs with either entity and relational shifts, pre-trained iHT representations are shown to be transferable, significantly improving the performance on FB15K-237 and WN18RR.

Deep Vision in Analysis and Recognition of Radar Data: Achievements, Advancements and Challenges

Radars are widely used to obtain echo information for effective prediction, such as precipitation nowcasting. In this paper, recent relevant scientific investigation and practical efforts using Deep Learning (DL) models for weather radar data analysis and pattern recognition have been reviewed; particularly, in the fields of beam blockage correction, radar echo extrapolation, and precipitation nowcast. Compared to traditional approaches, present DL methods depict better performance and convenience but suffer from stability and generalization. In addition to recent achievements, the latest advancements and existing challenges are also presented and discussed in this paper, trying to lead to reasonable potentials and trends in this highly-concerned field.

Language Models as Inductive Reasoners

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, logic language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, logic language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new task, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of logic language and use pretrained language models as ''reasoners''. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.

Joint Beamforming and PD Orientation Design for Mobile Visible Light Communications

In this paper, we propose joint beamforming and photo-detector (PD) orientation (BO) optimization schemes for mobile visible light communication (VLC) with the orientation adjustable receiver (OAR). Since VLC is sensitive to line-of-sight propagation, we first establish the OAR model and the human body blockage model for mobile VLC user equipment (UE). To guarantee the quality of service (QoS) of mobile VLC, we jointly optimize BO with minimal UE the power consumption for both fixed and random UE orientation cases. For the fixed UE orientation case, since the {transmit} beamforming and the PD orientation are mutually coupled, the joint BO optimization problem is nonconvex and intractable. To address this challenge, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm to obtain the transmit beamforming and the PD orientation. For the random UE orientation case, we further propose a robust alternating BO optimization algorithm to ensure the worst-case QoS requirement of the mobile UE. Finally, the performance of joint BO optimization design schemes are evaluated for mobile VLC through numerical experiments.