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Feb 6

Exploring the sustainable scaling of AI dilemma: A projective study of corporations' AI environmental impacts

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised concerns regarding its global environmental impact that extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include consideration of hardware fabrication and end-of-life processes. The opacity from major providers hinders companies' abilities to evaluate their AI-related environmental impacts and achieve net-zero targets. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of a company's AI portfolio, providing actionable insights without necessitating extensive AI and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise. Results confirm that large generative AI models consume up to 4600x more energy than traditional models. Our modelling approach, which accounts for increased AI usage, hardware computing efficiency, and changes in electricity mix in line with IPCC scenarios, forecasts AI electricity use up to 2030. Under a high adoption scenario, driven by widespread Generative AI and agents adoption associated to increasingly complex models and frameworks, AI electricity use is projected to rise by a factor of 24.4. Mitigating the environmental impact of Generative AI by 2030 requires coordinated efforts across the AI value chain. Isolated measures in hardware efficiency, model efficiency, or grid improvements alone are insufficient. We advocate for standardized environmental assessment frameworks, greater transparency from the all actors of the value chain and the introduction of a "Return on Environment" metric to align AI development with net-zero goals.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 24, 2025 3

From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI's Polarized Environmental Debate

As the climate crisis deepens, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a contested force: some champion its potential to advance renewable energy, materials discovery, and large-scale emissions monitoring, while others underscore its growing carbon footprint, water consumption, and material resource demands. Much of this debate has concentrated on direct impacts -- energy and water usage in data centers, e-waste from frequent hardware upgrades -- without addressing the significant indirect effects. This paper examines how the problem of Jevons' Paradox applies to AI, whereby efficiency gains may paradoxically spur increased consumption. We argue that understanding these second-order impacts requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining lifecycle assessments with socio-economic analyses. Rebound effects undermine the assumption that improved technical efficiency alone will ensure net reductions in environmental harm. Instead, the trajectory of AI's impact also hinges on business incentives and market logics, governance and policymaking, and broader social and cultural norms. We contend that a narrow focus on direct emissions misrepresents AI's true climate footprint, limiting the scope for meaningful interventions. We conclude with recommendations that address rebound effects and challenge the market-driven imperatives fueling uncontrolled AI growth. By broadening the analysis to include both direct and indirect consequences, we aim to inform a more comprehensive, evidence-based dialogue on AI's role in the climate crisis.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

AI computing and data centers consume a large amount of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage efficiency for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our findings show that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume about 0.7 liters of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about 60 liters. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about 0.13 liters and 3 liters of water, respectively. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 8 out of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation. However, water consumption can be substantially higher in some African countries with a steppe climate than the U.S. and global averages, prompting more attention when deploying AI computing in these countries. Our dataset is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/masterlion/WaterEfficientDatasetForAfricanCountries/tree/main{Hugging Face}.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024

NILMFormer: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring that Accounts for Non-Stationarity

Millions of smart meters have been deployed worldwide, collecting the total power consumed by individual households. Based on these data, electricity suppliers offer their clients energy monitoring solutions to provide feedback on the consumption of their individual appliances. Historically, such estimates have relied on statistical methods that use coarse-grained total monthly consumption and static customer data, such as appliance ownership. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the problem of disaggregating a household's collected total power consumption to retrieve the consumed power for individual appliances. Current state-of-the-art (SotA) solutions for NILM are based on deep-learning (DL) and operate on subsequences of an entire household consumption reading. However, the non-stationary nature of real-world smart meter data leads to a drift in the data distribution within each segmented window, which significantly affects model performance. This paper introduces NILMFormer, a Transformer-based architecture that incorporates a new subsequence stationarization/de-stationarization scheme to mitigate the distribution drift and that uses a novel positional encoding that relies only on the subsequence's timestamp information. Experiments with 4 real-world datasets show that NILMFormer significantly outperforms the SotA approaches. Our solution has been deployed as the backbone algorithm for EDF's (Electricit\'e De France) consumption monitoring service, delivering detailed insights to millions of customers about their individual appliances' power consumption. This paper appeared in KDD 2025.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025

AITEE -- Agentic Tutor for Electrical Engineering

Intelligent tutoring systems combined with large language models offer a promising approach to address students' diverse needs and promote self-efficacious learning. While large language models possess good foundational knowledge of electrical engineering basics, they remain insufficiently capable of addressing specific questions about electrical circuits. In this paper, we present AITEE, an agent-based tutoring system for electrical engineering designed to accompany students throughout their learning process, offer individualized support, and promote self-directed learning. AITEE supports both hand-drawn and digital circuits through an adapted circuit reconstruction process, enabling natural interaction with students. Our novel graph-based similarity measure identifies relevant context from lecture materials through a retrieval augmented generation approach, while parallel Spice simulation further enhances accuracy in applying solution methodologies. The system implements a Socratic dialogue to foster learner autonomy through guided questioning. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that AITEE significantly outperforms baseline approaches in domain-specific knowledge application, with even medium-sized LLM models showing acceptable performance. Our results highlight the potential of agentic tutors to deliver scalable, personalized, and effective learning environments for electrical engineering education.

  • 3 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

Towards a Reinforcement Learning Environment Toolbox for Intelligent Electric Motor Control

Electric motors are used in many applications and their efficiency is strongly dependent on their control. Among others, PI approaches or model predictive control methods are well-known in the scientific literature and industrial practice. A novel approach is to use reinforcement learning (RL) to have an agent learn electric drive control from scratch merely by interacting with a suitable control environment. RL achieved remarkable results with super-human performance in many games (e.g. Atari classics or Go) and also becomes more popular in control tasks like cartpole or swinging pendulum benchmarks. In this work, the open-source Python package gym-electric-motor (GEM) is developed for ease of training of RL-agents for electric motor control. Furthermore, this package can be used to compare the trained agents with other state-of-the-art control approaches. It is based on the OpenAI Gym framework that provides a widely used interface for the evaluation of RL-agents. The initial package version covers different DC motor variants and the prevalent permanent magnet synchronous motor as well as different power electronic converters and a mechanical load model. Due to the modular setup of the proposed toolbox, additional motor, load, and power electronic devices can be easily extended in the future. Furthermore, different secondary effects like controller interlocking time or noise are considered. An intelligent controller example based on the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm which controls a series DC motor is presented and compared to a cascaded PI-controller as a baseline for future research. Fellow researchers are encouraged to use the framework in their RL investigations or to contribute to the functional scope (e.g. further motor types) of the package.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 21, 2019 1

Location based Probabilistic Load Forecasting of EV Charging Sites: Deep Transfer Learning with Multi-Quantile Temporal Convolutional Network

Electrification of vehicles is a potential way of reducing fossil fuel usage and thus lessening environmental pollution. Electric Vehicles (EVs) of various types for different transport modes (including air, water, and land) are evolving. Moreover, different EV user groups (commuters, commercial or domestic users, drivers) may use different charging infrastructures (public, private, home, and workplace) at various times. Therefore, usage patterns and energy demand are very stochastic. Characterizing and forecasting the charging demand of these diverse EV usage profiles is essential in preventing power outages. Previously developed data-driven load models are limited to specific use cases and locations. None of these models are simultaneously adaptive enough to transfer knowledge of day-ahead forecasting among EV charging sites of diverse locations, trained with limited data, and cost-effective. This article presents a location-based load forecasting of EV charging sites using a deep Multi-Quantile Temporal Convolutional Network (MQ-TCN) to overcome the limitations of earlier models. We conducted our experiments on data from four charging sites, namely Caltech, JPL, Office-1, and NREL, which have diverse EV user types like students, full-time and part-time employees, random visitors, etc. With a Prediction Interval Coverage Probability (PICP) score of 93.62\%, our proposed deep MQ-TCN model exhibited a remarkable 28.93\% improvement over the XGBoost model for a day-ahead load forecasting at the JPL charging site. By transferring knowledge with the inductive Transfer Learning (TL) approach, the MQ-TCN model achieved a 96.88\% PICP score for the load forecasting task at the NREL site using only two weeks of data.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

EnergonAI: An Inference System for 10-100 Billion Parameter Transformer Models

Large transformer models display promising performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although the AI community has expanded the model scale to the trillion parameter level, the practical deployment of 10-100 billion parameter models is still uncertain due to the latency, throughput, and memory constraints. In this paper, we proposed EnergonAI to solve the challenges of the efficient deployment of 10-100 billion parameter transformer models on single- or multi-GPU systems. EnergonAI adopts a hierarchy-controller system architecture to coordinate multiple devices and efficiently support different parallel patterns. It delegates the execution of sub-models to multiple workers in the single-controller style and applies tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism among the workers in a multi-controller style. Upon the novel architecture, we propose three techniques, i.e. non-blocking pipeline parallelism, distributed redundant computation elimination, and peer memory pooling. EnergonAI enables the users to program complex parallel code the same as a serial one. Compared with the FasterTransformer, we have proven that EnergonAI has superior performance on latency and throughput. In our experiments, EnergonAI can achieve 37% latency reduction in tensor parallelism, 10% scalability improvement in pipeline parallelism, and it improves the model scale inferred on a single GPU by using a larger heterogeneous memory space at cost of limited performance reduction.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 6, 2022

A Novel Bifurcation Method for Observation Perturbation Attacks on Reinforcement Learning Agents: Load Altering Attacks on a Cyber Physical Power System

Components of cyber physical systems, which affect real-world processes, are often exposed to the internet. Replacing conventional control methods with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in energy systems is an active area of research, as these systems become increasingly complex with the advent of renewable energy sources and the desire to improve their efficiency. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are vulnerable to specific perturbations of their inputs or features, called adversarial examples. These perturbations are difficult to detect when properly regularized, but have significant effects on the ANN's output. Because DRL uses ANN to map optimal actions to observations, they are similarly vulnerable to adversarial examples. This work proposes a novel attack technique for continuous control using Group Difference Logits loss with a bifurcation layer. By combining aspects of targeted and untargeted attacks, the attack significantly increases the impact compared to an untargeted attack, with drastically smaller distortions than an optimally targeted attack. We demonstrate the impacts of powerful gradient-based attacks in a realistic smart energy environment, show how the impacts change with different DRL agents and training procedures, and use statistical and time-series analysis to evaluate attacks' stealth. The results show that adversarial attacks can have significant impacts on DRL controllers, and constraining an attack's perturbations makes it difficult to detect. However, certain DRL architectures are far more robust, and robust training methods can further reduce the impact.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 6, 2024

Green AI: Exploring Carbon Footprints, Mitigation Strategies, and Trade Offs in Large Language Model Training

Prominent works in the field of Natural Language Processing have long attempted to create new innovative models by improving upon previous model training approaches, altering model architecture, and developing more in-depth datasets to better their performance. However, with the quickly advancing field of NLP comes increased greenhouse gas emissions, posing concerns over the environmental damage caused by training LLMs. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the various costs, particularly those pertaining to environmental aspects, that are associated with artificial intelligence serves as the foundational basis for ensuring safe AI models. Currently, investigations into the CO2 emissions of AI models remain an emerging area of research, and as such, in this paper, we evaluate the CO2 emissions of well-known large language models, which have an especially high carbon footprint due to their significant amount of model parameters. We argue for the training of LLMs in a way that is responsible and sustainable by suggesting measures for reducing carbon emissions. Furthermore, we discuss how the choice of hardware affects CO2 emissions by contrasting the CO2 emissions during model training for two widely used GPUs. Based on our results, we present the benefits and drawbacks of our proposed solutions and make the argument for the possibility of training more environmentally safe AI models without sacrificing their robustness and performance.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 1, 2024

Reducing Inference Energy Consumption Using Dual Complementary CNNs

Energy efficiency of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has become an important area of research, with various strategies being developed to minimize the power consumption of these models. Previous efforts, including techniques like model pruning, quantization, and hardware optimization, have made significant strides in this direction. However, there remains a need for more effective on device AI solutions that balance energy efficiency with model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reduce the energy requirements of inference of CNNs. Our methodology employs two small Complementary CNNs that collaborate with each other by covering each other's "weaknesses" in predictions. If the confidence for a prediction of the first CNN is considered low, the second CNN is invoked with the aim of producing a higher confidence prediction. This dual-CNN setup significantly reduces energy consumption compared to using a single large deep CNN. Additionally, we propose a memory component that retains previous classifications for identical inputs, bypassing the need to re-invoke the CNNs for the same input, further saving energy. Our experiments on a Jetson Nano computer demonstrate an energy reduction of up to 85.8% achieved on modified datasets where each sample was duplicated once. These findings indicate that leveraging a complementary CNN pair along with a memory component effectively reduces inference energy while maintaining high accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 1, 2024

From FLOPs to Footprints: The Resource Cost of Artificial Intelligence

As computational demands continue to rise, assessing the environmental footprint of AI requires moving beyond energy and water consumption to include the material demands of specialized hardware. This study quantifies the material footprint of AI training by linking computational workloads to physical hardware needs. The elemental composition of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40 GB graphics processing unit (GPU) was analyzed using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy, which identified 32 elements. The results show that AI hardware consists of about 90% heavy metals and only trace amounts of precious metals. The elements copper, iron, tin, silicon, and nickel dominate the GPU composition by mass. In a multi-step methodology, we integrate these measurements with computational throughput per GPU across varying lifespans, accounting for the computational requirements of training specific AI models at different training efficiency regimes. Scenario-based analyses reveal that, depending on Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and hardware lifespan, training GPT-4 requires between 1,174 and 8,800 A100 GPUs, corresponding to the extraction and eventual disposal of up to 7 tons of toxic elements. Combined software and hardware optimization strategies can reduce material demands: increasing MFU from 20% to 60% lowers GPU requirements by 67%, while extending lifespan from 1 to 3 years yields comparable savings; implementing both measures together reduces GPU needs by up to 93%. Our findings highlight that incremental performance gains, such as those observed between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, come at disproportionately high material costs. The study underscores the necessity of incorporating material resource considerations into discussions of AI scalability, emphasizing that future progress in AI must align with principles of resource efficiency and environmental responsibility.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025 2

Analysis and Applications of Deep Learning with Finite Samples in Full Life-Cycle Intelligence of Nuclear Power Generation

The advent of Industry 4.0 has precipitated the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods within industrial contexts, aiming to realize intelligent manufacturing, operation as well as maintenance, also known as industrial intelligence. However, intricate industrial milieus, particularly those relating to energy exploration and production, frequently encompass data characterized by long-tailed class distribution, sample imbalance, and domain shift. These attributes pose noteworthy challenges to data-centric Deep Learning (DL) techniques, crucial for the realization of industrial intelligence. The present study centers on the intricate and distinctive industrial scenarios of Nuclear Power Generation (NPG), meticulously scrutinizing the application of DL techniques under the constraints of finite data samples. Initially, the paper expounds on potential employment scenarios for AI across the full life-cycle of NPG. Subsequently, we delve into an evaluative exposition of DL's advancement, grounded in the finite sample perspective. This encompasses aspects such as small-sample learning, few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, and open-set recognition, also referring to the unique data characteristics of NPG. The paper then proceeds to present two specific case studies. The first revolves around the automatic recognition of zirconium alloy metallography, while the second pertains to open-set recognition for signal diagnosis of machinery sensors. These cases, spanning the entirety of NPG's life-cycle, are accompanied by constructive outcomes and insightful deliberations. By exploring and applying DL methodologies within the constraints of finite sample availability, this paper not only furnishes a robust technical foundation but also introduces a fresh perspective toward the secure and efficient advancement and exploitation of this advanced energy source.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 7, 2023

Artificial intelligence in cyber physical systems

This article conducts a literature review of current and future challenges in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cyber physical systems. The literature review is focused on identifying a conceptual framework for increasing resilience with AI through automation supporting both, a technical and human level. The methodology applied resembled a literature review and taxonomic analysis of complex internet of things (IoT) interconnected and coupled cyber physical systems. There is an increased attention on propositions on models, infrastructures and frameworks of IoT in both academic and technical papers. These reports and publications frequently represent a juxtaposition of other related systems and technologies (e.g. Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Industry 4.0 etc.). We review academic and industry papers published between 2010 and 2020. The results determine a new hierarchical cascading conceptual framework for analysing the evolution of AI decision-making in cyber physical systems. We argue that such evolution is inevitable and autonomous because of the increased integration of connected devices (IoT) in cyber physical systems. To support this argument, taxonomic methodology is adapted and applied for transparency and justifications of concepts selection decisions through building summary maps that are applied for designing the hierarchical cascading conceptual framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11, 2019

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI

With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is this assumption based on, and how are we measuring value, power, and performance? And what are the collateral consequences of this race to ever-increasing scale? Here, we scrutinize the current scaling trends and trade-offs across multiple axes and refute two common assumptions underlying the 'bigger-is-better' AI paradigm: 1) that improved performance is a product of increased scale, and 2) that all interesting problems addressed by AI require large-scale models. Rather, we argue that this approach is not only fragile scientifically, but comes with undesirable consequences. First, it is not sustainable, as its compute demands increase faster than model performance, leading to unreasonable economic requirements and a disproportionate environmental footprint. Second, it implies focusing on certain problems at the expense of others, leaving aside important applications, e.g. health, education, or the climate. Finally, it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others in the context of shaping both AI research and its applications throughout society.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 21, 2024 1

AI for Service: Proactive Assistance with AI Glasses

In an era where AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active and adaptive companion, we introduce AI for Service (AI4Service), a new paradigm that enables proactive and real-time assistance in daily life. Existing AI services remain largely reactive, responding only to explicit user commands. We argue that a truly intelligent and helpful assistant should be capable of anticipating user needs and taking actions proactively when appropriate. To realize this vision, we propose Alpha-Service, a unified framework that addresses two fundamental challenges: Know When to intervene by detecting service opportunities from egocentric video streams, and Know How to provide both generalized and personalized services. Inspired by the von Neumann computer architecture and based on AI glasses, Alpha-Service consists of five key components: an Input Unit for perception, a Central Processing Unit for task scheduling, an Arithmetic Logic Unit for tool utilization, a Memory Unit for long-term personalization, and an Output Unit for natural human interaction. As an initial exploration, we implement Alpha-Service through a multi-agent system deployed on AI glasses. Case studies, including a real-time Blackjack advisor, a museum tour guide, and a shopping fit assistant, demonstrate its ability to seamlessly perceive the environment, infer user intent, and provide timely and useful assistance without explicit prompts.

A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models

With the advancement of web techniques, they have significantly revolutionized various aspects of people's lives. Despite the importance of the web, many tasks performed on it are repetitive and time-consuming, negatively impacting overall quality of life. To efficiently handle these tedious daily tasks, one of the most promising approaches is to advance autonomous agents based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, referred to as AI Agents, as they can operate continuously without fatigue or performance degradation. In the context of the web, leveraging AI Agents -- termed WebAgents -- to automatically assist people in handling tedious daily tasks can dramatically enhance productivity and efficiency. Recently, Large Foundation Models (LFMs) containing billions of parameters have exhibited human-like language understanding and reasoning capabilities, showing proficiency in performing various complex tasks. This naturally raises the question: `Can LFMs be utilized to develop powerful AI Agents that automatically handle web tasks, providing significant convenience to users?' To fully explore the potential of LFMs, extensive research has emerged on WebAgents designed to complete daily web tasks according to user instructions, significantly enhancing the convenience of daily human life. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing research studies on WebAgents across three key aspects: architectures, training, and trustworthiness. Additionally, several promising directions for future research are explored to provide deeper insights.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 30, 2025

Creating an LLM-based AI-agent: A high-level methodology towards enhancing LLMs with APIs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Personalized Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks: An AI-Enabled and Big Data-Driven Multi-Objective Optimization

The design and optimization of wireless networks have mostly been based on strong mathematical and theoretical modeling. Nonetheless, as novel applications emerge in the era of 5G and beyond, unprecedented levels of complexity will be encountered in the design and optimization of the network. As a result, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is envisioned for wireless network design and optimization due to the flexibility and adaptability it offers in solving extremely complex problems in real-time. One of the main future applications of AI is enabling user-level personalization for numerous use cases. AI will revolutionize the way we interact with computers in which computers will be able to sense commands and emotions from humans in a non-intrusive manner, making the entire process transparent to users. By leveraging this capability, and accelerated by the advances in computing technologies, wireless networks can be redesigned to enable the personalization of network services to the user level in real-time. While current wireless networks are being optimized to achieve a predefined set of quality requirements, the personalization technology advocated in this article is supported by an intelligent big data-driven layer designed to micro-manage the scarce network resources. This layer provides the intelligence required to decide the necessary service quality that achieves the target satisfaction level for each user. Due to its dynamic and flexible design, personalized networks are expected to achieve unprecedented improvements in optimizing two contradicting objectives in wireless networks: saving resources and improving user satisfaction levels.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 7, 2023

AI Flow: Perspectives, Scenarios, and Approaches

Pioneered by the foundational information theory by Claude Shannon and the visionary framework of machine intelligence by Alan Turing, the convergent evolution of information and communication technologies (IT/CT) has created an unbroken wave of connectivity and computation. This synergy has sparked a technological revolution, now reaching its peak with large artificial intelligence (AI) models that are reshaping industries and redefining human-machine collaboration. However, the realization of ubiquitous intelligence faces considerable challenges due to substantial resource consumption in large models and high communication bandwidth demands. To address these challenges, AI Flow has been introduced as a multidisciplinary framework that integrates cutting-edge IT and CT advancements, with a particular emphasis on the following three key points. First, device-edge-cloud framework serves as the foundation, which integrates end devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters to optimize scalability and efficiency for low-latency model inference. Second, we introduce the concept of familial models, which refers to a series of different-sized models with aligned hidden features, enabling effective collaboration and the flexibility to adapt to varying resource constraints and dynamic scenarios. Third, connectivity- and interaction-based intelligence emergence is a novel paradigm of AI Flow. By leveraging communication networks to enhance connectivity, the collaboration among AI models across heterogeneous nodes achieves emergent intelligence that surpasses the capability of any single model. The innovations of AI Flow provide enhanced intelligence, timely responsiveness, and ubiquitous accessibility to AI services, paving the way for the tighter fusion of AI techniques and communication systems.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 14, 2025

IISE PG&E Energy Analytics Challenge 2025: Hourly-Binned Regression Models Beat Transformers in Load Forecasting

Accurate electricity load forecasting is essential for grid stability, resource optimization, and renewable energy integration. While transformer-based deep learning models like TimeGPT have gained traction in time-series forecasting, their effectiveness in long-term electricity load prediction remains uncertain. This study evaluates forecasting models ranging from classical regression techniques to advanced deep learning architectures using data from the ESD 2025 competition. The dataset includes two years of historical electricity load data, alongside temperature and global horizontal irradiance (GHI) across five sites, with a one-day-ahead forecasting horizon. Since actual test set load values remain undisclosed, leveraging predicted values would accumulate errors, making this a long-term forecasting challenge. We employ (i) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction and (ii) frame the task as a regression problem, using temperature and GHI as covariates to predict load for each hour, (iii) ultimately stacking 24 models to generate yearly forecasts. Our results reveal that deep learning models, including TimeGPT, fail to consistently outperform simpler statistical and machine learning approaches due to the limited availability of training data and exogenous variables. In contrast, XGBoost, with minimal feature engineering, delivers the lowest error rates across all test cases while maintaining computational efficiency. This highlights the limitations of deep learning in long-term electricity forecasting and reinforces the importance of model selection based on dataset characteristics rather than complexity. Our study provides insights into practical forecasting applications and contributes to the ongoing discussion on the trade-offs between traditional and modern forecasting methods.

  • 3 authors
·
May 16, 2025

SWEnergy: An Empirical Study on Energy Efficiency in Agentic Issue Resolution Frameworks with SLMs

Context. LLM-based autonomous agents in software engineering rely on large, proprietary models, limiting local deployment. This has spurred interest in Small Language Models (SLMs), but their practical effectiveness and efficiency within complex agentic frameworks for automated issue resolution remain poorly understood. Goal. We investigate the performance, energy efficiency, and resource consumption of four leading agentic issue resolution frameworks when deliberately constrained to using SLMs. We aim to assess the viability of these systems for this task in resource-limited settings and characterize the resulting trade-offs. Method. We conduct a controlled evaluation of four leading agentic frameworks (SWE-Agent, OpenHands, Mini SWE Agent, AutoCodeRover) using two SLMs (Gemma-3 4B, Qwen-3 1.7B) on the SWE-bench Verified Mini benchmark. On fixed hardware, we measure energy, duration, token usage, and memory over 150 runs per configuration. Results. We find that framework architecture is the primary driver of energy consumption. The most energy-intensive framework, AutoCodeRover (Gemma), consumed 9.4x more energy on average than the least energy-intensive, OpenHands (Gemma). However, this energy is largely wasted. Task resolution rates were near-zero, demonstrating that current frameworks, when paired with SLMs, consume significant energy on unproductive reasoning loops. The SLM's limited reasoning was the bottleneck for success, but the framework's design was the bottleneck for efficiency. Conclusions. Current agentic frameworks, designed for powerful LLMs, fail to operate efficiently with SLMs. We find that framework architecture is the primary driver of energy consumption, but this energy is largely wasted due to the SLMs' limited reasoning. Viable low-energy solutions require shifting from passive orchestration to architectures that actively manage SLM weaknesses.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 10, 2025

General Scales Unlock AI Evaluation with Explanatory and Predictive Power

Ensuring safe and effective use of AI requires understanding and anticipating its performance on novel tasks, from advanced scientific challenges to transformed workplace activities. So far, benchmarking has guided progress in AI, but it has offered limited explanatory and predictive power for general-purpose AI systems, given the low transferability across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce general scales for AI evaluation that can explain what common AI benchmarks really measure, extract ability profiles of AI systems, and predict their performance for new task instances, in- and out-of-distribution. Our fully-automated methodology builds on 18 newly-crafted rubrics that place instance demands on general scales that do not saturate. Illustrated for 15 large language models and 63 tasks, high explanatory power is unleashed from inspecting the demand and ability profiles, bringing insights on the sensitivity and specificity exhibited by different benchmarks, and how knowledge, metacognition and reasoning are affected by model size, chain-of-thought and distillation. Surprisingly, high predictive power at the instance level becomes possible using these demand levels, providing superior estimates over black-box baseline predictors based on embeddings or finetuning, especially in out-of-distribution settings (new tasks and new benchmarks). The scales, rubrics, battery, techniques and results presented here represent a major step for AI evaluation, underpinning the reliable deployment of AI in the years ahead. (Collaborative platform: https://kinds-of-intelligence-cfi.github.io/ADELE.)

  • 26 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

The Generative Energy Arena (GEA): Incorporating Energy Awareness in Large Language Model (LLM) Human Evaluations

The evaluation of large language models is a complex task, in which several approaches have been proposed. The most common is the use of automated benchmarks in which LLMs have to answer multiple-choice questions of different topics. However, this method has certain limitations, being the most concerning, the poor correlation with the humans. An alternative approach, is to have humans evaluate the LLMs. This poses scalability issues as there is a large and growing number of models to evaluate making it impractical (and costly) to run traditional studies based on recruiting a number of evaluators and having them rank the responses of the models. An alternative approach is the use of public arenas, such as the popular LM arena, on which any user can freely evaluate models on any question and rank the responses of two models. The results are then elaborated into a model ranking. An increasingly important aspect of LLMs is their energy consumption and, therefore, evaluating how energy awareness influences the decisions of humans in selecting a model is of interest. In this paper, we present GEA, the Generative Energy Arena, an arena that incorporates information on the energy consumption of the model in the evaluation process. Preliminary results obtained with GEA are also presented, showing that for most questions, when users are aware of the energy consumption, they favor smaller and more energy efficient models. This suggests that for most user interactions, the extra cost and energy incurred by the more complex and top-performing models do not provide an increase in the perceived quality of the responses that justifies their use.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 17, 2025 1

Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents

Computer use agents automate digital tasks by directly interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on computers and mobile devices, offering significant potential to enhance human productivity by completing an open-ended space of user queries. However, current agents face significant challenges: imprecise grounding of GUI elements, difficulties with long-horizon task planning, and performance bottlenecks from relying on single generalist models for diverse cognitive tasks. To this end, we introduce Agent S2, a novel compositional framework that delegates cognitive responsibilities across various generalist and specialist models. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Grounding technique to achieve precise GUI localization and introduce Proactive Hierarchical Planning, dynamically refining action plans at multiple temporal scales in response to evolving observations. Evaluations demonstrate that Agent S2 establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on three prominent computer use benchmarks. Specifically, Agent S2 achieves 18.9% and 32.7% relative improvements over leading baseline agents such as Claude Computer Use and UI-TARS on the OSWorld 15-step and 50-step evaluation. Moreover, Agent S2 generalizes effectively to other operating systems and applications, surpassing previous best methods by 52.8% on WindowsAgentArena and by 16.52% on AndroidWorld relatively. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

simular-ai Simular
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Apr 1, 2025 2

The Role of Deep Learning in Advancing Proactive Cybersecurity Measures for Smart Grid Networks: A Survey

As smart grids (SG) increasingly rely on advanced technologies like sensors and communication systems for efficient energy generation, distribution, and consumption, they become enticing targets for sophisticated cyberattacks. These evolving threats demand robust security measures to maintain the stability and resilience of modern energy systems. While extensive research has been conducted, a comprehensive exploration of proactive cyber defense strategies utilizing Deep Learning (DL) in {SG} remains scarce in the literature. This survey bridges this gap, studying the latest DL techniques for proactive cyber defense. The survey begins with an overview of related works and our distinct contributions, followed by an examination of SG infrastructure. Next, we classify various cyber defense techniques into reactive and proactive categories. A significant focus is placed on DL-enabled proactive defenses, where we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of DL approaches, highlighting their roles and relevance in the proactive security of SG. Subsequently, we analyze the most significant DL-based methods currently in use. Further, we explore Moving Target Defense, a proactive defense strategy, and its interactions with DL methodologies. We then provide an overview of benchmark datasets used in this domain to substantiate the discourse.{ This is followed by a critical discussion on their practical implications and broader impact on cybersecurity in Smart Grids.} The survey finally lists the challenges associated with deploying DL-based security systems within SG, followed by an outlook on future developments in this key field.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 11, 2024

SAI: Solving AI Tasks with Systematic Artificial Intelligence in Communication Network

In the rapid development of artificial intelligence, solving complex AI tasks is a crucial technology in intelligent mobile networks. Despite the good performance of specialized AI models in intelligent mobile networks, they are unable to handle complicated AI tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Systematic Artificial Intelligence (SAI), which is a framework designed to solve AI tasks by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and JSON-format intent-based input to connect self-designed model library and database. Specifically, we first design a multi-input component, which simultaneously integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and JSON-format intent-based inputs to fulfill the diverse intent requirements of different users. In addition, we introduce a model library module based on model cards which employ model cards to pairwise match between different modules for model composition. Model cards contain the corresponding model's name and the required performance metrics. Then when receiving user network requirements, we execute each subtask for multiple selected model combinations and provide output based on the execution results and LLM feedback. By leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs and the abundant AI models in the model library, SAI can complete numerous complex AI tasks in the communication network, achieving impressive results in network optimization, resource allocation, and other challenging tasks.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 13, 2023

TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks

We interact with computers on an everyday basis, be it in everyday life or work, and many aspects of work can be done entirely with access to a computer and the Internet. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. But how performant are AI agents at helping to accelerate or even autonomously perform work-related tasks? The answer to this question has important implications for both industry looking to adopt AI into their workflows, and for economic policy to understand the effects that adoption of AI may have on the labor market. To measure the progress of these LLM agents' performance on performing real-world professional tasks, in this paper, we introduce TheAgentCompany, an extensible benchmark for evaluating AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a digital worker: by browsing the Web, writing code, running programs, and communicating with other coworkers. We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that with the most competitive agent, 24% of the tasks can be completed autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents -- in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems.

  • 21 authors
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Dec 18, 2024 2

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI

Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combine that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system. We find the most common work activities people seek AI assistance for involve gathering information and writing, while the most common activities that AI itself is performing are providing information and assistance, writing, teaching, and advising. Combining these activity classifications with measurements of task success and scope of impact, we compute an AI applicability score for each occupation. We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information. Additionally, we characterize the types of work activities performed most successfully, how wage and education correlate with AI applicability, and how real-world usage compares to predictions of occupational AI impact.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 10, 2025

Efficient and Scalable Agentic AI with Heterogeneous Systems

AI agents are emerging as a dominant workload in a wide range of applications, promising to be the vehicle that delivers the promised benefits of AI to enterprises and consumers. Unlike conventional software or static inference, agentic workloads are dynamic and structurally complex. Often these agents are directed graphs of compute and IO operations that span multi-modal data input and conversion), data processing and context gathering (e.g vector DB lookups), multiple LLM inferences, tool calls, etc. To scale AI agent usage, we need efficient and scalable deployment and agent-serving infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a system design for dynamic orchestration of AI agent workloads on heterogeneous compute infrastructure spanning CPUs and accelerators, both from different vendors and across different performance tiers within a single vendor. The system delivers several building blocks: a framework for planning and optimizing agentic AI execution graphs using cost models that account for compute, memory, and bandwidth constraints of different HW; a MLIR based representation and compilation system that can decompose AI agent execution graphs into granular operators and generate code for different HW options; and a dynamic orchestration system that can place the granular components across a heterogeneous compute infrastructure and stitch them together while meeting an end-to-end SLA. Our design performs a systems level TCO optimization and preliminary results show that leveraging a heterogeneous infrastructure can deliver significant TCO benefits. A preliminary surprising finding is that for some workloads a heterogeneous combination of older generation GPUs with newer accelerators can deliver similar TCO as the latest generation homogenous GPU infrastructure design, potentially extending the life of deployed infrastructure.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 25, 2025

AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

  • 3 authors
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May 15, 2025 2

Bridging the Gap: Integrating Ethics and Environmental Sustainability in AI Research and Practice

As the possibilities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) have grown, so have concerns regarding its impacts on society and the environment. However, these issues are often raised separately; i.e. carbon footprint analyses of AI models typically do not consider how the pursuit of scale has contributed towards building models that are both inaccessible to most researchers in terms of cost and disproportionately harmful to the environment. On the other hand, model audits that aim to evaluate model performance and disparate impacts mostly fail to engage with the environmental ramifications of AI models and how these fit into their auditing approaches. In this separation, both research directions fail to capture the depth of analysis that can be explored by considering the two in parallel and the potential solutions for making informed choices that can be developed at their convergence. In this essay, we build upon work carried out in AI and in sister communities, such as philosophy and sustainable development, to make more deliberate connections around topics such as generalizability, transparency, evaluation and equity across AI research and practice. We argue that the efforts aiming to study AI's ethical ramifications should be made in tandem with those evaluating its impacts on the environment, and we conclude with a proposal of best practices to better integrate AI ethics and sustainability in AI research and practice.

  • 4 authors
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Apr 1, 2025

RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts

Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.

  • 22 authors
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Nov 22, 2024

Toward Edge General Intelligence with Agentic AI and Agentification: Concepts, Technologies, and Future Directions

The rapid expansion of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has catalyzed the evolution from centralized cloud intelligence towards decentralized edge general intelligence. However, traditional edge intelligence methods, characterized by static models and limited cognitive autonomy, fail to address the dynamic, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained scenarios inherent to emerging edge networks. Agentic artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) emerges as a transformative solution, enabling edge systems to autonomously perceive multimodal environments, reason contextually, and adapt proactively through continuous perception-reasoning-action loops. In this context, the agentification of edge intelligence serves as a key paradigm shift, where distributed entities evolve into autonomous agents capable of collaboration and continual adaptation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey dedicated to Agentic AI and agentification frameworks tailored explicitly for edge general intelligence. First, we systematically introduce foundational concepts and clarify distinctions from traditional edge intelligence paradigms. Second, we analyze important enabling technologies, including compact model compression, energy-aware computing strategies, robust connectivity frameworks, and advanced knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms. Third, we provide representative case studies demonstrating Agentic AI's capabilities in low-altitude economy networks, intent-driven networking, vehicular networks, and human-centric service provisioning, supported by numerical evaluations. Furthermore, we identify current research challenges, review emerging open-source platforms, and highlight promising future research directions to guide robust, scalable, and trustworthy Agentic AI deployments for next-generation edge environments.

  • 13 authors
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Aug 26, 2025

More than Carbon: Cradle-to-Grave environmental impacts of GenAI training on the Nvidia A100 GPU

The rapid expansion of AI has intensified concerns about its environmental sustainability. Yet, current assessments predominantly focus on operational carbon emissions using secondary data or estimated values, overlooking environmental impacts in other life cycle stages. This study presents the first comprehensive multi-criteria life cycle assessment (LCA) of AI training, examining 16 environmental impact categories based on detailed primary data collection of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40GB GPU. The LCA results for training BLOOM reveal that the use phase dominates 11 of 16 impact categories including climate change (96\%), while manufacturing dominates the remaining 5 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (99\%) and mineral and metal depletion (85\%). For training GPT-4, the use phase dominates 10 of 16 impact categories, contributing about 96\% to both the climate change and resource use, fossils category. The manufacturing stage dominates 6 of 16 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (94\%) and eutrophication, freshwater (81\%). Assessing the cradle-to-gate environmental impact distribution across the GPU components reveals that the GPU chip is the largest contributor across 10 of 16 of impact categories and shows particularly pronounced contributions to climate change (81\%) and resource use, fossils (80\%). While primary data collection results in modest changes in carbon estimates compared to database-derived estimates, substantial variations emerge in other categories. Most notably, minerals and metals depletion increases by 33\%, demonstrating the critical importance of primary data for non-carbon accounting. This multi-criteria analysis expands the Sustainable AI discourse beyond operational carbon emissions, challenging current sustainability narratives and highlighting the need for policy frameworks addressing the full spectrum of AI's environmental impact.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 27, 2025

EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

  • 12 authors
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Oct 12, 2024

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 18

An Introduction to Electrocatalyst Design using Machine Learning for Renewable Energy Storage

Scalable and cost-effective solutions to renewable energy storage are essential to addressing the world's rising energy needs while reducing climate change. As we increase our reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which produce intermittent power, storage is needed to transfer power from times of peak generation to peak demand. This may require the storage of power for hours, days, or months. One solution that offers the potential of scaling to nation-sized grids is the conversion of renewable energy to other fuels, such as hydrogen or methane. To be widely adopted, this process requires cost-effective solutions to running electrochemical reactions. An open challenge is finding low-cost electrocatalysts to drive these reactions at high rates. Through the use of quantum mechanical simulations (density functional theory), new catalyst structures can be tested and evaluated. Unfortunately, the high computational cost of these simulations limits the number of structures that may be tested. The use of machine learning may provide a method to efficiently approximate these calculations, leading to new approaches in finding effective electrocatalysts. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the challenges in finding suitable electrocatalysts, how machine learning may be applied to the problem, and the use of the Open Catalyst Project OC20 dataset for model training.

  • 17 authors
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Oct 14, 2020

A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 10, 2025

Improve Machine Learning carbon footprint using Nvidia GPU and Mixed Precision training for classification models -- Part I

This is the 1st part of the dissertation for my master degree and compares the power consumption using the default floating point (32bit) and Nvidia mixed precision (16bit and 32bit) while training a classification ML model. A custom PC with specific hardware was built to perform the experiments, and different ML hyper-parameters, such as batch size, neurons, and epochs, were chosen to build Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Additionally, various software was used during the experiments to collect the power consumption data in Watts from the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Central Processing Unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM) and manually from a wattmeter connected to the wall. A benchmarking test with default hyper parameter values for the DNN was used as a reference, while the experiments used a combination of different settings. The results were recorded in Excel, and descriptive statistics were chosen to calculate the mean between the groups and compare them using graphs and tables. The outcome was positive when using mixed precision combined with specific hyper-parameters. Compared to the benchmarking, the optimisation for the classification reduced the power consumption between 7 and 11 Watts. Similarly, the carbon footprint is reduced because the calculation uses the same power consumption data. Still, a consideration is required when configuring hyper-parameters because it can negatively affect hardware performance. However, this research required inferential statistics, specifically ANOVA and T-test, to compare the relationship between the means. Furthermore, tests indicated no statistical significance of the relationship between the benchmarking and experiments. However, a more extensive implementation with a cluster of GPUs can increase the sample size significantly, as it is an essential factor and can change the outcome of the statistical analysis.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health and Well-Being: Evolution, Current Applications, Future Challenges, and Emerging Evidence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad field that is upturning mental health care in many ways, from addressing anxiety, depression, and stress to increasing access, personalization of treatment, and real-time monitoring that enhances patient outcomes. The current paper discusses the evolution, present application, and future challenges in the field of AI for mental health and well-being. From the early chatbot models, such as ELIZA, to modern machine learning systems, the integration of AI in mental health has grown rapidly to augment traditional treatment and open innovative solutions. AI-driven tools provide continuous support, offering personalized interventions and addressing issues such as treatment access and patient stigma. AI also enables early diagnosis through the analysis of complex datasets, including speech patterns and social media behavior, to detect early signs of conditions like depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Ethical challenges persist, however, most notably around privacy, data security, and algorithmic bias. With AI at the core of mental health care, there is a dire need to develop strong ethical frameworks that ensure patient rights are protected, access is equitable, and transparency is maintained in AI applications. Going forward, the role of AI in mental health will continue to evolve, and continued research and policy development will be needed to meet the diverse needs of patients while mitigating associated risks.

  • 1 authors
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Dec 13, 2024

Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use

How are AI assistants being used in the real world? While model providers in theory have a window into this impact via their users' data, both privacy concerns and practical challenges have made analyzing this data difficult. To address these issues, we present Clio (Claude insights and observations), a privacy-preserving platform that uses AI assistants themselves to analyze and surface aggregated usage patterns across millions of conversations, without the need for human reviewers to read raw conversations. We validate this can be done with a high degree of accuracy and privacy by conducting extensive evaluations. We demonstrate Clio's usefulness in two broad ways. First, we share insights about how models are being used in the real world from one million Claude.ai Free and Pro conversations, ranging from providing advice on hairstyles to providing guidance on Git operations and concepts. We also identify the most common high-level use cases on Claude.ai (coding, writing, and research tasks) as well as patterns that differ across languages (e.g., conversations in Japanese discuss elder care and aging populations at higher-than-typical rates). Second, we use Clio to make our systems safer by identifying coordinated attempts to abuse our systems, monitoring for unknown unknowns during critical periods like launches of new capabilities or major world events, and improving our existing monitoring systems. We also discuss the limitations of our approach, as well as risks and ethical concerns. By enabling analysis of real-world AI usage, Clio provides a scalable platform for empirically grounded AI safety and governance.

  • 21 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024 1

AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era

The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

Magentic-UI: Towards Human-in-the-loop Agentic Systems

AI agents powered by large language models are increasingly capable of autonomously completing complex, multi-step tasks using external tools. Yet, they still fall short of human-level performance in most domains including computer use, software development, and research. Their growing autonomy and ability to interact with the outside world, also introduces safety and security risks including potentially misaligned actions and adversarial manipulation. We argue that human-in-the-loop agentic systems offer a promising path forward, combining human oversight and control with AI efficiency to unlock productivity from imperfect systems. We introduce Magentic-UI, an open-source web interface for developing and studying human-agent interaction. Built on a flexible multi-agent architecture, Magentic-UI supports web browsing, code execution, and file manipulation, and can be extended with diverse tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP). Moreover, Magentic-UI presents six interaction mechanisms for enabling effective, low-cost human involvement: co-planning, co-tasking, multi-tasking, action guards, and long-term memory. We evaluate Magentic-UI across four dimensions: autonomous task completion on agentic benchmarks, simulated user testing of its interaction capabilities, qualitative studies with real users, and targeted safety assessments. Our findings highlight Magentic-UI's potential to advance safe and efficient human-agent collaboration.

  • 20 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025

Sasha: Creative Goal-Oriented Reasoning in Smart Homes with Large Language Models

Smart home assistants function best when user commands are direct and well-specified (e.g., "turn on the kitchen light"), or when a hard-coded routine specifies the response. In more natural communication, however, human speech is unconstrained, often describing goals (e.g., "make it cozy in here" or "help me save energy") rather than indicating specific target devices and actions to take on those devices. Current systems fail to understand these under-specified commands since they cannot reason about devices and settings as they relate to human situations. We introduce large language models (LLMs) to this problem space, exploring their use for controlling devices and creating automation routines in response to under-specified user commands in smart homes. We empirically study the baseline quality and failure modes of LLM-created action plans with a survey of age-diverse users. We find that LLMs can reason creatively to achieve challenging goals, but they experience patterns of failure that diminish their usefulness. We address these gaps with Sasha, a smarter smart home assistant. Sasha responds to loosely-constrained commands like "make it cozy" or "help me sleep better" by executing plans to achieve user goals, e.g., setting a mood with available devices, or devising automation routines. We implement and evaluate Sasha in a hands-on user study, showing the capabilities and limitations of LLM-driven smart homes when faced with unconstrained user-generated scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
May 16, 2023

Shielded Controller Units for RL with Operational Constraints Applied to Remote Microgrids

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimizing decision-making in complex systems under uncertainty, an essential challenge in real-world settings, particularly in the context of the energy transition. A representative example is remote microgrids that supply power to communities disconnected from the main grid. Enabling the energy transition in such systems requires coordinated control of renewable sources like wind turbines, alongside fuel generators and batteries, to meet demand while minimizing fuel consumption and battery degradation under exogenous and intermittent load and wind conditions. These systems must often conform to extensive regulations and complex operational constraints. To ensure that RL agents respect these constraints, it is crucial to provide interpretable guarantees. In this paper, we introduce Shielded Controller Units (SCUs), a systematic and interpretable approach that leverages prior knowledge of system dynamics to ensure constraint satisfaction. Our shield synthesis methodology, designed for real-world deployment, decomposes the environment into a hierarchical structure where each SCU explicitly manages a subset of constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SCUs on a remote microgrid optimization task with strict operational requirements. The RL agent, equipped with SCUs, achieves a 24% reduction in fuel consumption without increasing battery degradation, outperforming other baselines while satisfying all constraints. We hope SCUs contribute to the safe application of RL to the many decision-making challenges linked to the energy transition.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey

For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.

  • 30 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence commonly refers to the science and engineering of artificial systems that can carry out tasks generally associated with requiring aspects of human intelligence, such as playing games, translating languages, and driving cars. In recent years, there have been exciting advances in learning-based, data-driven approaches towards AI, and machine learning and deep learning have enabled computer systems to perceive the world in unprecedented ways. Reinforcement learning has enabled breakthroughs in complex games such as Go and challenging robotics tasks such as quadrupedal locomotion. A key aspect of intelligence is to not only make predictions, but reason about the uncertainty in these predictions, and to consider this uncertainty when making decisions. This is what this manuscript on "Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is about. The first part covers probabilistic approaches to machine learning. We discuss the differentiation between "epistemic" uncertainty due to lack of data and "aleatoric" uncertainty, which is irreducible and stems, e.g., from noisy observations and outcomes. We discuss concrete approaches towards probabilistic inference and modern approaches to efficient approximate inference. The second part of the manuscript is about taking uncertainty into account in sequential decision tasks. We consider active learning and Bayesian optimization -- approaches that collect data by proposing experiments that are informative for reducing the epistemic uncertainty. We then consider reinforcement learning and modern deep RL approaches that use neural network function approximation. We close by discussing modern approaches in model-based RL, which harness epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to guide exploration, while also reasoning about safety.

  • 2 authors
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Feb 7, 2025

Comparing Software Developers with ChatGPT: An Empirical Investigation

The advent of automation in particular Software Engineering (SE) tasks has transitioned from theory to reality. Numerous scholarly articles have documented the successful application of Artificial Intelligence to address issues in areas such as project management, modeling, testing, and development. A recent innovation is the introduction of ChatGPT, an ML-infused chatbot, touted as a resource proficient in generating programming codes and formulating software testing strategies for developers and testers respectively. Although there is speculation that AI-based computation can increase productivity and even substitute software engineers in software development, there is currently a lack of empirical evidence to verify this. Moreover, despite the primary focus on enhancing the accuracy of AI systems, non-functional requirements including energy efficiency, vulnerability, fairness (i.e., human bias), and safety frequently receive insufficient attention. This paper posits that a comprehensive comparison of software engineers and AI-based solutions, considering various evaluation criteria, is pivotal in fostering human-machine collaboration, enhancing the reliability of AI-based methods, and understanding task suitability for humans or AI. Furthermore, it facilitates the effective implementation of cooperative work structures and human-in-the-loop processes. This paper conducts an empirical investigation, contrasting the performance of software engineers and AI systems, like ChatGPT, across different evaluation metrics. The empirical study includes a case of assessing ChatGPT-generated code versus code produced by developers and uploaded in Leetcode.

  • 3 authors
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May 19, 2023

LABIIUM: AI-Enhanced Zero-configuration Measurement Automation System

The complexity of laboratory environments requires solutions that simplify instrument interaction and enhance measurement automation. Traditional tools often require configuration, software, and programming skills, creating barriers to productivity. Previous approaches, including dedicated software suites and custom scripts, frequently fall short in providing user-friendly solutions that align with programming practices. We present LABIIUM, an AI-enhanced, zero-configuration measurement automation system designed to streamline experimental workflows and improve user productivity. LABIIUM integrates an AI assistant powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. LABIIUM's Lab-Automation-Measurement Bridges (LAMBs) enable seamless instrument connectivity using standard tools such as VSCode and Python, eliminating setup overhead. To demonstrate its capabilities, we conducted experiments involving the measurement of the parametric transfer curve of a simple two-transistor inverting amplifier with a current source load. The AI assistant was evaluated using different prompt scenarios and compared with multiple models, including Claude Sonnet 3.5, Gemini Pro 1.5, and GPT-4o. An expert solution implementing the Gradient-Weighted Adaptive Stochastic Sampling (GWASS) method was used as a baseline. The solutions generated by the AI assistant were compared with the expert solution and a uniform linear sweep baseline with 10,000 points. The graph results show that the LLMs were able to successfully complete the most basic uniform sweep, but LLMs were unable to develop adaptive sweeping algorithms to compete with GWASS. The evaluation underscores LABIIUM's ability to enhance laboratory productivity and support digital transformation in research and industry, and emphasizes the future work required to improve LLM performance in Electronic Measurement Science Tasks.

  • 2 authors
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Dec 6, 2024

Securing AI Agents: Implementing Role-Based Access Control for Industrial Applications

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced solutions across various domains, from political science to software development. However, these models are constrained by their training data, which is static and limited to information available up to a specific date. Additionally, their generalized nature often necessitates fine-tuning -- whether for classification or instructional purposes -- to effectively perform specific downstream tasks. AI agents, leveraging LLMs as their core, mitigate some of these limitations by accessing external tools and real-time data, enabling applications such as live weather reporting and data analysis. In industrial settings, AI agents are transforming operations by enhancing decision-making, predictive maintenance, and process optimization. For example, in manufacturing, AI agents enable near-autonomous systems that boost productivity and support real-time decision-making. Despite these advancements, AI agents remain vulnerable to security threats, including prompt injection attacks, which pose significant risks to their integrity and reliability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework for integrating Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) into AI agents, providing a robust security guardrail. This framework aims to support the effective and scalable deployment of AI agents, with a focus on on-premises implementations.

  • 1 authors
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Sep 14, 2025

Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

  • 11 authors
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Feb 12, 2025

Forecasting Lithium-Ion Battery Longevity with Limited Data Availability: Benchmarking Different Machine Learning Algorithms

As the use of Lithium-ion batteries continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to be able to predict their remaining useful life. This work aims to compare the relative performance of different machine learning algorithms, both traditional machine learning and deep learning, in order to determine the best-performing algorithms for battery cycle life prediction based on minimal data. We investigated 14 different machine learning models that were fed handcrafted features based on statistical data and split into 3 feature groups for testing. For deep learning models, we tested a variety of neural network models including different configurations of standard Recurrent Neural Networks, Gated Recurrent Units, and Long Short Term Memory with and without attention mechanism. Deep learning models were fed multivariate time series signals based on the raw data for each battery across the first 100 cycles. Our experiments revealed that the machine learning algorithms on handcrafted features performed particularly well, resulting in 10-20% average mean absolute percentage error. The best-performing algorithm was the Random Forest Regressor, which gave a minimum 9.8% mean absolute percentage error. Traditional machine learning models excelled due to their capability to comprehend general data set trends. In comparison, deep learning models were observed to perform particularly poorly on raw, limited data. Algorithms like GRU and RNNs that focused on capturing medium-range data dependencies were less adept at recognizing the gradual, slow trends critical for this task. Our investigation reveals that implementing machine learning models with hand-crafted features proves to be more effective than advanced deep learning models for predicting the remaining useful Lithium-ion battery life with limited data availability.

  • 2 authors
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Dec 9, 2023

Neural Brain: A Neuroscience-inspired Framework for Embodied Agents

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from static, data-driven models to dynamic systems capable of perceiving and interacting with real-world environments. Despite advancements in pattern recognition and symbolic reasoning, current AI systems, such as large language models, remain disembodied, unable to physically engage with the world. This limitation has driven the rise of embodied AI, where autonomous agents, such as humanoid robots, must navigate and manipulate unstructured environments with human-like adaptability. At the core of this challenge lies the concept of Neural Brain, a central intelligence system designed to drive embodied agents with human-like adaptability. A Neural Brain must seamlessly integrate multimodal sensing and perception with cognitive capabilities. Achieving this also requires an adaptive memory system and energy-efficient hardware-software co-design, enabling real-time action in dynamic environments. This paper introduces a unified framework for the Neural Brain of embodied agents, addressing two fundamental challenges: (1) defining the core components of Neural Brain and (2) bridging the gap between static AI models and the dynamic adaptability required for real-world deployment. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired architecture that integrates multimodal active sensing, perception-cognition-action function, neuroplasticity-based memory storage and updating, and neuromorphic hardware/software optimization. Furthermore, we also review the latest research on embodied agents across these four aspects and analyze the gap between current AI systems and human intelligence. By synthesizing insights from neuroscience, we outline a roadmap towards the development of generalizable, autonomous agents capable of human-level intelligence in real-world scenarios.

  • 16 authors
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May 12, 2025 1

Verifying International Agreements on AI: Six Layers of Verification for Rules on Large-Scale AI Development and Deployment

The risks of frontier AI may require international cooperation, which in turn may require verification: checking that all parties follow agreed-on rules. For instance, states might need to verify that powerful AI models are widely deployed only after their risks to international security have been evaluated and deemed manageable. However, research on AI verification could benefit from greater clarity and detail. To address this, this report provides an in-depth overview of AI verification, intended for both policy professionals and technical researchers. We present novel conceptual frameworks, detailed implementation options, and key R&D challenges. These draw on existing literature, expert interviews, and original analysis, all within the scope of confidentially overseeing AI development and deployment that uses thousands of high-end AI chips. We find that states could eventually verify compliance by using six largely independent verification approaches with substantial redundancy: (1) built-in security features in AI chips; (2-3) separate monitoring devices attached to AI chips; and (4-6) personnel-based mechanisms, such as whistleblower programs. While promising, these approaches require guardrails to protect against abuse and power concentration, and many of these technologies have yet to be built or stress-tested. To enable states to confidently verify compliance with rules on large-scale AI development and deployment, the R&D challenges we list need significant progress.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 21, 2025

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)-Native Wireless Systems: A Journey Beyond 6G

Building future wireless systems that support services like digital twins (DTs) is challenging to achieve through advances to conventional technologies like meta-surfaces. While artificial intelligence (AI)-native networks promise to overcome some limitations of wireless technologies, developments still rely on AI tools like neural networks. Such tools struggle to cope with the non-trivial challenges of the network environment and the growing demands of emerging use cases. In this paper, we revisit the concept of AI-native wireless systems, equipping them with the common sense necessary to transform them into artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native systems. These systems acquire common sense by exploiting different cognitive abilities such as perception, analogy, and reasoning, that enable them to generalize and deal with unforeseen scenarios. Towards developing the components of such a system, we start by showing how the perception module can be built through abstracting real-world elements into generalizable representations. These representations are then used to create a world model, founded on principles of causality and hyper-dimensional (HD) computing, that aligns with intuitive physics and enables analogical reasoning, that define common sense. Then, we explain how methods such as integrated information theory play a role in the proposed intent-driven and objective-driven planning methods that maneuver the AGI-native network to take actions. Next, we discuss how an AGI-native network can enable use cases related to human and autonomous agents: a) analogical reasoning for next-generation DTs, b) synchronized and resilient experiences for cognitive avatars, and c) brain-level metaverse experiences like holographic teleportation. Finally, we conclude with a set of recommendations to build AGI-native systems. Ultimately, we envision this paper as a roadmap for the beyond 6G era.

  • 7 authors
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Apr 29, 2024

Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI

Large language model (LLM) queries are predominantly processed by frontier models in centralized cloud infrastructure. Rapidly growing demand strains this paradigm, and cloud providers struggle to scale infrastructure at pace. Two advances enable us to rethink this paradigm: small LMs (<=20B active parameters) now achieve competitive performance to frontier models on many tasks, and local accelerators (e.g., Apple M4 Max) run these models at interactive latencies. This raises the question: can local inference viably redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure? Answering this requires measuring whether local LMs can accurately answer real-world queries and whether they can do so efficiently enough to be practical on power-constrained devices (i.e., laptops). We propose intelligence per watt (IPW), task accuracy divided by unit of power, as a metric for assessing capability and efficiency of local inference across model-accelerator pairs. We conduct a large-scale empirical study across 20+ state-of-the-art local LMs, 8 accelerators, and a representative subset of LLM traffic: 1M real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. For each query, we measure accuracy, energy, latency, and power. Our analysis reveals 3 findings. First, local LMs can accurately answer 88.7% of single-turn chat and reasoning queries with accuracy varying by domain. Second, from 2023-2025, IPW improved 5.3x and local query coverage rose from 23.2% to 71.3%. Third, local accelerators achieve at least 1.4x lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models, revealing significant headroom for optimization. These findings demonstrate that local inference can meaningfully redistribute demand from centralized infrastructure, with IPW serving as the critical metric for tracking this transition. We release our IPW profiling harness for systematic intelligence-per-watt benchmarking.

Stanford Stanford AI
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Nov 11, 2025 3

Governed By Agents: A Survey On The Role Of Agentic AI In Future Computing Environments

The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can operate autonomously, demonstrate goal-directed behavior, and adaptively learn, indicates the onset of a massive change in today's computing infrastructure. This study investigates how agentic AI models' multiple characteristics may impact the architecture, governance, and operation under which computing environments function. Agentic AI has the potential to reduce reliance on extremely large (public) cloud environments due to resource efficiency, especially with processing and/or storage. The aforementioned characteristics provide us with an opportunity to canvas the likelihood of strategic migration in computing infrastructures away from massive public cloud services, towards more locally distributed architectures: edge computing and on-premises computing infrastructures. Many of these likely migrations will be spurred by factors like on-premises processing needs, diminished data consumption footprints, and cost savings. This study examines how a solution for implementing AI's autonomy could result in a re-architecture of the systems and model a departure from today's governance models to help us manage these increasingly autonomous agents, and an operational overhaul of processes over a very diverse computing systems landscape that bring together computing via cloud, edge, and on-premises computing solutions. To enable us to explore these intertwined decisions, it will be fundamentally important to understand how to best position agentic AI, and to navigate the future state of computing infrastructures.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 20, 2025

KARMA: Augmenting Embodied AI Agents with Long-and-short Term Memory Systems

Embodied AI agents responsible for executing interconnected, long-sequence household tasks often face difficulties with in-context memory, leading to inefficiencies and errors in task execution. To address this issue, we introduce KARMA, an innovative memory system that integrates long-term and short-term memory modules, enhancing large language models (LLMs) for planning in embodied agents through memory-augmented prompting. KARMA distinguishes between long-term and short-term memory, with long-term memory capturing comprehensive 3D scene graphs as representations of the environment, while short-term memory dynamically records changes in objects' positions and states. This dual-memory structure allows agents to retrieve relevant past scene experiences, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of task planning. Short-term memory employs strategies for effective and adaptive memory replacement, ensuring the retention of critical information while discarding less pertinent data. Compared to state-of-the-art embodied agents enhanced with memory, our memory-augmented embodied AI agent improves success rates by 1.3x and 2.3x in Composite Tasks and Complex Tasks within the AI2-THOR simulator, respectively, and enhances task execution efficiency by 3.4x and 62.7x. Furthermore, we demonstrate that KARMA's plug-and-play capability allows for seamless deployment on real-world robotic systems, such as mobile manipulation platforms.Through this plug-and-play memory system, KARMA significantly enhances the ability of embodied agents to generate coherent and contextually appropriate plans, making the execution of complex household tasks more efficient. The experimental videos from the work can be found at https://youtu.be/4BT7fnw9ehs. Our code is available at https://github.com/WZX0Swarm0Robotics/KARMA/tree/master.

  • 9 authors
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Sep 23, 2024