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Shiliang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Shiliang Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Adaptive Residual Modeling for Scenario Learning in Probabilistic Load Forecasting

Uncertainties in weather, user behavior, and distributed energy production introduce significant variability into feeder power. Effective power system operations require both multi-horizon load forecasts and well-calibrated extreme quantiles for the forecast. Nevertheless, standard objectives that fit the full forecast distribution often underemphasize rare observations and extremes. Conversely, applying heavy tail-weighting in the distribution to capture these extremes can distort the underlying probability distribution. To address this issue, this paper proposes adaptive residual modeling for scenario learning (ARMSL), a two-stage framework. Particularly, Stage I in our framework sequentially models environmental response, history-dependent load patterns, persistent residual deviations, and the remaining innovations. Upon the modeling, we then generate joint active- and reactive-power scenarios with state-dependent dispersion. Stage II keeps the scenario model fixed and calibrates extreme marginal quantiles using a simple, channel-specific reference forecast (an anchor). Only outward deviations from this anchor are admitted, with their contribution determined by local calibration history and the current operating state. From our numerical simulations on FeederBW dataset, Stage I outperforms diffusion baselines in energy and variogram scores. Our complete framework achieves an active-power 0.99-quantile pinball loss of 0.1932 (a 30.08% to 85.33% reduction relative to three baselines) with 1.054% exceedance rate against a nominal 1%. From simulations on the Rolle dataset, we observe decreased losses by 5.39%--14.40% compared to the active-power-only anchor. Furthermore, the unchanged Stage I scenarios in the simulation yield a correlation of 0.953 between predicted and observed feeder event rates, with 90.0% of feeder errors falling within two percentage points.

eess.SY↗

Topology-adaptive Estimation of Maximum Voltage Unbalance for Distribution Networks with Finite-sample Guarantee

High penetration of single-phase distributed power production and frequent topology changes can significantly increase voltage unbalance in distribution networks. Reliable probabilistic power flow (PPF) assessment for the network, therefore, must account for topology-dependent power-flow equations, numerical error in the voltage unbalance factor (VUF), and finite-sample uncertainty in power measurements. In this paper, we propose Topology-Adaptive Certified Quantile Estimation (TACQE) to estimate the maximum VUF across monitored electric buses. Following a local network change, TACQE updates the cross-couplings among power-flow sequences, and certifies candidate PPF solutions against the updated nonlinear equations. The resulted power-flow state enclosures provide rigorous bounds on the maximum VUF. Furthermore, we derive independent reference-solver evaluations to calibrate discrepancies from the reference PPF solution. This leads to a uniform sampling bound that yields simultaneous upper-tail probabilities and quantiles, which provides a finite-sample guarantee for the estimated maximum-VUF distribution over an entire range of VUF thresholds. From our numerical simulations across 101 fixed-topology quantiles, it demonstrates that the designed TACQE can provide a fast candidate post-change power flow solution where it reuses most of the previous network model and modifies only the affected bus blocks.

eess.SY↗

Urban Power Grid Topology and Hierarchy Identification from Open Data

Understanding the complex topology and hierarchy of urban power grid is crucial for energy prognosis, power flow management, and system resilience analysis. However, detailed grid information remains largely proprietary. This information, nevertheless, is crucial especially for analyzing the last-mile distribution networks connecting individual buildings. This paper addresses this challenge by developing an open-data-driven framework to identify urban power grid topology, from high-voltage transmission down to individual building connections. We integrate public infrastructure data (power-lines, substations, transformers, poles) to map the high and medium-voltage grid skeleton. We then leverage geospatial machine learning on OpenStreetMap building data to cluster loads of building energy demand. Upon the clustering, we develop the physical topology of the final distribution lines linking the clustered buildings and low-voltage distribution grids. Our derived grid topology incorporates physical and geographical constraints like voltage level and road networks, thus leading to reasonable topology and hierarchy of grid networks. We apply the developed framework to the districts of Alna in Oslo, Norway, and Waiheke Island in New Zealand, and we reconstruct the complete grid topology that connects all the buildings, power lines, and electricity infrastructure assets. With the developed framework, we provide a critical tool that facilitates power system analysis, e.g., power flow optimization, cascading failure simulation, and grid resilience against the penetration of distributed renewable generation. This work also opens the opportunity to build energy digital twins that fuse power assets and grid topology, geographic constraints, and fine-grained power demand profiles.

cs.LG↗

Hierarchical Graph Neural Network for Probabilistic Power Flow with Grid Topology Contingencies

Data-driven surrogates reduce the nonlinear solves required for probabilistic power flow (PPF), but models tied to a fixed bus--branch graph often generalize poorly when outages change electrical coupling. This paper proposes a topology-decomposition-driven hierarchical bidirectional graph neural network (TDD--HBGNN) for PPF under unseen topologies. For each realized topology, the network is decomposed into fundamental topological units (FTUs), dynamically homogeneous voltage clusters (DHVCs), and a core backbone sub-grid (CBSG), with equivalent-admittance representations preserving electrical ports between units. A sensitivity-based linear prior captures the first-order voltage-magnitude and phase-angle response, while the HBGNN learns topology-dependent nonlinear residuals. Impedance- and uncertainty-aware bottom-up aggregation condenses local perturbations, while mode-modulated top-down broadcasting restores system context at buses. We evaluate our approach on the IEEE 118-bus and Polish 2746-bus systems under unseen N--1 and N--2 contingencies against six baseline methods. Compared with these methods, TDD--HBGNN achieves 2.47--4.20-fold lower all-bus phase-angle errors and lower phase-angle errors in every held-out event. Its voltage-magnitude advantage is concentrated near the outaged branches, where paired error ratios reach 1.75--2.58 on the IEEE system and 1.87--1.97 in Polish N--2 events. All system--contingency--baseline comparisons favor TDD--HBGNN in joint voltage--angle error. Moreover, shared hierarchical operators keep the model size at 0.658 million parameters across both grids and yield 0.161--1.793~ms forward latency per probabilistic case. These results demonstrate system-wide angular accuracy, outage-local voltage accuracy, and parameter-efficient scaling across unseen topologies.

eess.SY↗

VeriTS: Verifiable Model-Enhanced Time-Series Queries on Blockchain Systems

Every blockchain transaction carries a timestamp, and the chain imposes a total order. On-chain data therefore forms per-source time-series streams. However, existing systems support only basic lookups on blocks and transactions, and cannot answer time-series queries such as time-range retrieval and windowed aggregation. Offloading queries off-chain restores expressiveness, but the off-chain query layer is untrusted, so results must be verifiable. To this end, we propose VeriTS, the first verifiable time-series query framework for blockchain systems. It supports efficient range and aggregation queries. VeriTS maintains an off-chain query layer. In this layer, each stream is kept under one tree whose nodes carry authenticated aggregates, so the query index is itself the authenticated data structure. A light client thus verifies a windowed aggregate from a logarithmic number of authenticated nodes rather than from every record. VeriTS further answers error-tolerant queries from compact model representations of a stream, and extends the completeness and soundness guarantees to such approximate answers. As VeriTS never trusts the model behind a representation, a faulty or adversarial model can only widen an answer's certified interval, never falsify it. Experiments offer evidence that on windowed aggregation, VeriTS improves verification efficiency by more than two orders of magnitude over per-record proofs. On range retrieval, proofs shrink by up to 14.5x.

cs.DB↗

A Distinct Covering System with Minimum Modulus 7 and Minimal Least Common Multiple 10080

We determine the minimum possible least common multiple of a distinct covering system whose minimum modulus is $7$. Klein previously constructed such a system with least common multiple $15120$ and conjectured that this value was minimal. We give a construction with least common multiple $10080$, and we prove that no smaller least common multiple can occur. The proof is organized as a successive filtering argument. Starting from the possible multiples of $7$ below $10080$, we first apply a reciprocal-sum filter, then a divisor-completed integer-programming filter, then a stronger partial-sum filter. The few remaining hard cases are finally certified by complete Gurobi computations.

math.NT↗

PixelGen: Improving Pixel Diffusion with Perceptual Supervision

Pixel diffusion generates images directly in pixel space, avoiding the VAE artifacts and representational bottlenecks of two-stage latent diffusion. Recent JiT further simplifies pixel diffusion with x-prediction, where the model predicts clean images rather than velocity. However, the standard pixel-wise diffusion loss treats all pixels equally, spending model capacity to perceptually insignificant signals and often leading to blurry samples. We propose PixelGen, an end-to-end pixel diffusion framework that augments x-prediction with perceptual supervision. Specifically, PixelGen introduces two complementary perceptual losses on top of x-prediction: an LPIPS loss for local textures and a P-DINO loss for global semantics. To preserve sample coverage, PixelGen further proposes a noise-gating strategy that applies these losses only at lower-noise timesteps. On ImageNet-256 without classifier-free guidance, PixelGen achieves an FID of 5.11 in 80 training epochs, surpassing the latent diffusion baselines. Moreover, PixelGen scales efficiently to text-to-image generation, reaching a GenEval score of 0.79 with only 6 days of training on 8xH800 GPUs. These results show that perceptual supervision substantially narrows the gap between pixel and latent diffusion while preserving a simple one-stage pipeline. Codes are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Ma/PixelGen.

cs.CV↗

Prompt-Anchored Vision-Text Distillation for Lifelong Person Re-identification

Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) aims to train a generalizable model with sequentially collected data. However, such models often suffer from semantic drift, limited adaptability, and catastrophic forgetting as new domains emerge. Existing exemplar-free approaches largely rely on visual-only distillation or parameter regularization, while overlooking the potential of auxiliary modalities, such as text, to preserve semantic stability and enable incremental plasticity. We observe that the frozen text encoder in pretrained vision-language models can serve as a stable semantic anchor across domains. To decouple the roles of vision and text, we propose Prompt-Anchored vision-text Distillation (PAD), an asymmetric vision-text framework for semantic alignment and cross-domain generalization. On the textual side, we distill prompts to preserve vision-text alignment under a fixed semantic space, acting as a global semantic reference rather than a dominant learning signal. On the visual side, an EMA-based teacher with an adaptive prompt pool enables domain-wise adaptation by allocating new slots while freezing past ones. Extensive experiments show that PAD substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods across seen and unseen domains, achieving a strong balance between stability and plasticity. Project page is available at https://github.com/zu-zi/PAD.

cs.CV↗

AI and Open-data Driven Scalable Solar Power Profiling

Solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment is expanding rapidly, yet detailed, up-to-date information on the spatial distribution and capacity of rooftop PV remains limited. This paper presents an open, scalable framework for detecting solar panels from open data and generating city-level solar power profiles. We leverage foundation vision AI models to detect solar panel geometries from open-source satellite imagery. This avoids manual data labeling and case-specific model training while maintaining robustness across heterogeneous imagery. Detected solar panels are converted into georeferenced polygons, yielding spatially explicit and incrementally extensible inventories. By integrating open weather data, we translate panel footprints into regional solar power profiles. The framework reduces dependency on proprietary imagery, manual labeling, and closed-source models, and offers a transparent and scalable approach for solar planning and analysis. We released the data and an API resulted from this work. For any user-specified building location, our API retrieves aerial imagery, detects rooftop solar panels, and returns georeferenced polygons. This empowers researchers and developers to scan user-defined areas to build solar panel maps and associated solar production profiles, thus facilitating advanced analysis like distributed solar production integration, local power flow optimization, energy tariff design, and infrastructure planning.

cs.AI↗

DeCo: Frequency-Decoupled Pixel Diffusion for End-to-End Image Generation

Pixel diffusion aims to generate images directly in pixel space in an end-to-end fashion. This approach avoids the limitations of VAE in the two-stage latent diffusion, offering higher model capacity. Existing pixel diffusion models suffer from slow training and inference, as they usually model both high-frequency signals and low-frequency semantics within a single diffusion transformer (DiT). To pursue a more efficient pixel diffusion paradigm, we propose the frequency-DeCoupled pixel diffusion framework. With the intuition to decouple the generation of high and low frequency components, we leverage a lightweight pixel decoder to generate high-frequency details conditioned on semantic guidance from the DiT. This thus frees the DiT to specialize in modeling low-frequency semantics. In addition, we introduce a frequency-aware flow-matching loss that emphasizes visually salient frequencies while suppressing insignificant ones. Extensive experiments show that DeCo achieves superior performance among pixel diffusion models, attaining FID of 1.62 (256x256) and 2.22 (512x512) on ImageNet, closing the gap with latent diffusion methods. Furthermore, our pretrained text-to-image model achieves a leading overall score of 0.86 on GenEval in system-level comparison. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Zehong-Ma/DeCo.

cs.CV↗

Cenergy3: An Open Software Package for City Energy 3D Modeling

The efficient management and planning of urban energy systems require integrated three-dimensional (3D) models that accurately represent both consumption nodes and distribution networks. This paper introduces our developed approach and openly released software that automate the generation of digital 3D urban energy model from open data. We synthesize data from OpenTopography, OpenStreetMap, and Overture Maps in generating 3D models. The rendered model visualizes and contextualizes distribution power grids alongside the built environment and transportation networks. Our developed software, including an open python library and a free API, provides interactive figures for the 3D models. The rendered models are essential for analyzing infrastructure alignment and spatially linking energy demand nodes (buildings) with energy supply (utility grids). The developed API leverages standard Web Mercator coordinates (EPSG:3857) and JSON serialization to ensure interoperability within smart city and energy simulation platforms. We also provide a graphic user interface (GUI) where end-users can access our API via a cloud-based server, regardless of their programming skills and what devices and platforms their are using. We anticipate that our approach and software can support field researchers, developers, end-users, and policy-makers in a varieties of applications like urban energy monitoring, demand-supply analysis, and energy digital twins.

cs.DL↗

Security, privacy, and agentic AI in a regulatory view: From definitions and distinctions to provisions and reflections

The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has led to a dynamic regulatory landscape, where legislative frameworks strive to keep pace with technical advancements. As AI paradigms shift towards greater autonomy, specifically in the form of agentic AI, it becomes increasingly challenging to precisely articulate regulatory stipulations. This challenge is even more acute in the domains of security and privacy, where the capabilities of autonomous agents often blur traditional legal and technical boundaries. This paper reviews the evolving European Union (EU) AI regulatory provisions via analyzing 24 relevant documents published between 2024 and 2025. From this review, we provide a clarification of critical definitions. We deconstruct the regulatory interpretations of security, privacy, and agentic AI, distinguishing them from closely related concepts to resolve ambiguity. We synthesize the reviewed documents to articulate the current state of regulatory provisions targeting different types of AI, particularly those related to security and privacy aspects. We analyze and reflect on the existing provisions in the regulatory dimension to better align security and privacy obligations with AI and agentic behaviors. These insights serve to inform policymakers, developers, and researchers on the compliance and AI governance in the society with increasing algorithmic agencies.

cs.CR↗

SyncSpeech: Efficient and Low-Latency Text-to-Speech based on Temporal Masked Transformer

Current text-to-speech (TTS) models face a persistent limitation: autoregressive (AR) models suffer from low generation efficiency, while modern non-autoregressive (NAR) models experience high latency due to their unordered temporal nature. To bridge this divide, we introduce SyncSpeech, an efficient and low-latency TTS model based on the proposed Temporal Mask Transformer (TMT) paradigm. TMT synergistically unifies the temporally ordered generation of AR models with the parallel decoding efficiency of NAR models. TMT is realized through a meticulously designed sequence construction rule, a corresponding training objective, and a specialized hybrid attention mask. Furthermore, with the primary aim of enhancing training efficiency, a high-probability masking strategy is introduced, which also leads to a significant improvement in overall model performance. During inference, SyncSpeech achieves high efficiency by decoding all speech tokens corresponding to each newly arrived text token in a single step, and low latency by beginning to generate speech immediately upon receiving the second text token from the streaming input. Evaluations show that SyncSpeech maintains speech quality comparable to the modern AR TTS model, while achieving a 5.8-fold reduction in first-packet latency and an 8.8-fold improvement in real-time factor. Speech samples are available at https://SyncSpeech.github.io/}{https://SyncSpeech.github.io/.

cs.SD↗

MoSA: Motion-Coherent Human Video Generation via Structure-Appearance Decoupling

Existing video generation models predominantly emphasize appearance fidelity while exhibiting limited ability to synthesize complex human motions, such as whole-body movements, long-range dynamics, and fine-grained human-environment interactions. This often leads to unrealistic or physically implausible movements with inadequate structural coherence. To conquer these challenges, we propose MoSA, which decouples the process of human video generation into two components, i.e., structure generation and appearance generation. MoSA first employs a 3D structure transformer to generate a human motion sequence from the text prompt. The remaining video appearance is then synthesized under the guidance of this structural sequence. We achieve fine-grained control over the sparse human structures by introducing Human-Aware Dynamic Control modules with a dense tracking constraint during training. The modeling of human-environment interactions is improved through the proposed contact constraint. Those two components work comprehensively to ensure the structural and appearance fidelity across the generated videos. This paper also contributes a large-scale human video dataset, which features more complex and diverse motions than existing human video datasets. We conduct comprehensive comparisons between MoSA and a variety of approaches, including general video generation models, human video generation models, and human animation models. Experiments demonstrate that MoSA substantially outperforms existing approaches across the majority of evaluation metrics.

cs.CV↗

FlattenGPT: Depth Compression for Transformer with Layer Flattening

Recent works have indicated redundancy across transformer blocks, prompting the research of depth compression to prune less crucial blocks. However, current ways of entire-block pruning suffer from risks of discarding meaningful cues learned in those blocks, leading to substantial performance degradation. As another line of model compression, channel pruning can better preserve performance, while it cannot reduce model depth and is challenged by inconsistent pruning ratios for individual layers. To pursue better model compression and acceleration, this paper proposes \textbf{FlattenGPT}, a novel way to detect and reduce depth-wise redundancies. By flatting two adjacent blocks into one, it compresses the network depth, meanwhile enables more effective parameter redundancy detection and removal. FlattenGPT allows to preserve the knowledge learned in all blocks, and remains consistent with the original transformer architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlattenGPT enhances model efficiency with a decent trade-off to performance. It outperforms existing pruning methods in both zero-shot accuracies and WikiText-2 perplexity across various model types and parameter sizes. On LLaMA-2/3 and Qwen-1.5 models, FlattenGPT retains 90-96\% of zero-shot performance with a compression ratio of 20\%. It also outperforms other pruning methods in accelerating LLM inference, making it promising for enhancing the efficiency of transformers.

cs.CV↗

Looping Back to Move Forward: Recursive Transformers for Efficient and Flexible Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks, yet their vast parameter counts are often underutilized during both training and inference. In this work, we embrace the idea of looping back to move forward: reusing model parameters through recursive refinement to extract stronger multimodal representations without increasing model size. We propose RecursiveVLM, a recursive Transformer architecture tailored for LMMs. Two key innovations enable effective looping: (i) a Recursive Connector that aligns features across recursion steps by fusing intermediate-layer hidden states and applying modality-specific projections, respecting the distinct statistical structures of vision and language tokens; (ii) a Monotonic Recursion Loss that supervises every step and guarantees performance improves monotonically with recursion depth. This design transforms recursion into an on-demand refinement mechanism: delivering strong results with few loops on resource-constrained devices and progressively improving outputs when more computation resources are available. Experiments show consistent gains of +3% over standard Transformers and +7% over vanilla recursive baselines, demonstrating that strategic looping is a powerful path toward efficient, deployment-adaptive LMMs.

cs.LG↗

Exploring the Interpretability of Forecasting Models for Energy Balancing Market

The balancing market in the energy sector plays a critical role in physically and financially balancing the supply and demand. Modeling dynamics in the balancing market can provide valuable insights and prognosis for power grid stability and secure energy supply. While complex machine learning models can achieve high accuracy, their black-box nature severely limits the model interpretability. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between model accuracy and interpretability for the energy balancing market. Particularly, we take the example of forecasting manual frequency restoration reserve (mFRR) activation price in the balancing market using real market data from different energy price zones. We explore the interpretability of mFRR forecasting using two models: extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) machine and explainable boosting machine (EBM). We also integrate the two models, and we benchmark all the models against a baseline naive model. Our results show that EBM provides forecasting accuracy comparable to XGBoost while yielding a considerable level of interpretability. Our analysis also underscores the challenge of accurately predicting the mFRR price for the instances when the activation price deviates significantly from the spot price. Importantly, EBM's interpretability features reveal insights into non-linear mFRR price drivers and regional market dynamics. Our study demonstrates that EBM is a viable and valuable interpretable alternative to complex black-box AI models in the forecast for the balancing market.

q-fin.ST↗

SLAM-LLM: A Modular, Open-Source Multimodal Large Language Model Framework and Best Practice for Speech, Language, Audio and Music Processing

The recent surge in open-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) frameworks, such as LLaVA, provides a convenient kickoff for artificial intelligence developers and researchers. However, most of the MLLM frameworks take vision as the main input modality, and provide limited in-depth support for the modality of speech, audio, and music. This situation hinders the development of audio-language models, and forces researchers to spend a lot of effort on code writing and hyperparameter tuning. We present SLAM-LLM, an open-source deep learning framework designed to train customized MLLMs, focused on speech, language, audio, and music processing. SLAM-LLM provides a modular configuration of different encoders, projectors, LLMs, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning plugins. SLAM-LLM also includes detailed training and inference recipes for mainstream tasks, along with high-performance checkpoints like LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automated Audio Captioning (AAC), and Music Captioning (MC). Some of these recipes have already reached or are nearing state-of-the-art performance, and some relevant techniques have also been accepted by academic papers. We hope SLAM-LLM will accelerate iteration, development, data engineering, and model training for researchers. We are committed to continually pushing forward audio-based MLLMs through this open-source framework, and call on the community to contribute to the LLM-based speech, audio and music processing.

cs.SD↗