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Alexander Sommer

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Sommer.

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Adaptive Self-Improvement for Smarter Energy Systems using Agentic Policy Search

Controlling energy systems usually involves manually designed policies for decision-making, which can be complex and time-consuming to develop. This process requires interdisciplinary collaboration among multiple domain experts, resulting in slow and inflexible adaptation to rapidly changing environments. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising paradigm shift by integrating extensive contextual knowledge with the capability to generate structured, executable code. We present Agentic Policy Search (APS) -- a novel hierarchical optimization framework in which LLMs act as autonomous agents that propose complete control logics, translate them into executable code, and iteratively improve them through direct system feedback. We apply APS to a residential energy system with PV, battery, demand, and dynamic electricity prices. Within just seven simulated days, the method yields a net profit of up to 6.20 EUR compared to the no-battery reference scenario (-10.70 EUR), nearly matching the global optimum of a perfectly informed linear program. By combining LLM-driven policy search with the generation of human-interpretable control logic, APS effectively bridges adaptability and traceability in energy management -- while also offering a transferable framework for agentic optimization in other domains.

eess.SY

LEAVEN -- Lightweight Surface and Volume Mesh Sampling Application for Particle-based Simulations

We present an easy-to-use and lightweight surface and volume mesh sampling standalone application tailored for the needs of particle-based simulation. We describe the surface and volume sampling algorithms used in LEAVEN in a beginner-friendly fashion. Furthermore, we describe a novel method of generating random volume samples that satisfy blue noise criteria by modifying a surface sampling algorithm. We aim to lower one entry barrier for starting with particle-based simulations while still pose a benefit to advanced users. The goal is to provide a useful tool to the community and lowering the need for heavyweight third-party applications, especially for starters.

cs.GR

Interactive High-Resolution Simulation of Granular Material

We introduce a particle-based simulation method for granular material in interactive frame rates. We divide the simulation into two decoupled steps. In the first step, a relatively small number of particles is accurately simulated with a constraint-based method. Here, all collisions and the resulting friction between the particles are taken into account. In the second step, the small number of particles is significantly increased by an efficient sampling algorithm without creating additional artifacts. The method is particularly robust and allows relatively large time steps, which makes it well suited for real-time applications. With our method, up to 500k particles can be computed in interactive frame rates on consumer CPUs without relying on GPU support for massive parallel computing. This makes it well suited for applications where a lot of GPU power is already needed for render tasks.

cs.GR

Real-time Light Estimation and Neural Soft Shadows for AR Indoor Scenarios

We present a pipeline for realistic embedding of virtual objects into footage of indoor scenes with focus on real-time AR applications. Our pipeline consists of two main components: A light estimator and a neural soft shadow texture generator. Our light estimation is based on deep neural nets and determines the main light direction, light color, ambient color and an opacity parameter for the shadow texture. Our neural soft shadow method encodes object-based realistic soft shadows as light direction dependent textures in a small MLP. We show that our pipeline can be used to integrate objects into AR scenes in a new level of realism in real-time. Our models are small enough to run on current mobile devices. We achieve runtimes of 9ms for light estimation and 5ms for neural shadows on an iPhone 11 Pro.

cs.CV