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Feng Qiu

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Qiu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Affective Behaviour Analysis via Progressive Learning

Affective Behavior Analysis aims to develop emotionally intelligent technology that can recognize and respond to human emotions. To advance this field, the 7th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition holds the Multi-Task Learning Challenge based on the s-Aff-Wild2 database. The participants are required to develop a framework that achieves Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, and AU detection simultaneously. To achieve this goal, we propose a progressive multi-task learning framework that fully leverages the distinct focuses of each task on facial emotion features. Specifically, our method design can be summarized into three main aspects: 1) Separate Training and Joint Training: We first train each task model separately and then perform joint training based on the pre-trained models, fully utilizing the feature focus aspects of each task to improve the overall framework performance. 2) Feature Fusion and Temporal Modeling:} We investigate effective strategies for fusing features extracted from each task-specific model and incorporate temporal feature modeling during the joint training phase, which further refines the performance of each task. 3) Joint Training Strategy Optimization: To identify the optimal joint training approach, we conduct a comprehensive strategy search, experimenting with various task combinations and training methodologies to further elevate the overall performance of each task. According to the official results, our team achieves first place in the MTL challenge with a total score of 1.5286 (i.e., AU F-score 0.5580, Expression F-score 0.4286, CCC VA score 0.5420). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YenanLiu/ABAW7th.

cs.CV↗

PI-Controlled Variable Time-Step Power System Simulation Using an Adaptive Order Differential Transformation Method

Dynamic simulation plays a crucial role in power system transient stability analysis, but traditional numerical integration-based methods are time-consuming due to the small time step sizes. Other semi-analytical solution methods, such as the Differential Transformation method, often struggle to select proper orders and steps, leading to slow performance and numerical instability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel adaptive dynamic simulation approach for power system transient stability analysis. The approach adds feedback control and optimization to selecting the step and order, utilizing the Differential Transformation method and a proportional-integral control strategy to control truncation errors. Order selection is formulated as an optimization problem resulting in a variable-step-optimal-order method that achieves significantly larger time step sizes without violating numerical stability. It is applied to three systems: the IEEE 9-bus, 3-generator system, IEEE 39-bus, 10-generator system, and a Polish 2383-bus, 327-generator system, promising computational efficiency and numerical robustness for large-scale power system is demonstrated in comprehensive case studies.

eess.SY↗

7ABAW-Compound Expression Recognition via Curriculum Learning

With the advent of deep learning, expression recognition has made significant advancements. However, due to the limited availability of annotated compound expression datasets and the subtle variations of compound expressions, Compound Emotion Recognition (CE) still holds considerable potential for exploration. To advance this task, the 7th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition introduces the Compound Expression Challenge based on C-EXPR-DB, a limited dataset without labels. In this paper, we present a curriculum learning-based framework that initially trains the model on single-expression tasks and subsequently incorporates multi-expression data. This design ensures that our model first masters the fundamental features of basic expressions before being exposed to the complexities of compound emotions. Specifically, our designs can be summarized as follows: 1) Single-Expression Pre-training: The model is first trained on datasets containing single expressions to learn the foundational facial features associated with basic emotions. 2) Dynamic Compound Expression Generation: Given the scarcity of annotated compound expression datasets, we employ CutMix and Mixup techniques on the original single-expression images to create hybrid images exhibiting characteristics of multiple basic emotions. 3) Incremental Multi-Expression Integration: After performing well on single-expression tasks, the model is progressively exposed to multi-expression data, allowing the model to adapt to the complexity and variability of compound expressions. The official results indicate that our method achieves the \textbf{best} performance in this competition track with an F-score of 0.6063. Our code is released at https://github.com/YenanLiu/ABAW7th.

cs.CV↗

Spatio-Temporal Conformal Prediction for Power Outage Data

In recent years, increasingly unpredictable and severe global weather patterns have frequently caused long-lasting power outages. Building resilience, the ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from major disruptions, has become crucial for the power industry. To enable rapid recovery, accurately predicting future outage numbers is essential. Rather than relying on simple point estimates, we analyze extensive quarter-hourly outage data and develop a graph conformal prediction method that delivers accurate prediction regions for outage numbers across the states for a time period. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through extensive numerical experiments in several states affected by extreme weather events that led to widespread outages.

stat.ML↗

Approximating the Gomory Mixed-Integer Cut Closure Using Historical Data

Many operations related optimization problems involve repeatedly solving similar mixed integer linear programming (MILP) instances with the same constraint matrix but differing objective coefficients and right-hand-side values. The goal of this paper is to generate good cutting-planes for such instances using historical data. Gomory mixed integer cuts (GMIC) for a general MILP can be parameterized by a vector of weights to aggregate the constraints into a single equality constraint, where each such equality constraint in turn yields a unique GMIC. In this paper, we prove that for a family of MILP instances, where the right-hand-side of the instances belongs to a lattice, the GMIC closure for every instance in this infinite family can be obtained using the same finite list of aggregation weights. This result motivates us to build a simple heuristic to efficiently select aggregations for generating GMICs from historical data of similar instances with varying right-hand-sides and objective function coefficients. For testing our method, we generated families of instances by perturbing the right-hand-side and objective functions of MIPLIB 2017 instances. The proposed heuristic can significantly accelerate the performance of Gurobi for many benchmark instances, even when taking into account the time required to predict aggregation multipliers and compute the cut coefficients. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the literature of data-driven cutting plane generation that is able to significantly accelerate the performance of a commercial state-of-the-art MILP solver, using default solver settings, on large-scale benchmark instances.

math.OC↗

PZT Optical Memristors

Optical memristors represent a monumental leap in the fusion of photonics and electronics, heralding a new era of applications from neuromorphic computing to artificial intelligence. However, current technologies are hindered by complex fabrication, limited endurance, high optical loss or low modulation depth. For the first time, we reveal optical non-volatility in thin-film Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) by electrically manipulating the ferroelectric domains to control the refractive index, providing a brand-new routine for optical memristors. The developed PZT optical memristors offer unprecedented advantages more than exceptional performance metrics like low loss of <2 dB/cm, high precision exceeding 6-bits, large modulation depth with an index change as large as 4.6x10-3. Additionally, these devices offer impressive stability, maintaining minimal wavelength variation for over three weeks and enduring more than 10,000 cycles, and require a mere 0.8 pJ of energy for non-volatile operation. The wafer-scale sol-gel fabrication process also ensures compatible with standardized mass fabrication processes and high scalability for photonic integration. Specially, these devices also demonstrate unique functional duality: setting above a threshold voltage enables non-volatile behaviors, below this threshold allows volatile high-speed optical modulation. This marks the first-ever optical memristor capable of performing high-speed (48 Gbps) and energy-efficient (450 fJ/bit) signal processing and non-volatile retention on a single platform, and is also the inaugural demonstration of scalable functional systems. The PZT optical memristors developed here facilitate the realization of novel paradigms for high-speed and energy-efficient optical interconnects, programmable PICs, quantum computing, neural networks, in-memory computing and brain-like architecture.

physics.optics↗

FreeAvatar: Robust 3D Facial Animation Transfer by Learning an Expression Foundation Model

Video-driven 3D facial animation transfer aims to drive avatars to reproduce the expressions of actors. Existing methods have achieved remarkable results by constraining both geometric and perceptual consistency. However, geometric constraints (like those designed on facial landmarks) are insufficient to capture subtle emotions, while expression features trained on classification tasks lack fine granularity for complex emotions. To address this, we propose \textbf{FreeAvatar}, a robust facial animation transfer method that relies solely on our learned expression representation. Specifically, FreeAvatar consists of two main components: the expression foundation model and the facial animation transfer model. In the first component, we initially construct a facial feature space through a face reconstruction task and then optimize the expression feature space by exploring the similarities among different expressions. Benefiting from training on the amounts of unlabeled facial images and re-collected expression comparison dataset, our model adapts freely and effectively to any in-the-wild input facial images. In the facial animation transfer component, we propose a novel Expression-driven Multi-avatar Animator, which first maps expressive semantics to the facial control parameters of 3D avatars and then imposes perceptual constraints between the input and output images to maintain expression consistency. To make the entire process differentiable, we employ a trained neural renderer to translate rig parameters into corresponding images. Furthermore, unlike previous methods that require separate decoders for each avatar, we propose a dynamic identity injection module that allows for the joint training of multiple avatars within a single network.

cs.GR↗

An Analysis of Market-to-Market Coordination

The growing usage of renewable energy resources has introduced significant uncertainties in energy generation, enlarging challenges for Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) in managing transmission congestion. To mitigate congestion that affects neighboring regions, RTOs employ a market-to-market (M2M) process through an iterative method, in which they exchange real-time security-constrained economic dispatch solutions and communicate requests for congestion relief. While this method provides economic benefits, it struggles with issues like power swings and time delays. To explore the full potential of M2M enhancements, in this paper, we first analyze the current M2M iterative method practice to better understand its efficacy and identify places for improvements. Then, we explore enhancements and develop an ADMM method for the M2M coordination that optimizes congestion management. Specifically, our ADMM method can achieve a minimal cost that is the same as the cost obtained through a centralized model that optimizes multiple markets altogether. Our final case studies, across a comprehensive set of multi-area benchmark instances, demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ADMM algorithm for the M2M process. Meanwhile, we identify scenarios where the existing M2M process fails to provide solutions as a by-product. Finally, the algorithm is implemented in an open-source package UnitCommitment.jl for easy access by a broader audience.

eess.SY↗

Market Implications of Alternative Operating Reserve Modeling in Wholesale Electricity Markets

Pricing and settlement mechanisms are crucial for efficient re-source allocation, investment incentives, market competition, and regulatory oversight. In the United States, Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) adopts a uniform pricing scheme that hinges on the marginal costs of supplying additional electricity. This study investigates the pricing and settlement impacts of alternative reserve constraint modeling, highlighting how even slight variations in the modeling of constraints can drastically alter market clearing prices, reserve quantities, and revenue outcomes. Focusing on the diverse market designs and assumptions in ancillary services by U.S. RTOs, particularly in relation to capacity sharing and reserve substitutions, the research examines four distinct models that combine these elements based on a large-scale synthetic power system test data. Our study provides a critical insight into the economic implications and the underlying factors of these alternative reserve constraints through market simulations and data analysis.

eess.SY↗

Stable beam operation of approximately 1 mA beam under highly efficient energy recovery conditions at compact energy-recovery linac

A compact energy-recovery linac (cERL) has been un-der construction at KEK since 2009 to develop key technologies for the energy-recovery linac. The cERL began operating in 2013 to create a high-current beam with a low-emittance beam with stable continuous wave (CW) superconducting cavities. Owing to the development of critical components, such as the DC gun, superconducting cavities, and the design of ideal beam transport optics, we have successfully established approximately 1 mA stable CW operation with a small beam emittance and extremely small beam loss. This study presents the details of our key technologies and experimental results for achieving 100% energy recovery operation with extremely small beam loss during a stable, approximately 1 mA CW beam operation.

physics.acc-ph↗

ECNet: Effective Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

The conditional text-to-image diffusion models have garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the precision of these models is often compromised mainly for two reasons, ambiguous condition input and inadequate condition guidance over single denoising loss. To address the challenges, we introduce two innovative solutions. Firstly, we propose a Spatial Guidance Injector (SGI) which enhances conditional detail by encoding text inputs with precise annotation information. This method directly tackles the issue of ambiguous control inputs by providing clear, annotated guidance to the model. Secondly, to overcome the issue of limited conditional supervision, we introduce Diffusion Consistency Loss (DCL), which applies supervision on the denoised latent code at any given time step. This encourages consistency between the latent code at each time step and the input signal, thereby enhancing the robustness and accuracy of the output. The combination of SGI and DCL results in our Effective Controllable Network (ECNet), which offers a more accurate controllable end-to-end text-to-image generation framework with a more precise conditioning input and stronger controllable supervision. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on generation under various conditions, such as human body skeletons, facial landmarks, and sketches of general objects. The results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the controllability and robustness of the generated images, outperforming existing state-of-the-art controllable text-to-image models.

cs.CV↗

Affective Behaviour Analysis via Integrating Multi-Modal Knowledge

Affective Behavior Analysis aims to facilitate technology emotionally smart, creating a world where devices can understand and react to our emotions as humans do. To comprehensively evaluate the authenticity and applicability of emotional behavior analysis techniques in natural environments, the 6th competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) utilizes the Aff-Wild2, Hume-Vidmimic2, and C-EXPR-DB datasets to set up five competitive tracks, i.e., Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (EXPR) Recognition, Action Unit (AU) Detection, Compound Expression (CE) Recognition, and Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation. In this paper, we present our method designs for the five tasks. Specifically, our design mainly includes three aspects: 1) Utilizing a transformer-based feature fusion module to fully integrate emotional information provided by audio signals, visual images, and transcripts, offering high-quality expression features for the downstream tasks. 2) To achieve high-quality facial feature representations, we employ Masked-Auto Encoder as the visual features extraction model and fine-tune it with our facial dataset. 3) Considering the complexity of the video collection scenes, we conduct a more detailed dataset division based on scene characteristics and train the classifier for each scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our designs.

cs.CV↗

Assessing Electricity Service Unfairness with Transfer Counterfactual Learning

Energy justice is a growing area of interest in interdisciplinary energy research. However, identifying systematic biases in the energy sector remains challenging due to confounding variables, intricate heterogeneity in counterfactual effects, and limited data availability. First, this paper demonstrates how one can evaluate counterfactual unfairness in a power system by analyzing the average causal effect of a specific protected attribute. Subsequently, we use subgroup analysis to handle model heterogeneity and introduce a novel method for estimating counterfactual unfairness based on transfer learning, which helps to alleviate the data scarcity in each subgroup. In our numerical analysis, we apply our method to a unique large-scale customer-level power outage data set and investigate the counterfactual effect of demographic factors, such as income and age of the population, on power outage durations. Our results indicate that low-income and elderly-populated areas consistently experience longer power outages under both daily and post-disaster operations, and such discrimination is exacerbated under severe conditions. These findings suggest a widespread, systematic issue of injustice in the power service systems and emphasize the necessity for focused interventions in disadvantaged communities.

cs.LG↗

A Semi-Analytical Approach for State-Space Electromagnetic Transient Simulation Using the Differential Transformation

Electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation is a crucial tool for power system dynamic analysis because of its detailed component modeling and high simulation accuracy. However, it suffers from computational burdens for large power grids since a tiny time step is typically required for accuracy. This paper proposes an efficient and accurate semi-analytical approach for state-space EMT simulations of power grids. It employs high-order semi-analytical solutions derived using the differential transformation from the state-space EMT grid model. The approach incorporates a proposed variable time step strategy based on equation imbalance, leveraging structural information of the grid model, to enlarge the time step and accelerate simulations, while high resolution is maintained by reconstructing detailed fast EMT dynamics through an efficient dense output mechanism. It also addresses limit-induced switches during large time steps by using a binary search-enhanced quadratic interpolation algorithm. Case studies are conducted on EMT models of the IEEE 39-bus system and a synthetic 390-bus system to demonstrate the merits of the new simulation approach against traditional methods.

eess.SY↗

Federated Battery Diagnosis and Prognosis

Battery diagnosis, prognosis and health management models play a critical role in the integration of battery systems in energy and mobility fields. However, large-scale deployment of these models is hindered by a myriad of challenges centered around data ownership, privacy, communication, and processing. State-of-the-art battery diagnosis and prognosis methods require centralized collection of data, which further aggravates these challenges. Here we propose a federated battery prognosis model, which distributes the processing of battery standard current-voltage-time-usage data in a privacy-preserving manner. Instead of exchanging raw standard current-voltage-time-usage data, our model communicates only the model parameters, thus reducing communication load and preserving data confidentiality. The proposed model offers a paradigm shift in battery health management through privacy-preserving distributed methods for battery data processing and remaining lifetime prediction.

cs.LG↗

Adaptive Distributionally Robust Planning for Renewable-Powered Fast Charging Stations Under Decision-Dependent EV Diffusion Uncertainty

When deploying fast charging stations (FCSs) to support long-distance trips of electric vehicles (EVs), there exist indirect network effects: while the gradual diffusion of EVs directly influences the timing and capacities of FCS allocation, the decisions for FCS allocations, in turn, impact the drivers' willingness to adopt EVs. This interplay, if neglected, can result in uncovered EVs and security issues on the grid side and even hinder the effective diffusion of EVs. In this paper, we explicitly incorporate this interdependence by quantifying EV adoption rates as decision-dependent uncertainties (DDUs) using decision-dependent ambiguity sets (DDASs). Then, a two-stage decision-dependent distributionally robust FCS planning (D$^3$R-FCSP) model is developed for adaptively deploying FCSs with on-site sources and expanding the coupled distribution network. A multi-period capacitated arc cover-path cover (MCACPC) model is incorporated to capture the EVs' recharging patterns to ensure the feasibility of FCS locations and capacities. To resolve the nonlinearity and nonconvexity, the D$^3$R-FCSP model is equivalently reformulated into a single-level mixed-integer linear programming by exploiting its strong duality and applying the McCormick envelope. Finally, case studies highlight the superior out-of-sample performances of our model in terms of security and cost-efficiency. Furthermore, the byproduct of accelerated EV adoption through an implicit positive feedback loop is highlighted.

eess.SY↗

Spatio-Temporal Wildfire Prediction using Multi-Modal Data

Due to severe societal and environmental impacts, wildfire prediction using multi-modal sensing data has become a highly sought-after data-analytical tool by various stakeholders (such as state governments and power utility companies) to achieve a more informed understanding of wildfire activities and plan preventive measures. A desirable algorithm should precisely predict fire risk and magnitude for a location in real time. In this paper, we develop a flexible spatio-temporal wildfire prediction framework using multi-modal time series data. We first predict the wildfire risk (the chance of a wildfire event) in real-time, considering the historical events using discrete mutually exciting point process models. Then we further develop a wildfire magnitude prediction set method based on the flexible distribution-free time-series conformal prediction (CP) approach. Theoretically, we prove a risk model parameter recovery guarantee, as well as coverage and set size guarantees for the CP sets. Through extensive real-data experiments with wildfire data in California, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, as well as their flexibility and scalability in large regions.

stat.AP↗

Multi-modal Facial Affective Analysis based on Masked Autoencoder

Human affective behavior analysis focuses on analyzing human expressions or other behaviors to enhance the understanding of human psychology. The CVPR 2023 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) is dedicated to providing high-quality and large-scale Aff-wild2 for the recognition of commonly used emotion representations, such as Action Units (AU), basic expression categories(EXPR), and Valence-Arousal (VA). The competition is committed to making significant strides in improving the accuracy and practicality of affective analysis research in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce our submission to the CVPR 2023: ABAW5. Our approach involves several key components. First, we utilize the visual information from a Masked Autoencoder(MAE) model that has been pre-trained on a large-scale face image dataset in a self-supervised manner. Next, we finetune the MAE encoder on the image frames from the Aff-wild2 for AU, EXPR and VA tasks, which can be regarded as a static and uni-modal training. Additionally, we leverage the multi-modal and temporal information from the videos and implement a transformer-based framework to fuse the multi-modal features. Our approach achieves impressive results in the ABAW5 competition, with an average F1 score of 55.49\% and 41.21\% in the AU and EXPR tracks, respectively, and an average CCC of 0.6372 in the VA track. Our approach ranks first in the EXPR and AU tracks, and second in the VA track. Extensive quantitative experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗