Paul Caron | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

From Benchmarks to Production: Transferring Time Series Anomaly Detection Methods for Electricity Production Monitoring

Accurate forecasting of electricity production is essential for maintaining the operational efficiency and strategic planning of energy utilities. In industrial settings, such forecasts are generated daily to ensure supply-demand balance and optimal management of production assets. However, the increasing complexity of modern power systems and data flows poses significant challenges for ensuring the reliability and consistency of these forecasts. This paper addresses the problem of anomaly detection in short-term production forecasts at EDF, formulated as identifying atypical intra-day patterns that may signal data quality issues or operational irregularities. We introduce TAMIS, a scalable and interpretable system that analyzes daily production time series to automatically detect anomalous days based on deviations from historical patterns learned from past data. Designed for human-in-the-loop workflows, TAMIS surfaces top-ranked anomalies through an automated daily newsletter, enabling efficient expert review and continuous monitoring. An extensive experimental evaluation on real-world industrial data demonstrates that TAMIS achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to baseline methods. To foster further research and reproducibility, we publicly release the anonymized application datasets used in our study.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

One Step at a Time: Pros and Cons of Multi-Step Meta-Gradient Reinforcement Learning

Self-tuning algorithms that adapt the learning process online encourage more effective and robust learning. Among all the methods available, meta-gradients have emerged as a promising approach. They leverage the differentiability of the learning rule with respect to some hyper-parameters to adapt them in an online fashion. Although meta-gradients can be accumulated over multiple learning steps to avoid myopic updates, this is rarely used in practice. In this work, we demonstrate that whilst multi-step meta-gradients do provide a better learning signal in expectation, this comes at the cost of a significant increase in variance, hindering performance. In the light of this analysis, we introduce a novel method mixing multiple inner steps that enjoys a more accurate and robust meta-gradient signal, essentially trading off bias and variance in meta-gradient estimation. When applied to the Snake game, the mixing meta-gradient algorithm can cut the variance by a factor of 3 while achieving similar or higher performance.

cs.LG↗