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Tobias von Arx

Publications and source records attributed to Tobias von Arx.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Shading-Aware Rooftop PV Placement

Rooftop photovoltaic (PV) design requires careful panel placement to make effective use of potentially limited roof space and available sunlight. Existing simplified roof models can miss objects and superstructures that shade panels. We simulate rooftop irradiance using hourly weather and a terrain horizon, computing shadows from nearby buildings, trees, and roof superstructures rendered from the Sun's viewpoint. Our method (i) infers existing panel layouts from imagery and estimates their yield, (ii) relocates these panels to improve the yield, and (iii) generates shading-aware layouts for new installations. We compare modeled yield with production records from 11 Swiss installations and evaluate new layouts in simulation on 19 additional rural roofs. Without knowledge of any electrical or system specifications, we obtain a median daily correlation with measured production of 0.982. Absolute energy estimates remain sensitive to system specifications. Comparing new layouts with equal panel counts, accounting for neighborhood and roof-detail shading changes the position or orientation of an average of 38.9\% of panels per roof. These layouts increase modeled annual yield by up to 7.91\% compared with layouts designed without accounting for neighborhood and roof-detail shadows. We publicly release our tool for modeling and designing rooftop PV installations with terrain, neighborhood, and roof-detail shading at https://github.com/tobiasvonarx/shading-aware-pv.

cs.CE↗

AutoBaxBuilder: Bootstrapping Code Security Benchmarking

As large language models (LLMs) see wide adoption in software engineering, the reliable assessment of the correctness and security of LLM-generated code is crucial. Notably, prior work showed that LLMs are prone to generating code with security vulnerabilities, highlighting that security is often overlooked. These insights were enabled by specialized benchmarks crafted by security experts through significant manual effort. However, benchmarks (i) inevitably end up contaminating training data, (ii) must extend to new tasks to provide a more complete picture, and (iii) must increase in difficulty to challenge more capable LLMs. In this work, we address these challenges and present AutoBaxBuilder, an automated pipeline that generates code security benchmarking tasks from scratch. It leverages the code-understanding capabilities of LLMs combined with robust reliability checks to construct functional tests and end-to-end security-probing exploits. The quality of the pipeline is quantitatively confirmed by aligning its predictions with an expert-written baseline and qualitatively validated through manual soundness verification. We use AutoBaxBuilder to construct a new benchmark and release it to the public as AutoBaxBench, together with a thorough evaluation on contemporary LLMs. AutoBaxBuilder generates new tasks in under 2 hours, for less than USD 4. Including a manual verification, this reduces the required human effort for benchmark construction by a factor of 12.

cs.CR↗

Memorization Dynamics of Fill-in-the-Middle Pretraining

Fill-in-the-middle (FIM) is a pretraining objective widely used to equip causal language models with infilling ability, yet its effect on verbatim memorization remains underexplored. We study the memorization dynamics of FIM in a controlled setting by pretraining matched Llama 3.2 models with FIM and standard left-to-right (LTR) objectives on a FineWeb-Gutenberg corpus containing repeated Gutenberg excerpts. With prefix-based probes, FIM more often recovers short or partially matching spans, while LTR more often assigns high confidence to long exact continuations. We observe that verbatim extraction under FIM-training grows approximately linearly with repetitions over the tested range. Evaluating native FIM-format probes reveals that suffix context is not sufficient: verbatim recall under FIM-training remains strongly anchored in prefix context. Our results also show that evaluating only one span length or probing format can miss important nuances in memorization behavior.

cs.CL↗