arXiv subjects

Wenli Du

Publications and source records attributed to Wenli Du.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Economic complexity at subnational level: A consistency analysis

Several network-based measures have been proposed to assess the economic complexity of countries. These measures have provided important insights into national economic development, and they are now widely applied at the subnational level as well. Here, we show that such applications lead to inconsistent results, in the sense that the estimated complexity of the same product appears to depend on methodological details such as the geographical scale of analysis. Building on these findings, we propose a measure of territorial economic complexity based on an exogenous and extensive computation. We show that these methodological choices yield estimates that are more consistent and more strongly aligned with standard economic indicators, such as GDP per capita and employment.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

From Text to Simulation: A Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Automated Chemical Process Design

Process simulation is a critical cornerstone of chemical engineering design. Current automated chemical design methodologies focus mainly on various representations of process flow diagrams. However, transforming these diagrams into executable simulation flowsheets remains a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor, requiring extensive manual parameter configuration within simulation software. In this work, we propose a novel multi-agent workflow that leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of large language models(LLMs) and enables iterative interactions with chemical process simulation software, achieving end-to-end automated simulation from textual process specifications to computationally validated software configurations for design enhancement. Our approach integrates four specialized agents responsible for task understanding, topology generation, parameter configuration, and evaluation analysis, respectively, coupled with Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search to accurately interpret semantics and robustly generate configurations. Evaluated on Simona, a large-scale process description dataset, our method achieves a 31.1% improvement in the simulation convergence rate compared to state-of-the-art baselines and reduces the design time by 89. 0% compared to the expert manual design. This work demonstrates the potential of AI-assisted chemical process design, which bridges the gap between conceptual design and practical implementation. Our workflow is applicable to diverse process-oriented industries, including pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, food processing, and manufacturing, offering a generalizable solution for automated process design.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A production planning benchmark for real-world refinery-petrochemical complexes

To achieve digital intelligence transformation and carbon neutrality, effective production planning is crucial for integrated refinery-petrochemical complexes. Modern refinery planning relies on advanced optimization techniques, whose development requires reproducible benchmark problems. However, existing benchmarks lack practical context or impose oversimplified assumptions, limiting their applicability to enterprise-wide optimization. To bridge the substantial gap between theoretical research and industrial applications, this paper introduces the first open-source, demand-driven benchmark for industrial-scale refinery-petrochemical complexes with transparent model formulations and comprehensive input parameters. The benchmark incorporates a novel port-stream hybrid superstructure for modular modeling and broad generalizability. Key secondary processing units are represented using the delta-base approach grounded in historical data. Three real-world cases have been constructed to encompass distinct scenario characteristics, respectively addressing (1) a stand-alone refinery without integer variables, (2) chemical site integration with inventory-related integer variables, and (3) multi-period planning. All model parameters are fully accessible. Additionally, this paper provides an analysis of computational performance, ablation experiments on delta-base modeling, and application scenarios for the proposed benchmark.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

A Risk-Averse Just-In-Time Scheme for Learning-Based Operation of Microgrids with Coupled Electricity-Hydrogen-Ammonia under Uncertainties

This paper proposes a Risk-Averse Just-In-Time (RAJIT) operation scheme for Ammonia-Hydrogen-based Micro-Grids (AHMGs) to boost electricity-hydrogen-ammonia coupling under uncertainties. First, an off-grid AHMG model is developed, featuring a novel multi-mode ammonia synthesis process and a hydrogen-ammonia dual gas turbine with tunable feed-in ratios. Subsequently, a state-behavior mapping strategy linking hydrogen storage levels with the operation modes of ammonia synthesis is established to prevent cost-ineffective shutdowns. The proposed model substantially improves operational flexibility but results in a challenging nonlinear fractional program. Based upon this model, a data-driven RAJIT scheme is developed for the real-time rolling optimization of AHMGs. Unlike conventional one-size-fits-all schemes using one optimization method throughout, the data driven RAJIT intelligently switches between cost-effective deterministic optimization and risk-averse online-learning distributionally robust optimization depending on actual risk profiles, thus capitalizing on the respective strengths of these two optimization methods. To facilitate the solution of the resulting nonlinear program, we develop an equivalent-reformulation-based solution methodology by leveraging a constraint-tightening technique. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme guarantees safety and yields an overall cost reduction up to 14.6% compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Mixed-Integer Control through Lifted Control Policy

This paper investigates the finite-horizon distributionally robust mixed-integer control (DRMIC) of uncertain linear systems. However, deriving an optimal causal feedback control policy to this DRMIC problem is computationally formidable for most ambiguity sets. To address the computational challenge, we propose a novel distributionally robust lifted control policy (DR-LCP) method to derive a high-quality approximate solution to this DRMIC problem for a rich class of Wasserstein metric-based ambiguity sets, including the Wasserstein ambiguity set and its variants. In theory, we analyze the asymptotic performance and establish a tight non-asymptotic bound of the proposed method. In numerical experiments, the proposed DR-LCP method empirically demonstrates superior performance compared with existing methods in the literature.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Adversarial Semantic Augmentation for Training Generative Adversarial Networks under Limited Data

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made remarkable achievements in synthesizing images in recent years. Typically, training GANs requires massive data, and the performance of GANs deteriorates significantly when training data is limited. To improve the synthesis performance of GANs in low-data regimes, existing approaches use various data augmentation techniques to enlarge the training sets. However, it is identified that these augmentation techniques may leak or even alter the data distribution. To remedy this, we propose an adversarial semantic augmentation (ASA) technique to enlarge the training data at the semantic level instead of the image level. Concretely, considering semantic features usually encode informative information of images, we estimate the covariance matrices of semantic features for both real and generated images to find meaningful transformation directions. Such directions translate original features to another semantic representation, e.g., changing the backgrounds or expressions of the human face dataset. Moreover, we derive an upper bound of the expected adversarial loss. By optimizing the upper bound, our semantic augmentation is implicitly achieved. Such design avoids redundant sampling of the augmented features and introduces negligible computation overhead, making our approach computation efficient. Extensive experiments on both few-shot and large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method consistently improve the synthesis quality under various data regimes, and further visualized and analytic results suggesting satisfactory versatility of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Differentiable Distributionally Robust Optimization Layers

In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in decision-focused learning, which embeds optimization problems as a layer in learning pipelines and demonstrates a superior performance than the prediction-focused approach. However, for distributionally robust optimization (DRO), a popular paradigm for decision-making under uncertainty, it is still unknown how to embed it as a layer, i.e., how to differentiate decisions with respect to an ambiguity set. In this paper, we develop such differentiable DRO layers for generic mixed-integer DRO problems with parameterized second-order conic ambiguity sets and discuss its extension to Wasserstein ambiguity sets. To differentiate the mixed-integer decisions, we propose a novel dual-view methodology by handling continuous and discrete parts of decisions via different principles. Specifically, we construct a differentiable energy-based surrogate to implement the dual-view methodology and use importance sampling to estimate its gradient. We further prove that such a surrogate enjoys the asymptotic convergency under regularization. As an application of the proposed differentiable DRO layers, we develop a novel decision-focused learning pipeline for contextual distributionally robust decision-making tasks and compare it with the prediction-focused approach in experiments.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Knowledge-Assisted Dual-Stage Evolutionary Optimization of Large-Scale Crude Oil Scheduling

With the scaling up of crude oil scheduling in modern refineries, large-scale crude oil scheduling problems (LSCOSPs) emerge with thousands of binary variables and non-linear constraints, which are challenging to be optimized by traditional optimization methods. To solve LSCOSPs, we take the practical crude oil scheduling from a marine-access refinery as an example and start with modeling LSCOSPs from crude unloading, transportation, crude distillation unit processing, and inventory management of intermediate products. On the basis of the proposed model, a dual-stage evolutionary algorithm driven by heuristic rules (denoted by DSEA/HR) is developed, where the dual-stage search mechanism consists of global search and local refinement. In the global search stage, we devise several heuristic rules based on the empirical operating knowledge to generate a well-performing initial population and accelerate convergence in the mixed variables space. In the local refinement stage, a repair strategy is proposed to move the infeasible solutions towards feasible regions by further optimizing the local continuous variables. During the whole evolutionary process, the proposed dual-stage framework plays a crucial role in balancing exploration and exploitation. Experimental results have shown that DSEA/HR outperforms the state-of-the-art and widely-used mathematical programming methods and metaheuristic algorithms on LSCOSP instances within a reasonable time.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Reinforcement Learning Based Gasoline Blending Optimization: Achieving More Efficient Nonlinear Online Blending of Fuels

The online optimization of gasoline blending benefits refinery economies. However, the nonlinear blending mechanism, the oil property fluctuations, and the blending model mismatch bring difficulties to the optimization. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a novel online optimization method based on deep reinforcement learning algorithm (DRL). The Markov decision process (MDP) expression are given considering a practical gasoline blending system. Then, the environment simulator of gasoline blending process is established based on the MDP expression and the one-year measurement data of a real-world refinery. The soft actor-critic (SAC) DRL algorithm is applied to improve the DRL agent policy by using the data obtained from the interaction between DRL agent and environment simulator. Compared with a traditional method, the proposed method has better economic performance. Meanwhile, it is more robust under property fluctuations and component oil switching. Furthermore, the proposed method maintains performance by automatically adapting to system drift.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2022

Accelerated Dual Averaging Methods for Decentralized Constrained Optimization

In this work, we study decentralized convex constrained optimization problems in networks. We focus on the dual averaging-based algorithmic framework that is well-documented to be superior in handling constraints and complex communication environments simultaneously. Two new decentralized dual averaging (DDA) algorithms are proposed. In the first one, a second-order dynamic average consensus protocol is tailored for DDA-type algorithms, which equips each agent with a provably more accurate estimate of the global dual variable than conventional schemes. We rigorously prove that the proposed algorithm attains $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ convergence for general convex and smooth problems, for which existing DDA methods were only known to converge at $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{t})$ prior to our work. In the second one, we use the extrapolation technique to accelerate the convergence of DDA. Compared to existing accelerated algorithms, where typically two different variables are exchanged among agents at each time, the proposed algorithm only seeks consensus on local gradients. Then, the extrapolation is performed based on two sequences of primal variables which are determined by the accumulations of gradients at two consecutive time instants, respectively. The algorithm is proved to converge at $\mathcal{O}(1)\left(\frac{1}{t^2}+\frac{1}{t(1-β)^2}\right)$, where $β$ denotes the second largest singular value of the mixing matrix. We remark that the condition for the algorithmic parameter to guarantee convergence does not rely on the spectrum of the mixing matrix, making itself easy to satisfy in practice. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Towards Fairness-Aware Multi-Objective Optimization

Recent years have seen the rapid development of fairness-aware machine learning in mitigating unfairness or discrimination in decision-making in a wide range of applications. However, much less attention has been paid to the fairness-aware multi-objective optimization, which is indeed commonly seen in real life, such as fair resource allocation problems and data driven multi-objective optimization problems. This paper aims to illuminate and broaden our understanding of multi-objective optimization from the perspective of fairness. To this end, we start with a discussion of user preferences in multi-objective optimization and then explore its relationship to fairness in machine learning and multi-objective optimization. Following the above discussions, representative cases of fairness-aware multiobjective optimization are presented, further elaborating the importance of fairness in traditional multi-objective optimization, data-driven optimization and federated optimization. Finally, challenges and opportunities in fairness-aware multi-objective optimization are addressed. We hope that this article makes a small step forward towards understanding fairness in the context of optimization and promote research interest in fairness-aware multi-objective optimization.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Perception and Navigation in Autonomous Systems in the Era of Learning: A Survey

Autonomous systems possess the features of inferring their own state, understanding their surroundings, and performing autonomous navigation. With the applications of learning systems, like deep learning and reinforcement learning, the visual-based self-state estimation, environment perception and navigation capabilities of autonomous systems have been efficiently addressed, and many new learning-based algorithms have surfaced with respect to autonomous visual perception and navigation. In this review, we focus on the applications of learning-based monocular approaches in ego-motion perception, environment perception and navigation in autonomous systems, which is different from previous reviews that discussed traditional methods. First, we delineate the shortcomings of existing classical visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) solutions, which demonstrate the necessity to integrate deep learning techniques. Second, we review the visual-based environmental perception and understanding methods based on deep learning, including deep learning-based monocular depth estimation, monocular ego-motion prediction, image enhancement, object detection, semantic segmentation, and their combinations with traditional vSLAM frameworks. Then, we focus on the visual navigation based on learning systems, mainly including reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning. Finally, we examine several challenges and promising directions discussed and concluded in related research of learning systems in the era of computer science and robotics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Ternary Compression for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning

Learning over massive data stored in different locations is essential in many real-world applications. However, sharing data is full of challenges due to the increasing demands of privacy and security with the growing use of smart mobile devices and IoT devices. Federated learning provides a potential solution to privacy-preserving and secure machine learning, by means of jointly training a global model without uploading data distributed on multiple devices to a central server. However, most existing work on federated learning adopts machine learning models with full-precision weights, and almost all these models contain a large number of redundant parameters that do not need to be transmitted to the server, consuming an excessive amount of communication costs. To address this issue, we propose a federated trained ternary quantization (FTTQ) algorithm, which optimizes the quantized networks on the clients through a self-learning quantization factor. Theoretical proofs of the convergence of quantization factors, unbiasedness of FTTQ, as well as a reduced weight divergence are given. On the basis of FTTQ, we propose a ternary federated averaging protocol (T-FedAvg) to reduce the upstream and downstream communication of federated learning systems. Empirical experiments are conducted to train widely used deep learning models on publicly available datasets, and our results demonstrate that the proposed T-FedAvg is effective in reducing communication costs and can even achieve slightly better performance on non-IID data in contrast to the canonical federated learning algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A Federated Data-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm for Expensive Multi/Many-objective Optimization

Data-driven optimization has found many successful applications in the real world and received increased attention in the field of evolutionary optimization. Most existing algorithms assume that the data used for optimization is always available on a central server for construction of surrogates. This assumption, however, may fail to hold when the data must be collected in a distributed way and is subject to privacy restrictions. This paper aims to propose a federated data-driven evolutionary multi-/many-objective optimization algorithm. To this end, we leverage federated learning for surrogate construction so that multiple clients collaboratively train a radial-basis-function-network as the global surrogate. Then a new federated acquisition function is proposed for the central server to approximate the objective values using the global surrogate and estimate the uncertainty level of the approximated objective values based on the local models. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified on a series of multi/many-objective benchmark problems by comparing it with two state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2021

A Federated Data-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm

Data-driven evolutionary optimization has witnessed great success in solving complex real-world optimization problems. However, existing data-driven optimization algorithms require that all data are centrally stored, which is not always practical and may be vulnerable to privacy leakage and security threats if the data must be collected from different devices. To address the above issue, this paper proposes a federated data-driven evolutionary optimization framework that is able to perform data driven optimization when the data is distributed on multiple devices. On the basis of federated learning, a sorted model aggregation method is developed for aggregating local surrogates based on radial-basis-function networks. In addition, a federated surrogate management strategy is suggested by designing an acquisition function that takes into account the information of both the global and local surrogate models. Empirical studies on a set of widely used benchmark functions in the presence of various data distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

cs.NE↗