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Xinyu Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Xinyu Feng.

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Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Power Systems Education Using a Hands-On Executable Framework

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly central to power and energy systems, supporting modeling, forecasting, optimization, and control. Yet most existing works emphasize specialized applications and offer little reusable material for newcomers or interdisciplinary learners, who increasingly rely on large language models rather than building their own. This gap points to a need for engineering-grounded AI (EGAI), in which AI workflows follow established engineering and power-system domain rules rather than acting as task-agnostic black boxes. Motivated by a community survey of researchers and practitioners, which shows 92% report at least one barrier before running an AI model and 94% want a power-specific hands-on course. This paper presents a framework consisting of open, executable module library that lowers the entry barrier for AI in power systems. The modules follow a progressive difficulty ladder that maps core AI concepts onto representative power-system tasks: (i) foundational deep neural network (DNN) templates for function approximation and load-curve fitting; (ii) a domain-coupled convolutional neural network (CNN) power-flow surrogate for a 5-bus system; and (iii) frontier modules on DNN-assisted optimization, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for battery storage control, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the swing equation. All modules are released as Jupyter notebooks that run locally or on Google Colab and are delivered through an IEEE online course and IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) webinar series. The webinar drew more than 590 live attendees, which is among the ten most-attended IEEE PES webinars, and over 344 repository visits within two weeks, reinforcing the survey-based motivation.

eess.SY

Topology-Aware Propagation-Based Assessment of Extreme-Weather Impacts on Distribution System Resilience

Extreme weather events and the increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) introduce growing uncertainty and resilience challenges for distribution systems. Unlike conventional deterministic contingencies, weather-driven disruptions exhibit probabilistic and spatial-temporal characteristics, where outage consequences depend on both geographic exposure and feeder topology. Existing approaches commonly focus on deterministic outage analysis, while topology-aware operational impact assessment under forecast uncertainty remains limited. This paper proposes an event-conditioned uncertainty modeling and topology-aware impact propagation framework for distribution systems under torrential rain events. The proposed framework integrates probabilistic event-track modeling, branch-level fault screening, downstream impact propagation analysis, and operational impact assessment within a unified workflow. Finally, case studies on the IEEE 33-bus distribution feeder demonstrate that the proposed framework can distinguish geographic exposure from topology-dependent operational impacts and support progressive early-warning impact assessment under uncertain scenarios. Furthermore, the impact zones are visualized on the CURENT Large-scale Testbed (LTB)-AGVis platform.

eess.SY

Do AI Agents Know When a Task Is Simple? Toward Complexity-Aware Reasoning and Execution

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate multi-step engineering and informatics workflows, yet they rarely ask how much effort a task actually requires. They often follow a maximum-context-first strategy--re-reading files and dependencies they have already seen--turning a one-line edit into a small code-base audit. We argue the missing capability is task-aware execution-scope estimation: judging a task's difficulty, the information it truly needs, and the shortest reliable path before committing budget. We formalize minimum-sufficient execution and the Agent Cognitive Redundancy Ratio (ACRR), and propose E3 (Estimate, Execute, Expand): the agent estimates an initial operating point, executes a minimum viable path, and expands scope only when verification fails. On MSE-Bench--a deterministic benchmark of 121 edits in a capability-controlled simulator--E3 matches the strongest baseline's 100% success while cutting cost by 85%, tokens by 91%, and inspected files by 92%, and further beats a strong adaptive retrieval baseline by 16%; the gains survive held-out instruction wording and essentially every cost weighting. A companion real-model harness (LLM-Case) corroborates the effect on a live gpt-4o agent editing a real open-source library, with every candidate patch graded by actually running the project's real pytest suite against a measured oracle: the over-reading is milder but real, and E3 is the leanest and fastest policy at comparable task success--its one shortfall a provider rate-limit, not a wrong edit. We frame this as a controlled probe of execution redundancy, not a measurement of any deployed agent, and position task-aware execution as a step toward engineering-grounded AI (EGAI)--agents whose effort is anchored in the engineering reality of the task. We release the framework and benchmark.

cs.AI

OTFS-IM-Assisted Non-Terrestrial Networks Relying on Autoencoder-Aided Soft-Decision Detection

Orthogonal Time Frequency Space ({OTFS}) modulation offers significant advantages over Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing ({OFDM}), particularly in high speed environments. Hence, we consider {OTFS} transmission over high-Doppler Non-Terrestrial Networks ({NTN}). However, OTFS-based systems inherit some deficiencies from {OFDM}, such as its high peak to average power ratio, the bandwidth efficiency loss due to the cyclic prefix, and the sensitivity to the carrier frequency offset. Against this background, we harness both Multi-Band Discrete Fourier Transform-based Spreading (MB-DFT-S) and Index Modulation ({IM}) in our {OTFS} system, termed as MB-DFT-S-OTFS-IM. More explicitly, 1) DFT-S has been shown to reduce the {PAPR}; 2) {IM} is capable of improving the throughput by harnessing it in the Delay and Doppler ({DD}) domain; and 3) MB-DFT-S-OTFS-IM provides frequency diversity gain, which benefits the tolerance to carrier frequency offset. Furthermore, we propose a {PAPR} reduction method based on a Deep Learning ({DL}) Autoencoder ({AE}) architecture for both hard- and soft-decision detection, where the encoder is specifically trained for minimizing {PAPR} and the decoder is conceived for accurately reconstructing the transmitted signal. Finally, we extend the proposed {AE}-aided {OTFS-IM} scheme constructed for a practical {NTN} channel model, representing a variety of satellite-to-ground schemes.

eess.SP

MedPriv-Bench: Benchmarking the Privacy-Utility Trade-off of Large Language Models in Medical Open-Ended Question Answering

Recent advances in Retrieval-Augmented Generation enable LLMs to ground outputs in clinical evidence, but connections to external databases create the risk of contextual leakage, where unique combinations of medical details enable patient re-identification without explicit identifiers. Existing healthcare benchmarks emphasize accuracy while overlooking this risk. To fill this gap, we present MedPriv-Bench, the first benchmark for jointly evaluating privacy preservation and clinical utility in medical open-ended question answering. Our framework utilizes a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop pipeline to synthesize sensitive medical contexts and clinically relevant queries that create realistic privacy pressure. We also establish an automated evaluation protocol using a fine-tuned RoBERTa-NLI model, which achieved an instance-level F1 score of 75.3%, sensitivity of 90.7%, and an average inference time of 0.056 s per sample against human annotations. Across nine LLMs and three privacy-preserving methods, we observed a pervasive privacy-utility trade-off. Relative to unprotected Med42-v2-8B (utility 3.87/5; leakage 72.8%), supervised fine-tuning improved utility to 4.25 and reduced leakage to 38.9%, whereas local differential privacy reduced leakage to 20.5% but lowered utility to 3.03. These results demonstrate the need for domain-specific benchmarks to validate medical AI systems in privacy-sensitive settings.

cs.CL

AdaSPEC: Selective Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Speculative Decoders

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a small draft model to generate predictions, which are then verified by a larger target model. The effectiveness of SD hinges on the alignment between these models, which is typically enhanced by Knowledge Distillation (KD). However, conventional KD methods aim to minimize the KL divergence between the draft and target models across all tokens, a goal that is misaligned with the true objective of SD, which is to maximize token acceptance rate. Therefore, draft models often struggle to fully assimilate the target model's knowledge due to capacity constraints, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose AdaSPEC, a novel method that incorporates selective token filtering into the KD process. AdaSPEC utilizes a reference model to identify and filter out difficult-to-fit tokens, enabling the distillation of a draft model that better aligns with the target model on simpler tokens. This approach improves the overall token acceptance rate without compromising generation quality. We evaluate AdaSPEC across diverse tasks, including arithmetic reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and summarization, using model configurations of 31M/1.4B and 350M/2.7B parameters. Our results demonstrate that AdaSPEC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art DistillSpec method, achieving higher acceptance rates across all tasks (up to 15\%). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuezhouhu/adaspec.

cs.CL

PsyLite Technical Report

With the rapid development of digital technology, AI-driven psychological counseling has gradually become an important research direction in the field of mental health. However, existing models still have deficiencies in dialogue safety, detailed scenario handling, and lightweight deployment. To address these issues, this study proposes PsyLite, a lightweight psychological counseling large language model agent developed based on the base model InternLM2.5-7B-chat. Through a two-stage training strategy (hybrid distillation data fine-tuning and ORPO preference optimization), PsyLite enhances the model's deep-reasoning ability, psychological counseling ability, and safe dialogue ability. After deployment using Ollama and Open WebUI, a custom workflow is created with Pipelines. An innovative conditional RAG is designed to introduce crosstalk humor elements at appropriate times during psychological counseling to enhance user experience and decline dangerous requests to strengthen dialogue safety. Evaluations show that PsyLite outperforms the baseline models in the Chinese general evaluation (CEval), psychological counseling professional evaluation (CPsyCounE), and dialogue safety evaluation (SafeDialBench), particularly in psychological counseling professionalism (CPsyCounE score improvement of 47.6\%) and dialogue safety (\safe{} score improvement of 2.4\%). Additionally, the model uses quantization technology (GGUF q4\_k\_m) to achieve low hardware deployment (5GB memory is sufficient for operation), providing a feasible solution for psychological counseling applications in resource-constrained environments.

cs.AI

Communication Efficient Multiparty Private Set Intersection from Multi-Point Sequential OPRF

Multiparty private set intersection (MPSI) allows multiple participants to compute the intersection of their locally owned data sets without revealing them. MPSI protocols can be categorized based on the network topology of nodes, with the star, mesh, and ring topologies being the primary types, respectively. Given that star and mesh topologies dominate current implementations, most existing MPSI protocols are based on these two topologies. However, star-topology MPSI protocols suffer from high leader node load, while mesh topology protocols suffer from high communication complexity and overhead. In this paper, we first propose a multi-point sequential oblivious pseudorandom function (MP-SOPRF) in a multi-party setting. Based on MP-SOPRF, we then develop an MPSI protocol with a ring topology, addressing the challenges of communication and computational overhead in existing protocols. We prove that our MPSI protocol is semi-honest secure under the Hamming correlation robustness assumption. Our experiments demonstrate that our MPSI protocol outperforms state-of-the-art protocols, achieving a reduction of 74.8% in communication and a 6% to 287% improvement in computational efficiency.

cs.CR

Graph Neural Network Aided Detection for the Multi-User Multi-Dimensional Index Modulated Uplink

The concept of Compressed Sensing-aided Space-Frequency Index Modulation (CS-SFIM) is conceived for the Large-Scale Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Uplink (LS-MU-MIMO-UL) of Next-Generation (NG) networks. Explicitly, in CS-SFIM, the information bits are mapped to both spatial- and frequency-domain indices, where we treat the activation patterns of the transmit antennas and of the subcarriers separately. Serving a large number of users in an MU-MIMO-UL system leads to substantial Multi-User Interference (MUI). Hence, we design the Space-Frequency (SF) domain matrix as a joint factor graph, where the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) and Expectation Propagation (EP) based MU detectors can be utilized. In the LS-MU-MIMO-UL scenario considered, the proposed system uses optimal Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detectors as benchmarks for comparison with the proposed MP-based detectors. These MP-based detectors significantly reduce the detection complexity compared to ML detection, making the design eminently suitable for LS-MU scenarios. To further reduce the detection complexity and improve the detection performance, we propose a pair of Graph Neural Network (GNN) based detectors, which rely on the orthogonal AMP (OAMP) and on the EP algorithm, which we refer to as the GNN-AMP and GEPNet detectors, respectively. The GEPNet detector maximizes the detection performance, while the GNN-AMP detector strikes a performance versus complexity trade-off. The GNN is trained for a single system configuration and yet it can be used for any number of users in the system. The simulation results show that the GNN-based detector approaches the ML performance in various configurations.

eess.SP

LLMs Can Generate a Better Answer by Aggregating Their Own Responses

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across tasks, yet they often require additional prompting techniques when facing complex problems. While approaches like self-correction and response selection have emerged as popular solutions, recent studies have shown these methods perform poorly when relying on the LLM itself to provide feedback or selection criteria. We argue this limitation stems from the fact that common LLM post-training procedures lack explicit supervision for discriminative judgment tasks. In this paper, we propose Generative Self-Aggregation (GSA), a novel prompting method that improves answer quality without requiring the model's discriminative capabilities. GSA first samples multiple diverse responses from the LLM, then aggregates them to obtain an improved solution. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require the LLM to correct errors or compare response quality; instead, it leverages the model's generative abilities to synthesize a new response based on the context of multiple samples. While GSA shares similarities with the self-consistency (SC) approach for response aggregation, SC requires specific verifiable tokens to enable majority voting. In contrast, our approach is more general and can be applied to open-ended tasks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that GSA effectively improves response quality across various tasks, including mathematical reasoning, knowledge-based problems, and open-ended generation tasks such as code synthesis and conversational responses.

cs.CL

Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) utilizes multimodal data to infer the users' sentiment. Previous methods focus on equally treating the contribution of each modality or statically using text as the dominant modality to conduct interaction, which neglects the situation where each modality may become dominant. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework (KuDA) for multimodal sentiment analysis. KuDA uses sentiment knowledge to guide the model dynamically selecting the dominant modality and adjusting the contributions of each modality. In addition, with the obtained multimodal representation, the model can further highlight the contribution of dominant modality through the correlation evaluation loss. Extensive experiments on four MSA benchmark datasets indicate that KuDA achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to adapt to different scenarios of dominant modality.

cs.CL

Good Examples Make A Faster Learner: Simple Demonstration-based Learning for Low-resource NER

Recent advances in prompt-based learning have shown strong results on few-shot text classification by using cloze-style templates. Similar attempts have been made on named entity recognition (NER) which manually design templates to predict entity types for every text span in a sentence. However, such methods may suffer from error propagation induced by entity span detection, high cost due to enumeration of all possible text spans, and omission of inter-dependencies among token labels in a sentence. Here we present a simple demonstration-based learning method for NER, which lets the input be prefaced by task demonstrations for in-context learning. We perform a systematic study on demonstration strategy regarding what to include (entity examples, with or without surrounding context), how to select the examples, and what templates to use. Results on in-domain learning and domain adaptation show that the model's performance in low-resource settings can be largely improved with a suitable demonstration strategy (e.g., a 4-17% improvement on 25 train instances). We also find that good demonstration can save many labeled examples and consistency in demonstration contributes to better performance.

cs.CL

EFMVFL: An Efficient and Flexible Multi-party Vertical Federated Learning without a Third Party

Federated learning allows multiple participants to conduct joint modeling without disclosing their local data. Vertical federated learning (VFL) handles the situation where participants share the same ID space and different feature spaces. In most VFL frameworks, to protect the security and privacy of the participants' local data, a third party is needed to generate homomorphic encryption key pairs and perform decryption operations. In this way, the third party is granted the right to decrypt information related to model parameters. However, it isn't easy to find such a credible entity in the real world. Existing methods for solving this problem are either communication-intensive or unsuitable for multi-party scenarios. By combining secret sharing and homomorphic encryption, we propose a novel VFL framework without a third party called EFMVFL, which supports flexible expansion to multiple participants with low communication overhead and is applicable to generalized linear models. We give instantiations of our framework under logistic regression and Poisson regression. Theoretical analysis and experiments show that our framework is secure, more efficient, and easy to be extended to multiple participants.

cs.LG