Xinghao Huang

Xinghao Huang, Shengyu Tao, Chen Liang et al.

Retired electric vehicle batteries offer immense potential to support low-carbon energy systems, but uncertainties in their degradation behavior and data inaccessibilities under second-life use pose major barriers to safe and scalable deployment. This work proposes a Physics-Informed Mixture of Experts (PIMOE) network that computes battery degradation trajectories using partial, field-accessible signals in a single cycle. PIMOE leverages an adaptive multi-degradation prediction module to classify degradation modes using expert weight synthesis underpinned by capacity-voltage and relaxation data, producing latent degradation trend embeddings. These are input to a use-dependent recurrent network for long-term trajectory prediction. Validated on 207 batteries across 77 use conditions and 67,902 cycles, PIMOE achieves an average mean absolute percentage (MAPE) errors of 0.88% with a 0.43 ms inference time. Compared to the state-of-the-art Informer and PatchTST, it reduces computational time and MAPE by 50%, respectively. Compatible with random state of charge region sampling, PIMOE supports 150-cycle forecasts with 1.50% average and 6.26% maximum MAPE, and operates effectively even with pruned 5MB training data. Broadly, PIMOE framework offers a deployable, history-free solution for battery degradation trajectory computation, redefining how second-life energy storage systems are assessed, optimized, and integrated into the sustainable energy landscape.

Junlin Wang, Zehao Wu, Shaowei Lu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to access external knowledge sources, but the effectiveness of RAG relies on the coordination between the retriever and the generator. Since these components are developed independently, their interaction is often suboptimal: the retriever may return irrelevant or redundant documents, while the generator may fail to fully leverage retrieved evidence. In this work, we propose a process-supervised multi-agent framework to bridge the gap between retriever and generator. The framework introduces two lightweight agents: a Decision Maker, which determines when to continue retrieval or stop for answer generation, and a Knowledge Selector, which filters retrieved documents to retain only the most useful evidence. To provide fine-grained supervision, we employ an LLM-as-a-Judge that evaluates each intermediate action with process-level rewards, ensuring more accurate credit assignment than relying solely on final answer correctness. We further adopt a tree-structured rollout strategy to explore diverse reasoning paths, and train both agents with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on single-hop and multi-hop question answering benchmarks show that our approach achieves higher accuracy, more stable convergence, and produces more interpretable reasoning trajectories compared with standard RAG baselines. Importantly, the proposed framework is modular and plug-and-play, requiring no modification to the retriever or generator, making it practical for real-world RAG applications.