Albert Y. S. Lam

Albert Y. S. Lam, Baosen Zhang, David Tse · stanford

Optimal power flow (OPF) is an important problem for power generation and it is in general non-convex. With the employment of renewable energy, it will be desirable if OPF can be solved very efficiently so its solution can be used in real time. With some special network structure, e.g. trees, the problem has been shown to have a zero duality gap and the convex dual problem yields the optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a primal and a dual algorithm to coordinate the smaller subproblems decomposed from the convexified OPF. We can arrange the subproblems to be solved sequentially and cumulatively in a central node or solved in parallel in distributed nodes. We test the algorithms on IEEE radial distribution test feeders, some random tree-structured networks, and the IEEE transmission system benchmarks. Simulation results show that the computation time can be improved dramatically with our algorithms over the centralized approach of solving the problem without decomposition, especially in tree-structured problems. The computation time grows linearly with the problem size with the cumulative approach while the distributed one can have size-independent computation time.

Baosen Zhang, Albert Y. S. Lam, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia et al. · stanford

This paper addresses the problem of voltage regulation in power distribution networks with deep-penetration of distributed energy resources, e.g., renewable-based generation, and storage-capable loads such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. We cast the problem as an optimization program, where the objective is to minimize the losses in the network subject to constraints on bus voltage magnitudes, limits on active and reactive power injections, transmission line thermal limits and losses. We provide sufficient conditions under which the optimization problem can be solved via its convex relaxation. Using data from existing networks, we show that these sufficient conditions are expected to be satisfied by most networks. We also provide an efficient distributed algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm adheres to a communication topology described by a graph that is the same as the graph that describes the electrical network topology. We illustrate the operation of the algorithm, including its robustness against communication link failures, through several case studies involving 5-, 34-, and 123-bus power distribution systems.

Haode Zhang, Haowen Liang, Yuwei Zhang et al.

It is challenging to train a good intent classifier for a task-oriented dialogue system with only a few annotations. Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning pre-trained language models with a small amount of labeled utterances from public benchmarks in a supervised manner is extremely helpful. However, we find that supervised pre-training yields an anisotropic feature space, which may suppress the expressive power of the semantic representations. Inspired by recent research in isotropization, we propose to improve supervised pre-training by regularizing the feature space towards isotropy. We propose two regularizers based on contrastive learning and correlation matrix respectively, and demonstrate their effectiveness through extensive experiments. Our main finding is that it is promising to regularize supervised pre-training with isotropization to further improve the performance of few-shot intent detection. The source code can be found at https://github.com/fanolabs/isoIntentBert-main.

Yuwei Zhang, Haode Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan et al.

New intent discovery aims to uncover novel intent categories from user utterances to expand the set of supported intent classes. It is a critical task for the development and service expansion of a practical dialogue system. Despite its importance, this problem remains under-explored in the literature. Existing approaches typically rely on a large amount of labeled utterances and employ pseudo-labeling methods for representation learning and clustering, which are label-intensive, inefficient, and inaccurate. In this paper, we provide new solutions to two important research questions for new intent discovery: (1) how to learn semantic utterance representations and (2) how to better cluster utterances. Particularly, we first propose a multi-task pre-training strategy to leverage rich unlabeled data along with external labeled data for representation learning. Then, we design a new contrastive loss to exploit self-supervisory signals in unlabeled data for clustering. Extensive experiments on three intent recognition benchmarks demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in both unsupervised and semi-supervised scenarios. The source code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-yu-wei/MTP-CLNN.

Haode Zhang, Haowen Liang, Liming Zhan et al.

We consider the task of few-shot intent detection, which involves training a deep learning model to classify utterances based on their underlying intents using only a small amount of labeled data. The current approach to address this problem is through continual pre-training, i.e., fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) on external resources (e.g., conversational corpora, public intent detection datasets, or natural language understanding datasets) before using them as utterance encoders for training an intent classifier. In this paper, we show that continual pre-training may not be essential, since the overfitting problem of PLMs on this task may not be as serious as expected. Specifically, we find that directly fine-tuning PLMs on only a handful of labeled examples already yields decent results compared to methods that employ continual pre-training, and the performance gap diminishes rapidly as the number of labeled data increases. To maximize the utilization of the limited available data, we propose a context augmentation method and leverage sequential self-distillation to boost performance. Comprehensive experiments on real-world benchmarks show that given only two or more labeled samples per class, direct fine-tuning outperforms many strong baselines that utilize external data sources for continual pre-training. The code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/DFTPlus.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, David J. Hill et al.

Transient stability assessment is a critical tool for power system design and operation. With the emerging advanced synchrophasor measurement techniques, machine learning methods are playing an increasingly important role in power system stability assessment. However, most existing research makes a strong assumption that the measurement data transmission delay is negligible. In this paper, we focus on investigating the influence of communication delay on synchrophasor-based transient stability assessment. In particular, we develop a delay aware intelligent system to address this issue. By utilizing an ensemble of multiple long short-term memory networks, the proposed system can make early assessments to achieve a much shorter response time by utilizing incomplete system variable measurements. Compared with existing work, our system is able to make accurate assessments with a significantly improved efficiency. We perform numerous case studies to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed intelligent system, in which accurate assessments can be developed with time one third less than state-of-the-art methodologies. Moreover, the simulations indicate that noise in the measurements has trivial impact on the assessment performance, demonstrating the robustness of the proposed system.

Albert Y. S. Lam, James J. Q. Yu, Yunhe Hou et al.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will revolutionarize ground transport and take a substantial role in the future transportation system. Most AVs are likely to be electric vehicles (EVs) and they can participate in the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system to support various V2G services. Although it is generally infeasible for EVs to dictate their routes, we can design AV travel plans to fulfill certain system-wide objectives. In this paper, we focus on the AVs looking for parking and study how they can be led to appropriate parking facilities to support V2G services. We formulate the Coordinated Parking Problem (CPP), which can be solved by a standard integer linear program solver but requires long computational time. To make it more practical, we develop a distributed algorithm to address CPP based on dual decomposition. We carry out a series of simulations to evaluate the proposed solution methods. Our results show that the distributed algorithm can produce nearly optimal solutions with substantially less computational time. A coarser time scale can improve computational time but degrade the solution quality resulting in possible infeasible solution. Even with communication loss, the distributed algorithm can still perform well and converge with only little degradation in speed.

Albert Y. S. Lam, Ka-Cheong Leung, Victor O. K. Li

The smart grid spawns many innovative ideas, but many of them cannot be easily integrated into the existing power system due to power system constraints, such as the lack of capacity to transport renewable energy in remote areas to the urban centers. An energy delivery system can be built upon the traffic network and electric vehicles (EVs) utilized as energy carriers to transport energy over a large geographical region. A generalized architecture called the vehicular energy network (VEN) is constructed and a mathematically tractable framework is developed. Dynamic wireless (dis)charging allows electric energy, as an energy packet, to be added and subtracted from EV batteries seamlessly. With proper routing, energy can be transported from the sources to destinations through EVs along appropriate vehicular routes. This paper gives a preliminary study of VEN. Models are developed to study its operational and economic feasibilities with real traffic data in the United Kingdom. Our study shows that a substantial amount of renewable energy can be transported from some remote wind farms to London under some reasonable settings and VEN is likely to be profitable in the near future. VEN can complement the power network and enhance its power delivery capability.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, David J. Hill et al.

Wide area measurement system (WAMS) is one of the essential components in the future power system. To make WAMS construction plans, practical models of the power network observability, reliability, and underlying communication infrastructures need to be considered. To address this challenging problem, in this paper we propose a unified framework for WAMS planning to cover most realistic concerns in the construction process. The framework jointly optimizes the system construction cost, measurement reliability, and volume of synchrophasor data traffic resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem, which provides multiple Pareto optimal solutions to suit different requirements by the utilities. The framework is verified on two IEEE test systems. The simulation results demonstrate the trade-off relationships among the proposed objectives. Moreover, the proposed framework can develop optimal WAMS plans for full observability with minimal cost. This work develops a comprehensive framework for most practical WAMS construction designs.

James J. Q. Yu, Junhao Lin, Albert Y. S. Lam et al.

Due to the increasing concern for greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel security, electric vehicles (EVs) have attracted much attention in recent years. EVs can aggregate together constituting the vehicle-to-grid system. Coordination of EVs is beneficial to the power system in many ways. In this paper, we formulate a novel large-scale EV charging problem with energy trading in order to maximize the aggregator profit. This problem is non-convex and can be solved with a centralized iterative approach. To overcome the computation complexity issue brought by the non-convexity, we develop a distributed optimization-based heuristic. To evaluate our proposed approach, a modified IEEE 118 bus testing system is employed with 10 aggregators serving 30 000 EVs. The simulation results indicate that our proposed distributed heuristic with energy trading can effectively increase the total profit of aggregators. In addition, the proposed distributed optimization-based heuristic strategy can achieve near-optimal performance.

Yujie Feng, Bo Liu, Xiaoyu Dong et al.

An ideal dialogue system requires continuous skill acquisition and adaptation to new tasks while retaining prior knowledge. Dialogue State Tracking (DST), vital in these systems, often involves learning new services and confronting catastrophic forgetting, along with a critical capability loss termed the "Value Selection Quandary." To address these challenges, we introduce the Reason-of-Select (RoS) distillation method by enhancing smaller models with a novel 'meta-reasoning' capability. Meta-reasoning employs an enhanced multi-domain perspective, combining fragments of meta-knowledge from domain-specific dialogues during continual learning. This transcends traditional single-perspective reasoning. The domain bootstrapping process enhances the model's ability to dissect intricate dialogues from multiple possible values. Its domain-agnostic property aligns data distribution across different domains, effectively mitigating forgetting. Additionally, two novel improvements, "multi-value resolution" strategy and Semantic Contrastive Reasoning Selection method, significantly enhance RoS by generating DST-specific selection chains and mitigating hallucinations in teachers' reasoning, ensuring effective and reliable knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments validate the exceptional performance and robust generalization capabilities of our method. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

Bo Liu, Liming Zhan, Yujie Feng et al.

In the realm of task-oriented dialogue systems, a robust intent detection mechanism must effectively handle malformed utterances encountered in real-world scenarios. This study presents a novel fine-tuning framework for large language models (LLMs) aimed at enhancing in-distribution (ID) intent classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection, which utilizes semantic matching with prototypes derived from ID class names. By harnessing the highly distinguishable representations of LLMs, we construct semantic prototypes for each ID class using a diversity-grounded prompt tuning approach. We rigorously test our framework in a challenging OOD context, where ID and OOD classes are semantically close yet distinct, referred to as \emph{near} OOD detection. For a thorough assessment, we benchmark our method against the prevalent fine-tuning approaches. The experimental findings reveal that our method demonstrates superior performance in both few-shot ID intent classification and near-OOD intent detection tasks.

Haode Zhang, Albert Y. S. Lam, Xiao-Ming Wu

Recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of training efficient intent detectors based on pre-trained language model~(PLM) with limited labeled data. However, deploying these detectors in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices poses challenges due to their large sizes. In this work, we aim to address this issue by exploring techniques to minimize the size of PLM-based intent detectors trained with few-shot data. Specifically, we utilize large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation, employ a cutting-edge model compression method for knowledge distillation, and devise a vocabulary pruning mechanism called V-Prune. Through these approaches, we successfully achieve a compression ratio of 21 in model memory usage, including both Transformer and the vocabulary, while maintaining almost identical performance levels on four real-world benchmarks.

Haode Zhang, Yuwei Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan et al.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model -- IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.

Li-Ming Zhan, Haowen Liang, Bo Liu et al.

Out-of-scope intent detection is of practical importance in task-oriented dialogue systems. Since the distribution of outlier utterances is arbitrary and unknown in the training stage, existing methods commonly rely on strong assumptions on data distribution such as mixture of Gaussians to make inference, resulting in either complex multi-step training procedures or hand-crafted rules such as confidence threshold selection for outlier detection. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to train an out-of-scope intent classifier in a fully end-to-end manner by simulating the test scenario in training, which requires no assumption on data distribution and no additional post-processing or threshold setting. Specifically, we construct a set of pseudo outliers in the training stage, by generating synthetic outliers using inliner features via self-supervision and sampling out-of-scope sentences from easily available open-domain datasets. The pseudo outliers are used to train a discriminative classifier that can be directly applied to and generalize well on the test task. We evaluate our method extensively on four benchmark dialogue datasets and observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code has been released at https://github.com/liam0949/DCLOOS.

James J. Q. Yu, David J. Hill, Albert Y. S. Lam et al.

Online identification of post-contingency transient stability is essential in power system control, as it facilitates the grid operator to decide and coordinate system failure correction control actions. Utilizing machine learning methods with synchrophasor measurements for transient stability assessment has received much attention recently with the gradual deployment of wide-area protection and control systems. In this paper, we develop a transient stability assessment system based on the long short-term memory network. By proposing a temporal self-adaptive scheme, our proposed system aims to balance the trade-off between assessment accuracy and response time, both of which may be crucial in real-world scenarios. Compared with previous work, the most significant enhancement is that our system learns from the temporal data dependencies of the input data, which contributes to better assessment accuracy. In addition, the model structure of our system is relatively less complex, speeding up the model training process. Case studies on three power systems demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed transient stability assessment system.

Albert Y. S. Lam, Longbo Huang, Alonso Silva et al.

In this work, we propose a multi-layer market for vehicle-to-grid energy trading. In the macro layer, we consider a double auction mechanism, under which the utility company act as an auctioneer and energy buyers and sellers interact. This double auction mechanism is strategy-proof and converges asymptotically. In the micro layer, the aggregators, which are the sellers in the macro layer, are paid with commissions to sell the energy of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and to maximize their utilities. We analyze the interaction between the macro and micro layers and study some simplified cases. Depending on the elasticity of supply and demand, the utility is analyzed under different scenarios. Simulation results show that our approach can significantly increase the utility of PHEVs.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, Victor O. K. Li

A newly proposed chemical-reaction-inspired metaheurisic, Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), has been applied to many optimization problems in both discrete and continuous domains. To alleviate the effort in tuning parameters, this paper reduces the number of optimization parameters in canonical CRO and develops an adaptive scheme to evolve them. Our proposed Adaptive CRO (ACRO) adapts better to different optimization problems. We perform simulations with ACRO on a widely-used benchmark of continuous problems. The simulation results show that ACRO has superior performance over canonical CRO.

Albert Y. S. Lam, Yiu-Wing Leung, Xiaowen Chu

Technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is getting mature and many AVs will appear on the roads in the near future. AVs become connected with the support of various vehicular communication technologies and they possess high degree of control to respond to instantaneous situations cooperatively with high efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a new public transportation system based on AVs. It manages a fleet of AVs to accommodate transportation requests, offering point-to-point services with ride sharing. We focus on the two major problems of the system: scheduling and admission control. The former is to configure the most economical schedules and routes for the AVs to satisfy the admissible requests while the latter is to determine the set of admissible requests among all requests to produce maximum profit. The scheduling problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program and the admission control problem is cast as a bilevel optimization, which embeds the scheduling problem as the major constraint. By utilizing the analytical properties of the problem, we develop an effective genetic-algorithm-based method to tackle the admission control problem. We validate the performance of the algorithm with real-world transportation service data.

Albert Y. S. Lam

A smart city provides its people with high standard of living through advanced technologies and transport is one of the major foci. With the advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs), an AV-based public transportation system has been proposed recently, which is capable of providing new forms of transportation services with high efficiency, high flexibility, and low cost. For the benefit of passengers, multitenancy can increase market competition leading to lower service charge and higher quality of service. In this paper, we study the pricing issue of the multi-tenant AV public transportation system and three types of services are defined. The pricing process for each service type is modeled as a combinatorial auction, in which the service providers, as bidders, compete for offering transportation services. The winners of the auction are determined through an integer linear program. To prevent the bidders from raising their bids for higher returns, we propose a strategy-proof Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-based charging mechanism, which can maximize the social welfare, to settle the final charges for the customers. We perform extensive simulations to verify the analytical results and evaluate the performance of the charging mechanism.

Albert Y. S. Lam, Ka-Cheong Leung, Victor O. K. Li

Due to various green initiatives, renewable energy will be massively incorporated into the future smart grid. However, the intermittency of the renewables may result in power imbalance, thus adversely affecting the stability of a power system. Frequency regulation may be used to maintain the power balance at all times. As electric vehicles (EVs) become popular, they may be connected to the grid to form a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system. An aggregation of EVs can be coordinated to provide frequency regulation services. However, V2G is a dynamic system where the participating EVs come and go independently. Thus it is not easy to estimate the regulation capacities for V2G. In a preliminary study, we modeled an aggregation of EVs with a queueing network, whose structure allows us to estimate the capacities for regulation-up and regulation-down, separately. The estimated capacities from the V2G system can be used for establishing a regulation contract between an aggregator and the grid operator, and facilitating a new business model for V2G. In this paper, we extend our previous development by designing a smart charging mechanism which can adapt to given characteristics of the EVs and make the performance of the actual system follow the analytical model.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, Victor O. K. Li

The set covering problem (SCP) is one of the representative combinatorial optimization problems, having many practical applications. This paper investigates the development of an algorithm to solve SCP by employing chemical reaction optimization (CRO), a general-purpose metaheuristic. It is tested on a wide range of benchmark instances of SCP. The simulation results indicate that this algorithm gives outstanding performance compared with other heuristics and metaheuristics in solving SCP.

James J. Q. Yu, Victor O. K. Li, Albert Y. S. Lam

Optimization techniques are frequently applied in science and engineering research and development. Evolutionary algorithms, as a kind of general-purpose metaheuristic, have been shown to be very effective in solving a wide range of optimization problems. A recently proposed chemical-reaction-inspired metaheuristic, Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), has been applied to solve many global optimization problems. However, the functionality of the inter-molecular ineffective collision operator in the canonical CRO design overlaps that of the on-wall ineffective collision operator, which can potential impair the overall performance. In this paper we propose a new inter-molecular ineffective collision operator for CRO for global optimization. To fully utilize our newly proposed operator, we also design a scheme to adapt the algorithm to optimization problems with different search space characteristics. We analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm with a number of widely used benchmark functions. The simulation results indicate that the new algorithm has superior performance over the canonical CRO.

James J. Q. Yu, Victor O. K. Li, Albert Y. S. Lam

An electric vehicle (EV) may be used as energy storage which allows the bi-directional electricity flow between the vehicle's battery and the electric power grid. In order to flatten the load profile of the electricity system, EV scheduling has become a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the joint scheduling of EV and Unit Commitment (UC), called EVUC. Our formulation considers the characteristics of EVs while optimizing the system total running cost. We employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a general-purpose optimization algorithm to solve this problem and the simulation results on a widely used set of instances indicate that CRO can effectively optimize this problem.

James J. Q. Yu, Victor O. K. Li, Albert Y. S. Lam

Air pollution monitoring is a very popular research topic and many monitoring systems have been developed. In this paper, we formulate the Bus Sensor Deployment Problem (BSDP) to select the bus routes on which sensors are deployed, and we use Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) to solve BSDP. CRO is a recently proposed metaheuristic designed to solve a wide range of optimization problems. Using the real world data, namely Hong Kong Island bus route data, we perform a series of simulations and the results show that CRO is capable of solving this optimization problem efficiently.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, Victor O. K. Li

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a powerful metaheuristic which mimics the interactions of molecules in chemical reactions to search for the global optimum. The perturbation function greatly influences the performance of CRO on solving different continuous problems. In this paper, we study four different probability distributions, namely, the Gaussian distribution, the Cauchy distribution, the exponential distribution, and a modified Rayleigh distribution, for the perturbation function of CRO. Different distributions have different impacts on the solutions. The distributions are tested by a set of well-known benchmark functions and simulation results show that problems with different characteristics have different preference on the distribution function. Our study gives guidelines to design CRO for different types of optimization problems.

James J. Q. Yu, Albert Y. S. Lam, Victor O. K. Li

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are very popular tools to design and evolve artificial neural networks (ANNs), especially to train them. These methods have advantages over the conventional backpropagation (BP) method because of their low computational requirement when searching in a large solution space. In this paper, we employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a newly developed global optimization method, to replace BP in training neural networks. CRO is a population-based metaheuristics mimicking the transition of molecules and their interactions in a chemical reaction. Simulation results show that CRO outperforms many EA strategies commonly used to train neural networks.

Albert Y. S. Lam, Victor O. K. Li

Vehicular energy network (VEN) is a vehicular network which can transport energy over a large geographical area by means of electric vehicles (EVs). In the near future, an abundance of EVs, plentiful generation of the renewables, and mature wireless energy transfer and vehicular communication technologies will expedite the realization of VEN. To transmit energy from a source to a destination, we need to establish energy paths, which are composed of segments of vehicular routes, while satisfying various design objectives. In this paper, we develop a method to construct all energy paths for a particular energy source-destination pair, followed by some analytical results of the method. We describe how to utilize the energy paths to develop optimization models for different design goals and propose two solutions. We also develop a heuristic for the power loss minimization problem. We compare the performance of the three solution methods with artificial and real-world traffic networks and provide a comprehensive comparison in terms of solution quality, computation time, solvable problem size, and applicability. This paper lays the foundations of VEN routing.