Praneet Dutta

Jerry Luo, Cosmin Paduraru, Octavian Voicu et al. · deepmind

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

Yuri Chervonyi, Praneet Dutta, Piotr Trochim et al. · deepmind

We present a hybrid industrial cooling system model that embeds analytical solutions within a multi-physics simulation. This model is designed for reinforcement learning (RL) applications and balances simplicity with simulation fidelity and interpretability. The model's fidelity is evaluated against real world data from a large scale cooling system. This is followed by a case study illustrating how the model can be used for RL research. For this, we develop an industrial task suite that allows specifying different problem settings and levels of complexity, and use it to evaluate the performance of different RL algorithms.

William Wong, Praneet Dutta, Octavian Voicu et al. · deepmind

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have been developed to optimize industrial cooling systems, offering substantial energy savings compared to traditional heuristic policies. A major challenge in industrial control involves learning behaviors that are feasible in the real world due to machinery constraints. For example, certain actions can only be executed every few hours while other actions can be taken more frequently. Without extensive reward engineering and experimentation, an RL agent may not learn realistic operation of machinery. To address this, we use hierarchical reinforcement learning with multiple agents that control subsets of actions according to their operation time scales. Our hierarchical approach achieves energy savings over existing baselines while maintaining constraints such as operating chillers within safe bounds in a simulated HVAC control environment.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Sanjana Reddy, Ishaan Malhi, Sally Ma et al.

Existing methods for preference tuning of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models often rely on computationally expensive generation steps to create positive and negative pairs of images. These approaches frequently yield training pairs that either lack meaningful differences, are expensive to sample and filter, or exhibit significant variance in irrelevant pixel regions, thereby degrading training efficiency. To address these limitations, we introduce "Di3PO", a novel method for constructing positive and negative pairs that isolates specific regions targeted for improvement during preference tuning, while keeping the surrounding context in the image stable. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying it to the challenging task of text rendering in diffusion models, showcasing improvements over baseline methods of SFT and DPO.

Imagen-Team-Google, Jason Baldridge, Jakob Bauer et al.

We introduce Imagen 3, a latent diffusion model that generates high quality images from text prompts. We describe our quality and responsibility evaluations. Imagen 3 is preferred over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the time of evaluation. In addition, we discuss issues around safety and representation, as well as methods we used to minimize the potential harm of our models.

Praneet Dutta, Joe Cheuk, Jonathan S Kim et al.

Contextual Bandits is one of the widely popular techniques used in applications such as personalization, recommendation systems, mobile health, causal marketing etc . As a dynamic approach, it can be more efficient than standard A/B testing in minimizing regret. We propose an end to end automated meta-learning pipeline to approximate the optimal Q function for contextual bandits problems. We see that our model is able to perform much better than random exploration, being more regret efficient and able to converge with a limited number of samples, while remaining very general and easy to use due to the meta-learning approach. We used a linearly annealed e-greedy exploration policy to define the exploration vs exploitation schedule. We tested the system on a synthetic environment to characterize it fully and we evaluated it on some open source datasets to benchmark against prior work. We see that our model outperforms or performs comparatively to other models while requiring no tuning nor feature engineering.

Dhruv Suri, Praneet Dutta, Flora Xue et al.

As Chile's electric power sector advances toward a future powered by renewable energy, accurate forecasting of renewable generation is essential for managing grid operations. The integration of renewable energy sources is particularly challenging due to the operational difficulties of managing their power generation, which is highly variable compared to fossil fuel sources, delaying the availability of clean energy. To mitigate this, we quantify the impact of increasing intermittent generation from wind and solar on thermal power plants in Chile and introduce a hybrid wind speed forecasting methodology which combines two custom ML models for Chile. The first model is based on TiDE, an MLP-based ML model for short-term forecasts, and the second is based on a graph neural network, GraphCast, for medium-term forecasts up to 10 days. Our hybrid approach outperforms the most accurate operational deterministic systems by 4-21% for short-term forecasts and 5-23% for medium-term forecasts and can directly lower the impact of wind generation on thermal ramping, curtailment, and system-level emissions in Chile.

Ishaan Malhi, Praneet Dutta, Ellie Talius et al.

We present a framework for high-fidelity product image recontextualization using text-to-image diffusion models and a novel data augmentation pipeline. This pipeline leverages image-to-video diffusion, in/outpainting & negatives to create synthetic training data, addressing limitations of real-world data collection for this task. Our method improves the quality and diversity of generated images by disentangling product representations and enhancing the model's understanding of product characteristics. Evaluation on the ABO dataset and a private product dataset, using automated metrics and human assessment, demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework in generating realistic and compelling product visualizations, with implications for applications such as e-commerce and virtual product showcasing.

Matthew Mithra Noel, Shubham Bharadwaj, Venkataraman Muthiah-Nakarajan et al.

The recent discovery of special human neocortical pyramidal neurons that can individually learn the XOR function highlights the significant performance gap between biological and artificial neurons. The output of these pyramidal neurons first increases to a maximum with input and then decreases. Artificial neurons with similar characteristics can be designed with oscillating activation functions. Oscillating activation functions have multiple zeros allowing single neurons to have multiple hyper-planes in their decision boundary. This enables even single neurons to learn the XOR function. This paper proposes four new oscillating activation functions inspired by human pyramidal neurons that can also individually learn the XOR function. Oscillating activation functions are non-saturating for all inputs unlike popular activation functions, leading to improved gradient flow and faster convergence. Using oscillating activation functions instead of popular monotonic or non-monotonic single-zero activation functions enables neural networks to train faster and solve classification problems with fewer layers. An extensive comparison of 23 activation functions on CIFAR 10, CIFAR 100, and Imagentte benchmarks is presented and the oscillating activation functions proposed in this paper are shown to outperform all known popular activation functions.

Mathew Mithra Noel, Arunkumar L, Advait Trivedi et al.

Convolutional neural networks have been successful in solving many socially important and economically significant problems. This ability to learn complex high-dimensional functions hierarchically can be attributed to the use of nonlinear activation functions. A key discovery that made training deep networks feasible was the adoption of the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function to alleviate the vanishing gradient problem caused by using saturating activation functions. Since then, many improved variants of the ReLU activation have been proposed. However, a majority of activation functions used today are non-oscillatory and monotonically increasing due to their biological plausibility. This paper demonstrates that oscillatory activation functions can improve gradient flow and reduce network size. Two theorems on limits of non-oscillatory activation functions are presented. A new oscillatory activation function called Growing Cosine Unit(GCU) defined as $C(z) = z\cos z$ that outperforms Sigmoids, Swish, Mish and ReLU on a variety of architectures and benchmarks is presented. The GCU activation has multiple zeros enabling single GCU neurons to have multiple hyperplanes in the decision boundary. This allows single GCU neurons to learn the XOR function without feature engineering. Experimental results indicate that replacing the activation function in the convolution layers with the GCU activation function significantly improves performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Imagenette.

Karl Tuyls, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Paul Muller et al.

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players' and coordinated teams' behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).

Praneet Dutta, Bruce Power, Adam Halpert et al.

We propose GAN-based image enhancement models for frequency enhancement of 2D and 3D seismic images. Seismic imagery is used to understand and characterize the Earth's subsurface for energy exploration. Because these images often suffer from resolution limitations and noise contamination, our proposed method performs large-scale seismic volume frequency enhancement and denoising. The enhanced images reduce uncertainty and improve decisions about issues, such as optimal well placement, that often rely on low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) seismic volumes. We explored the impact of adding lithology class information to the models, resulting in improved performance on PSNR and SSIM metrics over a baseline model with no conditional information.