Xiaolu Chen

Xiaolu Chen, Chenghao Huang, Yanru Zhang et al.

The wide adoption of residential photovoltaic (PV) systems introduces new challenges for generation fraud detection (FD). Unlike traditional electricity theft detection, which focuses on electricity consumption-side behavior, PV generation fraud detection (PVG-FD) is complicated by the inherent intermittency and uncertainty of PV generation. The distributed nature of PV systems poses further challenges for centralized PVG-FD approaches due to scalability and privacy concerns. This paper develops a privacy-preserving distributed PVG-FD framework based on federated learning (FL). In this framework, a utility company manages multiple household communities, where each of which is equipped with a local detector. The framework integrates a novel detection model architecture with privacy-preserving global collaboration. Each community's local model fuses PV generation and weather data via a co-attention mechanism to detect discrepancies critical for PVG-FD. The FL framework enables cross-community collaboration by aggregating model parameters and prototypes, leveraging global knowledge sharing with local refinement while preserving privacy. It also uses prototype alignment to address class imbalance by enhancing fraud sample representation. Extensive experiments on a real-world residential PV dataset validate the effectiveness of the developed method and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods across various scenarios. The results also show its scalability across varying community sizes and strong robustness to class imbalance.

Xiaolu Chen, Jie Bao, Haojie Wu et al.

Generative Search Engine (GSE) leverages the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique and the Large Language Model (LLM) to integrate multi-source information and provide users with accurate and comprehensive responses. Unlike traditional search engines that present results in ranked lists, GSE shifts users' attention from sequential browsing to content-driven subjective perception, not only driving a paradigm shift in information retrieval but also highlighting the importance of enhancing the subjective visibility of content in generative search. In this context, Generative Search Engine Optimization (G-SEO) methods have emerged as a new research focus. With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) techniques, GSE can now efficiently integrate text, images, audio, and video, producing richer responses that better satisfy complex information needs. Existing G-SEO methods, however, remain limited to text-based optimization and fail to fully exploit multimodal data. To address this gap, we propose Caption Injection, the first multimodal G-SEO approach, which extracts captions from images and injects them into textual content, integrating visual semantics to enhance the subjective visibility in generative search. We systematically evaluate Caption Injection on MRAMG, a benchmark for MRAG, under both unimodal and multimodal settings. Experimental results show that Caption Injection significantly outperforms text-only G-SEO baselines under the G-EVAL metric, effectively improving the subjective visibility of content perceived by users, and demonstrating the practical benefits of multimodal information in G-SEO.

Heyang Zhou, JiaJia Chen, Xiaolu Chen et al.

As Generative Engines revolutionize information retrieval by synthesizing direct answers from retrieved sources, ensuring source visibility becomes a significant challenge. Improving it through targeted content revisions is a practical strategy termed Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). However, optimizing a document for diverse queries presents a constrained optimization challenge where heterogeneous queries often impose conflicting and competing revision requirements under a limited content budget. To address this challenge, we propose IF-GEO, a "diverge-then-converge" framework comprising two phases: (i) mining distinct optimization preferences from representative latent queries; (ii) synthesizing a Global Revision Blueprint for guided editing by coordinating preferences via conflict-aware instruction fusion. To explicitly quantify IF-GEO's objective of cross-query stability, we introduce risk-aware stability metrics. Experiments on multi-query benchmarks demonstrate that IF-GEO achieves substantial performance gains while maintaining robustness across diverse retrieval scenarios.

Xiaolu Chen, Haojie Wu, Jie Bao et al.

Generative Search Engines (GSEs), powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), are reshaping information retrieval. While commercial systems (e.g., BingChat, Perplexity.ai) demonstrate impressive semantic synthesis capabilities, their black-box nature fundamentally undermines established Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices. Content creators face a critical challenge: their optimization strategies, effective in traditional search engines, are misaligned with generative retrieval contexts, resulting in diminished visibility. To bridge this gap, we propose a Role-Augmented Intent-Driven Generative Search Engine Optimization (G-SEO) method, providing a structured optimization pathway tailored for GSE scenarios. Our method models search intent through reflective refinement across diverse informational roles, enabling targeted content enhancement. To better evaluate the method under realistic settings, we address the benchmarking limitations of prior work by: (1) extending the GEO dataset with diversified query variations reflecting real-world search scenarios and (2) introducing G-Eval 2.0, a 6-level LLM-augmented evaluation rubric for fine-grained human-aligned assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that search intent serves as an effective signal for guiding content optimization, yielding significant improvements over single-aspect baseline approaches in both subjective impressions and objective content visibility within GSE responses.

Chenghao Huang, Xiaolu Chen, Yanru Zhang et al.

Heterogeneity arising from label distribution skew and data scarcity can cause inaccuracy and unfairness in intelligent communication applications that heavily rely on distributed computing. To deal with it, this paper proposes a novel personalized federated learning algorithm, named Federated Contrastive Shareable Representations (FedCoSR), to facilitate knowledge sharing among clients while maintaining data privacy. Specifically, the parameters of local models' shallow layers and typical local representations are both considered as shareable information for the server and are aggregated globally. To address performance degradation caused by label distribution skew among clients, contrastive learning is adopted between local and global representations to enrich local knowledge. Additionally, to ensure fairness for clients with scarce data, FedCoSR introduces adaptive local aggregation to coordinate the global model involvement in each client. Our simulations demonstrate FedCoSR's effectiveness in mitigating label heterogeneity by achieving accuracy and fairness improvements over existing methods on datasets with varying degrees of label heterogeneity.

Xiaolu Chen, Chenghao Huang, Yanru Zhang et al.

With the advancement of energy Internet and energy system integration, the increasing adoption of distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems presents new challenges on smart monitoring and measurement for utility companies, particularly in separating PV generation from net electricity load. Existing methods struggle with feature extraction from net load and capturing the relevance between weather factors. This paper proposes a PV disaggregation method that integrates Hierarchical Interpolation (HI) and multi-head self-attention mechanisms. By using HI to extract net load features and multi-head self-attention to capture the complex dependencies between weather factors, the method achieves precise PV generation predictions. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world data, supporting improved monitoring and management of distributed energy systems.

Xiaolu Chen, Chenghao Huang, Yanru Zhang et al.

The rapid expansion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) installations worldwide, many being behind-the-meter systems, has significantly challenged energy management and grid operations, as unobservable PV generation further complicates the supply-demand balance. Therefore, estimating this generation from net load, known as PV disaggregation, is critical. Given privacy concerns and the need for large training datasets, federated learning becomes a promising approach, but statistical heterogeneity, arising from geographical and behavioral variations among prosumers, poses new challenges to PV disaggregation. To overcome these challenges, a privacy-preserving distributed PV disaggregation framework is proposed using Personalized Federated Learning (PFL). The proposed method employs a two-level framework that combines local and global modeling. At the local level, a transformer-based PV disaggregation model is designed to generate solar irradiance embeddings for representing local PV conditions. A novel adaptive local aggregation mechanism is adopted to mitigate the impact of statistical heterogeneity on the local model, extracting a portion of global information that benefits the local model. At the global level, a central server aggregates information uploaded from multiple data centers, preserving privacy while enabling cross-center knowledge sharing. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed framework, showing improved accuracy and robustness compared to benchmark methods.

Jiaxiang Wang, Haote Xu, Xiaolu Chen et al.

Anomaly detection (AD) in 3D point clouds is crucial in a wide range of industrial applications, especially in various forms of precision manufacturing. Considering the industrial demand for reliable 3D AD, several methods have been developed. However, most of these approaches typically require training separate models for each category, which is memory-intensive and lacks flexibility. In this paper, we propose a novel Point-Language model with dual-prompts for 3D ANomaly dEtection (PLANE). The approach leverages multi-modal prompts to extend the strong generalization capabilities of pre-trained Point-Language Models (PLMs) to the domain of 3D point cloud AD, achieving impressive detection performance across multiple categories using a single model. Specifically, we propose a dual-prompt learning method, incorporating both text and point cloud prompts. The method utilizes a dynamic prompt creator module (DPCM) to produce sample-specific dynamic prompts, which are then integrated with class-specific static prompts for each modality, effectively driving the PLMs. Additionally, based on the characteristics of point cloud data, we propose a pseudo 3D anomaly generation method (Ano3D) to improve the model's detection capabilities in an unsupervised setting. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, which is under the multi-class-one-model paradigm, achieves a +8.7%/+17% gain on anomaly detection and localization performance as compared to the state-of-the-art one-class-one-model methods for the Anomaly-ShapeNet dataset, and obtains +4.3%/+4.1% gain for the Real3D-AD dataset. Code will be available upon publication.

Longhui Zheng, Qiming Xia, Xiaolu Chen et al.

3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, yet it remains fundamentally challenging to simultaneously maximize computational efficiency and capture long-range spatial dependencies. We observed that Mamba-based models, with their linear state-space design, capture long-range dependencies at lower cost, offering a promising balance between efficiency and accuracy. However, existing methods rely on axis-aligned scanning within a fixed window, inevitably discarding spatial information. To address this problem, we propose WinMamba, a novel Mamba-based 3D feature-encoding backbone composed of stacked WinMamba blocks. To enhance the backbone with robust multi-scale representation, the WinMamba block incorporates a window-scale-adaptive module that compensates voxel features across varying resolutions during sampling. Meanwhile, to obtain rich contextual cues within the linear state space, we equip the WinMamba layer with a learnable positional encoding and a window-shift strategy. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that WinMamba significantly outperforms the baseline. Ablation studies further validate the individual contributions of the WSF and AWF modules in improving detection accuracy. The code will be made publicly available.

Xiaolu Chen, Chenghao Huang, Yanru Zhang et al.

With the proliferation of smart grids, smart cities face growing challenges due to cyber-attacks and sophisticated electricity theft behaviors, particularly in residential photovoltaic (PV) generation systems. Traditional Electricity Theft Detection (ETD) methods often struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies and integrating multi-source data, limiting their effectiveness. In this work, we propose an efficient ETD method that accurately identifies fraudulent behaviors in residential PV generation, thus ensuring the supply-demand balance in smart cities. Our hybrid deep learning model, combining multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Transformer, excels in capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies. Additionally, we introduce a data embedding technique that seamlessly integrates time-series data with discrete temperature variables, enhancing detection robustness. Extensive simulation experiments using real-world data validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating significant improvements in the accuracy of detecting sophisticated energy theft activities, thereby contributing to the stability and fairness of energy systems in smart cities.