Yang Yu

Yu Yang, Guoqiang Hu, Costas J. Spanos

It has been well acknowledged that buildings account for a large proportion of the world's energy consumption. However, the energy use of buildings, especially the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), is far from being efficient. There still exists a dramatic potential to save energy through improving building energy efficiency. Therefore, this paper studies the control of HVAC system for multi-zone buildings with the objective to reduce energy consumption cost while satisfying thermal comfort. In particular, the thermal couplings due to the heat transfer between the adjacent zones are incorporated in the optimization. Considering that a centralized method is generally computationally prohibitive for large buildings, an efficient decentralized approach is developed, based on the Accelerated Distributed Augmented Lagrangian (ADAL) method [1]. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we first compare it with a centralized method, in which the optimal solution of a small-scale problem can be obtained. We find that this decentralized approach can almost approach the optimal solution of the problem. Further, this decentralized approach is compared with the Distributed Token-Based Scheduling Strategy (DTBSS) [2]. The numeric results reveal that when the number of zones is relatively small (less than 20), the two decentralized methods can achieve a comparable performance regarding the cost of the HVAC system. However, with an increase of the number of zones in the building, the proposed decentralized approach demonstrates better performance with a considerable reduction of the total cost. Moreover, the decentralized approach proposed in this paper demonstrate better scalability with less average computation required.

Yu Liang, Yu Yang, Wenjie Wei et al.

Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) offer promising efficiency advantages for resource-constrained computing. However, their training algorithms often require substantial memory overhead due to latent weights storage and temporal processing requirements. To address this issue, we propose Binary Spiking Online (BSO) optimization algorithm, a novel online training algorithm that significantly reduces training memory. BSO directly updates weights through flip signals under the online training framework. These signals are triggered when the product of gradient momentum and weights exceeds a threshold, eliminating the need for latent weights during training. To enhance performance, we propose T-BSO, a temporal-aware variant that leverages the inherent temporal dynamics of BSNNs by capturing gradient information across time steps for adaptive threshold adjustment. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees for both BSO and T-BSO, with formal regret bounds characterizing their convergence rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both BSO and T-BSO achieve superior optimization performance compared to existing training methods for BSNNs. The codes are available at https://github.com/hamings1/BSO.

Yang Yu, Kai Han, Hang Zhou et al.

While large-scale training data is fundamental for developing capable large language models (LLMs), strategically selecting high-quality data has emerged as a critical approach to enhance training efficiency and reduce computational costs. Current data selection methodologies predominantly rely on static, training-agnostic criteria, failing to account for the dynamic model training and data interactions. In this paper, we propose a new Data Weighting Model (DWM) to adjust the weight of selected data within each batch to achieve a dynamic data utilization during LLM training. Specially, to better capture the dynamic data preference of the trained model, a bi-level optimization framework is implemented to update the weighting model. Our experiments demonstrate that DWM enhances the performance of models trained with randomly-selected data, and the learned weighting model can be transferred to enhance other data selection methods and models of different sizes. Moreover, we further analyze how a model's data preferences evolve throughout training, providing new insights into the data preference of the model during training.