aspireai.
PUBLIC EDITION

Jointly steering turbine yaw and power setpoints with reinforcement learning held a 40 dB local noise constraint while losing 2 percent of power on average, against 17 percent for the industry's noise-reduced operation

AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.RO)
Wind farms usually meet local noise limits by cutting turbine output, which ignores the fact that turbine yaw changes both wake interactions and the direction of noise emission, so the resulting policies are over-conservative. This paper's model-free reinforcement learning strategy controls yaw angles and power setpoints together to maximise farm power subject to a local noise constraint, trained cheaply by coupling a low-fidelity acoustic model with the steady-state FLORIS simulator. On a six-turbine test farm the policy satisfies the 40 dB constraint across the full range of turbulent winds with an average power deficit of 2 percent relative to greedy unimpeded control, reaching 7.7 percent at high wind speeds, while the industry-standard noise-reduced operation baseline loses 17 percent on average. The result is simulation-based on a six-turbine farm, and the authors show it largely holds up when the policy is deployed in a higher-fidelity simulator under steady and turbulent inflow.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Discover more stories
Stay curious.
THE BIG PICTURE
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
Research
One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
Swipe into something new
01 / 1729
The conversation continues
Explore Builds — projects by Kiran Adimatyam ↗
A fresh perspective changes everything.
ASPIREAI — STAY CURIOUS.