Daily Papers

As energy systems transform to rely on renewable energy and electrification, they encounter stronger year-to-year variability in energy supply and demand. However, most infrastructure planning is based on a single weather year, resulting in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we optimize energy infrastructure for a European energy system designed for net-zero CO_2 emissions in 62 different weather years. Subsequently, we fix the capacity layouts and simulate their operation in every weather year, to evaluate resource adequacy and CO_2 emissions abatement. We show that interannual weather variability causes variation of pm10\% in total system cost. The most expensive capacity layout obtains the lowest net CO_2 emissions but not the highest resource adequacy. Instead, capacity layouts designed with years including compound weather events result in a more robust and cost-effective design. Deploying CO_2-emitting backup generation is a cost-effective robustness measure, which only increase CO_2 emissions marginally as the average CO_2 emissions remain less than 1\% of 1990 levels. Our findings highlight how extreme weather years drive investments in robustness measures, making them compatible with all weather conditions within six decades of historical weather data.

European countries are debating policies to mitigate the increased energy costs caused by renewed geopolitical tensions, while pursuing decarbonization and electrification. A notable example is Italy's 2026 Decreto Bollette package, which proposes to remove the carbon price equivalent from the bids of certain gas-driven power plants to wholesale electricity markets, among other provisions. We use this as a case study to assess the long-term implications of suppressing the carbon price signal in the electricity market for investment, emissions, and consumer costs. We employ a stylized Italian power system using MARLEY, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework focused on long-term electricity market assessments. In this framework, we test this policy across configurations with varying levels of support for green investment, resource adequacy, and flexibility. Results show that partial suppression of the carbon price signal yields short-term cost reductions but only a minor long-term effect on total system costs, as the deferred emissions are ultimately repaid by consumers. CO_2 emissions rise across most configurations since suppressing the price signal erodes incentives for renewable and storage investment. Only the most ambitious configurations for supporting green investment avoid this outcome, but they do so by marginalizing the wholesale price signal itself, thereby requiring a commitment to a hybrid market paradigm that is in contradiction with the rationale of the proposed price intervention.

We present KokborokMT, a high-quality neural machine translation (NMT) system for Kokborok (ISO 639-3), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in Tripura, India with approximately 1.5 million speakers. Despite its status as an official language of Tripura, Kokborok has remained severely under-resourced in the NLP community, with prior machine translation attempts limited to systems trained on small Bible-derived corpora achieving BLEU scores below 7. We fine-tune the NLLB-200-distilled-600M model on a multi-source parallel corpus comprising 36,052 sentence pairs: 9,284 professionally translated sentences from the SMOL dataset, 1,769 Bible-domain sentences from WMT shared task data, and 24,999 synthetic back-translated pairs generated via Gemini Flash from Tatoeba English source sentences. We introduce as a new language token for Kokborok in the NLLB framework. Our best system achieves BLEU scores of 17.30 and 38.56 on held-out test sets, representing substantial improvements over prior published results. Human evaluation by three annotators yields mean adequacy of 3.74/5 and fluency of 3.70/5, with substantial agreement between trained evaluators.

As part of the Open Language Data Initiative shared tasks, we have expanded the FLORES+ evaluation set to include Emakhuwa, a low-resource language widely spoken in Mozambique. We translated the dev and devtest sets from Portuguese into Emakhuwa, and we detail the translation process and quality assurance measures used. Our methodology involved various quality checks, including post-editing and adequacy assessments. The resulting datasets consist of multiple reference sentences for each source. We present baseline results from training a Neural Machine Translation system and fine-tuning existing multilingual translation models. Our findings suggest that spelling inconsistencies remain a challenge in Emakhuwa. Additionally, the baseline models underperformed on this evaluation set, underscoring the necessity for further research to enhance machine translation quality for Emakhuwa. The data is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LIACC/Emakhuwa-FLORES.

Getting the most out of limited resources allows advances in natural language processing (NLP) research and practice while being conservative with resources. Those resources may be data, time, storage, or energy. Recent work in NLP has yielded interesting results from scaling; however, using only scale to improve results means that resource consumption also scales. That relationship motivates research into efficient methods that require less resources to achieve similar results. This survey relates and synthesises methods and findings in those efficiencies in NLP, aiming to guide new researchers in the field and inspire the development of new methods.

Autonomous agents increasingly perform bounded software tasks under an orchestrator that retries, resumes, and budgets them. The machinery such orchestrators reach for is the service mesh's: retry, timeout, and error-rate circuit breaking. We report a failure study of a production agentic software-delivery platform over 147 numbered incidents spanning 81 runs, each with a measured cost and, in most cases, a mutation proof reproducing the failure. All three assumptions those primitives rest on are violated in practice, and we quantify the consequences: a loop of fifty-four consecutive successful tool calls no error-rate breaker could see; a progress signal constant by construction, guaranteeing a false trip on the third repair round and driving one run from six of six components to three; twenty-one events accumulated across six invocations of one delegation, making a correct, idempotent component unwinnable; a misrouted failure that woke five components for a two-component fault, leaving three bystanders regressing working code; and twelve incidents in which the enforcement layer blocked correct work, the most expensive costing 107 agent turns and zero accepted writes. We find one cross-cutting cause and its dual. Identity adequacy: in five separate subsystems an identity that failed to discriminate produced a confident wrong answer, and two of them derived the corrective rule independently. Evidence adequacy: a reliability decision may be taken only on evidence capable of moving, attributable to what it measures, and deterministic under identical conditions. From the findings we derive seven reliability primitives whose enforcement unit is the delegation rather than the message, and specify the controlled evaluation the study motivates but does not constitute.