Sequence-to-Segments-to-Sequence Learning with Neural Networks for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
Published in BuildSys'25: Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation
In order to better understand the power consumption of each appliance at home, Non-Invasive Load Monitoring (NILM) aims to extract per-appliance power consumption from aggregated whole-home power readings. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have modeled the problem as a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning task, showing state-of-the-art performance for NILM. However, existing Seq2Seq models perform prediction on short sequences and treat each point in the sequence with equal importance. This is inefficient as only some representative samples in the sequence are more informative than the rest. Furthermore, these short sequences lack global information such as appliances’ ON/OFF moments and duty cycle, leading to sub-optimal model performance. To address this issue, this paper introduces the Sequence-to-Segments-to-Sequence (Seq2Seg2Seq) scheme, which conducts segment-wise feature extraction. Specifically, the input signal is divided into multiple non-overlapping segments, followed by intra-segment feature extraction and inter-segment feature interaction. The Seq2Seg2Seq scheme can handle sequences that are an order of magnitude longer and enables long-time context awareness, with affordable resources on an IoT device.



































