离线强化学习用于在实时访问环境昂贵或不可能的情况下培训策略。作为这些恶劣条件的自然后果，在采取行动之前，代理商可能缺乏完全遵守在线环境的资源。我们配备了这种情况资源受限的设置。这导致脱机数据集（可用于培训）的情况可以包含完全处理的功能（使用功能强大的语言模型，图像模型，复杂传感器等）在实际在线时不可用。此断开连接导致离线RL中的有趣和未开发的问题：是否可以使用丰富地处理的脱机数据集来培训可访问在线环境中的更少功能的策略？在这项工作中，我们介绍并正式化这一新颖的资源受限的问题设置。我们突出了使用有限功能培训的完整脱机数据集和策略培训的策略之间的性能差距。我们通过策略传输算法解决了这种性能缺口，该策略传输算法首先使用功能完全可用的脱机数据集列举教师代理，然后将此知识传输到仅使用资源约束功能的学生代理。为了更好地捕获此设置的挑战，我们提出了一个数据收集过程：RL（RC-D4RL）的资源受限数据集。我们在RC-D4RL和流行的D4RL基准测试中评估传输算法，并观察到基线上的一致性改进（无需传输）。实验的代码在https://github.com/jayanthrr /rc-offlinerl上获得。

Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space of robots is non-trivial and requires a systematic procedure for exploration. We adopt the top-down design strategy, the V-model, used in automotive and aerospace industries. Our co-design approach identifies non-intuitive designs from within the design space and obtains the maximum permissible range of the design variables as a solution space, to physically realise the obtained design. We show that by constructing the solution space, one can (1) decompose higher-level requirements onto sub-system-level requirements with tolerance, alleviating the "chicken-or-egg" problem during the design process, (2) decouple the robot's morphology from its controller, enabling greater design flexibility, (3) obtain independent sub-system level requirements, reducing the development time by parallelising the development process.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

Data compression is becoming critical for storing scientific data because many scientific applications need to store large amounts of data and post process this data for scientific discovery. Unlike image and video compression algorithms that limit errors to primary data, scientists require compression techniques that accurately preserve derived quantities of interest (QoIs). This paper presents a physics-informed compression technique implemented as an end-to-end, scalable, GPU-based pipeline for data compression that addresses this requirement. Our hybrid compression technique combines machine learning techniques and standard compression methods. Specifically, we combine an autoencoder, an error-bounded lossy compressor to provide guarantees on raw data error, and a constraint satisfaction post-processing step to preserve the QoIs within a minimal error (generally less than floating point error). The effectiveness of the data compression pipeline is demonstrated by compressing nuclear fusion simulation data generated by a large-scale fusion code, XGC, which produces hundreds of terabytes of data in a single day. Our approach works within the ADIOS framework and results in compression by a factor of more than 150 while requiring only a few percent of the computational resources necessary for generating the data, making the overall approach highly effective for practical scenarios.

We consider the problem of continually releasing an estimate of the population mean of a stream of samples that is user-level differentially private (DP). At each time instant, a user contributes a sample, and the users can arrive in arbitrary order. Until now these requirements of continual release and user-level privacy were considered in isolation. But, in practice, both these requirements come together as the users often contribute data repeatedly and multiple queries are made. We provide an algorithm that outputs a mean estimate at every time instant $t$ such that the overall release is user-level $\varepsilon$-DP and has the following error guarantee: Denoting by $M_t$ the maximum number of samples contributed by a user, as long as $\tilde{\Omega}(1/\varepsilon)$ users have $M_t/2$ samples each, the error at time $t$ is $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{t}+\sqrt{M}_t/t\varepsilon)$. This is a universal error guarantee which is valid for all arrival patterns of the users. Furthermore, it (almost) matches the existing lower bounds for the single-release setting at all time instants when users have contributed equal number of samples.

Nonnegative matrix factorization can be used to automatically detect topics within a corpus in an unsupervised fashion. The technique amounts to an approximation of a nonnegative matrix as the product of two nonnegative matrices of lower rank. In this paper, we show this factorization can be combined with regression on a continuous response variable. In practice, the method performs better than regression done after topics are identified and retrains interpretability.

Despite the remarkable success achieved by graph convolutional networks for functional brain activity analysis, the heterogeneity of functional patterns and the scarcity of imaging data still pose challenges in many tasks. Transferring knowledge from a source domain with abundant training data to a target domain is effective for improving representation learning on scarce training data. However, traditional transfer learning methods often fail to generalize the pre-trained knowledge to the target task due to domain discrepancy. Self-supervised learning on graphs can increase the generalizability of graph features since self-supervision concentrates on inherent graph properties that are not limited to a particular supervised task. We propose a novel knowledge transfer strategy by integrating meta-learning with self-supervised learning to deal with the heterogeneity and scarcity of fMRI data. Specifically, we perform a self-supervised task on the source domain and apply meta-learning, which strongly improves the generalizability of the model using the bi-level optimization, to transfer the self-supervised knowledge to the target domain. Through experiments on a neurological disorder classification task, we demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly improves target task performance by increasing the generalizability and transferability of graph-based knowledge.

We address the problem of few-shot classification where the goal is to learn a classifier from a limited set of samples. While data-driven learning is shown to be effective in various applications, learning from less data still remains challenging. To address this challenge, existing approaches consider various data augmentation techniques for increasing the number of training samples. Pseudo-labeling is commonly used in a few-shot setup, where approximate labels are estimated for a large set of unlabeled images. We propose DiffAlign which focuses on generating images from class labels. Specifically, we leverage the recent success of the generative models (e.g., DALL-E and diffusion models) that can generate realistic images from texts. However, naive learning on synthetic images is not adequate due to the domain gap between real and synthetic images. Thus, we employ a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss to align the synthetic images to the real images minimizing the domain gap. We evaluate our method on the standard few-shot classification benchmarks: CIFAR-FS, FC100, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet and a cross-domain few-shot classification benchmark: miniImageNet to CUB. The proposed approach significantly outperforms the stateof-the-art in both 5-shot and 1-shot setups on these benchmarks. Our approach is also shown to be effective in the zero-shot classification setup

One of the major errors affecting GNSS signals in urban canyons is GNSS multipath error. In this work, we develop a Gazebo plugin which utilizes a ray tracing technique to account for multipath effects in a virtual urban canyon environment using virtual satellites. This software plugin balances accuracy and computational complexity to run the simulation in real-time for both software-in-the-loop (SITL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing. We also construct a 3D virtual environment of Hong Kong and compare the results from our plugin with the GNSS data in the publicly available Urban-Nav dataset, to validate the efficacy of the proposed Gazebo Plugin. The plugin is openly available to all the researchers in the robotics community. https://github.com/kpant14/multipath_sim

Soft actuators have attracted a great deal of interest in the context of rehabilitative and assistive robots for increasing safety and lowering costs as compared to rigid-body robotic systems. During actuation, soft actuators experience high levels of deformation, which can lead to microscale fractures in their elastomeric structure, which fatigues the system over time and eventually leads to macroscale damages and eventually failure. This paper reports finite element modeling (FEM) of pneu-nets at high angles, along with repetitive experimentation at high deformation rates, in order to study the effect and behavior of fatigue in soft robotic actuators, which would result in deviation from the ideal behavior. Comparing the FEM model and experimental data, we show that FEM can model the performance of the actuator before fatigue to a bending angle of 167 degrees with ~96% accuracy. We also show that the FEM model performance will drop to 80% due to fatigue after repetitive high-angle bending. The results of this paper objectively highlight the emergence of fatigue over cyclic activation of the system and the resulting deviation from the computational FEM model. Such behavior can be considered in future controllers to adapt the system with time-variable and non-autonomous response dynamics of soft robots.