当一家企业向另一家企业（B2B）出售时，购买业务由一组称为帐户的个人代表，他们共同决定是否购买。卖方向每个人做广告，并与他们互动，主要是通过数字方式进行的。销售周期很长，通常在几个月内。在寻求信息时，属于帐户的个人之间存在异质性，因此卖方需要在漫长的视野中对每个人的利益进行评分，以决定必须达到哪些人以及何时达到。此外，购买决定与帐户有关，必须进行评分才能投射购买的可能性，这一决定可能会一直变化，直到实际的决定，象征组决策。我们以动态的方式为帐户及其个人的决定分数。动态评分允许机会在长时间的不同时间点影响不同的单个成员。数据集包含与卖方的每个人通信活动的行为日志；但是，没有关于个人之间咨询的数据，这导致了决定。使用神经网络体系结构，我们提出了几种方法来汇总各个成员活动的信息，以预测该小组的集体决策。多次评估发现了强大的模型性能。

认知偏见是人类在处理信息和环境中使用的精神捷径，这会导致偏见的行动和行为（或行动），对自己不知所措。偏见采取了多种形式，认知偏见占据了核心作用，造成公平，问责制，透明，道德，法律，医学和歧视。偏见的检测被认为是朝着缓解措施的必要步骤。在此，我们专注于两个认知偏见 - 锚定和新近度。计算机科学中认知偏见的识别在很大程度上是在信息检索的领域中，并且在注释数据的帮助下在总级别上确定了偏差。提出了不同的偏见检测方向，我们提供了一种原则性的方法，以及机器学习以从用户操作的Web日志中检测这两个认知偏见。我们的个人用户级别检测使其真正个性化，并且不依赖注释的数据。取而代之的是，我们从认知心理学中建立的两个基本原理开始，使用注意力网络的修改培训，并根据这些原则以新颖的方式解释注意力权重，以推断和区分这两种偏见。个性化方法允许对特定用户进行检测，这些用户在执行任务时容易受到这些偏见的影响，并且可以帮助他们之间建立意识以进行偏见缓解。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

and widely used information measurement metric, particularly popularized for SSVEP- based Brain-Computer (BCI) interfaces. By combining speed and accuracy into a single-valued parameter, this metric aids in the evaluation and comparison of various target identification algorithms across different BCI communities. To accurately depict performance and inspire an end-to-end design for futuristic BCI designs, a more thorough examination and definition of ITR is therefore required. We model the symbiotic communication medium, hosted by the retinogeniculate visual pathway, as a discrete memoryless channel and use the modified capacity expressions to redefine the ITR. We use graph theory to characterize the relationship between the asymmetry of the transition statistics and the ITR gain with the new definition, leading to potential bounds on data rate performance. On two well-known SSVEP datasets, we compared two cutting-edge target identification methods. Results indicate that the induced DM channel asymmetry has a greater impact on the actual perceived ITR than the change in input distribution. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the ITR gain under the new definition is inversely correlated with the asymmetry in the channel transition statistics. Individual input customizations are further shown to yield perceived ITR performance improvements. An algorithm is proposed to find the capacity of binary classification and further discussions are given to extend such results to ensemble techniques.We anticipate that the results of our study will contribute to the characterization of the highly dynamic BCI channel capacities, performance thresholds, and improved BCI stimulus designs for a tighter symbiosis between the human brain and computer systems while enhancing the efficiency of the underlying communication resources.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have recently shown to be powerful tool for high-quality video compression. However, existing works are limiting as they do not explicitly exploit the temporal redundancy in videos, leading to a long encoding time. Additionally, these methods have fixed architectures which do not scale to longer videos or higher resolutions. To address these issues, we propose NIRVANA, which treats videos as groups of frames and fits separate networks to each group performing patch-wise prediction. This design shares computation within each group, in the spatial and temporal dimensions, resulting in reduced encoding time of the video. The video representation is modeled autoregressively, with networks fit on a current group initialized using weights from the previous group's model. To further enhance efficiency, we perform quantization of the network parameters during training, requiring no post-hoc pruning or quantization. When compared with previous works on the benchmark UVG dataset, NIRVANA improves encoding quality from 37.36 to 37.70 (in terms of PSNR) and the encoding speed by 12X, while maintaining the same compression rate. In contrast to prior video INR works which struggle with larger resolution and longer videos, we show that our algorithm is highly flexible and scales naturally due to its patch-wise and autoregressive designs. Moreover, our method achieves variable bitrate compression by adapting to videos with varying inter-frame motion. NIRVANA achieves 6X decoding speed and scales well with more GPUs, making it practical for various deployment scenarios.

Learning policies from fixed offline datasets is a key challenge to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms towards practical applications. This is often because off-policy RL algorithms suffer from distributional shift, due to mismatch between dataset and the target policy, leading to high variance and over-estimation of value functions. In this work, we propose variance regularization for offline RL algorithms, using stationary distribution corrections. We show that by using Fenchel duality, we can avoid double sampling issues for computing the gradient of the variance regularizer. The proposed algorithm for offline variance regularization (OVAR) can be used to augment any existing offline policy optimization algorithms. We show that the regularizer leads to a lower bound to the offline policy optimization objective, which can help avoid over-estimation errors, and explains the benefits of our approach across a range of continuous control domains when compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.