Machine learning (ML) has found broad applicability in quantum information science in topics as diverse as experimental design, state classification, and even studies on quantum foundations. Here, we experimentally realize an approach for defining custom prior distributions that are automatically tuned using ML for use with Bayesian quantum state estimation methods. Previously, researchers have looked to Bayesian quantum state tomography due to its unique advantages like natural uncertainty quantification, the return of reliable estimates under any measurement condition, and minimal mean-squared error. However, practical challenges related to long computation times and conceptual issues concerning how to incorporate prior knowledge most suitably can overshadow these benefits. Using both simulated and experimental measurement results, we demonstrate that ML-defined prior distributions reduce net convergence times and provide a natural way to incorporate both implicit and explicit information directly into the prior distribution. These results constitute a promising path toward practical implementations of Bayesian quantum state tomography.

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

我们提出Dave Aquatic Virtual Environals（Dave），这是用于水下机器人，传感器和环境的开源仿真堆栈。传统的机器人模拟器并非旨在应对海洋环境带来的独特挑战，包括但不限于在空间和时间上变化的环境条件，受损或具有挑战性的感知以及在通常未探索的环境中数据的不可用。考虑到各种传感器和平台，对于不可避免地抵制更广泛采用的特定用例，车轮通常会重新发明。在现有模拟器的基础上，我们提供了一个框架，以帮助加快算法的开发和评估，否则这些算法需要在海上需要昂贵且耗时的操作。该框架包括基本的构建块（例如，新车，水跟踪多普勒速度记录仪，基于物理的多微型声纳）以及开发工具（例如，动态测深的产卵，洋流），使用户可以专注于方法论，而不是方法。比软件基础架构。我们通过示例场景，测深数据导入，数据检查的用户界面和操纵运动计划以及可视化来演示用法。

我们介绍了Dessurt，这是一个相对简单的文档理解变压器，能够在各种文档任务上进行微调，而不是先前的方法。它接收文档映像和任务字符串作为输入，并作为输出以任意文本自动添加。由于Dessurt是端到端体系结构，除了文档理解外，还可以执行文本识别，因此它不需要像先前方法那样需要外部识别模型。Dessurt比先前的方法更灵活，并且能够处理各种文档域和任务。我们表明，该模型可在9种不同的数据集任务组合中有效。

倒置着陆是一种在空中机器人中执行的具有挑战性的壮举，特别是没有外部定位。然而，它经常通过蜜蜂，苍蝇和蝙蝠等生物传递器进行。我们之前对苍蝇着陆行为的观察表明其推定的视觉提示与所执行的空中机动的运动学之间的开环因果关系。例如，旋转机动程度（因此在触摸之前的身体反转）和腿部辅助体挥杆的量取决于苍蝇的初始体状态，同时接近天花板。在这项工作中，通过使用基于物理的模拟进行实验验证，我们系统地研究了如何优化的倒置着陆操纵如何取决于具有不同幅度和方向的初始接近速度。这是通过分析推定的视觉提示（可在最佳的机动轨迹期间衍生出推定的视觉提示来完成的。我们识别了一个三维策略区域，可以在不使用外部定位数据的情况下开发到全局反转着陆策略的映射。此外，我们还调查了一系列着陆齿轮设计对优化着陆性能的影响，并确定了它们的优缺点。以上使用有限的实验测试部分验证了上述结果，并继续通知并指导我们未来的实验，例如通过应用计算的全球政策。

Remote sensing imagery provides comprehensive views of the Earth, where different sensors collect complementary data at different spatial scales. Large, pretrained models are commonly finetuned with imagery that is heavily augmented to mimic different conditions and scales, with the resulting models used for various tasks with imagery from a range of spatial scales. Such models overlook scale-specific information in the data. In this paper, we present Scale-MAE, a pretraining method that explicitly learns relationships between data at different, known scales throughout the pretraining process. Scale-MAE pretrains a network by masking an input image at a known input scale, where the area of the Earth covered by the image determines the scale of the ViT positional encoding, not the image resolution. Scale-MAE encodes the masked image with a standard ViT backbone, and then decodes the masked image through a bandpass filter to reconstruct low/high frequency images at lower/higher scales. We find that tasking the network with reconstructing both low/high frequency images leads to robust multiscale representations for remote sensing imagery. Scale-MAE achieves an average of a $5.0\%$ non-parametric kNN classification improvement across eight remote sensing datasets compared to current state-of-the-art and obtains a $0.9$ mIoU to $3.8$ mIoU improvement on the SpaceNet building segmentation transfer task for a range of evaluation scales.

Traditional screening practices for anxiety and depression pose an impediment to monitoring and treating these conditions effectively. However, recent advances in NLP and speech modelling allow textual, acoustic, and hand-crafted language-based features to jointly form the basis of future mental health screening and condition detection. Speech is a rich and readily available source of insight into an individual's cognitive state and by leveraging different aspects of speech, we can develop new digital biomarkers for depression and anxiety. To this end, we propose a multi-modal system for the screening of depression and anxiety from self-administered speech tasks. The proposed model integrates deep-learned features from audio and text, as well as hand-crafted features that are informed by clinically-validated domain knowledge. We find that augmenting hand-crafted features with deep-learned features improves our overall classification F1 score comparing to a baseline of hand-crafted features alone from 0.58 to 0.63 for depression and from 0.54 to 0.57 for anxiety. The findings of our work suggest that speech-based biomarkers for depression and anxiety hold significant promise in the future of digital health.

This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to solve it is decomposing the problem into the smaller sub problems and combining the local solutions into the global one. The crux of any planning method for non-holonomic robots is the generation of motion primitives that generates solutions to local planning sub-problems. In this work we introduce a novel learnable steering function (policy), which takes into account kinodynamic constraints of the robot and both static and dynamic obstacles. This policy is efficiently trained via the policy optimization. Empirically, we show that our steering function generalizes well to unseen problems. We then plug in the trained policy into the sampling-based and lattice-based planners, and evaluate the resultant POLAMP algorithm (Policy Optimization that Learns Adaptive Motion Primitives) in a range of challenging setups that involve a car-like robot operating in the obstacle-rich parking-lot environments. We show that POLAMP is able to plan collision-free kinodynamic trajectories with success rates higher than 92%, when 50 simultaneously moving obstacles populate the environment showing better performance than the state-of-the-art competitors.

Most deep-learning-based continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) models share a similar backbone consisting of a visual module, a sequential module, and an alignment module. However, due to limited training samples, a connectionist temporal classification loss may not train such CSLR backbones sufficiently. In this work, we propose three auxiliary tasks to enhance the CSLR backbones. The first task enhances the visual module, which is sensitive to the insufficient training problem, from the perspective of consistency. Specifically, since the information of sign languages is mainly included in signers' facial expressions and hand movements, a keypoint-guided spatial attention module is developed to enforce the visual module to focus on informative regions, i.e., spatial attention consistency. Second, noticing that both the output features of the visual and sequential modules represent the same sentence, to better exploit the backbone's power, a sentence embedding consistency constraint is imposed between the visual and sequential modules to enhance the representation power of both features. We name the CSLR model trained with the above auxiliary tasks as consistency-enhanced CSLR, which performs well on signer-dependent datasets in which all signers appear during both training and testing. To make it more robust for the signer-independent setting, a signer removal module based on feature disentanglement is further proposed to remove signer information from the backbone. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of these auxiliary tasks. More remarkably, with a transformer-based backbone, our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on five benchmarks, PHOENIX-2014, PHOENIX-2014-T, PHOENIX-2014-SI, CSL, and CSL-Daily.

The xView2 competition and xBD dataset spurred significant advancements in overhead building damage detection, but the competition's pixel level scoring can lead to reduced solution performance in areas with tight clusters of buildings or uninformative context. We seek to advance automatic building damage assessment for disaster relief by proposing an auxiliary challenge to the original xView2 competition. This new challenge involves a new dataset and metrics indicating solution performance when damage is more local and limited than in xBD. Our challenge measures a network's ability to identify individual buildings and their damage level without excessive reliance on the buildings' surroundings. Methods that succeed on this challenge will provide more fine-grained, precise damage information than original xView2 solutions. The best-performing xView2 networks' performances dropped noticeably in our new limited/local damage detection task. The common causes of failure observed are that (1) building objects and their classifications are not separated well, and (2) when they are, the classification is strongly biased by surrounding buildings and other damage context. Thus, we release our augmented version of the dataset with additional object-level scoring metrics https://gitlab.kitware.com/dennis.melamed/xfbd to test independence and separability of building objects, alongside the pixel-level performance metrics of the original competition. We also experiment with new baseline models which improve independence and separability of building damage predictions. Our results indicate that building damage detection is not a fully-solved problem, and we invite others to use and build on our dataset augmentations and metrics.