In spite of machine learning's rapid growth, its engineering support is scattered in many forms, and tends to favor certain engineering stages, stakeholders, and evaluation preferences. We envision a capability-based framework, which uses fine-grained specifications for ML model behaviors to unite existing efforts towards better ML engineering. We use concrete scenarios (model design, debugging, and maintenance) to articulate capabilities' broad applications across various different dimensions, and their impact on building safer, more generalizable and more trustworthy models that reflect human needs. Through preliminary experiments, we show capabilities' potential for reflecting model generalizability, which can provide guidance for ML engineering process. We discuss challenges and opportunities for capabilities' integration into ML engineering.

在软件项目中引入机器学习（ML）组件创造了软件工程师与数据科学家和其他专家合作。虽然合作可以始终具有挑战性，但ML介绍了探索性模型开发过程的额外挑战，需要额外的技能和知识，测试ML系统的困难，需要连续演化和监测，以及非传统质量要求，如公平性和解释性。通过采访来自28个组织的45名从业者，我们确定了在建立和将ML系统部署到生产时面临的关键合作挑战。我们报告了生产ML系统的开发中的共同合作点，以获得要求，数据和集成以及相应的团队模式和挑战。我们发现，这些挑战中的大部分挑战围绕通信，文档，工程和流程以及收集建议以解决这些挑战。

Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of applications. It allows sending robots instead of humans in remote, possibly dangerous locations while still using the human brain with its enormous knowledge and creativity, especially for solving unexpected problems. A main challenge in teleoperation consists of providing enough feedback to the human operator for situation awareness and thus create full immersion, as well as offering the operator suitable control interfaces to achieve efficient and robust task fulfillment. We present a bimanual telemanipulation system consisting of an anthropomorphic avatar robot and an operator station providing force and haptic feedback to the human operator. The avatar arms are controlled in Cartesian space with a direct mapping of the operator movements. The measured forces and torques on the avatar side are haptically displayed to the operator. We developed a predictive avatar model for limit avoidance which runs on the operator side, ensuring low latency. The system was successfully evaluated during the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition semifinals. In addition, we performed in lab experiments and carried out a small user study with mostly untrained operators.

The purpose of this work was to tackle practical issues which arise when using a tendon-driven robotic manipulator with a long, passive, flexible proximal section in medical applications. A separable robot which overcomes difficulties in actuation and sterilization is introduced, in which the body containing the electronics is reusable and the remainder is disposable. A control input which resolves the redundancy in the kinematics and a physical interpretation of this redundancy are provided. The effect of a static change in the proximal section angle on bending angle error was explored under four testing conditions for a sinusoidal input. Bending angle error increased for increasing proximal section angle for all testing conditions with an average error reduction of 41.48% for retension, 4.28% for hysteresis, and 52.35% for re-tension + hysteresis compensation relative to the baseline case. Two major sources of error in tracking the bending angle were identified: time delay from hysteresis and DC offset from the proximal section angle. Examination of these error sources revealed that the simple hysteresis compensation was most effective for removing time delay and re-tension compensation for removing DC offset, which was the primary source of increasing error. The re-tension compensation was also tested for dynamic changes in the proximal section and reduced error in the final configuration of the tip by 89.14% relative to the baseline case.

Learning enabled autonomous systems provide increased capabilities compared to traditional systems. However, the complexity of and probabilistic nature in the underlying methods enabling such capabilities present challenges for current systems engineering processes for assurance, and test, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV). This paper provides a preliminary attempt to map recently developed technical approaches in the assurance and TEVV of learning enabled autonomous systems (LEAS) literature to a traditional systems engineering v-model. This mapping categorizes such techniques into three main approaches: development, acquisition, and sustainment. We review the latest techniques to develop safe, reliable, and resilient learning enabled autonomous systems, without recommending radical and impractical changes to existing systems engineering processes. By performing this mapping, we seek to assist acquisition professionals by (i) informing comprehensive test and evaluation planning, and (ii) objectively communicating risk to leaders.

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has access to full information about the environment. We remove this assumption by developing an algorithm for IRL in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We address two limitations of existing IRL techniques. First, they require an excessive amount of data due to the information asymmetry between the expert and the learner. Second, most of these IRL techniques require solving the computationally intractable forward problem -- computing an optimal policy given a reward function -- in POMDPs. The developed algorithm reduces the information asymmetry while increasing the data efficiency by incorporating task specifications expressed in temporal logic into IRL. Such specifications may be interpreted as side information available to the learner a priori in addition to the demonstrations. Further, the algorithm avoids a common source of algorithmic complexity by building on causal entropy as the measure of the likelihood of the demonstrations as opposed to entropy. Nevertheless, the resulting problem is nonconvex due to the so-called forward problem. We solve the intrinsic nonconvexity of the forward problem in a scalable manner through a sequential linear programming scheme that guarantees to converge to a locally optimal policy. In a series of examples, including experiments in a high-fidelity Unity simulator, we demonstrate that even with a limited amount of data and POMDPs with tens of thousands of states, our algorithm learns reward functions and policies that satisfy the task while inducing similar behavior to the expert by leveraging the provided side information.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressions matching the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor. Specifically, we train a style-agnostic transformer on a large facial expression dataset which we use as a prior for audio-driven facial expressions. Based on this prior, we optimize for identity-specific speaking style based on a short reference video. To train the prior, we introduce a novel loss function based on detected bilabial consonants to ensure plausible lip closures and consequently improve the realism of the generated expressions. Through detailed experiments and a user study, we show that our approach produces temporally coherent facial expressions from input audio while preserving the speaking style of the target actors.

We study the problem of graph clustering under a broad class of objectives in which the quality of a cluster is defined based on the ratio between the number of edges in the cluster, and the total weight of vertices in the cluster. We show that our definition is closely related to popular clustering measures, namely normalized associations, which is a dual of the normalized cut objective, and normalized modularity. We give a linear time constant-approximate algorithm for our objective, which implies the first constant-factor approximation algorithms for normalized modularity and normalized associations.

Neuromorphic systems require user-friendly software to support the design and optimization of experiments. In this work, we address this need by presenting our development of a machine learning-based modeling framework for the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system. This work represents an improvement over previous efforts, which either focused on the matrix-multiplication mode of BrainScaleS-2 or lacked full automation. Our framework, called hxtorch.snn, enables the hardware-in-the-loop training of spiking neural networks within PyTorch, including support for auto differentiation in a fully-automated hardware experiment workflow. In addition, hxtorch.snn facilitates seamless transitions between emulating on hardware and simulating in software. We demonstrate the capabilities of hxtorch.snn on a classification task using the Yin-Yang dataset employing a gradient-based approach with surrogate gradients and densely sampled membrane observations from the BrainScaleS-2 hardware system.

Multi-class ensemble classification remains a popular focus of investigation within the research community. The popularization of cloud services has sped up their adoption due to the ease of deploying large-scale machine-learning models. It has also drawn the attention of the industrial sector because of its ability to identify common problems in production. However, there are challenges to conform an ensemble classifier, namely a proper selection and effective training of the pool of classifiers, the definition of a proper architecture for multi-class classification, and uncertainty quantification of the ensemble classifier. The robustness and effectiveness of the ensemble classifier lie in the selection of the pool of classifiers, as well as in the learning process. Hence, the selection and the training procedure of the pool of classifiers play a crucial role. An (ensemble) classifier learns to detect the classes that were used during the supervised training. However, when injecting data with unknown conditions, the trained classifier will intend to predict the classes learned during the training. To this end, the uncertainty of the individual and ensemble classifier could be used to assess the learning capability. We present a novel approach for novel detection using ensemble classification and evidence theory. A pool selection strategy is presented to build a solid ensemble classifier. We present an architecture for multi-class ensemble classification and an approach to quantify the uncertainty of the individual classifiers and the ensemble classifier. We use uncertainty for the anomaly detection approach. Finally, we use the benchmark Tennessee Eastman to perform experiments to test the ensemble classifier's prediction and anomaly detection capabilities.