更具体地说，神经系统能够简单有效地解决复杂的问题，超过现代计算机。在这方面，神经形态工程是一个研究领域，重点是模仿控制大脑的基本原理，以开发实现此类计算能力的系统。在该领域中，生物启发的学习和记忆系统仍然是要解决的挑战，这就是海马涉及的地方。正是大脑的区域充当短期记忆，从而从大脑皮层的所有感觉核中学习，非结构化和快速存储信息及其随后的回忆。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个基于海马的新型生物启发的记忆模型，具有学习记忆的能力，从提示中回顾它们（与其他内容相关的记忆的一部分），甚至在尝试时忘记记忆通过相同的提示学习其他人。该模型已在使用尖峰神经网络上在大型摩托车硬件平台上实现，并进行了一组实验和测试以证明其正确且预期的操作。所提出的基于SPIKE的内存模型仅在接收输入，能提供节能的情况下才能生成SPIKES，并且需要7个时间步，用于学习步骤和6个时间段来召回以前存储的存储器。这项工作介绍了基于生物启发的峰值海马记忆模型的第一个硬件实现，为开发未来更复杂的神经形态系统的发展铺平了道路。

神经形态工程由于其作为研究领域的巨大潜力而​​集中了大量研究人员的努力，以寻找对生物神经系统的优势的利用，而整个大脑的优势是设计更有效，更真实的 - 有能力的应用程序。为了开发尽可能接近生物学的应用，使用了尖峰神经网络（SNN），被认为是生物学上的，并构成了第三代人工神经网络（ANN）。由于某些基于SNN的应用程序可能需要存储数据才能以后使用，因此在数字电路中既存在，又以某种形式，在生物学中，需要尖峰内存。这项工作介绍了内存的尖峰实现，这是计算机架构中最重要的组件之一，在设计完全尖峰计算机时可能至关重要。在设计这种尖峰内存的过程中，还实施了不同的中间组件和测试。测试是在大三角帆神经形态平台上进行的，并允许验证用于构建所构图的方法。此外，这项工作深入研究了如何使用这种方法构建尖峰块，并包括IT和其他类似作品中使用的方法的比较，该作品着重于尖峰组件的设计，其中包括尖峰逻辑门和尖峰记忆。所有实施的块和开发的测试均可在公共存储库中提供。

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.

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.

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

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.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

In this paper, we present a novel visual SLAM and long-term localization benchmark for autonomous driving in challenging conditions based on the large-scale 4Seasons dataset. The proposed benchmark provides drastic appearance variations caused by seasonal changes and diverse weather and illumination conditions. While significant progress has been made in advancing visual SLAM on small-scale datasets with similar conditions, there is still a lack of unified benchmarks representative of real-world scenarios for autonomous driving. We introduce a new unified benchmark for jointly evaluating visual odometry, global place recognition, and map-based visual localization performance which is crucial to successfully enable autonomous driving in any condition. The data has been collected for more than one year, resulting in more than 300 km of recordings in nine different environments ranging from a multi-level parking garage to urban (including tunnels) to countryside and highway. We provide globally consistent reference poses with up to centimeter-level accuracy obtained from the fusion of direct stereo-inertial odometry with RTK GNSS. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art visual odometry and visual localization baseline approaches on the benchmark and analyze their properties. The experimental results provide new insights into current approaches and show promising potential for future research. Our benchmark and evaluation protocols will be available at https://www.4seasons-dataset.com/.