为了执行机器人操纵任务，核心问题是确定满足任务要求的合适轨迹。存在各种计算此类轨迹的方法，是学习和优化主要驾驶技术。我们的作品建立在从示范中学习（LFD）范式的基础上，专家展示了动作，机器人学会了模仿它们。但是，专家演示不足以捕获各种任务规格，例如掌握对象的时间。在本文中，我们提出了一种新方法，以考虑LFD技能中的正式任务规格。确切地说，我们利用了系统的时间属性的一种表达形式信号时间逻辑（STL），以制定任务规格并使用黑盒优化（BBO）来相应地调整LFD技能。我们使用多个任务展示了我们的方法如何使用STL和BBO来解决LFD限制。

水果和蔬菜的检测，分割和跟踪是精确农业的三个基本任务，实现了机器人的收获和产量估计。但是，现代算法是饥饿的数据，并非总是有可能收集足够的数据来运用最佳性能的监督方法。由于数据收集是一项昂贵且繁琐的任务，因此在农业中使用计算机视觉的能力通常是小企业无法实现的。在此背景下的先前工作之后，我们提出了一种初始弱监督的解决方案，以减少在精确农业应用程序中获得最新检测和细分所需的数据，在这里，我们在这里改进该系统并探索跟踪果实的问题果园。我们介绍了拉齐奥南部（意大利）葡萄的葡萄园案例，因为葡萄由于遮挡，颜色和一般照明条件而难以分割。当有一些可以用作源数据的初始标记数据（例如，葡萄酒葡萄数据）时，我们会考虑这种情况，但与目标数据有很大不同（例如表格葡萄数据）。为了改善目标数据的检测和分割，我们建议使用弱边界框标签训练分割算法，而对于跟踪，我们从运动算法中利用3D结构来生成来自已标记样品的新标签。最后，将两个系统组合成完整的半监督方法。与SOTA监督解决方案的比较表明，我们的方法如何能够训练以很少的标记图像和非常简单的标签来实现高性能的新型号。

由于它可能对粮食安全，可持续性，资源利用效率，化学处理的降低以及人类努力和产量的优化，因此，自主机器人在农业中的应用正在越来越受欢迎。有了这一愿景，蓬勃发展的研究项目旨在开发一种适应性的机器人解决方案，用于精确耕作，该解决方案结合了小型自动无人驾驶飞机（UAV）（UAV）的空中调查能力以及由多功能无人驾驶的无人接地车（UGV）执行的针对性干预措施。本文概述了该项目中获得的科学和技术进步和结果。我们引入了多光谱感知算法以及空中和地面系统，用于监测农作物密度，杂草压力，作物氮营养状况，并准确地对杂草进行分类和定位。然后，我们介绍了针对我们在农业环境中机器人身份量身定制的导航和映射系统，以及用于协作映射的模块。我们最终介绍了我们在不同的现场条件和不同农作物中实施和测试的地面干预硬件，软件解决方案以及接口。我们描述了一个真正的用例，在该案例中，无人机与UGV合作以监视该领域并进行选择性喷涂而无需人工干预。

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

The current trend of applying transfer learning from CNNs trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present Colab NAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows it to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset in just 4.5 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

In this paper we propose a general approach to define a many-valued preferential interpretation of gradual argumentation semantics. The approach allows for conditional reasoning over arguments and boolean combination of arguments, with respect to a class of gradual semantics, through the verification of graded (strict or defeasible) implications over a preferential interpretation. As a proof of concept, in the finitely-valued case, an Answer set Programming approach is proposed for conditional reasoning in a many-valued argumentation semantics of weighted argumentation graphs. The paper also develops and discusses a probabilistic semantics for gradual argumentation, which builds on the many-valued conditional semantics.

One of today's goals for industrial robot systems is to allow fast and easy provisioning for new tasks. Skill-based systems that use planning and knowledge representation have long been one possible answer to this. However, especially with contact-rich robot tasks that need careful parameter settings, such reasoning techniques can fall short if the required knowledge not adequately modeled. We show an approach that provides a combination of task-level planning and reasoning with targeted learning of skill parameters for a task at hand. Starting from a task goal formulated in PDDL, the learnable parameters in the plan are identified and an operator can choose reward functions and parameters for the learning process. A tight integration with a knowledge framework allows to form a prior for learning and the usage of multi-objective Bayesian optimization eases to balance aspects such as safety and task performance that can often affect each other. We demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of our approach by learning skill parameters for two different contact-rich tasks and show their successful execution on a real 7-DOF KUKA-iiwa.

Weather forecasting centers currently rely on statistical postprocessing methods to minimize forecast error. This improves skill but can lead to predictions that violate physical principles or disregard dependencies between variables, which can be problematic for downstream applications and for the trustworthiness of postprocessing models, especially when they are based on new machine learning approaches. Building on recent advances in physics-informed machine learning, we propose to achieve physical consistency in deep learning-based postprocessing models by integrating meteorological expertise in the form of analytic equations. Applied to the post-processing of surface weather in Switzerland, we find that constraining a neural network to enforce thermodynamic state equations yields physically-consistent predictions of temperature and humidity without compromising performance. Our approach is especially advantageous when data is scarce, and our findings suggest that incorporating domain expertise into postprocessing models allows to optimize weather forecast information while satisfying application-specific requirements.

We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent empirical success, such algorithms have an apparent defect: trivial representations (such as constants) minimize the prediction error, yet it is obviously undesirable to converge to such solutions. Our central insight is that careful designs of the optimization dynamics are critical to learning meaningful representations. We identify that a faster paced optimization of the predictor and semi-gradient updates on the representation, are crucial to preventing the representation collapse. Then in an idealized setup, we show self-predictive learning dynamics carries out spectral decomposition on the state transition matrix, effectively capturing information of the transition dynamics. Building on the theoretical insights, we propose bidirectional self-predictive learning, a novel self-predictive algorithm that learns two representations simultaneously. We examine the robustness of our theoretical insights with a number of small-scale experiments and showcase the promise of the novel representation learning algorithm with large-scale experiments.

Pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks and benchmarks recently. Many state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs), however, do not scale well above the threshold of 512 input tokens. In specialized domains though (such as legal, scientific or biomedical), models often need to process very long text (sometimes well above 10000 tokens). Even though many efficient transformers have been proposed (such as Longformer, BigBird or FNet), so far, only very few such efficient models are available for specialized domains. Additionally, since the pretraining process is extremely costly in general - but even more so as the sequence length increases - it is often only in reach of large research labs. One way of making pretraining cheaper is the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) task, by providing more signal during training, since the loss can be computed over all tokens. In this work, we train Longformer models with the efficient RTD task on legal data to showcase that pretraining efficient LMs is possible using much less compute. We evaluate the trained models on challenging summarization tasks requiring the model to summarize long texts to show to what extent the models can achieve good performance on downstream tasks. We find that both the small and base models outperform their baselines on the in-domain BillSum and out-of-domain PubMed tasks in their respective parameter range. We publish our code and models for research purposes.