Brain-inspired computing proposes a set of algorithmic principles that hold promise for advancing artificial intelligence. They endow systems with self learning capabilities, efficient energy usage, and high storage capacity. A core concept that lies at the heart of brain computation is sequence learning and prediction. This form of computation is essential for almost all our daily tasks such as movement generation, perception, and language. Understanding how the brain performs such a computation is not only important to advance neuroscience but also to pave the way to new technological brain-inspired applications. A previously developed spiking neural network implementation of sequence prediction and recall learns complex, high-order sequences in an unsupervised manner by local, biologically inspired plasticity rules. An emerging type of hardware that holds promise for efficiently running this type of algorithm is neuromorphic hardware. It emulates the way the brain processes information and maps neurons and synapses directly into a physical substrate. Memristive devices have been identified as potential synaptic elements in neuromorphic hardware. In particular, redox-induced resistive random access memories (ReRAM) devices stand out at many aspects. They permit scalability, are energy efficient and fast, and can implement biological plasticity rules. In this work, we study the feasibility of using ReRAM devices as a replacement of the biological synapses in the sequence learning model. We implement and simulate the model including the ReRAM plasticity using the neural simulator NEST. We investigate the effect of different device properties on the performance characteristics of the sequence learning model, and demonstrate resilience with respect to different on-off ratios, conductance resolutions, device variability, and synaptic failure.

诊断将音频流划分为基于扬声器的声音。包括入学步骤的实时诊断系统应限制入学培训样本，以减少用户交互时间。尽管对少数样品的培训产生的性能较差，但我们表明，使用年代自我训练方法可以大大提高准确性。我们研究了训练时间和分类性能之间的权衡，发现1秒足以达到超过95％的精度。我们从6种不同的语言中评估了700个音频对话文件约10分钟，并证明平均诊断错误率低至10％。

放射线学使用定量医学成像特征来预测临床结果。目前，在新的临床应用中，必须通过启发式试验和纠正过程手动完成各种可用选项的最佳放射组方法。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个框架，以自动优化每个应用程序的放射线工作流程的构建。为此，我们将放射线学作为模块化工作流程，并为每个组件包含大量的常见算法。为了优化每个应用程序的工作流程，我们使用随机搜索和结合使用自动化机器学习。我们在十二个不同的临床应用中评估我们的方法，从而在曲线下导致以下区域：1）脂肪肉瘤（0.83）； 2）脱粘型纤维瘤病（0.82）; 3）原发性肝肿瘤（0.80）; 4）胃肠道肿瘤（0.77）； 5）结直肠肝转移（0.61）; 6）黑色素瘤转移（0.45）; 7）肝细胞癌（0.75）; 8）肠系膜纤维化（0.80）; 9）前列腺癌（0.72）； 10）神经胶质瘤（0.71）; 11）阿尔茨海默氏病（0.87）;和12）头颈癌（0.84）。我们表明，我们的框架具有比较人类专家的竞争性能，优于放射线基线，并且表现相似或优于贝叶斯优化和更高级的合奏方法。最后，我们的方法完全自动优化了放射线工作流的构建，从而简化了在新应用程序中对放射线生物标志物的搜索。为了促进可重复性和未来的研究，我们公开发布了六个数据集，框架的软件实施以及重现这项研究的代码。

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. We use an autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) to determine if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provide explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. However, we test the ability to determine the relevance of a bill with the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was state-of-the-art on many language tasks until text-davinci-003 was released on November 28, 2022. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than simply always predicting that a bill is irrelevant to a company. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to improve core natural language understanding capabilities, performance on corporate lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. We then discuss why this could be problematic for societal-AI alignment.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

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.

Research on automated essay scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written-responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate three active learning methods than can be used to minimize the number of essays that must be scored by human raters while still providing the data needed to train a modern automated essay scoring system. The three active learning methods are the uncertainty-based, the topological-based, and the hybrid method. These three methods were used to select essays included as part of the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition that were then classified using a scoring model that was training with the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer language model. All three active learning methods produced strong results, with the topological-based method producing the most efficient classification. Growth rate accuracy was also evaluated. The active learning methods produced different levels of efficiency under different sample size allocations but, overall, all three methods were highly efficient and produced classifications that were similar to one another.

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

As various city agencies and mobility operators navigate toward innovative mobility solutions, there is a need for strategic flexibility in well-timed investment decisions in the design and timing of mobility service regions, i.e. cast as "real options" (RO). This problem becomes increasingly challenging with multiple interacting RO in such investments. We propose a scalable machine learning based RO framework for multi-period sequential service region design & timing problem for mobility-on-demand services, framed as a Markov decision process with non-stationary stochastic variables. A value function approximation policy from literature uses multi-option least squares Monte Carlo simulation to get a policy value for a set of interdependent investment decisions as deferral options (CR policy). The goal is to determine the optimal selection and timing of a set of zones to include in a service region. However, prior work required explicit enumeration of all possible sequences of investments. To address the combinatorial complexity of such enumeration, we propose a new variant "deep" RO policy using an efficient recurrent neural network (RNN) based ML method (CR-RNN policy) to sample sequences to forego the need for enumeration, making network design & timing policy tractable for large scale implementation. Experiments on multiple service region scenarios in New York City (NYC) shows the proposed policy substantially reduces the overall computational cost (time reduction for RO evaluation of > 90% of total investment sequences is achieved), with zero to near-zero gap compared to the benchmark. A case study of sequential service region design for expansion of MoD services in Brooklyn, NYC show that using the CR-RNN policy to determine optimal RO investment strategy yields a similar performance (0.5% within CR policy value) with significantly reduced computation time (about 5.4 times faster).