Efficient and robust control using spiking neural networks (SNNs) is still an open problem. Whilst behaviour of biological agents is produced through sparse and irregular spiking patterns, which provide both robust and efficient control, the activity patterns in most artificial spiking neural networks used for control are dense and regular -- resulting in potentially less efficient codes. Additionally, for most existing control solutions network training or optimization is necessary, even for fully identified systems, complicating their implementation in on-chip low-power solutions. The neuroscience theory of Spike Coding Networks (SCNs) offers a fully analytical solution for implementing dynamical systems in recurrent spiking neural networks -- while maintaining irregular, sparse, and robust spiking activity -- but it's not clear how to directly apply it to control problems. Here, we extend SCN theory by incorporating closed-form optimal estimation and control. The resulting networks work as a spiking equivalent of a linear-quadratic-Gaussian controller. We demonstrate robust spiking control of simulated spring-mass-damper and cart-pole systems, in the face of several perturbations, including input- and system-noise, system disturbances, and neural silencing. As our approach does not need learning or optimization, it offers opportunities for deploying fast and efficient task-specific on-chip spiking controllers with biologically realistic activity.

从物体及其在3D空间中的几何形状方面对世界的组成理解被认为是人类认知的基石。促进神经网络中这种表示形式的学习有望实质上提高标记的数据效率。作为朝着这个方向发展的关键步骤，我们在学习3D一致的复杂场景分解的问题上取得了进展，以无监督的方式将复杂场景分解为单个对象。我们介绍对象场景表示变压器（OSRT），这是一个以3D为中心的模型，其中各个对象表示通过新颖的视图合成自然出现。 OSRT比现有方法更为复杂，具有更大的对象和背景的复杂场景。同时，由于其光场参数化和新型的插槽混合器解码器，它在组成渲染时的多个数量级更快。我们认为，这项工作不仅将加速未来的建筑探索和扩展工作，而且还将成为以对象为中心和神经场景表示社区的有用工具。

数据增强是自然语言处理（NLP）模型的鲁棒性评估的重要组成部分，以及增强他们培训的数据的多样性。在本文中，我们呈现NL-Cogmenter，这是一种新的参与式Python的自然语言增强框架，它支持创建两个转换（对数据的修改）和过滤器（根据特定功能的数据拆分）。我们描述了框架和初始的117个变换和23个过滤器，用于各种自然语言任务。我们通过使用其几个转换来分析流行自然语言模型的鲁棒性来证明NL-Upmenter的功效。基础架构，Datacards和稳健性分析结果在NL-Augmenter存储库上公开可用（\ url {https://github.com/gem-benchmark/nl-augmenter}）。

Designing experiments often requires balancing between learning about the true treatment effects and earning from allocating more samples to the superior treatment. While optimal algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem (MABP) provide allocation policies that optimally balance learning and earning, they tend to be computationally expensive. The Gittins Index (GI) is a solution to the MABP that can simultaneously attain optimality and computationally efficiency goals, and it has been recently used in experiments with Bernoulli and Gaussian rewards. For the first time, we present a modification of the GI rule that can be used in experiments with exponentially-distributed rewards. We report its performance in simulated 2- armed and 3-armed experiments. Compared to traditional non-adaptive designs, our novel GI modified design shows operating characteristics comparable in learning (e.g. statistical power) but substantially better in earning (e.g. direct benefits). This illustrates the potential that designs using a GI approach to allocate participants have to improve participant benefits, increase efficiencies, and reduce experimental costs in adaptive multi-armed experiments with exponential rewards.

Quadruped robots are currently used in industrial robotics as mechanical aid to automate several routine tasks. However, presently, the usage of such a robot in a domestic setting is still very much a part of the research. This paper discusses the understanding and virtual simulation of such a robot capable of detecting and understanding human emotions, generating its gait, and responding via sounds and expression on a screen. To this end, we use a combination of reinforcement learning and software engineering concepts to simulate a quadruped robot that can understand emotions, navigate through various terrains and detect sound sources, and respond to emotions using audio-visual feedback. This paper aims to establish the framework of simulating a quadruped robot that is emotionally intelligent and can primarily respond to audio-visual stimuli using motor or audio response. The emotion detection from the speech was not as performant as ERANNs or Zeta Policy learning, still managing an accuracy of 63.5%. The video emotion detection system produced results that are almost at par with the state of the art, with an accuracy of 99.66%. Due to its "on-policy" learning process, the PPO algorithm was extremely rapid to learn, allowing the simulated dog to demonstrate a remarkably seamless gait across the different cadences and variations. This enabled the quadruped robot to respond to generated stimuli, allowing us to conclude that it functions as predicted and satisfies the aim of this work.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

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.

and widely used information measurement metric, particularly popularized for SSVEP- based Brain-Computer (BCI) interfaces. By combining speed and accuracy into a single-valued parameter, this metric aids in the evaluation and comparison of various target identification algorithms across different BCI communities. To accurately depict performance and inspire an end-to-end design for futuristic BCI designs, a more thorough examination and definition of ITR is therefore required. We model the symbiotic communication medium, hosted by the retinogeniculate visual pathway, as a discrete memoryless channel and use the modified capacity expressions to redefine the ITR. We use graph theory to characterize the relationship between the asymmetry of the transition statistics and the ITR gain with the new definition, leading to potential bounds on data rate performance. On two well-known SSVEP datasets, we compared two cutting-edge target identification methods. Results indicate that the induced DM channel asymmetry has a greater impact on the actual perceived ITR than the change in input distribution. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the ITR gain under the new definition is inversely correlated with the asymmetry in the channel transition statistics. Individual input customizations are further shown to yield perceived ITR performance improvements. An algorithm is proposed to find the capacity of binary classification and further discussions are given to extend such results to ensemble techniques.We anticipate that the results of our study will contribute to the characterization of the highly dynamic BCI channel capacities, performance thresholds, and improved BCI stimulus designs for a tighter symbiosis between the human brain and computer systems while enhancing the efficiency of the underlying communication resources.

A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic approximations of the objective function and its associated derivatives can be computed via inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Under reasonable assumptions, a high-probability bound on the iteration complexity of the algorithm to approximate first-order stationarity is derived. Numerical results on standard nonlinear optimization test problems illustrate the advantages and limitations of our proposed method.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.