We introduce a language generation task grounded in a popular video game environment. KNUDGE (KNowledge Constrained User-NPC Dialogue GEneration) involves generating dialogue trees conditioned on an ontology captured in natural language passages providing quest and entity specifications. KNUDGE is constructed from side quest dialogues drawn directly from game data of Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, leading to real-world complexities in generation: (1) dialogues are branching trees as opposed to linear chains of utterances; (2) utterances must remain faithful to the game lore--character personas, backstories, and entity relationships; and (3) a dialogue must accurately reveal new quest-related details to the human player. We report results for supervised and in-context learning techniques, finding there is significant room for future work on creating realistic game-quality dialogues.

在现实世界中的对话系统中，生成的响应必须满足几个互锁的限制：内容丰富，真实且易于控制。语言生成中的两个主要范式 - 神经语言建模和基于规则的一代 - 都难以满足这些约束。即使是最好的神经模型，也容易出现信息的幻觉和省略，而现有的基于规则的形式的形式使得很难编写既灵活又流利的语法。我们描述了对话响应产生的混合体系结构，结合了两种方法的优势。该体系结构有两个组件。首先，使用新的正式框架定义的基于规则的内容选择模型，称为数据流转导，该模型使用声明性规则将对话代理的计算（表示为数据流图）转换为代表上下文可接受响应空间的无上下文语法。其次，使用这些语法来限制神经语言模型的输出的受约束解码过程，该过程选择流利的话语。最终的系统在人类对流利，相关性和真实性的评估中的表现都优于基于规则的方法和学识渊博的方法。

拟人化是一种语音人物，它赋予无生命实体具有属性和行动，通常被视为需要动画。在本文中，我们探讨了人格化生成的任务。为此，我们提出了菠萝：通过获取平行的人格化数据来学习增强的产生，来拟人化无生命的实体。我们策划了一个名为PersonifCorp的拟人化语料库，并自动生成了这些拟人化的文字化。我们通过训练SEQ2SEQ模型来拟人化给定的文字输入，从而证明了该平行语料库的有用性。自动评估和人类评估都表明，通过人格科目进行微调会带来与人格化相关的素质（例如动画和兴趣）的显着提高。详细的定性分析还强调了菠萝在基准上的关键优势和瑕疵，表明具有强大的能力产生多样化和创造性的拟人化，从而增强了句子的整体吸引力。

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions. The MPC employs a novel objective function and an online decomposition of the oscillatory motion of the vessel to predict, attempt, and accomplish the landing during near-zero tilt of the landing platform. The nonlinear prediction of the motion of the vessel is performed using visual data from an onboard camera. Therefore, the system does not require any communication with the USV or a control station. The proposed method was analyzed in numerous robotics simulations in harsh and extreme conditions and further validated in various real-world scenarios.

Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In this work, we analyze the class-imbalanced learning problem by examining the loss landscape of neural networks trained with re-weighting and margin-based techniques. Specifically, we examine the spectral density of Hessian of class-wise loss, through which we observe that the network weights converge to a saddle point in the loss landscapes of minority classes. Following this observation, we also find that optimization methods designed to escape from saddle points can be effectively used to improve generalization on minority classes. We further theoretically and empirically demonstrate that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recent technique that encourages convergence to a flat minima, can be effectively used to escape saddle points for minority classes. Using SAM results in a 6.2\% increase in accuracy on the minority classes over the state-of-the-art Vector Scaling Loss, leading to an overall average increase of 4\% across imbalanced datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/val-iisc/Saddle-LongTail.

Parkinson's disease is marked by altered and increased firing characteristics of pathological oscillations in the brain. In other words, it causes abnormal synchronous oscillations and suppression during neurological processing. In order to examine and regulate the synchronization and pathological oscillations in motor circuits, deep brain stimulators (DBS) are used. Although machine learning methods have been applied for the investigation of suppression, these models require large amounts of training data and computational power, both of which pose challenges to resource-constrained DBS. This research proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for suppressing the synchronization in neuronal activity during episodes of neurological disorders with less power consumption. The proposed RL algorithm comprises an ensemble of a temporal representation of stimuli and a twin-delayed deep deterministic (TD3) policy gradient algorithm. We quantify the stability of the proposed framework to noise and reduced synchrony using RL for three pathological signaling regimes: regular, chaotic, and bursting, and further eliminate the undesirable oscillations. Furthermore, metrics such as evaluation rewards, energy supplied to the ensemble, and the mean point of convergence were used and compared to other RL algorithms, specifically the Advantage actor critic (A2C), the Actor critic with Kronecker-featured trust region (ACKTR), and the Proximal policy optimization (PPO).

Problem statement: Standardisation of AI fairness rules and benchmarks is challenging because AI fairness and other ethical requirements depend on multiple factors such as context, use case, type of the AI system, and so on. In this paper, we elaborate that the AI system is prone to biases at every stage of its lifecycle, from inception to its usage, and that all stages require due attention for mitigating AI bias. We need a standardised approach to handle AI fairness at every stage. Gap analysis: While AI fairness is a hot research topic, a holistic strategy for AI fairness is generally missing. Most researchers focus only on a few facets of AI model-building. Peer review shows excessive focus on biases in the datasets, fairness metrics, and algorithmic bias. In the process, other aspects affecting AI fairness get ignored. The solution proposed: We propose a comprehensive approach in the form of a novel seven-layer model, inspired by the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model, to standardise AI fairness handling. Despite the differences in the various aspects, most AI systems have similar model-building stages. The proposed model splits the AI system lifecycle into seven abstraction layers, each corresponding to a well-defined AI model-building or usage stage. We also provide checklists for each layer and deliberate on potential sources of bias in each layer and their mitigation methodologies. This work will facilitate layer-wise standardisation of AI fairness rules and benchmarking parameters.

Recent work has shown that large language models are capable of generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) to answer a multi-step question when prompted to do so. This is insufficient, however, when the necessary knowledge is not available or up-to-date within a model's parameters. A straightforward approach to address this is to retrieve text from an external knowledge source using the question as a query and prepend it as context to the model's input. This, however, is also insufficient for multi-step QA where \textit{what to retrieve} depends on \textit{what has already been derived}. To address this issue we propose IRCoT, a new approach that interleaves retrieval with CoT for multi-step QA, guiding the retrieval with CoT and in turn using retrieved results to improve CoT. Our experiments with GPT3 show substantial improvements in retrieval (up to 22 points) and downstream QA (up to 16 points) over the baselines on four datasets: HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and IIRC. Notably, our method also works well for much smaller models such as T5-Flan-large (0.7B) without any additional training.

Active target sensing is the task of discovering and classifying an unknown number of targets in an environment and is critical in search-and-rescue missions. This paper develops a deep reinforcement learning approach to plan informative trajectories that increase the likelihood for an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) to discover missing targets. Our approach efficiently (1) explores the environment to discover new targets, (2) exploits its current belief of the target states and incorporates inaccurate sensor models for high-fidelity classification, and (3) generates dynamically feasible trajectories for an agile UAV by employing a motion primitive library. Extensive simulations on randomly generated environments show that our approach is more efficient in discovering and classifying targets than several other baselines. A unique characteristic of our approach, in contrast to heuristic informative path planning approaches, is that it is robust to varying amounts of deviations of the prior belief from the true target distribution, thereby alleviating the challenge of designing heuristics specific to the application conditions.

Sequence models based on linear state spaces (SSMs) have recently emerged as a promising choice of architecture for modeling long range dependencies across various modalities. However, they invariably rely on discretization of a continuous state space, which complicates their presentation and understanding. In this work, we dispose of the discretization step, and propose a model based on vanilla Diagonal Linear RNNs ($\mathrm{DLR}$). We empirically show that $\mathrm{DLR}$ is as performant as previously-proposed SSMs in the presence of strong supervision, despite being conceptually much simpler. Moreover, we characterize the expressivity of SSMs (including $\mathrm{DLR}$) and attention-based models via a suite of $13$ synthetic sequence-to-sequence tasks involving interactions over tens of thousands of tokens, ranging from simple operations, such as shifting an input sequence, to detecting co-dependent visual features over long spatial ranges in flattened images. We find that while SSMs report near-perfect performance on tasks that can be modeled via $\textit{few}$ convolutional kernels, they struggle on tasks requiring $\textit{many}$ such kernels and especially when the desired sequence manipulation is $\textit{context-dependent}$. For example, $\mathrm{DLR}$ learns to perfectly shift a $0.5M$-long input by an arbitrary number of positions but fails when the shift size depends on context. Despite these limitations, $\mathrm{DLR}$ reaches high performance on two higher-order reasoning tasks $\mathrm{ListOpsSubTrees}$ and $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{256}$ with input lengths $8K$ and $65K$ respectively, and gives encouraging performance on $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{512}$ with input length $262K$ for which attention is not a viable choice.