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.

深尾学习旨在培训有用的深层网络，以实用现实世界中的不平衡分布，其中大多数尾巴类别的标签都与一些样本相关联。有大量的工作来训练判别模型，以进行长尾分布的视觉识别。相比之下，我们旨在训练有条件的生成对抗网络，这是一类长尾分布的图像生成模型。我们发现，类似于识别图像产生的最新方法类似，也遭受了尾部类别的性能降解。性能降解主要是由于尾部类别的类别模式塌陷，我们观察到与调节参数矩阵的光谱爆炸相关。我们提出了一种新型的组光谱正规剂（GSR），以防止光谱爆炸减轻模式崩溃，从而导致尾巴类别的形象产生多样化和合理的图像产生。我们发现GSR有效地与现有的增强和正则化技术结合在一起，从而导致长尾数据上的最新图像生成性能。广泛的实验证明了我们的常规器在不同程度不平衡的长尾数据集上的功效。

GAN的进展使高分辨率的感性质量形象产生了产生。 stylegans允许通过数学操作对W/W+空间中的潜在样式向量进行数学操作进行引人入胜的属性修改，从而有效调节生成器的丰富层次结构表示。最近，此类操作已被推广到原始StyleGan纸中的属性交换之外，以包括插值。尽管StyleGans有许多重大改进，但仍被认为会产生不自然的图像。生成的图像的质量基于两个假设。 （a）生成器学到的层次表示的丰富性，以及（b）样式空间的线性和平滑度。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个层次的语义正常化程序（HSR），该层次正常化程序将生成器学到的层次表示与大量数据学到的相应的强大功能保持一致。 HSR不仅可以改善发电机的表示，还可以改善潜在风格空间的线性和平滑度，从而导致产生更自然的样式编辑的图像。为了证明线性改善，我们提出了一种新型的度量 - 属性线性评分（ALS）。通过改善感知路径长度（PPL）度量的改善，在不同的标准数据集中平均16.19％的不自然图像的生成显着降低，同时改善了属性编辑任务中属性变化的线性变化。

域对抗训练无处不在地实现不变表示，并广泛用于各种域适应任务。近来，融合到平滑最佳的方法已显示出对分类等监督学习任务的改进的概括。在这项工作中，我们分析了增强配方对域对抗训练的影响，其目的是任务损失（例如分类，回归等）和对抗性术语的组合。我们发现，相对于（W.R.T.）任务损失融合了平滑的最小值，可以稳定对抗性训练，从而在目标域上获得更好的性能。与任务损失相反，我们的分析表明，融合到平滑的最小W.R.T.对抗损失导致目标结构域的次级概括。基于分析，我们介绍了平滑的域对抗训练（SDAT）程序，该程序有效地增强了现有域对抗方法的性能，以进行分类和对象检测任务。我们的分析还提供了对社区中亚当（Adam）对域名对抗训练的广泛使用的洞察力。

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.

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.

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.

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.