汤普森采样是上下文匪徒的最有效方法之一，已被推广到某些MDP设置后的后验采样。但是，现有的后验学习方法是基于模型或缺乏线性MDP以外的最坏情况的理论保证而受到限制的。本文提出了一种新的无模型后取样公式，该公式适用于具有理论保证的更通用的情节增强学习问题。我们介绍了新颖的证明技术，以表明在适当的条件下，我们的后抽样方法的最遗憾与基于优化的方法的最著名结果相匹配。在具有尺寸的线性MDP设置中，与现有基于后采样的探索算法的二次依赖性相比，我们算法的遗憾与维度线性缩放。

我们提出了对Zimmert和Seldin [2020]算法的修改调整，用于对抗性的多型匪徒，并具有延迟的反馈，除了Zimmert和Seldin的最小值最佳对抗性遗憾保证外，还可以同时获得近乎遗憾的遗憾。有固定的延迟。具体而言，对抗性遗憾保证是$ \ Mathcal {o}（\ sqrt {tk} + \ sqrt {dt \ log k}）$，其中$ t $是时间范围，$ k $是武器数量，并且$ d $是固定的延迟，而随机遗憾保证是$ \ Mathcal {o} \ left（\ sum_ {i \ neq i^*}（\ frac {1} {\ delta_i} \ log log（t） frac {d} {\ delta_ {i} \ log k}） + d k^{1/3} \ log k \ right）$，其中$ \ delta_i $是次优差距。我们还向任意延迟的情况提供了算法的扩展，该算法基于对最大延迟$ d_ {max} $的甲骨文知识，并获得$ \ mathcal {o}（\ sqrt {\ sqrt {tk} + \ sqrt { d \ log k} + d_ {max} k^{1/3} \ log k）$在对抗性方案中遗憾，其中$ d $是总延迟，$ \ mathcal {o} \ left（\ sum_ {\ sum_ { i \ neq i^*}（\ frac {1} {\ delta_i} \ log（t） + \ frac {\ sigma_ {max}}} {\ delta_ {i} {1/3} \ log k \ right）$在随机制度中遗憾，其中$ \ sigma_ {max} $是最大的杰出观测值。最后，我们提出了一个下限，与Zimmert和Seldin [2020]在对抗环境中的跳过技术所达到的遗憾上限相匹配。

我们通过反馈图来重新审视随机在线学习的问题，目的是设计最佳的算法，直至常数，无论是渐近还是有限的时间。我们表明，令人惊讶的是，在这种情况下，最佳有限时间遗憾的概念并不是一个唯一的定义属性，总的来说，它与渐近率是与渐近率分离的。我们讨论了替代选择，并提出了有限时间最优性的概念，我们认为是\ emph {有意义的}。对于这个概念，我们给出了一种算法，在有限的时间和渐近上都承认了准最佳的遗憾。

We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of base algorithms and different type of adversarial meta-algorithms. Our methods rely on a novel and generic smoothing transformation for bandit algorithms that permits us to obtain optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ model selection guarantees for stochastic contextual bandit problems as long as the optimal base algorithm satisfies a high probability regret guarantee. We show through a lower bound that even when one of the base algorithms has $O(\log T)$ regret, in general it is impossible to get better than $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret in model selection, even asymptotically. Using our techniques, we address model selection in a variety of problems such as misspecified linear contextual bandits, linear bandit with unknown dimension and reinforcement learning with unknown feature maps. Our algorithm requires the knowledge of the optimal base regret to adjust the meta-algorithm learning rate. We show that without such prior knowledge any meta-algorithm can suffer a regret larger than the optimal base regret.

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

Feedforward fully convolutional neural networks currently dominate in semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds. Despite their great success, they suffer from the loss of local information at low-level layers, posing significant challenges to accurate scene segmentation and precise object boundary delineation. Prior works either address this issue by post-processing or jointly learn object boundaries to implicitly improve feature encoding of the networks. These approaches often require additional modules which are difficult to integrate into the original architecture. To improve the segmentation near object boundaries, we propose a boundary-aware feature propagation mechanism. This mechanism is achieved by exploiting a multi-task learning framework that aims to explicitly guide the boundaries to their original locations. With one shared encoder, our network outputs (i) boundary localization, (ii) prediction of directions pointing to the object's interior, and (iii) semantic segmentation, in three parallel streams. The predicted boundaries and directions are fused to propagate the learned features to refine the segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on the S3DIS and SensatUrban datasets against various baseline methods, demonstrating that our proposed approach yields consistent improvements by reducing boundary errors. Our code is available at https://github.com/shenglandu/PushBoundary.

Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Pre-training is an effective technique for ensuring robust performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. It typically depends on large-scale crawled corpora that can result in toxic or biased models. Such data can also be problematic with respect to copyright, attribution, and privacy. Pre-training with synthetic tasks and data is a promising way of alleviating such concerns since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our goal in this paper is to understand what makes for a good pre-trained model when using synthetic resources. We answer this question in the context of neural machine translation by considering two novel approaches to translation model pre-training. Our first approach studies the effect of pre-training on obfuscated data derived from a parallel corpus by mapping words to a vocabulary of 'nonsense' tokens. Our second approach explores the effect of pre-training on procedurally generated synthetic parallel data that does not depend on any real human language corpus. Our empirical evaluation on multiple language pairs shows that, to a surprising degree, the benefits of pre-training can be realized even with obfuscated or purely synthetic parallel data. In our analysis, we consider the extent to which obfuscated and synthetic pre-training techniques can be used to mitigate the issue of hallucinated model toxicity.