近年来，生成设计技术已在许多应用领域，尤其是在工程领域中牢固地建立。这些方法证明了由于前景有希望的增长。但是，现有方法受到考虑的问题的特异性受到限制。此外，它们不提供所需的灵活性。在本文中，我们为任意生成设计问题制定了一般方法，并提出了名为Gefest（编码结构的生成进化）的新颖框架。开发的方法基于三个一般原则：采样，估计和优化。这样可以确保方法调整特定生成设计问题的方法的自由度，因此可以构建最合适的方法。进行了一系列实验研究，以确认Gefest框架的有效性。它涉及合成和现实情况（沿海工程，微流体，热力学和油田计划）。 Gefest的柔性结构使得获得超过基线溶液的结果。

生物视觉系统的神经基础在实验上研究很具有挑战性，特别是因为相对于视觉输入，神经元活性变得越来越非线性。人工神经网络（ANN）可以为改善我们对这一复杂系统的理解提供各种目标，不仅充当硅中新假设产生的感觉皮层的预测数字双胞胎，而且还融合了生物启发的建筑主题，以逐步桥接桥梁生物和机器视觉之间的差距。该鼠标最近已成为研究视觉信息处理的流行模型系统，但是尚未确定识别鼠标视觉系统最新模型的标准化大规模基准。为了填补这一空白，我们提出了感官基准竞赛。我们从小鼠初级视觉皮层中收集了一个大规模数据集，其中包含七个小鼠的28,000多个神经元的反应，并通过数千个自然图像刺激，以及同时的行为测量，包括跑步速度，瞳孔扩张和眼动。基准挑战将基于固定测试集​​中神经元响应的预测性能对模型进行对模型，其中包括两个模型输入的轨道，仅限于刺激（感觉到）或刺激加行为（感觉符号+）。我们提供一个起始套件，以降低进入障碍的障碍，包括教程，预训练的基线模型以及带有一条线命令以进行数据加载和提交的API。我们希望将其视为定期挑战和数据发布的起点，也是衡量鼠标视觉系统及其他大规模神经系统识别模型中进度的标准工具。

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.

Attention mechanisms form a core component of several successful deep learning architectures, and are based on one key idea: ''The output depends only on a small (but unknown) segment of the input.'' In several practical applications like image captioning and language translation, this is mostly true. In trained models with an attention mechanism, the outputs of an intermediate module that encodes the segment of input responsible for the output is often used as a way to peek into the `reasoning` of the network. We make such a notion more precise for a variant of the classification problem that we term selective dependence classification (SDC) when used with attention model architectures. Under such a setting, we demonstrate various error modes where an attention model can be accurate but fail to be interpretable, and show that such models do occur as a result of training. We illustrate various situations that can accentuate and mitigate this behaviour. Finally, we use our objective definition of interpretability for SDC tasks to evaluate a few attention model learning algorithms designed to encourage sparsity and demonstrate that these algorithms help improve interpretability.

This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to solve it is decomposing the problem into the smaller sub problems and combining the local solutions into the global one. The crux of any planning method for non-holonomic robots is the generation of motion primitives that generates solutions to local planning sub-problems. In this work we introduce a novel learnable steering function (policy), which takes into account kinodynamic constraints of the robot and both static and dynamic obstacles. This policy is efficiently trained via the policy optimization. Empirically, we show that our steering function generalizes well to unseen problems. We then plug in the trained policy into the sampling-based and lattice-based planners, and evaluate the resultant POLAMP algorithm (Policy Optimization that Learns Adaptive Motion Primitives) in a range of challenging setups that involve a car-like robot operating in the obstacle-rich parking-lot environments. We show that POLAMP is able to plan collision-free kinodynamic trajectories with success rates higher than 92%, when 50 simultaneously moving obstacles populate the environment showing better performance than the state-of-the-art competitors.

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled us to address the curse of dimensionality (COD) by solving problems in higher dimensions. A subset of such approaches of addressing the COD has led us to solving high-dimensional PDEs. This has resulted in opening doors to solving a variety of real-world problems ranging from mathematical finance to stochastic control for industrial applications. Although feasible, these deep learning methods are still constrained by training time and memory. Tackling these shortcomings, Tensor Neural Networks (TNN) demonstrate that they can provide significant parameter savings while attaining the same accuracy as compared to the classical Dense Neural Network (DNN). In addition, we also show how TNN can be trained faster than DNN for the same accuracy. Besides TNN, we also introduce Tensor Network Initializer (TNN Init), a weight initialization scheme that leads to faster convergence with smaller variance for an equivalent parameter count as compared to a DNN. We benchmark TNN and TNN Init by applying them to solve the parabolic PDE associated with the Heston model, which is widely used in financial pricing theory.

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

KL-regularized reinforcement learning from expert demonstrations has proved successful in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, allowing them to be applied to challenging physical real-world tasks. However, we show that KL-regularized reinforcement learning with behavioral reference policies derived from expert demonstrations can suffer from pathological training dynamics that can lead to slow, unstable, and suboptimal online learning. We show empirically that the pathology occurs for commonly chosen behavioral policy classes and demonstrate its impact on sample efficiency and online policy performance. Finally, we show that the pathology can be remedied by non-parametric behavioral reference policies and that this allows KL-regularized reinforcement learning to significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of challenging locomotion and dexterous hand manipulation tasks.

Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly degrade the performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm -- robust consensus clustering that can find common ground truth among experts' opinions, which tends to be minimally affected by the bias caused by the outliers. In particular, we formalize the robust consensus clustering problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then derive an effective algorithm upon alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous convergence guarantee. Our method outperforms the baselines on benchmarks. We apply the proposed method to the real-world advertising campaign segmentation and forecasting tasks using the proposed consensus clustering results based on the similarity computed via Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics. The accurate clustering result is helpful for building the advertiser profiles so as to perform the forecasting.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.