我们提出了一种使用嵌入式麦克风和扬声器来测量不同执行器特性的软气动执行器的感应方法。执行器的物理状态确定声音通过结构传播时的特定调制。使用简单的机器学习，我们创建了一个计算传感器，该传感器从声音录音中渗透相应的状态。我们在软气动连续执行器上演示了声传感器，并使用它来测量接触位置，接触力，对象材料，执行器通胀和执行器温度。我们表明该传感器是可靠的（六个接触位置的平均分类速率为93％），精确（平均空间精度为3.7毫米），并且可抵抗常见的干扰（如背景噪声）。最后，我们比较了不同的声音和学习方法，并以20毫秒的白噪声和支持向量分类器作为传感器模型获得最佳结果。

我们使用嵌入式音频组件为软气动执行器创建虚拟2D触觉阵列。我们检测到声音调制的特定接触特定变化以推断触觉信息。我们评估不同的声音表示和学习方法，甚至可以检测到较小的接触变化。我们以pneflex执行器的示例演示了声学触觉传感器阵列，并使用盲文显示器单独控制29x4销与执行器的90x10 mm棕榈表面的接触。评估空间分辨率，声传感器以X和Y方向将边缘定位在X和Y方向上，其根平方回归误差分别为1.67 mm和0.0 mm。甚至具有高度精度测量的单个盲文销的光接触。最后，我们通过成功阅读单个显示单元格的26个字母来证明传感器对复杂接触形状的敏感性，分类速率为88％。

凝视的机器人可以立即，准确，稳健地感知到固定物体和周围物体的相对位置的距离。我们展示了固定是如何在移动时查看一个对象的行为，利用3D空间几何形状的规律性来获取此信息。这些规律性引入了旋转翻译耦合，这些耦合并未在运动中常用于结构中。为了验证，我们使用带有RGB摄像机的Franka Emika机器人。我们a）发现，距离估计值的误差小于5 mm，距离为15 cm，b）显示如何使用相对位置在具有挑战性的情况下找到障碍物。我们将准确的距离估计值和障碍信息结合到一个反应性的机器人行为中，该行为能够拾取未知大小的对象，同时受到不可预见的障碍的阻碍。

软机器人是一个新兴领域，对需要与环境或人类的安全性和强大的互动的任务产生了有希望的结果，例如抓握，操纵和人机互动。软机器依赖于本质上兼容的部件，并且难以配备传统的刚性传感器，这些传统传感器会干扰其合规性。我们提出了一种高度灵活的触觉传感器，在低成本且易于制造，同时独立于14个出租车测量接触压力。传感器由压阻织物构成，用于高度敏感，连续的响应，以及来自定制设计的柔性印刷电路板，提供高的Taxel密度。从这些TaxLes，可以推断出与传感器的接触位置和强度。在本文中，我们解释了所提出的传感器的设计和制造，表征其输入输出关系，在装备到软机器人RBO手2的硅树脂基气动执行器时，评估其对遵守的影响，并证明传感器提供基于学习的携手对象识别的丰富和有用的反馈。

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.

Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update the model parameters. When the model parameters directly affect a probability distribution, the gradient estimator will involve score function terms. This paper studies baselines, a variance reduction technique for score functions. Motivated primarily by reinforcement learning, we derive for the first time an expression for the optimal state-dependent baseline, the baseline which results in a gradient estimator with minimum variance. Although we show that there exist examples where the optimal baseline may be arbitrarily better than a value function baseline, we find that the value function baseline usually performs similarly to an optimal baseline in terms of variance reduction. Moreover, the value function can also be used for bootstrapping estimators of the return, leading to additional variance reduction. Our results give new insight and justification for why value function baselines and the generalized advantage estimator (GAE) work well in practice.

We propose a fairness-aware learning framework that mitigates intersectional subgroup bias associated with protected attributes. Prior research has primarily focused on mitigating one kind of bias by incorporating complex fairness-driven constraints into optimization objectives or designing additional layers that focus on specific protected attributes. We introduce a simple and generic bias mitigation approach that prevents models from learning relationships between protected attributes and output variable by reducing mutual information between them. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in reducing bias with little or no drop in accuracy. We also show that the models trained with our learning framework become causally fair and insensitive to the values of protected attributes. Finally, we validate our approach by studying feature interactions between protected and non-protected attributes. We demonstrate that these interactions are significantly reduced when applying our bias mitigation.

Automatic segmentation is essential for the brain tumor diagnosis, disease prognosis, and follow-up therapy of patients with gliomas. Still, accurate detection of gliomas and their sub-regions in multimodal MRI is very challenging due to the variety of scanners and imaging protocols. Over the last years, the BraTS Challenge has provided a large number of multi-institutional MRI scans as a benchmark for glioma segmentation algorithms. This paper describes our contribution to the BraTS 2022 Continuous Evaluation challenge. We propose a new ensemble of multiple deep learning frameworks namely, DeepSeg, nnU-Net, and DeepSCAN for automatic glioma boundaries detection in pre-operative MRI. It is worth noting that our ensemble models took first place in the final evaluation on the BraTS testing dataset with Dice scores of 0.9294, 0.8788, and 0.8803, and Hausdorf distance of 5.23, 13.54, and 12.05, for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method ranked first in the final ranking on another unseen test dataset, namely Sub-Saharan Africa dataset, achieving mean Dice scores of 0.9737, 0.9593, and 0.9022, and HD95 of 2.66, 1.72, 3.32 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The docker image for the winning submission is publicly available at (https://hub.docker.com/r/razeineldin/camed22).

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.