通过加强学习解决现实世界的顺序决策问题（RL）通常始于使用模拟真实条件的模拟环境。我们为现实的农作物管理任务提供了一种新颖的开源RL环境。 Gym-DSSAT是高保真作物模拟器的农业技术转移决策支持系统（DSSAT）的健身房界面。在过去的30年中，DSSAT已发展，并被农学家广泛认可。 Gym-DSSAT带有基于现实世界玉米实验的预定义仿真。环境与任何健身房环境一样易于使用。我们使用基本RL算法提供性能基准。我们还简要概述了用Fortran编写的单片DSSAT模拟器如何变成Python RL环境。我们的方法是通用的，可以应用于类似的模拟器。我们报告了非常初步的实验结果，这表明RL可以帮助研究人员改善受精和灌溉实践的可持续性。

胜利预测对于了解电子竞技中的技能建模，团队合作和对接至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了GCN-WP，这是基于图形卷积网络的电子竞技的半监督胜利预测模型。该模型在一个赛季（1年）的过程中了解了电子竞技联盟的结构，并在另一个类似的联赛上做出了预测。该模型集成了有关比赛和玩家的30多个功能，并采用图形卷积根据他们的附近进行分类。与机器学习或LOL的技能评级模型相比，我们的模型可实现最先进的预测准确性。该框架是可以推广的，因此可以轻松地扩展到其他多人游戏在线游戏。

目前，由精确的径向速度（RV）观察结果受到恒星活性引入的虚假RV信号的限制。我们表明，诸如线性回归和神经网络之类的机器学习技术可以有效地从RV观测中删除活动信号（由于星形/张图引起的）。先前的工作着重于使用高斯工艺回归等建模技术仔细地过滤活性信号（例如Haywood等人，2014年）。取而代之的是，我们仅使用对光谱线平均形状的更改进行系统地删除活动信号，也没有有关收集观测值的信息。我们对模拟数据（使用SOAP 2.0软件生成； Dumusque等人，2014年生成）和从Harps-N太阳能望远镜（Dumusque等，2015; Phillips等人2015; 2016; Collier训练）培训了机器学习模型。 Cameron等人2019）。我们发现，这些技术可以从模拟数据（将RV散射从82 cm/s提高到3 cm/s）以及从HARPS-N太阳能望远镜中几乎每天进行的600多种真实观察结果来预测和消除恒星活动（将RV散射从82 cm/s提高到3 cm/s）。 （将RV散射从1.753 m/s提高到1.039 m/s，提高了约1.7倍）。将来，这些或类似的技术可能会从太阳系以外的恒星观察中去除活动信号，并最终有助于检测到阳光状恒星周围可居住的区域质量系外行星。

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. We use an autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) to determine if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provide explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. However, we test the ability to determine the relevance of a bill with the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was state-of-the-art on many language tasks until text-davinci-003 was released on November 28, 2022. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than simply always predicting that a bill is irrelevant to a company. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to improve core natural language understanding capabilities, performance on corporate lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. We then discuss why this could be problematic for societal-AI alignment.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

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.

Research on automated essay scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written-responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate three active learning methods than can be used to minimize the number of essays that must be scored by human raters while still providing the data needed to train a modern automated essay scoring system. The three active learning methods are the uncertainty-based, the topological-based, and the hybrid method. These three methods were used to select essays included as part of the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition that were then classified using a scoring model that was training with the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer language model. All three active learning methods produced strong results, with the topological-based method producing the most efficient classification. Growth rate accuracy was also evaluated. The active learning methods produced different levels of efficiency under different sample size allocations but, overall, all three methods were highly efficient and produced classifications that were similar to one another.

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

As various city agencies and mobility operators navigate toward innovative mobility solutions, there is a need for strategic flexibility in well-timed investment decisions in the design and timing of mobility service regions, i.e. cast as "real options" (RO). This problem becomes increasingly challenging with multiple interacting RO in such investments. We propose a scalable machine learning based RO framework for multi-period sequential service region design & timing problem for mobility-on-demand services, framed as a Markov decision process with non-stationary stochastic variables. A value function approximation policy from literature uses multi-option least squares Monte Carlo simulation to get a policy value for a set of interdependent investment decisions as deferral options (CR policy). The goal is to determine the optimal selection and timing of a set of zones to include in a service region. However, prior work required explicit enumeration of all possible sequences of investments. To address the combinatorial complexity of such enumeration, we propose a new variant "deep" RO policy using an efficient recurrent neural network (RNN) based ML method (CR-RNN policy) to sample sequences to forego the need for enumeration, making network design & timing policy tractable for large scale implementation. Experiments on multiple service region scenarios in New York City (NYC) shows the proposed policy substantially reduces the overall computational cost (time reduction for RO evaluation of > 90% of total investment sequences is achieved), with zero to near-zero gap compared to the benchmark. A case study of sequential service region design for expansion of MoD services in Brooklyn, NYC show that using the CR-RNN policy to determine optimal RO investment strategy yields a similar performance (0.5% within CR policy value) with significantly reduced computation time (about 5.4 times faster).