Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the example of a soft robotic fish, we demonstrate an experimentally-verified, fast optimization pipeline for learning the material parameters from quasi-static data via differentiable simulation and apply it to the prediction of dynamic performance. Our method identifies physically plausible Young's moduli for various soft silicone elastomers and stiff acetal copolymers used in creation of our three different robotic fish tail designs. We show that our method is compatible with varying internal geometry of the actuators, such as the number of hollow cavities. Our framework allows high fidelity prediction of dynamic behavior for composite bi-morph bending structures in real hardware to millimeter-accuracy and within 3 percent error normalized to actuator length. We provide a differentiable and robust estimate of the thrust force using a neural network thrust predictor; this estimate allows for accurate modeling of our experimental setup measuring bollard pull. This work presents a prototypical hardware and simulation problem solved using our differentiable framework; the framework can be applied to higher dimensional parameter inference, learning control policies, and computational design due to its differentiable character.

无监督的表示学习的最新进展显着提高了模拟环境中培训强化学习政策的样本效率。但是，尚未看到针对实体强化学习的类似收益。在这项工作中，我们专注于从像素中启用数据有效的实体机器人学习。我们提出了有效的机器人学习（编码器）的对比前训练和数据增强，该方法利用数据增强和无监督的学习来从稀疏奖励中实现对实体ARM策略的样本效率培训。虽然对比预训练，数据增强，演示和强化学习不足以进行有效学习，但我们的主要贡献表明，这些不同技术的组合导致了一种简单而数据效率的方法。我们表明，只有10个示范，一个机器人手臂可以从像素中学习稀疏的奖励操纵策略，例如到达，拾取，移动，拉动大物体，翻转开关并在短短30分钟内打开抽屉现实世界训练时间。我们在项目网站上包括视频和代码：https：//sites.google.com/view/felfficited-robotic-manipulation/home

Most Graph Neural Networks follow the message-passing paradigm, assuming the observed structure depicts the ground-truth node relationships. However, this fundamental assumption cannot always be satisfied, as real-world graphs are always incomplete, noisy, or redundant. How to reveal the inherent graph structure in a unified way remains under-explored. We proposed PRI-GSL, a Graph Structure Learning framework guided by the Principle of Relevant Information, providing a simple and unified framework for identifying the self-organization and revealing the hidden structure. PRI-GSL learns a structure that contains the most relevant yet least redundant information quantified by von Neumann entropy and Quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence. PRI-GSL incorporates the evolution of quantum continuous walk with graph wavelets to encode node structural roles, showing in which way the nodes interplay and self-organize with the graph structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of PRI-GSL.

High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) has emerged as an important topic due to its wide application and considerable popularity. However, due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space when the HUSPM problem encounters a low utility threshold or large-scale data, it may be time-consuming and memory-costly to address the HUSPM problem. Several algorithms have been proposed for addressing this problem, but they still cost a lot in terms of running time and memory usage. In this paper, to further solve this problem efficiently, we design a compact structure called sequence projection (seqPro) and propose an efficient algorithm, namely discovering high-utility sequential patterns with the seqPro structure (HUSP-SP). HUSP-SP utilizes the compact seq-array to store the necessary information in a sequence database. The seqPro structure is designed to efficiently calculate candidate patterns' utilities and upper bound values. Furthermore, a new upper bound on utility, namely tighter reduced sequence utility (TRSU) and two pruning strategies in search space, are utilized to improve the mining performance of HUSP-SP. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that HUSP-SP can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of running time, memory usage, search space pruning efficiency, and scalability.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

The xView2 competition and xBD dataset spurred significant advancements in overhead building damage detection, but the competition's pixel level scoring can lead to reduced solution performance in areas with tight clusters of buildings or uninformative context. We seek to advance automatic building damage assessment for disaster relief by proposing an auxiliary challenge to the original xView2 competition. This new challenge involves a new dataset and metrics indicating solution performance when damage is more local and limited than in xBD. Our challenge measures a network's ability to identify individual buildings and their damage level without excessive reliance on the buildings' surroundings. Methods that succeed on this challenge will provide more fine-grained, precise damage information than original xView2 solutions. The best-performing xView2 networks' performances dropped noticeably in our new limited/local damage detection task. The common causes of failure observed are that (1) building objects and their classifications are not separated well, and (2) when they are, the classification is strongly biased by surrounding buildings and other damage context. Thus, we release our augmented version of the dataset with additional object-level scoring metrics https://gitlab.kitware.com/dennis.melamed/xfbd to test independence and separability of building objects, alongside the pixel-level performance metrics of the original competition. We also experiment with new baseline models which improve independence and separability of building damage predictions. Our results indicate that building damage detection is not a fully-solved problem, and we invite others to use and build on our dataset augmentations and metrics.

Neural image classifiers are known to undergo severe performance degradation when exposed to input that exhibits covariate-shift with respect to the training distribution. Successful hand-crafted augmentation pipelines aim at either approximating the expected test domain conditions or to perturb the features that are specific to the training environment. The development of effective pipelines is typically cumbersome, and produce transformations whose impact on the classifier performance are hard to understand and control. In this paper, we show that recent Text-to-Image (T2I) generators' ability to simulate image interventions via natural-language prompts can be leveraged to train more robust models, offering a more interpretable and controllable alternative to traditional augmentation methods. We find that a variety of prompting mechanisms are effective for producing synthetic training data sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art performance in widely-adopted domain-generalization benchmarks and reduce classifiers' dependency on spurious features. Our work suggests that further progress in T2I generation and a tighter integration with other research fields may represent a significant step towards the development of more robust machine learning systems.

The discovery of utility-driven patterns is a useful and difficult research topic. It can extract significant and interesting information from specific and varied databases, increasing the value of the services provided. In practice, the measure of utility is often used to demonstrate the importance, profit, or risk of an object or a pattern. In the database, although utility is a flexible criterion for each pattern, it is a more absolute criterion due to the neglect of utility sharing. This leads to the derived patterns only exploring partial and local knowledge from a database. Utility occupancy is a recently proposed model that considers the problem of mining with high utility but low occupancy. However, existing studies are concentrated on itemsets that do not reveal the temporal relationship of object occurrences. Therefore, this paper towards sequence utility maximization. We first define utility occupancy on sequence data and raise the problem of High Utility-Occupancy Sequential Pattern Mining (HUOSPM). Three dimensions, including frequency, utility, and occupancy, are comprehensively evaluated in HUOSPM. An algorithm called Sequence Utility Maximization with Utility occupancy measure (SUMU) is proposed. Furthermore, two data structures for storing related information about a pattern, Utility-Occupancy-List-Chain (UOL-Chain) and Utility-Occupancy-Table (UO-Table) with six associated upper bounds, are designed to improve efficiency. Empirical experiments are carried out to evaluate the novel algorithm's efficiency and effectiveness. The influence of different upper bounds and pruning strategies is analyzed and discussed. The comprehensive results suggest that the work of our algorithm is intelligent and effective.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to the black-box adversarial attack that is highly transferable. This threat comes from the distribution gap between adversarial and clean samples in feature space of the target DNNs. In this paper, we use Deep Generative Networks (DGNs) with a novel training mechanism to eliminate the distribution gap. The trained DGNs align the distribution of adversarial samples with clean ones for the target DNNs by translating pixel values. Different from previous work, we propose a more effective pixel level training constraint to make this achievable, thus enhancing robustness on adversarial samples. Further, a class-aware feature-level constraint is formulated for integrated distribution alignment. Our approach is general and applicable to multiple tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. We conduct extensive experiments on different datasets. Our strategy demonstrates its unique effectiveness and generality against black-box attacks.

The findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data principles have provided a framework for examining, evaluating, and improving how we share data with the aim of facilitating scientific discovery. Efforts have been made to generalize these principles to research software and other digital products. Artificial intelligence (AI) models -- algorithms that have been trained on data rather than explicitly programmed -- are an important target for this because of the ever-increasing pace with which AI is transforming scientific and engineering domains. In this paper, we propose a practical definition of FAIR principles for AI models and create a FAIR AI project template that promotes adherence to these principles. We demonstrate how to implement these principles using a concrete example from experimental high energy physics: a graph neural network for identifying Higgs bosons decaying to bottom quarks. We study the robustness of these FAIR AI models and their portability across hardware architectures and software frameworks, and report new insights on the interpretability of AI predictions by studying the interplay between FAIR datasets and AI models. Enabled by publishing FAIR AI models, these studies pave the way toward reliable and automated AI-driven scientific discovery.