我们提出了对基于模型的RL问题的交织勘探和开发时期的探索和剥削（DSEE）算法的确定性测序，旨在同时学习系统模型，即马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）以及相关的最佳政策。在探索过程中，DSEE探索环境并更新预期奖励和过渡概率的估计值。在开发过程中，使用系统动力学的最新估计值用于获得具有很高概率的强大策略。我们设计了探索和剥削时期的长度，以使累积遗憾成为时间的亚线性功能。我们还讨论了一种使用多跳跃MDP和大都市杂货算法的有效探索方法，以均匀地对每个州行动对采样，概率很高。

对于大多数现有的联合学习算法，每一轮都包括最大程度地减少每个客户端的损失功能，以在客户端学习最佳模型，然后在服务器上汇总这些客户端模型。客户端的模型参数的点估计并未考虑到每个客户端估计的模型中的不确定性。但是，在许多情况下，尤其是在有限的数据设置中，考虑到客户模型中的不确定性以实现更准确和健壮的预测是有益的。不确定性还为其他重要任务提供了有用的信息，例如主动学习和分布（OOD）检测。我们提出了一个贝叶斯联合学习的框架，每个客户都使用其培训数据侵入后验预测分布，并提出各种方法，以在服务器上汇总这些特定于客户端的预测分布。由于交流和汇总预测分布可能具有挑战性且昂贵，因此我们的方法基于将每个客户的预测分布提炼成一个深层的神经网络。这使我们能够利用标准联合学习的进步，也可以为贝叶斯联邦学习。与最近试图估算每个客户模型不确定性的最近作品不同，我们的工作也没有做出任何限制性假设，例如客户后分布的形式。我们评估了我们在联合环境中的分类方法，以及在联邦设置中的积极学习和OOD检测，我们的方法在其上优于各种现有的联合学习基线。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

Existing federated classification algorithms typically assume the local annotations at every client cover the same set of classes. In this paper, we aim to lift such an assumption and focus on a more general yet practical non-IID setting where every client can work on non-identical and even disjoint sets of classes (i.e., client-exclusive classes), and the clients have a common goal which is to build a global classification model to identify the union of these classes. Such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new challenge: how to ensure different clients are operating in the same latent space so as to avoid the drift after aggregation? We observe that the classes can be described in natural languages (i.e., class names) and these names are typically safe to share with all parties. Thus, we formulate the classification problem as a matching process between data representations and class representations and break the classification model into a data encoder and a label encoder. We leverage the natural-language class names as the common ground to anchor the class representations in the label encoder. In each iteration, the label encoder updates the class representations and regulates the data representations through matching. We further use the updated class representations at each round to annotate data samples for locally-unaware classes according to similarity and distill knowledge to local models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method can outperform various classical and state-of-the-art federated learning methods designed for learning with non-IID data.

The rise in data has led to the need for dimension reduction techniques, especially in the area of non-scalar variables, including time series, natural language processing, and computer vision. In this paper, we specifically investigate dimension reduction for time series through functional data analysis. Current methods for dimension reduction in functional data are functional principal component analysis and functional autoencoders, which are limited to linear mappings or scalar representations for the time series, which is inefficient. In real data applications, the nature of the data is much more complex. We propose a non-linear function-on-function approach, which consists of a functional encoder and a functional decoder, that uses continuous hidden layers consisting of continuous neurons to learn the structure inherent in functional data, which addresses the aforementioned concerns in the existing approaches. Our approach gives a low dimension latent representation by reducing the number of functional features as well as the timepoints at which the functions are observed. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through multiple simulations and real data examples.

Object movement identification is one of the most researched problems in the field of computer vision. In this task, we try to classify a pixel as foreground or background. Even though numerous traditional machine learning and deep learning methods already exist for this problem, the two major issues with most of them are the need for large amounts of ground truth data and their inferior performance on unseen videos. Since every pixel of every frame has to be labeled, acquiring large amounts of data for these techniques gets rather expensive. Recently, Zhao et al. [1] proposed one of a kind Arithmetic Distribution Neural Network (ADNN) for universal background subtraction which utilizes probability information from the histogram of temporal pixels and achieves promising results. Building onto this work, we developed an intelligent video surveillance system that uses ADNN architecture for motion detection, trims the video with parts only containing motion, and performs anomaly detection on the trimmed video.

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions. The MPC employs a novel objective function and an online decomposition of the oscillatory motion of the vessel to predict, attempt, and accomplish the landing during near-zero tilt of the landing platform. The nonlinear prediction of the motion of the vessel is performed using visual data from an onboard camera. Therefore, the system does not require any communication with the USV or a control station. The proposed method was analyzed in numerous robotics simulations in harsh and extreme conditions and further validated in various real-world scenarios.

Multiple studies have focused on predicting the prospective popularity of an online document as a whole, without paying attention to the contributions of its individual parts. We introduce the task of proactively forecasting popularities of sentences within online news documents solely utilizing their natural language content. We model sentence-specific popularity forecasting as a sequence regression task. For training our models, we curate InfoPop, the first dataset containing popularity labels for over 1.7 million sentences from over 50,000 online news documents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset automatically created using streams of incoming search engine queries to generate sentence-level popularity annotations. We propose a novel transfer learning approach involving sentence salience prediction as an auxiliary task. Our proposed technique coupled with a BERT-based neural model exceeds nDCG values of 0.8 for proactive sentence-specific popularity forecasting. Notably, our study presents a non-trivial takeaway: though popularity and salience are different concepts, transfer learning from salience prediction enhances popularity forecasting. We release InfoPop and make our code publicly available: https://github.com/sayarghoshroy/InfoPopularity

The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.

We present a novel hybrid learning method, HyLEAR, for solving the collision-free navigation problem for self-driving cars in POMDPs. HyLEAR leverages interposed learning to embed knowledge of a hybrid planner into a deep reinforcement learner to faster determine safe and comfortable driving policies. In particular, the hybrid planner combines pedestrian path prediction and risk-aware path planning with driving-behavior rule-based reasoning such that the driving policies also take into account, whenever possible, the ride comfort and a given set of driving-behavior rules. Our experimental performance analysis over the CARLA-CTS1 benchmark of critical traffic scenarios revealed that HyLEAR can significantly outperform the selected baselines in terms of safety and ride comfort.