我们提出了Covy - 一个机器人平台，可在Covid-19等大流行期间促进社会疏远。Covy具有一种新颖的复合视觉系统，使其能够检测到社会距离的破坏，最多可达16m。Covy使用混合导航堆栈自动地导航其周围环境，该堆栈结合了深钢筋学习（DRL）和概率定位方法。我们通过模拟和现实环境中的大量实验构建了完整的系统并评估了Covy的性能。除其他外，我们的结果表明，与基于DRL的纯解决方案相比，混合导航堆栈更强大。

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。

从诸如蛋白质折叠或配体 - 受体结合如蛋白质 - 折叠或配体 - 受体结合等生物分子过程的长时间轨迹的低尺寸表示是基本的重要性和动力学模型，例如Markov建模，这些模型已经证明是有用的，用于描述这些系统的动力学。最近，引入了一种被称为vampnet的无监督机器学习技术，以以端到端的方式学习低维度表示和线性动态模型。 Vampnet基于Markov进程（VAMP）的变分方法，并依赖于神经网络来学习粗粒度的动态。在此贡献中，我们将Vampnet和图形神经网络组合生成端到端的框架，以从长时间的分子动力学轨迹有效地学习高级动态和亚稳态。该方法承载图形表示学习的优点，并使用图形消息传递操作来生成用于VAMPNET中使用的每个数据点以生成粗粒化表示的嵌入。这种类型的分子表示结果导致更高的分辨率和更可接定的Markov模型，而不是标准Vampnet，使得对生物分子过程更详细的动力学研究。我们的GraphVampNet方法也具有注意机制，以找到分类为不同亚稳态的重要残留物。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

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.

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net based discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel as well as global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have recently shown to be powerful tool for high-quality video compression. However, existing works are limiting as they do not explicitly exploit the temporal redundancy in videos, leading to a long encoding time. Additionally, these methods have fixed architectures which do not scale to longer videos or higher resolutions. To address these issues, we propose NIRVANA, which treats videos as groups of frames and fits separate networks to each group performing patch-wise prediction. This design shares computation within each group, in the spatial and temporal dimensions, resulting in reduced encoding time of the video. The video representation is modeled autoregressively, with networks fit on a current group initialized using weights from the previous group's model. To further enhance efficiency, we perform quantization of the network parameters during training, requiring no post-hoc pruning or quantization. When compared with previous works on the benchmark UVG dataset, NIRVANA improves encoding quality from 37.36 to 37.70 (in terms of PSNR) and the encoding speed by 12X, while maintaining the same compression rate. In contrast to prior video INR works which struggle with larger resolution and longer videos, we show that our algorithm is highly flexible and scales naturally due to its patch-wise and autoregressive designs. Moreover, our method achieves variable bitrate compression by adapting to videos with varying inter-frame motion. NIRVANA achieves 6X decoding speed and scales well with more GPUs, making it practical for various deployment scenarios.