最近，在气象学中使用机器学习大大增加了。尽管许多机器学习方法并不是什么新鲜事物，但有关机器学习的大学课程在很大程度上是气象学专业的学生，​​不需要成为气象学家。缺乏正式的教学导致人们认为机器学习方法是“黑匣子”，因此最终用户不愿在每天的工作流程中应用机器学习方法。为了减少机器学习方法的不透明性，并降低了对气象学中机器学习的犹豫，本文对一些最常见的机器学习方法进行了调查。一个熟悉的气象示例用于将机器学习方法背景化，同时还使用普通语言讨论机器学习主题。证明了以下机器学习方法：线性回归；逻辑回归；决策树；随机森林；梯度增强了决策树；天真的贝叶斯；并支持向量机。除了讨论不同的方法外，本文还包含有关通用机器学习过程的讨论以及最佳实践，以使读者能够将机器学习应用于自己的数据集。此外，所有代码（以Jupyter笔记本电脑和Google Colaboratory Notebooks的形式）用于在论文中进行示例，以促进气象学中的机器学习使用。

In this paper, we present an adjustable-equilibrium parallel elastic actuator (AE-PEA). The actuator consists of a motor, an equilibrium adjusting mechanism, and a spring arranged into a cylindrical geometry, similar to a motor-gearbox assembly. The novel component of the actuator is the equilibrium adjusting mechanism which (i) does not require external energy to maintain the equilibrium position of the actuator even if the spring is deformed and (ii) enables equilibrium position control with low energy cost by rotating the spring while keeping it undeformed. Adjustable equilibrium parallel elastic actuators resolve the main limitation of parallel elastic actuators (PEAs) by enabling energy-efficient operation at different equilibrium positions, instead of being limited to energy-efficient operation at a single equilibrium position. We foresee the use of AE-PEAs in industrial robots, mobile robots, exoskeletons, and prostheses, where efficient oscillatory motion and gravity compensation at different positions are required.

基于片段的形状签名技术已经证明是计算机辅助药物设计的强大工具。它们允许科学家寻找与已知活性化合物的一些相似性的目标分子。它们不需要参考全潜在的化学结构，这对于处理包含数百万化合物的化学数据库至关重要。然而，发现碎片化合物的一部分的最佳匹配可以是耗时的。在本文中，我们使用约束程序来解决这个特定问题。它涉及找到受连接约束的片段的加权分配。我们的实验表明了我们的方法和开放新观点的实际相关性，包括产生多种多样化的解决方案。我们的方法在实时设置中构成约束解算器的原始使用，其中传播允许避免加权路径的枚举。该模型必须保持稳健，以添加其他限制，使得一些实例不易发布。这种特殊的上下文需要使用不寻常的标准来选择模型：轻量级，标准传播算法，数据结构，而无需持久的恒定成本，同时减少搜索空间。目标不是设计新的复杂算法来解决困难的情况。

Pennylane是用于量子计算机可区分编程的Python 3软件框架。该库为近期量子计算设备提供了统一的体系结构，支持量子和连续变化的范例。 Pennylane的核心特征是能够以与经典技术（例如反向传播）兼容的方式来计算变异量子电路的梯度。因此，Pennylane扩展了在优化和机器学习中常见的自动分化算法，以包括量子和混合计算。插件系统使该框架与任何基于门的量子模拟器或硬件兼容。我们为硬件提供商提供插件，包括Xanadu Cloud，Amazon Braket和IBM Quantum，允许Pennylane优化在公开访问的量子设备上运行。在古典方面，Pennylane与加速的机器学习库（例如Tensorflow，Pytorch，Jax和Autograd）接口。 Pennylane可用于优化变分的量子本素体，量子近似优化，量子机学习模型和许多其他应用。

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.