Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline RL, inverse dynamics, and waypoint conditioning correspond to different sequence maskings over a sequence of states, actions, and returns. We introduce the FlexiBiT framework, which provides a unified way to specify models which can be trained on many different sequential decision making tasks. We show that a single FlexiBiT model is simultaneously capable of carrying out many tasks with performance similar to or better than specialized models. Additionally, we show that performance can be further improved by fine-tuning our general model on specific tasks of interest.

我们提供了一种新的单调改进保证，以优化合作多代理增强学习（MARL）中的分散政策，即使过渡动态是非平稳的。这项新分析提供了对两种最新的MARL参与者批评方法的强劲表现的理论理解，即独立的近端策略优化（IPPO）和多代理PPO（MAPPO）（MAPPO），它们都依赖于独立比率，即计算概率，每个代理商的政策分别比率。我们表明，尽管独立比率引起的非平稳性，但由于对所有分散政策的信任区域约束，仍会产生单调的改进保证。我们还可以根据培训中的代理数量来界定独立比率，从而以原则性的方式有效地执行这种信任区域约束，从而为近端剪辑提供了理论基础。此外，我们表明，当IPPO和Mappo中优化的替代目标在批评者收敛到固定点时实质上是等效的。最后，我们的经验结果支持以下假设：IPPO和MAPPO的强劲表现是通过削减集中式培训来执行这种信任区域约束的直接结果，而该执行的超参数的良好值对此对此具有高度敏感性正如我们的理论分析所预测的那样。

样本效率对于仿制学习方法来说至关重要，以适用于现实世界应用。许多研究通过延长对抗性模仿的违法行为来提高样本效率，无论这些违规延迟是否可以改变原始目标或涉及复杂的优化。我们重新审视对抗性模仿的基础，并提出了一种不需要对抗性培训或最小最大优化的脱营式样本有效方法。我们的配方在两个主要见解中大写：（1）Bellman方程和静止状态 - 动作分配方程之间的相似性使我们能够推导出一种新的时间差异（TD）学习方法; （2）使用确定性政策简化了TD学习。结合，这些见解产生了一种实用的算法，确定性和鉴别的模仿（D2仿真），其通过第一分区样本来分为两个重放缓冲区，然后通过禁止策略加强学习学习确定性政策。我们的经验结果表明，D2模仿在实现良好的样本效率方面有效，表现出对许多控制任务的对抗模仿的几种违规延伸方法。

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.

Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In this work, we analyze the class-imbalanced learning problem by examining the loss landscape of neural networks trained with re-weighting and margin-based techniques. Specifically, we examine the spectral density of Hessian of class-wise loss, through which we observe that the network weights converge to a saddle point in the loss landscapes of minority classes. Following this observation, we also find that optimization methods designed to escape from saddle points can be effectively used to improve generalization on minority classes. We further theoretically and empirically demonstrate that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recent technique that encourages convergence to a flat minima, can be effectively used to escape saddle points for minority classes. Using SAM results in a 6.2\% increase in accuracy on the minority classes over the state-of-the-art Vector Scaling Loss, leading to an overall average increase of 4\% across imbalanced datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/val-iisc/Saddle-LongTail.

In this paper, we present the Circular Accessible Depth (CAD), a robust traversability representation for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to learn traversability in various scenarios containing irregular obstacles. To predict CAD, we propose a neural network, namely CADNet, with an attention-based multi-frame point cloud fusion module, Stability-Attention Module (SAM), to encode the spatial features from point clouds captured by LiDAR. CAD is designed based on the polar coordinate system and focuses on predicting the border of traversable area. Since it encodes the spatial information of the surrounding environment, which enables a semi-supervised learning for the CADNet, and thus desirably avoids annotating a large amount of data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD outperforms baselines in terms of robustness and precision. We also implement our method on a real UGV and show that it performs well in real-world scenarios.

The high feature dimensionality is a challenge in music emotion recognition. There is no common consensus on a relation between audio features and emotion. The MER system uses all available features to recognize emotion; however, this is not an optimal solution since it contains irrelevant data acting as noise. In this paper, we introduce a feature selection approach to eliminate redundant features for MER. We created a Selected Feature Set (SFS) based on the feature selection algorithm (FSA) and benchmarked it by training with two models, Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest (RF) and comparing them against with using the Complete Feature Set (CFS). The result indicates that the performance of MER has improved for both Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) models by using SFS. We found using FSA can improve performance in all scenarios, and it has potential benefits for model efficiency and stability for MER task.

Salient object detection (SOD) aims to determine the most visually attractive objects in an image. With the development of virtual reality technology, 360{\deg} omnidirectional image has been widely used, but the SOD task in 360{\deg} omnidirectional image is seldom studied due to its severe distortions and complex scenes. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Projection Fusion and Refinement Network (MPFR-Net) to detect the salient objects in 360{\deg} omnidirectional image. Different from the existing methods, the equirectangular projection image and four corresponding cube-unfolding images are embedded into the network simultaneously as inputs, where the cube-unfolding images not only provide supplementary information for equirectangular projection image, but also ensure the object integrity of the cube-map projection. In order to make full use of these two projection modes, a Dynamic Weighting Fusion (DWF) module is designed to adaptively integrate the features of different projections in a complementary and dynamic manner from the perspective of inter and intra features. Furthermore, in order to fully explore the way of interaction between encoder and decoder features, a Filtration and Refinement (FR) module is designed to suppress the redundant information between the feature itself and the feature. Experimental results on two omnidirectional datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

Recent methods in self-supervised learning have demonstrated that masking-based pretext tasks extend beyond NLP, serving as useful pretraining objectives in computer vision. However, existing approaches apply random or ad hoc masking strategies that limit the difficulty of the reconstruction task and, consequently, the strength of the learnt representations. We improve upon current state-of-the-art work in learning adversarial masks by proposing a new framework that generates masks in a sequential fashion with different constraints on the adversary. This leads to improvements in performance on various downstream tasks, such as classification on ImageNet100, STL10, and CIFAR10/100 and segmentation on Pascal VOC. Our results further demonstrate the promising capabilities of masking-based approaches for SSL in computer vision.