Reliability Assessment Commitment (RAC) Optimization is increasingly important in grid operations due to larger shares of renewable generations in the generation mix and increased prediction errors. Independent System Operators (ISOs) also aim at using finer time granularities, longer time horizons, and possibly stochastic formulations for additional economic and reliability benefits. The goal of this paper is to address the computational challenges arising in extending the scope of RAC formulations. It presents RACLEARN that (1) uses Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to predict generator commitments and active line constraints, (2) associates a confidence value to each commitment prediction, (3) selects a subset of the high-confidence predictions, which are (4) repaired for feasibility, and (5) seeds a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm with the feasible predictions and the active constraints. Experimental results on exact RAC formulations used by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and an actual transmission network (8965 transmission lines, 6708 buses, 1890 generators, and 6262 load units) show that the RACLEARN framework can speed up RAC optimization by factors ranging from 2 to 4 with negligible loss in solution quality.

本文研究了如何训练直接近似约束优化问题的最佳解决方案的机器学习模型。这是在约束下的经验风险最小化，这是具有挑战性的，因为培训必须平衡最佳和可行性条件。监督学习方法通​​常通过在大量预处理实例中训练模型来应对这一挑战。本文采用了不同的途径，并提出了原始偶尔学习的想法（PDL），这是一种自我监督的培训方法，不需要一组预处理的实例或用于培训和推理的优化求解器。取而代之的是，PDL模拟了增强拉格朗日方法（ALM）的轨迹，并共同训练原始和双神经网络。作为一种原始的双重方法，PDL使用用于训练原始网络的损失函数中的约束项的实例特定惩罚。实验表明，在一组非线性优化基准上，PDL通常表现出可忽略的约束违规和较小的最佳差距，并且非常接近ALM优化。与现有方法相比，PDL在最佳差距，约束违规和培训时间方面还表现出改善或类似的性能。

安全约束的经济调度（SCED）是传输系统运营商（TSO）的基本优化模型，以清除实时能源市场，同时确保电网的可靠操作。在不断增长的运营不确定性的背景下，由于可再生发电机和分布式能源资源的渗透率增加，运营商必须实时监控风险，即，他们必须在负载和可再生生产的各种变化下快速评估系统的行为。遗憾的是，鉴于实时操作的严格约束，系统地解决了每个这样的场景的优化问题。为了克服这种限制，本文提出了学习SCED，即机器学习（ML）模型的优化代理，其可以预测用于以毫秒为单位的最佳解决方案。本文提出了对MISO市场清算优化优化的原则性分析，提出了一种新颖的ML管道，解决了学习SCES解决方案的主要挑战，即负载，可再生产量和生产成本以及组合结构的变化，以及组合结构承诺决定。还提出了一种新的分类 - 然后回归架构，以进一步捕获SCED解决方案的行为。在法国传输系统上报告了数值实验，并展示了该方法在与实时操作兼容的时间范围内生产的能力，精确的优化代理产生相对误差低于0.6 \％$。

The automated segmentation and tracking of macrophages during their migration are challenging tasks due to their dynamically changing shapes and motions. This paper proposes a new algorithm to achieve automatic cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy macrophage data. First, we design a segmentation method employing space-time filtering, local Otsu's thresholding, and the SUBSURF (subjective surface segmentation) method. Next, the partial trajectories for cells overlapping in the temporal direction are extracted in the segmented images. Finally, the extracted trajectories are linked by considering their direction of movement. The segmented images and the obtained trajectories from the proposed method are compared with those of the semi-automatic segmentation and manual tracking. The proposed tracking achieved 97.4% of accuracy for macrophage data under challenging situations, feeble fluorescent intensity, irregular shapes, and motion of macrophages. We expect that the automatically extracted trajectories of macrophages can provide pieces of evidence of how macrophages migrate depending on their polarization modes in the situation, such as during wound healing.

Data-centric AI has shed light on the significance of data within the machine learning (ML) pipeline. Acknowledging its importance, various research and policies are suggested by academia, industry, and government departments. Although the capability of utilizing existing data is essential, the capability to build a dataset has become more important than ever. In consideration of this trend, we propose a "Data Management Operation and Recipes" that will guide the industry regardless of the task or domain. In other words, this paper presents the concept of DMOps derived from real-world experience. By offering a baseline for building data, we want to help the industry streamline its data operation optimally.

According to the rapid development of drone technologies, drones are widely used in many applications including military domains. In this paper, a novel situation-aware DRL- based autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm in cyber-physical loitering munition applications. On the battlefield, the design of DRL-based autonomous control algorithm is not straightforward because real-world data gathering is generally not available. Therefore, the approach in this paper is that cyber-physical virtual environment is constructed with Unity environment. Based on the virtual cyber-physical battlefield scenarios, a DRL-based automated nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm can be designed, evaluated, and visualized. Moreover, many obstacles exist which is harmful for linear trajectory control in real-world battlefield scenarios. Thus, our proposed autonomous nonlinear drone mobility control algorithm utilizes situation-aware components those are implemented with a Raycast function in Unity virtual scenarios. Based on the gathered situation-aware information, the drone can autonomously and nonlinearly adjust its trajectory during flight. Therefore, this approach is obviously beneficial for avoiding obstacles in obstacle-deployed battlefields. Our visualization-based performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm is superior from the other linear mobility control algorithms.

This paper proposes a new regularization algorithm referred to as macro-block dropout. The overfitting issue has been a difficult problem in training large neural network models. The dropout technique has proven to be simple yet very effective for regularization by preventing complex co-adaptations during training. In our work, we define a macro-block that contains a large number of units from the input to a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Rather than applying dropout to each unit, we apply random dropout to each macro-block. This algorithm has the effect of applying different drop out rates for each layer even if we keep a constant average dropout rate, which has better regularization effects. In our experiments using Recurrent Neural Network-Transducer (RNN-T), this algorithm shows relatively 4.30 % and 6.13 % Word Error Rates (WERs) improvement over the conventional dropout on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other. With an Attention-based Encoder-Decoder (AED) model, this algorithm shows relatively 4.36 % and 5.85 % WERs improvement over the conventional dropout on the same test sets.

Affect understanding capability is essential for social robots to autonomously interact with a group of users in an intuitive and reciprocal way. However, the challenge of multi-person affect understanding comes from not only the accurate perception of each user's affective state (e.g., engagement) but also the recognition of the affect interplay between the members (e.g., joint engagement) that presents as complex, but subtle, nonverbal exchanges between them. Here we present a novel hybrid framework for identifying a parent-child dyad's joint engagement by combining a deep learning framework with various video augmentation techniques. Using a dataset of parent-child dyads reading storybooks together with a social robot at home, we first train RGB frame- and skeleton-based joint engagement recognition models with four video augmentation techniques (General Aug, DeepFake, CutOut, and Mixed) applied datasets to improve joint engagement classification performance. Second, we demonstrate experimental results on the use of trained models in the robot-parent-child interaction context. Third, we introduce a behavior-based metric for evaluating the learned representation of the models to investigate the model interpretability when recognizing joint engagement. This work serves as the first step toward fully unlocking the potential of end-to-end video understanding models pre-trained on large public datasets and augmented with data augmentation and visualization techniques for affect recognition in the multi-person human-robot interaction in the wild.

Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches used for training. When calculating the loss function, off-policy algorithms assume that all samples are of the same importance. In this paper, we hypothesize that training can be enhanced by assigning different importance for each experience based on their temporal-difference (TD) error directly in the training objective. We propose a novel method that introduces a weighting factor for each experience when calculating the loss function at the learning stage. In addition to improving convergence speed when used with uniform sampling, the method can be combined with prioritization methods for non-uniform sampling. Combining the proposed method with prioritization methods improves sampling efficiency while increasing the performance of TD-based off-policy RL algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments in six environments of the OpenAI Gym suite. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a 33%~76% reduction of convergence speed in three environments and an 11% increase in returns and a 3%~10% increase in success rate for other three environments.

Neural fields, also known as coordinate-based or implicit neural representations, have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various forms of signals. For video representations, however, mapping pixel-wise coordinates to RGB colors has shown relatively low compression performance and slow convergence and inference speed. Frame-wise video representation, which maps a temporal coordinate to its entire frame, has recently emerged as an alternative method to represent videos, improving compression rates and encoding speed. While promising, it has still failed to reach the performance of state-of-the-art video compression algorithms. In this work, we propose FFNeRV, a novel method for incorporating flow information into frame-wise representations to exploit the temporal redundancy across the frames in videos inspired by the standard video codecs. Furthermore, we introduce a fully convolutional architecture, enabled by one-dimensional temporal grids, improving the continuity of spatial features. Experimental results show that FFNeRV yields the best performance for video compression and frame interpolation among the methods using frame-wise representations or neural fields. To reduce the model size even further, we devise a more compact convolutional architecture using the group and pointwise convolutions. With model compression techniques, including quantization-aware training and entropy coding, FFNeRV outperforms widely-used standard video codecs (H.264 and HEVC) and performs on par with state-of-the-art video compression algorithms.