Obstacles on the sidewalk often block the path, limiting passage and resulting in frustration and wasted time, especially for citizens and visitors who use assistive devices (wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, canes, etc). To enable equal participation and use of the city, all citizens should be able to perform and complete their daily activities in a similar amount of time and effort. Therefore, we aim to offer accessibility information regarding sidewalks, so that citizens can better plan their routes, and to help city officials identify the location of bottlenecks and act on them. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline to estimate obstacle-free sidewalk widths based on 3D point cloud data of the city of Amsterdam, as the first step to offer a more complete set of information regarding sidewalk accessibility.

As demand for large corpora increases with the size of current state-of-the-art language models, using web data as the main part of the pre-training corpus for these models has become a ubiquitous practice. This, in turn, has introduced an important challenge for NLP practitioners, as they are now confronted with the task of developing highly optimized models and pipelines for pre-processing large quantities of textual data, which implies, effectively classifying and filtering multilingual, heterogeneous and noisy data, at web scale. One of the main components of this pre-processing step for the pre-training corpora of large language models, is the removal of adult and harmful content. In this paper we explore different methods for detecting adult and harmful of content in multilingual heterogeneous web data. We first show how traditional methods in harmful content detection, that seemingly perform quite well in small and specialized datasets quickly break down when confronted with heterogeneous noisy web data. We then resort to using a perplexity based approach but with a twist: Instead of using a so-called "clean" corpus to train a small language model and then use perplexity so select the documents with low perplexity, i.e., the documents that resemble this so-called "clean" corpus the most. We train solely with adult and harmful textual data, and then select the documents having a perplexity value above a given threshold. This approach will virtually cluster our documents into two distinct groups, which will greatly facilitate the choice of the threshold for the perplexity and will also allow us to obtain higher precision than with the traditional classification methods for detecting adult and harmful content.

The quality of consequences in a decision making problem under (severe) uncertainty must often be compared among different targets (goals, objectives) simultaneously. In addition, the evaluations of a consequence's performance under the various targets often differ in their scale of measurement, classically being either purely ordinal or perfectly cardinal. In this paper, we transfer recent developments from abstract decision theory with incomplete preferential and probabilistic information to this multi-target setting and show how -- by exploiting the (potentially) partial cardinal and partial probabilistic information -- more informative orders for comparing decisions can be given than the Pareto order. We discuss some interesting properties of the proposed orders between decision options and show how they can be concretely computed by linear optimization. We conclude the paper by demonstrating our framework in an artificial (but quite real-world) example in the context of comparing algorithms under different performance measures.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are susceptible to adversarial noise in their observations that can mislead their policies and decrease their performance. However, an adversary may be interested not only in decreasing the reward, but also in modifying specific temporal logic properties of the policy. This paper presents a metric that measures the exact impact of adversarial attacks against such properties. We use this metric to craft optimal adversarial attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a model checking method that allows us to verify the robustness of RL policies against adversarial attacks. Our empirical analysis confirms (1) the quality of our metric to craft adversarial attacks against temporal logic properties, and (2) that we are able to concisely assess a system's robustness against attacks.

Automated synthesis of provably correct controllers for cyber-physical systems is crucial for deploying these systems in safety-critical scenarios. However, their hybrid features and stochastic or unknown behaviours make this synthesis problem challenging. In this paper, we propose a method for synthesizing controllers for Markov jump linear systems (MJLSs), a particular class of cyber-physical systems, that certifiably satisfy a requirement expressed as a specification in probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL). An MJLS consists of a finite set of linear dynamics with unknown additive disturbances, where jumps between these modes are governed by a Markov decision process (MDP). We consider both the case where the transition function of this MDP is given by probability intervals or where it is completely unknown. Our approach is based on generating a finite-state abstraction which captures both the discrete and the continuous behaviour of the original system. We formalise such abstraction as an interval Markov decision process (iMDP): intervals of transition probabilities are computed using sampling techniques from the so-called "scenario approach", resulting in a probabilistically sound approximation of the MJLS. This iMDP abstracts both the jump dynamics between modes, as well as the continuous dynamics within the modes. To demonstrate the efficacy of our technique, we apply our method to multiple realistic benchmark problems, in particular, temperature control, and aerial vehicle delivery problems.

There is an increasing need in our society to achieve faster advances in Science to tackle urgent problems, such as climate changes, environmental hazards, sustainable energy systems, pandemics, among others. In certain domains like chemistry, scientific discovery carries the extra burden of assessing risks of the proposed novel solutions before moving to the experimental stage. Despite several recent advances in Machine Learning and AI to address some of these challenges, there is still a gap in technologies to support end-to-end discovery applications, integrating the myriad of available technologies into a coherent, orchestrated, yet flexible discovery process. Such applications need to handle complex knowledge management at scale, enabling knowledge consumption and production in a timely and efficient way for subject matter experts (SMEs). Furthermore, the discovery of novel functional materials strongly relies on the development of exploration strategies in the chemical space. For instance, generative models have gained attention within the scientific community due to their ability to generate enormous volumes of novel molecules across material domains. These models exhibit extreme creativity that often translates in low viability of the generated candidates. In this work, we propose a workbench framework that aims at enabling the human-AI co-creation to reduce the time until the first discovery and the opportunity costs involved. This framework relies on a knowledge base with domain and process knowledge, and user-interaction components to acquire knowledge and advise the SMEs. Currently,the framework supports four main activities: generative modeling, dataset triage, molecule adjudication, and risk assessment.

Capturing uncertainty in models of complex dynamical systems is crucial to designing safe controllers. Stochastic noise causes aleatoric uncertainty, whereas imprecise knowledge of model parameters leads to epistemic uncertainty. Several approaches use formal abstractions to synthesize policies that satisfy temporal specifications related to safety and reachability. However, the underlying models exclusively capture aleatoric but not epistemic uncertainty, and thus require that model parameters are known precisely. Our contribution to overcoming this restriction is a novel abstraction-based controller synthesis method for continuous-state models with stochastic noise and uncertain parameters. By sampling techniques and robust analysis, we capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, with a user-specified confidence level, in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). We synthesize an optimal policy on this iMDP, which translates (with the specified confidence level) to a feedback controller for the continuous model with the same performance guarantees. Our experimental benchmarks confirm that accounting for epistemic uncertainty leads to controllers that are more robust against variations in parameter values.

本文介绍了Cool-MC，这是一种集成了最先进的加固学习（RL）和模型检查的工具。具体而言，该工具建立在OpenAI健身房和概率模型检查器风暴上。COOL-MC提供以下功能：（1）模拟器在OpenAI体育馆训练RL政策，用于Markov决策过程（MDPS），这些模拟器定义为暴风雨的输入，（2）使用“ SORM”的新型号构建器，用于使用回调功能要验证（神经网络）RL策略，（3）与OpenAI Gym或Storm中指定的模型和政策相关的正式抽象，以及（4）算法以获得有关所谓允许政策的性能的界限。我们描述了Cool-MC的组件和体系结构，并在多个基准环境中演示了其功能。

使用深度学习技术，可以在MRI图像中自动检测到旁那鼻鼻窦系统中的异常，并可以根据其体积，形状和其他参数（例如局部对比度）进行进一步分析和分类。但是，由于培训数据有限，传统的监督学习方法通​​常无法概括。现有的旁那间异常分类中的深度学习方法最多可诊断出一种异常。在我们的工作中，我们考虑三个异常。具体而言，我们采用3D CNN来分离上颌鼻窦体积，而没有异常的鼻窦体积，并具有异常。为了从一个小标记的数据集中学习强大的表示形式，我们提出了一种新颖的学习范式，结合了对比损失和跨内向损失。特别是，我们使用有监督的对比损失，鼓励有或没有异常的上颌窦量的嵌入来形成两个不同的簇，而跨层损失则鼓励3D CNN保持其歧视能力。我们报告说，两种损失的优化是有利的，而不是仅通过一次损失而优化。我们还发现我们的培训策略会提高标签效率。使用我们的方法，3D CNN分类器的AUROC为0.85，而用横向渗透损失优化的3D CNN分类器可实现0.66的AUROC。

尽管在机器学习的方法论核心中是一个问题，但如何比较分类器仍未达成一致的共识。每个比较框架都面临着（至少）三个基本挑战：质量标准的多样性，数据集的多样性以及选择数据集选择的随机性/任意性。在本文中，我们通过采用决策理论的最新发展，为生动的辩论增添了新的观点。我们最终的框架基于所谓的偏好系统，通过广义的随机优势概念对分类器进行排名，该概念强大地绕过了繁琐的，甚至通常是自相矛盾的，对聚合的依赖。此外，我们表明，可以通过解决易于手柄的线性程序和通过适应的两样本观察随机化测试进行统计测试来实现广泛的随机优势。这确实产生了一个有力的框架，可以同时相对于多个质量标准进行分类器的统计比较。我们在模拟研究和标准基准数据集中说明和研究我们的框架。