在该领域，机器人通常需要在未知和非结构化的环境中操作，在这种环境中，准确的感应和状态估计（SE）成为主要挑战。相机已被用于在此类环境中以及复杂但准静态任务（例如抓紧）的映射和计划方面取得巨大成功，但很少将其集成到不稳定系统的控制循环中。学习像素到扭力的控制有望允许机器人灵活处理多种任务。尽管他们没有添加其他理论障碍，但学习需要精确且高的带宽控制的不稳定系统的像素到扭力控制仍然构成了重大的实践挑战，并且尚未确定最佳实践。为了帮助推动对学习像素到扭矩控制的实际方面的可重复研究，我们提出了一个平台，可以灵活地表示从实验室到部署的整个过程，以便在机器人上学习像素到扭矩的速度控制，以快速，不稳定动力学：基于视觉的绒毛摆。该平台可以使用现成或定制的硬件复制。我们预计该平台将使研究人员能够快速，系统地测试不同的方法，并从其他实验室重现和基准测试案例研究。我们还使用DNN进行了对该系统的第一个案例研究，据我们所知，这是对不稳定系统学习像素到扭力控制的首次演示，其更新速度比100 Hz更快。可以在https://youtu.be/s2llscfg-8e和补充材料中在线找到视频概述。

安全限制和最优性很重要，但有时控制器有时相互冲突的标准。虽然这些标准通常与不同的工具单独解决以维持正式保障，但在惩罚失败时，加强学习的常见做法是惩罚，以惩罚为单纯的启发式。我们严格地检查了安全性和最优性与惩罚的关系，并对安全价值函数进行了足够的条件：对给定任务的最佳价值函数，并强制执行安全约束。我们通过强大的二元性证明，揭示这种关系的结构，表明始终存在一个有限的惩罚，引起安全值功能。这种惩罚并不是独特的，但大不束缚：更大的惩罚不会伤害最优性。虽然通常无法计算最低所需的惩罚，但我们揭示了清晰的惩罚，奖励，折扣因素和动态互动的结构。这种洞察力建议实用，理论引导的启发式设计奖励功能，用于控制安全性很重要的控制问题。

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.

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side information is available, e.g., patients' records or customers' history, which allows for personalized treatment. We focus on consistency -- vanishing regret compared to the optimal policy -- and show that for large classes of non-i.i.d. contexts, consistency can be achieved regardless of the time-invariant reward mechanism, a property known as universal consistency. Precisely, we first give necessary and sufficient conditions on the context-generating process for universal consistency to be possible. Second, we show that there always exists an algorithm that guarantees universal consistency whenever this is achievable, called an optimistically universal learning rule. Interestingly, for finite action spaces, learnable processes for universal learning are exactly the same as in the full-feedback setting of supervised learning, previously studied in the literature. In other words, learning can be performed with partial feedback without any generalization cost. The algorithms balance a trade-off between generalization (similar to structural risk minimization) and personalization (tailoring actions to specific contexts). Lastly, we consider the case of added continuity assumptions on rewards and show that these lead to universal consistency for significantly larger classes of data-generating processes.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer.github.io

The renewed interest from the scientific community in machine learning (ML) is opening many new areas of research. Here we focus on how novel trends in ML are providing opportunities to improve the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In particular, we discuss synergies between ML and CFD that have already shown benefits, and we also assess areas that are under development and may produce important benefits in the coming years. We believe that it is also important to emphasize a balanced perspective of cautious optimism for these emerging approaches

The theory of magnitude provides a mathematical framework for quantifying and maximizing diversity. We apply this framework to formulate quality-diversity algorithms in generic dissimilarity spaces. In particular, we instantiate and demonstrate a very general version of Go-Explore with promising performance.

Physically based rendering of complex scenes can be prohibitively costly with a potentially unbounded and uneven distribution of complexity across the rendered image. The goal of an ideal level of detail (LoD) method is to make rendering costs independent of the 3D scene complexity, while preserving the appearance of the scene. However, current prefiltering LoD methods are limited in the appearances they can support due to their reliance of approximate models and other heuristics. We propose the first comprehensive multi-scale LoD framework for prefiltering 3D environments with complex geometry and materials (e.g., the Disney BRDF), while maintaining the appearance with respect to the ray-traced reference. Using a multi-scale hierarchy of the scene, we perform a data-driven prefiltering step to obtain an appearance phase function and directional coverage mask at each scale. At the heart of our approach is a novel neural representation that encodes this information into a compact latent form that is easy to decode inside a physically based renderer. Once a scene is baked out, our method requires no original geometry, materials, or textures at render time. We demonstrate that our approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art prefiltering methods and achieves considerable savings in memory for complex scenes.

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.