在多机器人系统中，任务对单个机器人的适当分配是非常重要的组成部分。集中式基础架构的可用性可以保证任务的最佳分配。但是，在许多重要的情况下，例如搜索和救援，探索，灾难管理，战场等，以分散的方式将动态任务直接分配给机器人。机器人之间的有效交流在任何这样的分散环境中都起着至关重要的作用。现有的关于分布式多机器人任务分配（MRTA）的作品假设网络可用或使用幼稚的通信范例。相反，在大多数情况下，网络基础架构是不稳定的或不可用的，并且临时网络是唯一的度假胜地。在同步传输（ST）的无线通信协议（ST）的最新发展显示，比在临时网络（例如无线传感器网络（WSN）/物联网（IOT）应用程序中的传统异步传输协议（IOT）应用程序中比传统的基于异步传输的协议更有效。当前的工作是将ST用于MRTA的第一项工作。具体而言，我们提出了一种有效调整基于ST的多对多交互的算法，并将信息交换最小化以达成任务分配的共识。我们通过广泛的基于基于模拟的研究在不同的环境下进行了基于模拟的延迟和能源效率来展示拟议算法的功效。

有效的通信机制形成任何多机器人系统的骨干，以实现富有成效的协作和协调。在快速传播和聚合中存在基于异步传输的策略的限制将设计人员尽可能多地修剪这些要求。这也限制了移动多机器人系统的可能应用领域。在这项工作中，我们将基于并行的传输策略介绍为替代品。尽管常见地发现了同时传输的困难，例如微秒时间同步，硬件异质性等，但我们演示了如何利用多机器人系统。我们提出了一种分割架构，其中两个主要活动 - 通信和计算独立地进行并通过周期性相互作用进行协调。所提出的分离架构应用于自定义构建完整的网络控制系统，该控制系统由具有异质架构的五个双轮差分驱动器移动机器人组成。我们在领导者追随器设置中使用所提出的设计，以协调动态速度变化以及各种形状的独立形成。实验显示了厘米级空间和毫秒的时间准确度，同时在宽测试区域下花费非常低的无线电核心循环。

Transformer-based language models have been shown to be highly effective for several NLP tasks. In this paper, we consider three transformer models, BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet, in both small and large version, and investigate how faithful their representations are with respect to the semantic content of texts. We formalize a notion of semantic faithfulness, in which the semantic content of a text should causally figure in a model's inferences in question answering. We then test this notion by observing a model's behavior on answering questions about a story after performing two novel semantic interventions -- deletion intervention and negation intervention. While transformer models achieve high performance on standard question answering tasks, we show that they fail to be semantically faithful once we perform these interventions for a significant number of cases (~50% for deletion intervention, and ~20% drop in accuracy for negation intervention). We then propose an intervention-based training regime that can mitigate the undesirable effects for deletion intervention by a significant margin (from ~50% to ~6%). We analyze the inner-workings of the models to better understand the effectiveness of intervention-based training for deletion intervention. But we show that this training does not attenuate other aspects of semantic unfaithfulness such as the models' inability to deal with negation intervention or to capture the predicate-argument structure of texts. We also test InstructGPT, via prompting, for its ability to handle the two interventions and to capture predicate-argument structure. While InstructGPT models do achieve very high performance on predicate-argument structure task, they fail to respond adequately to our deletion and negation interventions.

Prompting large language models has enabled significant recent progress in multi-step reasoning over text. However, when applied to text generation from semi-structured data (e.g., graphs or tables), these methods typically suffer from low semantic coverage, hallucination, and logical inconsistency. We propose MURMUR, a neuro-symbolic modular approach to text generation from semi-structured data with multi-step reasoning. MURMUR is a best-first search method that generates reasoning paths using: (1) neural and symbolic modules with specific linguistic and logical skills, (2) a grammar whose production rules define valid compositions of modules, and (3) value functions that assess the quality of each reasoning step. We conduct experiments on two diverse data-to-text generation tasks like WebNLG and LogicNLG. These tasks differ in their data representations (graphs and tables) and span multiple linguistic and logical skills. MURMUR obtains significant improvements over recent few-shot baselines like direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting, while also achieving comparable performance to fine-tuned GPT-2 on out-of-domain data. Moreover, human evaluation shows that MURMUR generates highly faithful and correct reasoning paths that lead to 26% more logically consistent summaries on LogicNLG, compared to direct prompting.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Flooding is one of the most disastrous natural hazards, responsible for substantial economic losses. A predictive model for flood-induced financial damages is useful for many applications such as climate change adaptation planning and insurance underwriting. This research assesses the predictive capability of regressors constructed on the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) dataset using neural networks (Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks), decision trees (Extreme Gradient Boosting), and kernel-based regressors (Gaussian Process). The assessment highlights the most informative predictors for regression. The distribution for claims amount inference is modeled with a Burr distribution permitting the introduction of a bias correction scheme and increasing the regressor's predictive capability. Aiming to study the interaction with physical variables, we incorporate Daymet rainfall estimation to NFIP as an additional predictor. A study on the coastal counties in the eight US South-West states resulted in an $R^2=0.807$. Further analysis of 11 counties with a significant number of claims in the NFIP dataset reveals that Extreme Gradient Boosting provides the best results, that bias correction significantly improves the similarity with the reference distribution, and that the rainfall predictor strengthens the regressor performance.

Deep Learning and Machine Learning based models have become extremely popular in text processing and information retrieval. However, the non-linear structures present inside the networks make these models largely inscrutable. A significant body of research has focused on increasing the transparency of these models. This article provides a broad overview of research on the explainability and interpretability of natural language processing and information retrieval methods. More specifically, we survey approaches that have been applied to explain word embeddings, sequence modeling, attention modules, transformers, BERT, and document ranking. The concluding section suggests some possible directions for future research on this topic.

The internet has had a dramatic effect on the healthcare industry, allowing documents to be saved, shared, and managed digitally. This has made it easier to locate and share important data, improving patient care and providing more opportunities for medical studies. As there is so much data accessible to doctors and patients alike, summarizing it has become increasingly necessary - this has been supported through the introduction of deep learning and transformer-based networks, which have boosted the sector significantly in recent years. This paper gives a comprehensive survey of the current techniques and trends in medical summarization

Modeling the risk of extreme weather events in a changing climate is essential for developing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. Although the available low-resolution climate models capture different scenarios, accurate risk assessment for mitigation and adaption often demands detail that they typically cannot resolve. Here, we develop a dynamic data-driven downscaling (super-resolution) method that incorporates physics and statistics in a generative framework to learn the fine-scale spatial details of rainfall. Our method transforms coarse-resolution ($0.25^{\circ} \times 0.25^{\circ}$) climate model outputs into high-resolution ($0.01^{\circ} \times 0.01^{\circ}$) rainfall fields while efficaciously quantifying uncertainty. Results indicate that the downscaled rainfall fields closely match observed spatial fields and their risk distributions.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has the potential to be used for synthesizing feedback controllers (agents) for various complex systems with unknown dynamics. These systems are expected to satisfy diverse safety and liveness properties best captured using temporal logic. In RL, the reward function plays a crucial role in specifying the desired behaviour of these agents. However, the problem of designing the reward function for an RL agent to satisfy complex temporal logic specifications has received limited attention in the literature. To address this, we provide a systematic way of generating rewards in real-time by using the quantitative semantics of Signal Temporal Logic (STL), a widely used temporal logic to specify the behaviour of cyber-physical systems. We propose a new quantitative semantics for STL having several desirable properties, making it suitable for reward generation. We evaluate our STL-based reinforcement learning mechanism on several complex continuous control benchmarks and compare our STL semantics with those available in the literature in terms of their efficacy in synthesizing the controller agent. Experimental results establish our new semantics to be the most suitable for synthesizing feedback controllers for complex continuous dynamical systems through reinforcement learning.