The General Associative Memory Model (GAMM) has a constant state-dependant energy surface that leads the output dynamics to fixed points, retrieving single memories from a collection of memories that can be asynchronously preloaded. We introduce a new class of General Sequential Episodic Memory Models (GSEMM) that, in the adiabatic limit, exhibit temporally changing energy surface, leading to a series of meta-stable states that are sequential episodic memories. The dynamic energy surface is enabled by newly introduced asymmetric synapses with signal propagation delays in the network's hidden layer. We study the theoretical and empirical properties of two memory models from the GSEMM class, differing in their activation functions. LISEM has non-linearities in the feature layer, whereas DSEM has non-linearity in the hidden layer. In principle, DSEM has a storage capacity that grows exponentially with the number of neurons in the network. We introduce a learning rule for the synapses based on the energy minimization principle and show it can learn single memories and their sequential relationships online. This rule is similar to the Hebbian learning algorithm and Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which describe conditions under which synapses between neurons change strength. Thus, GSEMM combines the static and dynamic properties of episodic memory under a single theoretical framework and bridges neuroscience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

增强学习（RL）在接触式操纵中的经验成功（RL）从基于模型的角度来理解了很多待理解，其中关键困难通常归因于（i）触点模式的爆炸，（ii）僵硬，非平滑接触动力学和由此产生的爆炸 /不连续梯度，以及（iii）计划问题的非转换性。 RL的随机性质通过有效采样和平均接触模式来解决（i）和（ii）。另一方面，基于模型的方法通过分析平滑接触动力学来解决相同的挑战。我们的第一个贡献是建立两种方法的简单系统方法的理论等效性，并在许多复杂示例上提供定性和经验的等效性。为了进一步减轻（II），我们的第二个贡献是凸面的凸面，可区分和准动力的触点动力学表述，这两个方案都可以平滑方案，并且通过实验证明了对接触富含接触的计划非常有效。我们的最终贡献解决了（III），在其中我们表明，当通过平滑度抽取接触模式时，基于经典的运动计划算法在全球计划中可以有效。将我们的方法应用于具有挑战性的接触式操纵任务的集合中，我们证明了基于模型的有效运动计划可以实现与RL相当的结果，而计算却大大较少。视频：https：//youtu.be/12ew4xc-vwa

可视化优化景观导致了数字优化的许多基本见解，并对优化技术进行了新的改进。但是，仅在少数狭窄的环境中生成了增强学习优化（“奖励表面”）的目标的可视化。这项工作首次介绍了27个最广泛使用的增强学习环境的奖励表面和相关的可视化。我们还探索了政策梯度方向上的奖励表面，并首次表明许多流行的强化学习环境经常出现“悬崖”（预期回报中突然下降）。我们证明，A2C经常将这些悬崖“脱落”到参数空间的低奖励区域，而PPO避免了它们，这证实了PPO对PPO的流行直觉，以改善以前的方法。我们还引入了一个高度可扩展的库，该库使研究人员将来可以轻松地生成这些可视化。我们的发现提供了新的直觉，以解释现代RL方法的成功和失败，我们的可视化构成了以新颖方式进行强化学习剂的几种失败模式。

通过基于一阶梯度的估计，通过替换零阶梯度估计来替换零阶梯度估计，可以通过估算零阶梯度估计来更快地计算时间。但是，尚不清楚哪些因素决定了两个估计量在复杂景观上的性能，尽管该问题对于可区分的模拟器的实用性至关重要，但涉及长途计划和对物理系统的控制。我们表明，某些物理系统的特征，例如刚度或不连续性，可能会损害一阶估计器的功效，并通过偏置和方差的镜头分析这种现象。我们还提出了一个$ \ alpha $ - 订单梯度估计器，并在[0,1] $中使用$ \ alpha \，它正确利用了精确的梯度将一阶估计值的效率与零级方法的鲁棒性结合在一起。我们在一些数值示例中证明了传统估计器的陷阱以及$ \ alpha $订单估计器的优势。

我们提出了6D（种子）中系列弹性末端效应器的框架，其将空间兼容的元素结合在粘合性感觉中，以掌握和操纵野外的工具。我们的框架将串联弹性的益处推广到6- DOF，同时提供使用粘液触觉感测的控制抽象。我们提出了一种用于粘合性感测的相对姿势估计的算法，以及能够实现与环境的稳定力相互作用的空间混合力力位置控制器。我们展示了我们对需要监管空间力量的工具的效果。视频链接：https://youtu.be/2-yuifspdrk

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. We use an autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) to determine if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provide explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. However, we test the ability to determine the relevance of a bill with the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was state-of-the-art on many language tasks until text-davinci-003 was released on November 28, 2022. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than simply always predicting that a bill is irrelevant to a company. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to improve core natural language understanding capabilities, performance on corporate lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. We then discuss why this could be problematic for societal-AI alignment.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

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.

Research on automated essay scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written-responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate three active learning methods than can be used to minimize the number of essays that must be scored by human raters while still providing the data needed to train a modern automated essay scoring system. The three active learning methods are the uncertainty-based, the topological-based, and the hybrid method. These three methods were used to select essays included as part of the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition that were then classified using a scoring model that was training with the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer language model. All three active learning methods produced strong results, with the topological-based method producing the most efficient classification. Growth rate accuracy was also evaluated. The active learning methods produced different levels of efficiency under different sample size allocations but, overall, all three methods were highly efficient and produced classifications that were similar to one another.