感知，规划，估算和控制的当代方法允许机器人在不确定，非结构化环境中的远程代理中稳健运行。此进度现在创造了机器人不仅在隔离，而且在我们的复杂环境中运行的机器人。意识到这个机会需要一种高效且灵活的媒介，人类可以与协作机器人沟通。自然语言提供了一种这样的媒体，通过对自然语言理解的统计方法的重大进展，现在能够解释各种自由形式命令。然而，大多数当代方法需要机器人环境的详细，现有的空间语义地图，这些环境模拟了话语可能引用的可能引用的空间。因此，当机器人部署在新的，先前未知或部分观察到的环境中时，这些方法发生故障，特别是当环境的心理模型在人类运营商和机器人之间不同时。本文提供了一种新的学习框架的全面描述，允许现场和服务机器人解释并正确执行先验未知，非结构化环境中的自然语言指令。对于我们的方法而不是我们的语言作为“传感器” - 在话语中隐含的“传感器” - 推断的空间，拓扑和语义信息，然后利用这些信息来学习在潜在环境模型上的分布。我们将此分布纳入概率，语言接地模型中，并在机器人的动作空间的象征性表示中推断出分布。我们使用模仿学习来确定对环境和行为分布的原因的信仰空间政策。我们通过各种导航和移动操纵实验评估我们的框架。

异常和异常值检测是机器学习中的长期问题。在某些情况下，异常检测容易，例如当从诸如高斯的良好特征的分布中抽出数据时。但是，当数据占据高维空间时，异常检测变得更加困难。我们呈现蛤蜊（聚类学习近似歧管），是任何度量空间中的歧管映射技术。 CLAM以快速分层聚类技术开始，然后根据使用多个几何和拓扑功能所选择的重叠群集，从群集树中引导图表。使用这些图形，我们实现了Chaoda（群集分层异常和异常值检测算法），探索了图形的各种属性及其组成集群以查找异常值。 Chaoda采用了一种基于培训数据集的转移学习形式，并将这些知识应用于不同基数，维度和域的单独测试集。在24个公开可用的数据集上，我们将Chaoda（按衡量ROC AUC）与各种最先进的无监督异常检测算法进行比较。六个数据集用于培训。 Chaoda优于16个剩余的18个数据集的其他方法。 CLAM和Chaoda规模大，高维“大数据”异常检测问题，并贯穿数据集和距离函数。克拉姆和Chaoda的源代码在github上自由地提供https://github.com/uri-abd/clam。

When testing conditions differ from those represented in training data, so-called out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs can mar the reliability of black-box learned components in the modern robot autonomy stack. Therefore, coping with OOD data is an important challenge on the path towards trustworthy learning-enabled open-world autonomy. In this paper, we aim to demystify the topic of OOD data and its associated challenges in the context of data-driven robotic systems, drawing connections to emerging paradigms in the ML community that study the effect of OOD data on learned models in isolation. We argue that as roboticists, we should reason about the overall system-level competence of a robot as it performs tasks in OOD conditions. We highlight key research questions around this system-level view of OOD problems to guide future research toward safe and reliable learning-enabled autonomy.

Machine learning (ML) has found broad applicability in quantum information science in topics as diverse as experimental design, state classification, and even studies on quantum foundations. Here, we experimentally realize an approach for defining custom prior distributions that are automatically tuned using ML for use with Bayesian quantum state estimation methods. Previously, researchers have looked to Bayesian quantum state tomography due to its unique advantages like natural uncertainty quantification, the return of reliable estimates under any measurement condition, and minimal mean-squared error. However, practical challenges related to long computation times and conceptual issues concerning how to incorporate prior knowledge most suitably can overshadow these benefits. Using both simulated and experimental measurement results, we demonstrate that ML-defined prior distributions reduce net convergence times and provide a natural way to incorporate both implicit and explicit information directly into the prior distribution. These results constitute a promising path toward practical implementations of Bayesian quantum state tomography.

Science tests competing theories or models by evaluating the similarity of their predictions against observational experience. Thus, how we measure similarity fundamentally determines what we learn. In machine learning and scientific modeling, similarity metrics are used as objective functions. A classic example being mean squared error, which is the optimal measure of similarity when errors are normally distributed and independent and identically distributed (iid). In many cases, however, the error distribution is neither normal nor iid, so it is left to the scientist to determine an appropriate objective. Here, we review how information theory can guide that selection, then demonstrate the approach with a simple hydrologic model.

In off-policy reinforcement learning, a behaviour policy performs exploratory interactions with the environment to obtain state-action-reward samples which are then used to learn a target policy that optimises the expected return. This leads to a problem of off-policy evaluation, where one needs to evaluate the target policy from samples collected by the often unrelated behaviour policy. Importance sampling is a traditional statistical technique that is often applied to off-policy evaluation. While importance sampling estimators are unbiased, their variance increases exponentially with the horizon of the decision process due to computing the importance weight as a product of action probability ratios, yielding estimates with low accuracy for domains involving long-term planning. This paper proposes state-based importance sampling (SIS), which drops the action probability ratios of sub-trajectories with "neglible states" -- roughly speaking, those for which the chosen actions have no impact on the return estimate -- from the computation of the importance weight. Theoretical results show that this results in a reduction of the exponent in the variance upper bound as well as improving the mean squared error. An automated search algorithm based on covariance testing is proposed to identify a negligible state set which has minimal MSE when performing state-based importance sampling. Experiments are conducted on a lift domain, which include "lift states" where the action has no impact on the following state and reward. The results demonstrate that using the search algorithm, SIS yields reduced variance and improved accuracy compared to traditional importance sampling, per-decision importance sampling, and incremental importance sampling.

Go-Explore achieved breakthrough performance on challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with sparse rewards. The key insight of Go-Explore was that successful exploration requires an agent to first return to an interesting state ('Go'), and only then explore into unknown terrain ('Explore'). We refer to such exploration after a goal is reached as 'post-exploration'. In this paper, we present a clear ablation study of post-exploration in a general intrinsically motivated goal exploration process (IMGEP) framework, that the Go-Explore paper did not show. We study the isolated potential of post-exploration, by turning it on and off within the same algorithm under both tabular and deep RL settings on both discrete navigation and continuous control tasks. Experiments on a range of MiniGrid and Mujoco environments show that post-exploration indeed helps IMGEP agents reach more diverse states and boosts their performance. In short, our work suggests that RL researchers should consider to use post-exploration in IMGEP when possible since it is effective, method-agnostic and easy to implement.

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an essential tool for researchers that allows them to explore the astronomy and astrophysics scientific literature, but it has yet to exploit recent advances in natural language processing. At ADASS 2021, we introduced astroBERT, a machine learning language model tailored to the text used in astronomy papers in ADS. In this work we: - announce the first public release of the astroBERT language model; - show how astroBERT improves over existing public language models on astrophysics specific tasks; - and detail how ADS plans to harness the unique structure of scientific papers, the citation graph and citation context, to further improve astroBERT.

Non-parametric episodic memory can be used to quickly latch onto high-reward experience in reinforcement learning tasks. In contrast to parametric deep reinforcement learning approaches, these methods only need to discover the solution once, and may then repeatedly solve the task. However, episodic control solutions are stored in discrete tables, and this approach has so far only been applied to discrete action space problems. Therefore, this paper introduces Continuous Episodic Control (CEC), a novel non-parametric episodic memory algorithm for sequential decision making in problems with a continuous action space. Results on several sparse-reward continuous control environments show that our proposed method learns faster than state-of-the-art model-free RL and memory-augmented RL algorithms, while maintaining good long-run performance as well. In short, CEC can be a fast approach for learning in continuous control tasks, and a useful addition to parametric RL methods in a hybrid approach as well.

Artificial intelligence methods including deep neural networks (DNN) can provide rapid molecular classification of tumors from routine histology with accuracy that matches or exceeds human pathologists. Discerning how neural networks make their predictions remains a significant challenge, but explainability tools help provide insights into what models have learned when corresponding histologic features are poorly defined. Here, we present a method for improving explainability of DNN models using synthetic histology generated by a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). We show that cGANs generate high-quality synthetic histology images that can be leveraged for explaining DNN models trained to classify molecularly-subtyped tumors, exposing histologic features associated with molecular state. Fine-tuning synthetic histology through class and layer blending illustrates nuanced morphologic differences between tumor subtypes. Finally, we demonstrate the use of synthetic histology for augmenting pathologist-in-training education, showing that these intuitive visualizations can reinforce and improve understanding of histologic manifestations of tumor biology.