雅典娜2.0是一家亚历克萨奖的社会奖，这是最后两个Alexa奖奖挑战的决赛。雅典娜成功的一个原因是其新的对话管理战略，它允许它动态构建组件模块的对话和响应，导致每个互动的新型对话。在这里，我们在20/21竞争期间描述了Athena的Alexa奖的系统设计和性能。雅典娜的活跃演示以及视频录音将挑起对话AI的艺术状态的讨论。

Research has shown that climate change creates warmer temperatures and drier conditions, leading to longer wildfire seasons and increased wildfire risks in the United States. These factors have in turn led to increases in the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires in recent years. Given the danger posed by wildland fires to people, property, wildlife, and the environment, there is an urgency to provide tools for effective wildfire management. Early detection of wildfires is essential to minimizing potentially catastrophic destruction. In this paper, we present our work on integrating multiple data sources in SmokeyNet, a deep learning model using spatio-temporal information to detect smoke from wildland fires. Camera image data is integrated with weather sensor measurements and processed by SmokeyNet to create a multimodal wildland fire smoke detection system. We present our results comparing performance in terms of both accuracy and time-to-detection for multimodal data vs. a single data source. With a time-to-detection of only a few minutes, SmokeyNet can serve as an automated early notification system, providing a useful tool in the fight against destructive wildfires.

We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end task-oriented dialog (TOD) system with zero-shot capability for unseen tasks. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer in the form of a schema. To enable generalization onto unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing the dialog policy is executed to recommend next actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing a long-standing challenge in TOD research: rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the STAR and ABCD benchmarks, as well as AnyTOD's strong zero-shot transfer capability in low-resource settings. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer data annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot end-to-end TOD models.

We consider the sequential decision-making problem of making proactive request assignment and rejection decisions for a profit-maximizing operator of an autonomous mobility on demand system. We formalize this problem as a Markov decision process and propose a novel combination of multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic and weighted bipartite matching to obtain an anticipative control policy. Thereby, we factorize the operator's otherwise intractable action space, but still obtain a globally coordinated decision. Experiments based on real-world taxi data show that our method outperforms state of the art benchmarks with respect to performance, stability, and computational tractability.

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock greater capabilities with less manual effort. One particularly ambitious goal of meta-learning is to train general-purpose in-context learning algorithms from scratch, using only black-box models with minimal inductive bias. Such a model takes in training data, and produces test-set predictions across a wide range of problems, without any explicit definition of an inference model, training loss, or optimization algorithm. In this paper we show that Transformers and other black-box models can be meta-trained to act as general-purpose in-context learners. We characterize phase transitions between algorithms that generalize, algorithms that memorize, and algorithms that fail to meta-train at all, induced by changes in model size, number of tasks, and meta-optimization. We further show that the capabilities of meta-trained algorithms are bottlenecked by the accessible state size (memory) determining the next prediction, unlike standard models which are thought to be bottlenecked by parameter count. Finally, we propose practical interventions such as biasing the training distribution that improve the meta-training and meta-generalization of general-purpose learning algorithms.

The primary aim of this research was to find a model that best predicts which fallen angel bonds would either potentially rise up back to investment grade bonds and which ones would fall into bankruptcy. To implement the solution, we thought that the ideal method would be to create an optimal machine learning model that could predict bankruptcies. Among the many machine learning models out there we decided to pick four classification methods: logistic regression, KNN, SVM, and NN. We also utilized an automated methods of Google Cloud's machine learning. The results of our model comparisons showed that the models did not predict bankruptcies very well on the original data set with the exception of Google Cloud's machine learning having a high precision score. However, our over-sampled and feature selection data set did perform very well. This could likely be due to the model being over-fitted to match the narrative of the over-sampled data (as in, it does not accurately predict data outside of this data set quite well). Therefore, we were not able to create a model that we are confident that would predict bankruptcies. However, we were able to find value out of this project in two key ways. The first is that Google Cloud's machine learning model in every metric and in every data set either outperformed or performed on par with the other models. The second is that we found that utilizing feature selection did not reduce predictive power that much. This means that we can reduce the amount of data to collect for future experimentation regarding predicting bankruptcies.

We propose a learning-based robust predictive control algorithm that compensates for significant uncertainty in the dynamics for a class of discrete-time systems that are nominally linear with an additive nonlinear component. Such systems commonly model the nonlinear effects of an unknown environment on a nominal system. We optimize over a class of nonlinear feedback policies inspired by certainty equivalent "estimate-and-cancel" control laws pioneered in classical adaptive control to achieve significant performance improvements in the presence of uncertainties of large magnitude, a setting in which existing learning-based predictive control algorithms often struggle to guarantee safety. In contrast to previous work in robust adaptive MPC, our approach allows us to take advantage of structure (i.e., the numerical predictions) in the a priori unknown dynamics learned online through function approximation. Our approach also extends typical nonlinear adaptive control methods to systems with state and input constraints even when we cannot directly cancel the additive uncertain function from the dynamics. We apply contemporary statistical estimation techniques to certify the system's safety through persistent constraint satisfaction with high probability. Moreover, we propose using Bayesian meta-learning algorithms that learn calibrated model priors to help satisfy the assumptions of the control design in challenging settings. Finally, we show in simulation that our method can accommodate more significant unknown dynamics terms than existing methods and that the use of Bayesian meta-learning allows us to adapt to the test environments more rapidly.

The ongoing amalgamation of UAV and ML techniques is creating a significant synergy and empowering UAVs with unprecedented intelligence and autonomy. This survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of ML techniques used in UAV operations and communications and identify the potential growth areas and research gaps. We emphasise the four key components of UAV operations and communications to which ML can significantly contribute, namely, perception and feature extraction, feature interpretation and regeneration, trajectory and mission planning, and aerodynamic control and operation. We classify the latest popular ML tools based on their applications to the four components and conduct gap analyses. This survey also takes a step forward by pointing out significant challenges in the upcoming realm of ML-aided automated UAV operations and communications. It is revealed that different ML techniques dominate the applications to the four key modules of UAV operations and communications. While there is an increasing trend of cross-module designs, little effort has been devoted to an end-to-end ML framework, from perception and feature extraction to aerodynamic control and operation. It is also unveiled that the reliability and trust of ML in UAV operations and applications require significant attention before full automation of UAVs and potential cooperation between UAVs and humans come to fruition.

基于学习的行为预测方法越来越多地被部署在现实世界的自治系统中，例如，在全球主要城市的自动驾驶汽车舰队中开始商业运营。但是，尽管有进步，但绝大多数预测系统专门针对一组经过验证的地理区域或操作设计领域，使部署到其他城市，国家或大陆。为此，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，可以有效地将行为预测模型适应新环境。我们的方法利用了元学习的最新进展，特别是贝叶斯回归，以使用自适应层增强现有的行为预测模型，该模型可以通过离线微调，在线适应或两者兼而有之有效的域传输。多个现实世界数据集的实验表明，我们的方法可以有效地适应各种看不见的环境。

学识渊博的优化器 - 经过训练可以充当优化器的神经网络 - 有可能大大加速机器学习模型的培训。但是，即使以巨大的计算费用进行了数千个任务进行元训练，Blackbox学会的优化者在应用于任务的稳定性和概括方面也经常在其元训练集中使用。在本文中，我们使用动力学系统中的工具来研究优化算法的电感偏差和稳定性，并将所得的见解应用于设计黑框优化器的电感偏置。我们的调查始于嘈杂的二次模型，在该模型中，根据训练动力学的特征值，我们表征了优化稳定的条件。然后，我们将简单的修改引入了学到的优化器的体系结构和元训练过程，从而改善了稳定性，并改善了优化器的电感偏置。我们将最终学习的优化器应用于各种神经网络训练任务，在优化性能和元训练速度方面，它的表现优于当前的最新技术优化器（在匹配的优化器计算上的开销），并且能够实现对任务的概括与受元训练的任务大不相同。