Africa
Wealth Redistribution and Mutual Aid: Comparison using Equivalent/Nonequivalent Exchange Models of Econophysics
Given the wealth inequality worldwide, there is an urgent need to identify the mode of wealth exchange through which it arises. To address the research gap regarding models that combine equivalent exchange and redistribution, this study compares an equivalent market exchange with redistribution based on power centers and a nonequivalent exchange with mutual aid using the Polanyi, Graeber, and Karatani modes of exchange. Two new exchange models based on multi-agent interactions are reconstructed following an econophysics approach for evaluating the Gini index (inequality) and total exchange (economic flow). Exchange simulations indicate that the evaluation parameter of the total exchange divided by the Gini index can be expressed by the same saturated curvilinear approximate equation using the wealth transfer rate and time period of redistribution and the surplus contribution rate of the wealthy and the saving rate. However, considering the coercion of taxes and its associated costs and independence based on the morality of mutual aid, a nonequivalent exchange without return obligation is preferred. This is oriented toward Graeber's baseline communism and Karatani's mode of exchange D, with implications for alternatives to the capitalist economy.
Adapting the Exploration Rate for Value-of-Information-Based Reinforcement Learning
Sledge, Isaac J., Principe, Jose C.
In this paper, we consider the problem of adjusting the exploration rate when using value-of-information-based exploration. We do this by converting the value-of-information optimization into a problem of finding equilibria of a flow for a changing exploration rate. We then develop an efficient path-following scheme for converging to these equilibria and hence uncovering optimal action-selection policies. Under this scheme, the exploration rate is automatically adapted according to the agent's experiences. Global convergence is theoretically assured. We first evaluate our exploration-rate adaptation on the Nintendo GameBoy games Centipede and Millipede. We demonstrate aspects of the search process, like that it yields a hierarchy of state abstractions. We also show that our approach returns better policies in fewer episodes than conventional search strategies relying on heuristic, annealing-based exploration-rate adjustments. We then illustrate that these trends hold for deep, value-of-information-based agents that learn to play ten simple games and over forty more complicated games for the Nintendo GameBoy system. Performance either near or well above the level of human play is observed.
Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms
Nathan, Rakesh John Amala Arokia, Kurmi, Indrajit, Bimber, Oliver
We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.
BSA -- Bi-Stiffness Actuation for optimally exploiting intrinsic compliance and inertial coupling effects in elastic joint robots
Ossadnik, Dennis, Yildirim, Mehmet C., Wu, Fan, Swikir, Abdalla, Kussaba, Hugo T. M., Abdolshah, Saeed, Haddadin, Sami
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.
The Deep Learning Market is Expected to grow at a CAGR of 49% by 2027 - Digital Journal
Forecasts from Persistence Market Research indicate that by the end of the forecast period in 2027, the worldwide deep learning market would be worth US$ 261,113.0 This indicates a 49.0% compound annual growth rate that was seen over the anticipated period. This development can be ascribed to the demand for improved processing hardware, an increase in global R&D activity in particular industries, and the quick global adoption of cloud-based technologies. A recent research from Persistence Market Research offers a complete review of the worldwide deep learning market. In-depth analysis of the deep learning concept and the performance of the global deep learning market across significant end-use industry sectors throughout seven significant geographies are provided in this study.
Active Learning Through a Covering Lens
Yehuda, Ofer, Dekel, Avihu, Hacohen, Guy, Weinshall, Daphna
Deep active learning aims to reduce the annotation cost for the training of deep models, which is notoriously data-hungry. Until recently, deep active learning methods were ineffectual in the low-budget regime, where only a small number of examples are annotated. The situation has been alleviated by recent advances in representation and self-supervised learning, which impart the geometry of the data representation with rich information about the points. Taking advantage of this progress, we study the problem of subset selection for annotation through a "covering" lens, proposing ProbCover - a new active learning algorithm for the low budget regime, which seeks to maximize Probability Coverage. We then describe a dual way to view the proposed formulation, from which one can derive strategies suitable for the high budget regime of active learning, related to existing methods like Coreset. We conclude with extensive experiments, evaluating ProbCover in the low-budget regime. We show that our principled active learning strategy improves the state-of-the-art in the low-budget regime in several image recognition benchmarks. This method is especially beneficial in the semi-supervised setting, allowing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to match the performance of fully supervised methods, while using much fewer labels nonetheless.
Reviewing Labels: Label Graph Network with Top-k Prediction Set for Relation Extraction
Li, Bo, Ye, Wei, Zhang, Jinglei, Zhang, Shikun
The typical way for relation extraction is fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on task-specific datasets, then selecting the label with the highest probability of the output distribution as the final prediction. However, the usage of the Top-k prediction set for a given sample is commonly overlooked. In this paper, we first reveal that the Top-k prediction set of a given sample contains useful information for predicting the correct label. To effectively utilizes the Top-k prediction set, we propose Label Graph Network with Top-k Prediction Set, termed as KLG. Specifically, for a given sample, we build a label graph to review candidate labels in the Top-k prediction set and learn the connections between them. We also design a dynamic $k$-selection mechanism to learn more powerful and discriminative relation representation. Our experiments show that KLG achieves the best performances on three relation extraction datasets. Moreover, we observe that KLG is more effective in dealing with long-tailed classes.
WL-Align: Weisfeiler-Lehman Relabeling for Aligning Users across Networks via Regularized Representation Learning
Liu, Li, Chen, Penggang, Li, Xin, Cheung, William K., Zhang, Youmin, Liu, Qun, Wang, Guoyin
Aligning users across networks using graph representation learning has been found effective where the alignment is accomplished in a low-dimensional embedding space. Yet, achieving highly precise alignment is still challenging, especially when nodes with long-range connectivity to the labeled anchors are encountered. To alleviate this limitation, we purposefully designed WL-Align which adopts a regularized representation learning framework to learn distinctive node representations. It extends the Weisfeiler-Lehman Isormorphism Test and learns the alignment in alternating phases of "across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling" and "proximity-preserving representation learning". The across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling is achieved through iterating the anchor-based label propagation and a similarity-based hashing to exploit the known anchors' connectivity to different nodes in an efficient and robust manner. The representation learning module preserves the second-order proximity within individual networks and is regularized by the across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman hash labels. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets have demonstrated that our proposed WL-Align outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant performance improvements in the "exact matching" scenario. Data and code of WL-Align are available at https://github.com/ChenPengGang/WLAlignCode.
The top 10 weird and wonderful scientific discoveries of 2022
From a pig heart being successfully transplanted into a human, to being able to redirect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, there have been all manner of weird and wonderful scientific discoveries in 2022. They include the human genome finally been mapped after two decades, the unearthing of Africa's oldest known dinosaur, and the release of the first ever image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. There was also the alarming discovery that microplastics are everywhere – including in us – and the hugely-anticipated first images from the world's most powerful space telescope James Webb, which will peer back to the dawn of the universe. Here, MailOnline looks at 10 of the most interesting advances this year. The year began with a bang scientifically when just a week into it a dying man became the first patient in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig.
Improving a sequence-to-sequence nlp model using a reinforcement learning policy algorithm
Ismail, Jabri, Ahmed, Aboulbichr, Aziza, El ouaazizi
Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.