Recent comprehensive overview of 40 years of research in cognitive architectures, (Kotseruba and Tsotsos 2020), evaluates modelling of the core cognitive abilities in humans, but only marginally addresses biologically plausible approaches based on natural computation. This mini review presents a set of perspectives and approaches which have shaped the development of biologically inspired computational models in the recent past that can lead to the development of biologically more realistic cognitive architectures. For describing continuum of natural cognitive architectures, from basal cellular to human-level cognition, we use evolutionary info-computational framework, where natural/ physical/ morphological computation leads to evolution of increasingly complex cognitive systems. Forty years ago, when the first cognitive architectures have been proposed, understanding of cognition, embodiment and evolution was different. So was the state of the art of information physics, bioinformatics, information chemistry, computational neuroscience, complexity theory, self-organization, theory of evolution, information and computation. Novel developments support a constructive interdisciplinary framework for cognitive architectures in the context of computing nature, where interactions between constituents at different levels of organization lead to complexification of agency and increased cognitive capacities. We identify several important research questions for further investigation that can increase understanding of cognition in nature and inspire new developments of cognitive technologies. Recently, basal cell cognition attracted a lot of interest for its possible applications in medicine, new computing technologies, as well as micro- and nanorobotics.

In image retrieval, standard evaluation metrics rely on score ranking, e.g. average precision (AP). In this paper, we introduce a method for robust and decomposable average precision (ROADMAP) addressing two major challenges for end-to-end training of deep neural networks with AP: non-differentiability and non-decomposability. Firstly, we propose a new differentiable approximation of the rank function, which provides an upper bound of the AP loss and ensures robust training. Secondly, we design a simple yet effective loss function to reduce the decomposability gap between the AP in the whole training set and its averaged batch approximation, for which we provide theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments conducted on three image retrieval datasets show that ROADMAP outperforms several recent AP approximation methods and highlight the importance of our two contributions. Finally, using ROADMAP for training deep models yields very good performances, outperforming state-of-the-art results on the three datasets.

Despite the success of a number of recent techniques for visual self-supervised deep learning, there remains limited investigation into the representations that are ultimately learned. By using recent advances in comparing neural representations, we explore in this direction by comparing a constrastive self-supervised algorithm (SimCLR) to supervision for simple image data in a common architecture. We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR's objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true. Our work particularly highlights the importance of the learned intermediate representations, and raises important questions for auxiliary task design.

Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling probability distributions in physical systems. While state-of-the-art flows accurately approximate distributions and energies, applications in physics additionally require smooth energies to compute forces and higher-order derivatives. Furthermore, such densities are often defined on non-trivial topologies. A recent example are Boltzmann Generators for generating 3D-structures of peptides and small proteins. These generative models leverage the space of internal coordinates (dihedrals, angles, and bonds), which is a product of hypertori and compact intervals. In this work, we introduce a class of smooth mixture transformations working on both compact intervals and hypertori. Mixture transformations employ root-finding methods to invert them in practice, which has so far prevented bi-directional flow training. To this end, we show that parameter gradients and forces of such inverses can be computed from forward evaluations via the inverse function theorem. We demonstrate two advantages of such smooth flows: they allow training by force matching to simulation data and can be used as potentials in molecular dynamics simulations.

An increasingly common use case for machine learning models is augmenting the abilities of human decision makers. For classification tasks where neither the human or model are perfectly accurate, a key step in obtaining high performance is combining their individual predictions in a manner that leverages their relative strengths. In this work, we develop a set of algorithms that combine the probabilistic output of a model with the class-level output of a human. We show theoretically that the accuracy of our combination model is driven not only by the individual human and model accuracies, but also by the model's confidence. Empirical results on image classification with CIFAR-10 and a subset of ImageNet demonstrate that such human-model combinations consistently have higher accuracies than the model or human alone, and that the parameters of the combination method can be estimated effectively with as few as ten labeled datapoints.

Let me begin with a disclaimer. I am no expert in Australian law. However, it seems to me that the Australian Federal Court (FCA) has made a series of missteps in the DABUS case (Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879) that led it to conclude that an AI-driven system can be an inventor. As similar DABUS cases are currently pending before the European Patent Office and the UK Court of Appeal and a number of companies employ AI in their inventive endeavours, I find it relevant to discuss the FCA's argumentation. DABUS is an AI-driven system which is currently on a world tour of courts and patent offices with the claim to have invented the following subject matter: food container and devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention.

I ulearn/learn stuff full time for a paradigm shift in art/design. Went to National Institute of Design, India. 'The Endangered' was born as an urge to spread message to the wider world about our great seas and rivers through my art. The art is a representation of the natural beauty (texture/color) of the endangered species enlisted by WWF and IUCN Red list. Process briefly explained below how AI/Machine learning was used to bring in power to represent the heavy dataset in the way the artist intents.

US and EU officials opened their two-day, high-level meetings in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, an effort to repair relations damaged under the administration of former president Donald Trump and boost cooperation on technology issues. The inaugural meeting of the Trade and Technology Council (TTC) comes as industries worldwide grapple with shortages of crucial semiconductors and is being held in Pittsburgh, a Pennsylvania city that was once the heart of the American steel industry and has since evolved into a tech hub. The ministers met at Mill 19, a massive World War II-era munitions factory and later steel mill on the shores of the Monongahela River that has been reborn as an advanced robotics facility for researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. The shadow of steel hangs over the meetings in other ways as well, especially as the two sides have yet to resolve a conflict over Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminum. The former president cited US national security concerns in June 2018 when he imposed punitive tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum, which have been a thorn in the side of trans-Atlantic relations since.

The standard ML methodology assumes that the test samples are derived from a set of pre-observed classes used in the training phase. Where the model extracts and learns useful patterns to detect new data samples belonging to the same data classes. However, in certain applications such as Network Intrusion Detection Systems, it is challenging to obtain data samples for all attack classes that the model will most likely observe in production. ML-based NIDSs face new attack traffic known as zero-day attacks, that are not used in the training of the learning models due to their non-existence at the time. In this paper, a zero-shot learning methodology has been proposed to evaluate the ML model performance in the detection of zero-day attack scenarios. In the attribute learning stage, the ML models map the network data features to distinguish semantic attributes from known attack (seen) classes. In the inference stage, the models are evaluated in the detection of zero-day attack (unseen) classes by constructing the relationships between known attacks and zero-day attacks. A new metric is defined as Zero-day Detection Rate, which measures the effectiveness of the learning model in the inference stage. The results demonstrate that while the majority of the attack classes do not represent significant risks to organisations adopting an ML-based NIDS in a zero-day attack scenario. However, for certain attack groups identified in this paper, such systems are not effective in applying the learnt attributes of attack behaviour to detect them as malicious. Further Analysis was conducted using the Wasserstein Distance technique to measure how different such attacks are from other attack types used in the training of the ML model. The results demonstrate that sophisticated attacks with a low zero-day detection rate have a significantly distinct feature distribution compared to the other attack classes.

Search and recommendation are the two most common approaches used by people to obtain information. They share the same goal -- satisfying the user's information need at the right time. There are already a lot of Internet platforms and Apps providing both search and recommendation services, showing us the demand and opportunity to simultaneously handle both tasks. However, most platforms consider these two tasks independently -- they tend to train separate search model and recommendation model, without exploiting the relatedness and dependency between them. In this paper, we argue that jointly modeling these two tasks will benefit both of them and finally improve overall user satisfaction. We investigate the interactions between these two tasks in the specific information content service domain. We propose first integrating the user's behaviors in search and recommendation into a heterogeneous behavior sequence, then utilizing a joint model for handling both tasks based on the unified sequence. More specifically, we design the Unified Information Search and Recommendation model (USER), which mines user interests from the integrated sequence and accomplish the two tasks in a unified way.