Playtesting is an essential step in the game design process. Game designers use the feedback from playtests to refine their design. Game designers may employ procedural personas to automate the playtesting process. In this paper, we present two approaches to improve automated playtesting. First, we propose a goal-based persona model, which we call developing persona -- developing persona proposes a dynamic persona model, whereas the current persona models are static. Game designers can use the developing persona to model the changes that a player undergoes while playing a game. Additionally, a human playtester knows which paths she has tested before, and during the consequent tests, she may test different paths. However, RL agents disregard the previously generated trajectories. We propose a novel methodology that helps Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to generate distinct trajectories than the previous trajectories. We refer to this methodology as Alternative Path Finder (APF). We present a generic APF framework that can be applied to all RL agents. APF is trained with the previous trajectories, and APF distinguishes the novel states from similar states. We use the General Video Game Artificial Intelligence (GVG-AI) and VizDoom frameworks to test our proposed methodologies. We use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) RL agent during experiments. First, we show that the playtest data generated by the developing persona cannot be generated using the procedural personas. Second, we present the alternative paths found using APF. We show that the APF penalizes the previous paths and rewards the distinct paths.

India lost two early wickets in the first session of the initial innings of the ICC Test Championship Final. There is already much history about him and England. This History was enough to create the hype around him. On the first note, the ground was the same where India loses their debut world cup winning chance in the captaincy of Kohli. Southampton has seen India losing enough times.

One of the difficulties in training dialogue systems is the lack of training data. We explore the possibility of creating dialogue data through the interaction between a dialogue system and a user simulator. Our goal is to develop a modelling framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between the two agents. In this framework, we first pre-train the two agents on a collection of source domain dialogues, which equips the agents to converse with each other via natural language. With further fine-tuning on a small amount of target domain data, the agents continue to interact with the aim of improving their behaviors using reinforcement learning with structured reward functions. In experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, two practical transfer learning problems are investigated: 1) domain adaptation and 2) single-to-multiple domain transfer. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of the two agents in transfer learning. We also show that our method leads to improvements in dialogue system performance on complete datasets.

Deep generative models have recently achieved impressive performance in speech and music synthesis. However, compared to the generation of those domain-specific sounds, generating general sounds (such as siren, gunshots) has received less attention, despite their wide applications. In previous work, the SampleRNN method was considered for sound generation in the time domain. However, SampleRNN is potentially limited in capturing long-range dependencies within sounds as it only back-propagates through a limited number of samples. In this work, we propose a method for generating sounds via neural discrete time-frequency representation learning, conditioned on sound classes. This offers an advantage in efficiently modelling long-range dependencies and retaining local fine-grained structures within sound clips. We evaluate our approach on the UrbanSound8K dataset, compared to SampleRNN, with the performance metrics measuring the quality and diversity of generated sounds. Experimental results show that our method offers comparable performance in quality and significantly better performance in diversity.

Software Vulnerabilities (SVs) are increasing in complexity and scale, posing great security risks to many software systems. Given the limited resources in practice, SV assessment and prioritization help practitioners devise optimal SV mitigation plans based on various SV characteristics. The surge in SV data sources and data-driven techniques such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning have taken SV assessment and prioritization to the next level. Our survey provides a taxonomy of the past research efforts and highlights the best practices for data-driven SV assessment and prioritization. We also discuss the current limitations and propose potential solutions to address such issues.

Using satellites, drones and artificial intelligence, emerging technology is changing the way firefighting agencies and governments battle the ever-increasing threat of wildfires as hundreds of thousands of acres burn across the western United States. New programs are being developed by startups and research institutions to predict fire behavior, monitor drought and even detect fires when they first start. As climate change continues to increase the intensity and frequency of wildfires, these breakthroughs offer at least one tool in the growing arsenal of prevention and suppression strategies. "This is not to replace firefighting on the ground," said Ilkay Altintas, a computer scientist with the University of California, San Diego, who developed a fire map for the region. "The more science and data we can give firefighters and the public, the quicker we'll have solutions to combat and mitigate wildfires."

The one glaring gap in the Commonwealth government's AI strategy and action plan is a process to develop a coordinated governance framework around the development, use and procurement of AI services within commonwealth government agencies. This is where the NSW Government has taken a clear lead, setting out a mandatory customer service circular which all NSW Government agencies need to adhere to. There is practical guidance on adhering to principles, assessing risk, managing data, sourcing AI solutions, meeting legal obligations and more.

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a non-zero probability for any context/action of the evaluation policy. However, many real-world systems do not guarantee such logging policies, especially when the action space is large and many actions have poor or missing rewards. With such \emph{support deficiency}, the offline learning fails to find optimal policies. We propose a novel approach that uses a hybrid of offline learning with online exploration. The online exploration is used to explore unsupported actions in the logged data whilst offline learning is used to exploit supported actions from the logged data avoiding unnecessary explorations. Our approach determines an optimal policy with theoretical guarantees using the minimal number of online explorations. We demonstrate our algorithms' effectiveness empirically on a diverse collection of datasets.

Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) is recognized as a unifying framework for modeling a wide range of problems. Problems can be solved with commercial solvers customized for solving QUBO and since QUBO have degree two, it is useful to have a method for transforming higher degree pseudo-Boolean problems to QUBO format. The standard transformation approach requires additional auxiliary variables supported by penalty terms for each higher degree term. This paper improves on the existing cubic-to-quadratic transformation approach by minimizing the number of additional variables as well as penalty coefficient. Extensive experimental testing on Max 3-SAT modeled as QUBO shows a near 100% reduction in the subproblem size used for minimization of the number of auxiliary variables.