We provide a dataset that enables the creation of learning agents that can build knowledge graph-based world models of interactive narratives. Interactive narratives -- or text-adventure games -- are partially observable environments structured as long puzzles or quests in which an agent perceives and interacts with the world purely through textual natural language. Each individual game typically contains hundreds of locations, characters, and objects -- each with their own unique descriptions -- providing an opportunity to study the problem of giving language-based agents the structured memory necessary to operate in such worlds. Our dataset provides 24198 mappings between rich natural language observations and: (1) knowledge graphs that reflect the world state in the form of a map; (2) natural language actions that are guaranteed to cause a change in that particular world state. The training data is collected across 27 games in multiple genres and contains a further 7836 heldout instances over 9 additional games in the test set. We further provide baseline models using rules-based, question-answering, and sequence learning approaches in addition to an analysis of the data and corresponding learning tasks.

Reasoning about the behaviour of physical objects is a key capability of agents operating in physical worlds. Humans are very experienced in physical reasoning while it remains a major challenge for AI. To facilitate research addressing this problem, several benchmarks have been proposed recently. However, these benchmarks do not enable us to measure an agent's granular physical reasoning capabilities when solving a complex reasoning task. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark for physical reasoning that allows us to test individual physical reasoning capabilities. Inspired by how humans acquire these capabilities, we propose a general hierarchy of physical reasoning capabilities with increasing complexity. Our benchmark tests capabilities according to this hierarchy through generated physical reasoning tasks in the video game Angry Birds. This benchmark enables us to conduct a comprehensive agent evaluation by measuring the agent's granular physical reasoning capabilities. We conduct an evaluation with human players, learning agents, and heuristic agents and determine their capabilities. Our evaluation shows that learning agents, with good local generalization ability, still struggle to learn the underlying physical reasoning capabilities and perform worse than current state-of-the-art heuristic agents and humans. We believe that this benchmark will encourage researchers to develop intelligent agents with advanced, human-like physical reasoning capabilities. URL: https://github.com/Cheng-Xue/Hi-Phy

World models improve a learning agent's ability to efficiently operate in interactive and situated environments. This work focuses on the task of building world models of text-based game environments. Text-based games, or interactive narratives, are reinforcement learning environments in which agents perceive and interact with the world using textual natural language. These environments contain long, multi-step puzzles or quests woven through a world that is filled with hundreds of characters, locations, and objects. Our world model learns to simultaneously: (1) predict changes in the world caused by an agent's actions when representing the world as a knowledge graph; and (2) generate the set of contextually relevant natural language actions required to operate in the world. We frame this task as a Set of Sequences generation problem by exploiting the inherent structure of knowledge graphs and actions and introduce both a transformer-based multi-task architecture and a loss function to train it. A zero-shot ablation study on never-before-seen textual worlds shows that our methodology significantly outperforms existing textual world modeling techniques as well as the importance of each of our contributions.

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Abstract With the development of the 5G and Internet of Things, amounts of wireless devices need to share the limited spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising paradigm to remedy the problem of inef!cient spectrum utilization brought upon by the historical command-and-control approach to spectrum allocation. In this paper, we investigate the distributed DSA problem for multiuser in a typical multi-channel cognitive radio network. The problem is formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), and we proposed a centralized off-line training and distributed on-line execution framework based on cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We employ the deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) to address the partial observability of the state for each cognitive user. The ultimate goal is to learn a cooperative strategy which maximizes the sum throughput of cognitive radio network in distributed fashion without coordination information exchange between cognitive users. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 6193000305. X. Tan, L. Zhou, Y. Sun, H. Wang, H. Zhao and J. Wei are all with College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China (E-mail: {tanxiang, zhouli2035, haijunwang14, sunyuli19, haitaozhao, wjbhw}@nudt.edu.cn). Boon-Chong Seet is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland 1142, New Zealand (E-mail: boon-chong.seet@aut.ac.nz). Victor C. M. Leung is with Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (E-mail: vleung@ieee.org). 2 From the simulation results, we can observe that the proposed algorithm can converge fast and achieve almost the optimal performance. The future network is involving into the Internet of Everything.

In many real-world imitation learning tasks, the demonstrator and the learner have to act in different but full observation spaces. This situation generates significant obstacles for existing imitation learning approaches to work, even when they are combined with traditional space adaptation techniques. The main challenge lies in bridging expert's occupancy measures to learner's dynamically changing occupancy measures under the different observation spaces. In this work, we model the above learning problem as Heterogeneous Observations Imitation Learning (HOIL). We propose the Importance Weighting with REjection (IWRE) algorithm based on the techniques of importance-weighting, learning with rejection, and active querying to solve the key challenge of occupancy measure matching. Experimental results show that IWRE can successfully solve HOIL tasks, including the challenging task of transforming the vision-based demonstrations to random access memory (RAM)-based policies under the Atari domain.

What is the future of chatbots? As the Chief Product Officer of an AI bot-building platform, I get this question a lot, and there are many ways to answer it. As a company, I think we can only answer this question if we know where we are planning to go. Which goal are we aiming for? Chatlayer's mission is to make it possible for everyone to have a personal conversation at any time.

"A period that had been broadly described as engagement has come to an end," Kurt Campbell, the Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the United States (US) National Security Council, told a virtual audience in May on the subject of US-China relations. "The dominant paradigm is going to be competition." On several occasions, Campbell has highlighted that one of the major arenas of this competition will concern technology. This is increasingly reflected in US national security structures. Today, there is both a senior director and coordinator for technology and national security at the White House; the National Economic Council has briefed the Cabinet on supply chain resilience; and the focus of Department of Defense policy reviews have been on emerging military technologies.

The graph represents a network of 4,327 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "#VR", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Tuesday, 15 June 2021 at 17:45 UTC. The requested start date was Tuesday, 15 June 2021 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 7,500. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2-day, 5-hour, 6-minute period from Saturday, 12 June 2021 at 16:46 UTC to Monday, 14 June 2021 at 21:52 UTC.

Microsoft's sleek and stylish Surface Laptop is back for its fourth generation with faster performance and a greater variety of chips. The Surface Laptop 4 is available with either a 13.5in or a 15in screen and starts at £999 in the UK, $999 in the US or $1,599 in Australia sitting above the Surface Laptop Go as Microsoft's mainstream premium notebook, competing with the similarly priced Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air, among others. Very little has changed on the outside, matching the dimensions, weight, port selection and design of 2020's Surface Laptop 3. Here tested with a 13.5in screen, it still looks and feels sleek with its aluminium lid, choice of Alcantara fabric or aluminium deck and bright and crisp touch screen. The keyboard is excellent while the large trackpad is smooth and precise. The speakers are loud and clear with reasonable bass for a laptop, while the 720p webcam and microphones are better than most for video calls.

Detecting and responding to novel situations in open-world environments is a key capability of human cognition. Current artificial intelligence (AI) researchers strive to develop systems that can perform in open-world environments. Novelty detection is an important ability of such AI systems. In an open-world, novelties appear in various forms and the difficulty to detect them varies. Therefore, to accurately evaluate the detection capability of AI systems, it is necessary to investigate the difficulty to detect novelties. In this paper, we propose a qualitative physics-based method to quantify the difficulty of novelty detection focusing on open-world physical domains. We apply our method in a popular physics simulation game, Angry Birds. We conduct an experiment with human players with different novelties in Angry Birds to validate our method. Results indicate that the calculated difficulty values are in line with the detection difficulty of the human players.