Humans have needs motivating their behavior according to intensity and context. However, we also create preferences associated with each action's perceived pleasure, which is susceptible to changes over time. This makes decision-making more complex, requiring learning to balance needs and preferences according to the context. To understand how this process works and enable the development of robots with a motivational-based learning model, we computationally model a motivation theory proposed by Hull. In this model, the agent (an abstraction of a mobile robot) is motivated to keep itself in a state of homeostasis. We added hedonic dimensions to see how preferences affect decision-making, and we employed reinforcement learning to train our motivated-based agents. We run three agents with energy decay rates representing different metabolisms in two different environments to see the impact on their strategy, movement, and behavior. The results show that the agent learned better strategies in the environment that enables choices more adequate according to its metabolism. The use of pleasure in the motivational mechanism significantly impacted behavior learning, mainly for slow metabolism agents. When survival is at risk, the agent ignores pleasure and equilibrium, hinting at how to behave in harsh scenarios.

Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.

Uncertainty in sensors results in corrupted input streams and hinders the performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which focus on deducing information from data. However, for sensors with multiple input streams, the relevant information among the streams correlates and hence contains mutual information. This paper utilizes this opportunity to recover the perturbed information due to corrupted input streams. We propose RecNet, which estimates the information entropy at every element of the input feature to the network and interpolates the missing information in the input feature matrix. Finally, using the estimated information entropy and interpolated data, we introduce a novel guided replacement procedure to recover the complete information that is the input to the downstream DNN task. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on a sound event detection and localization application where audio streams from the microphone array are corrupted. We have recovered the performance drop due to the corrupted input stream and reduced the localization error with non-corrupted input streams.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used and meet many demands in military and civilian fields. With the continuous enrichment and extensive expansion of application scenarios, the safety of UAVs is constantly being challenged. To address this challenge, we propose algorithms to detect anomalous data collected from drones to improve drone safety. We deployed a one-class kernel extreme learning machine (OCKELM) to detect anomalies in drone data. By default, OCKELM uses the radial basis (RBF) kernel function as the kernel function of the model. To improve the performance of OCKELM, we choose a Triangular Global Alignment Kernel (TGAK) instead of an RBF Kernel and introduce the Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA) algorithm to reconstruct UAV data. Based on the above improvements, we create a novel anomaly detection strategy FastICA-TGAK-OCELM. The method is finally validated on the UCI dataset and detected on the Aeronautical Laboratory Failures and Anomalies (ALFA) dataset. The experimental results show that compared with other methods, the accuracy of this method is improved by more than 30%, and point anomalies are effectively detected.

Hate speech detection has been the subject of high research attention, due to the scale of content created on social media. In spite of the attention and the sensitive nature of the task, privacy preservation in hate speech detection has remained under-studied. The majority of research has focused on centralised machine learning infrastructures which risk leaking data. In this paper, we show that using federated machine learning can help address privacy the concerns that are inherent to hate speech detection while obtaining up to 6.81% improvement in terms of F1-score.

Large LMs such as GPT-3 are powerful, but can commit mistakes that are obvious to humans. For example, GPT-3 would mistakenly interpret "What word is similar to good?" to mean a homophone, while the user intended a synonym. Our goal is to effectively correct such errors via user interactions with the system but without retraining, which will be prohibitively costly. We pair GPT-3 with a growing memory of recorded cases where the model misunderstood the user's intents, along with user feedback for clarification. Such a memory allows our system to produce enhanced prompts for any new query based on the user feedback for error correction on similar cases in the past. On four tasks (two lexical tasks, two advanced ethical reasoning tasks), we show how a (simulated) user can interactively teach a deployed GPT-3, substantially increasing its accuracy over the queries with different kinds of misunderstandings by the GPT-3. Our approach is a step towards the low-cost utility enhancement for very large pre-trained LMs. Code, data, and instructions to implement MEMPROMPT for a new task at https://www.memprompt.com/.

Recent years have witnessed a boom in self-supervised learning (SSL) in various areas including speech processing. Speech based SSL models present promising performance in a range of speech related tasks. However, the training of SSL models is computationally expensive and a common practice is to fine-tune a released SSL model on the specific task. It is essential to use consistent front-end input during pre-training and fine-tuning. This consistency may introduce potential issues when the optimal front-end is not the same as that used in pre-training. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective front-end adapter to address this front-end discrepancy. By minimizing the distance between the outputs of different front-ends, the filterbank feature (Fbank) can be compatible with SSL models which are pre-trained with waveform. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed front-end adapter on several popular SSL models for the speech recognition task.

We propose a distributed planning method with asynchronous execution for multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problems for environments with occasional delays in agents' activities and flexible endpoints. MAPD is a crucial problem framework with many applications; however, most existing studies assume ideal agent behaviors and environments, such as a fixed speed of agents, synchronized movements, and a well-designed environment with many short detours for multiple agents to perform tasks easily. However, such an environment is often infeasible; for example, the moving speed of agents may be affected by weather and floor conditions and is often prone to delays. The proposed method can relax some infeasible conditions to apply MAPD in more realistic environments by allowing fluctuated speed in agents' actions and flexible working locations (endpoints). Our experiments showed that our method enables agents to perform MAPD in such an environment efficiently, compared to the baseline methods. We also analyzed the behaviors of agents using our method and discuss the limitations.

William Shatner, 'Star Trek' alum and author of'Boldly Go,' spoke to Fox News Digital about his decadeslong friendship with Leonard Nimoy, as well as his iconic on-screen kiss with Nichelle Nichols. "Star Trek" fans can bask in nostalgia, as the cast of the iconic science fiction series has reunited. After more than two decades, "Star Trek: Nemesis" actors, including Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Jonathan Frakes and Patrick Stewart, revealed the decision to reprise their famous roles and what it was like working together on the spacecraft again on "Star Trek: Picard." Stewart, who's known for his role as Jean Luc Picard in the "Star Trek" franchise, gave fans a preview of what they can expect in the current series. "Star Trek: Nemesis" actors, including, from left, Jonathan Frakes, Patrick Stewart, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn, reprise their famous roles on "Star Trek: Picard."

Lebanon, Slovenia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the top three countries that are most interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) crypto, according to CoinGecko's recent report. Countries with major economic problems, like Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, have also ranked higher in the charts -- while the U.S. was placed 33rd, the CoinGecko report stated. The report measured the search popularity of 14 English search terms related to AI crypto between Nov. 30, 2022, and Feb. 16. A 100 indicates maximum popularity, while 50 indicates half -- zero would mean there was not enough data to examine. Lebanon scored 100 on almost all 14 search terms -- collecting 1,200 points and ranking first on the list.