A revolutionary lightweight exosuit that makes walking and running easier has been developed. Scientists say their pioneering design - weighing just five kilos (11 lbs) - could be worn by soldiers, firefighters or rescue workers. They say it could help keep them fresh by lightening the load of their jobs and assist them in negotiating difficult terrain. The portable gear may also improve mobility and quality of life for the elderly and people suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. A revolutionary lightweight exosuit (pictured) that makes walking and running easier has been developed.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. Gone are the days when you'd write a note on a piece of paper to remind someone to do something. Instead, you now leave reminders on your smart speaker. Google Assistant devices in the U.S., U.K. and Australia will get an upgrade over the next few weeks to allow you to set reminders for other people.

Waste management is one of the significant problems throughout the world. Contemporaneous methods find it difficult to manage the volume of solid waste generated by the growing urban population. In this paper, we propose a system which is very hygienic and cheap that uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms for detection of the garbage. Once the garbage is detected the system calculates the position of the garbage by the use of the camera only. The proposed system is capable of distinguishing between valuables and garbage with more than 95% confidence in real time. Finally, a robotic arm controlled by the microcontroller is used to pick up the garbage and places it in the bin. Concluding, the paper explains a system that is capable of working as a human in terms of inspecting and collecting the garbage. The system is able to achieve 3-4 frames per second on the Raspberry Pi, capable of detecting the garbage in real time with 90%+ confidence.

Multi-modal journey planning, which allows multiple types of transport within a single trip, is becoming increasingly popular, due to a strong practical interest and an increasing availability of data. In real life, transport networks feature uncertainty. Yet, most approaches assume a deterministic environment, making plans more prone to failures such as missed connections and major delays in the arrival. This paper presents an approach to computing optimal contingent plans in multi-modal journey planning. The problem is modeled as a search in an and/or state space. We describe search enhancements used on top of the AO* algorithm. Enhancements include admissible heuristics, multiple types of pruning that preserve the completeness and the optimality, and a hybrid search approach with a deterministic and a nondeterministic search. We demonstrate an NP-hardness result, with the hardness stemming from the dynamically changing distributions of the travel time random variables. We perform a detailed empirical analysis on realistic transport networks from cities such as Montpellier, Rome and Dublin. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithmic contributions, and the benefits of contingent plans as compared to standard sequential plans, when the arrival and departure times of buses are characterized by uncertainty.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are often described as black boxes due to the difficulty in explaining how they reach their final output for a given task. Consequently a number of techniques have been developed to aid in the process of explainability. These techniques range from the scoring of individual pixels to reflect their impact on the networks decision making, to the scoring of larger regions of the image. Scoring larger regions allows for the results to be more easily interpreted. A popular technique for explaining images is LIME [10]. This uses superpixels, contiguous regions for visualisation, allowing a level of interpretability that may not be present in individual pixel scoring. However, this increased interpretability comes at a cost. The LIME technique relies on perturbing the input image and repeatedly passing it to the network to build an understanding of how important each superpixel region is to the final classification. This requires multiple perturbed images to be passed through the network, by default 1000 in the released code.

Deep learning methods operate in regimes that defy the traditional statistical mindset. The neural network architectures often contain more parameters than training samples, and are so rich that they can interpolate the observed labels, even if the latter are replaced by pure noise. Despite their huge complexity, the same architectures achieve small generalization error on real data. This phenomenon has been rationalized in terms of a so-called `double descent' curve. As the model complexity increases, the generalization error follows the usual U-shaped curve at the beginning, first decreasing and then peaking around the interpolation threshold (when the model achieves vanishing training error). However, it descends again as model complexity exceeds this threshold. The global minimum of the generalization error is found in this overparametrized regime, often when the number of parameters is much larger than the number of samples. Far from being a peculiar property of deep neural networks, elements of this behavior have been demonstrated in much simpler settings, including linear regression with random covariates. In this paper we consider the problem of learning an unknown function over the $d$-dimensional sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, from $n$ i.i.d. samples $(\boldsymbol x_i, y_i) \in \mathbb S^{d-1} \times \mathbb R$, $i \le n$. We perform ridge regression on $N$ random features of the form $\sigma(\boldsymbol w_a^{\mathsf T}\boldsymbol x)$, $a \le N$. This can be equivalently described as a two-layers neural network with random first-layer weights. We compute the precise asymptotics of the generalization error, in the limit $N, n, d \to \infty$ with $N/d$ and $n/d$ fixed. This provides the first analytically tractable model that captures all the features of the double descent phenomenon.

Counterfactual thinking describes a psychological phenomenon that people re-infer the possible results with different solutions about things that have already happened. It helps people to gain more experience from mistakes and thus to perform better in similar future tasks. This paper investigates the counterfactual thinking for agents to find optimal decision-making strategies in multi-agent reinforcement learning environments. In particular, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning model with a structure which mimics the human-psychological counterfactual thinking process to improve the competitive abilities for agents. To this end, our model generates several possible actions (intent actions) with a parallel policy structure and estimates the rewards and regrets for these intent actions based on its current understanding of the environment. Our model incorporates a scenario-based framework to link the estimated regrets with its inner policies. During the iterations, our model updates the parallel policies and the corresponding scenario-based regrets for agents simultaneously. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on two different environments with real-world applications. Experimental results show that counterfactual thinking can actually benefit the agents to obtain more accumulative rewards from the environments with fair information by comparing to their opponents while keeping high performing efficiency.

The importance of training robust neural network grows as 3D data is increasingly utilized in deep learning for vision tasks, like autonomous driving. We examine this problem from the perspective of the attacker, which is necessary in understanding how neural networks can be exploited, and thus defended. More specifically, we propose adversarial attacks based on solving different optimization problems, like minimizing the perceptibility of our generated adversarial examples, or maintaining a uniform density distribution of points across the adversarial object surfaces. Our four proposed algorithms for attacking 3D point cloud classification are all highly successful on existing neural networks, and we find that some of them are even effective against previously proposed point removal defenses.

Training accurate deep neural networks (DNNs) in the presence of noisy labels is an important and challenging task. Though a number of approaches have been proposed for learning with noisy labels, many open issues remain. In this paper, we show that DNN learning with Cross Entropy (CE) exhibits overfitting to noisy labels on some classes ("easy" classes), but more surprisingly, it also suffers from significant under learning on some other classes ("hard" classes). Intuitively, CE requires an extra term to facilitate learning of hard classes, and more importantly, this term should be noise tolerant, so as to avoid overfitting to noisy labels. Inspired by the symmetric KL-divergence, we propose the approach of \textbf{Symmetric cross entropy Learning} (SL), boosting CE symmetrically with a noise robust counterpart Reverse Cross Entropy (RCE). Our proposed SL approach simultaneously addresses both the under learning and overfitting problem of CE in the presence of noisy labels. We provide a theoretical analysis of SL and also empirically show, on a range of benchmark and real-world datasets, that SL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also show that SL can be easily incorporated into existing methods in order to further enhance their performance.

Deep learning is a popular machine learning technique and has been applied to many real-world problems. However, training a deep neural network is very time-consuming, especially on big data. It has become difficult for a single machine to train a large model over large datasets. A popular solution is to distribute and parallelize the training process across multiple machines using the parameter server framework. In this paper, we present a distributed paradigm on the parameter server framework called Dynamic Stale Synchronous Parallel (DSSP) which improves the state-of-the-art Stale Synchronous Parallel (SSP) paradigm by dynamically determining the staleness threshold at the run time. Conventionally to run distributed training in SSP, the user needs to specify a particular staleness threshold as a hyper-parameter. However, a user does not usually know how to set the threshold and thus often finds a threshold value through trial and error, which is time-consuming. Based on workers' recent processing time, our approach DSSP adaptively adjusts the threshold per iteration at running time to reduce the waiting time of faster workers for synchronization of the globally shared parameters, and consequently increases the frequency of parameters updates (increases iteration throughput), which speedups the convergence rate. We compare DSSP with other paradigms such as Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP), Asynchronous Parallel (ASP), and SSP by running deep neural networks (DNN) models over GPU clusters in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. The results show that in a heterogeneous environment where the cluster consists of mixed models of GPUs, DSSP converges to a higher accuracy much earlier than SSP and BSP and performs similarly to ASP. In a homogeneous distributed cluster, DSSP has more stable and slightly better performance than SSP and ASP, and converges much faster than BSP.