HAGA, Japan--Honda Motor Co. said it would focus for now on partially autonomous driving technology to improve safety, adding itself to the list of auto makers that say fully self-driving cars aren't ready for prime time. The Japanese auto maker, an investor in General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving unit, this week showed off a prototype system that allows a car to automatically overtake slow-moving vehicles on a highway. It plans to roll out the technology globally starting in 2024, and it says it has found ways to use less-expensive radar and sensor technologies to make the system affordable for mass-market cars. An alert human driver still needs to be at the wheel. Honda's executive chief engineer, Mahito Shikama, said the company intends to focus on technologies such as the automatic passing system and other crash-prevention measures that fall short of full autonomy.

In many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications for surveillance and data collection, it is not possible to reach all requested locations due to the given maximum flight time. Hence, the requested locations must be prioritized and the problem of selecting the most important locations is modeled as an Orienteering Problem (OP). To fully exploit the kinematic properties of the UAV in such scenarios, we combine the OP with the generation of time-optimal trajectories with bounds on velocity and acceleration. We define the resulting problem as the Kinematic Orienteering Problem (KOP) and propose an exact mixed-integer formulation together with a Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) as a heuristic solution method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach based on Orienteering instances from the literature and benchmark against optimal solutions of the Dubins Orienteering Problem (DOP) as the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we show by simulation \color{black} that the resulting solutions can be tracked precisely by a modern MPC-based flight controller. Since we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art in generating time-optimal trajectories in multiple dimensions is not generally correct, we further present an improved analytical method for time-optimal trajectory generation.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to achieve competitive results to tackle graph-related tasks, such as node and graph classification, link prediction and node and graph clustering in a variety of domains. Most GNNs use a message passing framework and hence are called MPNNs. Despite their promising results, MPNNs have been reported to suffer from over-smoothing, over-squashing and under-reaching. Graph rewiring and graph pooling have been proposed in the literature as solutions to address these limitations. However, most state-of-the-art graph rewiring methods fail to preserve the global topology of the graph, are neither differentiable nor inductive, and require the tuning of hyper-parameters. In this paper, we propose DiffWire, a novel framework for graph rewiring in MPNNs that is principled, fully differentiable and parameter-free by leveraging the Lov\'asz bound. The proposed approach provides a unified theory for graph rewiring by proposing two new, complementary layers in MPNNs: CT-Layer, a layer that learns the commute times and uses them as a relevance function for edge re-weighting; and GAP-Layer, a layer to optimize the spectral gap, depending on the nature of the network and the task at hand. We empirically validate the value of each of these layers separately with benchmark datasets for graph classification. We also perform preliminary studies on the use of CT-Layer for homophilic and heterophilic node classification tasks. DiffWire brings together the learnability of commute times to related definitions of curvature, opening the door to creating more expressive MPNNs.

With the breakthrough of AlphaGo, deep reinforcement learning becomes a recognized technique for solving sequential decision-making problems. Despite its reputation, data inefficiency caused by its trial and error learning mechanism makes deep reinforcement learning hard to be practical in a wide range of areas. Plenty of methods have been developed for sample efficient deep reinforcement learning, such as environment modeling, experience transfer, and distributed modifications, amongst which, distributed deep reinforcement learning has shown its potential in various applications, such as human-computer gaming, and intelligent transportation. In this paper, we conclude the state of this exciting field, by comparing the classical distributed deep reinforcement learning methods, and studying important components to achieve efficient distributed learning, covering single player single agent distributed deep reinforcement learning to the most complex multiple players multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we review recently released toolboxes that help to realize distributed deep reinforcement learning without many modifications of their non-distributed versions. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, a multi-player multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning toolbox is developed and released, which is further validated on Wargame, a complex environment, showing usability of the proposed toolbox for multiple players and multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning under complex games. Finally, we try to point out challenges and future trends, hoping this brief review can provide a guide or a spark for researchers who are interested in distributed deep reinforcement learning.

Automatic spoken language identification (LID) is a very important research field in the era of multilingual voice-command-based human-computer interaction (HCI). A front-end LID module helps to improve the performance of many speech-based applications in the multilingual scenario. India is a populous country with diverse cultures and languages. The majority of the Indian population needs to use their respective native languages for verbal interaction with machines. Therefore, the development of efficient Indian spoken language recognition systems is useful for adapting smart technologies in every section of Indian society. The field of Indian LID has started gaining momentum in the last two decades, mainly due to the development of several standard multilingual speech corpora for the Indian languages. Even though significant research progress has already been made in this field, to the best of our knowledge, there are not many attempts to analytically review them collectively. In this work, we have conducted one of the very first attempts to present a comprehensive review of the Indian spoken language recognition research field. In-depth analysis has been presented to emphasize the unique challenges of low-resource and mutual influences for developing LID systems in the Indian contexts. Several essential aspects of the Indian LID research, such as the detailed description of the available speech corpora, the major research contributions, including the earlier attempts based on statistical modeling to the recent approaches based on different neural network architectures, and the future research trends are discussed. This review work will help assess the state of the present Indian LID research by any active researcher or any research enthusiasts from related fields.

Curiosity for machine agents has been a focus of lively research activity. The study of human and animal curiosity, particularly specific curiosity, has unearthed several properties that would offer important benefits for machine learners, but that have not yet been well-explored in machine intelligence. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive, multidisciplinary survey of the field of animal and machine curiosity. As a principal contribution of this work, we use this survey as a foundation to introduce and define what we consider to be five of the most important properties of specific curiosity: 1) directedness towards inostensible referents, 2) cessation when satisfied, 3) voluntary exposure, 4) transience, and 5) coherent long-term learning. As a second main contribution of this work, we show how these properties may be implemented together in a proof-of-concept reinforcement learning agent: we demonstrate how the properties manifest in the behaviour of this agent in a simple non-episodic grid-world environment that includes curiosity-inducing locations and induced targets of curiosity. As we would hope, our example of a computational specific curiosity agent exhibits short-term directed behaviour while updating long-term preferences to adaptively seek out curiosity-inducing situations. This work, therefore, presents a landmark synthesis and translation of specific curiosity to the domain of machine learning and reinforcement learning and provides a novel view into how specific curiosity operates and in the future might be integrated into the behaviour of goal-seeking, decision-making computational agents in complex environments.

The word alignment task, despite its prominence in the era of statistical machine translation (SMT), is niche and under-explored today. In this two-part tutorial, we argue for the continued relevance for word alignment. The first part provides a historical background to word alignment as a core component of the traditional SMT pipeline. We zero-in on GIZA++, an unsupervised, statistical word aligner with surprising longevity. Jumping forward to the era of neural machine translation (NMT), we show how insights from word alignment inspired the attention mechanism fundamental to present-day NMT. The second part shifts to a survey approach. We cover neural word aligners, showing the slow but steady progress towards surpassing GIZA++ performance. Finally, we cover the present-day applications of word alignment, from cross-lingual annotation projection, to improving translation.

The inception of large language models has helped advance state-of-the-art performance on numerous natural language tasks. This has also opened the door for the development of foundation models for other domains and data modalities such as images, code, and music. In this paper, we argue that business process data representations have unique characteristics that warrant the development of a new class of foundation models to handle tasks like process mining, optimization, and decision making. These models should also tackle the unique challenges of applying AI to business processes which include data scarcity, multi-modal representations, domain specific terminology, and privacy concerns.

In this article, we plan to provide an introduction about some basics about robots for readers. Several key topics of classic robotics will be introduced, including robot representation, robot rotational motion, coordinates transformation and velocity transformation. By now, classic rigid-body robot analysis is still the main-stream approach in robot controlling and motion planning. In this article, no data-driven or machine learning based methods will be introduced. Most of the materials covered in this article are based on the rigid-body kinematics that the readers probably have learned from the physics course at high-school or college. Meanwhile, these classic robot kinematics analyses will serve as the foundation for the latest intelligent robot control algorithms in modern robotics studies.

The prediction of protein structures from sequences is an important task for function prediction, drug design, and related biological processes understanding. Recent advances have proved the power of language models (LMs) in processing the protein sequence databases, which inherit the advantages of attention networks and capture useful information in learning representations for proteins. The past two years have witnessed remarkable success in tertiary protein structure prediction (PSP), including evolution-based and single-sequence-based PSP. It seems that instead of using energy-based models and sampling procedures, protein language model (pLM)-based pipelines have emerged as mainstream paradigms in PSP. Despite the fruitful progress, the PSP community needs a systematic and up-to-date survey to help bridge the gap between LMs in the natural language processing (NLP) and PSP domains and introduce their methodologies, advancements and practical applications. To this end, in this paper, we first introduce the similarities between protein and human languages that allow LMs extended to pLMs, and applied to protein databases. Then, we systematically review recent advances in LMs and pLMs from the perspectives of network architectures, pre-training strategies, applications, and commonly-used protein databases. Next, different types of methods for PSP are discussed, particularly how the pLM-based architectures function in the process of protein folding. Finally, we identify challenges faced by the PSP community and foresee promising research directions along with the advances of pLMs. This survey aims to be a hands-on guide for researchers to understand PSP methods, develop pLMs and tackle challenging problems in this field for practical purposes.