Learning in multi-agent systems is highly challenging due to the inherent complexity introduced by agents' interactions. We tackle systems with a huge population of interacting agents (e.g., swarms) via Mean-Field Control (MFC). MFC considers an asymptotically infinite population of identical agents that aim to collaboratively maximize the collective reward. Specifically, we consider the case of unknown system dynamics where the goal is to simultaneously optimize for the rewards and learn from experience. We propose an efficient model-based reinforcement learning algorithm $\text{M}^3\text{-UCRL}$ that runs in episodes and provably solves this problem. $\text{M}^3\text{-UCRL}$ uses upper-confidence bounds to balance exploration and exploitation during policy learning. Our main theoretical contributions are the first general regret bounds for model-based RL for MFC, obtained via a novel mean-field type analysis. $\text{M}^3\text{-UCRL}$ can be instantiated with different models such as neural networks or Gaussian Processes, and effectively combined with neural network policy learning. We empirically demonstrate the convergence of $\text{M}^3\text{-UCRL}$ on the swarm motion problem of controlling an infinite population of agents seeking to maximize location-dependent reward and avoid congested areas.

Text Worlds are virtual environments for embodied agents that, unlike 2D or 3D environments, are rendered exclusively using textual descriptions. These environments offer an alternative to higher-fidelity 3D environments due to their low barrier to entry, providing the ability to study semantics, compositional inference, and other high-level tasks with rich high-level action spaces while controlling for perceptual input. This systematic survey outlines recent developments in tooling, environments, and agent modeling for Text Worlds, while examining recent trends in knowledge graphs, common sense reasoning, transfer learning of Text World performance to higher-fidelity environments, as well as near-term development targets that, once achieved, make Text Worlds an attractive general research paradigm for natural language processing.

A state-of-the-art systematic review on XAI applied to Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) of industrial asset is presented. The work attempts to provide an overview of the general trend of XAI in PHM, answers the question of accuracy versus explainability, investigates the extent of human role, explainability evaluation and uncertainty management in PHM XAI. Research articles linked to PHM XAI, in English language, from 2015 to 2021 are selected from IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, ACM Digital Library and Scopus databases using PRISMA guidelines. Data was extracted from 35 selected articles and examined using MS. Excel. Several findings were synthesized. Firstly, while the discipline is still young, the analysis indicates the growing acceptance of XAI in PHM domain. Secondly, XAI functions as a double edge sword, where it is assimilated as a tool to execute PHM tasks as well as a mean of explanation, in particular in diagnostic and anomaly detection. There is thus a need for XAI in PHM. Thirdly, the review shows that PHM XAI papers produce either good or excellent results in general, suggesting that PHM performance is unaffected by XAI. Fourthly, human role, explainability metrics and uncertainty management are areas requiring further attention by the PHM community. Adequate explainability metrics to cater for PHM need are urgently needed. Finally, most case study featured on the accepted articles are based on real, indicating that available AI and XAI approaches are equipped to solve complex real-world challenges, increasing the confidence of AI model adoption in the industry. This work is funded by the Universiti Teknologi Petronas Foundation.

Knowledge compilation (KC) languages find a growing number of practical uses, including in Constraint Programming (CP) and in Machine Learning (ML). In most applications, one natural question is how to explain the decisions made by models represented by a KC language. This paper shows that for many of the best known KC languages, well-known classes of explanations can be computed in polynomial time. These classes include deterministic decomposable negation normal form (d-DNNF), and so any KC language that is strictly less succinct than d-DNNF. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the conditions under which polynomial time computation of explanations can be extended to KC languages more succinct than d-DNNF.

With the remarkable success of representation learning for prediction problems, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of the use of machine learning and deep learning for the analysis of digital pathology and biopsy image patches. However, traditional learning over patch-wise features using convolutional neural networks limits the model when attempting to capture global contextual information. The phenotypical and topological distribution of constituent histological entities play a critical role in tissue diagnosis. As such, graph data representations and deep learning have attracted significant attention for encoding tissue representations, and capturing intra- and inter- entity level interactions. In this review, we provide a conceptual grounding of graph-based deep learning and discuss its current success for tumor localization and classification, tumor invasion and staging, image retrieval, and survival prediction.

Staying on top of your reading list is hard, and finding which papers should be on that list can be even harder. At Zeta Alpha we're always keeping a close eye to the latest ML research, so we're sharing a monthly selection of recent papers to surface what we believe will be impactful publications, mostly based on each work's contributions and the authors' influence. Don't take this list as comprehensive: we have our biases like everyone else, but hey there's only so much you can choose out of 4000 papers. This month we bring Volunteer Computing to the forefront, more Transformers, Mixture of Experts and much more. Why Cars spend almost all their lifetime parked, and similarly, a big chunk of the world's compute is standing idle most of the time.

Chemical reactions and phase transformations underpin phenomena ranging from cosmological processes, to the emergence of life on Earth, to modern technologies and are therefore of tremendous interest for both basic and applied sciences. Here I provide a review of recent advancements in the intersection between computational mathematics, material science & chemical engineering. Fast Fourier Transforms were used to label the data in an automated & reliable manner. Deep learning was used to map breeches in lattice periodicity to atomic defects in Mo-doped WS2 -- effectively identifying atomic defects in the data. A Gaussian Mixture Model was then used to probabilistically cluster defects.

Fake reviews and review manipulation are growing problems on online marketplaces globally. Review Hijacking is a new review manipulation tactic in which unethical sellers "hijack" an existing product page (usually one with many positive reviews), then update the product details like title, photo, and description with those of an entirely different product. With the earlier reviews still attached, the new item appears well-reviewed. However, there are no public datasets of review hijacking and little is known in the literature about this tactic. Hence, this paper proposes a three-part study: (i) we propose a framework to generate synthetically labeled data for review hijacking by swapping products and reviews; (ii) then, we evaluate the potential of both a Twin LSTM network and BERT sequence pair classifier to distinguish legitimate reviews from hijacked ones using this data; and (iii) we then deploy the best performing model on a collection of 31K products (with 6.5 M reviews) in the original data, where we find 100s of previously unknown examples of review hijacking.

Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.

Shorter product life cycles and increasing individualization of production leads to an increased reconfiguration demand in the domain of industrial automation systems, which will be dominated by cyber-physical production systems in the future. In constantly changing systems, however, not all configuration alternatives of the almost infinite state space are fully understood. Thus, certain configurations can lead to process instability, a reduction in quality or machine failures. Therefore, this paper presents an approach that enhances an intelligent Digital Twin with a self-organized reconfiguration management based on adaptive process models in order to find optimized configurations more comprehensively.