As Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant intelligence, the progress to leverage LLMs as planning modules of autonomous agents has attracted more attention. This survey provides the first systematic view of LLM-based agents planning, covering recent works aiming to improve planning ability. We provide a taxonomy of existing works on LLM-Agent planning, which can be categorized into Task Decomposition, Plan Selection, External Module, Reflection and Memory. Comprehensive analyses are conducted for each direction, and further challenges for the field of research are discussed.

In the landscape of technological innovation, autonomous racing is a dynamic and challenging domain that not only pushes the limits of technology, but also plays a crucial role in advancing and fostering a greater acceptance of autonomous systems. This paper thoroughly explores challenges and advances in autonomous racing vehicle design and performance, focusing on Roborace and the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). This review provides a detailed analysis of sensor setups, architectural nuances, and test metrics on these cutting-edge platforms. In Roborace, the evolution from Devbot 1.0 to Robocar and Devbot 2.0 is detailed, revealing insights into sensor configurations and performance outcomes. The examination extends to the IAC, which is dedicated to high-speed self-driving vehicles, emphasizing developmental trajectories and sensor adaptations. By reviewing these platforms, the analysis provides valuable insight into autonomous driving racing, contributing to a broader understanding of sensor architectures and the challenges faced. This review supports future advances in full-scale autonomous racing technology.

In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded natural language understanding (NLU) research. Grounded language understanding studies language understanding systems situated in the context of events, actions and precepts in naturalistic/simulated virtual environments. Where classic research tends to focus on designing new models and optimization methods while treating environments as given, we explore the potential of environment design for improving data collection and model development. We developed novel training and annotation approaches for procedural text understanding based on text-based game environments. We also drew upon embodied cognitive linguistics literature to propose a roadmap for grounded NLP research, and to inform the development of a new benchmark for measuring the progress of large language models on challenging commonsense reasoning tasks. We leveraged the richer supervision provided by text-based game environments to develop Breakpoint Transformers, a novel approach to modeling intermediate semantic information in long narrative or procedural texts. Finally, we integrated theories on the role of environments in collective human intelligence to propose a design for AI-augmented "social thinking environments" for knowledge workers like scientists.

While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization capabilities, so that they can perform general-purpose tasks in open, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Recent advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality learning have shown that the foundation models have superhuman capabilities for specific tasks. They not only provide a solid cornerstone for integrating basic modules into embodied AI systems but also shed light on how to scale up robot learning from a methodological perspective. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of foundation models in robotics, focusing on autonomous manipulation and encompassing high-level planning and low-level control. Moreover, we showcase their commonly used datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Importantly, we emphasize the critical challenges intrinsic to this field and delineate potential avenues for future research, contributing to advancing the frontier of academic and industrial discourse.

Applications involving distributions defined on a hypersphere are remarkably diverse, highlighting the importance of spherical geometries across various disciplines. These applications include: 1) mapping the distribution of geographic or geological features on celestial bodies, such as stars and planets [39, 8, 60], 2) magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging [75] in medical domains, 3) spherical image representations and 360 images [13, 38], such as omnidirectional images in computer vision [40], 4) texture mapping in computer graphics [24, 21], and more recently, 5) deep representation learning, where the latent representation is often mapped to a bounded space, commonly a sphere, where cosine similarity is utilized for effective representation learning [11, 76]. The analysis of distributions on hyperspheres is traditionally approached through directional statistics, also referred to as circular/spherical statistics [37, 52, 50, 61]. This specialized field is dedicated to the statistical analysis of directions, orientations, and rotations. More recently, with the growing application of optimal transport theory [74, 62] in machine learning, due in part to its favorable statistical, geometrical, and topological properties, there has been an increasing interest in using optimal transport to compare spherical probability measures [14, 32]. One of the main bottlenecks in optimal transport theory is its high computational cost, generally of cubic complexity.

Supervised fairness-aware machine learning under distribution shifts is an emerging field that addresses the challenge of maintaining equitable and unbiased predictions when faced with changes in data distributions from source to target domains. In real-world applications, machine learning models are often trained on a specific dataset but deployed in environments where the data distribution may shift over time due to various factors. This shift can lead to unfair predictions, disproportionately affecting certain groups characterized by sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. In this survey, we provide a summary of various types of distribution shifts and comprehensively investigate existing methods based on these shifts, highlighting six commonly used approaches in the literature. Additionally, this survey lists publicly available datasets and evaluation metrics for empirical studies. We further explore the interconnection with related research fields, discuss the significant challenges, and identify potential directions for future studies.

The automatic generation of visualizations is an old task that, through the years, has shown more and more interest from the research and practitioner communities. Recently, large language models (LLM) have become an interesting option for supporting generative tasks related to visualization, demonstrating initial promising results. At the same time, several pitfalls, like the multiple ways of instructing an LLM to generate the desired result, the different perspectives leading the generation (code-based, image-based, grammar-based), and the presence of hallucinations even for the visualization generation task, make their usage less affordable than expected. Following similar initiatives for benchmarking LLMs, this paper copes with the problem of modeling the evaluation of a generated visualization through an LLM. We propose a theoretical evaluation stack, EvaLLM, that decomposes the evaluation effort in its atomic components, characterizes their nature, and provides an overview of how to implement and interpret them. We also designed and implemented an evaluation platform that provides a benchmarking resource for the visualization generation task. The platform supports automatic and manual scoring conducted by multiple assessors to support a fine-grained and semantic evaluation based on the EvaLLM stack. Two case studies on GPT3.5-turbo with Code Interpreter and Llama2-70-b models show the benefits of EvaLLM and illustrate interesting results on the current state-of-the-art LLM-generated visualizations.

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do businesses in local languages, including for those who cannot read and write. Unfortunately, these audio datasets are not fully exploited by current MI tools, leaving several Africans out of MI business opportunities. Additionally, many state-of-the-art MI models are not culture-aware, and the ethics of their adoption indexes are questionable. The lack thereof is a major drawback in many applications in Africa. This paper summarizes recent developments in machine intelligence in Africa from a multi-layer multiscale and culture-aware ethics perspective, showcasing MI use cases in 54 African countries through 400 articles on MI research, industry, government actions, as well as uses in art, music, the informal economy, and small businesses in Africa. The survey also opens discussions on the reliability of MI rankings and indexes in the African continent as well as algorithmic definitions of unclear terms used in MI.

Change point detection is a typical task that aim to find changes in time series and can be tackled with two-sample test. Copula Entropy is a mathematical concept for measuring statistical independence and a two-sample test based on it was introduced recently. In this paper we propose a nonparametric multivariate method for multiple change point detection with the copula entropy-based two-sample test. The single change point detection is first proposed as a group of two-sample tests on every points of time series data and the change point is considered as with the maximum of the test statistics. The multiple change point detection is then proposed by combining the single change point detection method with binary segmentation strategy. We verified the effectiveness of our method and compared it with the other similar methods on the simulated univariate and multivariate data and the Nile data.

A comprehensive view of factors associated with AD/ADRD will significantly aid in studies to develop new treatments for AD/ADRD and identify high-risk populations and patients for prevention efforts. In our study, we summarized the risk factors for AD/ADRD by reviewing existing meta-analyses and review articles on risk and preventive factors for AD/ADRD. In total, we extracted 477 risk factors in 10 categories from 537 studies. We constructed an interactive knowledge map to disseminate our study results. Most of the risk factors are accessible from structured Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and clinical narratives show promise as information sources. However, evaluating genomic risk factors using RWD remains a challenge, as genetic testing for AD/ADRD is still not a common practice and is poorly documented in both structured and unstructured EHRs. Considering the constantly evolving research on AD/ADRD risk factors, literature mining via NLP methods offers a solution to automatically update our knowledge map.