Humans often acquire new skills through observation and imitation. For robotic agents, learning from the plethora of unlabeled video demonstration data available on the Internet necessitates imitating the expert without access to its action, presenting a challenge known as Imitation Learning from Observations (ILfO). A common approach to tackle ILfO problems is to convert them into inverse reinforcement learning problems, utilizing a proxy reward computed from the agent's and the expert's observations. Nonetheless, we identify that tasks characterized by a progress dependency property pose significant challenges for such approaches; in these tasks, the agent needs to initially learn the expert's preceding behaviors before mastering the subsequent ones. Our investigation reveals that the main cause is that the reward signals assigned to later steps hinder the learning of initial behaviors. To address this challenge, we present a novel ILfO framework that enables the agent to master earlier behaviors before advancing to later ones. We introduce an Automatic Discount Scheduling (ADS) mechanism that adaptively alters the discount factor in reinforcement learning during the training phase, prioritizing earlier rewards initially and gradually engaging later rewards only when the earlier behaviors have been mastered. Our experiments, conducted on nine Meta-World tasks, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all tasks, including those that are unsolvable by them.

Inspired by the diversity and depth of XLand and the simplicity and minimalism of MiniGrid, we present XLand-MiniGrid, a suite of tools and grid-world environments for meta-reinforcement learning research. Written in JAX, XLand-MiniGrid is designed to be highly scalable and can potentially run on GPU or TPU accelerators, democratizing large-scale experimentation with limited resources. Along with the environments, XLand-MiniGrid provides pre-sampled benchmarks with millions of unique tasks of varying difficulty and easy-to-use baselines that allow users to quickly start training adaptive agents. In addition, we have conducted a preliminary analysis of scaling and generalization, showing that our baselines are capable of reaching millions of steps per second during training and validating that the proposed benchmarks are challenging.

This research critically navigates the intricate landscape of AI deception, concentrating on deceptive behaviours of Large Language Models (LLMs). My objective is to elucidate this issue, examine the discourse surrounding it, and subsequently delve into its categorization and ramifications. The essay initiates with an evaluation of the AI Safety Summit 2023 (ASS) and introduction of LLMs, emphasising multidimensional biases that underlie their deceptive behaviours.The literature review covers four types of deception categorised: Strategic deception, Imitation, Sycophancy, and Unfaithful Reasoning, along with the social implications and risks they entail. Lastly, I take an evaluative stance on various aspects related to navigating the persistent challenges of the deceptive AI. This encompasses considerations of international collaborative governance, the reconfigured engagement of individuals with AI, proposal of practical adjustments, and specific elements of digital education.

Applications such as ChatGPT and WOMBO Dream make it easy to inspire students without programming knowledge to use artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, given the increasing importance of AI in all disciplines, innovative strategies are needed to educate students in AI without programming knowledge so that AI can be integrated into their study modules as a future skill. This work presents a didactic planning script for applied AI. The didactic planning script is based on the AI application pipeline and links AI concepts with study-relevant topics. These linkages open up a new solution space and promote students' interest in and understanding of the potentials and risks of AI. An example lecture series for master students in energy management shows how AI can be seamlessly integrated into discipline-specific lectures. To this end, the planning script for applied AI is adapted to fit the study programs' topic. This specific teaching scenario enables students to solve a discipline-specific task step by step using the AI application pipeline. Thus, the application of the didactic planning script for applied AI shows the practical implementation of the theoretical concepts of AI. In addition, a checklist is presented that can be used to assess whether AI can be used in the discipline-specific lecture. AI as a future skill must be learned by students based on use cases that are relevant to the course of studies. For this reason, AI education should fit seamlessly into various curricula, even if the students do not have a programming background due to their field of study.

Driven by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence (AI), organizations are at the epicenter of a seismic shift, facing a crucial question: How can AI be successfully integrated into existing operations? To help answer it, manage expectations and mitigate frustration, this article introduces Computational Management, a systematic approach to task automation for enhancing the ability of organizations to harness AI's potential within existing workflows. Computational Management acts as a bridge between the strategic insights of management science with the analytical rigor of computational thinking. The article offers three easy step-by-step procedures to begin the process of implementing AI within a workflow. Such procedures focus on task (re)formulation, on the assessment of the automation potential of tasks, on the completion of task specification templates for AI selection and adaptation. Included in the article there are manual and automated methods, with prompt suggestions for publicly available LLMs, to complete these three procedures. The first procedure, task (re)formulation, focuses on breaking down work activities into basic units, so they can be completed by one agent, involve a single well-defined action, and produce a distinct outcome. The second, allows the assessment of the granular task and its suitability for automation, using the Task Automation Index to rank tasks based on whether they have standardized input, well-defined rules, repetitiveness, data dependency, and objective outputs. The third, focuses on a task specification template which details information on 16 critical components of tasks, and can be used as a checklist to select or adapt the most suitable AI solution for integration into existing workflows. Computational Management provides a roadmap and a toolkit for humans and AI to thrive together, while enhancing organizational efficiency and innovation.

The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models' abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models. Our benchmark and analysis will be available at https://scemqa.github.io/

We introduce GEOTACT, a robotic manipulation method capable of retrieving objects buried in granular media. This is a challenging task due to the need to interact with granular media, and doing so based exclusively on tactile feedback, since a buried object can be completely hidden from vision. Tactile feedback is in itself challenging in this context, due to ubiquitous contact with the surrounding media, and the inherent noise level induced by the tactile readings. To address these challenges, we use a learning method trained end-to-end with simulated sensor noise. We show that our problem formulation leads to the natural emergence of learned pushing behaviors that the manipulator uses to reduce uncertainty and funnel the object to a stable grasp despite spurious and noisy tactile readings. We also introduce a training curriculum that enables learning these behaviors in simulation, followed by zero-shot transfer to real hardware. To the best of our knowledge, GEOTACT is the first method to reliably retrieve a number of different objects from a granular environment, doing so on real hardware and with integrated tactile sensing. Videos and additional information can be found at https://jxu.ai/geotact.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a natural role in answering complex queries about data streams, but the high computational cost of LLM inference makes them infeasible in many such tasks. We propose online cascade learning, the first approach to addressing this challenge. The objective here is to learn a "cascade" of models, starting with lower-capacity models (such as logistic regressors) and ending with a powerful LLM, along with a deferral policy that determines the model that is used on a given input. We formulate the task of learning cascades online as an imitation-learning problem and give a no-regret algorithm for the problem. Experimental results across four benchmarks show that our method parallels LLMs in accuracy while cutting down inference costs by as much as 90%, underscoring its efficacy and adaptability in stream processing.

We explore the AI2050 "hard problems" that block the promise of AI and cause AI risks: (1) developing general capabilities of the systems; (2) assuring the performance of AI systems and their training processes; (3) aligning system goals with human goals; (4) enabling great applications of AI in real life; (5) addressing economic disruptions; (6) ensuring the participation of all; (7) at the same time ensuring socially responsible deployment; (8) addressing any geopolitical disruptions that AI causes; (9) promoting sound governance of the technology; and (10) managing the philosophical disruptions for humans living in the age of AI. For each problem, we outline the area, identify significant recent work, and suggest ways forward. [Note: this paper reviews literature through January 2023.]

Multirotor UAVs are used for a wide spectrum of civilian and public domain applications. Navigation controllers endowed with different attributes and onboard sensor suites enable multirotor autonomous or semi-autonomous, safe flight, operation, and functionality under nominal and detrimental conditions and external disturbances, even when flying in uncertain and dynamically changing environments. During the last decade, given the faster-than-exponential increase of available computational power, different learning-based algorithms have been derived, implemented, and tested to navigate and control, among other systems, multirotor UAVs. Learning algorithms have been, and are used to derive data-driven based models, to identify parameters, to track objects, to develop navigation controllers, and to learn the environment in which multirotors operate. Learning algorithms combined with model-based control techniques have been proven beneficial when applied to multirotors. This survey summarizes published research since 2015, dividing algorithms, techniques, and methodologies into offline and online learning categories, and then, further classifying them into machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning sub-categories. An integral part and focus of this survey are on online learning algorithms as applied to multirotors with the aim to register the type of learning techniques that are either hard or almost hard real-time implementable, as well as to understand what information is learned, why, and how, and how fast. The outcome of the survey offers a clear understanding of the recent state-of-the-art and of the type and kind of learning-based algorithms that may be implemented, tested, and executed in real-time.