We propose a model predictive control approach for autonomous vehicles that exploits learned Gaussian processes for predicting human driving behavior. The proposed approach employs the uncertainty about the GP's prediction to achieve safety. A multi-mode predictive control approach considers the possible intentions of the human drivers. While the intentions are represented by different Gaussian processes, their probabilities foreseen in the observed behaviors are determined by a suitable online classification. Intentions below a certain probability threshold are neglected to improve performance. The proposed multi-mode model predictive control approach with Gaussian process regression support enables repeated feasibility and probabilistic constraint satisfaction with high probability. The approach is underlined in simulation, considering real-world measurements for training the Gaussian processes.

Tasks involving locally unstable or discontinuous dynamics (such as bifurcations and collisions) remain challenging in robotics, because small variations in the environment can have a significant impact on task outcomes. For such tasks, learning a robust deterministic policy is difficult. We focus on structuring exploration with multiple stochastic policies based on a mixture of experts (MoE) policy representation that can be efficiently adapted. The MoE policy is composed of stochastic sub-policies that allow exploration of multiple distinct regions of the action space (or strategies) and a high-level selection policy to guide exploration towards the most promising regions. We develop a robot system to evaluate our approach in a real-world physical problem solving domain. After training the MoE policy in simulation, online learning in the real world demonstrates efficient adaptation within just a few dozen attempts, with a minimal sim2real gap. Our results confirm that representing multiple strategies promotes efficient adaptation in new environments and strategies learned under different dynamics can still provide useful information about where to look for good strategies.

The scale of the global edge AI market continues to grow. The current technical challenges that hinder the large-scale replication of edge AI are mainly small samples on the edge and heterogeneity of edge data. In addition, edge AI customers often have requirements for data security compliance and offline autonomy of edge AI services. Based on the lifelong learning method in the academic world, we formally define the problem of edge-cloud collaborative lifelong learning for the first time, and release the industry's first open-source edge-cloud collaborative lifelong learning. Edge-cloud collaborative lifelong learning adapts to data heterogeneity at different edge locations through (1) multi-task transfer learning to achieve accurate prediction of "thousands of people and thousands of faces"; (2) incremental processing of unknown tasks, the more systems learn and the smarter systems are with small samples, gradually realize AI engineering and automation; (3) Use the cloud-side knowledge base to remember new situational knowledge to avoid catastrophic forgetting; (4) The edge-cloud collaborative architecture enables data security compliance and edge AI services to be offline autonomy while applying cloud resources. This work hopes to help fundamentally solve the above-mentioned challenges of edge-cloud collaborative machine learning.

Sleep is among the most important factors affecting one's daily performance, well-being, and life quality. Nevertheless, it became possible to measure it in daily life in an unobtrusive manner with wearable devices. Rather than camera recordings and extraction of the state from the images, wrist-worn devices can measure directly via accelerometer, heart rate, and heart rate variability sensors. Some measured features can be as follows: time to bed, time out of bed, bedtime duration, minutes to fall asleep, and minutes after wake-up. There are several studies in the literature regarding sleep quality and stage prediction. However, they use only wearable data to predict or focus on the sleep stage. In this study, we use the NetHealth dataset, which is collected from 698 college students' via wearables, as well as surveys. Recently, there has been an advancement in deep learning algorithms, and they generally perform better than conventional machine learning techniques. Among them, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have high performances. Thus, in this study, we apply different CNN architectures that have already performed well in the human activity recognition domain and compare their results. We also apply Random Forest (RF) since it performs best among the conventional methods. In future studies, we will compare them with other deep learning algorithms.

Federated learning is a promising paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing the local data. However, the presence of heterogeneous devices in federated learning, such as mobile phones and IoT devices with varying memory capabilities, would limit the scale and hence the performance of the model could be trained. The mainstream approaches to address memory limitations focus on width-slimming techniques, where different clients train subnetworks with reduced widths locally and then the server aggregates the subnetworks. The global model produced from these methods suffers from performance degradation due to the negative impact of the actions taken to handle the varying subnetwork widths in the aggregation phase. In this paper, we introduce a memory-adaptive depth-wise learning solution in FL called FeDepth, which adaptively decomposes the full model into blocks according to the memory budgets of each client and trains blocks sequentially to obtain a full inference model. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 5% and more than 10% improvements in top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of depth-wise fine-tuning on ViT. Our findings highlight the importance of memory-aware techniques for federated learning with heterogeneous devices and the success of depth-wise training strategy in improving the global model's performance.

We initiate the study of smoothed analysis for the sequential probability assignment problem with contexts. We study information-theoretically optimal minmax rates as well as a framework for algorithmic reduction involving the maximum likelihood estimator oracle. Our approach establishes a general-purpose reduction from minimax rates for sequential probability assignment for smoothed adversaries to minimax rates for transductive learning. This leads to optimal (logarithmic) fast rates for parametric classes and classes with finite VC dimension. On the algorithmic front, we develop an algorithm that efficiently taps into the MLE oracle, for general classes of functions. We show that under general conditions this algorithmic approach yields sublinear regret.

Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.

Existing domain generalization aims to learn a generalizable model to perform well even on unseen domains. For many real-world machine learning applications, the data distribution often shifts gradually along domain indices. For example, a self-driving car with a vision system drives from dawn to dusk, with the sky darkening gradually. Therefore, the system must be able to adapt to changes in ambient illumination and continue to drive safely on the road. In this paper, we formulate such problems as Evolving Domain Generalization, where a model aims to generalize well on a target domain by discovering and leveraging the evolving pattern of the environment. We then propose Directional Domain Augmentation (DDA), which simulates the unseen target features by mapping source data as augmentations through a domain transformer. Specifically, we formulate DDA as a bi-level optimization problem and solve it through a novel meta-learning approach in the representation space. We evaluate the proposed method on both synthetic datasets and realworld datasets, and empirical results show that our approach can outperform other existing methods.

Understanding the meaning of words in context is fundamental for reading comprehension. The perceived difficulty, hereafter referred to as complexity, of a target word within a given text varies widely among readers. With an increased demand for distance learning and educational technologies[107], research into automatically predicting which words are likely to cause comprehension problems is becoming a popular area of research [115, 147, 185]. Systems have been created to identify complex words that are difficult to acquire, reproduce, or understand for children [79], second-language learners [89], people suffering from a reading disability, such as dyslexia [131] or aphasia [35, 53], or more generally, individuals with low literacy [59, 175]. In Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the task of automatically recognizing complex words is most often achieved by training machine learning (ML) models. These ML models assign a complexity value to each target word within an inputted extract, sentence, or text that allows for the identification of complex words. This information can then be used to improve downstream lexical and text simplification systems that provide simpler alternatives to aid reading comprehension. Take the extract shown in Table 1 for example.

Federated learning has recently been applied to recommendation systems to protect user privacy. In federated learning settings, recommendation systems can train recommendation models only collecting the intermediate parameters instead of the real user data, which greatly enhances the user privacy. Beside, federated recommendation systems enable to collaborate with other data platforms to improve recommended model performance while meeting the regulation and privacy constraints. However, federated recommendation systems faces many new challenges such as privacy, security, heterogeneity and communication costs. While significant research has been conducted in these areas, gaps in the surveying literature still exist. In this survey, we-(1) summarize some common privacy mechanisms used in federated recommendation systems and discuss the advantages and limitations of each mechanism; (2) review some robust aggregation strategies and several novel attacks against security; (3) summarize some approaches to address heterogeneity and communication costs problems; (4)introduce some open source platforms that can be used to build federated recommendation systems; (5) present some prospective research directions in the future. This survey can guide researchers and practitioners understand the research progress in these areas.