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Moving Target Intelligent Tutoring System for Marksmanship Training

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Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) may augment military training systems and mitigate existing limitations in training personnel and resources. A study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of an embedded rifle marksmanship ITS for Moving Targets (MT ITS). MT ITS has two main components: (1) a Smart Sight System that provides a perceptual cue to help trainees adjust their point of aim to account for a target's speed, direction of movement, and distance, and (2) a performance based algorithm that delivers shooting performance feedback to trainees. The MT ITS was tested in an experiment where participants engaged moving targets in a virtual shooting range. Moving targets were presented at different speeds, direction of movement, and distances.


Fulltime Machine Learning Engineers openings in Los Angeles on September 19, 2022

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All candidates must be submitted via our Applicant Tracking System by approved Liftoff Vungle vendors who have been expressly requested to make a submission by our Recruiting Team for a specific job opening.


An information-theoretic perspective on intrinsic motivation in reinforcement learning: a survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Traditionally, an agent maximizes a reward defined according to the task to perform: it may be a score when the agent learns to solve a game or a distance function when the agent learns to reach a goal. The reward is then considered as extrinsic (or as a feedback) because the reward function is provided expertly and specifically for the task. With an extrinsic reward, many spectacular results have been obtained on Atari game [Bellemare et al. 2015] with the Deep Q-network (DQN) [Mnih et al. 2015] through the integration of deep learning to RL, leading to deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, despite the recent improvements of DRL approaches, they turn out to be most of the time unsuccessful when the rewards are scattered in the environment, as the agent is then unable to learn the desired behavior for the targeted task [Francois-Lavet et al. 2018]. Moreover, the behaviors learned by the agent are hardly reusable, both within the same task and across many different tasks [Francois-Lavet et al. 2018]. It is difficult for an agent to generalize the learnt skills to make high-level decisions in the environment. For example, such skill could be go to the door using primitive actions consisting in moving in the four cardinal directions; or even to move forward controlling different joints of a humanoid robot like in the robotic simulator MuJoCo [Todorov et al. 2012]. On another side, unlike RL, developmental learning [Cangelosi and Schlesinger 2018; Oudeyer and Smith 2016; Piaget and Cook 1952] is based on the trend that babies, or more broadly organisms, acquire new skill while spontaneously exploring their environment [Barto 2013; Gopnik et al. 1999].


Data Representativeness in Accessibility Datasets: A Meta-Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As data-driven systems are increasingly deployed at scale, ethical concerns have arisen around unfair and discriminatory outcomes for historically marginalized groups that are underrepresented in training data. In response, work around AI fairness and inclusion has called for datasets that are representative of various demographic groups. In this paper, we contribute an analysis of the representativeness of age, gender, and race & ethnicity in accessibility datasets - datasets sourced from people with disabilities and older adults - that can potentially play an important role in mitigating bias for inclusive AI-infused applications. We examine the current state of representation within datasets sourced by people with disabilities by reviewing publicly-available information of 190 datasets, we call these accessibility datasets. We find that accessibility datasets represent diverse ages, but have gender and race representation gaps. Additionally, we investigate how the sensitive and complex nature of demographic variables makes classification difficult and inconsistent (e.g., gender, race & ethnicity), with the source of labeling often unknown. By reflecting on the current challenges and opportunities for representation of disabled data contributors, we hope our effort expands the space of possibility for greater inclusion of marginalized communities in AI-infused systems.


Stability and Generalization Analysis of Gradient Methods for Shallow Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Neural networks have achieved remarkable success in solving large-scale machine learning problems in various application domains such as computer vision and natural language processing [33]. Firstorder methods such as gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are mainstream optimization algorithms for training neural networks due to their simplicity and efficiency [11, 33, 50]. Although the associated optimization problems are nonconvex and nonsmooth, GD/SGD can still find a model with a very small or even zero training error [16, 20, 34, 39, 64, 69]. At the same time, the models found by such first-order methods has demonstrated good generalization performance on test data despite neural networks are often highly overparameterized in the sense that the number of parameters is much larger than the size of training examples [1, 2, 5]. These surprising phenomena have triggered a surge of research activities in understanding the generalization ability of neural networks. Generalization analysis typically uses complexity measures such as VC dimension, covering numbers or Rademacher complexities to develop capacity-dependent bounds [8, 9, 25, 42, 48], which, however, may not explain well the generalization of overparameterized neural networks. Impressive alternatives have been proposed which include the compression approach [4], the norm-based analysis [8, 25], the PAC-Bayes analysis [21] and the neural tangent kernel (NTK) approach [5, 28]. In particular, the NTK approach shows that the overparameterization pulls the dynamic of GD on neural networks close to its counterpart on a kernelized machine with the least-square loss [5, 20], which shows how overparameterization can help both optimization and generalization. However, this approach often requires a very high overparameterization to gain useful results [6, 55, 60].


Robot Skill Adaptation via Soft Actor-Critic Gaussian Mixture Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A core challenge for an autonomous agent acting in the real world is to adapt its repertoire of skills to cope with its noisy perception and dynamics. To scale learning of skills to long-horizon tasks, robots should be able to learn and later refine their skills in a structured manner through trajectories rather than making instantaneous decisions individually at each time step. To this end, we propose the Soft Actor-Critic Gaussian Mixture Model (SAC-GMM), a novel hybrid approach that learns robot skills through a dynamical system and adapts the learned skills in their own trajectory distribution space through interactions with the environment. Our approach combines classical robotics techniques of learning from demonstration with the deep reinforcement learning framework and exploits their complementary nature. We show that our method utilizes sensors solely available during the execution of preliminarily learned skills to extract relevant features that lead to faster skill refinement. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in refining robot skills by leveraging physical interactions, high-dimensional sensory data, and sparse task completion rewards. Videos, code, and pre-trained models are available at http://sac-gmm.cs.uni-freiburg.de.


Toward Understanding Privileged Features Distillation in Learning-to-Rank

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In learning-to-rank problems, a privileged feature is one that is available during model training, but not available at test time. Such features naturally arise in merchandised recommendation systems; for instance, "user clicked this item" as a feature is predictive of "user purchased this item" in the offline data, but is clearly not available during online serving. Another source of privileged features is those that are too expensive to compute online but feasible to be added offline. Privileged features distillation (PFD) refers to a natural idea: train a "teacher" model using all features (including privileged ones) and then use it to train a "student" model that does not use the privileged features. In this paper, we first study PFD empirically on three public ranking datasets and an industrial-scale ranking problem derived from Amazon's logs. We show that PFD outperforms several baselines (no-distillation, pretraining-finetuning, self-distillation, and generalized distillation) on all these datasets. Next, we analyze why and when PFD performs well via both empirical ablation studies and theoretical analysis for linear models. Both investigations uncover an interesting non-monotone behavior: as the predictive power of a privileged feature increases, the performance of the resulting student model initially increases but then decreases. We show the reason for the later decreasing performance is that a very predictive privileged teacher produces predictions with high variance, which lead to high variance student estimates and inferior testing performance.


Deep Variation Prior: Joint Image Denoising and Noise Variance Estimation without Clean Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With recent deep learning based approaches showing promising results in removing noise from images, the best denoising performance has been reported in a supervised learning setup that requires a large set of paired noisy images and ground truth for training. The strong data requirement can be mitigated by unsupervised learning techniques, however, accurate modelling of images or noise variance is still crucial for high-quality solutions. The learning problem is ill-posed for unknown noise distributions. This paper investigates the tasks of image denoising and noise variance estimation in a single, joint learning framework. To address the ill-posedness of the problem, we present deep variation prior (DVP), which states that the variation of a properly learnt denoiser with respect to the change of noise satisfies some smoothness properties, as a key criterion for good denoisers. Building upon DVP, an unsupervised deep learning framework, that simultaneously learns a denoiser and estimates noise variances, is developed. Our method does not require any clean training images or an external step of noise estimation, and instead, approximates the minimum mean squared error denoisers using only a set of noisy images. With the two underlying tasks being considered in a single framework, we allow them to be optimised for each other. The experimental results show a denoising quality comparable to that of supervised learning and accurate noise variance estimates.


Top 10 Projects for Data Science and Machine Learning

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The concept of machine learning is essentially the same as what it sounds like; it refers to the concept that various forms of technology, such as computers and tablets, can learn something based on programming and other data. Although it has the appearance of an idea from the far future, most people now make regular use of this level of technology. One particularly useful application of this is speech recognition. The technology is utilized by virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa to do tasks such as reciting reminders, answering queries, and carrying out requests. As machine learning becomes increasingly popular, an increasing number of individuals are deciding to specialize in the field as machine learning engineers.


Introduction to Machine Learning for Beginners [Level 1] - Views Coupon

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Introduction to Machine Learning is a front row seat to help beginners unravel the curious mystery behind machine learning. What you'll learn in Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners - Level 1 If you're a complete beginner to the world of Robotics, This course will teach you all the basic fundamentals you'll need. Introduction to Machine Learning is a front row seat to help beginners unravel the curious mystery behind machine learning. You can use this course to gain knowledge of basic machine learning concepts in preparation for, or alongside, more advanced courses. Machine Learning is the study of algorithms that improve their performance P at some task T with experience E. As Herbert Simon once said, "Learning is any process by which a system improves performance from experience."