Education
Foxconn launches iAI Institute aimed to train people in industrial artificial intelligence
The Foxconn Technology Group is getting in the online education game. On Friday Foxconn launched the iAI Institute "an initiative focused on training the workforce of tomorrow and sharing Industrial AI knowledge across industries." The iAI Institute plans to help train people in industrial artificial intelligence. Individuals can watch online lectures or companies can purchase course packages using "points" although it is unclear as to how someone can collect points. It also allows people to access different data sets for "fault detection" on machines like wind turbines, train bogeys, gearboxes and other data sets.
Learning Abstract Models for Strategic Exploration and Fast Reward Transfer
Liu, Evan Zheran, Keramati, Ramtin, Seshadri, Sudarshan, Guu, Kelvin, Pasupat, Panupong, Brunskill, Emma, Liang, Percy
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an accurate Markov Decision Process (MDP) over high-dimensional states (e.g., raw pixels) is extremely challenging because it requires function approximation, which leads to compounding errors. Instead, to avoid compounding errors, we propose learning an abstract MDP over abstract states: low-dimensional coarse representations of the state (e.g., capturing agent position, ignoring other objects). We assume access to an abstraction function that maps the concrete states to abstract states. In our approach, we construct an abstract MDP, which grows through strategic exploration via planning. Similar to hierarchical RL approaches, the abstract actions of the abstract MDP are backed by learned subpolicies that navigate between abstract states. Our approach achieves strong results on three of the hardest Arcade Learning Environment games (Montezuma's Revenge, Pitfall!, and Private Eye), including superhuman performance on Pitfall! without demonstrations. After training on one task, we can reuse the learned abstract MDP for new reward functions, achieving higher reward in 1000x fewer samples than model-free methods trained from scratch.
On Improving Hotspot Detection Through Synthetic Pattern-Based Database Enhancement
Reddy, Gaurav Rajavendra, Xanthopoulos, Constantinos, Makris, Yiorgos
Continuous technology scaling and the introduction of advanced technology nodes in Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication is constantly exposing new manufacturability issues. One such issue, stemming from complex interaction between design and process, is the problem of design hotspots. Such hotspots are known to vary from design to design and, ideally, should be predicted early and corrected in the design stage itself, as opposed to relying on the foundry to develop process fixes for every hotspot, which would be intractable. In the past, various efforts have been made to address this issue by using a known database of hotspots as the source of information. The majority of these efforts use either Machine Learning (ML) or Pattern Matching (PM) techniques to identify and predict hotspots in new incoming designs. However, almost all of them suffer from high false-alarm rates, mainly because they are oblivious to the root causes of hotspots. In this work, we seek to address this limitation by using a novel database enhancement approach through synthetic pattern generation based on carefully crafted Design of Experiments (DOEs). Effectiveness of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art is evaluated on a 45nm process using industry-standard tools and designs.
Online Parameter-Free Learning of Multiple Low Variance Tasks
Denevi, Giulia, Stamos, Dimitris, Pontil, Massimiliano
We propose a method to learn a common bias vector for a growing sequence of low-variance tasks. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches, our method does not require tuning any hyper-parameter. Our approach is presented in the non-statistical setting and can be of two variants. The "aggressive" one updates the bias after each datapoint, the "lazy" one updates the bias only at the end of each task. We derive an across-tasks regret bound for the method. When compared to state-of-the-art approaches, the aggressive variant returns faster rates, the lazy one recovers standard rates, but with no need of tuning hyper-parameters. We then adapt the methods to the statistical setting: the aggressive variant becomes a multi-task learning method, the lazy one a meta-learning method. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of our methods in practice.
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Combining AI and biology could solve drug discovery's biggest problems
Daphne Koller is best known as the cofounder of Coursera, the open database for online learning that launched in 2012. But before her work on Coursera, she was doing something much different. In 2000, Koller started working on applying machine learning to biomedical data sets to understand gene activity across cancer types. She put that work on hold to nurture Coursera, which took many more years than she initially thought it would. She didn't return to biology until 2016 when she joined Alphabet's life science research and development arm Calico.
Europe and AI: Leading, Lagging Behind, or Carving Its Own Way?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to play a major role in shaping global competitiveness and productivity over the next couple of decades, granting early adopters significant societal, economic, and strategic advantages. As the pace of AI innovation and development picks up--underpinned by advancements in big data and high-performance computing--the United States and China are both in the driver's seat.
A Survey on Autonomous Vehicle Control in the Era of Mixed-Autonomy: From Physics-Based to AI-Guided Driving Policy Learning
This paper serves as an introduction and overview of the potentially useful models and methodologies from artificial intelligence (AI) into the field of transportation engineering for autonomous vehicle (AV) control in the era of mixed autonomy. We will discuss state-of-the-art applications of AI-guided methods, identify opportunities and obstacles, raise open questions, and help suggest the building blocks and areas where AI could play a role in mixed autonomy. We divide the stage of autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment into four phases: the pure HVs, the HV-dominated, the AVdominated, and the pure AVs. This paper is primarily focused on the latter three phases. It is the first-of-its-kind survey paper to comprehensively review literature in both transportation engineering and AI for mixed traffic modeling. Models used for each phase are summarized, encompassing game theory, deep (reinforcement) learning, and imitation learning. While reviewing the methodologies, we primarily focus on the following research questions: (1) What scalable driving policies are to control a large number of AVs in mixed traffic comprised of human drivers and uncontrollable AVs? (2) How do we estimate human driver behaviors? (3) How should the driving behavior of uncontrollable AVs be modeled in the environment? (4) How are the interactions between human drivers and autonomous vehicles characterized? Hopefully this paper will not only inspire our transportation community to rethink the conventional models that are developed in the data-shortage era, but also reach out to other disciplines, in particular robotics and machine learning, to join forces towards creating a safe and efficient mixed traffic ecosystem.
Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Deng, Zhiwei, Narasimhan, Karthik, Russakovsky, Olga
The ability to perform effective planning is crucial for building an instructionfollowing agent. When navigating through a new environment, an agent is challenged with (1) connecting the natural language instructions with its progressively growing knowledge of the world; and (2) performing long-range planning and decision making in the form of effective exploration and error correction. Current methods are still limited on both fronts despite extensive efforts. In this paper, we introduce the Evolving Graphical Planner (EGP), a model that performs global planning for navigation based on raw sensory input. The model dynamically constructs a graphical representation, generalizes the action space to allow for more flexible decision making, and performs efficient planning on a proxy graph representation. We evaluate our model on a challenging Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task with photorealistic images, and achieve superior performance compared to previous navigation architectures. For instance, we achieve a 53% success rate on the test split of the Room-to-Room navigation task [1] through pure imitation learning, outperforming previous navigation architectures by up to 5%.