Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from requiring many particles for accurate estimates, leading to high computational costs. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an extension of SMC that mitigates this issue by allowing particles from previous iterations to persist. This generates a growing, weighted ensemble of particles distributed across iterations. In each iteration, PS utilizes multiple importance sampling and resampling from the mixture of all previous distributions to produce the next generation of particles. This addresses particle impoverishment and mode collapse, resulting in more accurate posterior approximations. Furthermore, this approach provides lower-variance marginal likelihood estimates for model comparison. Additionally, the persistent particles improve transition kernel adaptation for efficient exploration. Experiments on complex distributions show that PS consistently outperforms standard methods, achieving lower squared bias in posterior moment estimation and significantly reduced marginal likelihood errors, all at a lower computational cost. PS offers a robust, efficient, and scalable framework for Bayesian inference.

Track finding in particle data is a challenging pattern recognition problem in High Energy Physics. It takes as inputs a point cloud of space points and labels them so that space points created by the same particle have the same label. The list of space points with the same label is a track candidate. We argue that this pattern recognition problem can be formulated as a sorting problem, of which the inputs are a list of space points sorted by their distances away from the collision points and the outputs are the space points sorted by their labels. In this paper, we propose the TrackSorter algorithm: a Transformer-based algorithm for pattern recognition in particle data. TrackSorter uses a simple tokenization scheme to convert space points into discrete tokens. It then uses the tokenized space points as inputs and sorts the input tokens into track candidates. TrackSorter is a novel end-to-end track finding algorithm that leverages Transformer-based models to solve pattern recognition problems. It is evaluated on the TrackML dataset and has good track finding performance.

Net load forecasting is crucial for energy planning and facilitating informed decision-making regarding trade and load distributions. However, evaluating forecasting models' performance against benchmark models remains challenging, thereby impeding experts' trust in the model's performance. In this context, there is a demand for technological interventions that allow scientists to compare models across various timeframes and solar penetration levels. This paper introduces a visual analytics-based application designed to compare the performance of deep-learning-based net load forecasting models with other models for probabilistic net load forecasting. This application employs carefully selected visual analytic interventions, enabling users to discern differences in model performance across different solar penetration levels, dataset resolutions, and hours of the day over multiple months. We also present observations made using our application through a case study, demonstrating the effectiveness of visualizations in aiding scientists in making informed decisions and enhancing trust in net load forecasting models.

Static noise maps depicting long-term noise levels over wide areas are valuable urban planning assets for municipalities in decreasing noise exposure of residents. However, non-traffic noise sources with transient behavior, which people complain frequently, are usually ignored by static maps. We propose here a dynamic noise mapping approach using the data collected via low-power wide-area network (LPWAN, specifically LoRaWAN) based internet of things (IoT) infrastructure, which is one of the most common communication backbones for smart cities. Noise mapping based on LPWAN is challenging due to the low data rates of these protocols. The proposed dynamic noise mapping approach diminishes the negative implications of data rate limitations using machine learning (ML) for event and location prediction of non-traffic sources based on the scarce data. The strength of these models lies in their consideration of the spatial variance in acoustic behavior caused by the buildings in urban settings. The effectiveness of the proposed method and the accuracy of the resulting dynamic maps are evaluated in field tests. The results show that the proposed system can decrease the map error caused by non-traffic sources up to 51% and can stay effective under significant packet losses.

Literature research, vital for scientific advancement, is overwhelmed by the vast ocean of available information. Addressing this, we propose an automated review generation method based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline literature processing and reduce cognitive load. In case study on propane dehydrogenation (PDH) catalysts, our method swiftly generated comprehensive reviews from 343 articles, averaging seconds per article per LLM account. Extended analysis of 1041 articles provided deep insights into catalysts' composition, structure, and performance. Recognizing LLMs' hallucinations, we employed a multi-layered quality control strategy, ensuring our method's reliability and effective hallucination mitigation. Expert verification confirms the accuracy and citation integrity of generated reviews, demonstrating LLM hallucination risks reduced to below 0.5% with over 95% confidence. Released Windows application enables one-click review generation, aiding researchers in tracking advancements and recommending literature. This approach showcases LLMs' role in enhancing scientific research productivity and sets the stage for further exploration.

Alongside the continuous process of improving AI performance through the development of more sophisticated models, researchers have also focused their attention to the emerging concept of data-centric AI, which emphasizes the important role of data in a systematic machine learning training process. Nonetheless, the development of models has also continued apace. One result of this progress is the development of the Transformer Architecture, which possesses a high level of capability in multiple domains such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV) and Time Series Forecasting (TSF). Its performance is, however, heavily dependent on input data preprocessing and output data evaluation, justifying a data-centric approach to future research. We argue that data-centric AI is essential for training AI models, particularly for transformer-based TSF models efficiently. However, there is a gap regarding the integration of transformer-based TSF and data-centric AI. This survey aims to pin down this gap via the extensive literature review based on the proposed taxonomy. We review the previous research works from a data-centric AI perspective and we intend to lay the foundation work for the future development of transformer-based architecture and data-centric AI.

This paper investigates the utilization of Quantum Computing and Neuromorphic Computing for Safe, Reliable, and Explainable Multi_Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in the context of optimal control in autonomous robotics. The objective was to address the challenges of optimizing the behavior of autonomous agents while ensuring safety, reliability, and explainability. Quantum Computing techniques, including Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), were employed to efficiently explore large solution spaces and find approximate solutions to complex MARL problems. Neuromorphic Computing, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, provided parallel and distributed processing capabilities, which were leveraged to develop intelligent and adaptive systems. The combination of these technologies held the potential to enhance the safety, reliability, and explainability of MARL in autonomous robotics. This research contributed to the advancement of autonomous robotics by exploring cutting-edge technologies and their applications in multi-agent systems. Codes and data are available.

Significant wave height (SWH) is a vital metric in marine science, and accurate SWH estimation is crucial for various applications, e.g., marine energy development, fishery, early warning systems for potential risks, etc. Traditional SWH estimation methods that are based on numerical models and physical theories are hindered by computational inefficiencies. Recently, machine learning has emerged as an appealing alternative to improve accuracy and reduce computational time. However, due to limited observational technology and high costs, the scarcity of real-world data restricts the potential of machine learning models. To overcome these limitations, we propose an ocean SWH estimation framework, namely Orca. Specifically, Orca enhances the limited spatio-temporal reasoning abilities of classic LLMs with a novel spatiotemporal aware encoding module. By segmenting the limited buoy observational data temporally, encoding the buoys' locations spatially, and designing prompt templates, Orca capitalizes on the robust generalization ability of LLMs to estimate significant wave height effectively with limited data. Experimental results on the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate that Orca achieves state-of-the-art performance in SWH estimation.

Using "soft" targets to improve model performance has been shown to be effective in classification settings, but the usage of soft targets for regression is a much less studied topic in machine learning. The existing literature on the usage of soft targets for regression fails to properly assess the method's limitations, and empirical evaluation is quite limited. In this work, we assess the strengths and drawbacks of existing methods when applied to molecular property regression tasks. Our assessment outlines key biases present in existing methods and proposes methods to address them, evaluated through careful ablation studies. We leverage these insights to propose Distributional Mixture of Experts (DMoE): A model-independent, and data-independent method for regression which trains a model to predict probability distributions of its targets. Our proposed loss function combines the cross entropy between predicted and target distributions and the L1 distance between their expected values to produce a loss function that is robust to the outlined biases. We evaluate the performance of DMoE on different molecular property prediction datasets -- Open Catalyst (OC20), MD17, and QM9 -- across different backbone model architectures -- SchNet, GemNet, and Graphormer. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising alternative to classical regression for molecular property prediction tasks, showing improvements over baselines on all datasets and architectures.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) for event-based optical flow are claimed to be computationally more efficient than their artificial neural networks (ANNs) counterparts, but a fair comparison is missing in the literature. In this work, we propose an event-based optical flow solution based on activation sparsification and a neuromorphic processor, SENECA. SENECA has an event-driven processing mechanism that can exploit the sparsity in ANN activations and SNN spikes to accelerate the inference of both types of neural networks. The ANN and the SNN for comparison have similar low activation/spike density (~5%) thanks to our novel sparsification-aware training. In the hardware-in-loop experiments designed to deduce the average time and energy consumption, the SNN consumes 44.9ms and 927.0 microjoules, which are 62.5% and 75.2% of the ANN's consumption, respectively. We find that SNN's higher efficiency attributes to its lower pixel-wise spike density (43.5% vs. 66.5%) that requires fewer memory access operations for neuron states.