Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector technology offers a wealth of high-resolution information on particle interactions, and leveraging that information to its full potential requires sophisticated automated reconstruction techniques. This article describes NuGraph2, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) for low-level reconstruction of simulated neutrino interactions in a LArTPC detector. Simulated neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE detector geometry are described as heterogeneous graphs, with energy depositions on each detector plane forming nodes on planar subgraphs. The network utilizes a multi-head attention message-passing mechanism to perform background filtering and semantic labelling on these graph nodes, identifying those associated with the primary physics interaction with 98.0\% efficiency and labelling them according to particle type with 94.9\% efficiency. The network operates directly on detector observables across multiple 2D representations, but utilizes a 3D-context-aware mechanism to encourage consistency between these representations. Model inference takes 0.12 s/event on a CPU, and 0.005 s/event batched on a GPU. This architecture is designed to be a general-purpose solution for particle reconstruction in neutrino physics, with the potential for deployment across a broad range of detector technologies, and offers a core convolution engine that can be leveraged for a variety of tasks beyond the two described in this article.

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents sequentially interact with changing environments while aiming to maximize the obtained rewards. Usually, rewards are observed only after acting, and so the goal is to maximize the expected cumulative reward. Yet, in many practical settings, reward information is observed in advance -- prices are observed before performing transactions; nearby traffic information is partially known; and goals are oftentimes given to agents prior to the interaction. In this work, we aim to quantifiably analyze the value of such future reward information through the lens of competitive analysis. In particular, we measure the ratio between the value of standard RL agents and that of agents with partial future-reward lookahead. We characterize the worst-case reward distribution and derive exact ratios for the worst-case reward expectations. Surprisingly, the resulting ratios relate to known quantities in offline RL and reward-free exploration. We further provide tight bounds for the ratio given the worst-case dynamics. Our results cover the full spectrum between observing the immediate rewards before acting to observing all the rewards before the interaction starts.

Addressing the large distribution gap between training and testing data has long been a challenge in machine learning, giving rise to fields such as transfer learning and domain adaptation. Recently, Continuous Domain Adaptation (CDA) has emerged as an effective technique, closing this gap by utilizing a series of intermediate domains. This paper contributes a novel CDA method, W-MPOT, which rigorously addresses the domain ordering and error accumulation problems overlooked by previous studies. Specifically, we construct a transfer curriculum over the source and intermediate domains based on Wasserstein distance, motivated by theoretical analysis of CDA. Then we transfer the source model to the target domain through multiple valid paths in the curriculum using a modified version of continuous optimal transport. A bidirectional path consistency constraint is introduced to mitigate the impact of accumulated mapping errors during continuous transfer. We extensively evaluate W-MPOT on multiple datasets, achieving up to 54.1\% accuracy improvement on multi-session Alzheimer MR image classification and 94.7\% MSE reduction on battery capacity estimation.

Dynamical Systems (DS) are an effective and powerful means of shaping high-level policies for robotics control. They provide robust and reactive control while ensuring the stability of the driving vector field. The increasing complexity of real-world scenarios necessitates DS with a higher degree of non-linearity, along with the ability to adapt to potential changes in environmental conditions, such as obstacles. Current learning strategies for DSs often involve a trade-off, sacrificing either stability guarantees or offline computational efficiency in order to enhance the capabilities of the learned DS. Online local adaptation to environmental changes is either not taken into consideration or treated as a separate problem. In this paper, our objective is to introduce a method that enhances the complexity of the learned DS without compromising efficiency during training or stability guarantees. Furthermore, we aim to provide a unified approach for seamlessly integrating the initially learned DS's non-linearity with any local non-linearities that may arise due to changes in the environment. We propose a geometrical approach to learn asymptotically stable non-linear DS for robotics control. Each DS is modeled as a harmonic damped oscillator on a latent manifold. By learning the manifold's Euclidean embedded representation, our approach encodes the non-linearity of the DS within the curvature of the space. Having an explicit embedded representation of the manifold allows us to showcase obstacle avoidance by directly inducing local deformations of the space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology through two scenarios: first, the 2D learning of synthetic vector fields, and second, the learning of 3D robotic end-effector motions in real-world settings.

Accurate positioning of remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) in confined environments is crucial for inspection and mapping tasks and is also a prerequisite for autonomous operations. Presently, there are no positioning systems available that are suited for real-world use in confined underwater environments, unconstrained by environmental lighting and water turbidity levels and have sufficient accuracy for long-term, reliable and repeatable navigation. This shortage presents a significant barrier to enhancing the capabilities of ROVs in such scenarios. This paper introduces an innovative positioning system for ROVs operating in confined, cluttered underwater settings, achieved through the collaboration of an omnidirectional surface vehicle and an ROV. A formulation is proposed and evaluated in the simulation against ground truth. The experimental results from the simulation form a proof of principle of the proposed system and also demonstrate its deployability. Unlike many previous approaches, the system does not rely on fixed infrastructure or tracking of features in the environment and can cover large enclosed areas without additional equipment.

Frustrated itinerant magnets often exhibit complex noncollinear or noncoplanar magnetic orders which support topological electronic structures. A canonical example is the anomalous quantum Hall state with a chiral spin order stabilized by electron-spin interactions on a triangular lattice. While a long-range magnetic order cannot survive thermal fluctuations in two dimensions, the chiral order which results from the breaking of a discrete Ising symmetry persists even at finite temperatures. We present a scalable machine learning (ML) framework to model the complex electron-mediated spin-spin interactions that stabilize the chiral magnetic domains in a triangular lattice. Large-scale dynamical simulations, enabled by the ML force-field models, are performed to investigate the coarsening of chiral domains after a thermal quench. While the chiral phase is described by a broken $Z_2$ Ising-type symmetry, we find that the characteristic size of chiral domains increases linearly with time, in stark contrast to the expected Allen-Cahn domain growth law for a non-conserved Ising order parameter field. The linear growth of the chiral domains is attributed to the orientational anisotropy of domain boundaries. Our work also demonstrates the promising potential of ML models for large-scale spin dynamics of itinerant magnets.

A wide range of applications in science and engineering involve a PDE model in a domain with perforations, such as perforated metals or air filters. Solving such perforated domain problems suffers from computational challenges related to resolving the scale imposed by the geometries of perforations. We propose a neural network-based mesh-free approach for perforated domain problems. The method is robust and efficient in capturing various configuration scales, including the averaged macroscopic behavior of the solution that involves a multiscale nature induced by small perforations. The new approach incorporates the derivative-free loss method that uses a stochastic representation or the Feynman-Kac formulation. In particular, we implement the Neumann boundary condition for the derivative-free loss method to handle the interface between the domain and perforations. A suite of stringent numerical tests is provided to support the proposed method's efficacy in handling various perforation scales.

Artificial neural network (NN) architecture design is a nontrivial and time-consuming task that often requires a high level of human expertise. Neural architecture search (NAS) serves to automate the design of NN architectures and has proven to be successful in automatically finding NN architectures that outperform those manually designed by human experts. NN architecture performance can be quantified based on multiple objectives, which include model accuracy and some NN architecture complexity objectives, among others. The majority of modern NAS methods that consider multiple objectives for NN architecture performance evaluation are concerned with automated feed forward NN architecture design, which leaves multi-objective automated recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture design unexplored. RNNs are important for modeling sequential datasets, and prominent within the natural language processing domain. It is often the case in real world implementations of machine learning and NNs that a reasonable trade-off is accepted for marginally reduced model accuracy in favour of lower computational resources demanded by the model. This paper proposes a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm-based RNN architecture search method. The proposed method relies on approximate network morphisms for RNN architecture complexity optimisation during evolution. The results show that the proposed method is capable of finding novel RNN architectures with comparable performance to state-of-the-art manually designed RNN architectures, but with reduced computational demand.

Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with edge server to assist terrestrial mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted tremendous attention. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art schemes based on deterministic optimizations or single-objective reinforcement learning (RL) cannot reduce the backlog of task bits and simultaneously improve energy efficiency in highly dynamic network environments, where the design problem amounts to a sequential decision-making problem. In order to address the aforementioned problems, as well as the curses of dimensionality introduced by the growing number of terrestrial terrestrial users, this paper proposes a distributed multi-objective (MO) dynamic trajectory planning and offloading scheduling scheme, integrated with MORL and the kernel method. The design of n-step return is also applied to average fluctuations in the backlog. Numerical results reveal that the n-step return can benefit the proposed kernel-based approach, achieving significant improvement in the long-term average backlog performance, compared to the conventional 1-step return design. Due to such design and the kernel-based neural network, to which decision-making features can be continuously added, the kernel-based approach can outperform the approach based on fully-connected deep neural network, yielding improvement in energy consumption and the backlog performance, as well as a significant reduction in decision-making and online learning time.

Reservoir computing (RC) offers a neuromorphic framework that is particularly effective for processing spatiotemporal signals. Known for its temporal processing prowess, RC significantly lowers training costs compared to conventional recurrent neural networks. A key component in its hardware deployment is the ability to generate dynamic reservoir states. Our research introduces a novel dual-memory RC system, integrating a short-term memory via a WOx-based memristor, capable of achieving 16 distinct states encoded over 4 bits, and a long-term memory component using a TiOx-based memristor within the readout layer. We thoroughly examine both memristor types and leverage the RC system to process temporal data sets. The performance of the proposed RC system is validated through two benchmark tasks: isolated spoken digit recognition with incomplete inputs and Mackey-Glass time series prediction. The system delivered an impressive 98.84% accuracy in digit recognition and sustained a low normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) of 0.036 in the time series prediction task, underscoring its capability. This study illuminates the adeptness of memristor-based RC systems in managing intricate temporal challenges, laying the groundwork for further innovations in neuromorphic computing.