The prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings is a pivotal issue in industrial production. A crucial approach to tackling this issue involves transforming vibration signals into health indicators (HI) to aid model training. This paper presents an end-to-end HI construction method, vector quantised variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), which addresses the need for dimensionality reduction of latent variables in traditional unsupervised learning methods such as autoencoder. Moreover, concerning the inadequacy of traditional statistical metrics in reflecting curve fluctuations accurately, two novel statistical metrics, mean absolute distance (MAD) and mean variance (MV), are introduced. These metrics accurately depict the fluctuation patterns in the curves, thereby indicating the model's accuracy in discerning similar features. On the PMH2012 dataset, methods employing VQ-VAE for label construction achieved lower values for MAD and MV. Furthermore, the ASTCN prediction model trained with VQ-VAE labels demonstrated commendable performance, attaining the lowest values for MAD and MV.

The paper introduces an advanced Decentralized Energy Marketplace (DEM) integrating blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to manage energy exchanges among smart homes with energy storage systems. The proposed framework uses Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to represent unique energy profiles in a transparent and secure trading environment. Leveraging Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL), the system promotes collaborative and adaptive energy management strategies, maintaining user privacy. A notable innovation is the use of smart contracts, ensuring high efficiency and integrity in energy transactions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the system's scalability and the effectiveness of the FDRL method in optimizing energy distribution. This research significantly contributes to developing sophisticated decentralized smart grid infrastructures. Our approach broadens potential blockchain and AI applications in sustainable energy systems and addresses incentive alignment and transparency challenges in traditional energy trading mechanisms. The implementation of this paper is publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/RasoulNik/DEM}.

Deep-learning inverse techniques have attracted significant attention in recent years. Among them, the neural adjoint (NA) method, which employs a neural network surrogate simulator, has demonstrated impressive performance in the design tasks of artificial electromagnetic materials (AEM). However, the impact of the surrogate simulators' accuracy on the solutions in the NA method remains uncertain. Furthermore, achieving sufficient optimization becomes challenging in this method when the surrogate simulator is large, and computational resources are limited. Additionally, the behavior under constraints has not been studied, despite its importance from the engineering perspective. In this study, we investigated the impact of surrogate simulators' accuracy on the solutions and discovered that the more accurate the surrogate simulator is, the better the solutions become. We then developed an extension of the NA method, named Neural Lagrangian (NeuLag) method, capable of efficiently optimizing a sufficient number of solution candidates. We then demonstrated that the NeuLag method can find optimal solutions even when handling sufficient candidates is difficult due to the use of a large and accurate surrogate simulator. The resimulation errors of the NeuLag method were approximately 1/50 compared to previous methods for three AEM tasks. Finally, we performed optimization under constraint using NA and NeuLag, and confirmed their potential in optimization with soft or hard constraints. We believe our method holds potential in areas that require large and accurate surrogate simulators.

It's been widely touted as a replacement for the smartphone, but it seems Humane's AI Pin isn't quite so smart after all. In a promotional video released to launch the product, the device made not just one, but two blunders. In the video, founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno asked the device seemingly simple questions. Embarrassingly, the $699 (£564) AI Pin incorrectly identified the best location to view the next solar eclipse, as well as the nutritional value of a handful of almonds. In an embarrassing back-step, the company has now released an edited version of the video, and claims the errors were the result of a'glitch.'

Understanding visually situated language requires recognizing text and visual elements, and interpreting complex layouts. State-of-the-art methods commonly use specialized pre-processing tools, such as optical character recognition (OCR) systems, that map document image inputs to extracted information in the space of textual tokens, and sometimes also employ large language models (LLMs) to reason in text token space. However, the gains from external tools and LLMs come at the cost of increased computational and engineering complexity. In this paper, we ask whether small pretrained image-to-text models can learn selective text or layout recognition and reasoning as an intermediate inference step in an end-to-end model for pixel-level visual language understanding. We incorporate the outputs of such OCR tools, LLMs, and larger multimodal models as intermediate ``rationales'' on training data, and train a small student model to predict both rationales and answers for input questions based on those training examples. A student model based on Pix2Struct (282M parameters) achieves consistent improvements on three visual document understanding benchmarks representing infographics, scanned documents, and figures, with improvements of more than 4\% absolute over a comparable Pix2Struct model that predicts answers directly.

This paper presents an optimisation-based approach for an obstacle avoidance problem within an autonomous vehicle racing context. Our control regime leverages online reachability analysis and sensor data to compute the maximal safe traversable region that an agent can traverse within the environment. The idea is to first compute a non-convex safe region, which then can be convexified via a novel coupled separating hyperplane algorithm. This derived safe area is then used to formulate a nonlinear model-predictive control problem that seeks to find an optimal and safe driving trajectory. We evaluate the proposed approach through a series of diverse experiments and assess the runtime requirements of our proposed approach through an analysis of the effects of a set of varying optimisation objectives for generating these coupled hyperplanes.

Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example, Chukar and Hoatzin birds can repurpose their wings for quadrupedal walking and wing-assisted incline running (WAIR) to climb steep surfaces. We took inspiration from nature and designed a morphing robot with multi-functional thruster-wheel appendages that allows the robot to change its mode of locomotion by transforming into a rover, quad-rotor, mobile inverted pendulum (MIP), and other modes. In this work, we derive a dynamic model and formulate a nonlinear model predictive controller to perform WAIR to showcase the unique capabilities of our robot. We implemented the model and controller in a numerical simulation and experiments to show their feasibility and the capabilities of our transforming multi-modal robot.

Federated Learning (FL) enables many resource-limited devices to train a model collaboratively without data sharing. However, many existing works focus on model-homogeneous FL, where the global and local models are the same size, ignoring the inherently heterogeneous computational capabilities of different devices and restricting resource-constrained devices from contributing to FL. In this paper, we consider model-heterogeneous FL and propose Federated Partial Model Training (FedPMT), where devices with smaller computational capabilities work on partial models (subsets of the global model) and contribute to the global model. Different from Dropout-based partial model generation, which removes neurons in hidden layers at random, model training in FedPMT is achieved from the back-propagation perspective. As such, all devices in FedPMT prioritize the most crucial parts of the global model. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed partial model training design has a similar convergence rate to the widely adopted Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm, $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$, with the sub-optimality gap enlarged by a constant factor related to the model splitting design in FedPMT. Empirical results show that FedPMT significantly outperforms the existing benchmark FedDrop. Meanwhile, compared to the popular model-homogeneous benchmark, FedAvg, FedPMT reaches the learning target in a shorter completion time, thus achieving a better trade-off between learning accuracy and completion time.

Despite the popularity of the `pre-train then fine-tune' paradigm in the NLP community, existing work quantifying energy costs and associated carbon emissions has largely focused on language model pre-training. Although a single pre-training run draws substantially more energy than fine-tuning, fine-tuning is performed more frequently by many more individual actors, and thus must be accounted for when considering the energy and carbon footprint of NLP. In order to better characterize the role of fine-tuning in the landscape of energy and carbon emissions in NLP, we perform a careful empirical study of the computational costs of fine-tuning across tasks, datasets, hardware infrastructure and measurement modalities. Our experimental results allow us to place fine-tuning energy and carbon costs into perspective with respect to pre-training and inference, and outline recommendations to NLP researchers and practitioners who wish to improve their fine-tuning energy efficiency.

The central question of ensemble learning has been: what factors make an ensemble system good or bad? It has We propose a fundamental theory on ensemble been widely believed that accurate and diverse models lead learning that answers the central question: what to better performance for ensemble systems. Guided by factors make an ensemble system good or bad? this intuition, many heuristical metrics have been proposed Previous studies used a variant of Fano's inequality to measure accuracy and diversity (Kohavi et al., 1996; of information theory and derived a lower Skalak et al., 1996; Cunningham & Carney, 2000; Shipp bound of the classification error rate on the basis & Kuncheva, 2002). However, these metrics lack theoretical of the accuracy and diversity of models. We grounding, and indeed, Kuncheva & Whitaker (2003) revisit the original Fano's inequality and argue empirically showed that there are no connections between that the studies did not take into account the information the metrics and system performance through a broad range lost when multiple model predictions of experiments. Turning to theoretical viewpoints, Geman are combined into a final prediction. To address et al. (1992) decomposed the squared error loss used in regression this issue, we generalize the previous theory to tasks into the bias and covariance of models. Bias incorporate the information loss, which we name here corresponds to accuracy and covariance diversity.