We present EasyGen, an efficient model designed to enhance multimodal understanding and generation by harnessing the capabilities of diffusion models and large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing multimodal models that predominately depend on encoders like CLIP or ImageBind and need ample amounts of training data to bridge the gap between modalities, EasyGen is built upon a bidirectional conditional diffusion model named BiDiffuser, which promotes more efficient interactions between modalities. EasyGen handles image-to-text generation by integrating BiDiffuser and an LLM via a simple projection layer. Unlike most existing multimodal models that are limited to generating text responses, EasyGen can also facilitate text-to-image generation by leveraging the LLM to create textual descriptions, which can be interpreted by BiDiffuser to generate appropriate visual responses. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EasyGen, whose training can be easily achieved in a lab setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/zxy556677/EasyGen.

This came during a discussion with Venkat Viswanathan about the potential for electric aviation--an exciting prospect as well as a huge challenge, given the steep demands on batteries during flight. In our discussion, Viswanathan said one of the reasons he saw hope for electric aviation is the potential of AI to speed up battery research. In fact, he cofounded a startup called Aionics in 2020 to bring AI into battery development. On stage at ClimateTech, Viswanathan announced a new research partnership that he says could make AI a key force in developing future EV batteries. The deal is between Aionics and Cellforce, a German battery maker that's a subsidiary of Porsche.

A new study warned that artificial intelligence technology could cause a significant surge in electricity consumption. The paper, published in the journal Joule, details the potential future energy output of AI systems, noting that generative AI technology relies on powerful servers and that increased use could drive a spike in demand for energy. The authors point to tech giant Google in one such example, noting that AI only accounted for 10-15% of the company's total electricity consumption in 2021. But as AI technology continues to expand, Google's energy consumption could start to be on the scale of a small country. "The worst-case scenario suggests Google's AI alone could consume as much electricity as a country such as Ireland (29.3 TWh per year), which is a significant increase compared to its historical AI-related energy consumption," the authors wrote.

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when cheap simulators are not available), we consider an agent that faces an unknown distribution of environments and must decide on an exploration strategy. It may leverage a series of training environments to improve its policy before it is evaluated in a test environment drawn from the same environment distribution. Most existing approaches focus on fixed exploration strategies, while the few that view exploration as a meta-optimization problem tend to ignore the need for cost-efficient exploration. We propose a cost-aware Bayesian optimization approach that efficiently searches over a class of dynamic subgoal-based exploration strategies. The algorithm adjusts a variety of levers -- the locations of the subgoals, the length of each episode, and the number of replications per trial -- in order to overcome the challenges of sparse rewards, expensive interactions, and noise. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that the new approach outperforms existing baselines across a number of problem domains. We also provide a theoretical foundation and prove that the method asymptotically identifies a near-optimal subgoal design.

Although Maxwell discovered the physical laws of electromagnetic waves 160 years ago, how to precisely model the propagation of an RF signal in an electrically large and complex environment remains a long-standing problem. The difficulty is in the complex interactions between the RF signal and the obstacles (e.g., reflection, diffraction, etc.). Inspired by the great success of using a neural network to describe the optical field in computer vision, we propose a neural radio-frequency radiance field, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$, which represents a continuous volumetric scene function that makes sense of an RF signal's propagation. Particularly, after training with a few signal measurements, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can tell how/what signal is received at any position when it knows the position of a transmitter. As a physical-layer neural network, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can take advantage of the learned statistic model plus the physical model of ray tracing to generate a synthetic dataset that meets the training demands of application-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Thus, we can boost the performance of ANNs by the proposed turbo-learning, which mixes the true and synthetic datasets to intensify the training. Our experiment results show that turbo-learning can enhance performance with an approximate 50% increase. We also demonstrate the power of NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ in the field of indoor localization and 5G MIMO.

Learning high-quality Q-value functions plays a key role in the success of many modern off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Previous works focus on addressing the value overestimation issue, an outcome of adopting function approximators and off-policy learning. Deviating from the common viewpoint, we observe that Q-values are indeed underestimated in the latter stage of the RL training process, primarily related to the use of inferior actions from the current policy in Bellman updates as compared to the more optimal action samples in the replay buffer. We hypothesize that this long-neglected phenomenon potentially hinders policy learning and reduces sample efficiency. Our insight to address this issue is to incorporate sufficient exploitation of past successes while maintaining exploration optimism. We propose the Blended Exploitation and Exploration (BEE) operator, a simple yet effective approach that updates Q-value using both historical best-performing actions and the current policy. The instantiations of our method in both model-free and model-based settings outperform state-of-the-art methods in various continuous control tasks and achieve strong performance in failure-prone scenarios and real-world robot tasks.

We review four types of algorithms for physics-informed machine learning (PIML) inversion of geophysical data. The unifying equation is given by the joint objective function $\epsilon$: \begin{eqnarray} \epsilon^{||-PIML}&=&\lambda_1 \overbrace{||{\bf W}^{ML}({\bf H}_{{\bf w}} {\bf d}^{obs}-{\bf m})||^2}^{NN} + \lambda_2 \overbrace{{||{\bf W}^{FWI}({\bf L} {\bf m}-{\bf d}^{obs})||^2}}^{FWI} ~+ \nonumber\\ \nonumber\\ && + ~~Regularizer, \label{PIML.eq120} \end{eqnarray}where the optimal model ${\bf m}^*$ and weights $\bf w^*$ minimize $\epsilon$. Here, The matrix weights are given by the boldface symbol $\bf W$, and full waveform inversion (FWI) is typically computed using a finite-difference solution of the wave equation, where $\bf L$ represents the forward modeling operation of the wave equation as a function of the model $\bf m$. Also, a fully-connected neural network (NN) is used to compute the model ${\bf H_w}{\bf d}^{obs} \approx \bf m$ from the observed input data ${\bf d}^{obs}$. The selection of weights $\lambda_i$ and the NN operations determine one of four different PIML algorithms. PIML offers potential advantages over standard FWI through its enhanced ability to avoid local minima and the option to locally train the inversion operator, minimizing the requirement for extensive training data for global applicability. However, the effectiveness of PIML relies on the similarity between the test and trained data. Nevertheless, a possible strategy to overcome this limitation involves initial pretraining of a PIML architecture with data from a broader region, followed by fine-tuning for specific data-a method reminiscent of the way large language models are pretrained and adapted for various tasks.

As machine learning technology gets applied to actual products and solutions, new challenges have emerged. Models unexpectedly fail to generalize to small changes in the distribution, tend to be confident on novel data they have never seen, or cannot communicate the rationale behind their decisions effectively with the end users. Collectively, we face a trustworthiness issue with the current machine learning technology. This textbook on Trustworthy Machine Learning (TML) covers a theoretical and technical background of four key topics in TML: Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Explainability, Uncertainty Quantification, and Evaluation of Trustworthiness. We discuss important classical and contemporary research papers of the aforementioned fields and uncover and connect their underlying intuitions. The book evolved from the homonymous course at the University of T\"ubingen, first offered in the Winter Semester of 2022/23. It is meant to be a stand-alone product accompanied by code snippets and various pointers to further sources on topics of TML. The dedicated website of the book is https://trustworthyml.io/.

Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides an optimal control solution based on a cost function while allowing for the implementation of process constraints. As a model-based optimal control technique, the performance of MPC strongly depends on the model used where a trade-off between model computation time and prediction performance exists. One solution is the integration of MPC with a machine learning (ML) based process model which are quick to evaluate online. This work presents the experimental implementation of a deep neural network (DNN) based nonlinear MPC for Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion control. The DNN model consists of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network surrounded by fully connected layers which was trained using experimental engine data and showed acceptable prediction performance with under 5% error for all outputs. Using this model, the MPC is designed to track the Indicated Mean Effective Pressure (IMEP) and combustion phasing trajectories, while minimizing several parameters. Using the acados software package to enable the real-time implementation of the MPC on an ARM Cortex A72, the optimization calculations are completed within 1.4 ms. The external A72 processor is integrated with the prototyping engine controller using a UDP connection allowing for rapid experimental deployment of the NMPC. The IMEP trajectory following of the developed controller was excellent, with a root-mean-square error of 0.133 bar, in addition to observing process constraints.

Modern commercial Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) devices form a complex and interconnected thermodynamic system with the building and outside weather conditions, and current setpoint control policies are not fully optimized for minimizing energy use and carbon emission. Given a suitable training environment, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model is able to improve upon these policies, but training such a model, especially in a way that scales to thousands of buildings, presents many real world challenges. We propose a novel simulation-based approach, where a customized simulator is used to train the agent for each building. Our open-source simulator (available online: https://github.com/google/sbsim) is lightweight and calibrated via telemetry from the building to reach a higher level of fidelity. On a two-story, 68,000 square foot building, with 127 devices, we were able to calibrate our simulator to have just over half a degree of drift from the real world over a six-hour interval. This approach is an important step toward having a real-world RL control system that can be scaled to many buildings, allowing for greater efficiency and resulting in reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions.