Overlapping frequently occurs in paired texts in natural language processing tasks like text editing and semantic similarity evaluation. Better evaluation of the semantic distance between the overlapped sentences benefits the language system's understanding and guides the generation. Since conventional semantic metrics are based on word representations, they are vulnerable to the disturbance of overlapped components with similar representations. This paper aims to address the issue with a mask-and-predict strategy. We take the words in the longest common sequence (LCS) as neighboring words and use masked language modeling (MLM) from pre-trained language models (PLMs) to predict the distributions on their positions. Our metric, Neighboring Distribution Divergence (NDD), represent the semantic distance by calculating the divergence between distributions in the overlapped parts. Experiments on Semantic Textual Similarity show NDD to be more sensitive to various semantic differences, especially on highly overlapped paired texts. Based on the discovery, we further implement an unsupervised and training-free method for text compression, leading to a significant improvement on the previous perplexity-based method. The high scalability of our method even enables NDD to outperform the supervised state-of-the-art in domain adaption by a huge margin. Further experiments on syntax and semantics analyses verify the awareness of internal sentence structures, indicating the high potential of NDD for further studies.

We propose attention-based modeling of quantities at arbitrary spatial points conditioned on related measurements at different locations. Our approach adapts a transformer-encoder to process measurements and read-out positions together. Attention-based models exhibit excellent performance across domains, which makes them an interesting candidate for modeling data irregularly sampled in space. We introduce a novel encoding strategy that applies the same transformation to the measurements and read-out positions, after which they are combined with encoded measurement values instead of relying on two different mappings. Efficiently learning input-output mappings from irregularly-spaced data is a fundamental challenge in modeling physical phenomena. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct experiments on diverse problem domains, including high-altitude wind nowcasting, two-days weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, and heat diffusion. Our attention-based model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as Graph Element Networks and Conditional Neural Processes, for modeling irregularly sampled data. Notably, our model reduces root mean square error (RMSE) for wind nowcasting, improving from 9.24 to 7.98 and for a heat diffusion task from .126 to .084. We hypothesize that this superior performance can be attributed to the enhanced flexibility of our latent representation and the improved data encoding technique. To support our hypothesis, we design a synthetic experiment that reveals excessive bottlenecking in the latent representations of alternative models, which hinders information utilization and impedes training.

The identification of material parameters occurring in constitutive models has a wide range of applications in practice. One of these applications is the monitoring and assessment of the actual condition of infrastructure buildings, as the material parameters directly reflect the resistance of the structures to external impacts. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as a suitable method for solving inverse problems. The advantages of this method are a straightforward inclusion of observation data. Unlike grid-based methods, such as the least square finite element method (LS-FEM) approach, no computational grid and no interpolation of the data is required. In the current work, we propose PINNs for the calibration of constitutive models from full-field displacement and global force data in a realistic regime on the example of linear elasticity. We show that conditioning and reformulation of the optimization problem play a crucial role in real-world applications. Therefore, among others, we identify the material parameters from initial estimates and balance the individual terms in the loss function. In order to reduce the dependency of the identified material parameters on local errors in the displacement approximation, we base the identification not on the stress boundary conditions but instead on the global balance of internal and external work. We demonstrate that the enhanced PINNs are capable of identifying material parameters from both experimental one-dimensional data and synthetic full-field displacement data in a realistic regime. Since displacement data measured by, e.g., a digital image correlation (DIC) system is noisy, we additionally investigate the robustness of the method to different levels of noise.

Many Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are inspired by physics and employ stochastic fluctuations. We connect these physics-inspired AI algorithms by unifying them under a single mathematical framework that we call Thermodynamic AI. Seemingly disparate algorithmic classes can be described by this framework, for example, (1) Generative diffusion models, (2) Bayesian neural networks, (3) Monte Carlo sampling and (4) Simulated annealing. Such Thermodynamic AI algorithms are currently run on digital hardware, ultimately limiting their scalability and overall potential. Stochastic fluctuations naturally occur in physical thermodynamic systems, and such fluctuations can be viewed as a computational resource. Hence, we propose a novel computing paradigm, where software and hardware become inseparable. Our algorithmic unification allows us to identify a single full-stack paradigm, involving Thermodynamic AI hardware, that could accelerate such algorithms. We contrast Thermodynamic AI hardware with quantum computing where noise is a roadblock rather than a resource. Thermodynamic AI hardware can be viewed as a novel form of computing, since it uses a novel fundamental building block. We identify stochastic bits (s-bits) and stochastic modes (s-modes) as the respective building blocks for discrete and continuous Thermodynamic AI hardware. In addition to these stochastic units, Thermodynamic AI hardware employs a Maxwell's demon device that guides the system to produce non-trivial states. We provide a few simple physical architectures for building these devices and we develop a formalism for programming the hardware via gate sequences. We hope to stimulate discussion around this new computing paradigm. Beyond acceleration, we believe it will impact the design of both hardware and algorithms, while also deepening our understanding of the connection between physics and intelligence.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising solution to learning an agent fully relying on a data-driven paradigm. However, constrained by the limited quality of the offline dataset, its performance is often sub-optimal. Therefore, it is desired to further finetune the agent via extra online interactions before deployment. Unfortunately, offline-to-online RL can be challenging due to two main challenges: constrained exploratory behavior and state-action distribution shift. To this end, we propose a Simple Unified uNcertainty-Guided (SUNG) framework, which naturally unifies the solution to both challenges with the tool of uncertainty. Specifically, SUNG quantifies uncertainty via a VAE-based state-action visitation density estimator. To facilitate efficient exploration, SUNG presents a practical optimistic exploration strategy to select informative actions with both high value and high uncertainty. Moreover, SUNG develops an adaptive exploitation method by applying conservative offline RL objectives to high-uncertainty samples and standard online RL objectives to low-uncertainty samples to smoothly bridge offline and online stages. SUNG achieves state-of-the-art online finetuning performance when combined with different offline RL methods, across various environments and datasets in D4RL benchmark.

Motion planning is a crucial aspect of robot autonomy as it involves identifying a feasible motion path to a destination while taking into consideration various constraints, such as input, safety, and performance constraints, without violating either system or environment boundaries. This becomes particularly challenging when multiple robots run without communication, which compromises their real-time efficiency, safety, and performance. In this paper, we present a learning-based potential field algorithm that incorporates deep reinforcement learning into an artificial potential field (APF). Specifically, we introduce an observation embedding mechanism that pre-processes dynamic information about the environment and develop a soft wall-following rule to improve trajectory smoothness. Our method, while belonging to reactive planning, implicitly encodes environmental properties. Additionally, our approach can scale up to any number of robots and has demonstrated superior performance compared to APF and RL through numerical simulations. Finally, experiments are conducted to highlight the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Recent advances in zero-shot learning have enabled the use of paired image-text data to replace structured labels, replacing the need for expert annotated datasets. Models such as CLIP-based CheXzero utilize these advancements in the domain of chest X-ray interpretation. We hypothesize that domain pre-trained models such as CXR-BERT, BlueBERT, and ClinicalBERT offer the potential to improve the performance of CLIP-like models with specific domain knowledge by replacing BERT weights at the cost of breaking the original model's alignment. We evaluate the performance of zero-shot classification models with domain-specific pre-training for detecting low-prevalence pathologies. Even though replacing the weights of the original CLIP-BERT degrades model performance on commonly found pathologies, we show that pre-trained text towers perform exceptionally better on low-prevalence diseases. This motivates future ensemble models with a combination of differently trained language models for maximal performance.

Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity across various sectors, especially in finance and investment. The popularity is partly due to their unique specifications originating from blockchain-related characteristics such as privacy, decentralisation, and untraceability. Despite their growing popularity, cryptocurrencies remain a high-risk investment due to their price volatility and uncertainty. The inherent volatility in cryptocurrency prices, coupled with internal cryptocurrency-related factors and external influential global economic factors makes predicting their prices and price movement directions challenging. Nevertheless, the knowledge obtained from predicting the direction of cryptocurrency prices can provide valuable guidance for investors in making informed investment decisions. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) approach, which can model complex systems in multivariate settings, to predict the price movement direction of five popular altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin) in the next trading day. The efficacy of the proposed model in predicting cryptocurrency price directions is evaluated from two perspectives. Firstly, our proposed approach is compared to two baseline models, namely an auto-regressive integrated moving average and support vector regression. Secondly, from a feature engineering point of view, the impact of twenty-three different features, grouped into four categories, on the DBN's prediction performance is investigated. The experimental results demonstrate that the DBN significantly outperforms the baseline models. In addition, among the groups of features, technical indicators are found to be the most effective predictors of cryptocurrency price directions.

Additive manufacturing is advantageous for producing lightweight components while addressing complex design requirements. This capability has been bolstered by the introduction of unit lattice cells and the gradation of those cells. In cases where loading varies throughout a part, it may be beneficial to use multiple, distinct lattice cell types, resulting in multi-lattice structures. In such structures, abrupt transitions between unit cell topologies may cause stress concentrations, making the boundary between unit cell types a primary failure point. Thus, these regions require careful design in order to ensure the overall functionality of the part. Although computational design approaches have been proposed, smooth transition regions are still difficult to achieve, especially between lattices of drastically different topologies. This work demonstrates and assesses a method for using variational autoencoders to automate the creation of transitional lattice cells, examining the factors that contribute to smooth transitions. Through computational experimentation, it was found that the smoothness of transition regions was strongly predicted by how closely the endpoints were in the latent space, whereas the number of transition intervals was not a sole predictor.

Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC) is a recurrent phenomenon in several industrial and geoscience flows and a well-studied system from a fundamental fluid-mechanics viewpoint. However, controlling RBC, for example by modulating the spatial distribution of the bottom-plate heating in the canonical RBC configuration, remains a challenging topic for classical control-theory methods. In the present work, we apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling RBC. We show that effective RBC control can be obtained by leveraging invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which takes advantage of the locality and translational invariance inherent to RBC flows inside wide channels. The MARL framework applied to RBC allows for an increase in the number of control segments without encountering the curse of dimensionality that would result from a naive increase in the DRL action-size dimension. This is made possible by the MARL ability for re-using the knowledge generated in different parts of the RBC domain. We show in a case study that MARL DRL is able to discover an advanced control strategy that destabilizes the spontaneous RBC double-cell pattern, changes the topology of RBC by coalescing adjacent convection cells, and actively controls the resulting coalesced cell to bring it to a new stable configuration. This modified flow configuration results in reduced convective heat transfer, which is beneficial in several industrial processes. Therefore, our work both shows the potential of MARL DRL for controlling large RBC systems, as well as demonstrates the possibility for DRL to discover strategies that move the RBC configuration between different topological configurations, yielding desirable heat-transfer characteristics. These results are useful for both gaining further understanding of the intrinsic properties of RBC, as well as for developing industrial applications.