Energy
Saltation Matrices: The Essential Tool for Linearizing Hybrid Dynamical Systems
Kong, Nathan J., Payne, J. Joe, Zhu, James, Johnson, Aaron M.
I Figure 1: An example 2 mode hybrid system where the domains are shown in black circles D, the dynamics are shown with gray arrows F, the guard for the current domain is shown in red dashed g, and the reset from the current mode to the next mode is shown in blue R. The saltation matrix relies on differentiating the guards B. Saltation matrix derivation and resets so they must be differentiable. Excluding Zeno In this section, the derivation of the saltation matrix (2) is conditions ensures we avoid computing infinite saltation matrices presented, following the geometric derivation from [10] with in finite time, which would clearly be unsound for the addition of reset maps. There are many alternate ways analysis. Transversality ensures that neighboring trajectories to derive (2): a derivation using the chain rule is included in impact the same guard unless the impact point lies on any Appendix A and a derivation using a double limit can be found other guard surface, in which case the Bouligand derivative in [96]. is the appropriate analysis tool [52, 114-117]. Transversality Suppose the nominal trajectory of interest is x(t) as shown also ensures the denominator in (2) does not approach zero. in Figure 1. The trajectory starts in mode I and goes through a In some cases, the saltation matrix for a hybrid transition hybrid transition to mode J at time t. The saltation matrix is a can become an identity transformation.
Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society
Solaiman, Irene, Talat, Zeerak, Agnew, William, Ahmad, Lama, Baker, Dylan, Blodgett, Su Lin, Daumรฉ, Hal III, Dodge, Jesse, Evans, Ellie, Hooker, Sara, Jernite, Yacine, Luccioni, Alexandra Sasha, Lusoli, Alberto, Mitchell, Margaret, Newman, Jessica, Png, Marie-Therese, Strait, Andrew, Vassilev, Apostol
Generative AI systems across modalities, ranging from text, image, audio, and video, have broad social impacts, but there exists no official standard for means of evaluating those impacts and which impacts should be evaluated. We move toward a standard approach in evaluating a generative AI system for any modality, in two overarching categories: what is able to be evaluated in a base system that has no predetermined application and what is able to be evaluated in society. We describe specific social impact categories and how to approach and conduct evaluations in the base technical system, then in people and society. Our framework for a base system defines seven categories of social impact: bias, stereotypes, and representational harms; cultural values and sensitive content; disparate performance; privacy and data protection; financial costs; environmental costs; and data and content moderation labor costs. Suggested methods for evaluation apply to all modalities and analyses of the limitations of existing evaluations serve as a starting point for necessary investment in future evaluations. We offer five overarching categories for what is able to be evaluated in society, each with their own subcategories: trustworthiness and autonomy; inequality, marginalization, and violence; concentration of authority; labor and creativity; and ecosystem and environment. Each subcategory includes recommendations for mitigating harm. We are concurrently crafting an evaluation repository for the AI research community to contribute existing evaluations along the given categories. This version will be updated following a CRAFT session at ACM FAccT 2023.
Connecting the Dots in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: From AI Principles, Ethics, and Key Requirements to Responsible AI Systems and Regulation
Dรญaz-Rodrรญguez, Natalia, Del Ser, Javier, Coeckelbergh, Mark, de Prado, Marcos Lรณpez, Herrera-Viedma, Enrique, Herrera, Francisco
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) is based on seven technical requirements sustained over three main pillars that should be met throughout the system's entire life cycle: it should be (1) lawful, (2) ethical, and (3) robust, both from a technical and a social perspective. However, attaining truly trustworthy AI concerns a wider vision that comprises the trustworthiness of all processes and actors that are part of the system's life cycle, and considers previous aspects from different lenses. A more holistic vision contemplates four essential axes: the global principles for ethical use and development of AI-based systems, a philosophical take on AI ethics, a risk-based approach to AI regulation, and the mentioned pillars and requirements. The seven requirements (human agency and oversight; robustness and safety; privacy and data governance; transparency; diversity, non-discrimination and fairness; societal and environmental wellbeing; and accountability) are analyzed from a triple perspective: What each requirement for trustworthy AI is, Why it is needed, and How each requirement can be implemented in practice. On the other hand, a practical approach to implement trustworthy AI systems allows defining the concept of responsibility of AI-based systems facing the law, through a given auditing process. Therefore, a responsible AI system is the resulting notion we introduce in this work, and a concept of utmost necessity that can be realized through auditing processes, subject to the challenges posed by the use of regulatory sandboxes. Our multidisciplinary vision of trustworthy AI culminates in a debate on the diverging views published lately about the future of AI. Our reflections in this matter conclude that regulation is a key for reaching a consensus among these views, and that trustworthy and responsible AI systems will be crucial for the present and future of our society.
SwissBERT: The Multilingual Language Model for Switzerland
Vamvas, Jannis, Graรซn, Johannes, Sennrich, Rico
We present SwissBERT, a masked language model created specifically for processing Switzerland-related text. SwissBERT is a pre-trained model that we adapted to news articles written in the national languages of Switzerland -- German, French, Italian, and Romansh. We evaluate SwissBERT on natural language understanding tasks related to Switzerland and find that it tends to outperform previous models on these tasks, especially when processing contemporary news and/or Romansh Grischun. Since SwissBERT uses language adapters, it may be extended to Swiss German dialects in future work. The model and our open-source code are publicly released at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/swissbert.
SE-MoE: A Scalable and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Distributed Training and Inference System
Shen, Liang, Wu, Zhihua, Gong, WeiBao, Hao, Hongxiang, Bai, Yangfan, Wu, HuaChao, Wu, Xinxuan, Bian, Jiang, Xiong, Haoyi, Yu, Dianhai, Ma, Yanjun
With the increasing diversity of ML infrastructures nowadays, distributed training over heterogeneous computing systems is desired to facilitate the production of big models. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have been proposed to lower the cost of training subject to the overall size of models/data through gating and parallelism in a divide-and-conquer fashion. While DeepSpeed has made efforts in carrying out large-scale MoE training over heterogeneous infrastructures, the efficiency of training and inference could be further improved from several system aspects, including load balancing, communication/computation efficiency, and memory footprint limits. In this work, we present SE-MoE that proposes Elastic MoE training with 2D prefetch and Fusion communication over Hierarchical storage, so as to enjoy efficient parallelisms in various types. For scalable inference in a single node, especially when the model size is larger than GPU memory, SE-MoE forms the CPU-GPU memory jointly into a ring of sections to load the model, and executes the computation tasks across the memory sections in a round-robin manner for efficient inference. We carried out extensive experiments to evaluate SE-MoE, where SE-MoE successfully trains a Unified Feature Optimization (UFO) model with a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts model of 12B parameters in 8 days on 48 A100 GPU cards. The comparison against the state-of-the-art shows that SE-MoE outperformed DeepSpeed with 33% higher throughput (tokens per second) in training and 13% higher throughput in inference in general. Particularly, under unbalanced MoE Tasks, e.g., UFO, SE-MoE achieved 64% higher throughput with 18% lower memory footprints. The code of the framework will be released on: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Paddle.
What would happen if you fell in a black hole?
For all the chaos going on down here on Earth, it's easy to forget that we live in a volatile galaxy full of formidable dangers. From space rocks flying at thousands of miles per hour, to black holes that could rip our planet apart, sometimes it's best not to think about them. But what would actually happen to the human body if we perished at the hands of these wild astronomical phenomena? MailOnline spoke to experts to find out โ and to see if there's any chance of them actually occurring while humanity still exists. Before any of them happen, Homo sapiens could be responsible for their own demise โ likely by creating dangerous AI or the emission of greenhouse gases.
The Single Robot Line Coverage Problem: Theory, Algorithms, and Experiments
Agarwal, Saurav, Akella, Srinivas
Line coverage is the task of servicing a given set of one-dimensional features in an environment. It is important for the inspection of linear infrastructure such as road networks, power lines, and oil and gas pipelines. This paper addresses the single robot line coverage problem for aerial and ground robots by modeling it as an optimization problem on a graph. The problem belongs to the broad class of arc routing problems and is closely related to the rural postman problem (RPP) on asymmetric graphs. The paper presents an integer linear programming formulation with proofs of correctness. Using the minimum cost flow problem, we develop approximation algorithms with guarantees on the solution quality. These guarantees also improve the existing results for the asymmetric RPP. The main algorithm partitions the problem into three cases based on the structure of the required graph, i.e., the graph induced by the features that require servicing. We evaluate our algorithms on road networks from the 50 most populous cities in the world, consisting of up to 730 road segments. The algorithms, augmented with improvement heuristics, run within 3s and generate solutions that are within 10% of the optimum. We experimentally demonstrate our algorithms with commercial UAVs.
End-to-End Learning for Stochastic Optimization: A Bayesian Perspective
Rychener, Yves, Kuhn, Daniel, Sutter, Tobias
We develop a principled approach to end-to-end learning in stochastic optimization. First, we show that the standard end-to-end learning algorithm admits a Bayesian interpretation and trains a posterior Bayes action map. Building on the insights of this analysis, we then propose new end-to-end learning algorithms for training decision maps that output solutions of empirical risk minimization and distributionally robust optimization problems, two dominant modeling paradigms in optimization under uncertainty. Numerical results for a synthetic newsvendor problem illustrate the key differences between alternative training schemes. We also investigate an economic dispatch problem based on real data to showcase the impact of the neural network architecture of the decision maps on their test performance.
Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Motion Planning by Combined Experience-based Planning and Self-Imitation Learning
High-quality and representative data is essential for both Imitation Learning (IL)- and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based motion planning tasks. For real robots, it is challenging to collect enough qualified data either as demonstrations for IL or experiences for RL due to safety considerations in environments with obstacles. We target this challenge by proposing the self-imitation learning by planning plus (SILP+) algorithm, which efficiently embeds experience-based planning into the learning architecture to mitigate the data-collection problem. The planner generates demonstrations based on successfully visited states from the current RL policy, and the policy improves by learning from these demonstrations. In this way, we relieve the demand for human expert operators to collect demonstrations required by IL and improve the RL performance as well. Various experimental results show that SILP+ achieves better training efficiency higher and more stable success rate in complex motion planning tasks compared to several other methods. Extensive tests on physical robots illustrate the effectiveness of SILP+ in a physical setting.
Toward Terrain-based Navigation Using Side-scan Sonar
Davenport, Ellen, Jang, Junsu, Meyer, Florian
This paper introduces a statistical model and corresponding sequential Bayesian estimation method for terrain-based navigation using side-scan sonar (SSS) data. The presented approach relies on slant range measurements extracted from the received ping of a SSS. In particular, incorporating slant range measurements to landmarks for navigation constrains the location and altitude error of an autonomous platform in GPS-denied environments. The proposed navigation filter consists of a prediction step based on the unscented transform and an update step that relies on particle filtering. The SSS measurement model aims to capture the highly nonlinear nature of SSS data while maintaining reasonable computational requirements in the particle-based update step. For our numerical results, we assume a scenario with a surface vehicle that performs SSS and compass measurements. The simulated scenario is consistent with our current hardware platform. We also discuss how the proposed method can be extended to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in a straightforward way and why the combination of SSS sensor and compass is particularly suitable for small autonomous platforms.