The role of an expert in the decision-making process is crucial, as the final recommendation depends on his disposition, clarity of mind, experience, and knowledge of the problem. However, the recommendation also depends on their honesty. But what if the expert is dishonest? Then, the answer on how difficult it is to manipulate in a given case becomes essential. In the presented work, we consider manipulation of a ranking obtained by comparing alternatives in pairs. More specifically, we propose an algorithm for finding an almost optimal way to swap the positions of two selected alternatives. Thanks to this, it is possible to determine how difficult such manipulation is in a given case. Theoretical considerations are illustrated by a practical example.

We propose a new approach to learning the subgrid-scale model when simulating partial differential equations (PDEs) solved by the method of lines and their representation in chaotic ordinary differential equations, based on neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs). Solving systems with fine temporal and spatial grid scales is an ongoing computational challenge, and closure models are generally difficult to tune. Machine learning approaches have increased the accuracy and efficiency of computational fluid dynamics solvers. In this approach neural networks are used to learn the coarse- to fine-grid map, which can be viewed as subgrid-scale parameterization. We propose a strategy that uses the NODE and partial knowledge to learn the source dynamics at a continuous level. Our method inherits the advantages of NODEs and can be used to parameterize subgrid scales, approximate coupling operators, and improve the efficiency of low-order solvers. Numerical results with the two-scale Lorenz 96 ODE, the convection-diffusion PDE, and the viscous Burgers' PDE are used to illustrate this approach.

The digital transformation of automation places new demands on data acquisition and processing in industrial processes. Logical relationships between acquired data and cyclic process sequences must be correctly interpreted and evaluated. To solve this problem, a novel approach based on evolutionary algorithms is proposed to self optimise the system logic of complex processes. Based on the genetic results, a programme code for the system implementation is derived by decoding the solution. This is achieved by a flexible system structure with an upstream, intermediate and downstream unit. In the intermediate unit, a directed learning process interacts with a system replica and an evaluation function in a closed loop. The code generation strategy is represented by redundancy and priority, sequencing and performance derivation. The presented approach is evaluated on an industrial liquid station process subject to a multi-objective optimisation problem.

Sea surface temperature (SST) is uniquely important to the Earth's atmosphere since its dynamics are a major force in shaping local and global climate and profoundly affect our ecosystems. Accurate forecasting of SST brings significant economic and social implications, for example, better preparation for extreme weather such as severe droughts or tropical cyclones months ahead. However, such a task faces unique challenges due to the intrinsic complexity and uncertainty of ocean systems. Recently, deep learning techniques, such as graphical neural networks (GNN), have been applied to address this task. Even though these methods have some success, they frequently have serious drawbacks when it comes to investigating dynamic spatiotemporal dependencies between signals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel static and dynamic learnable personalized graph convolution network (SD-LPGC). Specifically, two graph learning layers are first constructed to respectively model the stable long-term and short-term evolutionary patterns hidden in the multivariate SST signals. Then, a learnable personalized convolution layer is designed to fuse this information. Our experiments on real SST datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performances of the proposed approach on the forecasting task.

We conduct the first comprehensive meta-analysis of deterministic solar forecasting based on skill score, screening 1,447 papers from Google Scholar and reviewing the full texts of 320 papers for data extraction. A database of 4,687 points was built and analyzed with multivariate adaptive regression spline modelling, partial dependence plots, and linear regression. The marginal impacts on skill score of ten factors were quantified. The analysis shows the non-linearity and complex interaction between variables in the database. Forecast horizon has a central impact and dominates other factors' impacts. Therefore, the analysis of solar forecasts should be done separately for each horizon. Climate zone variables have statistically significant correlation with skill score. Regarding inputs, historical data and spatial temporal information are highly helpful. For intra-day, sky and satellite images show the most importance. For day-ahead, numerical weather predictions and locally measured meteorological data are very efficient. All forecast models were compared. Ensemble-hybrid models achieve the most accurate forecasts for all horizons. Hybrid models show superiority for intra-hour while image-based methods are the most efficient for intra-day forecasts. More training data can enhance skill score. However, over-fitting is observed when there is too much training data (longer than 2000 days). There has been a substantial improvement in solar forecast accuracy, especially in recent years. More improvement is observed for intra-hour and intra-day than day-ahead forecasts. By controlling for the key differences between forecasts, including location variables, our findings can be applied globally.

We present a combined scaling method - named BASIC - that achieves 85.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 validation set without learning from any labeled ImageNet example. This accuracy surpasses best published similar models - CLIP and ALIGN - by 9.3%. Our BASIC model also shows significant improvements in robustness benchmarks. For instance, on 5 test sets with natural distribution shifts such as ImageNet-{A,R,V2,Sketch} and ObjectNet, our model achieves 84.3% top-1 average accuracy, only a small drop from its original ImageNet accuracy. To achieve these results, we scale up the contrastive learning framework of CLIP and ALIGN in three dimensions: data size, model size, and batch size. Our dataset has 6.6B noisy image-text pairs, which is 4x larger than ALIGN, and 16x larger than CLIP. Our largest model has 3B weights, which is 3.75x larger in parameters and 8x larger in FLOPs than ALIGN and CLIP. Finally, our batch size is 65536 which is 2x more than CLIP and 4x more than ALIGN. We encountered two main challenges with the scaling rules of BASIC. First, the main challenge with implementing the combined scaling rules of BASIC is the limited memory of accelerators, such as GPUs and TPUs. To overcome the memory limit, we propose two simple methods which make use of gradient checkpointing and model parallelism. Second, while increasing the dataset size and the model size has been the defacto method to improve the performance of deep learning models like BASIC, the effect of a large contrastive batch size on such contrastive-trained image-text models is not well-understood. To shed light on the benefits of large contrastive batch sizes, we develop a theoretical framework which shows that larger contrastive batch sizes lead to smaller generalization gaps for image-text models such as BASIC.

Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are limited by: 1) their scope, measuring single parameters/events and often requiring multiple types of sensors, 2) being expensive to manufacture, limiting their use to where they are strictly necessary and often compromising redundancy, and 3) have null or reduced physical flexibility, requiring further costs with adaptation to a variety of robot structures. This paper presents a novel mechanically flexible force and proximity hybrid sensor based on piezoresistive and self-capacitive phenomena. The sensor is inexpensive and easy to apply even on complex-shaped robot structures. The manufacturing process is described, including controlling circuits, mechanical design, and data acquisition. Experimental trials featuring the characterisation of the sensor were conducted, focusing on both force-electrical resistance and self-capacitive proximity response. The sensor's versatility, flexibility, thinness (1 mm thickness), accuracy (reduced drift) and repeatability demonstrated its applicability in several domains. Finally, the sensor was successfully applied in two distinct situations: hand guiding a robot (by touch commands), and human-robot collision avoidance (by proximity detection).

Many surveys and reviews like [22, 23, 39] describe semantic segmentation as the Computer Vision (CV) task of predicting a category label at the pixel level. It builds upon simpler vision tasks such as image classification and object detection, and also shares some similarities with more advanced challenges like parts segmentation, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation. A visual comparison between the related Computer Vision (CV) tasks is reported in Figure 1. Image classification aims at understanding the overall scene in an image by giving it one or more labels, while object detection (Figure 1b) focuses on predicting the location of one or more objects in an image usually providing bounding boxes. Pixel-level prediction tasks like parts segmentation (Figure 1d) is a closer problem to semantic segmentation (Figure 1c), as it aims at predicting pixel-level segmentation masks covering the parts that compose the intended subject, such as face parts like the chin, nose and eyes. Instance segmentation (Figure 1e) aims to distinguish individual objects in an image, even if they are of the same kind, but does not necessarily assign them a category. Finally, panoptic segmentation (Figure 1f) combines semantic segmentation with instance segmentation, predicting the pixel-level category and distinguishing each object in the scene. Overall, we can place semantic segmentation as a midpoint on a spectrum of image understanding tasks ranging from coarse to fine.

The amount of data has growing significance in exploring cutting-edge materials and a number of datasets have been generated either by hand or automated approaches. However, the materials science field struggles to effectively utilize the abundance of data, especially in applied disciplines where materials are evaluated based on device performance rather than their properties. This article presents a new natural language processing (NLP) task called structured information inference (SII) to address the complexities of information extraction at the device level in materials science. We accomplished this task by tuning GPT-3 on an existing perovskite solar cell FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) dataset with 91.8% F1-score and extended the dataset with data published since its release. The produced data is formatted and normalized, enabling its direct utilization as input in subsequent data analysis. This feature empowers materials scientists to develop models by selecting high-quality review articles within their domain. Additionally, we designed experiments to predict the electrical performance of solar cells and design materials or devices with targeted parameters using large language models (LLMs). Our results demonstrate comparable performance to traditional machine learning methods without feature selection, highlighting the potential of LLMs to acquire scientific knowledge and design new materials akin to materials scientists.

Over the last few years, key architectural advances have been proposed for neural network interatomic potentials (NNIPs), such as incorporating message-passing networks, equivariance, or many-body expansion terms. Although modern NNIP models exhibit small differences in energy/forces errors, improvements in accuracy are still considered the main target when developing new NNIP architectures. In this work, we show how architectural and optimization choices influence the generalization of NNIPs, revealing trends in molecular dynamics (MD) stability, data efficiency, and loss landscapes. Using the 3BPA dataset, we show that test errors in NNIP follow a scaling relation and can be robust to noise, but cannot predict MD stability in the high-accuracy regime. To circumvent this problem, we propose the use of loss landscape visualizations and a metric of loss entropy for predicting the generalization power of NNIPs. With a large-scale study on NequIP and MACE, we show that the loss entropy predicts out-of-distribution error and MD stability despite being computed only on the training set. Using this probe, we demonstrate how the choice of optimizers, loss function weighting, data normalization, and other architectural decisions influence the extrapolation behavior of NNIPs. Finally, we relate loss entropy to data efficiency, demonstrating that flatter landscapes also predict learning curve slopes. Our work provides a deep learning justification for the extrapolation performance of many common NNIPs, and introduces tools beyond accuracy metrics that can be used to inform the development of next-generation models.