Leveraging recent developments in black-box risk-aware verification, we provide three algorithms that generate probabilistic guarantees on (1) optimality of solutions, (2) recursive feasibility, and (3) maximum controller runtimes for general nonlinear safety-critical finite-time optimal controllers. These methods forego the usual (perhaps) restrictive assumptions required for typical theoretical guarantees, e.g. terminal set calculation for recursive feasibility in Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, or convexification of optimal controllers to ensure optimality. Furthermore, we show that these methods can directly be applied to hardware systems to generate controller guarantees on their respective systems.

In this paper, we present a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing without relying on a known object model. In many cases, vision-only approaches may not be feasible; for example, due to occlusion in cluttered spaces. We address this limitation by introducing a method to reorient unknown objects using tactile sensing. It incrementally builds a probabilistic estimate of the object shape and pose during task-driven manipulation. Our approach uses Bayesian optimization to balance exploration of the global object shape with efficient task completion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to a simulated Tactile-Enabled Roller Grasper, a gripper that rolls objects in hand while collecting tactile data. We evaluate our method on an insertion task with randomly generated objects and find that it reliably reorients objects while significantly reducing the exploration time.

Federated Learning (FL) is an intriguing distributed machine learning approach due to its privacy-preserving characteristics. To balance the trade-off between energy and execution latency, and thus accommodate different demands and application scenarios, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize a weighted sum of total energy consumption and completion time through two weight parameters. The optimization variables include bandwidth, transmission power and CPU frequency of each device in the FL system, where all devices are linked to a base station and train a global model collaboratively. Through decomposing the non-convex optimization problem into two subproblems, we devise a resource allocation algorithm to determine the bandwidth allocation, transmission power, and CPU frequency for each participating device. We further present the convergence analysis and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm not only has better performance at different weight parameters (i.e., different demands) but also outperforms the state of the art.

Like everyone and their brother, I've been playing with ChatGPT and asking it life's essential questions. It confidently tells me things, and some of those things are incredibly insightful. However, people and chatbots that are wrong often state things confidently. I saw a recent Google Answer posted on Mastodon. In this "answer," Google suggested that there were benefits to disposing of used car batteries in the ocean, including charging electric eels and powering the Gulf Stream.

Using chemical reactions to store energy is handy and scalable, and there are about a million ways to do it, which is why batteries have basically become synonymous with energy storage. But more groups are starting to think outside the battery. In an effort to cut costs and store lots of energy for long periods of time, researchers and companies alike are getting creative: pumping water into the earth, compressing gas in underground caverns or massive tanks, even lifting giant blocks. As we build more renewable energy capacity in the form of variable sources like wind and solar power, we're going to need to add a lot more energy storage to the grid to keep it stable. Our climate reporter Casey Crownhart has dug into the exciting, busy world of battery alternatives, and what it might take to make them a reality.

Artificial-intelligence systems that can churn out fluent text, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, are the newest darlings of the technology industry. But when faced with mathematical queries that require reasoning to answer, these large language models (LLMs) often stumble. A line parallel to y 4x 6 passes through (5, 10). What is the y-coordinate of the point where this line crosses the y-axis? Although LLMs can sometimes answer these types of question correctly, they more often get them wrong. In one early test of its reasoning abilities, ChatGPT scored just 26% when faced with a sample of questions from the'MATH' data set of secondary-school-level mathematical problems1. This is to be expected: given input text, an LLM simply generates new text in accordance with statistical regularities in the words, symbols and sentences that make up the model's training data.

Indiscriminate data poisoning attacks are quite effective against supervised learning. However, not much is known about their impact on unsupervised contrastive learning (CL). This paper is the first to consider indiscriminate poisoning attacks of contrastive learning. We propose Contrastive Poisoning (CP), the first effective such attack on CL. We empirically show that Contrastive Poisoning, not only drastically reduces the performance of CL algorithms, but also attacks supervised learning models, making it the most generalizable indiscriminate poisoning attack. We also show that CL algorithms with a momentum encoder are more robust to indiscriminate poisoning, and propose a new countermeasure based on matrix completion. Research on indiscriminate poisoning attacks has attracted much attention in recent years due Figure 1: Accuracy of the victim model when to concerns about unauthorized or even illegal facing the current SOTA in indiscriminate data exploitation of online personal data (Prabhu & poisoning attacks (Fowl et al., 2021a). It shows Birhane, 2021; Carlini et al., 2021). One example that past indiscriminate poisoning while highly is reported by Hill & Krolik where a commercial effective on victim models that use supervised company collected billions of face images learning is mostly ineffective when the victim to build their face recognition model without acquiring uses unsupervised contrastive learning (SimCLR, any consent. All prior works on indiscriminate poisoning of deep learning are in the context of supervised learning (SL), and use a cross-entropy loss. However, advances in modern machine learning have shown that unsupervised contrastive learning (CL) can achieve the same accuracy or even exceed the performance of supervised learning on core machine learning tasks (Azizi et al., 2021; Radford et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2020b; 2021; Tian et al., 2021; Jaiswal et al., 2021).

Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) allows reduced-order modeling of complex dynamical systems at a substantial level, while maintaining a high degree of accuracy in modeling the underlying dynamical systems. Advances in machine learning algorithms enable learning POD-based dynamics from data and making accurate and fast predictions of dynamical systems. In this paper, we leverage the recently proposed heavy-ball neural ODEs (HBNODEs) [Xia et al. NeurIPS, 2021] for learning data-driven reduced-order models (ROMs) in the POD context, in particular, for learning dynamics of time-varying coefficients generated by the POD analysis on training snapshots generated from solving full order models. HBNODE enjoys several practical advantages for learning POD-based ROMs with theoretical guarantees, including 1) HBNODE can learn long-term dependencies effectively from sequential observations and 2) HBNODE is computationally efficient in both training and testing. We compare HBNODE with other popular ROMs on several complex dynamical systems, including the von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n Street flow, the Kurganov-Petrova-Popov equation, and the one-dimensional Euler equations for fluids modeling.

A generative model based on a continuous-time normalizing flow between any pair of base and target probability densities is proposed. The velocity field of this flow is inferred from the probability current of a time-dependent density that interpolates between the base and the target in finite time. Unlike conventional normalizing flow inference methods based the maximum likelihood principle, which require costly backpropagation through ODE solvers, our interpolant approach leads to a simple quadratic loss for the velocity itself which is expressed in terms of expectations that are readily amenable to empirical estimation. The flow can be used to generate samples from either the base or target, and to estimate the likelihood at any time along the interpolant. In addition, the flow can be optimized to minimize the path length of the interpolant density, thereby paving the way for building optimal transport maps. In situations where the base is a Gaussian density, we also show that the velocity of our normalizing flow can also be used to construct a diffusion model to sample the target as well as estimate its score. However, our approach shows that we can bypass this diffusion completely and work at the level of the probability flow with greater simplicity, opening an avenue for methods based solely on ordinary differential equations as an alternative to those based on stochastic differential equations. Benchmarking on density estimation tasks illustrates that the learned flow can match and surpass conventional continuous flows at a fraction of the cost, and compares well with diffusions on image generation on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet $32\times32$. The method scales ab-initio ODE flows to previously unreachable image resolutions, demonstrated up to $128\times128$.

Evaluating the potential of a prospective candidate is a common task in multiple decision-making processes in different industries. We refer to a prospect as something or someone that could potentially produce positive results in a given context, e.g., an area where an oil company could find oil, a compound that, when synthesized, results in a material with required properties, and so on. In many contexts, assessing the Probability of Success (PoS) of prospects heavily depends on experts' knowledge, often leading to biased and inconsistent assessments. We have developed the framework named KARA (Knowledge-augmented Risk Assessment) to address these issues. It combines multiple AI techniques that consider SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) feedback on top of a structured domain knowledge-base to support risk assessment processes of prospect candidates in knowledge-intensive contexts.