Samsung's loose lips whispered the truth: On Tuesday, Nvidia announced new GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti laptop GPUs designed to bring ray tracing, performance-boosting DLSS technology, and supercharged creative capabilities to the mobile masses. Nvidia timed the announcement to coincide with Intel's reveal of its heavy-duty 11th-generation Core H-series processors, and the company says the RTX 3050 GPUs will appear in notebooks starting for as little as $799. Last generation's GeForce graphics cards introduced Nvidia's RTX technology, which added dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing and tensor cores for AI acceleration tasks. But the newfangled hardware never crept down to mainstream laptops. Instead, RTX 2060 laptops launched at $1,200 and up.

In real life auctions, a widely observed phenomenon is the winner's curse -- the winner's high bid implies that the winner often over-estimates the value of the good for sale, resulting in an incurred negative utility. The seminal work of Eyster and Rabin [Econometrica'05] introduced a behavioral model aimed to explain this observed anomaly. We term agents who display this bias "cursed agents". We adopt their model in the interdependent value setting, and aim to devise mechanisms that prevent the cursed agents from obtaining negative utility. We design mechanisms that are cursed ex-post IC, that is, incentivize agents to bid their true signal even though they are cursed, while ensuring that the outcome is individually rational -- the price the agents pay is no more than the agents' true value. Since the agents might over-estimate the good's value, such mechanisms might require the seller to make positive transfers to the agents to prevent agents from over-paying. For revenue maximization, we give the optimal deterministic and anonymous mechanism. For welfare maximization, we require ex-post budget balance (EPBB), as positive transfers might lead to negative revenue. We propose a masking operation that takes any deterministic mechanism, and imposes that the seller would not make positive transfers, enforcing EPBB. We show that in typical settings, EPBB implies that the mechanism cannot make any positive transfers, implying that applying the masking operation on the fully efficient mechanism results in a socially optimal EPBB mechanism. This further implies that if the valuation function is the maximum of agents' signals, the optimal EPBB mechanism obtains zero welfare. In contrast, we show that for sum-concave valuations, which include weighted-sum valuations and l_p-norms, the welfare optimal EPBB mechanism obtains half of the optimal welfare as the number of agents grows large.

Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and stability, create interference between learning tasks, and necessitate substantial tuning. We revisit this topic for agents based on temporal-difference learning, sketch out some desiderata and investigate scenarios where simple fixes fall short. The mechanism we propose requires neither tuning, clipping, nor adaptation. We validate its effectiveness and robustness on the suite of Atari games. Our scaling method turns out to be particularly helpful at mitigating interference, when training a shared neural network on multiple targets that differ in reward scale or discounting.

Over the past decade, wind energy has gained more attention in the world. However, owing to its indirectness and volatility properties, wind power penetration has increased the difficulty and complexity in dispatching and planning of electric power systems. Therefore, it is needed to make the high-precision wind power prediction in order to balance the electrical power. For this purpose, in this study, the prediction performance of linear regression, k-nearest neighbor regression and decision tree regression algorithms is compared in detail. k-nearest neighbor regression algorithm provides lower coefficient of determination values, while decision tree regression algorithm produces lower mean absolute error values. In addition, the meteorological parameters of wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure and air temperature are evaluated in terms of their importance on the wind power parameter. The biggest importance factor is achieved by wind speed parameter. In consequence, many useful assessments are made for wind power predictions.

With NASA aiming to get humans to Mars by 2030, the idea of a long-term settlement on the Red Planet is getting closer to reality and scientists are working on innovated ways to power these habitats. Researchers in the Netherlands propose using massive kites to harness high Martian winds that would transformed into energy for colonists. The kite is attached by cable to a spindle. Similar kites are being developed to harness wind power on Earth, but these would be much larger, with a surface area of 530 square feet. Wind turbines and batteries are too heavy to bring to Mars via rocket, and the planet doesn't get enough sunlight to consider solar power.

A lot of energy is consumed by buildings. In fact, the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit energy efficiency advocacy group, says buildings account for about 40% of all U.S. energy consumption and a similar proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. Some estimates suggest about 45% of the energy used in commercial buildings is consumed by heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, of which, as much as 30% is often wasted. Most power companies these days have energy efficiency programs that help customers identify waste and implement energy-saving measures, but there are also non-utility providers working on solutions. Montreal, Canada–based BrainBox AI is one of them. It's using artificial intelligence (AI) to significantly reduce energy consumption in buildings.

Predicting the weather can be a frustratingly imprecise science. The weather app on your phone is pretty good at forecasting if it's likely to rain at some point during a given day, but much less helpful if you want to know if there's going to be a downpour in central London at 3 pm this Sunday. If you absolutely have to stay dry, you're best off keeping an umbrella with you or staying inside. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. For most people, not knowing what the weather is going to do in the next hour is a minor inconvenience.

In the field of machine learning, the well-trained model is assumed to be able to recover the training labels, i.e. the synthetic labels predicted by the model should be as close to the ground-truth labels as possible. Inspired by this, we propose a self-guided curriculum strategy to encourage the learning of neural machine translation (NMT) models to follow the above recovery criterion, where we cast the recovery degree of each training example as its learning difficulty. Specifically, we adopt the sentence level BLEU score as the proxy of recovery degree. Different from existing curricula relying on linguistic prior knowledge or third-party language models, our chosen learning difficulty is more suitable to measure the degree of knowledge mastery of the NMT models. Experiments on translation benchmarks, including WMT14 English$\Rightarrow$German and WMT17 Chinese$\Rightarrow$English, demonstrate that our approach can consistently improve translation performance against strong baseline Transformer.

A practical approach to robot reinforcement learning is to first collect a large batch of real or simulated robot interaction data, using some data collection policy, and then learn from this data to perform various tasks, using offline learning algorithms. Previous work focused on manually designing the data collection policy, and on tasks where suitable policies can easily be designed, such as random picking policies for collecting data about object grasping. For more complex tasks, however, it may be difficult to find a data collection policy that explores the environment effectively, and produces data that is diverse enough for the downstream task. In this work, we propose that data collection policies should actively explore the environment to collect diverse data. In particular, we develop a simple-yet-effective goal-conditioned reinforcement-learning method that actively focuses data collection on novel observations, thereby collecting a diverse data-set. We evaluate our method on simulated robot manipulation tasks with visual inputs and show that the improved diversity of active data collection leads to significant improvements in the downstream learning tasks.

Designing efficient exploration is central to Reinforcement Learning due to the fundamental problem posed by the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Bayesian exploration strategies like Thompson Sampling resolve this trade-off in a principled way by modeling and updating the distribution of the parameters of the the action-value function, the outcome model of the environment. However, this technique becomes infeasible for complex environments due to the difficulty of representing and updating probability distributions over parameters of outcome models of corresponding complexity. Moreover, the approximation techniques introduced to mitigate this issue typically result in poor exploration-exploitation trade-offs, as observed in the case of deep neural network models with approximate posterior methods that have been shown to underperform in the deep bandit scenario. In this paper we introduce Sample Average Uncertainty (SAU), a simple and efficient uncertainty measure for contextual bandits. While Bayesian approaches like Thompson Sampling estimate outcomes uncertainty indirectly by first quantifying the variability over the parameters of the outcome model, SAU is a frequentist approach that directly estimates the uncertainty of the outcomes based on the value predictions. Importantly, we show theoretically that the uncertainty measure estimated by SAU asymptotically matches the uncertainty provided by Thompson Sampling, as well as its regret bounds. Because of its simplicity SAU can be seamlessly applied to deep contextual bandits as a very scalable drop-in replacement for epsilon-greedy exploration. Finally, we empirically confirm our theory by showing that SAU-based exploration outperforms current state-of-the-art deep Bayesian bandit methods on several real-world datasets at modest computation cost.