These solutions will help Huawei deliver intelligent connectivity that is characterized by ubiquitous gigabit, deterministic experience, and hyper-automation in order to build industry Intelligent Twins. Huawei also launched autonomous driving network (ADN) solutions for enterprises, propelling enterprise networks into the ADN era and accelerating the intelligent upgrades of industries. David Wang, Huawei Executive Director and Chairman of the Investment Review Board, delivered a keynote speech titled "Building industry Intelligent Twins with intelligent connectivity." According to Mr. Wang, connectivity is productivity. It is not mere computing power, but strong connectivity that makes Intelligent Twins smarter.

Adversarial training, in which a network is trained on both adversarial and clean examples, is one of the most trusted defense methods against adversarial attacks. However, there are three major practical difficulties in implementing and deploying this method - expensive in terms of running memory and computation costs; accuracy trade-off between clean and adversarial examples; cannot foresee all adversarial attacks at training time. Here, we present a new solution to ease these three difficulties - Beneficial perturbation Networks (BPN). BPN generates and leverages beneficial perturbations (somewhat opposite to well-known adversarial perturbations) as biases within the parameter space of the network, to neutralize the effects of adversarial perturbations on data samples. Thus, BPN can effectively defend against adversarial examples. Compared to adversarial training, we demonstrate that BPN can significantly reduce the required running memory and computation costs, by generating beneficial perturbations through recycling of the gradients computed from training on clean examples. In addition, BPN can alleviate the accuracy trade-off difficulty and the difficulty of foreseeing multiple attacks, by improving the generalization of the network, thanks to increased diversity of the training set achieved through neutralization between adversarial and beneficial perturbations.

We propose an Anderson Acceleration (AA) scheme for the adaptive Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for unsupervised learning a finite mixture model from multivariate data (Figueiredo and Jain 2002). The proposed algorithm is able to determine the optimal number of mixture components autonomously, and converges to the optimal solution much faster than its non-accelerated version. The success of the AA-based algorithm stems from several developments rather than a single breakthrough (and without these, our tests demonstrate that AA fails catastrophically). To begin, we ensure the monotonicity of the likelihood function (a the key feature of the standard EM algorithm) with a recently proposed monotonicity-control algorithm (Henderson and Varahdan 2019), enhanced by a novel monotonicity test with little overhead. We propose nimble strategies for AA to preserve the positive definiteness of the Gaussian weights and covariance matrices strictly, and to conserve up to the second moments of the observed data set exactly. Finally, we employ a K-means clustering algorithm using the gap statistic to avoid excessively overestimating the initial number of components, thereby maximizing performance. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm with several synthetic data sets that are mixtures of Gaussians distributions of known number of components, as well as data sets generated from particle-in-cell simulations. Our numerical results demonstrate speed-ups with respect to non-accelerated EM of up to 60X when the exact number of mixture components is known, and between a few and more than an order of magnitude with component adaptivity.

Faults are endemic to all systems. Adaptive fault-tolerant control maintains degraded performance when faults occur as opposed to unsafe conditions or catastrophic events. In systems with abrupt faults and strict time constraints, it is imperative for control to adapt quickly to system changes to maintain system operations. We present a meta-reinforcement learning approach that quickly adapts its control policy to changing conditions. The approach builds upon model-agnostic meta learning (MAML). The controller maintains a complement of prior policies learned under system faults. This "library" is evaluated on a system after a new fault to initialize the new policy. This contrasts with MAML, where the controller derives intermediate policies anew, sampled from a distribution of similar systems, to initialize a new policy. Our approach improves sample efficiency of the reinforcement learning process. We evaluate our approach on an aircraft fuel transfer system under abrupt faults.

Tackling carbon emissions is one of the biggest challenges faced by the world today. For big business, this means making a strategic and managed move towards increasing the use of renewable energy sources, as well as creating efficiencies across all aspects of their operations. It's a difficult task to manage alone, even for an enterprise on the scale of tech giant Microsoft or energy titan Shell. But working together creates new possibilities that go further than what it is likely they could accomplish individually. Beyond meeting their own zero-carbon commitments, there's the opportunity to help other companies within their vast ecosystems of customers and suppliers to meet their environmental and safety goals, too.

If you've eaten vegan burgers that taste like meat or used synthetic collagen in your beauty routine--both products that are "grown" in the lab--then you've benefited from synthetic biology. It's a field rife with potential, as it allows scientists to design biological systems to specification, such as engineering a microbe to produce a cancer-fighting agent. Yet conventional methods of bioengineering are slow and laborious, with trial and error being the main approach. Now scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new tool that adapts machine learning algorithms to the needs of synthetic biology to guide development systematically. The innovation means scientists will not have to spend years developing a meticulous understanding of each part of a cell and what it does in order to manipulate it; instead, with a limited set of training data, the algorithms are able to predict how changes in a cell's DNA or biochemistry will affect its behavior, then make recommendations for the next engineering cycle along with probabilistic predictions for attaining the desired goal.

Decentralized multi-robot systems typically perform coordinated motion planning by constantly broadcasting their intentions as a means to cope with the lack of a central system coordinating the efforts of all robots. Especially in complex dynamic environments, the coordination boost allowed by communication is critical to avoid collisions between cooperating robots. However, the risk of collision between a pair of robots fluctuates through their motion and communication is not always needed. Additionally, constant communication makes much of the still valuable information shared in previous time steps redundant. This paper presents an efficient communication method that solves the problem of "when" and with "whom" to communicate in multi-robot collision avoidance scenarios. In this approach, every robot learns to reason about other robots' states and considers the risk of future collisions before asking for the trajectory plans of other robots. We evaluate and verify the proposed communication strategy in simulation with four quadrotors and compare it with three baseline strategies: non-communicating, broadcasting and a distance-based method broadcasting information with quadrotors within a predefined distance.

Current deep domain adaptation methods used in computer vision have mainly focused on learning discriminative and domain-invariant features across different domains. In this paper, we present a novel "deep adversarial transition learning" (DATL) framework that bridges the domain gap by projecting the source and target domains into intermediate, transitional spaces through the employment of adjustable, cross-grafted generative network stacks and effective adversarial learning between transitions. Specifically, we construct variational auto-encoders (VAE) for the two domains, and form bidirectional transitions by cross-grafting the VAEs' decoder stacks. Furthermore, generative adversarial networks (GAN) are employed for domain adaptation, mapping the target domain data to the known label space of the source domain. The overall adaptation process hence consists of three phases: feature representation learning by VAEs, transitions generation, and transitions alignment by GANs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation benchmarks.

We propose a novel machine learning algorithm for simulating radiative transfer. Our algorithm is based on physics informed neural networks (PINNs), which are trained by minimizing the residual of the underlying radiative tranfer equations. We present extensive experiments and theoretical error estimates to demonstrate that PINNs provide a very easy to implement, fast, robust and accurate method for simulating radiative transfer. We also present a PINN based algorithm for simulating inverse problems for radiative transfer efficiently.

Traditional methods for demand forecasting only focus on modeling the temporal dependency. However, forecasting on spatio-temporal data requires modeling of complex nonlinear relational and spatial dependencies. In addition, dynamic contextual information can have a significant impact on the demand values, and therefore needs to be captured. For example, in a bike-sharing system, bike usage can be impacted by weather. Existing methods assume the contextual impact is fixed. However, we note that the contextual impact evolves over time. We propose a novel context integrated relational model, Context Integrated Graph Neural Network (CIGNN), which leverages the temporal, relational, spatial, and dynamic contextual dependencies for multi-step ahead demand forecasting. Our approach considers the demand network over various geographical locations and represents the network as a graph. We define a demand graph, where nodes represent demand time-series, and context graphs (one for each type of context), where nodes represent contextual time-series. Assuming that various contexts evolve and have a dynamic impact on the fluctuation of demand, our proposed CIGNN model employs a fusion mechanism that jointly learns from all available types of contextual information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that integrates dynamic contexts with graph neural networks for spatio-temporal demand forecasting, thereby increasing prediction accuracy. We present empirical results on two real-world datasets, demonstrating that CIGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, in both periodic and irregular time-series networks.