Skid-steered wheel mobile robots (SSWMRs) operate in a variety of outdoor environments exhibiting motion behaviors dominated by the effects of complex wheel-ground interactions. Characterizing these interactions is crucial both from the immediate robot autonomy perspective (for motion prediction and control) as well as a long-term predictive maintenance and diagnostics perspective. An ideal solution entails capturing precise state measurements for decisions and controls, which is considerably difficult, especially in increasingly unstructured outdoor regimes of operations for these robots. In this milieu, a framework to identify pre-determined discrete modes of operation can considerably simplify the motion model identification process. To this end, we propose an interactive multiple model (IMM) based filtering framework to probabilistically identify predefined robot operation modes that could arise due to traversal in different terrains or loss of wheel traction.

A practical application of quantum machine learning in real-world scenarios in the short term remains elusive, despite significant theoretical efforts. Image classification, a common task for classical models, has been used to benchmark quantum algorithms with simple datasets, but only few studies have tackled complex real-data classification challenges. In this work, we address such a gap by focusing on the classification of satellite images, a task of particular interest to the earth observation (EO) industry. We first preprocess the selected intrincate dataset by reducing its dimensionality. Subsequently, we employ neural quantum kernels (NQKs)- embedding quantum kernels (EQKs) constructed from trained quantum neural networks (QNNs)- to classify images which include solar panels. We explore both $1$-to-$n$ and $n$-to-$n$ NQKs. In the former, parameters from a single-qubit QNN's training construct an $n$-qubit EQK achieving a mean test accuracy over 86% with three features. In the latter, we iteratively train an $n$-qubit QNN to ensure scalability, using the resultant architecture to directly form an $n$-qubit EQK. In this case, a test accuracy over 88% is obtained for three features and 8 qubits. Additionally, we show that the results are robust against a suboptimal training of the QNN.

Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world contexts. However, systematic studies on their transferability to specific and critical applications are underrepresented in the research literature. An important example is visual anomaly detection (VAD) for robotic power line inspection. While existing VAD methods perform well in controlled environments, real-world scenarios present diverse and unexpected anomalies that current datasets fail to capture. To address this gap, we introduce $\textit{CableInspect-AD}$, a high-quality, publicly available dataset created and annotated by domain experts from Hydro-Qu\'ebec, a Canadian public utility. This dataset includes high-resolution images with challenging real-world anomalies, covering defects with varying severity levels. To address the challenges of collecting diverse anomalous and nominal examples for setting a detection threshold, we propose an enhancement to the celebrated PatchCore algorithm. This enhancement enables its use in scenarios with limited labeled data. We also present a comprehensive evaluation protocol based on cross-validation to assess models' performances. We evaluate our $\textit{Enhanced-PatchCore}$ for few-shot and many-shot detection, and Vision-Language Models for zero-shot detection. While promising, these models struggle to detect all anomalies, highlighting the dataset's value as a challenging benchmark for the broader research community. Project page: https://mila-iqia.github.io/cableinspect-ad/.

Many decision-making problems feature multiple objectives where it is not always possible to know the preferences of a human or agent decision-maker for different objectives. However, demonstrated behaviors from the decision-maker are often available. This research proposes a dynamic weight-based preference inference (DWPI) algorithm that can infer the preferences of agents acting in multi-objective decision-making problems from demonstrations. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on three multi-objective Markov decision processes: Deep Sea Treasure, Traffic, and Item Gathering, and is compared to two existing preference inference algorithms. Empirical results demonstrate significant improvements compared to the baseline algorithms, in terms of both time efficiency and inference accuracy. The DWPI algorithm maintains its performance when inferring preferences for sub-optimal demonstrations. Moreover, the DWPI algorithm does not necessitate any interactions with the user during inference - only demonstrations are required. We provide a correctness proof and complexity analysis of the algorithm and statistically evaluate the performance under different representation of demonstrations.

Humanoid robots, with the potential to perform a broad range of tasks in environments designed for humans, have been deemed crucial for the basis of general AI agents. When talking about planning and controlling, although traditional models and task-specific methods have been extensively studied over the past few decades, they are inadequate for achieving the flexibility and versatility needed for general autonomy. Learning approaches, especially reinforcement learning, are powerful and popular nowadays, but they are inherently "blind" during training, relying heavily on trials in simulation without proper guidance from physical principles or underlying dynamics. In response, we propose a novel end-to-end pipeline that seamlessly integrates perception, planning, and model-based control for humanoid robot walking. We refer to our method as iWalker, which is driven by imperative learning (IL), a self-supervising neuro-symbolic learning framework. This enables the robot to learn from arbitrary unlabeled data, significantly improving its adaptability and generalization capabilities. In experiments, iWalker demonstrates effectiveness in both simulated and real-world environments, representing a significant advancement toward versatile and autonomous humanoid robots.

Inverse problems in physical or biological sciences often involve recovering an unknown parameter that is random. The sought-after quantity is a probability distribution of the unknown parameter, that produces data that aligns with measurements. Consequently, these problems are naturally framed as stochastic inverse problems. In this paper, we explore three aspects of this problem: direct inversion, variational formulation with regularization, and optimization via gradient flows, drawing parallels with deterministic inverse problems. A key difference from the deterministic case is the space in which we operate. Here, we work within probability space rather than Euclidean or Sobolev spaces, making tools from measure transport theory necessary for the study. Our findings reveal that the choice of metric -- both in the design of the loss function and in the optimization process -- significantly impacts the stability and properties of the optimizer.

When solving inverse problems, it is increasingly popular to use pre-trained diffusion models as plug-and-play priors. This framework can accommodate different forward models without re-training while preserving the generative capability of diffusion models. Despite their success in many imaging inverse problems, most existing methods rely on privileged information such as derivative, pseudo-inverse, or full knowledge about the forward model. This reliance poses a substantial limitation that restricts their use in a wide range of problems where such information is unavailable, such as in many scientific applications. To address this issue, we propose Ensemble Kalman Diffusion Guidance (EnKG) for diffusion models, a derivative-free approach that can solve inverse problems by only accessing forward model evaluations and a pre-trained diffusion model prior. We study the empirical effectiveness of our method across various inverse problems, including scientific settings such as inferring fluid flows and astronomical objects, which are highly non-linear inverse problems that often only permit black-box access to the forward model.

Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 1, located in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County, in Pennsylvania, generates 852 megawatts of clean, safe and reliable electricity for more than 800,000 homes. In 2009, Three Mile Island Unit 1 received a 20 year extension to the plant's operating license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. With license extension, Three Mile Island is well positioned to help meet the growing demand for energy well into the future as power needs across central Pennsylvania and the United States are projected to increase. The operation of Three Mile Island produces no greenhouse gas emissions and improves the air quality of the region.Kirk Condyles/ZUMA This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For five years, reactor one at Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania has lain dormant.

We introduce a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for training deep neural networks, systematically unifying the Back-Propagation (BP) and Forward-Forward (FF) algorithms. At the same time, it gives rise to a range of intermediate training algorithms with varying look-forward horizons, leading to a performance-efficiency trade-off. We perform a precise analysis of this trade-off on a deep linear network, where the qualitative conclusions carry over to general networks. Based on our analysis, we propose a principled method to choose the optimization horizon based on given objectives and model specifications. Numerical results on various models and tasks demonstrate the versatility of our method.

Model-based reinforcement learning has attracted much attention due to its high sample efficiency and is expected to be applied to real-world robotic applications. In the real world, as unobservable disturbances can lead to unexpected situations, robot policies should be taken to improve not only control performance but also robustness. Adversarial learning is an effective way to improve robustness, but excessive adversary would increase the risk of malfunction, and make the control performance too conservative. Therefore, this study addresses a new adversarial learning framework to make reinforcement learning robust moderately and not conservative too much. To this end, the adversarial learning is first rederived with variational inference. In addition, light robustness, which allows for maximizing robustness within an acceptable performance degradation, is utilized as a constraint. As a result, the proposed framework, so-called LiRA, can automatically adjust adversary level, balancing robustness and conservativeness. The expected behaviors of LiRA are confirmed in numerical simulations. In addition, LiRA succeeds in learning a force-reactive gait control of a quadrupedal robot only with real-world data collected less than two hours.