How to behave efficiently and flexibly is a central problem for understanding biological agents and creating intelligent embodied AI. It has been well known that behavior can be classified as two types: reward-maximizing habitual behavior, which is fast while inflexible; and goal-directed behavior, which is flexible while slow. Conventionally, habitual and goal-directed behaviors are considered handled by two distinct systems in the brain. Here, we propose to bridge the gap between the two behaviors, drawing on the principles of variational Bayesian theory. We incorporate both behaviors in one framework by introducing a Bayesian latent variable called "intention". The habitual behavior is generated by using prior distribution of intention, which is goal-less; and the goal-directed behavior is generated by the posterior distribution of intention, which is conditioned on the goal. Building on this idea, we present a novel Bayesian framework for modeling behaviors. Our proposed framework enables skill sharing between the two kinds of behaviors, and by leveraging the idea of predictive coding, it enables an agent to seamlessly generalize from habitual to goal-directed behavior without requiring additional training. The proposed framework suggests a fresh perspective for cognitive science and embodied AI, highlighting the potential for greater integration between habitual and goal-directed behaviors.

Various real-world scientific applications involve the mathematical modeling of complex uncertain systems with numerous unknown parameters. Accurate parameter estimation is often practically infeasible in such systems, as the available training data may be insufficient and the cost of acquiring additional data may be high. In such cases, based on a Bayesian paradigm, we can design robust operators retaining the best overall performance across all possible models and design optimal experiments that can effectively reduce uncertainty to enhance the performance of such operators maximally. While objective-based uncertainty quantification (objective-UQ) based on MOCU (mean objective cost of uncertainty) provides an effective means for quantifying uncertainty in complex systems, the high computational cost of estimating MOCU has been a challenge in applying it to real-world scientific/engineering problems. In this work, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the computational cost for objective-UQ via MOCU based on a data-driven approach. We adopt a neural message-passing model for surrogate modeling, incorporating a novel axiomatic constraint loss that penalizes an increase in the estimated system uncertainty. As an illustrative example, we consider the optimal experimental design (OED) problem for uncertain Kuramoto models, where the goal is to predict the experiments that can most effectively enhance robust synchronization performance through uncertainty reduction. We show that our proposed approach can accelerate MOCU-based OED by four to five orders of magnitude, without any visible performance loss compared to the state-of-the-art. The proposed approach applies to general OED tasks, beyond the Kuramoto model.

News can convey bearish or bullish views on financial assets. Institutional investors need to evaluate automatically the implied news sentiment based on textual data. Given the huge amount of news articles published each day, most of which are neutral, we present a systematic news screening method to identify the ``true'' impactful ones, aiming for more effective development of news sentiment learning methods. Based on several liquidity-driven variables, including volatility, turnover, bid-ask spread, and book size, we associate each 5-min time bin to one of two specific liquidity modes. One represents the ``calm'' state at which the market stays for most of the time and the other, featured with relatively higher levels of volatility and trading volume, describes the regime driven by some exogenous events. Then we focus on the moments where the liquidity mode switches from the former to the latter and consider the news articles published nearby impactful. We apply naive Bayes on these filtered samples for news sentiment classification as an illustrative example. We show that the screened dataset leads to more effective feature capturing and thus superior performance on short-term asset return prediction compared to the original dataset.

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult for non-experts to use.

Many statistical models can be simulated forwards but have intractable likelihoods. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to infer properties of these models from data. Traditionally these methods approximate the posterior over parameters by conditioning on data being inside an ɛ-ball around the observed data, which is only correct in the limit ɛ 0. Monte Carlo methods can then draw samples from the approximate posterior to approximate predictions or error bars on parameters.

Humans cannot always be treated as oracles for collaborative sensing. Robots thus need to maintain beliefs over unknown world states when receiving semantic data from humans, as well as account for possible discrepancies between human-provided data and these beliefs. To this end, this paper introduces the problem of semantic data association (SDA) in relation to conventional data association problems for sensor fusion. It then develops a novel probabilistic semantic data association (PSDA) algorithm to rigorously address SDA in general settings, unlike previous work on semantic data fusion which developed heuristic techniques for specific settings. PSDA is further incorporated into a recursive hybrid Bayesian data fusion scheme which uses Gaussian mixture priors for object states and softmax functions for semantic human sensor data likelihoods. Simulations of a multi-object search task show that PSDA enables robust collaborative state estimation under a wide range of conditions where semantic human sensor data can be erroneous or contain significant reference ambiguities.

Although neural networks (especially deep neural networks) have achieved \textit{better-than-human} performance in many fields, their real-world deployment is still questionable due to the lack of awareness about the limitation in their knowledge. To incorporate such awareness in the machine learning model, prediction with reject option (also known as selective classification or classification with abstention) has been proposed in literature. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the prediction with the reject option in the context of various neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study focusing on this aspect of neural networks. Moreover, we discuss different novel loss functions related to the reject option and post-training processing (if any) of network output for generating suitable measurements for knowledge awareness of the model. Finally, we address the application of the rejection option in reducing the prediction time for the real-time problems and present a comprehensive summary of the techniques related to the reject option in the context of extensive variety of neural networks. Our code is available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/MehediHasanTutul/Reject_option}

Gestures that accompany speech are an essential part of natural and efficient embodied human communication. The automatic generation of such co-speech gestures is a long-standing problem in computer animation and is considered an enabling technology in film, games, virtual social spaces, and for interaction with social robots. The problem is made challenging by the idiosyncratic and non-periodic nature of human co-speech gesture motion, and by the great diversity of communicative functions that gestures encompass. Gesture generation has seen surging interest recently, owing to the emergence of more and larger datasets of human gesture motion, combined with strides in deep-learning-based generative models, that benefit from the growing availability of data. This review article summarizes co-speech gesture generation research, with a particular focus on deep generative models. First, we articulate the theory describing human gesticulation and how it complements speech. Next, we briefly discuss rule-based and classical statistical gesture synthesis, before delving into deep learning approaches. We employ the choice of input modalities as an organizing principle, examining systems that generate gestures from audio, text, and non-linguistic input. We also chronicle the evolution of the related training data sets in terms of size, diversity, motion quality, and collection method. Finally, we identify key research challenges in gesture generation, including data availability and quality; producing human-like motion; grounding the gesture in the co-occurring speech in interaction with other speakers, and in the environment; performing gesture evaluation; and integration of gesture synthesis into applications. We highlight recent approaches to tackling the various key challenges, as well as the limitations of these approaches, and point toward areas of future development.

Adhesive joints are increasingly used in industry for a wide variety of applications because of their favorable characteristics such as high strength-to-weight ratio, design flexibility, limited stress concentrations, planar force transfer, good damage tolerance, and fatigue resistance. Finding the optimal process parameters for an adhesive bonding process is challenging: the optimization is inherently multi-objective (aiming to maximize break strength while minimizing cost), constrained (the process should not result in any visual damage to the materials, and stress tests should not result in failures that are adhesion-related), and uncertain (testing the same process parameters several times may lead to different break strengths). Real-life physical experiments in the lab are expensive to perform. Traditional evolutionary approaches (such as genetic algorithms) are then ill-suited to solve the problem, due to the prohibitive amount of experiments required for evaluation. Although Bayesian optimization-based algorithms are preferred to solve such expensive problems, few methods consider the optimization of more than one (noisy) objective and several constraints at the same time. In this research, we successfully applied specific machine learning techniques (Gaussian Process Regression) to emulate the objective and constraint functions based on a limited amount of experimental data. The techniques are embedded in a Bayesian optimization algorithm, which succeeds in detecting Pareto-optimal process settings in a highly efficient way (i.e., requiring a limited number of physical experiments).

Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) aims to combine the power of AI with the big data generated by IT Operations processes, particularly in cloud infrastructures, to provide actionable insights with the primary goal of maximizing availability. There are a wide variety of problems to address, and multiple use-cases, where AI capabilities can be leveraged to enhance operational efficiency. Here we provide a review of the AIOps vision, trends challenges and opportunities, specifically focusing on the underlying AI techniques. We discuss in depth the key types of data emitted by IT Operations activities, the scale and challenges in analyzing them, and where they can be helpful. We categorize the key AIOps tasks as - incident detection, failure prediction, root cause analysis and automated actions. We discuss the problem formulation for each task, and then present a taxonomy of techniques to solve these problems. We also identify relatively under explored topics, especially those that could significantly benefit from advances in AI literature. We also provide insights into the trends in this field, and what are the key investment opportunities.