Over the last several years, the field of Structured prediction in NLP has had seen huge advancements with sophisticated probabilistic graphical models, energy-based networks, and its combination with deep learning-based approaches. This survey provides a brief of major techniques in structured prediction and its applications in the NLP domains like parsing, sequence labeling, text generation, and sequence to sequence tasks. We also deep-dived into energy-based and attention-based techniques in structured prediction, identified some relevant open issues and gaps in the current state-of-the-art research, and have come up with some detailed ideas for future research in these fields.

In this position paper, we present five key principles, namely interpretability, inherent capability to explain, independent data, interactive learning, and inquisitiveness, for the development of conversational AI that, unlike the currently popular black box approaches, is transparent and accountable. At present, there is a growing concern with the use of black box statistical language models: While displaying impressive average performance, such systems are also prone to occasional spectacular failures, for which there is no clear remedy. In an effort to initiate a discussion on possible alternatives, we outline and exemplify how our five principles enable the development of conversational AI systems that are transparent and thus safer for use. We also present some of the challenges inherent in the implementation of those principles.

While most classic studies of function in experimental neuroscience have focused on the coding properties of individual neurons, recent developments in recording technologies have resulted in an increasing emphasis on the dynamics of neural populations. This has given rise to a wide variety of models for analyzing population activity in relation to experimental variables, but direct testing of many neural population hypotheses requires intervening in the system based on current neural state, necessitating models capable of inferring neural state online. Existing approaches, primarily based on dynamical systems, require strong parametric assumptions that are easily violated in the noise-dominated regime and do not scale well to the thousands of data channels in modern experiments. To address this problem, we propose a method that combines fast, stable dimensionality reduction with a soft tiling of the resulting neural manifold, allowing dynamics to be approximated as a probability flow between tiles. This method can be fit efficiently using online expectation maximization, scales to tens of thousands of tiles, and outperforms existing methods when dynamics are noise-dominated or feature multi-modal transition probabilities. The resulting model can be trained at kiloHertz data rates, produces accurate approximations of neural dynamics within minutes, and generates predictions on submillisecond time scales. It retains predictive performance throughout many time steps into the future and is fast enough to serve as a component of closed-loop causal experiments.

Several intelligent transportation systems focus on studying the various driver behaviors for numerous objectives. This includes the ability to analyze driver actions, sensitivity, distraction, and response time. As the data collection is one of the major concerns for learning and validating different driving situations, we present a driver behavior switching model validated by a low-cost data collection solution using smartphones. The proposed model is validated using a real dataset to predict the driver behavior in short duration periods. A literature survey on motion detection (specifically driving behavior detection using smartphones) is presented. Multiple Markov Switching Variable Auto-Regression (MSVAR) models are implemented to achieve a sophisticated fitting with the collected driver behavior data. This yields more accurate predictions not only for driver behavior but also for the entire driving situation. The performance of the presented models together with a suitable model selection criteria is also presented. The proposed driver behavior prediction framework can potentially be used in accident prediction and driver safety systems.

Autonomous vehicles need to model the behavior of surrounding human driven vehicles to be safe and efficient traffic participants. Existing approaches to modeling human driving behavior have relied on both data-driven and rule-based methods. While data-driven models are more expressive, rule-based models are interpretable, which is an important requirement for safety-critical domains like driving. However, rule-based models are not sufficiently representative of data, and data-driven models are yet unable to generate realistic traffic simulation due to unrealistic driving behavior such as collisions. In this paper, we propose a methodology that combines rule-based modeling with data-driven learning. While the rules are governed by interpretable parameters of the driver model, these parameters are learned online from driving demonstration data using particle filtering. We perform driver modeling experiments on the task of highway driving and merging using data from three real-world driving demonstration datasets. Our results show that driver models based on our hybrid rule-based and data-driven approach can accurately capture real-world driving behavior. Further, we assess the realism of the driving behavior generated by our model by having humans perform a driving Turing test, where they are asked to distinguish between videos of real driving and those generated using our driver models.

Creating virtual humans with embodied, human-like perceptual and actuation constraints has the promise to provide an integrated simulation platform for many scientific and engineering applications. We present Dynamic and Autonomous Simulated Human (DASH), an embodied virtual human that, given natural language commands, performs grasp-and-stack tasks in a physically-simulated cluttered environment solely using its own visual perception, proprioception, and touch, without requiring human motion data. By factoring the DASH system into a vision module, a language module, and manipulation modules of two skill categories, we can mix and match analytical and machine learning techniques for different modules so that DASH is able to not only perform randomly arranged tasks with a high success rate, but also do so under anthropomorphic Figure 1: Our system, dynamic and autonomous simulated constraints and with fluid and diverse motions. The modular design human (DASH), is an embodied virtual human modeled off also favors analysis and extensibility to more complex manipulation of a child. DASH is able to manipulate tabletop objects with a skills.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), an emerging and promising field in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Starting with a tutorial of Federated Learning (FL) and RL, we then focus on the introduction of FRL as a new method with great potential by leveraging the basic idea of FL to improve the performance of RL while preserving data-privacy. According to the distribution characteristics of the agents in the framework, FRL algorithms can be divided into two categories, i.e. Horizontal Federated Reinforcement Learning (HFRL) and Vertical Federated Reinforcement Learning (VFRL). We provide the detailed definitions of each category by formulas, investigate the evolution of FRL from a technical perspective, and highlight its advantages over previous RL algorithms. In addition, the existing works on FRL are summarized by application fields, including edge computing, communication, control optimization, and attack detection. Finally, we describe and discuss several key research directions that are crucial to solving the open problems within FRL.

Recent works have demonstrated the remarkable successes of deep reinforcement learning in various domains including finance, medicine, healthcare, video games, robotics, and computer vision. In this work, we provide a detailed review of recent and state-of-the-art research advances of deep reinforcement learning in computer vision. We start with comprehending the theories of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and deep reinforcement learning. We then propose a categorization of deep reinforcement learning methodologies and discuss their advantages and limitations. In particular, we divide deep reinforcement learning into seven main categories according to their applications in computer vision, i.e. (i) landmark localization (ii) object detection; (iii) object tracking; (iv) registration on both 2D image and 3D image volumetric data (v) image segmentation; (vi) videos analysis; and (vii) other applications. Each of these categories is further analyzed with reinforcement learning techniques, network design, and performance. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing publicly available datasets and examine source code availability. Finally, we present some open issues and discuss future research directions on deep reinforcement learning in computer vision.

The integration of learning and reasoning is one of the key challenges in artificial intelligence and machine learning today, and various communities have been addressing it. That is especially true for the field of neural-symbolic computation (NeSy) [10, 21], where the goal is to integrate symbolic reasoning and neural networks. NeSy already has a long tradition, and it has recently attracted a lot of attention from various communities (cf. the keynotes of Y. Bengio and H. Kautz on this topic at AAAI 2020, the AI Debate [9] between Y. Bengio and G. Marcus). Another domain that has a rich tradition in integrating learning and reasoning is that of statistical relational learning and artificial intelligence (StarAI) [39, 85]. But rather than focusing on integrating logic and neural networks, it is centred around the question of integrating logic with probabilistic reasoning, more specifically probabilistic graphical models. Despite the common interest in combining symbolic reasoning with a basic paradigm for learning, i.e., probabilistic graphical models or neural networks, it is surprising that there are not more interactions between these two fields.

The IJCAI-2021 awards were announced during the opening ceremony of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21). The honours included the 2021 AIJ classic paper award, the AIJ prominent paper award, and the IJCAI-JAIR best paper prize. This award recognizes outstanding papers, exceptional in their significance and impact, that were published at least 15 years ago, in the journal Artificial Intelligence (AIJ). This paper brought partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) from the field of operational research to the field of AI. It provides an excellent account of the theory behind POMDPs, which demystified the field for a generation of researchers, and popularised their use in both AI and robotics.