Evolving consumer demands and market trends have led to businesses increasingly embracing a production approach that prioritizes flexibility and customization. Consequently, factory workers must engage in tasks that are more complex than before. Thus, productivity depends on each worker's skills in assembling products. Therefore, analyzing the behavior of a worker is crucial for work improvement. However, manual analysis is time consuming and does not provide quick and accurate feedback. Machine learning have been attempted to automate the analyses; however, most of these methods need several labels for training. To this end, we extend the Gaussian process hidden semi-Markov model (GP-HSMM), to enable the rapid and automated analysis of worker behavior without pre-training. The model does not require labeled data and can automatically and accurately segment continuous motions into motion classes. The proposed model is a probabilistic model that hierarchically connects GP-HSMM and HSMM, enabling the extraction of behavioral patterns with different granularities. Furthermore, it mutually infers the parameters between the GP-HSMM and HSMM, resulting in accurate motion pattern extraction. We applied the proposed method to motion data in which workers assembled products at an actual production site. The accuracy of behavior pattern extraction was evaluated using normalized Levenshtein distance (NLD). The smaller the value of NLD, the more accurate is the pattern extraction. The NLD of motion patterns captured by GP-HSMM and HSMM layers in our proposed method was 0.50 and 0.33, respectively, which are the smallest compared to that of the baseline methods.

Learning in simulation and transferring the learned policy to the real world has the potential to enable generalist robots. The key challenge of this approach is to address simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gaps. Previous methods often require domain-specific knowledge a priori. We argue that a straightforward way to obtain such knowledge is by asking humans to observe and assist robot policy execution in the real world. The robots can then learn from humans to close various sim-to-real gaps. We propose TRANSIC, a data-driven approach to enable successful sim-to-real transfer based on a human-in-the-loop framework. TRANSIC allows humans to augment simulation policies to overcome various unmodeled sim-to-real gaps holistically through intervention and online correction. Residual policies can be learned from human corrections and integrated with simulation policies for autonomous execution. We show that our approach can achieve successful sim-to-real transfer in complex and contact-rich manipulation tasks such as furniture assembly. Through synergistic integration of policies learned in simulation and from humans, TRANSIC is effective as a holistic approach to addressing various, often coexisting sim-to-real gaps. It displays attractive properties such as scaling with human effort. Videos and code are available at https://transic-robot.github.io/

Federated learning (FL) requires edge devices to perform local training and exchange information with a parameter server, leading to substantial energy consumption. A critical challenge in practical FL systems is the rapid energy depletion of battery-limited edge devices, which curtails their operational lifespan and affects the learning performance. To address this issue, we apply energy harvesting technique in FL systems to extract ambient energy for continuously powering edge devices. We first establish the convergence bound for the wireless FL system with energy harvesting devices, illustrating that the convergence is impacted by partial device participation and packet drops, both of which depend on the energy supply. To accelerate the convergence, we formulate a joint device scheduling and power control problem and model it as a Markov decision process (MDP). By solving this MDP, we derive the optimal transmission policy and demonstrate that it possesses a monotone structure with respect to the battery and channel states. To overcome the curse of dimensionality caused by the exponential complexity of computing the optimal policy, we propose a low-complexity algorithm, which is asymptotically optimal as the number of devices increases. Furthermore, for unknown channels and harvested energy statistics, we develop a structure-enhanced deep reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages the monotone structure of the optimal policy to improve the training performance. Finally, extensive numerical experiments on real-world datasets are presented to validate the theoretical results and corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a computational model that uses multiple layers of interconnected units (neurons) to learn intricate patterns and representations directly from raw input data. Empowered by this learning capability, it has become a powerful tool for solving complex problems and is the core driver of many groundbreaking technologies and innovations. Building a deep learning model is a challenging task due to the algorithm`s complexity and the dynamic nature of real-world problems. Several studies have reviewed deep learning concepts and applications. However, the studies mostly focused on the types of deep learning models and convolutional neural network architectures, offering limited coverage of the state-of-the-art of deep learning models and their applications in solving complex problems across different domains. Therefore, motivated by the limitations, this study aims to comprehensively review the state-of-the-art deep learning models in computer vision, natural language processing, time series analysis and pervasive computing. We highlight the key features of the models and their effectiveness in solving the problems within each domain. Furthermore, this study presents the fundamentals of deep learning, various deep learning model types and prominent convolutional neural network architectures. Finally, challenges and future directions in deep learning research are discussed to offer a broader perspective for future researchers.

This paper proposes a method to combine reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) using a dynamic, performance-based modulation over learning signals. The proposed method combines RL and behavioral cloning (IL), or corrective feedback in the action space (interactive IL/IIL), by dynamically weighting the losses to be optimized, taking into account the backpropagated gradients used to update the policy and the agent's estimated performance. In this manner, RL and IL/IIL losses are combined by equalizing their impact on the policy's updates, while modulating said impact such that IL signals are prioritized at the beginning of the learning process, and as the agent's performance improves, the RL signals become progressively more relevant, allowing for a smooth transition from pure IL/IIL to pure RL. The proposed method is used to learn local planning policies for mobile robots, synthesizing IL/IIL signals online by means of a scripted policy. An extensive evaluation of the application of the proposed method to this task is performed in simulations, and it is empirically shown that it outperforms pure RL in terms of sample efficiency (achieving the same level of performance in the training environment utilizing approximately 4 times less experiences), while consistently producing local planning policies with better performance metrics (achieving an average success rate of 0.959 in an evaluation environment, outperforming pure RL by 12.5% and pure IL by 13.9%). Furthermore, the obtained local planning policies are successfully deployed in the real world without performing any major fine tuning. The proposed method can extend existing RL algorithms, and is applicable to other problems for which generating IL/IIL signals online is feasible. A video summarizing some of the real world experiments that were conducted can be found in https://youtu.be/mZlaXn9WGzw.

Value function factorization methods are commonly used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, with QMIX receiving significant attention. Many QMIX-based methods introduce monotonicity constraints between the joint action value and individual action values to achieve decentralized execution. However, such constraints limit the representation capacity of value factorization, restricting the joint action values it can represent and hindering the learning of the optimal policy. To address this challenge, we propose the Potentially Optimal joint actions Weighted QMIX (POWQMIX) algorithm, which recognizes the potentially optimal joint actions and assigns higher weights to the corresponding losses of these joint actions during training. We theoretically prove that with such a weighted training approach the optimal policy is guaranteed to be recovered. Experiments in matrix games, predator-prey, and StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge environments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods.

Unbiased learning-to-rank (ULTR) is a well-established framework for learning from user clicks, which are often biased by the ranker collecting the data. While theoretically justified and extensively tested in simulation, ULTR techniques lack empirical validation, especially on modern search engines. The Baidu-ULTR dataset released for the WSDM Cup 2023, collected from Baidu's search engine, offers a rare opportunity to assess the real-world performance of prominent ULTR techniques. Despite multiple submissions during the WSDM Cup 2023 and the subsequent NTCIR ULTRE-2 task, it remains unclear whether the observed improvements stem from applying ULTR or other learning techniques. In this work, we revisit and extend the available experiments on the Baidu-ULTR dataset. We find that standard unbiased learning-to-rank techniques robustly improve click predictions but struggle to consistently improve ranking performance, especially considering the stark differences obtained by choice of ranking loss and query-document features. Our experiments reveal that gains in click prediction do not necessarily translate to enhanced ranking performance on expert relevance annotations, implying that conclusions strongly depend on how success is measured in this benchmark.

Minimizing an adversarial surrogate risk is a common technique for learning robust classifiers. Prior work showed that convex surrogate losses are not statistically consistent in the adversarial context-- or in other words, a minimizing sequence of the adversarial surrogate risk will not necessarily minimize the adversarial classification error. We connect the consistency of adversarial surrogate losses to properties of minimizers to the adversarial classification risk, known as adversarial Bayes classifiers. Specifically, under reasonable distributional assumptions, a convex surrogate loss is statistically consistent for adversarial learning iff the adversarial Bayes classifier satisfies a certain notion of uniqueness.

We introduce and make publicly available the NIFTY Financial News Headlines dataset, designed to facilitate and advance research in financial market forecasting using large language models (LLMs). This dataset comprises two distinct versions tailored for different modeling approaches: (i) NIFTY-LM, which targets supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs with an auto-regressive, causal language-modeling objective, and (ii) NIFTY-RL, formatted specifically for alignment methods (like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)) to align LLMs via rejection sampling and reward modeling. Each dataset version provides curated, high-quality data incorporating comprehensive metadata, market indices, and deduplicated financial news headlines systematically filtered and ranked to suit modern LLM frameworks. We also include experiments demonstrating some applications of the dataset in tasks like stock price movement and the role of LLM embeddings in information acquisition/richness. The NIFTY dataset along with utilities (like truncating prompt's context length systematically) are available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/raeidsaqur/NIFTY.

The increasing complexity of automated driving functions and their growing operational design domains imply more demanding requirements on their validation. Classical methods such as field tests or formal analyses are not sufficient anymore and need to be complemented by simulations. For simulations, the standard approach is scenario-based testing, as opposed to distance-based testing primarily performed in field tests. Currently, the time evolution of specific scenarios is mainly described using trajectories, which limit or at least hamper generalizations towards variations. As an alternative, maneuver-based approaches have been proposed. We shed light on the state of the art and available foundations for this new method through a literature review of early and recent works related to maneuver-based scenario description. It includes related modeling approaches originally developed for other applications. Current limitations and research gaps are identified.