Ground robots navigating in complex, dynamic environments must compute collision-free trajectories to avoid obstacles safely and efficiently. Nonconvex optimization is a popular method to compute a trajectory in real-time. However, these methods often converge to locally optimal solutions and frequently switch between different local minima, leading to inefficient and unsafe robot motion. In this work, We propose a novel topology-driven trajectory optimization strategy for dynamic environments that plans multiple distinct evasive trajectories to enhance the robot's behavior and efficiency. A global planner iteratively generates trajectories in distinct homotopy classes. These trajectories are then optimized by local planners working in parallel. While each planner shares the same navigation objectives, they are locally constrained to a specific homotopy class, meaning each local planner attempts a different evasive maneuver. The robot then executes the feasible trajectory with the lowest cost in a receding horizon manner. We demonstrate, on a mobile robot navigating among pedestrians, that our approach leads to faster and safer trajectories than existing planners.

Vision is widely understood as an inference problem. However, two contrasting conceptions of the inference process have each been influential in research on biological vision as well as the engineering of machine vision. The first emphasizes bottom-up signal flow, describing vision as a largely feedforward, discriminative inference process that filters and transforms the visual information to remove irrelevant variation and represent behaviorally relevant information in a format suitable for downstream functions of cognition and behavioral control. In this conception, vision is driven by the sensory data, and perception is direct because the processing proceeds from the data to the latent variables of interest. The notion of "inference" in this conception is that of the engineering literature on neural networks, where feedforward convolutional neural networks processing images are said to perform inference. The alternative conception is that of vision as an inference process in Helmholtz's sense, where the sensory evidence is evaluated in the context of a generative model of the causal processes giving rise to it. In this conception, vision inverts a generative model through an interrogation of the evidence in a process often thought to involve top-down predictions of sensory data to evaluate the likelihood of alternative hypotheses. The authors include scientists rooted in roughly equal numbers in each of the conceptions and motivated to overcome what might be a false dichotomy between them and engage the other perspective in the realm of theory and experiment. The primate brain employs an unknown algorithm that may combine the advantages of both conceptions. We explain and clarify the terminology, review the key empirical evidence, and propose an empirical research program that transcends the dichotomy and sets the stage for revealing the mysterious hybrid algorithm of primate vision.

Despite their stellar performance on a wide range of tasks, including in-context tasks only revealed during inference, vanilla transformers and variants trained for next-token predictions (a) do not learn an explicit world model of their environment which can be flexibly queried and (b) cannot be used for planning or navigation. In this paper, we consider partially observed environments (POEs), where an agent receives perceptually aliased observations as it navigates, which makes path planning hard. We introduce a transformer with (multiple) discrete bottleneck(s), TDB, whose latent codes learn a compressed representation of the history of observations and actions. After training a TDB to predict the future observation(s) given the history, we extract interpretable cognitive maps of the environment from its active bottleneck(s) indices. These maps are then paired with an external solver to solve (constrained) path planning problems. First, we show that a TDB trained on POEs (a) retains the near perfect predictive performance of a vanilla transformer or an LSTM while (b) solving shortest path problems exponentially faster. Second, a TDB extracts interpretable representations from text datasets, while reaching higher in-context accuracy than vanilla sequence models. Finally, in new POEs, a TDB (a) reaches near-perfect in-context accuracy, (b) learns accurate in-context cognitive maps (c) solves in-context path planning problems.

As smart grids (SG) increasingly rely on advanced technologies like sensors and communication systems for efficient energy generation, distribution, and consumption, they become enticing targets for sophisticated cyberattacks. These evolving threats demand robust security measures to maintain the stability and resilience of modern energy systems. While extensive research has been conducted, a comprehensive exploration of proactive cyber defense strategies utilizing Deep Learning (DL) in {SG} remains scarce in the literature. This survey bridges this gap, studying the latest DL techniques for proactive cyber defense. The survey begins with an overview of related works and our distinct contributions, followed by an examination of SG infrastructure. Next, we classify various cyber defense techniques into reactive and proactive categories. A significant focus is placed on DL-enabled proactive defenses, where we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of DL approaches, highlighting their roles and relevance in the proactive security of SG. Subsequently, we analyze the most significant DL-based methods currently in use. Further, we explore Moving Target Defense, a proactive defense strategy, and its interactions with DL methodologies. We then provide an overview of benchmark datasets used in this domain to substantiate the discourse.{ This is followed by a critical discussion on their practical implications and broader impact on cybersecurity in Smart Grids.} The survey finally lists the challenges associated with deploying DL-based security systems within SG, followed by an outlook on future developments in this key field.

The essential of navigation, perception, and decision-making which are basic tasks for intelligent robots, is to estimate necessary system states. Among them, navigation is fundamental for other upper applications, providing precise position and orientation, by integrating measurements from multiple sensors. With observations of each sensor appropriately modelled, multi-sensor fusion tasks for navigation are reduced to the state estimation problem which can be solved by two approaches: optimization and filtering. Recent research has shown that optimization-based frameworks outperform filtering-based ones in terms of accuracy. However, both methods are based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and should be theoretically equivalent with the same linearization points, observation model, measurements, and Gaussian noise assumption. In this paper, we deeply dig into the theories and existing strategies utilized in both optimization-based and filtering-based approaches. It is demonstrated that the two methods are equal theoretically, but this equivalence corrupts due to different strategies applied in real-time operation. By adjusting existing strategies of the filtering-based approaches, the Monte-Carlo simulation and vehicular ablation experiments based on visual odometry (VO) indicate that the strategy adjusted filtering strictly equals to optimization. Therefore, future research on sensor-fusion problems should concentrate on their own algorithms and strategies rather than state estimation approaches.

Part of speech tagging in zero-resource settings can be an effective approach for low-resource languages when no labeled training data is available. Existing systems use two main techniques for POS tagging i.e. pretrained multilingual large language models(LLM) or project the source language labels into the zero resource target language and train a sequence labeling model on it. We explore the latter approach using the off-the-shelf alignment module and train a hidden Markov model(HMM) to predict the POS tags. We evaluate transfer learning setup with English as a source language and French, German, and Spanish as target languages for part-of-speech tagging. Our conclusion is that projected alignment data in zero-resource language can be beneficial to predict POS tags.

Uncertainty estimation in Neural Networks (NNs) is vital in improving reliability and confidence in predictions, particularly in safety-critical applications. Bayesian Neural Networks (BayNNs) with Dropout as an approximation offer a systematic approach to quantifying uncertainty, but they inherently suffer from high hardware overhead in terms of power, memory, and computation. Thus, the applicability of BayNNs to edge devices with limited resources or to high-performance applications is challenging. Some of the inherent costs of BayNNs can be reduced by accelerating them in hardware on a Computation-In-Memory (CIM) architecture with spintronic memories and binarizing their parameters. However, numerous stochastic units are required to implement conventional dropout-based BayNN. In this paper, we propose the Scale Dropout, a novel regularization technique for Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), and Monte Carlo-Scale Dropout (MC-Scale Dropout)-based BayNNs for efficient uncertainty estimation. Our approach requires only one stochastic unit for the entire model, irrespective of the model size, leading to a highly scalable Bayesian NN. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Spintronic memory-based CIM architecture for the proposed BayNN that achieves more than $100\times$ energy savings compared to the state-of-the-art. We validated our method to show up to a $1\%$ improvement in predictive performance and superior uncertainty estimates compared to related works.

Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural network to approximate a distribution by evaluating it pointwise. Normalizing flows have been shown to improve the performance of MCMC and IS. On the other side, (randomized) quasi-Monte Carlo methods are used to perform numerical integration. They replace the random sampling of Monte Carlo by a sequence which cover the hypercube more uniformly, resulting in better convergence rates for the error that plain Monte Carlo. In this work, we combine these two methods by using quasi-Monte Carlo to sample the initial distribution that is transported by the flow. We demonstrate through numerical experiments that this combination can lead to an estimator with significantly lower variance than if the flow was sampled with a classic Monte Carlo.

Evidence Networks can enable Bayesian model comparison when state-of-the-art methods (e.g. nested sampling) fail and even when likelihoods or priors are intractable or unknown. Bayesian model comparison, i.e. the computation of Bayes factors or evidence ratios, can be cast as an optimization problem. Though the Bayesian interpretation of optimal classification is well-known, here we change perspective and present classes of loss functions that result in fast, amortized neural estimators that directly estimate convenient functions of the Bayes factor. This mitigates numerical inaccuracies associated with estimating individual model probabilities. We introduce the leaky parity-odd power (l-POP) transform, leading to the novel ``l-POP-Exponential'' loss function. We explore neural density estimation for data probability in different models, showing it to be less accurate and scalable than Evidence Networks. Multiple real-world and synthetic examples illustrate that Evidence Networks are explicitly independent of dimensionality of the parameter space and scale mildly with the complexity of the posterior probability density function. This simple yet powerful approach has broad implications for model inference tasks. As an application of Evidence Networks to real-world data we compute the Bayes factor for two models with gravitational lensing data of the Dark Energy Survey. We briefly discuss applications of our methods to other, related problems of model comparison and evaluation in implicit inference settings.

Since the advent of personal computing devices, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have been one of the key technologies that researchers and engineers have focused on, aiming to help users efficiently obtain information and execute tasks, and provide users with more intelligent, convenient, and rich interaction experiences. With the development of smartphones and IoT, computing and sensing devices have become ubiquitous, greatly expanding the boundaries of IPAs. However, due to the lack of capabilities such as user intent understanding, task planning, tool using, and personal data management etc., existing IPAs still have limited practicality and scalability. Recently, the emergence of foundation models, represented by large language models (LLMs), brings new opportunities for the development of IPAs. With the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLM can enable intelligent agents to solve complex problems autonomously. In this paper, we focus on Personal LLM Agents, which are LLM-based agents that are deeply integrated with personal data and personal devices and used for personal assistance. We envision that Personal LLM Agents will become a major software paradigm for end-users in the upcoming era. To realize this vision, we take the first step to discuss several important questions about Personal LLM Agents, including their architecture, capability, efficiency and security. We start by summarizing the key components and design choices in the architecture of Personal LLM Agents, followed by an in-depth analysis of the opinions collected from domain experts. Next, we discuss several key challenges to achieve intelligent, efficient and secure Personal LLM Agents, followed by a comprehensive survey of representative solutions to address these challenges.