Motivated by the goal of endowing robots with a means for focusing attention in order to operate reliably in complex, uncertain, and time-varying environments, we consider how a robot can (i) determine which portions of its environment to pay attention to at any given point in time, (ii) infer changes in context (e.g., task or environment dynamics), and (iii) switch its attention accordingly. In this work, we tackle these questions by modeling context switches in a time-varying Markov decision process (MDP) framework. We utilize the theory of bisimulation-based state abstractions in order to synthesize mechanisms for paying attention to context-relevant information. We then present an algorithm based on Bayesian inference for detecting changes in the robot's context (task or environment dynamics) as it operates online, and use this to trigger switches between different abstraction-based attention mechanisms. Our approach is demonstrated on two examples: (i) an illustrative discrete-state tracking problem, and (ii) a continuous-state tracking problem implemented on a quadrupedal hardware platform. These examples demonstrate the ability of our approach to detect context switches online and robustly ignore task-irrelevant distractors by paying attention to context-relevant information.

The present paper comes across the main steps that laid from Zadeh's fuzziness ana Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets to Smarandache's indeterminacy and to Molodstov's soft sets. Two hybrid methods for assessment and decision making respectively under fuzzy conditions are also presented through suitable examples that use soft sets and real intervals as tools. The decision making method improves an earlier method of Maji et al. Further, it is described how the concept of topological space, the most general category of mathematical spaces, can be extended to fuzzy structures and how to generalize the fundamental mathematical concepts of limit, continuity compactness and Hausdorff space within such kind of structures. In particular, fuzzy and soft topological spaces are defined and examples are given to illustrate these generalizations.

As an efficient way to integrate multiple distributed energy resources and the user side, a microgrid is mainly faced with the problems of small-scale volatility, uncertainty, intermittency and demand-side uncertainty of DERs. The traditional microgrid has a single form and cannot meet the flexible energy dispatch between the complex demand side and the microgrid. In response to this problem, the overall environment of wind power, thermostatically controlled loads, energy storage systems, price-responsive loads and the main grid is proposed. Secondly, the centralized control of the microgrid operation is convenient for the control of the reactive power and voltage of the distributed power supply and the adjustment of the grid frequency. However, there is a problem in that the flexible loads aggregate and generate peaks during the electricity price valley. The existing research takes into account the power constraints of the microgrid and fails to ensure a sufficient supply of electric energy for a single flexible load. This paper considers the response priority of each unit component of TCLs and ESSs on the basis of the overall environment operation of the microgrid so as to ensure the power supply of the flexible load of the microgrid and save the power input cost to the greatest extent. Finally, the simulation optimization of the environment can be expressed as a Markov decision process process. It combines two stages of offline and online operations in the training process. The addition of multiple threads with the lack of historical data learning leads to low learning efficiency. The asynchronous advantage actor-critic with the experience replay pool memory library is added to solve the data correlation and nonstatic distribution problems during training.

Labeling a module defective or non-defective is an expensive task. Hence, there are often limits on how much-labeled data is available for training. Semi-supervised classifiers use far fewer labels for training models, but there are numerous semi-supervised methods, including self-labeling, co-training, maximal-margin, and graph-based methods, to name a few. Only a handful of these methods have been tested in SE for (e.g.) predicting defects and even that, those tests have been on just a handful of projects. This paper takes a wide range of 55 semi-supervised learners and applies these to over 714 projects. We find that semi-supervised "co-training methods" work significantly better than other approaches. However, co-training needs to be used with caution since the specific choice of co-training methods needs to be carefully selected based on a user's specific goals. Also, we warn that a commonly-used co-training method ("multi-view"-- where different learners get different sets of columns) does not improve predictions (while adding too much to the run time costs 11 hours vs. 1.8 hours). Those cautions stated, we find using these "co-trainers," we can label just 2.5% of data, then make predictions that are competitive to those using 100% of the data. It is an open question worthy of future work to test if these reductions can be seen in other areas of software analytics. All the codes used and datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the https://GitHub.com/Suvodeep90/Semi_Supervised_Methods.

Law enforcement and city safety are significantly impacted by detecting violent incidents in surveillance systems. Although modern (smart) cameras are widely available and affordable, such technological solutions are impotent in most instances. Furthermore, personnel monitoring CCTV recordings frequently show a belated reaction, resulting in the potential cause of catastrophe to people and property. Thus automated detection of violence for swift actions is very crucial. The proposed solution uses a novel end-to-end deep learning-based video vision transformer (ViViT) that can proficiently discern fights, hostile movements, and violent events in video sequences. The study presents utilizing a data augmentation strategy to overcome the downside of weaker inductive biasness while training vision transformers on a smaller training datasets. The evaluated results can be subsequently sent to local concerned authority, and the captured video can be analyzed. In comparison to state-of-theart (SOTA) approaches the proposed method achieved auspicious performance on some of the challenging benchmark datasets.

Abstract: We present a novel method to address the problem of multi-vehicle conflict resolution in highly constrained spaces. An optimal control problem is formulated to incorporate nonlinear, non-holonomic vehicle dynamics and exact collision avoidance constraints. A solution to the problem can be obtained by first learning configuration strategies with reinforcement learning (RL) in a simplified discrete environment, and then using these strategies to shape the constraint space of the original problem. Simulation results show that our method can explore efficient actions to resolve conflicts in confined space and generate dexterous maneuvers that are both collision-free and kinematically feasible. Keywords: Trajectory and Path Planning, Multi-vehicle systems, Autonomous Vehicles, Reinforcement learning control, Control problems under conflict 1. INTRODUCTION When conflicts arise in highly constrained spaces such as crowded parking lots, both the optimal control and the RL approaches often fail due to the following reasons: Current autonomous vehicles (AVs) operate reasonably well in environments where traffic rules are well-defined, (i) The vehicles need to plan for combinatorial actions in the surrounding agents are rational, and their actions can order to create spaces for each other to pass through; be easily predicted.

Simulation-based inference (SBI) solves statistical inverse problems by repeatedly running a stochastic simulator and inferring posterior distributions from model-simulations. To improve simulation efficiency, several inference methods take a sequential approach and iteratively adapt the proposal distributions from which model simulations are generated. However, many of these sequential methods are difficult to use in practice, both because the resulting optimisation problems can be challenging and efficient diagnostic tools are lacking. To overcome these issues, we present Truncated Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (TSNPE). TSNPE performs sequential inference with truncated proposals, sidestepping the optimisation issues of alternative approaches. In addition, TSNPE allows to efficiently perform coverage tests that can scale to complex models with many parameters. We demonstrate that TSNPE performs on par with previous methods on established benchmark tasks. We then apply TSNPE to two challenging problems from neuroscience and show that TSNPE can successfully obtain the posterior distributions, whereas previous methods fail. Overall, our results demonstrate that TSNPE is an efficient, accurate, and robust inference method that can scale to challenging scientific models.

In contrast, the setting of fully observable (FO) control has featured the success of many powerful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms (e.g., [8, 9, 10, 11]). Unfortunately, full observability only holds for a small portion of realistic robotics problems. Figure 1: To reach the In this work, we attempt to leverage good fully observable policies (state correct goal object, a experts) available only during offline training to help train PO policies state expert takes the that can execute online. We rely on the setting of offline training and red path directly, while online execution, a successful RL framework where an agent can use a partially observable "privileged" information such as the state [12, 13, 14, 15] or the belief agent must first take the about the state [6] during offline training, e.g., from simulators, to efficiently green path to identify learn PO policies that are later can be deployed without the access the correct goal object, to the privileged information anymore. In this work, the privileged information then take the red path. is not just the state itself but also the state expert. Our setting can be illustrated in a navigation task (Figure 1), which requires an agent to navigate to an unknown goal object on the right, identifiable by an object on the left side. While the optimal behavior under partial observability is to first navigate leftwards to identify the goal object, the state expert is able to move to the goal object directly. Despite being sup-optimal from the PO perspective, the state expert can provide experience during training leading to the goal object, which is potentially useful for both exploration and as a part of the policy needed in the PO case after the goal object is identified.

Real-world reinforcement learning tasks often involve some form of partial observability where the observations only give a partial or noisy view of the true state of the world. Such tasks typically require some form of memory, where the agent has access to multiple past observations, in order to perform well. One popular way to incorporate memory is by using a recurrent neural network to access the agent's history. However, recurrent neural networks in reinforcement learning are often fragile and difficult to train, susceptible to catastrophic forgetting and sometimes fail completely as a result. In this work, we propose Deep Transformer Q-Networks (DTQN), a novel architecture utilizing transformers and self-attention to encode an agent's history. DTQN is designed modularly, and we compare results against several modifications to our base model. Our experiments demonstrate the transformer can solve partially observable tasks faster and more stably than previous recurrent approaches.

Abstract: In many classification models, data is discretized to better estimate its distribution. Existing discretization methods often target at maximizing the discriminant power of discretized data, while overlooking the fact that the primary target of data discretization in classification is to improve the generalization performance. As a result, the data tend to be over-split into many small bins since the data without discretization retain the maximal discriminant information. Thus, we propose a Max-Dependency-Min-Divergence (MDmD) criterion that maximizes both the discriminant information and generalization ability of the discretized data. More specifically, the Max-Dependency criterion maximizes the statistical dependency between the discretized data and the classification variable while the Min-Divergence criterion explicitly minimizes the JS-divergence between the training data and the validation data for a given discretization scheme.