Vision-based grasping systems typically adopt an open-loop execution of a planned grasp. This policy can fail due to many reasons, including ubiquitous calibration error. Recovery from a failed grasp is further complicated by visual occlusion, as the hand is usually occluding the vision sensor as it attempts another open-loop regrasp. This work presents MAT, a tactile closed-loop method capable of realizing grasps provided by a coarse initial positioning of the hand above an object. Our algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimized through the clipped surrogate objective within a maximum entropy RL framework to balance exploitation and exploration. The method utilizes tactile and proprioceptive information to act through both fine finger motions and larger regrasp movements to execute stable grasps. A novel curriculum of action motion magnitude makes learning more tractable and helps turn common failure cases into successes. Careful selection of features that exhibit small sim-to-real gaps enables this tactile grasping policy, trained purely in simulation, to transfer well to real world environments without the need for additional learning. Experimentally, this methodology improves over a vision-only grasp success rate substantially on a multi-fingered robot hand. When this methodology is used to realize grasps from coarse initial positions provided by a vision-only planner, the system is made dramatically more robust to calibration errors in the camera-robot transform.

This paper proposes a new generative model called neural belief reasoner (NBR). It differs from previous models in that it specifies a belief function rather than a probability distribution. Its implementation consists of neural networks, fuzzy-set operations and belief-function operations, and query-answering, sample-generation and training algorithms are presented. This paper studies NBR in two tasks. The first is a synthetic unsupervised-learning task, which demonstrates NBR's ability to perform multi-hop reasoning, reasoning with uncertainty and reasoning about conflicting information. The second is supervised learning: a robust MNIST classifier. Without any adversarial training, this classifier exceeds the state of the art in adversarial robustness as measured by the L2 metric, and at the same time maintains 99% accuracy on natural images. A proof is presented that, as capacity increases, NBR classifiers can asymptotically approach the best possible robustness.

This paper studies a fundamental mechanism of how to detect a conflict between arguments given sentiments regarding acceptability of the arguments. We introduce a concept of the inverse problem of the abstract argumentation to tackle the problem. Given noisy sets of acceptable arguments, it aims to find attack relations explaining the sets well in terms of acceptability semantics. It is the inverse of the direct problem corresponding to the traditional problem of the abstract argumentation that focuses on finding sets of acceptable arguments in terms of the semantics given an attack relation between the arguments. We give a probabilistic model handling both of the problems in a way that is faithful to the acceptability semantics. From a theoretical point of view, we show that a solution to both the direct and inverse problems is a special case of the probabilistic inference on the model. We discuss that the model provides a natural extension of the semantics to cope with uncertain attack relations distributed probabilistically. From en empirical point of view, we argue that it reasonably predicts individuals sentiments regarding acceptability of arguments. This paper contributes to lay the foundation for making acceptability semantics data-driven and to provide a way to tackle the knowledge acquisition bottleneck.

Probabilistic Boolean Networks (PBNs) were introduced as a computational model for studying gene interactions in Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs). Controllability of PBNs, and hence GRNs, is the process of making strategic interventions to a network in order to drive it from a particular state towards some other potentially more desirable state. This is of significant importance to systems biology as successful control could be used to obtain potential gene treatments by making therapeutic interventions. Recent advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning have enabled systems to develop policies merely by interacting with the environment, without complete knowledge of the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper we have implemented a Deep Q Network with Double Q Learning, that directly interacts with the environment -that is, a Probabilistic Boolean Network. Our approach develops a control policy by sampling experiences obtained from the environment using Prioritized Experience Replay which successfully drives a PBN from any state towards the desired one. This novel approach sets the foundations for overcoming the inability to scale to larger PBNs and opens up the spectrum in which to consider control of GRNs without the need of a computational model, i.e. by direct interventions to the GRN.

Machine Learning is a field of computer science concerned with developing systems that can learn from data. Like statistics and linear algebra, probability is another foundational field that supports machine learning. Probability is a field of mathematics concerned with quantifying uncertainty. Many aspects of machine learning are uncertain, including, most critically, observations from the problem domain and the relationships learned by models from that data. As such, some understanding of probability and tools and methods used in the field are required by a machine learning practitioner to be effective.

The biomanufacturing industry is growing rapidly and becoming one of the key drivers of personalized medicine and life science. However, biopharmaceutical production faces critical challenges, including complexity, high variability, long lead time and rapid changes in technologies, processes, and regulatory environment. Driven by these challenges, we explore the biotechnology domain knowledge and propose a rigorous risk and sensitivity analysis framework for biomanufacturing innovation. Built on the causal relationships of raw material quality attributes, production process, and bio-drug properties in safety and efficacy, we develop a Bayesian Network (BN) to model the complex probabilistic interdependence between process parameters and quality attributes of raw materials/in-process materials/drug substance. It integrates various sources of data and leads to an interpretable probabilistic knowledge graph of the end-to-end production process. Then, we introduce a systematic risk analysis to assess the criticality of process parameters and quality attributes. The complex production processes often involve many process parameters and quality attributes impacting on the product quality variability. However, the real-world (batch) data are often limited, especially for customized and personalized bio-drugs. We propose uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis to analyze the impact of model risk. Given very limited process data, the empirical results show that we can provide reliable and inter-Corresponding author Email addresses: w.xie@northeastern.edu Thus, the proposed framework can provide the science-and risk-based guidance on the process monitoring, data collection, and process parameters specifications to facilitate the production process learning and stability control. Keywords: Decision analysis, biomanufacturing, Bayesian network, production process risk analysis, sensitivity analysis 2017 MSC: 00-01, 99-00 1. Introduction In the past decades, pharmaceutical companies have invested billions of dollars in the research and development (R&D) of new biomedicines for the treatment of many severe illnesses, including cancer cells and adult blindness. More than 40 percent of the overall pharmaceutical industry R&D and products in the development pipeline are biopharmaceuticals and this percentage is expected to continuously increase. Compared to the classical pharmaceutical manufacturing, biopharmaceutical production faces several challenges, including complexity, high variability, long lead time and rapid changes in technologies, processes, and regulatory environment (Kaminsky & Wang, 2015). Biotechnology products are produced in living organisms, which induces a lot of uncertainty in the production process.

RESEARCH Static Force Field Representation of Environments Based on Agents' Nonlinear Motions Damian Campo 1*, Alejandro Betancourt 1,2, Lucio Marcenaro 1 and Carlo Regazzoni 1 Abstract This paper presents a methodology that aims at the incremental representation of areas inside environments in terms of attractive forces. It is proposed a parametric representation of velocity fields ruling the dynamics of moving agents. It is assumed that attractive spots in the environment are responsible for modifying the motion of agents. A switching model is used to describe near and far velocity fields, which in turn are used to learn attractive characteristics of environments. The effect of such areas is considered radial over all the scene. Based on the estimation of attractive areas, a map that describes their effects in terms of their localizations, ranges of action and intensities is derived in an online way . Information of static attractive areas is added dynamically into a set of filters that describes possible interactions between moving agents and an environment. The proposed approach is first evaluated on synthetic data, posteriorly, the method is applied on real trajectories coming from moving pedestrians in an indoor environment. Keywords: Kalman filtering; Interactive force models; T rajectory analysis; Representation of environments; Situation awareness1 Introduction Analysis of trajectories performed by moving entities in environments is an important topic for different fields such as video surveillance [1], crowd/vehicle analysis [2, 3] and in general for monitoring systems, on which the dynamics of agents can lead to a better understanding of patterns and situations of interest [4, 5]. Abnormality detection is one of the most explored applications that involves analysis of trajectories. In such approach, by characterizing agents' motions, it is possible to learn and identify normal/abnormal situations in a certain environment. In general, approaches for abnormality detection are based on a set of observations that define the regular behaviors in a scene. Afterwards, abnormalities are defined as behaviors that do not match with patterns previously learned as normal, i.e., behaviors that have not been observed before [6].

We propose a new approach to combine Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) that can be used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. This allows synthesis of larger models from smaller RBMs that have been pretrained, thus effectively bypassing the problem of learning in large RBMs, and creating a system able to model a large, complex multi-modal space. We validate this approach by using learned representations to create "invertible boolean logic", where we can use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches to find the solution to large scale boolean satisfiability problems and show viability towards other combinatorial optimization problems. Using this method, we are able to solve 64 bit addition based problems, as well as factorize 16 bit numbers. We find that these combined representations can provide a more accurate result for the same sample size as compared to a fully trained model. The Ising Problem has long been known to be in the class of NP-Hard problems, with no exact polynomial solution existing. Because of this, a large class of combinatorial optimization problems can be reformulated as Ising problems and solved by finding the ground state of that system (Barahona, 1982; Kirkpatrick et al., 1983; Lucas, 2014). The Boltzmann Machine (Ackley et al., 1987) was originally introduced as a constraint satisfaction network based on the Ising model problem, where the weights would encode some global constraints, and stochastic units were used to escape local minima. The original Boltzmann Machine found favor as a method to solve various combinatorial optimization problems (Korst & Aarts, 1989). However, learning was very slow with this model due to the difficulties with sampling and convergence, as well as the inability to exactly calculate the partition function.

Optimal Bayesian feature filtering (OBF) is a supervised screening method designed for biomarker discovery. In this article, we prove two major theoretical properties of OBF. First, optimal Bayesian feature selection under a general family of Bayesian models reduces to filtering if and only if the underlying Bayesian model assumes all features are mutually independent. Therefore, OBF is optimal if and only if one assumes all features are mutually independent, and OBF is the only filter method that is optimal under at least one model in the general Bayesian framework. Second, OBF under independent Gaussian models is consistent under very mild conditions, including cases where the data is non-Gaussian with correlated features. This result provides conditions where OBF is guaranteed to identify the correct feature set given enough data, and it justifies the use of OBF in non-design settings where its assumptions are invalid.

Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown state of the world with their neighbors using a learning rule. Existing approaches assume agents have access to precise statistical models (in the form of likelihoods) for the state of the world. However in many situations, such models must be learned from finite data. We propose a social learning rule that takes into account uncertainty in the statistical models using second-order probabilities. Therefore, beliefs derived from uncertain models are sensitive to the amount of past evidence collected for each hypothesis. We characterize how well the hypotheses can be tested on a social network, as consistent or not with the state of the world. We explicitly show the dependency of the generated beliefs with respect to the amount of prior evidence. Moreover, as the amount of prior evidence goes to infinity, learning occurs and is consistent with traditional social learning theory.