Maximum-entropy methods, rooted in the inverse Ising/Potts problem from statistical mechanics, have become indispensable tools for modeling pairwise interactions in disciplines such as bioinformatics, ecology, and neuroscience. Despite their remarkable success, these methods often overlook high-order interactions that may be crucial in complex systems. Conversely, while modern machine learning approaches can capture such interactions, existing interpretable frameworks are computationally expensive, making it impractical to assess the relevance of high-order interactions in real-world scenarios. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) offer a computationally efficient alternative by encoding statistical correlations via hidden nodes in a bipartite neural network. Here, we present a method that maps RBMs exactly onto generalized Potts models with interactions of arbitrary high order. This approach leverages large-$N$ approximations, facilitated by the simple architecture of the RBM, to enable the efficient extraction of effective many-body couplings with minimal computational cost. This mapping also enables the development of a general formal framework for the extraction of effective higher-order interactions in arbitrarily complex probabilistic models. Additionally, we introduce a robust formalism for gauge fixing within the generalized Potts model. We validate our method by accurately recovering two- and three-body interactions from synthetic datasets. Additionally, applying our framework to protein sequence data demonstrates its effectiveness in reconstructing protein contact maps, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art inverse Potts models. These results position RBMs as a powerful and efficient tool for investigating high-order interactions in complex systems.

We study the problem of training neural stochastic differential equations, or diffusion models, to sample from a Boltzmann distribution without access to target samples. Existing methods for training such models enforce time-reversal of the generative and noising processes, using either differentiable simulation or off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We prove equivalences between families of objectives in the limit of infinitesimal discretization steps, linking entropic RL methods (GFlowNets) with continuous-time objects (partial differential equations and path space measures). We further show that an appropriate choice of coarse time discretization during training allows greatly improved sample efficiency and the use of time-local objectives, achieving competitive performance on standard sampling benchmarks with reduced computational cost.

Service robots are increasingly entering the home to provide domestic tasks for residents. However, when working in an open, dynamic, and unstructured home environment, service robots still face challenges such as low intelligence for task execution and poor long-term autonomy (LTA), which has limited their deployment. As the basis of robotic task execution, environment modeling has attracted significant attention. This integrates core technologies such as environment perception, understanding, and representation to accurately recognize environmental information. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of environmental modeling from a new task-executionoriented perspective. In particular, guided by the requirements of robots in performing domestic service tasks in the home environment, we systematically review the progress that has been made in task-execution-oriented environmental modeling in four respects: 1) localization, 2) navigation, 3) manipulation, and 4) LTA. Current challenges are discussed, and potential research opportunities are also highlighted.

To achieve high service quality and profitability, meal delivery platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub must strategically operate their fleets to ensure timely deliveries for current orders while mitigating the consequential impacts of suboptimal decisions that leads to courier understaffing in the future. This study set out to solve the real-time order dispatching and idle courier steering problems for a meal delivery platform by proposing a reinforcement learning (RL)-based strategic dual-control framework. To address the inherent sequential nature of these problems, we model both order dispatching and courier steering as Markov Decision Processes. Trained via a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, we obtain strategic policies by leveraging the explicitly predicted demands as part of the inputs. In our dual-control framework, the dispatching and steering policies are iteratively trained in an integrated manner. These forward-looking policies can be executed in real-time and provide decisions while jointly considering the impacts on local and network levels. To enhance dispatching fairness, we propose convolutional deep Q networks to construct fair courier embeddings. To simultaneously rebalance the supply and demand within the service network, we propose to utilize mean-field approximated supply-demand knowledge to reallocate idle couriers at the local level. Utilizing the policies generated by the RL-based strategic dual-control framework, we find the delivery efficiency and fairness of workload distribution among couriers have been improved, and under-supplied conditions have been alleviated within the service network. Our study sheds light on designing an RL-based framework to enable forward-looking real-time operations for meal delivery platforms and other on-demand services.

Automated Vehicles (AVs) hold promise for revolutionizing transportation by improving road safety, traffic efficiency, and overall mobility. Despite the steady advancement in high-level AVs in recent years, the transition to full automation entails a period of mixed traffic, where AVs of varying automation levels coexist with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Making AVs socially compliant and understood by human drivers is expected to improve the safety and efficiency of mixed traffic. Thus, ensuring AVs compatibility with HDVs and social acceptance is crucial for their successful and seamless integration into mixed traffic. However, research in this critical area of developing Socially Compliant AVs (SCAVs) remains sparse. This study carries out the first comprehensive scoping review to assess the current state of the art in developing SCAVs, identifying key concepts, methodological approaches, and research gaps. An expert interview was also conducted to identify critical research gaps and expectations towards SCAVs. Based on the scoping review and expert interview input, a conceptual framework is proposed for the development of SCAVs. The conceptual framework is evaluated using an online survey targeting researchers, technicians, policymakers, and other relevant professionals worldwide. The survey results provide valuable validation and insights, affirming the significance of the proposed conceptual framework in tackling the challenges of integrating AVs into mixed-traffic environments. Additionally, future research perspectives and suggestions are discussed, contributing to the research and development agenda of SCAVs.

Despite the wide use of $k$-Nearest Neighbors as classification models, their explainability properties remain poorly understood from a theoretical perspective. While nearest neighbors classifiers offer interpretability from a "data perspective", in which the classification of an input vector $\bar{x}$ is explained by identifying the vectors $\bar{v}_1, \ldots, \bar{v}_k$ in the training set that determine the classification of $\bar{x}$, we argue that such explanations can be impractical in high-dimensional applications, where each vector has hundreds or thousands of features and it is not clear what their relative importance is. Hence, we focus on understanding nearest neighbor classifications through a "feature perspective", in which the goal is to identify how the values of the features in $\bar{x}$ affect its classification. Concretely, we study abductive explanations such as "minimum sufficient reasons", which correspond to sets of features in $\bar{x}$ that are enough to guarantee its classification, and "counterfactual explanations" based on the minimum distance feature changes one would have to perform in $\bar{x}$ to change its classification. We present a detailed landscape of positive and negative complexity results for counterfactual and abductive explanations, distinguishing between discrete and continuous feature spaces, and considering the impact of the choice of distance function involved. Finally, we show that despite some negative complexity results, Integer Quadratic Programming and SAT solving allow for computing explanations in practice.

Causal inference has recently gained notable attention across various fields like biology, healthcare, and environmental science, especially within explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) systems, for uncovering the causal relationships among multiple variables and outcomes. Yet, it has not been fully recognized and deployed in the manufacturing systems. In this paper, we introduce an explainable, scalable, and flexible federated Bayesian learning framework, \texttt{xFBCI}, designed to explore causality through treatment effect estimation in distributed manufacturing systems. By leveraging federated Bayesian learning, we efficiently estimate posterior of local parameters to derive the propensity score for each client without accessing local private data. These scores are then used to estimate the treatment effect using propensity score matching (PSM). Through simulations on various datasets and a real-world Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing data, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms standard Bayesian causal inference methods and several state-of-the-art federated learning benchmarks.

Deploying artificial intelligence (AI) models on edge devices involves a delicate balance between meeting stringent complexity constraints, such as limited memory and energy resources, and ensuring reliable performance in sensitive decision-making tasks. One way to enhance reliability is through uncertainty quantification via Bayesian inference. This approach, however, typically necessitates maintaining and running multiple models in an ensemble, which may exceed the computational limits of edge devices. This paper introduces a low-complexity methodology to address this challenge by distilling calibration information from a more complex model. In an offline phase, predictive probabilities generated by a high-complexity cloud-based model are leveraged to determine a threshold based on the typical divergence between the cloud and edge models. At run time, this threshold is used to construct credal sets -- ranges of predictive probabilities that are guaranteed, with a user-selected confidence level, to include the predictions of the cloud model. The credal sets are obtained through thresholding of a divergence measure in the simplex of predictive probabilities. Experiments on visual and language tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach, termed Conformalized Distillation for Credal Inference (CD-CI), significantly improves calibration performance compared to low-complexity Bayesian methods, such as Laplace approximation, making it a practical and efficient solution for edge AI deployments.

Cooperative heterogeneous multi-agent tasks require agents to effectively coordinate their behaviors while accounting for their relative capabilities. Learning-based solutions to this challenge span between two extremes: i) shared-parameter methods, which encode diverse behaviors within a single architecture by assigning an ID to each agent, and are sample-efficient but result in limited behavioral diversity; ii) independent methods, which learn a separate policy for each agent, and show greater behavioral diversity but lack sample-efficiency. Prior work has also explored selective parameter-sharing, allowing for a compromise between diversity and efficiency. None of these approaches, however, effectively generalize to unseen agents or teams. We present Capability-Aware Shared Hypernetworks (CASH), a novel architecture for heterogeneous multi-agent coordination that generates sufficient diversity while maintaining sample-efficiency via soft parameter-sharing hypernetworks. Intuitively, CASH allows the team to learn common strategies using a shared encoder, which are then adapted according to the team's individual and collective capabilities with a hypernetwork, allowing for zero-shot generalization to unseen teams and agents. We present experiments across two heterogeneous coordination tasks and three standard learning paradigms (imitation learning, on- and off-policy reinforcement learning). CASH is able to outperform baseline architectures in success rate and sample efficiency when evaluated on unseen teams and agents despite using less than half of the learnable parameters.

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is widely used in nonlinear state-space systems, but its performance often suffers from poorly approximated proposal and state-transition distributions. This work introduces a differentiable particle filter that leverages the unsupervised variational SMC objective to parameterize the proposal and transition distributions with a neural network, designed to learn from high-dimensional observations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms established baselines in tracking the challenging Lorenz attractor from high-dimensional and partial observations. Furthermore, an evidence lower bound based evaluation indicates that our method offers a more accurate representation of the posterior distribution.