Nanorobots are a promising development in targeted drug delivery and the treatment of neurological disorders, with potential for crossing the blood-brain barrier (BBB). These small devices leverage advancements in nanotechnology and bioengineering for precise navigation and targeted payload delivery, particularly for conditions like brain tumors, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has improved the navigation and effectiveness of nanorobots, allowing them to detect and interact with cancer cells through biomarker analysis. This study presents a new reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimizing nanorobot navigation in complex biological environments, focusing on cancer cell detection by analyzing the concentration gradients of surrounding biomarkers. We utilize a computer simulation model to explore the behavior of nanorobots in a three-dimensional space with cancer cells and biological barriers. The proposed method uses Q-learning to refine movement strategies based on real-time biomarker concentration data, enabling nanorobots to autonomously navigate to cancerous tissues for targeted drug delivery. This research lays the groundwork for future laboratory experiments and clinical applications, with implications for personalized medicine and less invasive cancer treatments. The integration of intelligent nanorobots could revolutionize therapeutic strategies, reducing side effects and enhancing treatment effectiveness for cancer patients. Further research will investigate the practical deployment of these technologies in medical settings, aiming to unlock the full potential of nanorobotics in healthcare.

In-context learning allows models like transformers to adapt to new tasks from a few examples without updating their weights, a desirable trait for reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing in-context RL methods, such as Algorithm Distillation (AD), demand large, carefully curated datasets and can be unstable and costly to train due to the transient nature of in-context learning abilities. In this work we integrated the n-gram induction heads into transformers for in-context RL. By incorporating these n-gram attention patterns, we significantly reduced the data required for generalization - up to 27 times fewer transitions in the Key-to-Door environment - and eased the training process by making models less sensitive to hyperparameters. Our approach not only matches but often surpasses the performance of AD, demonstrating the potential of n-gram induction heads to enhance the efficiency of in-context RL.

Learning-task oriented semantic communication is pivotal in optimizing transmission efficiency by extracting and conveying essential semantics tailored to specific tasks, such as image reconstruction and classification. Nevertheless, the challenge of eavesdropping poses a formidable threat to semantic privacy due to the open nature of wireless communications. In this paper, intelligent reflective surface (IRS)-enhanced secure semantic communication (IRS-SSC) is proposed to guarantee the physical layer security from a task-oriented semantic perspective. Specifically, a multi-layer codebook is exploited to discretize continuous semantic features and describe semantics with different numbers of bits, thereby meeting the need for hierarchical semantic representation and further enhancing the transmission efficiency. Novel semantic security metrics, i.e., secure semantic rate (S-SR) and secure semantic spectrum efficiency (S-SSE), are defined to map the task-oriented security requirements at the application layer into the physical layer. To achieve artificial intelligence (AI)-native secure communication, we propose a noise disturbance enhanced hybrid deep reinforcement learning (NdeHDRL)-based resource allocation scheme. This scheme dynamically maximizes the S-SSE by jointly optimizing the bits for semantic representations, reflective coefficients of the IRS, and the subchannel assignment. Moreover, we propose a novel semantic context awared state space (SCA-SS) to fusion the high-dimensional semantic space and the observable system state space, which enables the agent to perceive semantic context and solves the dimensional catastrophe problem. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed schemes in both enhancing the security performance and the S-SSE compared to several benchmark schemes.

A long-standing goal in robot learning is to develop methods for robots to acquire new skills autonomously. While reinforcement learning (RL) comes with the promise of enabling autonomous data collection, it remains challenging to scale in the real-world partly due to the significant effort required for environment design and instrumentation, including the need for designing reset functions or accurate success detectors. On the other hand, imitation learning (IL) methods require little to no environment design effort, but instead require significant human supervision in the form of collected demonstrations. To address these shortcomings, recent works in autonomous IL start with an initial seed dataset of human demonstrations that an autonomous policy can bootstrap from. While autonomous IL approaches come with the promise of addressing the challenges of autonomous RL as well as pure IL strategies, in this work, we posit that such techniques do not deliver on this promise and are still unable to scale up autonomous data collection in the real world. Through a series of real-world experiments, we demonstrate that these approaches, when scaled up to realistic settings, face much of the same scaling challenges as prior attempts in RL in terms of environment design. Further, we perform a rigorous study of autonomous IL methods across different data scales and 7 simulation and real-world tasks, and demonstrate that while autonomous data collection can modestly improve performance, simply collecting more human data often provides significantly more improvement. Our work suggests a negative result: that scaling up autonomous data collection for learning robot policies for real-world tasks is more challenging and impractical than what is suggested in prior work. We hope these insights about the core challenges of scaling up data collection help inform future efforts in autonomous learning.

In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood -- of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance -- is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant future. It is an issue for the near future, and AI companies and other actors have a responsibility to start taking it seriously. We also recommend three early steps that AI companies and other actors can take: They can (1) acknowledge that AI welfare is an important and difficult issue (and ensure that language model outputs do the same), (2) start assessing AI systems for evidence of consciousness and robust agency, and (3) prepare policies and procedures for treating AI systems with an appropriate level of moral concern. To be clear, our argument in this report is not that AI systems definitely are -- or will be -- conscious, robustly agentic, or otherwise morally significant. Instead, our argument is that there is substantial uncertainty about these possibilities, and so we need to improve our understanding of AI welfare and our ability to make wise decisions about this issue. Otherwise there is a significant risk that we will mishandle decisions about AI welfare, mistakenly harming AI systems that matter morally and/or mistakenly caring for AI systems that do not.

A common way to drive progress of AI models and agents is to compare their performance on standardized benchmarks. Comparing the performance of general agents requires aggregating their individual performances across a potentially wide variety of different tasks. In this paper, we describe a novel ranking scheme inspired by social choice frameworks, called Soft Condorcet Optimization (SCO), to compute the optimal ranking of agents: the one that makes the fewest mistakes in predicting the agent comparisons in the evaluation data. This optimal ranking is the maximum likelihood estimate when evaluation data (which we view as votes) are interpreted as noisy samples from a ground truth ranking, a solution to Condorcet's original voting system criteria. SCO ratings are maximal for Condorcet winners when they exist, which we show is not necessarily true for the classical rating system Elo. We propose three optimization algorithms to compute SCO ratings and evaluate their empirical performance. When serving as an approximation to the Kemeny-Young voting method, SCO rankings are on average 0 to 0.043 away from the optimal ranking in normalized Kendall-tau distance across 865 preference profiles from the PrefLib open ranking archive. In a simulated noisy tournament setting, SCO achieves accurate approximations to the ground truth ranking and the best among several baselines when 59\% or more of the preference data is missing. Finally, SCO ranking provides the best approximation to the optimal ranking, measured on held-out test sets, in a problem containing 52,958 human players across 31,049 games of the classic seven-player game of Diplomacy.

Masked prediction has emerged as a promising pretraining paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to its versatile masking schemes, enabling flexible inference across various downstream tasks with a unified model. Despite the versatility of masked prediction, it remains unclear how to balance the learning of skills at different levels of complexity. To address this, we propose CurrMask, a curriculum masking pretraining paradigm for sequential decision making. Motivated by how humans learn by organizing knowledge in a curriculum, CurrMask adjusts its masking scheme during pretraining for learning versatile skills. Through extensive experiments, we show that CurrMask exhibits superior zero-shot performance on skill prompting tasks, goal-conditioned planning tasks, and competitive finetuning performance on offline RL tasks. Additionally, our analysis of training dynamics reveals that CurrMask gradually acquires skills of varying complexity by dynamically adjusting its masking scheme. Code is available at here.

A safe and efficient decision-making system is crucial for autonomous vehicles. However, the complexity of driving environments limits the effectiveness of many rule-based and machine learning approaches. Reinforcement Learning (RL), with its robust self-learning capabilities and environmental adaptability, offers a promising solution to these challenges. Nevertheless, safety and efficiency concerns during training hinder its widespread application. To address these concerns, we propose a novel RL framework, Simple to Complex Collaborative Decision (S2CD). First, we rapidly train the teacher model in a lightweight simulation environment. In the more complex and realistic environment, teacher intervenes when the student agent exhibits suboptimal behavior by assessing actions' value to avert dangers. We also introduce an RL algorithm called Adaptive Clipping Proximal Policy Optimization Plus, which combines samples from both teacher and student policies and employs dynamic clipping strategies based on sample importance. This approach improves sample efficiency while effectively alleviating data imbalance. Additionally, we employ the Kullback-Leibler divergence as a policy constraint, transforming it into an unconstrained problem with the Lagrangian method to accelerate the student's learning. Finally, a gradual weaning strategy ensures that the student learns to explore independently over time, overcoming the teacher's limitations and maximizing performance. Simulation experiments in highway lane-change scenarios show that the S2CD framework enhances learning efficiency, reduces training costs, and significantly improves safety compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. This framework also ensures effective knowledge transfer between teacher and student models, even with suboptimal teachers, the student achieves superior performance, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of S2CD.

This paper introduces the risk-sensitive control as inference (RCaI) that extends CaI by using R\'{e}nyi divergence variational inference. RCaI is shown to be equivalent to log-probability regularized risk-sensitive control, which is an extension of the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) control. We also prove that the risk-sensitive optimal policy can be obtained by solving a soft Bellman equation, which reveals several equivalences between RCaI, MaxEnt control, the optimal posterior for CaI, and linearly-solvable control. Moreover, based on RCaI, we derive the risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) methods: the policy gradient and the soft actor-critic. As the risk-sensitivity parameter vanishes, we recover the risk-neutral CaI and RL, which means that RCaI is a unifying framework. Furthermore, we give another risk-sensitive generalization of the MaxEnt control using R\'{e}nyi entropy regularization. We show that in both of our extensions, the optimal policies have the same structure even though the derivations are very different.

This survey paper explores the transformative role of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). It examines the evolution from traditional CPR methods to innovative ML-driven approaches, highlighting the impact of predictive modeling, AI-enhanced devices, and real-time data analysis in improving resuscitation outcomes. The paper provides a comprehensive overview, classification, and critical analysis of current applications, challenges, and future directions in this emerging field.