Michael Chui, Nicolaus Henke, and Mehdi Miremadi, "Most of AI's business uses will be in two areas," McKinsey, March 7, 2019. As companies are recovering from the pandemic, research shows that talent, resilience, tech enablement across all areas, and organic growth are their top priorities. 2 2. What matters most? This article is a collaborative effort by Kimberly Borden, Mark Huntington, Mithun Kamat, Alex Singla, Joris Wijpkema, and Bill Wiseman, representing views from McKinsey's Advanced Industries Practices. Despite this opportunity, many executives remain unsure where to apply AI solutions to capture real bottom-line impact. The result has been slow rates of adoption, with many companies taking a wait-and-see approach rather than diving in.

Ongoing risks from climate change have impacted the livelihood of global nomadic communities, and are likely to lead to increased migratory movements in coming years. As a result, mobility considerations are becoming increasingly important in energy systems planning, particularly to achieve energy access in developing countries. Advanced Plug and Play control strategies have been recently developed with such a decentralized framework in mind, more easily allowing for the interconnection of nomadic communities, both to each other and to the main grid. In light of the above, the design and planning strategy of a mobile multi-energy supply system for a nomadic community is investigated in this work. Motivated by the scale and dimensionality of the associated uncertainties, impacting all major design and decision variables over the 30-year planning horizon, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is implemented for the design and planning problem tackled. DRL based solutions are benchmarked against several rigid baseline design options to compare expected performance under uncertainty. The results on a case study for ger communities in Mongolia suggest that mobile nomadic energy systems can be both technically and economically feasible, particularly when considering flexibility, although the degree of spatial dispersion among households is an important limiting factor. Key economic, sustainability and resilience indicators such as Cost, Equivalent Emissions and Total Unmet Load are measured, suggesting potential improvements compared to available baselines of up to 25%, 67% and 76%, respectively. Finally, the decomposition of values of flexibility and plug and play operation is presented using a variation of real options theory, with important implications for both nomadic communities and policymakers focused on enabling their energy access.

The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the desired robot gripper. In this work, we show that manipulation skills can be transferred from a human to a robot through the use of micro-evolutionary reinforcement learning, where a five-finger human dexterous hand robot gradually evolves into a commercial robot, while repeated interacting in a physics simulator to continuously update the policy that is first learned from human demonstration. To deal with the high dimensions of robot parameters, we propose an algorithm for multi-dimensional evolution path searching that allows joint optimization of both the robot evolution path and the policy. Through experiments on human object manipulation datasets, we show that our framework can efficiently transfer the expert human agent policy trained from human demonstrations in diverse modalities to target commercial robots.

Researchers across cognitive, neuro-, and computer sciences increasingly reference human-like artificial intelligence and neuroAI. However, the scope and use of the terms are often inconsistent. Contributed research ranges widely from mimicking behaviour, to testing machine learning methods as neurally plausible hypotheses at the cellular or functional levels, or solving engineering problems. However, it cannot be assumed nor expected that progress on one of these three goals will automatically translate to progress in others. Here a simple rubric is proposed to clarify the scope of individual contributions, grounded in their commitments to human-like behaviour, neural plausibility, or benchmark/engineering goals. This is clarified using examples of weak and strong neuroAI and human-like agents, and discussing the generative, corroborate, and corrective ways in which the three dimensions interact with one another. The author maintains that future progress in artificial intelligence will need strong interactions across the disciplines, with iterative feedback loops and meticulous validity tests, leading to both known and yet-unknown advances that may span decades to come.

In many real-world problems, the learning agent needs to learn a problem's abstractions and solution simultaneously. However, most such abstractions need to be designed and refined by hand for different problems and domains of application. This paper presents a novel top-down approach for constructing state abstractions while carrying out reinforcement learning. Starting with state variables and a simulator, it presents a novel domain-independent approach for dynamically computing an abstraction based on the dispersion of Q-values in abstract states as the agent continues acting and learning. Extensive empirical evaluation on multiple domains and problems shows that this approach automatically learns abstractions that are finely-tuned to the problem, yield powerful sample efficiency, and result in the RL agent significantly outperforming existing approaches.

Behavioural cloning (BC) is a commonly used imitation learning method to infer a sequential decision-making policy from expert demonstrations. However, when the quality of the data is not optimal, the resulting behavioural policy also performs sub-optimally once deployed. Recently, there has been a surge in offline reinforcement learning methods that hold the promise to extract high-quality policies from sub-optimal historical data. A common approach is to perform regularisation during training, encouraging updates during policy evaluation and/or policy improvement to stay close to the underlying data. In this work, we investigate whether an offline approach to improving the quality of the existing data can lead to improved behavioural policies without any changes in the BC algorithm. The proposed data improvement approach - Trajectory Stitching (TS) - generates new trajectories (sequences of states and actions) by `stitching' pairs of states that were disconnected in the original data and generating their connecting new action. By construction, these new transitions are guaranteed to be highly plausible according to probabilistic models of the environment, and to improve a state-value function. We demonstrate that the iterative process of replacing old trajectories with new ones incrementally improves the underlying behavioural policy. Extensive experimental results show that significant performance gains can be achieved using TS over BC policies extracted from the original data. Furthermore, using the D4RL benchmarking suite, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art results are obtained by combining TS with two existing offline learning methodologies reliant on BC, model-based offline planning (MBOP) and policy constraint (TD3+BC).

Efficient use of the space in an elevator is very necessary for a service robot, due to the need for reducing the amount of time caused by waiting for the next elevator. To provide a solution for this, we propose a hybrid approach that combines reinforcement learning (RL) with voice interaction for robot navigation in the scene of entering the elevator. RL provides robots with a high exploration ability to find a new clear path to enter the elevator compared to traditional navigation methods such as Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA). The proposed method allows the robot to take an active clear path action towards the elevator whilst a crowd of people stands at the entrance of the elevator wherein there are still lots of space. This is done by embedding a clear path action (voice prompt) into the RL framework, and the proposed navigation policy helps the robot to finish tasks efficiently and safely. Our model approach provides a great improvement in the success rate and reward of entering the elevator compared to state-of-the-art navigation policies without active clear path operation.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

In the field of autonomous robots, reinforcement learning (RL) is an increasingly used method to solve the task of dynamic obstacle avoidance for mobile robots, autonomous ships, and drones. A common practice to train those agents is to use a training environment with random initialization of agent and obstacles. Such approaches might suffer from a low coverage of high-risk scenarios in training, leading to impaired final performance of obstacle avoidance. This paper proposes a general training environment where we gain control over the difficulty of the obstacle avoidance task by using short training episodes and assessing the difficulty by two metrics: The number of obstacles and a collision risk metric. We found that shifting the training towards a greater task difficulty can massively increase the final performance. A baseline agent, using a traditional training environment based on random initialization of agent and obstacles and longer training episodes, leads to a significantly weaker performance. To prove the generalizability of the proposed approach, we designed two realistic use cases: A mobile robot and a maritime ship under the threat of approaching obstacles. In both applications, the previous results can be confirmed, which emphasizes the general usability of the proposed approach, detached from a specific application context and independent of the agent's dynamics. We further added Gaussian noise to the sensor signals, resulting in only a marginal degradation of performance and thus indicating solid robustness of the trained agent.

To achieve autonomy in a priori unknown real-world scenarios, agents should be able to: i) act from high-dimensional sensory observations (e.g., images), ii) learn from past experience to adapt and improve, and iii) be capable of long horizon planning. Classical planning algorithms (e.g. PRM, RRT) are proficient at handling long-horizon planning. Deep learning based methods in turn can provide the necessary representations to address the others, by modeling statistical contingencies between observations. In this direction, we introduce a general-purpose planning algorithm called PALMER that combines classical sampling-based planning algorithms with learning-based perceptual representations. For training these perceptual representations, we combine Q-learning with contrastive representation learning to create a latent space where the distance between the embeddings of two states captures how easily an optimal policy can traverse between them. For planning with these perceptual representations, we re-purpose classical sampling-based planning algorithms to retrieve previously observed trajectory segments from a replay buffer and restitch them into approximately optimal paths that connect any given pair of start and goal states. This creates a tight feedback loop between representation learning, memory, reinforcement learning, and sampling-based planning. The end result is an experiential framework for long-horizon planning that is significantly more robust and sample efficient compared to existing methods.