A practical approach to learning robot skills, often termed sim2real, is to train control policies in simulation and then deploy them on a real robot. Popular techniques to improve the sim2real transfer build on domain randomization (DR): Training the policy on a diverse set of randomly generated domains with the hope of better generalization to the real world. Due to the large number of hyper-parameters in both the policy learning and DR algorithms, one often ends up with a large number of trained models, where choosing the best model among them demands costly evaluation on the real robot. In this work we ask: Can we rank the policies without running them in the real world? Our main idea is that a predefined set of real world data can be used to evaluate all policies, using out-of-distribution detection (OOD) techniques. In a sense, this approach can be seen as a "unit test" to evaluate policies before any real world execution. However, we find that by itself, the OOD score can be inaccurate and very sensitive to the particular OOD method. Our main contribution is a simple-yet-effective policy score that combines OOD with an evaluation in simulation. We show that our score - VSDR - can significantly improve the accuracy of policy ranking without requiring additional real world data. We evaluate the effectiveness of VSDR on sim2real transfer in a robotic grasping task with image inputs. We extensively evaluate different DR parameters and OOD methods, and show that VSDR improves policy selection across the board. More importantly, our method achieves significantly better ranking, and uses significantly less data compared to baselines.

Tactics analyze the current proof state (goal and assumptions) and apply non-trivial proof transformations. Formalized proofs take advantage of different levels of automation which are in increasing order of generality: specialized rules, theory-based strategies and general purpose strategies. Thanks to progress in proof automation, developers can delegate more and more complicated proof obligations to general purpose strategies. Those are implemented by automated theorem provers (ATPs) such as E prover [32]. Communication between an ITP and ATPs is made possible by a "hammer" system [4,14]. It acts as an interface by performing premise selection, translation and proof reconstruction. Yet, ATPs are not flawless and more precise user-guidance, achieved by applying a particular sequence of specialized rules, is almost always necessary to develop a mathematical theory.

Machine learning (ML) models are an effective and efficient alternative to mechanistic models for predicting CO2 emissions from agricultural soils. Random forest (RF), a classical regression ML model, is a suitable algorithm to predict soil CO2 emissions regardless of fertiliser scenario. Feed-forward neural network (FNN) provides acceptable predictive performance for CO2 emissions, but it does not provide consistent predictive performance in K-Fold cross-validation. Climatic parameters influence CO2 emissions and the complexity of the relationship is not fully captured in biophysical models. Machine learning (ML) is now being applied to environmental problems, and it is, therefore, opportune to investigate ML models in CO2 predictions from agricultural soils.

This is article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Welcome to this wide-ranging article on clustering in data science! There's a lot to unpack so let's dive straight in. In this article, we will be discussing what is clustering, why is clustering required, various applications of clustering, a brief about the K Means algorithm, and finally in detail practical implementations of some of the applications using clustering. Let's go ahead and understand this with an example, suppose you are on a trip with your friends all of you decided to hike in the mountains, there you came across a beautiful butterfly which you have never seen before.

The topological patterns exhibited by many real-world networks motivate the development of topology-based methods for assessing the similarity of networks. However, extracting topological structure is difficult, especially for large and dense networks whose node degrees range over multiple orders of magnitude. In this paper, we propose a novel and computationally practical topological clustering method that clusters complex networks with intricate topology using principled theory from persistent homology and optimal transport. Such networks are aggregated into clusters through a centroid-based clustering strategy based on both their topological and geometric structure, preserving correspondence between nodes in different networks. The notions of topological proximity and centroid are characterized using a novel and efficient approach to computation of the Wasserstein distance and barycenter for persistence barcodes associated with connected components and cycles. The proposed method is demonstrated to be effective using both simulated networks and measured functional brain networks.

Point cloud instance segmentation has achieved huge progress with the emergence of deep learning. However, these methods are usually data-hungry with expensive and time-consuming dense point cloud annotations. To alleviate the annotation cost, unlabeled or weakly labeled data is still less explored in the task. In this paper, we introduce the first semi-supervised point cloud instance segmentation framework (SPIB) using both labeled and unlabelled bounding boxes as supervision. To be specific, our SPIB architecture involves a two-stage learning procedure. For stage one, a bounding box proposal generation network is trained under a semi-supervised setting with perturbation consistency regularization (SPCR). The regularization works by enforcing an invariance of the bounding box predictions over different perturbations applied to the input point clouds, to provide self-supervision for network learning. For stage two, the bounding box proposals with SPCR are grouped into some subsets, and the instance masks are mined inside each subset with a novel semantic propagation module and a property consistency graph module. Moreover, we introduce a novel occupancy ratio guided refinement module to refine the instance masks. Extensive experiments on the challenging ScanNet v2 dataset demonstrate our method can achieve competitive performance compared with the recent fully-supervised methods.

Causal inference grows increasingly complex as the number of confounders increases. Given treatments $X$, confounders $Z$ and outcomes $Y$, we develop a non-parametric method to test the \textit{do-null} hypothesis $H_0:\; p(y|\text{\it do}(X=x))=p(y)$ against the general alternative. Building on the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) for marginal independence testing, we propose backdoor-HSIC (bd-HSIC) and demonstrate that it is calibrated and has power for both binary and continuous treatments under a large number of confounders. Additionally, we establish convergence properties of the estimators of covariance operators used in bd-HSIC. We investigate the advantages and disadvantages of bd-HSIC against parametric tests as well as the importance of using the do-null testing in contrast to marginal independence testing or conditional independence testing. A complete implementation can be found at \hyperlink{https://github.com/MrHuff/kgformula}{\texttt{https://github.com/MrHuff/kgformula}}.

Causal analysis and classification of injury severity applying non-parametric methods for traffic crashes has received limited attention. This study presents a methodological framework for causal inference, using Granger causality analysis, and injury severity classification of traffic crashes, occurring on interstates, with different machine learning techniques including decision trees (DT), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and deep neural network (DNN). The data used in this study were obtained for traffic crashes on all interstates across the state of Texas from a period of six years between 2014 and 2019. The output of the proposed severity classification approach includes three classes for fatal and severe injury (KA) crashes, non-severe and possible injury (BC) crashes, and property damage only (PDO) crashes. While Granger Causality helped identify the most influential factors affecting crash severity, the learning-based models predicted the severity classes with varying performance. The results of Granger causality analysis identified the speed limit, surface and weather conditions, traffic volume, presence of workzones, workers in workzones, and high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, among others, as the most important factors affecting crash severity. The prediction performance of the classifiers yielded varying results across the different classes. Specifically, while decision tree and random forest classifiers provided the greatest performance for PDO and BC severities, respectively, for the KA class, the rarest class in the data, deep neural net classifier performed superior than all other algorithms, most likely due to its capability of approximating nonlinear models. This study contributes to the limited body of knowledge pertaining to causal analysis and classification prediction of traffic crash injury severity using non-parametric approaches.

Power curves capture the relationship between wind speed and output power for a specific wind turbine. Accurate regression models of this function prove useful in monitoring, maintenance, design, and planning. In practice, however, the measurements do not always correspond to the ideal curve: power curtailments will appear as (additional) functional components. Such multivalued relationships cannot be modelled by conventional regression, and the associated data are usually removed during pre-processing. The current work suggests an alternative method to infer multivalued relationships in curtailed power data. Using a population-based approach, an overlapping mixture of probabilistic regression models is applied to signals recorded from turbines within an operational wind farm. The model is shown to provide an accurate representation of practical power data across the population.

For example, the economic or social effects of a new drug trial, a new policy or even the effects of a new feature in an advertisement or software are all areas of interest to researchers.