Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight into human decision-making using tools that will be familiar to those with backgrounds in optimization and control (e.g., probability theory, statistical machine learning, and reinforcement learning). Here, we review some of this work, focusing on how cognitive science can provide forward models of human decision-making and inverse models of how humans think about others' decision-making. We highlight relevant recent developments, including approaches that synthesize blackbox and theory-driven modeling, accounts that recast heuristics and biases as forms of bounded optimality, and models that characterize human theory of mind and communication in decision-theoretic terms. In doing so, we aim to provide readers with a glimpse of the range of frameworks, methodologies, and actionable insights that lie at the intersection of cognitive science and control research.

Humans are well-versed in reasoning about the behaviors of physical objects when choosing actions to accomplish tasks, while it remains a major challenge for AI. To facilitate research addressing this problem, we propose a new benchmark that requires an agent to reason about physical scenarios and take an action accordingly. Inspired by the physical knowledge acquired in infancy and the capabilities required for robots to operate in real-world environments, we identify 15 essential physical scenarios. For each scenario, we create a wide variety of distinct task templates, and we ensure all the task templates within the same scenario can be solved by using one specific physical rule. By having such a design, we evaluate two distinct levels of generalization, namely the local generalization and the broad generalization. We conduct an extensive evaluation with human players, learning agents with varying input types and architectures, and heuristic agents with different strategies. The benchmark gives a Phy-Q (physical reasoning quotient) score that reflects the physical reasoning ability of the agents. Our evaluation shows that 1) all agents fail to reach human performance, and 2) learning agents, even with good local generalization ability, struggle to learn the underlying physical reasoning rules and fail to generalize broadly. We encourage the development of intelligent agents with broad generalization abilities in physical domains.

We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0. We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.

Collision avoidance is one of the most important topics in the robotics field. The goal is to move the robots from initial locations to target locations such that they follow shortest non-colliding paths in the shortest time and with the least amount of energy. In this paper, a distributed and real-time algorithm for dense and complex 2D and 3D environments is proposed. This algorithm uses angular calculations to select the optimal direction for the movement of each robot and it has been shown that these separate calculations lead to a form of cooperative behavior among agents. We evaluated the proposed approach on various simulation and experimental scenarios and compared the results with FMP and ORCA, two important algorithms in this field. The results show that the proposed approach is at least 25% faster than ORCA and at least 7% faster than FMP and also more reliable than both methods. The proposed method is shown to enable fully autonomous navigation of a swarm of crazyflies.

The use of robots in non-industrial environments is set to continue increasing more and more over the coming years. Robots in industrial environments which are more structured, usually perform specific tasks in well-defined environments, whereas non-industrial environments can be complex and unpredictable, therefore robots that will operate in these environments need more skills – making enhanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) essential to success in service robotics. Essentially, AI in service robots brings learning and decision-making capabilities into applications that were previously inclined to do pre-programmed tasks. Within the broader category of AI, there are the subcategories of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Machine Learning is an application of AI that lets algorithms gather data and then learn from the data to make decisions based on what has been learned.

zoofs is a Python library for performing feature selection using a variety of nature-inspired wrapper algorithms. The algorithms range from swarm-intelligence to physics-based to Evolutionary. It's easy to use , flexible and powerful tool to reduce your feature size. - GitHub - jaswinder9051998/zoofs: zoofs is a Python library for performing feature selection using a variety of nature-inspired wrapper algorithms. The algorithms range from swarm-intelligence to physics-based to Evolutionary. It's easy to use , flexible and powerful tool to reduce your feature size.

Building accurate and predictive models of the underlying mechanisms of celestial motion has inspired fundamental developments in theoretical physics. Candidate theories seek to explain observations and predict future positions of planets, stars, and other astronomical bodies as faithfully as possible. We use a data-driven learning approach, extending that developed in Lu et al. ($2019$) and extended in Zhong et al. ($2020$), to a derive stable and accurate model for the motion of celestial bodies in our Solar System. Our model is based on a collective dynamics framework, and is learned from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab's development ephemerides. By modeling the major astronomical bodies in the Solar System as pairwise interacting agents, our learned model generate extremely accurate dynamics that preserve not only intrinsic geometric properties of the orbits, but also highly sensitive features of the dynamics, such as perihelion precession rates. Our learned model can provide a unified explanation to the observation data, especially in terms of reproducing the perihelion precession of Mars, Mercury, and the Moon. Moreover, Our model outperforms Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation in all cases and performs similarly to, and exceeds on the Moon, the Einstein-Infeld-Hoffman equations derived from Einstein's theory of general relativity.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), an emerging and promising field in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Starting with a tutorial of Federated Learning (FL) and RL, we then focus on the introduction of FRL as a new method with great potential by leveraging the basic idea of FL to improve the performance of RL while preserving data-privacy. According to the distribution characteristics of the agents in the framework, FRL algorithms can be divided into two categories, i.e. Horizontal Federated Reinforcement Learning (HFRL) and Vertical Federated Reinforcement Learning (VFRL). We provide the detailed definitions of each category by formulas, investigate the evolution of FRL from a technical perspective, and highlight its advantages over previous RL algorithms. In addition, the existing works on FRL are summarized by application fields, including edge computing, communication, control optimization, and attack detection. Finally, we describe and discuss several key research directions that are crucial to solving the open problems within FRL.

Contact centers have experienced overwhelming strain since the onset of the pandemic and for many organizations this chaotic trajectory has continued. In the travel industry, for example, airlines are currently facing record-breaking call volumes and their service agents are struggling to deal with a surge of inquiries. Delta reports call wait times of two to three hours and other major U.S. airlines have call wait times as long as 8 hours and 30 minutes. Extending superior customer experiences in these types of circumstances is challenging, if not impossible, and customer service agents are equally affected. The average customer service agent remains in their job for approximately one year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. As part of Microsoft's research into ways to use machine learning and AI to improve security defenses, the company has released an open source attack toolkit to let researchers create simulated network environments and see how they fare against attacks. Microsoft 365 Defender Research released CyberBattleSim, which creates a network simulation and models how threat actors can move laterally through the network looking for weak points. When building the attack simulation, enterprise defenders and researchers create various nodes on the network and indicate which services are running, which vulnerabilities are present, and what type of security controls are in place. Automated agents, representing threat actors, are deployed in the attack simulation to randomly execute actions as they try to take over the nodes. "The simulated attacker's goal is to take ownership of some portion of the network by exploiting these planted vulnerabilities.