Some of the world's biggest companies are going all-in on the metaverse. One you may not know about is Ansys, a US public company that makes engineering simulation software and has been around since 1970. Dr. Prith Banerjee is its Chief Technology Officer, and I spoke to him last week about his vision for the metaverse -- and specifically, why he thinks the metaverse can't reach its full potential without "optimum physics-based modeling and simulation." Ansys, it turns out, already has a number of partnerships with companies building the metaverse -- including global telecoms companies, microchip and GPU manufacturers, data center and storage companies, and "all the cloud providers," according to Banerjee. He said that Ansys provides a mix of hardware and software expertise to these customers; everything from building hardware to designing a structural electromagnetics system.

In automatic speech recognition (ASR) research, discriminative criteria have achieved superior performance in DNN-HMM systems. Given this success, the adoption of discriminative criteria is promising to boost the performance of end-to-end (E2E) ASR systems. With this motivation, previous works have introduced the minimum Bayesian risk (MBR, one of the discriminative criteria) into E2E ASR systems. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of the MBR-based methods are compromised: the MBR criterion is only used in system training, which creates a mismatch between training and decoding; the on-the-fly decoding process in MBR-based methods results in the need for pre-trained models and slow training speeds. To this end, novel algorithms are proposed in this work to integrate another widely used discriminative criterion, lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI), into E2E ASR systems not only in the training stage but also in the decoding process. The proposed LF-MMI training and decoding methods show their effectiveness on two widely used E2E frameworks: Attention-Based Encoder-Decoders (AEDs) and Neural Transducers (NTs). Compared with MBR-based methods, the proposed LF-MMI method: maintains the consistency between training and decoding; eschews the on-the-fly decoding process; trains from randomly initialized models with superior training efficiency. Experiments suggest that the LF-MMI method outperforms its MBR counterparts and consistently leads to statistically significant performance improvements on various frameworks and datasets from 30 hours to 14.3k hours. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on Aishell-1 (CER 4.10%) and Aishell-2 (CER 5.02%) datasets. Code is released.

Designing and implementing explainable systems is seen as the next step towards increasing user trust in, acceptance of and reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. While explaining choices made by black-box algorithms such as machine learning and deep learning has occupied most of the limelight, systems that attempt to explain decisions (even simple ones) in the context of social choice are steadily catching up. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of explainability in mechanism design, a domain characterized by economically motivated agents and often having no single choice that maximizes all individual utility functions. We discuss the main properties and goals of explainability in mechanism design, distinguishing them from those of Explainable AI in general. This discussion is followed by a thorough review of the challenges one may face when working on Explainable Mechanism Design and propose a few solution concepts to those.

Node classification using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely applied in various real-world scenarios. However, in recent years, compelling evidence emerges that the performance of GNN-based node classification may deteriorate substantially by topological perturbation, such as random connections or adversarial attacks. Various solutions, such as topological denoising methods and mechanism design methods, have been proposed to develop robust GNN-based node classifiers but none of these works can fully address the problems related to topological perturbations. Recently, the Bayesian label transition model is proposed to tackle this issue but its slow convergence may lead to inferior performance. In this work, we propose a new label inference model, namely LInDT, which integrates both Bayesian label transition and topology-based label propagation for improving the robustness of GNNs against topological perturbations. LInDT is superior to existing label transition methods as it improves the label prediction of uncertain nodes by utilizing neighborhood-based label propagation leading to better convergence of label inference. Besides, LIndT adopts asymmetric Dirichlet distribution as a prior, which also helps it to improve label inference. Extensive experiments on five graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of LInDT for GNN-based node classification under three scenarios of topological perturbations.

Algorithmic Game theory is about strategic interactions among intelligent individuals, and mechanism design is about creating effective incentives in economic settings. Together, they're fascinating ways to understand human behavior and the challenges of designing and building systems. Algorithmic game theory (AGT) is a way of analyzing social interactions that use mathematical models to predict the strategies that individuals will adopt in any given situation. A simple game theory model can predict human behavior in many situations. But the surprising thing is that this same model can also explain the complex, self-organizing systems that power the World Wide Web.

Autonomous bin picking poses significant challenges to vision-driven robotic systems given the complexity of the problem, ranging from various sensor modalities, to highly entangled object layouts, to diverse item properties and gripper types. Existing methods often address the problem from one perspective. Diverse items and complex bin scenes require diverse picking strategies together with advanced reasoning. As such, to build robust and effective machine-learning algorithms for solving this complex task requires significant amounts of comprehensive and high quality data. Collecting such data in real world would be too expensive and time prohibitive and therefore intractable from a scalability perspective. To tackle this big, diverse data problem, we take inspiration from the recent rise in the concept of metaverses, and introduce MetaGraspNet, a large-scale photo-realistic bin picking dataset constructed via physics-based metaverse synthesis. The proposed dataset contains 217k RGBD images across 82 different article types, with full annotations for object detection, amodal perception, keypoint detection, manipulation order and ambidextrous grasp labels for a parallel-jaw and vacuum gripper. We also provide a real dataset consisting of over 2.3k fully annotated high-quality RGBD images, divided into 5 levels of difficulties and an unseen object set to evaluate different object and layout properties. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments showing that our proposed vacuum seal model and synthetic dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to real world use-cases.

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Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) is the burgeoning field combining scientific knowledge with machine learning for data-efficient predictive modeling. We will introduce SciML as the key to effective learning in many engineering applications, such as improving the fidelity of climate models to accelerating clinical trials. This will lead us to the question on the frontier of SciML: what about stiffness? Stiffness is a pervasive quality throughout engineering systems and the most common cause of numerical difficulties in simulation. We will see that handling stiffness in learning, and thus real-world models, requires new training techniques.

In this work we improve forecasting of Sea Surface A recent and promising line of work consists of combining Height (SSH) and current velocity (speed and direction) ML with physics-based models -- often referred to as in oceanic scenarios. We do so by resorting Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML). Such an approach to Random Forests so as to predict the error of a numerical aims to take advantage of both the power of pattern forecasting system developed for the Santos recognition given by ML approaches and the power of generalization Channel in Brazil. We have used the Santos Operational in unseen scenarios given by the physics-based Forecasting System (SOFS) and data collected model. in situ between the years of 2019 and 2021. This work expands on our previous work [Moreno et al., In previous studies we have applied similar methods 2022] where PIML was used to correct the error predicted for current velocity in the channel entrance, in by a numerical model of the speed of water current in a this work we expand the application to improve the measuring station. Our main contribution here consists of SHH forecast and include four other stations in the inserting a correction for the direction of the water current channel. We have obtained an average reduction and the sea surface height (SSH) predicted by the numerical of 11.9% in forecasting Root-Mean Square Error model into the PIML model. In addition, we expand the (RMSE) and 38.7% in bias with our approach. We corrections to other measurement stations in the Santos-São also obtained an increase of Agreement (IOA) in 10 Vicente-Bertioga Estuarine System region on the Brazilian of the 14 combinations of forecasted variables and coast.