Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility across tasks, but aligning them with individual human preferences remains challenging due to the complexity and diversity of these preferences. Existing methods often overlook the fact that preferences are multi-objective, diverse, and hard to articulate, making full alignment difficult. In response, we propose an active preference learning framework that uses binary feedback to estimate user preferences across multiple objectives. Our approach leverages Bayesian inference to update preferences efficiently and reduces user feedback through an acquisition function that optimally selects queries. Additionally, we introduce a parameter to handle feedback noise and improve robustness. We validate our approach through theoretical analysis and experiments on language generation tasks, demonstrating its feedback efficiency and effectiveness in personalizing model responses.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is an important optimization problem underlying the deployment of robots in automated warehouses and factories. Despite the large body of work on this topic, most approaches make heavy simplifications, both on the environment and the agents, which make the resulting algorithms impractical for real-life scenarios. In this paper, we consider a realistic problem of online order delivery in a warehouse, where a fleet of robots bring the products belonging to each order from shelves to workstations. This creates a stream of inter-dependent pickup and delivery tasks and the associated MAPF problem consists of computing realistic collision-free robot trajectories fulfilling these tasks. To solve this MAPF problem, we propose an extension of the standard Prioritized Planning algorithm to deal with the inter-dependent tasks (Interleaved Prioritized Planning) and a novel Via-Point Star (VP*) algorithm to compute an optimal dynamics-compliant robot trajectory to visit a sequence of goal locations while avoiding moving obstacles. We prove the completeness of our approach and evaluate it in simulation as well as in a real warehouse.

Complex spatiotemporal dynamics of physicochemical processes are often modeled at a microscopic level (through e.g. atomistic, agent-based or lattice models) based on first principles. Some of these processes can also be successfully modeled at the macroscopic level using e.g. partial differential equations (PDEs) describing the evolution of the right few macroscopic observables (e.g. concentration and momentum fields). Deriving good macroscopic descriptions (the so-called "closure problem") is often a time-consuming process requiring deep understanding/intuition about the system of interest. Recent developments in data science provide alternative ways to effectively extract/learn accurate macroscopic descriptions approximating the underlying microscopic observations. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven framework for the identification of unavailable coarse-scale PDEs from microscopic observations via machine learning algorithms. Specifically, using Gaussian Processes, Artificial Neural Networks, and/or Diffusion Maps, the proposed framework uncovers the relation between the relevant macroscopic space fields and their time evolution (the right-hand-side of the explicitly unavailable macroscopic PDE). Interestingly, several choices equally representative of the data can be discovered. The framework will be illustrated through the data-driven discovery of macroscopic, concentration-level PDEs resulting from a fine-scale, Lattice Boltzmann level model of a reaction/transport process. Once the coarse evolution law is identified, it can be simulated to produce long-term macroscopic predictions. Different features (pros as well as cons) of alternative machine learning algorithms for performing this task (Gaussian Processes and Artificial Neural Networks), are presented and discussed.

In statistical modeling with Gaussian Process regression, it has been shown that combining (few) high-fidelity data with (many) low-fidelity data can enhance prediction accuracy, compared to prediction based on the few high-fidelity data only. Such information fusion techniques for multifidelity data commonly approach the high-fidelity model $f_h(t)$ as a function of two variables $(t,y)$, and then using $f_l(t)$ as the $y$ data. More generally, the high-fidelity model can be written as a function of several variables $(t,y_1,y_2....)$; the low-fidelity model $f_l$ and, say, some of its derivatives, can then be substituted for these variables. In this paper, we will explore mathematical algorithms for multifidelity information fusion that use such an approach towards improving the representation of the high-fidelity function with only a few training data points. Given that $f_h$ may not be a simple function -- and sometimes not even a function -- of $f_l$, we demonstrate that using additional functions of $t$, such as derivatives or shifts of $f_l$, can drastically improve the approximation of $f_h$ through Gaussian Processes. We also point out a connection with "embedology" techniques from topology and dynamical systems.