In the context of multi-agent reinforcement learning, generalization is a challenge to solve various tasks that may require different joint policies or coordination without relying on policies specialized for each task. We refer to this type of problem as a multi-task, and we train agents to be versatile in this multi-task setting through a single training process. To address this challenge, we introduce TRajectory-class-Aware Multi-Agent reinforcement learning (TRAMA). In TRAMA, agents recognize a task type by identifying the class of trajectories they are experiencing through partial observations, and the agents use this trajectory awareness or prediction as additional information for action policy. To this end, we introduce three primary objectives in TRAMA: (a) constructing a quantized latent space to generate trajectory embeddings that reflect key similarities among them; (b) conducting trajectory clustering using these trajectory embeddings; and (c) building a trajectory-class-aware policy. Specifically for (c), we introduce a trajectory-class predictor that performs agent-wise predictions on the trajectory class; and we design a trajectory-class representation model for each trajectory class. Each agent takes actions based on this trajectory-class representation along with its partial observation for task-aware execution. The proposed method is evaluated on various tasks, including multi-task problems built upon StarCraft II. Empirical results show further performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

Mechanisms are designed to perform functions in various fields. Often, there is no unique mechanism that performs a well-defined function. For example, vehicle suspensions are designed to improve driving performance and ride comfort, but different types are available depending on the environment. This variability in design makes performance comparison difficult. Additionally, the traditional design process is multi-step, gradually reducing the number of design candidates while performing costly analyses to meet target performance. Recently, AI models have been used to reduce the computational cost of FEA. However, there are limitations in data availability and different analysis environments, especially when transitioning from low-fidelity to high-fidelity analysis. In this paper, we propose a multi-fidelity design framework aimed at recommending optimal types and designs of mechanical mechanisms. As an application, vehicle suspension systems were selected, and several types were defined. For each type, mechanism parameters were generated and converted into 3D CAD models, followed by low-fidelity rigid body dynamic analysis under driving conditions. To effectively build a deep learning-based multi-fidelity surrogate model, the results of the low-fidelity analysis were analyzed using DBSCAN and sampled at 5% for high-cost flexible body dynamic analysis. After training the multi-fidelity model, a multi-objective optimization problem was formulated for the performance metrics of each suspension type. Finally, we recommend the optimal type and design based on the input to optimize ride comfort-related performance metrics. To validate the proposed methodology, we extracted basic design rules of Pareto solutions using data mining techniques. We also verified the effectiveness and applicability by comparing the results with those obtained from a conventional deep learning-based design process.

Molecules have a number of distinct properties whose importance and application vary. Often, in reality, labels for some properties are hard to achieve despite their practical importance. A common solution to such data scarcity is to use models of good generalization with transfer learning. This involves domain experts for designing source and target tasks whose features are shared. However, this approach has limitations: i). Difficulty in accurate design of source-target task pairs due to the large number of tasks, and ii). corresponding computational burden verifying many trials and errors of transfer learning design, thereby iii). constraining the potential of foundation modeling of multi-task molecular property prediction. We address the limitations of the manual design of transfer learning via data-driven bi-level optimization. The proposed method enables scalable multi-task transfer learning for molecular property prediction by automatically obtaining the optimal transfer ratios. Empirically, the proposed method improved the prediction performance of 40 molecular properties and accelerated training convergence.

Training deep learning models on limited data while maintaining generalization is one of the fundamental challenges in molecular property prediction. One effective solution is transferring knowledge extracted from abundant datasets to those with scarce data. Recently, a novel algorithm called Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder (GATE) has been introduced, which uses soft parameter sharing by aligning the geometrical shapes of task-specific latent spaces. However, GATE faces limitations in scaling to multiple tasks due to computational costs. In this study, we propose a task addition approach for GATE to improve performance on target tasks with limited data while minimizing computational complexity. It is achieved through supervised multi-task pre-training on a large dataset, followed by the addition and training of task-specific modules for each target task. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the task addition strategy for GATE over conventional multi-task methods, with comparable computational costs.

Molecular datasets often suffer from a lack of data. It is well-known that gathering data is difficult due to the complexity of experimentation or simulation involved. Here, we leverage mutual information across different tasks in molecular data to address this issue. We extend an algorithm that utilizes the geometric characteristics of the encoding space, known as the Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder (GATE), to a multi-task setup. Thus, we connect multiple molecular tasks by aligning the curved coordinates onto locally flat coordinates, ensuring the flow of information from source tasks to support performance on target data.

Mechanisms are essential components designed to perform specific tasks in various mechanical systems. However, designing a mechanism that satisfies certain kinematic or quasi-static requirements is a challenging task. The kinematic requirements may include the workspace of a mechanism, while the quasi-static requirements of a mechanism may include its torque transmission, which refers to the ability of the mechanism to transfer power and torque effectively. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based generative model for generating multiple crank-rocker four-bar linkage mechanisms that satisfy both the kinematic and quasi-static requirements aforementioned. The proposed model is based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) with modifications for mechanism synthesis, which is trained to learn the relationship between the requirements of a mechanism with respect to linkage lengths. The results demonstrate that the proposed model successfully generates multiple distinct mechanisms that satisfy specific kinematic and quasi-static requirements. To evaluate the novelty of our approach, we provide a comparison of the samples synthesized by the proposed cGAN, traditional cVAE and NSGA-II. Our approach has several advantages over traditional design methods. It enables designers to efficiently generate multiple diverse and feasible design candidates while exploring a large design space. Also, the proposed model considers both the kinematic and quasi-static requirements, which can lead to more efficient and effective mechanisms for real-world use, making it a promising tool for linkage mechanism design.

This paper proposes a framework that optimizes the linkage mechanism of the quasi-serial manipulator for target tasks. This process is explained through a case study of 2-degree-of-freedom linkage mechanisms, which significantly affect the workspace of the quasi-serial manipulator. First, a vast quasi-serial mechanism is generated with a workspace satisfying a target task and it converts it into a 3D CAD model. Then, the workspace and required torque performance of each mechanism are evaluated through kinematic and dynamic analysis. A deep learning-based surrogate model is leveraged to efficiently predict mechanisms and performance during the optimization process. After model training, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated under the mechanical and dynamic conditions of the manipulator. The design goal of the manipulator is to recommend quasi-serial mechanisms with optimized kinematic (workspace) and dynamic (joint torque) performance that satisfies the target task. To investigate the underlying physics from the obtained Pareto solutions, various data mining techniques are performed to extract design rules that can provide practical design guidance. Finally, the manipulator was designed in detail for realization with 3D printed parts, including topology optimization. Also, the task-based optimized manipulator is verified through a payload test. Based on these results, the proposed framework has the potential for other real applications as realized cases and provides a reasonable design plan through the design rule extraction.

Transfer learning is a crucial technique for handling a small amount of data that is potentially related to other abundant data. However, most of the existing methods are focused on classification tasks using images and language datasets. Therefore, in order to expand the transfer learning scheme to regression tasks, we propose a novel transfer technique based on differential geometry, namely the Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder (GATE). In this method, we interpret the latent vectors from the model to exist on a Riemannian curved manifold. We find a proper diffeomorphism between pairs of tasks to ensure that every arbitrary point maps to a locally flat coordinate in the overlapping region, allowing the transfer of knowledge from the source to the target data. This also serves as an effective regularizer for the model to behave in extrapolation regions. In this article, we demonstrate that GATE outperforms conventional methods and exhibits stable behavior in both the latent space and extrapolation regions for various molecular graph datasets.

Deep learning has made significant strides in video understanding tasks, but the computation required to classify lengthy and massive videos using clip-level video classifiers remains impractical and prohibitively expensive. To address this issue, we propose Audio-Visual Glance Network (AVGN), which leverages the commonly available audio and visual modalities to efficiently process the spatio-temporally important parts of a video. AVGN firstly divides the video into snippets of image-audio clip pair and employs lightweight unimodal encoders to extract global visual features and audio features. To identify the important temporal segments, we use an Audio-Visual Temporal Saliency Transformer (AV-TeST) that estimates the saliency scores of each frame. To further increase efficiency in the spatial dimension, AVGN processes only the important patches instead of the whole images. We use an Audio-Enhanced Spatial Patch Attention (AESPA) module to produce a set of enhanced coarse visual features, which are fed to a policy network that produces the coordinates of the important patches. This approach enables us to focus only on the most important spatio-temporally parts of the video, leading to more efficient video recognition. Moreover, we incorporate various training techniques and multi-modal feature fusion to enhance the robustness and effectiveness of our AVGN. By combining these strategies, our AVGN sets new state-of-the-art performance in multiple video recognition benchmarks while achieving faster processing speed.

Standard multi-modal models assume the use of the same modalities in training and inference stages. However, in practice, the environment in which multi-modal models operate may not satisfy such assumption. As such, their performances degrade drastically if any modality is missing in the inference stage. We ask: how can we train a model that is robust to missing modalities? This paper seeks a set of good practices for multi-modal action recognition, with a particular interest in circumstances where some modalities are not available at an inference time. First, we study how to effectively regularize the model during training (e.g., data augmentation). Second, we investigate on fusion methods for robustness to missing modalities: we find that transformer-based fusion shows better robustness for missing modality than summation or concatenation. Third, we propose a simple modular network, ActionMAE, which learns missing modality predictive coding by randomly dropping modality features and tries to reconstruct them with the remaining modality features. Coupling these good practices, we build a model that is not only effective in multi-modal action recognition but also robust to modality missing. Our model achieves the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmarks and maintains competitive performances even in missing modality scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/sangminwoo/ActionMAE.