Crop production management is essential for optimizing yield and minimizing a field's environmental impact to crop fields, yet it remains challenging due to the complex and stochastic processes involved. Recently, researchers have turned to machine learning to address these complexities. Specifically, reinforcement learning (RL), a cutting-edge approach designed to learn optimal decision-making strategies through trial and error in dynamic environments, has emerged as a promising tool for developing adaptive crop management policies. RL models aim to optimize long-term rewards by continuously interacting with the environment, making them well-suited for tackling the uncertainties and variability inherent in crop management. Studies have shown that RL can generate crop management policies that compete with, and even outperform, expert-designed policies within simulation-based crop models. In the gym-DSSAT crop model environment, one of the most widely used simulators for crop management, proximal policy optimization (PPO) and deep Q-networks (DQN) have shown promising results. However, these methods have not yet been systematically evaluated under identical conditions. In this study, we evaluated PPO and DQN against static baseline policies across three different RL tasks, fertilization, irrigation, and mixed management, provided by the gym-DSSAT environment. To ensure a fair comparison, we used consistent default parameters, identical reward functions, and the same environment settings. Our results indicate that PPO outperforms DQN in fertilization and irrigation tasks, while DQN excels in the mixed management task. This comparative analysis provides critical insights into the strengths and limitations of each approach, advancing the development of more effective RL-based crop management strategies.

As widely used feature extraction approaches in machine learning, dimensionality reduction (DR) methods [53, 7, 20, 12] learn projections such that the projected lower dimensional subspaces maintain the coherent structure of datasets and reduce computational costs of classification or clustering. The linear projection obtained from linear DR methods takes the form of a matrix such that the embedding to the lower dimensional subspace only involves matrix multiplications. Due to such ease in interpretation and implementation, linear DR methods are often the favored choice among numerous DR methods. For example, principal component analysis (PCA) [24] seeks to find a linear projection that preserves the dataset's variation and is one of the most common and well-known DR methods. Other well-known DR methods include Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA) [24] to take into account the information of classes and compute a linear projection that best separates different classes, and Mahalanobis metric learning [35] to seek a distance metric that better models the relationship among dataset from a linear projection. Wasserstein discriminant analysis (WDA) [19] is a supervised linear DR that is based on the use of regularized Wasserstein distances [13] as a distance metric. Similar to Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA), WDA seeks a projection matrix to maximize the dispersion of projected points between different classes and minimize the dispersion of projected points within same classes.

Multi-view datasets are increasingly collected in many real-world applications, and we have seen better learning performance by existing multi-view learning methods than by conventional single-view learning methods applied to each view individually. But, most of these multi-view learning methods are built on the assumption that at each instance no view is missing and all data points from all views must be perfectly paired. Hence they cannot handle unpaired data but ignore them completely from their learning process. However, unpaired data can be more abundant in reality than paired ones and simply ignoring all unpaired data incur tremendous waste in resources. In this paper, we focus on learning uncorrelated features by semi-paired subspace learning, motivated by many existing works that show great successes of learning uncorrelated features. Specifically, we propose a generalized uncorrelated multi-view subspace learning framework, which can naturally integrate many proven learning criteria on the semi-paired data. To showcase the flexibility of the framework, we instantiate five new semi-paired models for both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. We also design a successive alternating approximation (SAA) method to solve the resulting optimization problem and the method can be combined with the powerful Krylov subspace projection technique if needed. Extensive experimental results on multi-view feature extraction and multi-modality classification show that our proposed models perform competitively to or better than the baselines.

We establish a family of subspace-based learning method for multi-view learning using the least squares as the fundamental basis. Specifically, we investigate orthonormalized partial least squares (OPLS) and study its important properties for both multivariate regression and classification. Building on the least squares reformulation of OPLS, we propose a unified multi-view learning framework to learn a classifier over a common latent space shared by all views. The regularization technique is further leveraged to unleash the power of the proposed framework by providing three generic types of regularizers on its inherent ingredients including model parameters, decision values and latent projected points. We instantiate a set of regularizers in terms of various priors. The proposed framework with proper choices of regularizers not only can recast existing methods, but also inspire new models. To further improve the performance of the proposed framework on complex real problems, we propose to learn nonlinear transformations parameterized by deep networks. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare various methods on nine data sets with different numbers of views in terms of both feature extraction and cross-modal retrieval.

In this paper, we propose an interpretation of active learning from a pure algebraic view and combine it with semi-supervised manifold learning. The proposed active manifold learning algorithm aims to learn the low-dimensional parameter space of the manifold with high accuracy from smartly labeled samples. We demonstrate that this problem is equivalent to a condition number minimization problem of the alignment matrix. Focusing on this problem, we first give a theoretical upper bound for the solution. Then we develop a heuristic but effective sample selection algorithm with the help of the Gershgorin circle theorem. We investigate the rationality, the feasibility, the universality and the complexity of the proposed method and demonstrate that our method yields encouraging active learning results.