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SMPL: Simulated Industrial Manufacturing and Process Control Learning Environments, Benjamin Decardi-Nelson

Neural Information Processing Systems

Traditional biological and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants are controlled by human workers or pre-defined thresholds. Modernized factories have advanced process control algorithms such as model predictive control (MPC). However, there is little exploration of applying deep reinforcement learning to control manufacturing plants. One of the reasons is the lack of high fidelity simulations and standard APIs for benchmarking. To bridge this gap, we develop an easy-to-use library that includes five high-fidelity simulation environments: BeerFMTEnv, ReactorEnv, AtropineEnv, PenSimEnv and mAbEnv, which cover a wide range of manufacturing processes. We build these environments on published dynamics models.


Targeted Sequential Indirect Experiment Design Niclas Dern Technical University of Munich Technical University of Munich Helmholtz Munich Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) Jason Hartford

Neural Information Processing Systems

Scientific hypotheses typically concern specific aspects of complex, imperfectly understood or entirely unknown mechanisms, such as the effect of gene expression levels on phenotypes or how microbial communities influence environmental health. Such queries are inherently causal (rather than purely associational), but in many settings, experiments can not be conducted directly on the target variables of interest, but are indirect. Therefore, they perturb the target variable, but do not remove potential confounding factors. If, additionally, the resulting experimental measurements are multi-dimensional and the studied mechanisms nonlinear, the query of interest is generally not identified. We develop an adaptive strategy to design indirect experiments that optimally inform a targeted query about the ground truth mechanism in terms of sequentially narrowing the gap between an upper and lower bound on the query. While the general formulation consists of a bi-level optimization procedure, we derive an efficiently estimable analytical kernel-based estimator of the bounds for the causal effect, a query of key interest, and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in confounded, multivariate, nonlinear synthetic settings.


A Unified, Scalable Framework for Neural Population Decoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Our ability to use deep learning approaches to decipher neural activity would likely benefit from greater scale, in terms of both model size and datasets. However, the integration of many neural recordings into one unified model is challenging, as each recording contains the activity of different neurons from different individual animals. In this paper, we introduce a training framework and architecture designed to model the population dynamics of neural activity across diverse, large-scale neural recordings. Our method first tokenizes individual spikes within the dataset to build an efficient representation of neural events that captures the fine temporal structure of neural activity. We then employ cross-attention and a PerceiverIO backbone to further construct a latent tokenization of neural population activities. Utilizing this architecture and training framework, we construct a large-scale multisession model trained on large datasets from seven nonhuman primates, spanning over 158 different sessions of recording from over 27,373 neural units and over 100 hours of recordings. In a number of different tasks, we demonstrate that our pretrained model can be rapidly adapted to new, unseen sessions with unspecified neuron correspondence, enabling few-shot performance with minimal labels. This work presents a powerful new approach for building deep learning tools to analyze neural data and stakes out a clear path to training at scale.


Accelerating Non-Maximum Suppression: A Graph Theory Perspective

Neural Information Processing Systems

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an indispensable post-processing step in object detection. With the continuous optimization of network models, NMS has become the "last mile" to enhance the efficiency of object detection.


The Gyro-Structure of Some Matrix Manifolds

Neural Information Processing Systems

This supplemental material provides the proofs for the Theorems and Lemmas presented in our paper. In Sections 7 and 8, we give more details on the proposed methods, datasets, experimental settings, and experimental results. To further demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we present a method for knowledge graph completion in Section 9. Please see the paper for references. Each frame contains the 3D coordinates of 31 body joints. We use all the action classes and follow the experimental protocol [15] in which 2 subjects are used for training and the remaining 3 subjects are used for testing.


The real Frankenstein's lab: Scientists want to grow 'spare' human BODIES - and claim they could 'revolutionize medicine'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A Frankenstein's lab for growing'spare' human bodies sounds like something ripped straight from an episode of Black Mirror. But scientists really want to make this gruesome concept a reality. In an article published in the MIT Technology Review, three Stanford University scientists argue that so-called'bodyoids' could'revolutionise' medicine. Bodyoids would be physiologically identical to a normal human but engineered not to have consciousness or experience pain, they write. The researchers argue that modern medical science is being held back by a severe shortage of'ethically sourced human bodies'.


The Gyro-Structure of Some Matrix Manifolds

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we study the gyrovector space structure (gyro-structure) of matrix manifolds. Our work is motivated by the success of hyperbolic neural networks (HNNs) that have demonstrated impressive performance in a variety of applications. At the heart of HNNs is the theory of gyrovector spaces that provides a powerful tool for studying hyperbolic geometry. Here we focus on two matrix manifolds, i.e., Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) and Grassmann manifolds, and consider connecting the Riemannian geometry of these manifolds with the basic operations, i.e., the binary operation and scalar multiplication on gyrovector spaces. Our work reveals some interesting facts about SPD and Grassmann manifolds. First, SPD matrices with the Affine-Invariant (AI) and Log-Euclidean (LE) geometries have rich structure with strong connection to hyperbolic geometry. Second, linear subspaces, when equipped with our proposed basic operations, form what we call gyrocommutative and gyrononreductive gyrogroups. Furthermore, they share remarkable analogies with gyrovector spaces. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach for human activity understanding and question answering.


Adaptive Experimentation When You Can't Experiment

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper introduces the confounded pure exploration transductive linear bandit (CPET-LB) problem. As a motivating example, often online services cannot directly assign users to specific control or treatment experiences either for business or practical reasons. In these settings, naively comparing treatment and control groups that may result from self-selection can lead to biased estimates of underlying treatment effects. Instead, online services can employ a properly randomized encouragement that incentivizes users toward a specific treatment. Our methodology provides online services with an adaptive experimental design approach for learning the best-performing treatment for such encouragement designs. We consider a more general underlying model captured by a linear structural equation and formulate pure exploration linear bandits in this setting. Though pure exploration has been extensively studied in standard adaptive experimental design settings, we believe this is the first work considering a setting where noise is confounded. Elimination-style algorithms using experimental design methods in combination with a novel finitetime confidence interval on an instrumental variable style estimator are presented with sample complexity upper bounds nearly matching a minimax lower bound. Finally, experiments are conducted that demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.