Unreliable predictions can occur when using artificial intelligence (AI) systems with negative consequences for downstream applications, particularly when employed for decision-making. Conformal prediction provides a model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification that can be applied to any dataset, irrespective of its distribution, post hoc. In contrast to other pixel-level uncertainty quantification methods, conformal prediction operates without requiring access to the underlying model and training dataset, concurrently offering statistically valid and informative prediction regions, all while maintaining computational efficiency. In response to the increased need to report uncertainty alongside point predictions, we bring attention to the promise of conformal prediction within the domain of Earth Observation (EO) applications. To accomplish this, we assess the current state of uncertainty quantification in the EO domain and found that only 20% of the reviewed Google Earth Engine (GEE) datasets incorporated a degree of uncertainty information, with unreliable methods prevalent. Next, we introduce modules that seamlessly integrate into existing GEE predictive modelling workflows and demonstrate the application of these tools for datasets spanning local to global scales, including the Dynamic World and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) datasets. These case studies encompass regression and classification tasks, featuring both traditional and deep learning-based workflows. Subsequently, we discuss the opportunities arising from the use of conformal prediction in EO. We anticipate that the increased availability of easy-to-use implementations of conformal predictors, such as those provided here, will drive wider adoption of rigorous uncertainty quantification in EO, thereby enhancing the reliability of uses such as operational monitoring and decision making.

Open domain entity state tracking aims to predict reasonable state changes of entities (i.e., [attribute] of [entity] was [before_state] and [after_state] afterwards) given the action descriptions. It's important to many reasoning tasks to support human everyday activities. However, it's challenging as the model needs to predict an arbitrary number of entity state changes caused by the action while most of the entities are implicitly relevant to the actions and their attributes as well as states are from open vocabularies. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end Knowledge Informed framework for open domain Entity State Tracking, namely KIEST, which explicitly retrieves the relevant entities and attributes from external knowledge graph (i.e., ConceptNet) and incorporates them to autoregressively generate all the entity state changes with a novel dynamic knowledge grained encoder-decoder framework. To enforce the logical coherence among the predicted entities, attributes, and states, we design a new constraint decoding strategy and employ a coherence reward to improve the decoding process. Experimental results show that our proposed KIEST framework significantly outperforms the strong baselines on the public benchmark dataset OpenPI.

Unlike satellite images, which are typically acquired and processed in near-real-time, global land cover products have historically been produced on an annual basis, often with substantial lag times between image processing and dataset release. We developed a new automated approach for globally consistent, high resolution, near real-time (NRT) land use land cover (LULC) classification leveraging deep learning on 10 m Sentinel-2 imagery. We utilize a highly scalable cloud-based system to apply this approach and provide an open, continuous feed of LULC predictions in parallel with Sentinel-2 acquisitions. This first-of-its-kind NRT product, which we collectively refer to as Dynamic World, accommodates a variety of user needs ranging from extremely up-to-date LULC data to custom global composites representing user-specified date ranges. Furthermore, the continuous nature of the product’s outputs enables refinement, extension, and even redefinition of the LULC classification. In combination, these unique attributes enable unprecedented flexibility for a diverse community of users across a variety of disciplines.

Self-supervised methods have shown tremendous success in the field of computer vision, including applications in remote sensing and medical imaging. Most popular contrastive-loss based methods like SimCLR, MoCo, MoCo-v2 use multiple views of the same image by applying contrived augmentations on the image to create positive pairs and contrast them with negative examples. Although these techniques work well, most of these techniques have been tuned on ImageNet (and similar computer vision datasets). While there have been some attempts to capture a richer set of deformations in the positive samples, in this work, we explore a promising alternative to generating positive examples for remote sensing data within the contrastive learning framework. Images captured from different sensors at the same location and nearby timestamps can be thought of as strongly augmented instances of the same scene, thus removing the need to explore and tune a set of hand crafted strong augmentations. In this paper, we propose a simple dual-encoder framework, which is pre-trained on a large unlabeled dataset (~1M) of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 image pairs. We test the embeddings on two remote sensing downstream tasks: flood segmentation and land cover mapping, and empirically show that embeddings learnt from this technique outperform the conventional technique of collecting positive examples via aggressive data augmentations.

One of the most difficult problems for an adaptable agent is gauging how to behave in a nonstationary environment. When conditions are stable, an organism generally pursues a strategy known to provide the best outcome. However, when environmental conditions change, an organism abandons the current action plan and searches for a new best option. The most challenging aspect of this search—calculating the exact time point at which to change strategies—requires the brain to integrate past and present observations and evaluate whether they remain consistent with current environmental conditions. On page 1076 of this issue, Domenech et al. ([ 1 ][1]) report on the modeling of rare direct electrical recordings from the prefrontal cortices (PFCs) of a small group of human epilepsy patients as they flexibly negotiated a nonstationary environment. To understand the brain's mode of navigation, consider for example a sailor at sea (see the figure). The winds and the currents determine the waves that drive the sailor to continuously adjust the rudder so as to stay on course. By observing the wave patterns, he can anticipate the navigational effects of his actions and adapt accordingly. But when the currents or the weather changes, the sailor must adapt his course to reach the next port of call. At that time, the sailor observes essentially the same stimulus (the waves) but has to remap his action plan (rudder adjustments) to the new wind conditions and currents. This difficult-decision problem—how to detect and then adapt to a nonstationary environment—is captured perfectly in the exploration-exploitation dilemma: When should I stop exploiting my current action plan and start exploring different ways to reach my goals? An optimal solution tracks the discounted sum of normalized future rewards. However, this approach applies strictly to stationary environments and thus does not capture the dynamic changes that organisms encounter in their daily lives ([ 2 ][2]). Yet the human brain and those of other species seem to smoothly solve the exploration-exploitation dilemma in nonstationary environments. Decision neuroscience has investigated the flexible adaptation to changing environmental contingencies with diverse experimental paradigms and assorted computational models. The simplest paradigm is probabilistic reversal learning, in which the agent has to search for reward among two options with complementary reward probabilities. This adaptation problem can be solved by hidden Markov models ([ 3 ][3]), which are well-approximated by reinforcement learning (RL) models that also update nonchosen actions ([ 4 ][4]). Extension of this paradigm to include independently changing reward probabilities reveals two distinct neural responses: Expected-value signals, which reflect “exploitative” choices, spur activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC); and “explorative” choices (that is, the choosing of a currently lesser valued option) activate the frontopolar cortex ([ 5 ][5]). ![Figure][6] A sailor solves a dilemma at sea As the ship nears bad weather, the sailor's ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) evaluates the ongoing (orange) action plan (exploitation) and the prospective (brown, red) plans (exploration). Once the red (calm waters) plan is exploited, the sailor's dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) uses trial-and-error learning to map the proper rudder adjustments. GRAPHIC: A. KITTERMAN/ SCIENCE Another task with both rapid and slow changes in the reward probabilities of various options was used to develop a hierarchical Bayesian model that estimates the volatility of the environment and adjusts the learning rate accordingly ([ 6 ][7]). This model has found its generalization in the hierarchical Gaussian filter (HGF) framework ([ 7 ][8]), which is widely used in modeling social and nonsocial human decision-making in nonstationary environments. Although these computational modeling frameworks differ, all are trying to solve similar problems: How to infer the latent structure of the world from discrete observations and how to detect transitions between different states of the world. Domenech et al. address the same problems with yet another experimental paradigm, this one carried out with a small group of human epilepsy patients. Electrodes deeply implanted in the patients' PFCs delivered direct electrical recordings from the vmPFC and dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) while the patients performed a multioption decision task. The participants had to associate three different stimuli with three distinct actions, thus constituting an action plan. The mapping changed every 33 to 57 trials, and participants had to relearn the association of the same stimuli with a different combination of actions, much like our sailor at sea who faces changes in weather and currents that alter wave patterns. The computational model ([ 8 ][9]) generates a reliability value for the ongoing action plan and other concurrently monitored plans. When the ongoing action plan is deemed reliable, the model is in “exploitation” mode and learns the stimulus-action mapping through RL mechanisms. When the ongoing action plan is deemed unreliable, the model switches to “exploration” mode. New provisional action plans are created and evaluated, until one emerges as a reliable predictor for successful stimulus-action mapping (see the figure). Using a state-of-the-art model-based analysis that associates the model-derived variables with the brain activity in various frequency bands of the neural recordings, the authors found a delicate interplay between the vmPFC and dmPFC that supports a predictive coding interpretation for resolution of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. vmPFC monitors and represents the reliability of the ongoing action plan. vmPFC relays the ongoing action plan to the dmPFC as either a “stay” or “switch” trial. A stay trial triggers additional learning through RL mechanisms in the dmPFC. In contrast, the dmPFC responds to a switch trial by suppressing activity related to maintaining the ongoing action plan. These findings resonate with and extend earlier results obtained with functional neuroimaging ([ 5 ][5], [ 9 ][10]). These computational approaches to the problem of behavioral flexibility in a nonstationary environment share one commonality: They are all building a model of the environment and the transition therein, either explicitly (as in the HGF framework) or implicitly (by evaluating the ongoing action plan, as in the Domenech et al. study). Although all of these models strive for generality, each was developed for a specific experimental context. It remains to be seen which of these provides the best account of flexible decision-making in humans and other species, preferably using a unified experimental paradigm. A model-free RL account ([ 10 ][11]) likely will not suffice, as several studies have demonstrated the superiority of more-complex models over this “vanilla” RL model. 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Communication Service Providers will now be able to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to turn vast amounts of telecommunications network data into proactive resolutions for pressing assurance challenges. Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled its HPE Intelligent Assurance Suite at Digital Transformation World this week, describing it as an AI platform that can automate a dynamic world and enable zero-touch operations. According to HPE's VP and GM of communications and media solutions, David Sliter, HPE intelligent Assurance is a new and'major' step in the achievement of the company's vision. "It combines machine learning based intelligence with AI-driven automation to predict problems and proactively resolve them, 24/7." Sliter also says communication service providers (CSPs) now have an opportunity to transform into digital service providers.

The idea is that although an AI system without the frame problem might, say, read an echocardiogram and diagnose a heart defect, a really smart autonomous robot will arrive only if, like us humans, it can handle the frame problem. The highlight … is an entertaining go-round between two pugilists trading blows in civil but gloves-off style, reminiscent of a net discussion. We're still confronted by a difficult question: Is there a solution to it? If not, then R2D2 might forever be but a creature of fiction. If, however, the frame problem is solvable, we must confront yet another question: Is there a general solution to the frame problem, or is the best that can be mustered a so-called domain-dependent solution?

For problems such as pathfinding in video games and robotics, a search algorithm must be real-time (return the next move within a fixed time bound) and dynamic (accommodate edge costs that can increase and decrease before the goal is reached). Existing real-time search algorithms, such as LSS-LRTA*, can handle edge cost increases but do not handle edge cost decreases. Existing dynamic search algorithms, such as D* Lite, are not real-time. We show how these two families of algorithms can be combined using bidirectional search, producing Real-Time D* (RTD*), the first real-time search algorithm designed for dynamic worlds. Our empirical evaluation shows that, for dynamic grid pathfinding, RTD* results in significantly shorter trajectories than either LSS-LRTA* or naive real-time adaptations of D* Lite because of its ability to opportunistically exploit shortcuts.

Navigating through the Frame Problem: Review of Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World