The following study presents results obtained from experiments in which, before training a classification model, we added noise to the labels of the training set, so that the information contained in this set is not entirely correct. In fact, most datasets encountered in practical situations contain some degree of noise, which highlights the importance of this type of study for new techniques before implementing them in real-world applications. In this case, we are interested in measuring the impact of noise addition on BCOPS (Guan & Tib-shirani, 2022), a algorithm based on conformal prediction (V ovk et al., 2005) which, when combined with other machine learning methods, allows the construction of prediction sets for the test set observations in classification tasks. Prediction sets are sets that contain the possible values (for regression tasks) or possible classes (for classification tasks) for new observations. These sets are constructed so that the probability of the true value or class being contained within them meets a coverage guarantee. In the work developed by Guan & Tibshirani (2022), the possibility of using these prediction sets to detect outlier observations - meaning, observations whose true class was not present during training - is emphasized. Thus, we aim to measure both the classification coverage and the abstention rate on outlier observations of the BCOPS algorithm under the addition of noise, considering some of the datasets and machine learning algorithms used by Guan & Tibshirani (2022).

Using LLMs not to predict plans but to formalize an environment into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has been shown to improve performance and control. Existing work focuses on fully observable environments; we tackle the more realistic and challenging partially observable environments that lack of complete, reliable information. We propose PDDLego+, a framework to iteratively formalize, plan, grow, and refine PDDL representations in a zero-shot manner, without needing access to any existing trajectories. On two textual simulated environments, we show that PDDLego+ improves goal reaching success and exhibits robustness against problem complexity. We also show that the domain knowledge captured after a successful trial can benefit future tasks.

Robotic navigation in complex environments remains a critical research challenge. Traditional navigation methods focus on optimal trajectory generation within free space, struggling in environments lacking viable paths to the goal, such as disaster zones or cluttered warehouses. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive interactive navigation approach that proactively interacts with environments to create feasible paths to reach originally unavailable goals. Specifically, we present a primitive tree for task planning with large language models (LLMs), facilitating effective reasoning to determine interaction objects and sequences. To ensure robust subtask execution, we adopt reinforcement learning to pre-train a comprehensive skill library containing versatile locomotion and interaction behaviors for motion planning. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive replanning method featuring two LLM-based modules: an advisor serving as a flexible replanning trigger and an arborist for autonomous plan adjustment. Integrated with the tree structure, the replanning mechanism allows for convenient node addition and pruning, enabling rapid plan modification in unknown environments. Comprehensive simulations and experiments have demonstrated our method's effectiveness and adaptivity in diverse scenarios. The supplementary video is available at page: https://youtu.be/W5ttPnSap2g.

Maps of dynamics are effective representations of motion patterns learned from prior observations, with recent research demonstrating their ability to enhance performance in various downstream tasks such as human-aware robot navigation, long-term human motion prediction, and robot localization. Current advancements have primarily concentrated on methods for learning maps of human flow in environments where the flow is static, i.e., not assumed to change over time. In this paper we propose a method to update the CLiFF-map, one type of map of dynamics, for achieving efficient life-long robot operation. As new observations are collected, our goal is to update a CLiFF-map to effectively and accurately integrate new observations, while retaining relevant historic motion patterns. The proposed online update method maintains a probabilistic representation in each observed location, updating parameters by continuously tracking sufficient statistics. In experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our method is able to maintain accurate representations of human motion dynamics, contributing to high performance flow-compliant planning downstream tasks, while being orders of magnitude faster than the comparable baselines.

Instance-incremental learning (IIL) focuses on learning continually with data of the same classes. Compared to class-incremental learning (CIL), the IIL is seldom explored because IIL suffers less from catastrophic forgetting (CF). However, besides retaining knowledge, in real-world deployment scenarios where the class space is always predefined, continual and cost-effective model promotion with the potential unavailability of previous data is a more essential demand. Therefore, we first define a new and more practical IIL setting as promoting the model's performance besides resisting CF with only new observations. Two issues have to be tackled in the new IIL setting: 1) the notorious catastrophic forgetting because of no access to old data, and 2) broadening the existing decision boundary to new observations because of concept drift. To tackle these problems, our key insight is to moderately broaden the decision boundary to fail cases while retain old boundary. Hence, we propose a novel decision boundary-aware distillation method with consolidating knowledge to teacher to ease the student learning new knowledge. We also establish the benchmarks on existing datasets Cifar-100 and ImageNet. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that the teacher model can be a better incremental learner than the student model, which overturns previous knowledge distillation-based methods treating student as the main role.

Analytical models developed in offline settings with pre-prepared data are typically used to predict students' performance. However, when data are available over time, this learning method is not suitable anymore. Online learning is increasingly used to update the online models from stream data. A rehearsal technique is typically used, which entails re-training the model on a small training set that is updated each time new data is received. The main challenge in this regard is the construction of the training set with appropriate data samples to maintain good model performance. Typically, a random selection of samples is made, which can deteriorate the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a memory-based online incremental learning approach for updating an online classifier that predicts student performance using stream data. The approach is based on the use of the genetic algorithm heuristic while respecting the memory space constraints as well as the balance of class labels. In contrast to random selection, our approach improves the stability of the analytical model by promoting diversity when creating the training set. As a proof of concept, we applied it to the open dataset OULAD. Our approach achieves a notable improvement in model accuracy, with an enhancement of nearly 10% compared to the current state-of-the-art, while maintaining a relatively low standard deviation in accuracy, ranging from 1% to 2.1%.

The Space Domain Awareness (SDA) community routinely tracks satellites in orbit by fitting an orbital state to observations made by the Space Surveillance Network (SSN). In order to fit such orbits, an accurate model of the forces that are acting on the satellite is required. Over the past several decades, high-quality, physics-based models have been developed for satellite state estimation and propagation. These models are exceedingly good at estimating and propagating orbital states for non-maneuvering satellites; however, there are several classes of anomalous accelerations that a satellite might experience which are not well-modeled, such as satellites that use low-thrust electric propulsion to modify their orbit. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a valuable tool for these classes of satellites as they combine physics models with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which are highly expressive and versatile function approximators. By combining a physics model with a DNN, the machine learning model need not learn astrodynamics, which results in more efficient and effective utilization of machine learning resources. This paper details the application of PINNs to estimate the orbital state and a continuous, low-amplitude anomalous acceleration profile for satellites. The PINN is trained to learn the unknown acceleration by minimizing the mean square error of observations. We evaluate the performance of pure physics models with PINNs in terms of their observation residuals and their propagation accuracy beyond the fit span of the observations. For a two-day simulation of a GEO satellite using an unmodeled acceleration profile on the order of $10^{-8} \text{ km/s}^2$, the PINN outperformed the best-fit physics model by orders of magnitude for both observation residuals (123 arcsec vs 1.00 arcsec) as well as propagation accuracy (3860 km vs 164 km after five days).

We study active perception from first principles to argue that an autonomous agent performing active perception should maximize the mutual information that past observations posses about future ones. Doing so requires (a) a representation of the scene that summarizes past observations and the ability to update this representation to incorporate new observations (state estimation and mapping), (b) the ability to synthesize new observations of the scene (a generative model), and (c) the ability to select control trajectories that maximize predictive information (planning). This motivates a neural radiance field (NeRF)-like representation which captures photometric, geometric and semantic properties of the scene grounded. This representation is well-suited to synthesizing new observations from different viewpoints. And thereby, a sampling-based planner can be used to calculate the predictive information from synthetic observations along dynamically-feasible trajectories. We use active perception for exploring cluttered indoor environments and employ a notion of semantic uncertainty to check for the successful completion of an exploration task. We demonstrate these ideas via simulation in realistic 3D indoor environments.

Capturing the conditional covariances or correlations among the elements of a multivariate response vector based on covariates is important to various fields including neuroscience, epidemiology and biomedicine. We propose a new method called Covariance Regression with Random Forests (CovRegRF) to estimate the covariance matrix of a multivariate response given a set of covariates, using a random forest framework. Random forest trees are built with a splitting rule specially designed to maximize the difference between the sample covariance matrix estimates of the child nodes. We also propose a significance test for the partial effect of a subset of covariates. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method and significance test through a simulation study which shows that the proposed method provides accurate covariance matrix estimates and that the Type-1 error is well controlled. An application of the proposed method to thyroid disease data is also presented. CovRegRF is implemented in a freely available R package on CRAN.

Transforming a design into a high-quality product is a challenge in metal additive manufacturing due to rare events which can cause defects to form. Detecting these events in-situ could, however, reduce inspection costs, enable corrective action, and is the first step towards a future of tailored material properties. In this study a model is trained on laser input information to predict nominal laser melting conditions. An anomaly score is then calculated by taking the difference between the predictions and new observations. The model is evaluated on a dataset with known defects achieving an F1 score of 0.821. This study shows that anomaly detection methods are an important tool in developing robust defect detection methods.