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A Recurrent Neural Circuit Mechanism of T emporal-scaling Equivariant Representation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Time perception is fundamental in our daily life. An important feature of time perception is temporal scaling (TS): the ability to generate temporal sequences (e.g., movements) with different speeds. However, it is largely unknown about the mathematical principle underlying TS in the brain.




Creating Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies in Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

What is a useful skill hierarchy for an autonomous agent? We propose an answer based on a graphical representation of how the interaction between an agent and its environment may unfold. Our approach uses modularity maximisation as a central organising principle to expose the structure of the interaction graph at multiple levels of abstraction. The result is a collection of skills that operate at varying time scales, organised into a hierarchy, where skills that operate over longer time scales are composed of skills that operate over shorter time scales. The entire skill hierarchy is generated automatically, with no human input, including the skills themselves (their behaviour, when they can be called, and when they terminate) as well as the dependency structure between them. In a wide range of environments, this approach generates skill hierarchies that are intuitively appealing and that considerably improve the learning performance of the agent.


DeepSITH: Efficient Learning via Decomposition of What and When Across Time Scales

Neural Information Processing Systems

Extracting temporal relationships over a range of scales is a hallmark ofhuman perception and cognition---and thus it is a critical feature of machinelearning applied to real-world problems. Neural networks are either plaguedby the exploding/vanishing gradient problem in recurrent neural networks(RNNs) or must adjust their parameters to learn the relevant time scales(e.g., in LSTMs).


Generalizing Weather Forecast to Fine-grained Temporal Scales via Physics-AI Hybrid Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) models have made significant advancements in weather forecasting, particularly in medium-range and nowcasting. However, most data-driven weather forecasting models are black-box systems that focus on learning data mapping rather than fine-grained physical evolution in the time dimension. Consequently, the limitations in the temporal scale of datasets prevent these models from forecasting at finer time scales. This paper proposes a physics-AI hybrid model (i.e., WeatherGFT) which generalizes weather forecasts to finer-grained temporal scales beyond training dataset. Specifically, we employ a carefully designed PDE kernel to simulate physical evolution on a small time scale (e.g., 300 seconds) and use a parallel neural networks with a learnable router for bias correction. Furthermore, we introduce a lead time-aware training framework to promote the generalization of the model at different lead times. The weight analysis of physics-AI modules indicates that physics conducts major evolution while AI performs corrections adaptively. Extensive experiments show that WeatherGFT trained on an hourly dataset, effectively generalizes forecasts across multiple time scales, including 30-minute, which is even smaller than the dataset's temporal resolution.


Time Series Forecasting via Direct Per-Step Probability Distribution Modeling

Kong, Linghao, Hong, Xiaopeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep neural network-based time series prediction models have recently demonstrated superior capabilities in capturing complex temporal dependencies. However, it is challenging for these models to account for uncertainty associated with their predictions, because they directly output scalar values at each time step. To address such a challenge, we propose a novel model named interleaved dual-branch Probability Distribution Network (interPDN), which directly constructs discrete probability distributions per step instead of a scalar. The regression output at each time step is derived by computing the expectation of the predictive distribution on a predefined support set. To mitigate prediction anomalies, a dual-branch architecture is introduced with interleaved support sets, augmented by coarse temporal-scale branches for long-term trend forecasting. Outputs from another branch are treated as auxiliary signals to impose self-supervised consistency constraints on the current branch's prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of interPDN.



Comments relevant to all reviewers: 2

Neural Information Processing Systems

We thank the reviewers for their interest in our work and their helpful comments. Please find our response below. DDPG and TD3, by keeping an exploration strategy which does not decay to zero. Gradient methods to bridge the gap between DPO and GAC. Reviewer 3: Thank you for pointing out some confusing explanations, we will make sure to clarify them in the paper.