In this paper we introduce novel Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) treatments to improve the psychological well being of patients in palliative care, based on interviews with a clinical psychologist who has successfully implemented VR assisted interventions on palliative care patients in the Hong Kong hospital system. Our VR and AR assisted interventions are adaptations of traditional palliative care therapies which simultaneously facilitate patients communication with family and friends while isolated in hospital due to physical weakness and COVID-19 related restrictions. The first system we propose is a networked, metaverse platform for palliative care patients to create customized virtual environments with therapists, family and friends which function as immersive and collaborative versions of 'life review' and 'reminiscence therapy'. The second proposed system will investigate the use of Mixed Reality telepresence and haptic touch in an AR environment, which will allow palliative care patients to physically feel friends and family in a virtual space, adding to the sense of presence and immersion in that environment.
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Metaverse applications that incorporate Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) provide mixed and immersive experiences by amalgamating the virtual with the physical world. Notably, due to their multi-modality such applications are demanding in terms of energy consumption, computing and caching resources to efficiently support foreground interactions of participating users and rich background content. In this paper, the metaverse service is decomposed and anchored at suitable edge caching/computing nodes in 5G and beyond networks to enable efficient processing of background metaverse region models embedded with target AROs. To achieve that, a joint optimization problem is proposed, which explicitly considers the user physical mobility, service decomposition, and the balance between service delay, user perception quality and power consumption. A wide set of numerical investigations reveal that, the proposed scheme could provide optimal decision making and outperform other nominal baseline schemes which are oblivious of user mobility as well as do not consider service decomposition.
Vision guided navigation requires processing complex visual information to inform task-orientated decisions. Applications include autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and assistive vision for humans. A key element is the extraction and selection of relevant features in pixel space upon which to base action choices, for which Machine Learning techniques are well suited. However, Deep Reinforcement Learning agents trained in simulation often exhibit unsatisfactory results when deployed in the real-world due to perceptual differences known as the $\textit{reality gap}$. An approach that is yet to be explored to bridge this gap is self-attention. In this paper we (1) perform a systematic exploration of the hyperparameter space for self-attention based navigation of 3D environments and qualitatively appraise behaviour observed from different hyperparameter sets, including their ability to generalise; (2) present strategies to improve the agents' generalisation abilities and navigation behaviour; and (3) show how models trained in simulation are capable of processing real world images meaningfully in real time. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a self-attention based agent successfully trained in navigating a 3D action space, using less than 4000 parameters.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, edge computing can be initiated at anytime and anywhere. However, in an IoT, edge computing sessions are often ephemeral, i.e., they last for a short period of time and can often be discontinued once the current application usage is completed or the edge devices leave the system due to factors such as mobility. Therefore, in this paper, the problem of ephemeral edge computing in an IoT is studied by considering scenarios in which edge computing operates within a limited time period. To this end, a novel online framework is proposed in which a source edge node offloads its computing tasks from sensors within an area to neighboring edge nodes for distributed task computing, within the limited period of time of an ephemeral edge computing system. The online nature of the framework allows the edge nodes to optimize their task allocation and decide on which neighbors to use for task processing, even when the tasks are revealed to the source edge node in an online manner, and the information on future task arrivals is unknown. The proposed framework essentially maximizes the number of computed tasks by jointly considering the communication and computation latency. To solve the problem, an online greedy algorithm is proposed and solved by using the primal-dual approach. Since the primal problem provides an upper bound of the original dual problem, the competitive ratio of the online approach is analytically derived as a function of the task sizes and the data rates of the edge nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed online algorithm can achieve a near-optimal task allocation with an optimality gap that is no higher than 7.1% compared to the offline, optimal solution with complete knowledge of all tasks.
In learning-to-rank problems, a privileged feature is one that is available during model training, but not available at test time. Such features naturally arise in merchandised recommendation systems; for instance, "user clicked this item" as a feature is predictive of "user purchased this item" in the offline data, but is clearly not available during online serving. Another source of privileged features is those that are too expensive to compute online but feasible to be added offline. Privileged features distillation (PFD) refers to a natural idea: train a "teacher" model using all features (including privileged ones) and then use it to train a "student" model that does not use the privileged features. In this paper, we first study PFD empirically on three public ranking datasets and an industrial-scale ranking problem derived from Amazon's logs. We show that PFD outperforms several baselines (no-distillation, pretraining-finetuning, self-distillation, and generalized distillation) on all these datasets. Next, we analyze why and when PFD performs well via both empirical ablation studies and theoretical analysis for linear models. Both investigations uncover an interesting non-monotone behavior: as the predictive power of a privileged feature increases, the performance of the resulting student model initially increases but then decreases. We show the reason for the later decreasing performance is that a very predictive privileged teacher produces predictions with high variance, which lead to high variance student estimates and inferior testing performance.
Both in academic and industry-based research, online evaluation methods are seen as the golden standard for interactive applications like recommendation systems. Naturally, the reason for this is that we can directly measure utility metrics that rely on interventions, being the recommendations that are being shown to users. Nevertheless, online evaluation methods are costly for a number of reasons, and a clear need remains for reliable offline evaluation procedures. In industry, offline metrics are often used as a first-line evaluation to generate promising candidate models to evaluate online. In academic work, limited access to online systems makes offline metrics the de facto approach to validating novel methods. Two classes of offline metrics exist: proxy-based methods, and counterfactual methods. The first class is often poorly correlated with the online metrics we care about, and the latter class only provides theoretical guarantees under assumptions that cannot be fulfilled in real-world environments. Here, we make the case that simulation-based comparisons provide ways forward beyond offline metrics, and argue that they are a preferable means of evaluation.
Probabilistic models of language understanding are interpretable and structured, for instance models of metaphor understanding describe inference about latent topics and features. However, these models are manually designed for a specific task. Large language models (LLMs) can perform many tasks through in-context learning, but they lack the clear structure of probabilistic models. In this paper, we use chain-of-thought prompts to introduce structures from probabilistic models into LLMs. These prompts lead the model to infer latent variables and reason about their relationships to choose appropriate paraphrases for metaphors. The latent variables and relationships chosen are informed by theories of metaphor understanding from cognitive psychology. We apply these prompts to the two largest versions of GPT-3 and show that they can improve paraphrase selection.
News recommender systems (NRs) have been shown to shape public discourse and to enforce behaviors that have a critical, oftentimes detrimental effect on democracies. Earlier research on the impact of media bias has revealed their strong impact on opinions and preferences. Responsible NRs are supposed to have depolarizing capacities, once they go beyond accuracy measures. We performed sequence prediction by using the BERT4Rec algorithm to investigate the interplay of news of coverage and user behavior. Based on live data and training of a large data set from one news outlet "event bursts", "rally around the flag" effect and "filter bubbles" were investigated in our interdisciplinary approach between data science and psychology. Potentials for fair NRs that go beyond accuracy measures are outlined via training of the models with a large data set of articles, keywords, and user behavior. The development of the news coverage and user behavior of the COVID-19 pandemic from primarily medical to broader political content and debates was traced. Our study provides first insights for future development of responsible news recommendation that acknowledges user preferences while stimulating diversity and accountability instead of accuracy, only.
Games and simulators can be a valuable platform to execute complex multi-agent, multiplayer, imperfect information scenarios with significant parallels to military applications: multiple participants manage resources and make decisions that command assets to secure specific areas of a map or neutralize opposing forces. These characteristics have attracted the artificial intelligence (AI) community by supporting development of algorithms with complex benchmarks and the capability to rapidly iterate over new ideas. The success of artificial intelligence algorithms in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II have also attracted the attention of the military research community aiming to explore similar techniques in military counterpart scenarios. Aiming to bridge the connection between games and military applications, this work discusses past and current efforts on how games and simulators, together with the artificial intelligence algorithms, have been adapted to simulate certain aspects of military missions and how they might impact the future battlefield. This paper also investigates how advances in virtual reality and visual augmentation systems open new possibilities in human interfaces with gaming platforms and their military parallels.
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