Emergency department (ED) crowding is a significant threat to patient safety and it has been repeatedly associated with increased mortality. Forecasting future service demand has the potential patient outcomes. Despite active research on the subject, several gaps remain: 1) proposed forecasting models have become outdated due to quick influx of advanced machine learning models (ML), 2) amount of multivariable input data has been limited and 3) discrete performance metrics have been rarely reported. In this study, we document the performance of a set of advanced ML models in forecasting ED occupancy 24 hours ahead. We use electronic health record data from a large, combined ED with an extensive set of explanatory variables, including the availability of beds in catchment area hospitals, traffic data from local observation stations, weather variables, etc. We show that N-BEATS and LightGBM outpeform benchmarks with 11 % and 9 % respective improvements and that DeepAR predicts next day crowding with an AUC of 0.76 (95 % CI 0.69-0.84). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to document the superiority of LightGBM and N-BEATS over statistical benchmarks in the context of ED forecasting.
This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: //github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).
Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) must meet rigorous safety standards when deployed in high-stress emergency response scenarios. However, tests that execute perfectly in simulation can fail dramatically in real-world environments. Fuzz testing can be used to increase system robustness by providing malformed input data aimed at triggering failure cases. In this paper, we apply fuzzing to support human interaction testing. Initial tests are run in simulation to provide broad coverage of the input space in a safe environment; however, they lack the fidelity of real-world tests. Field tests provide higher fidelity but can result in costly or dangerous crashes. We, therefore, propose and demonstrate HiFuzz, which executes large numbers of fuzz tests in simulation and then down-selects tests for deployment in human-in-the-loop simulations and safety-aware physical field tests. We apply \hf to a multi-sUAS system and show that each test level serves a unique purpose in identifying known and unknown failures associated with human interactions.
Sharding is essential for improving blockchain scalability. Existing protocols overlook diverse adversarial attacks, limiting transaction throughput. This paper presents Reticulum, a groundbreaking sharding protocol addressing this issue, boosting blockchain scalability. Reticulum employs a two-phase approach, adapting transaction throughput based on runtime adversarial attacks. It comprises "control" and "process" shards in two layers. Process shards contain at least one trustworthy node, while control shards have a majority of trusted nodes. In the first phase, transactions are written to blocks and voted on by nodes in process shards. Unanimously accepted blocks are confirmed. In the second phase, blocks without unanimous acceptance are voted on by control shards. Blocks are accepted if the majority votes in favor, eliminating first-phase opponents and silent voters. Reticulum uses unanimous voting in the first phase, involving fewer nodes, enabling more parallel process shards. Control shards finalize decisions and resolve disputes. Experiments confirm Reticulum's innovative design, providing high transaction throughput and robustness against various network attacks, outperforming existing sharding protocols for blockchain networks.
Identifying defect patterns in a wafer map during manufacturing is crucial to find the root cause of the underlying issue and provides valuable insights on improving yield in the foundry. Currently used methods use deep neural networks to identify the defects. These methods are generally very huge and have significant inference time. They also require GPU support to efficiently operate. All these issues make these models not fit for on-line prediction in the manufacturing foundry. In this paper, we propose an extremely simple yet effective technique to extract features from wafer images. The proposed method is extremely fast, intuitive, and non-parametric while being explainable. The experiment results show that the proposed pipeline outperforms conventional deep learning models. Our feature extraction requires no training or fine-tuning while preserving the relative shape and location of data points as revealed by our interpretability analysis.
Deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for robotics applications in the real world requires ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Safe Robot RL (SRRL) is a crucial step towards achieving human-robot coexistence. In this paper, we envision a human-centered SRRL framework consisting of three stages: safe exploration, safety value alignment, and safe collaboration. We examine the research gaps in these areas and propose to leverage interactive behaviors for SRRL. Interactive behaviors enable bi-directional information transfer between humans and robots, such as conversational robot ChatGPT. We argue that interactive behaviors need further attention from the SRRL community. We discuss four open challenges related to the robustness, efficiency, transparency, and adaptability of SRRL with interactive behaviors.
Reconstructing transparent objects using affordable RGB-D cameras is a persistent challenge in robotic perception due to inconsistent appearances across views in the RGB domain and inaccurate depth readings in each single-view. We introduce a two-stage pipeline for reconstructing transparent objects tailored for mobile platforms. In the first stage, off-the-shelf monocular object segmentation and depth completion networks are leveraged to predict the depth of transparent objects, furnishing single-view shape prior. Subsequently, we propose Epipolar-guided Optical Flow (EOF) to fuse several single-view shape priors from the first stage to a cross-view consistent 3D reconstruction given camera poses estimated from opaque part of the scene. Our key innovation lies in EOF which employs boundary-sensitive sampling and epipolar-line constraints into optical flow to accurately establish 2D correspondences across multiple views on transparent objects. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms baseline methods in 3D reconstruction quality, paving the way for more adept robotic perception and interaction with transparent objects.
The robustness of signal temporal logic not only assesses whether a signal adheres to a specification but also provides a measure of how much a formula is fulfilled or violated. The calculation of robustness is based on evaluating the robustness of underlying predicates. However, the robustness of predicates is usually defined in a model-free way, i.e., without including the system dynamics. Moreover, it is often nontrivial to define the robustness of complicated predicates precisely. To address these issues, we propose a notion of model predictive robustness, which provides a more systematic way of evaluating robustness compared to previous approaches by considering model-based predictions. In particular, we use Gaussian process regression to learn the robustness based on precomputed predictions so that robustness values can be efficiently computed online. We evaluate our approach for the use case of autonomous driving with predicates used in formalized traffic rules on a recorded dataset, which highlights the advantage of our approach compared to traditional approaches in terms of precision. By incorporating our robustness definitions into a trajectory planner, autonomous vehicles obey traffic rules more robustly than human drivers in the dataset.
Adversarial examples can be useful for identifying vulnerabilities in AI systems before they are deployed. In reinforcement learning (RL), adversarial policies can be developed by training an adversarial agent to minimize a target agent's rewards. Prior work has studied black-box versions of these attacks where the adversary only observes the world state and treats the target agent as any other part of the environment. However, this does not take into account additional structure in the problem. In this work, we study white-box adversarial policies and show that having access to a target agent's internal state can be useful for identifying its vulnerabilities. We make two contributions. (1) We introduce white-box adversarial policies where an attacker observes both a target's internal state and the world state at each timestep. We formulate ways of using these policies to attack agents in 2-player games and text-generating language models. (2) We demonstrate that these policies can achieve higher initial and asymptotic performance against a target agent than black-box controls. Code is available at //github.com/thestephencasper/lm_white_box_attacks
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in the autonomous driving sector, particularly in generalization and interpretability. We introduce a unique object-level multimodal LLM architecture that merges vectorized numeric modalities with a pre-trained LLM to improve context understanding in driving situations. We also present a new dataset of 160k QA pairs derived from 10k driving scenarios, paired with high quality control commands collected with RL agent and question answer pairs generated by teacher LLM (GPT-3.5). A distinct pretraining strategy is devised to align numeric vector modalities with static LLM representations using vector captioning language data. We also introduce an evaluation metric for Driving QA and demonstrate our LLM-driver's proficiency in interpreting driving scenarios, answering questions, and decision-making. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-based driving action generation in comparison to traditional behavioral cloning. We make our benchmark, datasets, and model available for further exploration.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.