Task and motion planning problems in robotics combine symbolic planning over discrete task variables with motion optimization over continuous state and action variables. Recent works such as PDDLStream have focused on optimistic planning with an incrementally growing set of objects until a feasible trajectory is found. However, this set is exhaustively expanded in a breadth-first manner, regardless of the logical and geometric structure of the problem at hand, which makes long-horizon reasoning with large numbers of objects prohibitively time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose a geometrically informed symbolic planner that expands the set of objects and facts in a best-first manner, prioritized by a Graph Neural Network that is learned from prior search computations. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of problems and demonstrate an improved ability to plan in difficult scenarios. We also apply our algorithm on a 7DOF robotic arm in block-stacking manipulation tasks.
A biomechanical model often requires parameter estimation and selection in a known but complicated nonlinear function. Motivated by observing that data from a head-neck position tracking system, one of biomechanical models, show multiplicative time dependent errors, we develop a modified penalized weighted least squares estimator. The proposed method can be also applied to a model with non-zero mean time dependent additive errors. Asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator are investigated under mild conditions on a weight matrix and the error process. A simulation study demonstrates that the proposed estimation works well in both parameter estimation and selection with time dependent error. The analysis and comparison with an existing method for head-neck position tracking data show better performance of the proposed method in terms of the variance accounted for (VAF).
We propose a distributional framework for assessing socio-technical risks of foundation models with quantified statistical significance. Our approach hinges on a new statistical relative testing based on first and second order stochastic dominance of real random variables. We show that the second order statistics in this test are linked to mean-risk models commonly used in econometrics and mathematical finance to balance risk and utility when choosing between alternatives. Using this framework, we formally develop a risk-aware approach for foundation model selection given guardrails quantified by specified metrics. Inspired by portfolio optimization and selection theory in mathematical finance, we define a \emph{metrics portfolio} for each model as a means to aggregate a collection of metrics, and perform model selection based on the stochastic dominance of these portfolios. The statistical significance of our tests is backed theoretically by an asymptotic analysis via central limit theorems instantiated in practice via a bootstrap variance estimate. We use our framework to compare various large language models regarding risks related to drifting from instructions and outputting toxic content.
SGD and AdamW are the two most used optimizers for fine-tuning large neural networks in computer vision. When the two methods perform the same, SGD is preferable because it uses less memory (12 bytes/parameter with momentum and 8 bytes/parameter without) than AdamW (16 bytes/parameter). However, on a suite of downstream tasks, especially those with distribution shifts, we find that fine-tuning with AdamW performs substantially better than SGD on modern Vision Transformer and ConvNeXt models. We find that large gaps in performance between SGD and AdamW occur when the fine-tuning gradients in the first "embedding" layer are much larger than in the rest of the model. Our analysis suggests an easy fix that works consistently across datasets and models: freezing the embedding layer (less than 1% of the parameters) leads to SGD with or without momentum performing slightly better than AdamW while using less memory (e.g., on ViT-L, SGD uses 33% less GPU memory). Our insights result in state-of-the-art accuracies on five popular distribution shift benchmarks: WILDS-FMoW, WILDS-Camelyon, BREEDS-Living-17, Waterbirds, and DomainNet.
Gaussian processes scale prohibitively with the size of the dataset. In response, many approximation methods have been developed, which inevitably introduce approximation error. This additional source of uncertainty, due to limited computation, is entirely ignored when using the approximate posterior. Therefore in practice, GP models are often as much about the approximation method as they are about the data. Here, we develop a new class of methods that provides consistent estimation of the combined uncertainty arising from both the finite number of data observed and the finite amount of computation expended. The most common GP approximations map to an instance in this class, such as methods based on the Cholesky factorization, conjugate gradients, and inducing points. For any method in this class, we prove (i) convergence of its posterior mean in the associated RKHS, (ii) decomposability of its combined posterior covariance into mathematical and computational covariances, and (iii) that the combined variance is a tight worst-case bound for the squared error between the method's posterior mean and the latent function. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the consequences of ignoring computational uncertainty and show how implicitly modeling it improves generalization performance on benchmark datasets.
We investigate a novel modeling approach for end-to-end neural network training using hidden Markov models (HMM) where the transition probabilities between hidden states are modeled and learned explicitly. Most contemporary sequence-to-sequence models allow for from-scratch training by summing over all possible label segmentations in a given topology. In our approach there are explicit, learnable probabilities for transitions between segments as opposed to a blank label that implicitly encodes duration statistics. We implement a GPU-based forward-backward algorithm that enables the simultaneous training of label and transition probabilities. We investigate recognition results and additionally Viterbi alignments of our models. We find that while the transition model training does not improve recognition performance, it has a positive impact on the alignment quality. The generated alignments are shown to be viable targets in state-of-the-art Viterbi trainings.
Discovering governing equations from data is important to many scientific and engineering applications. Despite promising successes, existing methods are still challenged by data sparsity as well as noise issues, both of which are ubiquitous in practice. Moreover, state-of-the-art methods lack uncertainty quantification and/or are costly in training. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel equation discovery method based on Kernel learning and BAyesian Spike-and-Slab priors (KBASS). We use kernel regression to estimate the target function, which is flexible, expressive, and more robust to data sparsity and noises. We combine it with a Bayesian spike-and-slab prior -- an ideal Bayesian sparse distribution -- for effective operator selection and uncertainty quantification. We develop an expectation propagation expectation-maximization (EP-EM) algorithm for efficient posterior inference and function estimation. To overcome the computational challenge of kernel regression, we place the function values on a mesh and induce a Kronecker product construction, and we use tensor algebra methods to enable efficient computation and optimization. We show the significant advantages of KBASS on a list of benchmark ODE and PDE discovery tasks.
The resolution of near-field beamforming is an important metric to measure how effectively users with different locations can be located. This letter identifies the condition under which the resolution of near-field beamforming is not perfect. This imperfect resolution means that one user's near-field beam can be still useful to other users, which motivates the application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Both the analytical and simulation results are developed to demonstrate that those near-field beams preconfigured for legacy users can indeed be used to effectively serve additional NOMA users, which improves the overall connectivity and system throughput.
Different notions of the consistency of obligations collapse in standard deontic logic. In justification logics, which feature explicit reasons for obligations, the situation is different. Their strength depends on a constant specification and on the available set of operations for combining different reasons. We present different consistency principles in justification logic and compare their logical strength. We propose a novel semantics for which justification logics with the explicit version of axiom D, jd, are complete for arbitrary constant specifications. We then discuss the philosophical implications with regard to some deontic paradoxes.
Concurrent estimation and control of robotic systems remains an ongoing challenge, where controllers rely on data extracted from states/parameters riddled with uncertainties and noises. Framework suitability hinges on task complexity and computational constraints, demanding a balance between computational efficiency and mission-critical accuracy. This study leverages recent advancements in neuromorphic computing, particularly spiking neural networks (SNNs), for estimation and control applications. Our presented framework employs a recurrent network of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, mimicking a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) through a robust filtering strategy, a modified sliding innovation filter (MSIF). Benefiting from both the robustness of MSIF and the computational efficiency of SNN, our framework customizes SNN weight matrices to match the desired system model without requiring training. Additionally, the network employs a biologically plausible firing rule similar to predictive coding. In the presence of uncertainties, we compare the SNN-LQR-MSIF with non-spiking LQR-MSIF and the optimal linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) strategy. Evaluation across a workbench linear problem and a satellite rendezvous maneuver, implementing the Clohessy-Wiltshire (CW) model in space robotics, demonstrates that the SNN-LQR-MSIF achieves acceptable performance in computational efficiency, robustness, and accuracy. This positions it as a promising solution for addressing dynamic systems' concurrent estimation and control challenges in dynamic systems.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.