Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR) estimators, suffer from high variance, particularly in cases of low overlap between target and behavior policies or large action and context spaces. In this paper, we introduce a new OPE estimator for contextual bandits, the Marginal Ratio (MR) estimator, which focuses on the shift in the marginal distribution of outcomes $Y$ instead of the policies themselves. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the benefits of the MR estimator compared to conventional methods like IPW and DR in terms of variance reduction. Additionally, we establish a connection between the MR estimator and the state-of-the-art Marginalized Inverse Propensity Score (MIPS) estimator, proving that MR achieves lower variance among a generalized family of MIPS estimators. We further illustrate the utility of the MR estimator in causal inference settings, where it exhibits enhanced performance in estimating Average Treatment Effects (ATE). Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets corroborate our theoretical findings and highlight the practical advantages of the MR estimator in OPE for contextual bandits.
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A common limitation of autonomous tissue manipulation in robotic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is the absence of force sensing and control at the tool level. Recently, our team has developed haptics-enabled forceps that can simultaneously measure the grasping and pulling forces during tissue manipulation. Based on this design, here we further present a method to automate tissue traction with controlled grasping and pulling forces. Specifically, the grasping stage relies on a controlled grasping force, while the pulling stage is under the guidance of a controlled pulling force. Notably, during the pulling process, the simultaneous control of both grasping and pulling forces is also enabled for more precise tissue traction, achieved through force decoupling. The force controller is built upon a static model of tissue manipulation, considering the interaction between the haptics-enabled forceps and soft tissue. The efficacy of this force control approach is validated through a series of experiments comparing targeted, estimated, and actual reference forces. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method in surgical applications, various tissue resections are conducted on ex vivo tissues employing a dual-arm robotic setup. Finally, we discuss the benefits of multi-force control in tissue traction, evidenced through comparative analyses of various ex vivo tissue resections. The results affirm the feasibility of implementing automatic tissue traction using micro-sized forceps with multi-force control, suggesting its potential to promote autonomous MIS. A video demonstrating the experiments can be found at //youtu.be/8fe8o8IFrjE.
Language Models (LMs) have greatly influenced diverse domains. However, their inherent limitation in comprehending 3D molecular structures has considerably constrained their potential in the biomolecular domain. To bridge this gap, we focus on 3D molecule-text interpretation, and propose 3D-MoLM: 3D-Molecular Language Modeling. Specifically, 3D-MoLM enables an LM to interpret and analyze 3D molecules by equipping the LM with a 3D molecular encoder. This integration is achieved by a 3D molecule-text projector, bridging the 3D molecular encoder's representation space and the LM's input space. Moreover, to enhance 3D-MoLM's ability of cross-modal molecular understanding and instruction following, we meticulously curated a 3D molecule-centric instruction tuning dataset -- 3D-MoIT. Through 3D molecule-text alignment and 3D molecule-centric instruction tuning, 3D-MoLM establishes an integration of 3D molecular encoder and LM. It significantly surpasses existing baselines on downstream tasks, including molecule-text retrieval, molecule captioning, and more challenging open-text molecular QA tasks, especially focusing on 3D-dependent properties.
Sequence-independent lifting is a procedure for strengthening valid inequalities of an integer program. We generalize the sequence-independent lifting method of Gu, Nemhauser, and Savelsbergh (GNS lifting) for cover inequalities and correct an error in their proposed generalization. We obtain a new sequence-independent lifting technique -- piecewise-constant (PC) lifting -- with a number of interesting properties. We derive a broad set of sufficient conditions under which PC lifting is facet defining. To our knowledge, this is the first characterization of facet-defining sequence-independent liftings that are efficiently computable from the underlying cover. Finally, we demonstrate via experiments that PC lifting can be a useful alternative to GNS lifting. We test our new lifting techniques atop a number of novel cover cut generation routines, which prove to be effective in experiments with CPLEX.
Although continuous advances in theoretical modelling of Molecular Communications (MC) are observed, there is still an insuperable gap between theory and experimental testbeds, especially at the microscale. In this paper, the development of the first testbed incorporating engineered yeast cells is reported. Different from the existing literature, eukaryotic yeast cells are considered for both the sender and the receiver, with {\alpha}-factor molecules facilitating the information transfer. The use of such cells is motivated mainly by the well understood biological mechanism of yeast mating, together with their genetic amenability. In addition, recent advances in yeast biosensing establish yeast as a suitable detector and a neat interface to in-body sensor networks. The system under consideration is presented first, and the mathematical models of the underlying biological processes leading to an end-to-end (E2E) system are given. The experimental setup is then described and used to obtain experimental results which validate the developed mathematical models. Beyond that, the ability of the system to effectively generate output pulses in response to repeated stimuli is demonstrated, reporting one event per two hours. However, fast RNA fluctuations indicate cell responses in less than three minutes, demonstrating the potential for much higher rates in the future.
Collaborative perception allows each agent to enhance its perceptual abilities by exchanging messages with others. It inherently results in a trade-off between perception ability and communication costs. Previous works transmit complete full-frame high-dimensional feature maps among agents, resulting in substantial communication costs. To promote communication efficiency, we propose only transmitting the information needed for the collaborator's downstream task. This pragmatic communication strategy focuses on three key aspects: i) pragmatic message selection, which selects task-critical parts from the complete data, resulting in spatially and temporally sparse feature vectors; ii) pragmatic message representation, which achieves pragmatic approximation of high-dimensional feature vectors with a task-adaptive dictionary, enabling communicating with integer indices; iii) pragmatic collaborator selection, which identifies beneficial collaborators, pruning unnecessary communication links. Following this strategy, we first formulate a mathematical optimization framework for the perception-communication trade-off and then propose PragComm, a multi-agent collaborative perception system with two key components: i) single-agent detection and tracking and ii) pragmatic collaboration. The proposed PragComm promotes pragmatic communication and adapts to a wide range of communication conditions. We evaluate PragComm for both collaborative 3D object detection and tracking tasks in both real-world, V2V4Real, and simulation datasets, OPV2V and V2X-SIM2.0. PragComm consistently outperforms previous methods with more than 32.7K times lower communication volume on OPV2V. Code is available at github.com/PhyllisH/PragComm.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
The military is investigating methods to improve communication and agility in its multi-domain operations (MDO). Nascent popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) has gained traction in public and government domains. Its usage in MDO may revolutionize future battlefields and may enable strategic advantage. While this technology offers leverage to military capabilities, it comes with challenges where one is the uncertainty and associated risk. A key question is how can these uncertainties be addressed. Recently published studies proposed information camouflage to transform information from one data domain to another. As this is comparatively a new approach, we investigate challenges of such transformations and how these associated uncertainties can be detected and addressed, specifically unknown-unknowns to improve decision-making.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.
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