使用团队或机器人联盟的任务分配是机器人技术，计算机科学，运营研究和人工智能中最重要的问题之一。在最近的工作中，研究集中在处理复杂的目标和可行性限制之间，这是多机器人任务分配问题的其他变化。在这些方向上有许多重要的研究进展的例子。我们提出了任务分配问题的一般表述，该问题概括了几个经过充分研究的版本。我们的表述包括机器人，任务和其操作周围环境的状态。我们描述问题如何根据可行性约束，目标函数和动态变化信息的水平而变化。此外，我们讨论了有关该问题的现有解决方案方法，包括基于优化的方法和基于市场的方法。

We study the problem of planning under model uncertainty in an online meta-reinforcement learning (RL) setting where an agent is presented with a sequence of related tasks with limited interactions per task. The agent can use its experience in each task and across tasks to estimate both the transition model and the distribution over tasks. We propose an algorithm to meta-learn the underlying structure across tasks, utilize it to plan in each task, and upper-bound the regret of the planning loss. Our bound suggests that the average regret over tasks decreases as the number of tasks increases and as the tasks are more similar. In the classical single-task setting, it is known that the planning horizon should depend on the estimated model's accuracy, that is, on the number of samples within task. We generalize this finding to meta-RL and study this dependence of planning horizons on the number of tasks. Based on our theoretical findings, we derive heuristics for selecting slowly increasing discount factors, and we validate its significance empirically.

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders -- respected allies and opposed bogeymen -- across U.S. political ideologies.

Creativity is an indispensable part of human cognition and also an inherent part of how we make sense of the world. Metaphorical abstraction is fundamental in communicating creative ideas through nuanced relationships between abstract concepts such as feelings. While computer vision benchmarks and approaches predominantly focus on understanding and generating literal interpretations of images, metaphorical comprehension of images remains relatively unexplored. Towards this goal, we introduce MetaCLUE, a set of vision tasks on visual metaphor. We also collect high-quality and rich metaphor annotations (abstract objects, concepts, relationships along with their corresponding object boxes) as there do not exist any datasets that facilitate the evaluation of these tasks. We perform a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art models in vision and language based on our annotations, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in visual metaphor Classification, Localization, Understanding (retrieval, question answering, captioning) and gEneration (text-to-image synthesis) tasks. We hope this work provides a concrete step towards developing AI systems with human-like creative capabilities.

The problem of reversing the compilation process, decompilation, is an important tool in reverse engineering of computer software. Recently, researchers have proposed using techniques from neural machine translation to automate the process in decompilation. Although such techniques hold the promise of targeting a wider range of source and assembly languages, to date they have primarily targeted C code. In this paper we argue that existing neural decompilers have achieved higher accuracy at the cost of requiring language-specific domain knowledge such as tokenizers and parsers to build an abstract syntax tree (AST) for the source language, which increases the overhead of supporting new languages. We explore a different tradeoff that, to the extent possible, treats the assembly and source languages as plain text, and show that this allows us to build a decompiler that is easily retargetable to new languages. We evaluate our prototype decompiler, Beyond The C (BTC), on Go, Fortran, OCaml, and C, and examine the impact of parameters such as tokenization and training data selection on the quality of decompilation, finding that it achieves comparable decompilation results to prior work in neural decompilation with significantly less domain knowledge. We will release our training data, trained decompilation models, and code to help encourage future research into language-agnostic decompilation.

Human operators in human-robot teams are commonly perceived to be critical for mission success. To explore the direct and perceived impact of operator input on task success and team performance, 16 real-world missions (10 hrs) were conducted based on the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. These missions were to deploy a heterogeneous team of robots for a search task to locate and identify artifacts such as climbing rope, drills and mannequins representing human survivors. Two conditions were evaluated: human operators that could control the robot team with state-of-the-art autonomy (Human-Robot Team) compared to autonomous missions without human operator input (Robot-Autonomy). Human-Robot Teams were often in directed autonomy mode (70% of mission time), found more items, traversed more distance, covered more unique ground, and had a higher time between safety-related events. Human-Robot Teams were faster at finding the first artifact, but slower to respond to information from the robot team. In routine conditions, scores were comparable for artifacts, distance, and coverage. Reasons for intervention included creating waypoints to prioritise high-yield areas, and to navigate through error-prone spaces. After observing robot autonomy, operators reported increases in robot competency and trust, but that robot behaviour was not always transparent and understandable, even after high mission performance.

We present a method for controlling a swarm using its spectral decomposition -- that is, by describing the set of trajectories of a swarm in terms of a spatial distribution throughout the operational domain -- guaranteeing scale invariance with respect to the number of agents both for computation and for the operator tasked with controlling the swarm. We use ergodic control, decentralized across the network, for implementation. In the DARPA OFFSET program field setting, we test this interface design for the operator using the STOMP interface -- the same interface used by Raytheon BBN throughout the duration of the OFFSET program. In these tests, we demonstrate that our approach is scale-invariant -- the user specification does not depend on the number of agents; it is persistent -- the specification remains active until the user specifies a new command; and it is real-time -- the user can interact with and interrupt the swarm at any time. Moreover, we show that the spectral/ergodic specification of swarm behavior degrades gracefully as the number of agents goes down, enabling the operator to maintain the same approach as agents become disabled or are added to the network. We demonstrate the scale-invariance and dynamic response of our system in a field relevant simulator on a variety of tactical scenarios with up to 50 agents. We also demonstrate the dynamic response of our system in the field with a smaller team of agents. Lastly, we make the code for our system available.

Privacy noise may negate the benefits of using adaptive optimizers in differentially private model training. Prior works typically address this issue by using auxiliary information (e.g., public data) to boost the effectiveness of adaptive optimization. In this work, we explore techniques to estimate and efficiently adapt to gradient geometry in private adaptive optimization without auxiliary data. Motivated by the observation that adaptive methods can tolerate stale preconditioners, we propose differentially private adaptive training with delayed preconditioners (DP^2), a simple method that constructs delayed but less noisy preconditioners to better realize the benefits of adaptivity. Theoretically, we provide convergence guarantees for our method for both convex and non-convex problems, and analyze trade-offs between delay and privacy noise reduction. Empirically, we explore DP^2 across several real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can improve convergence speed by as much as 4x relative to non-adaptive baselines and match the performance of state-of-the-art optimization methods that require auxiliary data.

Likelihood-based deep generative models have recently been shown to exhibit pathological behaviour under the manifold hypothesis as a consequence of using high-dimensional densities to model data with low-dimensional structure. In this paper we propose two methodologies aimed at addressing this problem. Both are based on adding Gaussian noise to the data to remove the dimensionality mismatch during training, and both provide a denoising mechanism whose goal is to sample from the model as though no noise had been added to the data. Our first approach is based on Tweedie's formula, and the second on models which take the variance of added noise as a conditional input. We show that surprisingly, while well motivated, these approaches only sporadically improve performance over not adding noise, and that other methods of addressing the dimensionality mismatch are more empirically adequate.

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.