Many, if not most, systems of interest in science are naturally described as nonlinear dynamical systems (DS). Empirically, we commonly access these systems through time series measurements, where often we have time series from different types of data modalities simultaneously. For instance, we may have event counts in addition to some continuous signal. While by now there are many powerful machine learning (ML) tools for integrating different data modalities into predictive models, this has rarely been approached so far from the perspective of uncovering the underlying, data-generating DS (aka DS reconstruction). Recently, sparse teacher forcing (TF) has been suggested as an efficient control-theoretic method for dealing with exploding loss gradients when training ML models on chaotic DS. Here we incorporate this idea into a novel recurrent neural network (RNN) training framework for DS reconstruction based on multimodal variational autoencoders (MVAE). The forcing signal for the RNN is generated by the MVAE which integrates different types of simultaneously given time series data into a joint latent code optimal for DS reconstruction. We show that this training method achieves significantly better reconstructions on multimodal datasets generated from chaotic DS benchmarks than various alternative methods.

在许多科学学科中，我们有兴趣推断一组观察到的时间序列的非线性动力学系统，这是面对混乱的行为和噪音，这是一项艰巨的任务。以前的深度学习方法实现了这一目标，通常缺乏解释性和障碍。尤其是，即使基本动力学生存在较低维的多种多样的情况下，忠实嵌入通常需要的高维潜在空间也会阻碍理论分析。在树突计算的新兴原则的推动下，我们通过线性样条基础扩展增强了动态解释和数学可牵引的分段线性（PL）复发性神经网络（RNN）。我们表明，这种方法保留了简单PLRNN的所有理论上吸引人的特性，但在相对较低的尺寸中提高了其近似任意非线性动态系统的能力。我们采用两个框架来训练该系统，一个将反向传播的时间（BPTT）与教师强迫结合在一起，另一个将基于快速可扩展的变异推理的基础。我们表明，树枝状扩展的PLRNN可以在各种动力学系统基准上获得更少的参数和尺寸，并与其他方法进行比较，同时保留了可拖动和可解释的结构。

物理学，生物学或医学中的经验观察时间序列通常由一些潜在的动态系统（DS）产生，这是科学兴趣的目标。收获机器学习方法越来越兴趣，以完全数据驱动，无人监督的方式重建这种潜在的DS。在许多科学领域，通常可以同时采样时间序列观察，例如，从许多数据模式中进行采样时间序列观察。典型神经科学实验中的电生理和行为时间序列。然而，用于重建DSS的当前机器学习工具通常只关注一个数据模型。在这里，我们提出了一种用于非线性DS识别和跨模态预测的多模态数据集成的一般框架。该框架基于动态可解释的复发性神经网络作为非线性DS的一般近似器，耦合到来自广义线性模型类的模态特定解码器模型集。预期最大化和模型培训的变分推理算法都是先进的和比较。我们在非线性DS基准上展示了我们的算法通过利用其他频道，我们的算法可以有效地补偿一个数据信道中的太吵或丢失的信息，并在实验神经科学数据上演示算法如何将不同的数据域链接到底层动态

复发性神经网络（RNN）是用于建模顺序和时间序列数据的广泛机器学习工具。众所周知，他们很难训练，因为他们的损失梯度在训练过程中倾向于饱和或差异。这被称为爆炸和消失的梯度问题。对该问题的先前解决方案要么建立在具有门控内存缓冲区的相当复杂的，专门设计的体系结构上，要么 - 最近 - 施加的约束，以确保收敛到固定点或限制（限制复发矩阵）。然而，这种限制传达了对RNN表现性的严重局限性。绝对的内在动态（例如多稳定性或混乱）被禁用。这本质上是在大自然和社会中遇到的许多（如果不是大多数时间）的混乱性质的脱节性。在科学应用中，尤其是一个旨在重建基本动力学系统的科学应用程序。在这里，我们通过将RNN培训期间的损耗梯度与RNN生成的轨道的lyapunov谱相关联，对该问题提供了全面的理论处理。我们从数学上证明，产生稳定平衡或环状行为的RNN具有有限的梯度，而混沌动力学的RNN梯度总是不同。基于这些分析和见解，我们建议如何根据系统的Lyapunov Spectrum，如何优化混乱数据的训练过程，无论使用的RNN架构如何。

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.