As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

Acquiring a better understanding of drought impacts becomes increasingly vital under a warming climate. Traditional drought indices describe mainly biophysical variables and not impacts on social, economic, and environmental systems. We utilized natural language processing and bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) based transfer learning to fine-tune the model on the data from the news-based Drought Impact Report (DIR) and then apply it to recognize seven types of drought impacts based on the filtered Twitter data from the United States. Our model achieved a satisfying macro-F1 score of 0.89 on the DIR test set. The model was then applied to California tweets and validated with keyword-based labels. The macro-F1 score was 0.58. However, due to the limitation of keywords, we also spot-checked tweets with controversial labels. 83.5% of BERT labels were correct compared to the keyword labels. Overall, the fine-tuned BERT-based recognizer provided proper predictions and valuable information on drought impacts. The interpretation and analysis of the model were consistent with experiential domain expertise.

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) refers to clinician-performed and interpreted ultrasonography at the patient's bedside. Interpreting these images requires a high level of expertise, which may not be available during emergencies. In this paper, we support POCUS by developing classifiers that can aid medical professionals by diagnosing whether or not a patient has pneumothorax. We decomposed the task into multiple steps, using YOLOv4 to extract relevant regions of the video and a 3D sparse coding model to represent video features. Given the difficulty in acquiring positive training videos, we trained a small-data classifier with a maximum of 15 positive and 32 negative examples. To counteract this limitation, we leveraged subject matter expert (SME) knowledge to limit the hypothesis space, thus reducing the cost of data collection. We present results using two lung ultrasound datasets and demonstrate that our model is capable of achieving performance on par with SMEs in pneumothorax identification. We then developed an iOS application that runs our full system in less than 4 seconds on an iPad Pro, and less than 8 seconds on an iPhone 13 Pro, labeling key regions in the lung sonogram to provide interpretable diagnoses.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

In recent years, deep learning has infiltrated every field it has touched, reducing the need for specialist knowledge and automating the process of knowledge discovery from data. This review argues that astronomy is no different, and that we are currently in the midst of a deep learning revolution that is transforming the way we do astronomy. We trace the history of astronomical connectionism from the early days of multilayer perceptrons, through the second wave of convolutional and recurrent neural networks, to the current third wave of self-supervised and unsupervised deep learning. We then predict that we will soon enter a fourth wave of astronomical connectionism, in which finetuned versions of an all-encompassing 'foundation' model will replace expertly crafted deep learning models. We argue that such a model can only be brought about through a symbiotic relationship between astronomy and connectionism, whereby astronomy provides high quality multimodal data to train the foundation model, and in turn the foundation model is used to advance astronomical research.

我们介绍了一种考虑复杂的环境条件，在极地地区介绍了一种在极地地区长距离海上路线计划的方法。该方法允许构建优化的路线，描述了该过程的三个主要阶段：使用不均匀网格对环境条件进行离散建模，网格最佳路径的构建以及路径平滑。为了说明不同的车辆性能，我们构建了一系列数据驱动的功能，这些功能可以应用于环境网格，以确定给定容器和网格单元的速度限制和燃料要求，以图形和地理空间表示这些数量。在描述我们的结果时，我们展示了一个示例用途，用于Polar Research船RRS David Attenborough爵士（SDA）的路线规划，核算冰的性能特征，并验证韦德尔海地区的时空路线构建，南极洲。我们通过证明路线的变化取决于季节性海冰可变性，所使用的路线规划目标函数的差异以及其他环境条件（如电流）的存在来证明这种路线构建方法的多功能性。为了证明我们的方法的普遍性，我们在北极海洋和波罗的海中介绍了例子。本手稿中概述的技术是通用的，因此可以应用于具有不同特征的血管。我们的方法不仅可以拥有一个船只计划程序，而且我们概述了该工作流程如何适用于更广泛的社区，例如商业和乘客运输。

我们表明，降噪扩散Probabalistic模型（DDPM），一类基于分数的生成模型，可用于制作逼真的假尚图像星系的模拟观测。我们的方法与从河外调查（探针）样品从斯隆数字巡天选择的测光和旋转曲线的观察和星系星系暗能量光谱仪器GRZ成像测试。主观上，当与来自真正的数据集中样品相比所产生的星系高度逼真。我们从深生成学习文学借款，使用'神父\“echet盗梦空间距离”，以测试主观和形态相似性量化的相似性。我们还引进了`合成银河的距离”这一指标来比较新兴的物理性质（如总大小，颜色和半光半径）地面实况父母和子女合成数据集。我们认为，DDPM方法产生比其它生成方法如对抗性网络（与更昂贵的推理的下侧）更清晰，更逼真的图像，并且可以用于产生适合于特定的成像调查合成的观察大样本。我们证明了DDPM的两个潜在的用途：（1）在准确喷漆遮蔽数据，如卫星路径，和（2）域转移，其中新的输入图像可以被处理以模仿DDPM训练集的属性。在这里，我们`DESI-FY”卡通形象为理念的域转移的证明。最后，我们建议适用于可在天文学界内有关这个主题的激励进一步的研究基于分数的办法的潜在应用。

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.

KL-regularized reinforcement learning from expert demonstrations has proved successful in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, allowing them to be applied to challenging physical real-world tasks. However, we show that KL-regularized reinforcement learning with behavioral reference policies derived from expert demonstrations can suffer from pathological training dynamics that can lead to slow, unstable, and suboptimal online learning. We show empirically that the pathology occurs for commonly chosen behavioral policy classes and demonstrate its impact on sample efficiency and online policy performance. Finally, we show that the pathology can be remedied by non-parametric behavioral reference policies and that this allows KL-regularized reinforcement learning to significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of challenging locomotion and dexterous hand manipulation tasks.

Wearable sensors for measuring head kinematics can be noisy due to imperfect interfaces with the body. Mouthguards are used to measure head kinematics during impacts in traumatic brain injury (TBI) studies, but deviations from reference kinematics can still occur due to potential looseness. In this study, deep learning is used to compensate for the imperfect interface and improve measurement accuracy. A set of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) models was developed to denoise mouthguard kinematics measurements along three spatial axes of linear acceleration and angular velocity. The denoised kinematics had significantly reduced errors compared to reference kinematics, and reduced errors in brain injury criteria and tissue strain and strain rate calculated via finite element modeling. The 1D-CNN models were also tested on an on-field dataset of college football impacts and a post-mortem human subject dataset, with similar denoising effects observed. The models can be used to improve detection of head impacts and TBI risk evaluation, and potentially extended to other sensors measuring kinematics.