通过将从地面视图摄像头拍摄到从卫星或飞机上拍摄的架空图像的图像，通过将代理定位在搜索区域内，将代理定位在搜索区域内，将代理定位在搜索区域中。尽管地面图像和架空图像之间的观点差异使得跨视图地理定位具有挑战性，但假设地面代理可以使用全景相机，则取得了重大进展。例如，我们先前的工作（WAG）引入了搜索区域离散化，训练损失和粒子过滤器加权的变化，从而实现了城市规模的全景跨视图地理定位。但是，由于其复杂性和成本，全景相机并未在现有机器人平台中广泛使用。非Panoramic跨视图地理定位更适用于机器人技术，但也更具挑战性。本文介绍了受限的FOV广泛地理定位（Rewag），这是一种跨视图地理定位方法，通过创建姿势吸引的嵌入并提供将粒子姿势纳入暹罗网络，将其概括为与标准的非填充地面摄像机一起使用，以供与标准的非卧型地面摄像机一起使用。 Rewag是一种神经网络和粒子滤波器系统，能够在GPS下的环境中全球定位移动代理，仅具有探测仪和90度FOV摄像机，其本地化精度与使用全景相机实现并提高本地化精度相似的定位精度与基线视觉变压器（VIT）方法相比，100倍。一个视频亮点，该视频亮点在https://youtu.be/u_obqrt8qce上展示了几十公里的测试路径上的收敛。

跨视图图像地理位置化通过将本地地面图像与高架卫星图像匹配而无需GPS，从而提供了代理的全局位置的估计。可靠地将地面图像与正确的卫星图像相匹配是具有挑战性的，因为这些图像具有显着的视点差异。现有的作品已经证明了在小区域的限制情景中的本地化，但尚未证明更广泛的定位。我们的方法称为广域地理定位（WAG），将神经网络与粒子过滤器相结合，以实现在GPS污染环境中移动的代理的全局位置估计，从而有效地扩展到城市尺度区域。 WAG引入了暹罗网络的三项损失函数，以稳健地匹配非中心的图像对，从而使较小的卫星图像数据库生成，从而使搜索区域的离散化。还提出了一种修改的粒子滤波器加权方案，以提高定位精度和收敛性。综上所述，WAG的网络训练和粒子滤清器加权方法达到了20米的阶段估计精度，与基线训练和加权方法相比，降低了98％。与文献的最新基线相比，WAG应用于较小的测试区域，将最终位置估计误差降低了64％。 WAG的搜索空间离散化可显着减少存储和处理要求。

Demand for high-performance, robust, and safe autonomous systems has grown substantially in recent years. These objectives motivate the desire for efficient safety-theoretic reasoning that can be embedded in core decision-making tasks such as motion planning, particularly in constrained environments. On one hand, Monte-Carlo (MC) and other sampling-based techniques provide accurate collision probability estimates for a wide variety of motion models but are cumbersome in the context of continuous optimization. On the other, "direct" approximations aim to compute (or upper-bound) the failure probability as a smooth function of the decision variables, and thus are convenient for optimization. However, existing direct approaches fundamentally assume discrete-time dynamics and can perform unpredictably when applied to continuous-time systems ubiquitous in the real world, often manifesting as severe conservatism. State-of-the-art attempts to address this within a conventional discrete-time framework require additional Gaussianity approximations that ultimately produce inconsistency of their own. In this paper we take a fundamentally different approach, deriving a risk approximation framework directly in continuous time and producing a lightweight estimate that actually converges as the underlying discretization is refined. Our approximation is shown to significantly outperform state-of-the-art techniques in replicating the MC estimate while maintaining the functional and computational benefits of a direct method. This enables robust, risk-aware, continuous motion-planning for a broad class of nonlinear and/or partially-observable systems.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer.github.io

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.

大型语言模型可以编码有关世界的大量语义知识。这种知识对于旨在采取自然语言表达的高级，时间扩展的指示的机器人可能非常有用。但是，语言模型的一个重大弱点是，它们缺乏现实世界的经验，这使得很难利用它们在给定的体现中进行决策。例如，要求语言模型描述如何清洁溢出物可能会导致合理的叙述，但是它可能不适用于需要在特定环境中执行此任务的特定代理商（例如机器人）。我们建议通过预处理的技能来提供现实世界的基础，这些技能用于限制模型以提出可行且在上下文上适当的自然语言动作。机器人可以充当语​​言模型的“手和眼睛”，而语言模型可以提供有关任务的高级语义知识。我们展示了如何将低级技能与大语言模型结合在一起，以便语言模型提供有关执行复杂和时间扩展说明的过程的高级知识，而与这些技能相关的价值功能则提供了连接必要的基础了解特定的物理环境。我们在许多现实世界的机器人任务上评估了我们的方法，我们表明了对现实世界接地的需求，并且这种方法能够在移动操纵器上完成长远，抽象的自然语言指令。该项目的网站和视频可以在https://say-can.github.io/上找到。

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. We use an autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) to determine if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provide explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model, which outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. However, we test the ability to determine the relevance of a bill with the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was state-of-the-art on many language tasks until text-davinci-003 was released on November 28, 2022. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than simply always predicting that a bill is irrelevant to a company. These results suggest that, as large language models continue to improve core natural language understanding capabilities, performance on corporate lobbying related tasks will continue to improve. We then discuss why this could be problematic for societal-AI alignment.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

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.