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Simultaneously optimizing the processing parameters of functional thin films remains a challenge. The design and utilization of a fully automated platform called SPINBOT is presented for the engineering of solution‐processed functional thin films. The SPINBOT is capable of performing experiments with high sampling variability through the unsupervised processing of hundreds of substrates with exceptional experimental control. Through the iterative optimization process enabled by the Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithm, the SPINBOT explores an intricate parameter space, continuously improving the quality and reproducibility of the produced thin films. This machine learning (ML)‐guided reliable SPINBOT platform enables the acceleration of the optimization process of perovskite solar cells via a simple photoluminescence characterization of films. As a result, this study arrives at an optimal film that, when processed into a solar cell in an ambient atmosphere, immediately yields a champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 21.6% with satisfactory performance reproducibility. The unsealed devices retain 90% of their initial efficiency after 1100 h of continuous operation at 60–65 °C under metal‐halide lamps. It is anticipated that the integration of robotic platforms with the intelligent algorithm will facilitate the widespread adoption of effective autonomous experimentation to address the evolving needs and constraints within the materials science research community.

Fang Rong,1,2,* Ziyi Liu,3,4,* Pengbin Yang,3,4 Feng Wu,5 Yu Sun,5 Xuewei Sun,5 Jun Zhou5 1Department of General Practice, The Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China; 2Graduate School Department of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China; 3Jiangsu Co-Innovation Center for Prevention and Control of Important Animal Infectious Diseases and Zoonoses, College of Veterinary Medicine, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China; 4Institute of Comparative Medicine, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, The Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jun Zhou, Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, The Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou University, 368 Hanjiang Middle Road, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, 225009, People’s Republic of China, Email zj662121@163.comObjective: Carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) has emerged and spread worldwide. It can usually cause a serious threat complicating treatment options in clinical settings. However, treatment options are limited. The present study investigates the prevalence and genetic characteristics of blaNDM-1 and blaKPC-2 co-harboring clinical isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae.Methods: In this study, Multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was performed to detect the carbapenem-resistant genes, and the broth microdilution method was used to determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of antibacterial drugs. The transferability of carbapenem-resistant phenotypes was examined using filter mating assays. Overall, we used Illumina sequencing to evaluate the epidemiological and molecular characteristics of blaNDM-1 and blaKPC-2 (genes

Graph partitioning is a common solution to scale up the graph algorithms, and shortest path (SP) computation is one of them. However, the existing solutions typically have a fixed partition method with a fixed path index and fixed partition structure, so it is unclear how the partition method and path index influence the pathfinding performance. Moreover, few studies have explored the index maintenance of partitioned SP (PSP) on dynamic graphs. To provide a deeper insight into the dynamic PSP indexes, we systematically deliberate on the existing works and propose a universal scheme to analyze this problem theoretically. Specifically, we first propose two novel partitioned index strategies and one optimization to improve index construction, query answering, or index maintenance of PSP index. Then we propose a path-oriented graph partitioning classification criteria for easier partition method selection. After that, we re-couple the dimensions in our scheme (partitioned index strategy, path index, and partition structure) to propose five new partitioned SP indexes that are more efficient either in the query or update on different networks. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our new indexes by comparing them with state-of-the-art PSP indexes through comprehensive evaluations.

In general-sum games, the interaction of self-interested learning agents commonly leads to socially worse outcomes, such as defect-defect in the iterated stag hunt (ISH). Previous works address this challenge by sharing rewards or shaping their opponents' learning process, which require too strong assumptions. In this paper, we demonstrate that agents trained to optimize expected returns are more likely to choose a safe action that leads to guaranteed but lower rewards. However, there typically exists a risky action that leads to higher rewards in the long run only if agents cooperate, e.g., cooperate-cooperate in ISH. To overcome this, we propose using action value distribution to characterize the decision's risk and corresponding potential payoffs. Specifically, we present Adaptable Risk-Sensitive Policy (ARSP). ARSP learns the distributions over agent's return and estimates a dynamic risk-seeking bonus to discover risky coordination strategies. Furthermore, to avoid overfitting training opponents, ARSP learns an auxiliary opponent modeling task to infer opponents' types and dynamically alter corresponding strategies during execution. Empirically, agents trained via ARSP can achieve stable coordination during training without accessing opponent's rewards or learning process, and can adapt to non-cooperative opponents during execution. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first method to learn coordination strategies between agents both in iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) and iterated stag hunt (ISH) without shaping opponents or rewards, and can adapt to opponents with distinct strategies during execution. Furthermore, we show that ARSP can be scaled to high-dimensional settings., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2205.15859

Among the remarkable emergent capabilities of large language models (LMs) is free-text rationalization; beyond a certain scale, large LMs are capable of generating seemingly useful rationalizations, which in turn, can dramatically enhance their performances on leaderboards. This phenomenon raises a question: can machine generated rationales also be useful for humans, especially when lay humans try to answer questions based on those machine rationales? We observe that human utility of existing rationales is far from satisfactory, and expensive to estimate with human studies. Existing metrics like task performance of the LM generating the rationales, or similarity between generated and gold rationales are not good indicators of their human utility. While we observe that certain properties of rationales like conciseness and novelty are correlated with their human utility, estimating them without human involvement is challenging. We show that, by estimating a rationale's helpfulness in answering similar unseen instances, we can measure its human utility to a better extent. We also translate this finding into an automated score, GEN-U, that we propose, which can help improve LMs' ability to generate rationales with better human utility, while maintaining most of its task performance. Lastly, we release all code and collected data with this project., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2023

Machine learning (ML) based time series forecasting models often require and assume certain degrees of stationarity in the data when producing forecasts. However, in many real-world situations, the data distributions are not stationary and they can change over time while reducing the accuracy of the forecasting models, which in the ML literature is known as concept drift. Handling concept drift in forecasting is essential for many ML methods in use nowadays, however, the prior work only proposes methods to handle concept drift in the classification domain. To fill this gap, we explore concept drift handling methods in particular for Global Forecasting Models (GFM) which recently have gained popularity in the forecasting domain. We propose two new concept drift handling methods, namely: Error Contribution Weighting (ECW) and Gradient Descent Weighting (GDW), based on a continuous adaptive weighting concept. These methods use two forecasting models which are separately trained with the most recent series and all series, and finally, the weighted average of the forecasts provided by the two models are considered as the final forecasts. Using LightGBM as the underlying base learner, in our evaluation on three simulated datasets, the proposed models achieve significantly higher accuracy than a set of statistical benchmarks and LightGBM baselines across four evaluation metrics., Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

The Multi-Constraint Shortest Path (MCSP) problem aims to find the shortest path between two nodes in a network subject to a given constraint set. It is typically processed as a skyline path problem. However, the number of intermediate skyline paths becomes larger as the network size increases and the constraint number grows, which brings about the dramatical growth of computational cost and further makes the existing index-based methods hardly capable of obtaining the complete exact results. In this paper, we propose a novel high-dimensional skyline path concatenation method to avoid the expensive skyline path search, which supports the efficient construction of hop labeling index for MCSP queries. Specifically, a set of insightful observations and techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency of concatenating two skyline path set, a n-Cube technique is designed to prune the concatenation space among multiple hops, and a constraint pruning method is used to avoid the unnecessary computation. Furthermore, to scale up to larger networks, we propose a novel forest hop labeling which enables the parallel label construction from different network partitions. Our approach is the first method that can achieve accuracy and efficiency for MCSP query. Extensive experiments on real-life road networks demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art solutions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

In a plethora of recent work, large language models (LLMs) demonstrated impressive reasoning ability, but many proposed downstream reasoning tasks focus on performance-wise evaluation. Two fundamental questions persist: 1) how reliable is the quality of reasoning, and 2) can models detect unreliable reasoning? In this paper, we investigate self-contradictory (Self-Contra) reasoning, where the model reasoning does not support predictions. To address 1), we assess the Self-Contra rate across four datasets and delve into finer-grained categories of Self-Contra reasoning. We find that LLMs often contradict themselves when performing reasoning tasks that involve contextual information understanding or commonsense. Importantly, a higher accuracy does not necessarily correspond to a lower Self-Contra rate. The model may appear to generate correct answers but it may take shortcuts in reasoning or skip over contextual evidence, thereby displaying Self-Contra behaviors with compromised reasoning. As for 2), we task GPT-4 with identifying Self-Contra reasoning and finer-grained fallacies. We observe that GPT-4 struggles to effectively detect Self-Contra reasoning, with significantly low performance compared with human judgment. Our results indicate that the current LLMs lack robustness necessary for reliable reasoning and we emphasize the urgent need for establishing best practices in comprehensive reasoning evaluations beyond accuracy-based metrics.

The malicious applications of deep forgery, represented by face swapping, have introduced security threats such as misinformation dissemination and identity fraud. While some research has proposed the use of robust watermarking methods to trace the copyright of facial images for post-event traceability, these methods cannot effectively prevent the generation of forgeries at the source and curb their dissemination. To address this problem, we propose a novel comprehensive active defense mechanism that combines traceability and adversariality, called Dual Defense. Dual Defense invisibly embeds a single robust watermark within the target face to actively respond to sudden cases of malicious face swapping. It disrupts the output of the face swapping model while maintaining the integrity of watermark information throughout the entire dissemination process. This allows for watermark extraction at any stage of image tracking for traceability. Specifically, we introduce a watermark embedding network based on original-domain feature impersonation attack. This network learns robust adversarial features of target facial images and embeds watermarks, seeking a well-balanced trade-off between watermark invisibility, adversariality, and traceability through perceptual adversarial encoding strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dual Defense achieves optimal overall defense success rates and exhibits promising universality in anti-face swapping tasks and dataset generalization ability. It maintains impressive adversariality and traceability in both original and robust settings, surpassing current forgery defense methods that possess only one of these capabilities, including CMUA-Watermark, Anti-Forgery, FakeTagger, or PGD methods.

We propose BOSS, an approach that automatically learns to solve new long-horizon, complex, and meaningful tasks by growing a learned skill library with minimal supervision. Prior work in reinforcement learning require expert supervision, in the form of demonstrations or rich reward functions, to learn long-horizon tasks. Instead, our approach BOSS (BOotStrapping your own Skills) learns to accomplish new tasks by performing "skill bootstrapping," where an agent with a set of primitive skills interacts with the environment to practice new skills without receiving reward feedback for tasks outside of the initial skill set. This bootstrapping phase is guided by large language models (LLMs) that inform the agent of meaningful skills to chain together. Through this process, BOSS builds a wide range of complex and useful behaviors from a basic set of primitive skills. We demonstrate through experiments in realistic household environments that agents trained with our LLM-guided bootstrapping procedure outperform those trained with naive bootstrapping as well as prior unsupervised skill acquisition methods on zero-shot execution of unseen, long-horizon tasks in new environments. Website at clvrai.com/boss., Comment: CoRL 2023 (Oral); 24 pages, 11 figures

Shortest path (SP) computation is the fundamental operation in various networks such as urban networks, logistic networks, communication networks, social networks, etc. With the development of technology and societal expansions, those networks tend to be massive. This, in turn, causes deteriorated performance of SP computation, and graph partitioning is commonly leveraged to scale up the SP algorithms. However, the partitioned shortest path (PSP) index has never been systematically investigated and theoretically analyzed, and there is a lack of experimental comparison among different PSP indexes. Moreover, few studies have explored PSP index maintenance in dynamic networks. Therefore, in this paper, we systematically analyze the dynamic PSP index by proposing a universal scheme for it. Specifically, we first propose two novel partitioned shortest path strategies (No-boundary and Post-boundary strategies) to improve the performance of PSP indexes and design the corresponding index maintenance approaches to deal with dynamic scenarios. Then we categorize the partition methods from the perspective of partition structure to facilitate the selection of partition methods in the PSP index. Furthermore, we propose a universal scheme for designing the PSP index by coupling its three dimensions (i.e. PSP strategy, partition structure, and SP algorithm). Based on this scheme, we propose five new PSP indexes with prominent performance in either query or update efficiency. Lastly, extensive experiments are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PSP scheme, with valuable guidance provided on the PSP index design.