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Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Policy Gradient Methods: Analysis, Misconceptions, And Improvements, Christopher P. Nota
Policy Gradient Methods: Analysis, Misconceptions, And Improvements, Christopher P. Nota
Doctoral Dissertations
Policy gradient methods are a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that optimize a parametric policy by maximizing an objective function that directly measures the performance of the policy. Despite being used in many high-profile applications of reinforcement learning, the conventional use of policy gradient methods in practice deviates from existing theory. This thesis presents a comprehensive mathematical analysis of policy gradient methods, uncovering misconceptions and suggesting novel solutions to improve their performance. We first demonstrate that the update rule used by most policy gradient methods does not correspond to the gradient of any objective function due to the way the …
Multi-Slam Systems For Fault-Tolerant Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, Samer Nashed
Multi-Slam Systems For Fault-Tolerant Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, Samer Nashed
Doctoral Dissertations
Mobile robots need accurate, high fidelity models of their operating environments in order to complete their tasks safely and efficiently. Generating these models is most often done via Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a paradigm where the robot alternatively estimates the most up-to-date model of the environment and its position relative to this model as it acquires new information from its sensors over time. Because robots operate in many different environments with different compute, memory, sensing, and form constraints, the nature and quality of information available to individual instances of different SLAM systems varies substantially. `One-size-fits-all' solutions are thus exceedingly …
Bayesian Structural Causal Inference With Probabilistic Programming, Sam A. Witty
Bayesian Structural Causal Inference With Probabilistic Programming, Sam A. Witty
Doctoral Dissertations
Reasoning about causal relationships is central to the human experience. This evokes a natural question in our pursuit of human-like artificial intelligence: how might we imbue intelligent systems with similar causal reasoning capabilities? Better yet, how might we imbue intelligent systems with the ability to learn cause and effect relationships from observation and experimentation? Unfortunately, reasoning about cause and effect requires more than just data: it also requires partial knowledge about data generating mechanisms. Given this need, our task then as computational scientists is to design data structures for representing partial causal knowledge, and algorithms for updating that knowledge in …
Better Understanding Genomic Architecture With The Use Of Applied Statistics And Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Jonathon C. Romero
Better Understanding Genomic Architecture With The Use Of Applied Statistics And Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Jonathon C. Romero
Doctoral Dissertations
With the continuous improvements in biological data collection, new techniques are needed to better understand the complex relationships in genomic and other biological data sets. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (X-AI) techniques like Iterative Random Forest (iRF) excel at finding interactions within data, such as genomic epistasis. Here, the introduction of new methods to mine for these complex interactions is shown in a variety of scenarios. The application of iRF as a method for Genomic Wide Epistasis Studies shows that the method is robust in finding interacting sets of features in synthetic data, without requiring the exponentially increasing computation time of many …
Reliable Decision-Making With Imprecise Models, Sandhya Saisubramanian
Reliable Decision-Making With Imprecise Models, Sandhya Saisubramanian
Doctoral Dissertations
The rapid growth in the deployment of autonomous systems across various sectors has generated considerable interest in how these systems can operate reliably in large, stochastic, and unstructured environments. Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is challenging to assure that autonomous systems will operate reliably in the open world. One of the causes of unreliable behavior is the impreciseness of the model used for decision-making. Due to the practical challenges in data collection and precise model specification, autonomous systems often operate based on models that do not represent all the details in the environment. Even if …
Advances And Applications In High-Dimensional Heuristic Optimization, Samuel Alexander Vanfossan
Advances And Applications In High-Dimensional Heuristic Optimization, Samuel Alexander Vanfossan
Doctoral Dissertations
“Applicable to most real-world decision scenarios, multiobjective optimization is an area of multicriteria decision-making that seeks to simultaneously optimize two or more conflicting objectives. In contrast to single-objective scenarios, nontrivial multiobjective optimization problems are characterized by a set of Pareto optimal solutions wherein no solution unanimously optimizes all objectives. Evolutionary algorithms have emerged as a standard approach to determine a set of these Pareto optimal solutions, from which a decision-maker can select a vetted alternative. While easy to implement and having demonstrated great efficacy, these evolutionary approaches have been criticized for their runtime complexity when dealing with many alternatives or …
Development Of A Modeling Algorithm To Predict Lean Implementation Success, Richard Charles Barclay
Development Of A Modeling Algorithm To Predict Lean Implementation Success, Richard Charles Barclay
Doctoral Dissertations
”Lean has become a common term and goal in organizations throughout the world. The approach of eliminating waste and continuous improvement may seem simple on the surface but can be more complex when it comes to implementation. Some firms implement lean with great success, getting complete organizational buy-in and realizing the efficiencies foundational to lean. Other organizations struggle to implement lean. Never able to get the buy-in or traction needed to really institute the sort of cultural change that is often needed to implement change. It would be beneficial to have a tool that organizations could use to assess their …
Abstractions In Reasoning For Long-Term Autonomy, Kyle Hollins Wray
Abstractions In Reasoning For Long-Term Autonomy, Kyle Hollins Wray
Doctoral Dissertations
The path to building adaptive, robust, intelligent agents has led researchers to develop a suite of powerful models and algorithms for agents with a single objective. However, in recent years, attempts to use this monolithic approach to solve an ever-expanding set of complex real-world problems, which increasingly include long-term autonomous deployments, have illuminated challenges in its ability to scale. Consequently, a fragmented collection of hierarchical and multi-objective models were developed. This trend continues into the algorithms as well, as each approximates an optimal solution in a different manner for scalability. These models and algorithms represent an attempt to solve pieces …
Integration Of Robotic Perception, Action, And Memory, Li Yang Ku
Integration Of Robotic Perception, Action, And Memory, Li Yang Ku
Doctoral Dissertations
In the book "On Intelligence", Hawkins states that intelligence should be measured by the capacity to memorize and predict patterns. I further suggest that the ability to predict action consequences based on perception and memory is essential for robots to demonstrate intelligent behaviors in unstructured environments. However, traditional approaches generally represent action and perception separately---as computer vision modules that recognize objects and as planners that execute actions based on labels and poses. I propose here a more integrated approach where action and perception are combined in a memory model, in which a sequence of actions can be planned based on …
Mitigation Of Environmental Hazards Of Sulfide Mineral Flotation With An Insight Into Froth Stability And Flotation Performance, Muhammad Badar Hayat
Mitigation Of Environmental Hazards Of Sulfide Mineral Flotation With An Insight Into Froth Stability And Flotation Performance, Muhammad Badar Hayat
Doctoral Dissertations
"Today's major challenges facing the flotation of sulfide minerals involve constant variability in the ore composition; environmental concerns; water scarcity and inefficient plant performance. The present work addresses these challenges faced by the flotation process of complex sulfide ore of Mississippi Valley type with an insight into the froth stability and the flotation performance. The first project in this study was aimed at finding the optimum conditions for the bulk flotation of galena (PbS) and chalcopyrite (CuFeS₂) through Response Surface Methodology (RSM). In the second project, an attempt was made to replace toxic sodium cyanide (NaCN) with the biodegradable chitosan …