Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy Learning from Failures

Reinforcement learning methods have been used for learning dialogue policies. However, learning an effective dialogue policy frequently requires prohibitively many conversations. This is partly because of the sparse rewards in dialogues, and the very few successful dialogues in early learning phase. Hindsight experience replay (HER) enables learning from failures, but the vanilla HER is inapplicable to dialogue learning due to the implicit goals. In this work, we develop two complex HER methods providing different trade-offs between complexity and performance, and, for the first time, enabled HER-based dialogue policy learning. Experiments using a realistic user simulator show that our HER methods perform better than existing experience replay methods (as applied to deep Q-networks) in learning rate

Learning and Reasoning for Robot Dialog and Navigation Tasks

You are viewing an article from the Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue that was in the Good Systems Network Digest in 2020.Office of the VP for Researc

Mapping global research on shadow education: Trends and future agenda

This study aimed to analyze bibliographies of journals, authors, and research topics on shadow education using the Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis focuses on the metadata of journals, authors, and topics, visualized, and analyzed to produce a road map, research trends, and future agenda. The data were obtained from 207 articles published on Scopus downloaded on 29/8/2021 by using “shadow education” or “shadow curriculum” keywords. Furthermore, descriptive statistical methods and bibliometric analysis using Biblioshiny, an R-based application that generates bibliometric maps were used. Shadow education research has not been widely developed. Therefore, this bibliographic study may form the basis for future developments. Shadow education is the highest trend, followed by education and policy, high stakes testing, teacher education, curriculum, academic achievement, and private tutoring. This study provides an overview of trends in journals, authors, and research topics related to shadow education. Specifically, it provides relevant information to develop the potential and related themes in the future

The diversification of the lynx lineage during the Plio-Pleistocene-evidence from a new small Lynx from Longdan, Gansu Province, China

Altres ajuts: CERCA Programme/Generalitat de CatalunyaA new small-sized lynx from Longdan, Gansu Province, China, Lynx hei sp. nov., is described in this study. The new species displays the characteristic Lynx generic traits, such as distinct buccal grooves in the upper canine, presence of an anterior groove in the upper canine, absence of upper premolar 2, and a moderately developed mastoid process, but it is markedly smaller than the previously described Lynx issiodorensis specimens from the same site and is also smaller overall than most living species, comparable to Lynx rufus in size. The new species has a relatively wide and deep zygomatic arch, similar to that of living Lynx lynx, Lynx pardinus and Lynx canadensis but wider than that of Lynx rufus. Our phylogenetic analyses suggest that Lynx hei falls within the crown group Lynx, being the sister to Lynx rufus or, less probably, a sister to Lynx issiodorensis + three other living species of Lynx. The Plio-Pleistocene Lynx issiodorensis is supported as the ancestor of Lynx lynx, Lynx pardinus and Lynx canadensis. Our phylogenetic study suggests that Lynx diversification over the Plio-Pleistocene was achieved initially by body size differentiation, putatively forced by intraspecific competition with other carnivorans, followed by morphological divergence

Design and Verification of a Novel Triphibian Robot

Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks, there are seldom research to date in the literature. Generally, locomotions in different working media, i.e. land, water and air, require different propelling actuators, and thus the triphibian system becomes bulky. To overcome this challenge, we proposed a triphibian robot and provide the robot with driving forces to perform all-terrain operations in an efficient way. A morphable mechanism is designed to enable the transition between different motion modes, and specifically a cylindrical body is implemented as the rolling mechanism in land mode. Detailed design principles of different mechanisms and the transition between various locomotion modes are analyzed. Finally, a triphibian robot prototype is fabricated and tested in various working media with both mono-modal and multi-modal functionalities. Experiments have verified our platform, and the results show promising adaptions in future exploration tasks in various working scenarios.Comment: IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS. PREPRINT VERSION,8 page

A benchmark and an algorithm for detecting germline transposon insertions and measuring de novo transposon insertion frequencies

Transposons are genomic parasites, and their new insertions can cause instability and spur the evolution of their host genomes. Rapid accumulation of short-read whole-genome sequencing data provides a great opportunity for studying new transposon insertions and their impacts on the host genome. Although many algorithms are available for detecting transposon insertions, the task remains challenging and existing tools are not designed for identifying de novo insertions. Here, we present a new benchmark fly dataset based on PacBio long-read sequencing and a new method TEMP2 for detecting germline insertions and measuring de novo \u27singleton\u27 insertion frequencies in eukaryotic genomes. TEMP2 achieves high sensitivity and precision for detecting germline insertions when compared with existing tools using both simulated data in fly and experimental data in fly and human. Furthermore, TEMP2 can accurately assess the frequencies of de novo transposon insertions even with high levels of chimeric reads in simulated datasets; such chimeric reads often occur during the construction of short-read sequencing libraries. By applying TEMP2 to published data on hybrid dysgenic flies inflicted by de-repressed P-elements, we confirmed the continuous new insertions of P-elements in dysgenic offspring before they regain piRNAs for P-element repression. TEMP2 is freely available at Github: https://github.com/weng-lab/TEMP2