6 research outputs found
Extraneousness-Aware Imitation Learning
Visual imitation learning provides an effective framework to learn skills
from demonstrations. However, the quality of the provided demonstrations
usually significantly affects the ability of an agent to acquire desired
skills. Therefore, the standard visual imitation learning assumes near-optimal
demonstrations, which are expensive or sometimes prohibitive to collect.
Previous works propose to learn from noisy demonstrations; however, the noise
is usually assumed to follow a context-independent distribution such as a
uniform or gaussian distribution. In this paper, we consider another crucial
yet underexplored setting -- imitation learning with task-irrelevant yet
locally consistent segments in the demonstrations (e.g., wiping sweat while
cutting potatoes in a cooking tutorial). We argue that such noise is common in
real world data and term them "extraneous" segments. To tackle this problem, we
introduce Extraneousness-Aware Imitation Learning (EIL), a self-supervised
approach that learns visuomotor policies from third-person demonstrations with
extraneous subsequences. EIL learns action-conditioned observation embeddings
in a self-supervised manner and retrieves task-relevant observations across
visual demonstrations while excluding the extraneous ones. Experimental results
show that EIL outperforms strong baselines and achieves comparable policies to
those trained with perfect demonstration on both simulated and real-world robot
control tasks. The project page can be found at
https://sites.google.com/view/eil-website.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization
Visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in continuous control
tasks. Despite its progress, current algorithms are still unsatisfactory in
virtually every aspect of the performance such as sample efficiency, asymptotic
performance, and their robustness to the choice of random seeds. In this paper,
we identify a major shortcoming in existing visual RL methods that is the
agents often exhibit sustained inactivity during early training, thereby
limiting their ability to explore effectively. Expanding upon this crucial
observation, we additionally unveil a significant correlation between the
agents' inclination towards motorically inactive exploration and the absence of
neuronal activity within their policy networks. To quantify this inactivity, we
adopt dormant ratio as a metric to measure inactivity in the RL agent's
network. Empirically, we also recognize that the dormant ratio can act as a
standalone indicator of an agent's activity level, regardless of the received
reward signals. Leveraging the aforementioned insights, we introduce DrM, a
method that uses three core mechanisms to guide agents'
exploration-exploitation trade-offs by actively minimizing the dormant ratio.
Experiments demonstrate that DrM achieves significant improvements in sample
efficiency and asymptotic performance with no broken seeds (76 seeds in total)
across three continuous control benchmark environments, including DeepMind
Control Suite, MetaWorld, and Adroit. Most importantly, DrM is the first
model-free algorithm that consistently solves tasks in both the Dog and
Manipulator domains from the DeepMind Control Suite as well as three dexterous
hand manipulation tasks without demonstrations in Adroit, all based on pixel
observations
Monitoring Prevalence and Persistence of Environmental Contamination by SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a Makeshift Hospital for Asymptomatic and Very Mild COVID-19 Patients
Objective: To investigate the details of environmental contamination status by SARS-CoV-2 in a makeshift COVID-19 hospital.Methods: Environmental samples were collected from a makeshift hospital. The extent of contamination was assessed by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) for SARS-CoV-2 RNA from various samples.Results: There was a wide range of total collected samples contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 RNA, ranging from 8.47% to 100%. Results revealed that 70.00% of sewage from the bathroom and 48.19% of air samples were positive. The highest rate of contamination was found from the no-touch surfaces (73.07%) and the lowest from frequently touched surfaces (33.40%). The most contaminated objects were the top surfaces of patient cubic partitions (100%). The median Ct values among strongly positive samples were 33.38 (IQR, 31.69–35.07) and 33.24 (IQR, 31.33–34.34) for ORF1ab and N genes, respectively. SARS-CoV-2 relic RNA can be detected on indoor surfaces for up to 20 days.Conclusion: The findings show a higher prevalence and persistence in detecting the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the makeshift COVID-19 hospital setting. The contamination mode of droplet deposition may be more common than contaminated touches
Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density
Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data
Table2_Monitoring Prevalence and Persistence of Environmental Contamination by SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a Makeshift Hospital for Asymptomatic and Very Mild COVID-19 Patients.XLSX
Objective: To investigate the details of environmental contamination status by SARS-CoV-2 in a makeshift COVID-19 hospital.Methods: Environmental samples were collected from a makeshift hospital. The extent of contamination was assessed by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) for SARS-CoV-2 RNA from various samples.Results: There was a wide range of total collected samples contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 RNA, ranging from 8.47% to 100%. Results revealed that 70.00% of sewage from the bathroom and 48.19% of air samples were positive. The highest rate of contamination was found from the no-touch surfaces (73.07%) and the lowest from frequently touched surfaces (33.40%). The most contaminated objects were the top surfaces of patient cubic partitions (100%). The median Ct values among strongly positive samples were 33.38 (IQR, 31.69–35.07) and 33.24 (IQR, 31.33–34.34) for ORF1ab and N genes, respectively. SARS-CoV-2 relic RNA can be detected on indoor surfaces for up to 20 days.Conclusion: The findings show a higher prevalence and persistence in detecting the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the makeshift COVID-19 hospital setting. The contamination mode of droplet deposition may be more common than contaminated touches.</p
ET White Paper: To Find the First Earth 2.0
We propose to develop a wide-field and ultra-high-precision photometric
survey mission, temporarily named "Earth 2.0 (ET)". This mission is designed to
measure, for the first time, the occurrence rate and the orbital distributions
of Earth-sized planets. ET consists of seven 30cm telescopes, to be launched to
the Earth-Sun's L2 point. Six of these are transit telescopes with a field of
view of 500 square degrees. Staring in the direction that encompasses the
original Kepler field for four continuous years, this monitoring will return
tens of thousands of transiting planets, including the elusive Earth twins
orbiting solar-type stars. The seventh telescope is a 30cm microlensing
telescope that will monitor an area of 4 square degrees toward the galactic
bulge. This, combined with simultaneous ground-based KMTNet observations, will
measure masses for hundreds of long-period and free-floating planets. Together,
the transit and the microlensing telescopes will revolutionize our
understandings of terrestrial planets across a large swath of orbital distances
and free space. In addition, the survey data will also facilitate studies in
the fields of asteroseismology, Galactic archeology, time-domain sciences, and
black holes in binaries.Comment: 116 pages,79 figure