Conservative World Models

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) promises to provide agents that can perform any task in an environment after an offline pre-training phase. Forward-backward (FB) representations represent remarkable progress towards this ideal, achieving 85% of the performance of task-specific agents in this setting. However, such performance is contingent on access to large and diverse datasets for pre-training, which cannot be expected for most real problems. Here, we explore how FB performance degrades when trained on small datasets that lack diversity, and mitigate it with conservatism, a well-established feature of performant offline RL algorithms. We evaluate our family of methods across various datasets, domains and tasks, reaching 150% of vanilla FB performance in aggregate. Somewhat surprisingly, conservative FB algorithms also outperform the task-specific baseline, despite lacking access to reward labels and being required to maintain policies for all tasks. Conservative FB algorithms perform no worse than FB on full datasets, and so present little downside over their predecessor. Our code is available open-source via https://enjeeneer.io/projects/conservative-world-models/

Collection and Preparation of Milk Samples for Microbiological Culturing

In developing individual farm mastitis control and treatment strategies, it is often necessary to characterize the types of bacteria that are present on your farm. To answer this question, a microbiological analysis, or milk culture, must be performed on milk samples collected from cows showing clinical or subclinical signs of mastitis. Results of the milk cultures will help identify which bacteria are causing the mastitis. In turn, this information can be used to alter mastitis control, prevention, and treatment options to fit your herd’s conditions. During an investigation of a herd dealing with high somatic cell counts or a high incidence of clinical mastitis, milk culture results provide essential evidence for solving the problem. When managing a contagious mastitis problem (Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus agalactiae), milk cultures are even more important to help make individual cow treatment and culling decisions. Extra care and precaution are necessary during the collection process, using strict, clean, aseptic (without germs and bacteria) procedures to be sure that the bacteria originated from milk from the udder and not the teat end or hair, the sampler’s hands, or the barn environment. If the samples are not collected, handled, and transported correctly, the bacteriological results will be of no diagnostic value

Neutron inelastic scattering investigation of the magnetic excitations in Cu_2Te_2O_5X_2 (X=Br, Cl)

Neutron inelastic scattering investigations have been performed on the spin tetrahedral system Cu_2Te_2O_5X_2 (X = Cl, Br). We report the observation of magnetic excitations with a dispersive component in both compounds, associated with the 3D incommensurate magnetic order that develops below $T^{Cl}_{N}$=18.2 K and $T^{Br}_{N}$=11.4 K. The excitation in Cu_2Te_2O_5Cl_2 softens as the temperature approaches $T^{Cl}_{N}$, leaving diffuse quasi-elastic scattering above the transition temperature. In the bromide, the excitations are present well above $T^{Br}_{N}$, which might be attributed to the presence of a degree of low dimensional correlations above $T^{Br}_{N}$ in this compound

Influence of static Jahn-Teller distortion on the magnetic excitation spectrum of PrO2: A synchrotron x-ray and neutron inelastic scattering study

A synchrotron x-ray diffraction study of the crystallographic structure of PrO2 in the Jahn-Teller distorted phase is reported. The distortion of the oxygen sublattice, which was previously ambiguous, is shown to be a chiral structure in which neighbouring oxygen chains have opposite chiralities. A temperature dependent study of the magnetic excitation spectrum, probed by neutron inelastic scattering, is also reported. Changes in the energies and relative intensities of the crystal field transitions provide an insight into the interplay between the static and dynamic Jahn-Teller effects.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Classification of dementia from FDG-PET parametric images using data mining

Author name used in this publication: Michael FulhamAuthor name used in this publication: (David) Dagan FengCentre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information EngineeringRefereed conference paper2007-2008 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe