Abstract

The study reports diurnal and seasonal variations of atmospheric CO2 across multiple locations in India using the dedicated ground-based observations, satellite observations and model simulations. Data from seven sites collected during different time periods are analysed to understand the role of biospheric, fossil fuel fluxes on diurnal and seasonal variations of atmospheric CO2. The study also examines the impact of land use/land cover on the variability of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Results show that CO2 mixing ratios are highest during night and lowest in the afternoon. Ponmudi station shows homogeneous daily CO2 mixing ratios because of an active ecosystem and free of boundary layer influence. A high altitude site Ooty exhibits higher diurnal and seasonal variations, possibly due to entrapped emissions from tourism and settlements, while Nagpur’s (an urban site), CO2 mixing ratios remain moderate throughout the year due to active plantations. The observed CO2 is further compared with the simulations from atmospheric chemistry-transport model. The model is able to cap- ture the observed seasonal cycle all over the study locations.

Abstract

Diurnal variation of atmospheric CO2 and its driving factors are studied using high-precision in situ mixing ratio measurements and stable carbon isotopic CO2 (δ 13C-CO2) for the first time over Shadnagar, a suburban site in India, from November 2018 to October 2019. The annual mean mixing ratios of atmospheric CO2 and δ 13 C-CO2 are observed to be 414.76 ± 4.26 ppm and −11.19 ‰ ± 1.63 ‰. Maximum diurnal variability of atmospheric CO 2 was observed in summer monsoon (17.30 ± 9.29 ppm), and the minimum was noticed in winter (7.19 ± 0.11 ppm), indicating strong seasonality in diurnal variability of amplitude. To characterize the atmospheric CO 2 sources, the Miller-Tans model was implemented separately using the CO2 and its δ 13 C-CO2 isotopic data during day and night. However, a strong source signature of δ 13C-CO2 was observed during the night-time of summer monsoon with a slope of −37.42‰ ± 0.73‰, obtained using a reduced major axis regression. The identified source indicates possible emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Further, a Lagrangian back trajectory analysis was performed to study the influence of transport on the observed CO2 mixing ratios. The model trajectory confirms the influence of the Indian summer monsoon on the variations of atmospheric CO 2 mixing ratios. Our study shows that fossil fuel emissions are one of the major contributors of CO 2 in the study location (about ∼2 to 4 ppm) with biogenic fluxes adding a clear seasonality ranging from −8 to 4 ppm.

Abstract

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have led to many exciting applications. These advancements have been driven by improvements in both algorithms and engineering, which have resulted in faster training of RL agents. We present marl-jax, a multi-agent reinforcement learning software package for training and evaluating social generalization of the agents. The package is designed for training a population of agents in multi-agent environments and evaluating their ability to generalize to diverse background agents. It is built on top of DeepMind's JAX ecosystem~\cite{deepmind2020jax} and leverages the RL ecosystem developed by DeepMind. Our framework marl-jax is capable of working in cooperative and competitive, simultaneous-acting environments with multiple agents. The package offers an intuitive and user-friendly command-line interface for training a population and evaluating its generalization capabilities. In conclusion, marl-jax provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in exploring social generalization in the context of MARL. The open-source code for marl-jax is available at: \href{this https URL}{this https URL}

Abstract

A reliable critic is central to on-policy actor-critic learning. But it becomes challenging to learn a reliable critic in a multi-agent sparse reward scenario due to two factors: 1) The joint action space grows exponentially with the number of agents 2) This, combined with the reward sparseness and environment noise, leads to large sample requirements for accurate learning. We show that regularising the critic with spectral normalization (SN) enables it to learn more robustly, even in multi-agent on-policy sparse reward scenarios. Our experiments show that the regularised critic is quickly able to learn from the sparse rewarding experience in the complex SMAC and RWARE domains. These findings highlight the importance of regularisation in the critic for stable learning.

Abstract

Music processing is a complex and intriguing phenomenon that has garnered extensive research interest in recent years. In this study, we investigated neural representations of music features by analyzing blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fMRI activations of selected regions of interest during a continuous listening task. Additionally, we compared these activations to the hidden layer activations of a special class of deep neural networks (DNNs). Using representational similarity analysis, we found a strong correlation between low-level music feature encoding in the human brain regions of the Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG) and Heschl’s gyrus (HG) to the hidden layers of the DNN encoder. Our results suggest that self-supervised DNNs can serve as a reliable architecture to study the music processing domain, which is crucial considering the absence of naturalistic listening conditions in prior research Keywords: neural networks, representation similarity analysis, music cognition, music encoding, neuromusicology

Abstract

Humans use abstract concepts instead of hard features for generalization. Recent interpretability research has focused on human-centered concept explanations of neural networks. We present Concept Distillation, a novel method and framework for concept-sensitive training to induce human-centered knowledge into the model. We use Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) to estimate the model’s sensitivity and possible biases to a given concept. We extend CAVs to ante-hoc training from post-hoc analysis. We distill the conceptual knowledge from a pretrained knowledgeable teacher to a student model focused on a single downstream task. Our method can sensitize or desensitize the student model towards concepts. We show applications of concept-sensitive training to debias classification and to induce prior knowledge into a reconstruction problem. We also introduce the TextureMNIST dataset to evaluate the presence of complex texture biases. We show that concept-sensitive training can improve model interpretability, reduce biases, and induce prior knowledge

Abstract

The focus of recent research has shifted from merely increasing the Deep Neu- ral Networks (DNNs) performance in various tasks to DNNs which are more interpretable to humans. The field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has observed various techniques, including saliency-based and concept-based ap- proaches. Concept-based approaches explain the model’s decisions in simple human understandable terms called Concepts. Concepts are human interpretable units of data and the thinking ground of humans. Explanations in terms of concepts enable detecting spurious correlations, inherent biases, or clever-hans. With the ad- vent of concept-based explanations, there have been various concept representation methods and automatic concept discovery algorithms. With automatic concept dis- covery, there are a variety of discovered concept evaluation metrics. Additionally, some approaches use concepts to improve the model explainability and generaliza- tion (Concept Oriented Deep Learning CODL). The concept-based approaches are fairly new, with many new representations coming up while there is very limited work on CODL. We thus provide a systematic review and taxonomy of various concept representations and their discovery algorithms in DNNs, specifically in vision. We also provide details on concept-based model improvement literature being the first to survey CODL methods

Abstract

This paper proposes a scalable distributed video analytics framework that can process thousands of video streams from sources such as CCTV cameras using semantic scene analysis. The main idea is to deploy deep learning pipelines on the fog nodes and generate semantic scene description records (SDRs) of video feeds from the associated CCTV cameras. These SDRs are transmitted to the cloud instead of video frames saving on network bandwidth. Using these SDRs stored on the cloud database, we can answer many complex queries and perform rich video analytics, within extremely low latencies. There is no need to scan and process the video streams again on a per query basis. The software architecture on the fog nodes allows for integrating new deep learning pipelines dynamically into the existing system, thereby supporting novel analytics and queries. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the system by proposing a novel distributed algorithm for real-time vehicle pursuit. The proposed algorithm involves asking multiple spatio-temporal queries in an adaptive fashion to reduce the query processing time and is robust to inaccuracies in the deployed deep learning pipelines and camera failures.

Abstract

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is used to find the global optima of black box functions. In this work, we propose a practical BO method of function compositions where the form of the composition is known but the constituent functions are expensive to evaluate. By assuming an independent Gaussian process (GP) model for each of the constituent black-box function, we propose EI and UCB based BO algorithms and demonstrate their ability to outperform vanilla BO and the current state-of-art algorithms. We demonstrate a novel application of the proposed methods to dynamic pricing in revenue management when the underlying demand function is expensive to evaluate.

Abstract

Link forecasting in a temporal Knowledge Graph (tKG) in- volves predicting a future event from a given set of past events. Most previous studies suffered from reduced performance as they disregarded acyclic rules and enforced a tight constraint that all past events must exist in a strict temporal order. This paper proposes a novel explainable rule-based link forecasting framework by introducing two new concepts, namely ‘relaxed temporal cyclic and acyclic random walks’ and ‘link-star rules’. The former concept involves generating rules by performing cyclic and acyclic random walks on a tKG by taking into account the real-world phenomenon that the order of any two events may be ignored if their oc- currence time gap is within a threshold value. Link-star rules are a special class of acyclic rules generated based on the natural phenomenon that history repeats itself after a particular time. Link-star rules eliminate the problem of combinatorial rule explosion, thereby making our frame- work practicable. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art by a substantial margin. The evaluation measures hits@1 and mean reciprocal rank were improved by 45% and 23%, respectively. Keywords: Knowledge Graphs · Graph Analytics · Forecasting