Human cognitive states, such as mental workload, play a pivotal role in decision making processes within human automation teams. Although subjective measures of mental workload can be obtained using standard questionnaires, such as the NASA-TLX, their administration is often impractical as it interferes with the primary tasks of the human operator. Therefore, it is of interest to estimate these subjective measures from less intrusive observations. Evidence suggests that mental workload is a dynamic process so incorporating historical measurements could reduce its estimation error. In addition, the estimation of operator performance in human automation teams is essential in optimizing task effectiveness and facilitating efficient resource allocation. In this work, we consider a scenario where a human and an automation solve binary classification tasks under time constraints. We present and compare different dynamic schemes to estimate the operator’s performance, i.e., classification accuracy, and its subjective ratings on subscales of the NASA-TLX questionnaire, which measure mental workload across multiple dimensions. These schemes differ in the information available for estimation. We test these schemes on data collected from a scenario, where a human and an automation perform a series of classification tasks for simulated mobile objects. Our analysis of the interaction data and the estimation schemes indicates that employing dynamic estimation for certain NASA-TLX subscale ratings leads to decreased estimation errors.

Machine-based prediction of real-world events is garnering attention due to its potential for informed decision-making. Whereas traditional forecasting predominantly hinges on structured data like time-series, recent breakthroughs in language models enable predictions using unstructured text. In particular, (Zou et al., 2022) unveils AutoCast, a new benchmark that employs news articles for answering forecasting queries. Nevertheless, existing methods still trail behind human performance. The cornerstone of accurate forecasting, we argue, lies in identifying a concise, yet rich subset of news snippets from a vast corpus. With this motivation, we introduce AutoCast++, a zero-shot ranking-based context retrieval system, tailored to sift through expansive news document collections for event forecasting. Our approach first re-ranks articles based on zero-shot question-passage relevance, honing in on semantically pertinent news. Following this, the chosen articles are subjected to zero-shot summarization to attain succinct context. Leveraging a pre-trained language model, we conduct both the relevance evaluation and article summarization without needing domain-specific training. Notably, recent articles can sometimes be at odds with preceding ones due to new facts or unanticipated incidents, leading to fluctuating temporal dynamics. To tackle this, our re-ranking mechanism gives preference to more recent articles, and we further regularize the multi-passage representation learning to align with human forecaster responses made on different dates. Empirical results underscore marked improvements across multiple metrics, improving the performance for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) by 48% and true/false (TF) questions by up to 8%. Code is available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus.

Goal-conditioned planning benefits from learned low-dimensional representations of rich observations. While compact latent representations typically learned from variational autoencoders or inverse dynamics enable goal-conditioned decision making, they ignore state reachability, hampering their performance. In this paper, we learn a representation that associates reachable states together for effective planning and goal-conditioned policy learning. We first learn a latent representation with multi-step inverse dynamics (to remove distracting information), and then transform this representation to associate reachable states together in $\ell_2$ space. Our proposals are rigorously tested in various simulation testbeds. Numerical results in reward-based settings show significant improvements in sampling efficiency. Further, in reward-free settings this approach yields layered state abstractions that enable computationally efficient hierarchical planning for reaching ad hoc goals with zero additional samples.

This paper introduces an interpretable contextual bandit algorithm using Tsetlin Machines, which solves complex pattern recognition tasks using propositional (Boolean) logic. The proposed bandit learning algorithm relies on straightforward bit manipulation, thus simplifying computation and interpretation. We then present a mechanism for performing Thompson sampling with Tsetlin Machine, given its non-parametric nature. Our empirical analysis shows that Tsetlin Machine as a base contextual bandit learner outperforms other popular base learners on eight out of nine datasets. We further analyze the interpretability of our learner, investigating how arms are selected based on propositional expressions that model the context.

We propose a theoretical framework for approximate planning and learning in partially observed systems. Our framework is based on the fundamental notion of information state. We provide two definitions of information state---i) a function of history which is sufficient to compute the expected reward and predict its next value; ii) a function of the history which can be recursively updated and is sufficient to compute the expected reward and predict the next observation. An information state always leads to a dynamic programming decomposition. Our key result is to show that if a function of the history (called AIS) approximately satisfies the properties of the information state, then there is a corresponding approximate dynamic program. We show that the policy computed using this is approximately optimal with bounded loss of optimality. We show that several approximations in state, observation and action spaces in literature can be viewed as instances of AIS. In some of these cases, we obtain tighter bounds. A salient feature of AIS is that it can be learnt from data. We present AIS based multi-time scale policy gradient algorithms and detailed numerical experiments with low, moderate and high dimensional environments.