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Die wahrscheinlich beste Entscheidung : wie Online-Algorithmen mit der unsicheren Zukunft rechnen
(2018)
Lohnt es sich, als Skianfänger in einem schneeunsicheren Jahr Skier zu kaufen? Oder ist es günstiger, sie zu mieten? Oft müssen wir Entscheidungen treffen, ohne genügend Informationen über die Zukunft zu haben. Das gilt in noch größerem Maße für Rechnersysteme, die große Datenmengen verarbeiten und schnelle Entscheidungen treffen müssen. Damit sie trotz einer Vielzahl von Unsicherheiten erfolgreich arbeiten können, entwickeln Informatiker OnlineAlgorithmen.
Large language models have become widely available to the general public, especially due to ChatGPT's release. Consequently, the AI community has invested much effort into recreating language models of the same caliber as ChatGPT, since the latter is still a technical blackbox. This thesis aims to contribute to that cause by proposing R.O.B.E.R.T., a Robotic Operating Buddy for Efficiency, Research and Teaching. In doing so, it presents a first implementation of a lightweight environment which produces tailor-made, instruction-following language models with a heavy focus on conversational capabilities that instruct themselves into a given domain-context. Within this environment, the generation of datasets, the fine-tuning process and finally the inference of a unique R.O.B.E.R.T. instance are all carried out as part of an automated pipeline.
Interacting with the environment to process sensory information, generate perceptions, and shape behavior engages neural networks in brain areas with highly varied representations, ranging from unimodal sensory cortices to higher-order association areas. Recent work suggests a much greater degree of commonality across areas, with distributed and modular networks present in both sensory and non-sensory areas during early development. However, it is currently unknown whether this initially common modular structure undergoes an equally common developmental trajectory, or whether such a modular functional organization persists in some areas—such as primary visual cortex—but not others. Here we examine the development of network organization across diverse cortical regions in ferrets of both sexes using in vivo widefield calcium imaging of spontaneous activity. We find that all regions examined, including both primary sensory cortices (visual, auditory, and somatosensory—V1, A1, and S1, respectively) and higher order association areas (prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices) exhibit a largely similar pattern of changes over an approximately 3 week developmental period spanning eye opening and the transition to predominantly externally-driven sensory activity. We find that both a modular functional organization and millimeter-scale correlated networks remain present across all cortical areas examined. These networks weakened over development in most cortical areas, but strengthened in V1. Overall, the conserved maintenance of modular organization across different cortical areas suggests a common pathway of network refinement, and suggests that a modular organization—known to encode functional representations in visual areas—may be similarly engaged in highly diverse brain areas.
Significance Different areas of the mature brain encode vastly different representations of the world. This study shows that a modular functional organization where nearby neurons participate in similar functional networks is shared across different brain areas not only during early development, but also as the brain matures where it remains a shared feature that shapes neural activity. The largely conserved trajectory of developmental changes across brain areas suggests that similar circuit mechanisms may drive this maturation. This implies that the large literature on developing cortical circuits, which is largely focused on sensory areas, may also apply more broadly, and that perturbations during development that impinge on any such shared mechanisms may produce deficits that extend across multiple brain systems.
This thesis will first introduce in more detail the Bayesian theory and its use in integrating multiple information sources. I will briefly talk about models and their relation to the dynamics of an environment, and how to combine multiple alternative models. Following that I will discuss the experimental findings on multisensory integration in humans and animals. I start with psychophysical results on various forms of tasks and setups, that show that the brain uses and combines information from multiple cues. Specifically, the discussion will focus on the finding that humans integrate this information in a way that is close to the theoretical optimal performance. Special emphasis will be put on results about the developmental aspects of cue integration, highlighting experiments that could show that children do not perform similar to the Bayesian predictions. This section also includes a short summary of experiments on how subjects handle multiple alternative environmental dynamics. I will also talk about neurobiological findings of cells receiving input from multiple receptors both in dedicated brain areas but also primary sensory areas. I will proceed with an overview of existing theories and computational models of multisensory integration. This will be followed by a discussion on reinforcement learning (RL). First I will talk about the original theory including the two different main approaches model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. The important variables will be introduced as well as different algorithmic implementations. Secondly, a short review on the mapping of those theories onto brain and behaviour will be given. I mention the most in uential papers that showed correlations between the activity in certain brain regions with RL variables, most prominently between dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference errors. I will try to motivate, why I think that this theory can help to explain the development of near-optimal cue integration in humans. The next main chapter will introduce our model that learns to solve the task of audio-visual orienting. Many of the results in this section have been published in [Weisswange et al. 2009b,Weisswange et al. 2011]. The model agent starts without any knowledge of the environment and acts based on predictions of rewards, which will be adapted according to the reward signaling the quality of the performed action. I will show that after training this model performs similarly to the prediction of a Bayesian observer. The model can also deal with more complex environments in which it has to deal with multiple possible underlying generating models (perform causal inference). In these experiments I use di#erent formulations of Bayesian observers for comparison with our model, and find that it is most similar to the fully optimal observer doing model averaging. Additional experiments using various alterations to the environment show the ability of the model to react to changes in the input statistics without explicitly representing probability distributions. I will close the chapter with a discussion on the benefits and shortcomings of the model. The thesis continues whith a report on an application of the learning algorithm introduced before to two real world cue integration tasks on a robotic head. For these tasks our system outperforms a commonly used approximation to Bayesian inference, reliability weighted averaging. The approximation is handy because of its computational simplicity, because it relies on certain assumptions that are usually controlled for in a laboratory setting, but these are often not true for real world data. This chapter is based on the paper [Karaoguz et al. 2011]. Our second modeling approach tries to address the neuronal substrates of the learning process for cue integration. I again use a reward based training scheme, but this time implemented as a modulation of synaptic plasticity mechanisms in a recurrent network of binary threshold neurons. I start the chapter with an additional introduction section to discuss recurrent networks and especially the various forms of neuronal plasticity that I will use in the model. The performance on a task similar to that of chapter 3 will be presented together with an analysis of the in uence of different plasticity mechanisms on it. Again benefits and shortcomings and the general potential of the method will be discussed. I will close the thesis with a general conclusion and some ideas about possible future work.
Programmable hardware in the form of FPGAs found its place in various high energy physics experiments over the past few decades. These devices provide highly parallel and fully configurable data transport, data formatting, and data processing capabilities with custom interfaces, even in rigid or constrained environments. Additionally, FPGA functionalities and the number of their logic resources have grown exponentially in the last few years, making FPGAs more and more suitable for complex data processing tasks. ALICE is one of the four main experiments at the LHC and specialized in the study of heavy-ion collisions. The readout chain of the ALICE detectors makes use of FPGAs at various places. The Read-Out Receiver Cards (RORCs) are one example of FPGA-based readout hardware, building the interface between the custom detector electronics and the commercial server nodes in the data processing clusters of the Data Acquisition (DAQ) system as well as the High Level Trigger (HLT). These boards are implemented as server plug-in cards with serial optical links towards the detectors. Experimental data is received via more than 500 optical links, already partly pre-processed in the FPGAs, and pushed towards the host machines. Computer clusters consisting of a few hundred nodes collect, aggregate, compress, reconstruct, and prepare the experimental data for permanent storage and later analysis. With the end of the first LHC run period in 2012 and the start of Run 2 in 2015, the DAQ and HLT systems were renewed and several detector components were upgraded for higher data rates and event rates. Increased detector link rates and obsolete host interfaces rendered it impossible to reuse the previous RORCs in Run 2.
This thesis describes the development, integration, and maintenance of the next generation of RORCs for ALICE in Run 2. A custom hardware platform, initially developed as a joint effort between the ALICE DAQ and HLT groups in the course of this work, found its place in the Run 2 readout systems of the ALICE and ATLAS experiments. The hardware fulfills all experiment requirements, matches its target performance, and has been running stable in the production systems since the start of Run 2. Firmware and software developments for the hardware evaluation, the design of the board, the mass production hardware tests, as well as the operation of the final board in the HLT, were carried out as part of this work. 74 boards were integrated into the HLT hardware and software infrastructure, with various firmware and software developments, to provide the main experimental data input and output interface of the HLT for Run 2. The hardware cluster finder, an FPGA-based data pre-processing core from the previous generation of RORCs, was ported to the new hardware. It has been improved and extended to meet the experimental requirements throughout Run 2. The throughput of this firmware component could be doubled and the algorithm extended, providing an improved noise rejection and an increased overall mean data compression ratio compared to its previous implementation. The hardware cluster finder forms a crucial component in the HLT data reconstruction and compression scheme with a processing performance of one board equivalent to around ten server nodes for comparable processing steps in software.
The work on the firmware development, especially on the hardware cluster finder, once more demonstrated that developing and maintaining data processing algorithms with the common low-level hardware description methods is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, a high-level synthesis (HLS) hardware description method applying dataflow computing at an algorithmic level to FPGAs was evaluated in this context. The hardware cluster finder served as an example of a typical data processing algorithm in a high energy physics readout application. The existing and highly optimized low-level implementation provided a reference for comparisons in terms of throughput and resource usage. The cluster finder algorithm could be implemented in the dataflow description with comparably little effort, providing fast development cycles, compact code and at, the same time, simplified extension and maintenance options. The performance results in terms of throughput and resource usage are comparable to the manual implementation. The dataflow environment proved to be highly valuable for design space explorations. An integration of the dataflow description into the HLT firmware and software infrastructure could be demonstrated as a proof of concept. A high-level hardware description could ease both the design space exploration, the initial development, the maintenance, and the extension of hardware algorithms for high energy physics readout applications.
Particle identification is an important feature of the ALICE detector at the LHC. In particular, for particle identification via the time-of-flight technique, the precise determination of the event collision time represents an important ingredient of the quality of the measurement. In this paper, the different methods used for such a measurement in ALICE by means of the T0 and the TOF detectors are reviewed. Efficiencies, resolution and the improvement of the particle identification separation power of the methods used are presented for the different LHC colliding systems (pp , p-Pb and Pb-Pb) during the first period of data taking of LHC (Run 1).
Particle identification is an important feature of the ALICE detector at the LHC. In particular, for particle identification via the time-of-flight technique, the precise determination of the event collision time represents an important ingredient of the quality of the measurement. In this paper, the different methods used for such a measurement in ALICE by means of the T0 and the TOF detectors are reviewed. Efficiencies, resolution and the improvement of the particle identification separation power of the methods used are presented for the different LHC colliding systems (pp , p-Pb and Pb-Pb) during the first period of data taking of LHC (Run 1).
Particle identification is an important feature of the ALICE detector at the LHC. In particular, for particle identification via the time-of-flight technique, the precise determination of the event collision time represents an important ingredient of the quality of the measurement. In this paper, the different methods used for such a measurement in ALICE by means of the T0 and the TOF detectors are reviewed. Efficiencies, resolution and the improvement of the particle identification separation power of the methods used are presented for the different LHC colliding systems (pp , p-Pb and Pb-Pb) during the first period of data taking of LHC (Run 1).
Future operation of the CBM detector requires ultra-fast analysis of the continuous stream of data from all subdetector systems. Determining the inter-system time shifts among individual detector systems in the existing prototype experiment mCBM is an essential step for data processing and in particular for stable data taking. Based on the input of raw measurements from all detector systems, the corresponding time correlations can be obtained at digital level by evaluating the differences in time stamps. If the relevant systems are stable during data taking and sufficient digital measurements are available, the distribution of time differences should display a clear peak. Up to now, the outcome of the processed time differences is stored in histograms and the maximum peak is considered, after the evaluation of all timeslices of a run leading to significant run times. The results presented here demonstrate the stability of the synchronicity of mCBM systems. Furthermore it is illustrated that relatively small amounts of raw measurements are sufficient to evaluate corresponding time correlations among individual mCBM detectors, thus enabling fast online monitoring of them in future online data processing.