Recent Progress in Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Dynamic Programming for Advanced Control Applications

Reinforcement learning(RL) has roots in dynamic programming and it is called adaptive/approximate dynamic programming(ADP) within the control community. This paper reviews recent developments in ADP along with RL and its applications to various advanced control fields. First, the background of the development of ADP is described, emphasizing the significance of regulation and tracking control problems. Some effective offline and online algorithms for ADP/adaptive critic control are displayed, where the main results towards discrete-time systems and continuous-time systems are surveyed, respectively.Then, the research progress on adaptive critic control based on the event-triggered framework and under uncertain environment is discussed, respectively, where event-based design, robust stabilization, and game design are reviewed. Moreover, the extensions of ADP for addressing control problems under complex environment attract enormous attention. The ADP architecture is revisited under the perspective of data-driven and RL frameworks,showing how they promote ADP formulation significantly.Finally, several typical control applications with respect to RL and ADP are summarized, particularly in the fields of wastewater treatment processes and power systems, followed by some general prospects for future research. Overall, the comprehensive survey on ADP and RL for advanced control applications has d emonstrated its remarkable potential within the artificial intelligence era. In addition, it also plays a vital role in promoting environmental protection and industrial intelligence.

In vivo astrocyte reprogramming following spinal cord injury

Harmful and helpful roles of astrocytes in spinal cord injury(SCI):SCI induce gradable sensory,motor and autonomic impairments that correlate with the lesion severity and the rostro-caudal location of the injury site.The absence of spontaneous axonal regeneration after injury results from neuron-intrinsic and neuron-extrinsic parameters.Indeed,not only adult neurons display limited capability to regrow axons but also the injury environment contains inhibitors to axonal regeneration and a lack of growth-promoting factors.Amongst other cell populations that respond to the lesion,reactive astrocytes were first considered as only detrimental to spontaneous axonal regeneration.Indeed,astrocytes.

Transcriptional reprogramming during human osteoclast differentiation identifies regulators of osteoclast activity

Enhanced osteoclastogenesis and osteoclast activity contribute to the development of osteoporosis,which is characterized by increased bone resorption and inadequate bone formation.As novel antiosteoporotic therapeutics are needed,understanding the genetic regulation of human osteoclastogenesis could help identify potential treatment targets.This study aimed to provide an overview of transcriptional reprogramming during human osteoclast differentiation.Osteoclasts were differentiated from CD14+monocytes from eight female donors.RNA sequencing during differentiation revealed 8980 differentially expressed genes grouped into eight temporal patterns conserved across donors.These patterns revealed distinct molecular functions associated with postmenopausal osteoporosis susceptibility genes based on RNA from iliac crest biopsies and bone mineral density SNPs.Network analyses revealed mutual dependencies between temporal expression patterns and provided insight into subtype-specific transcriptional networks.The donor-specific expression patterns revealed genes at the monocyte stage,such as filamin B(FLNB)and oxidized low-density lipoprotein receptor 1(OLR1,encoding LOX-1),that are predictive of the resorptive activity of mature osteoclasts.The expression of differentially expressed G-protein coupled receptors was strong during osteoclast differentiation,and these receptors are associated with bone mineral density SNPs,suggesting that they play a pivotal role in osteoclast differentiation and activity.The regulatory effects of three differentially expressed G-protein coupled receptors were exemplified by in vitro pharmacological modulation of complement 5 A receptor 1(C5AR1),somatostatin receptor 2(SSTR2),and free fatty acid receptor 4(FFAR4/GPR120).Activating C5AR1 enhanced osteoclast formation,while activating SSTR2 decreased the resorptive activity of mature osteoclasts,and activating FFAR4 decreased both the number and resorptive activity of mature osteoclasts.In conclusion,we report the occurrence of transcriptional reprogramming during human osteoclast differentiation and identified SSTR2 and FFAR4 as antiresorptive G-protein coupled receptors and FLNB and LOX-1 as potential molecular markers of osteoclast activity.These data can help future investigations identify molecular regulators of osteoclast differentiation and activity and provide the basis for novel antiosteoporotic targets.

Uncertainty quantification of inverse analysis for geomaterials using probabilistic programming

Uncertainty is an essentially challenging for safe construction and long-term stability of geotechnical engineering.The inverse analysis is commonly utilized to determine the physico-mechanical parameters.However,conventional inverse analysis cannot deal with uncertainty in geotechnical and geological systems.In this study,a framework was developed to evaluate and quantify uncertainty in inverse analysis based on the reduced-order model(ROM)and probabilistic programming.The ROM was utilized to capture the mechanical and deformation properties of surrounding rock mass in geomechanical problems.Probabilistic programming was employed to evaluate uncertainty during construction in geotechnical engineering.A circular tunnel was then used to illustrate the proposed framework using analytical and numerical solution.The results show that the geomechanical parameters and associated uncertainty can be properly obtained and the proposed framework can capture the mechanical behaviors under uncertainty.Then,a slope case was employed to demonstrate the performance of the developed framework.The results prove that the proposed framework provides a scientific,feasible,and effective tool to characterize the properties and physical mechanism of geomaterials under uncertainty in geotechnical engineering problems.

Rapid Prototype Development Approach for Genetic Programming

Genetic Programming (GP) is an important approach to deal with complex problem analysis and modeling, and has been applied in a wide range of areas. The development of GP involves various aspects, including design of genetic operators, evolutionary controls and implementations of heuristic strategy, evaluations and other mechanisms. When designing genetic operators, it is necessary to consider the possible limitations of encoding methods of individuals. And when selecting evolutionary control strategies, it is also necessary to balance search efficiency and diversity based on representation characteristics as well as the problem itself. More importantly, all of these matters, among others, have to be implemented through tedious coding work. Therefore, GP development is both complex and time-consuming. To overcome some of these difficulties that hinder the enhancement of GP development efficiency, we explore the feasibility of mutual assistance among GP variants, and then propose a rapid GP prototyping development method based on πGrammatical Evolution (πGE). It is demonstrated through regression analysis experiments that not only is this method beneficial for the GP developers to get rid of some tedious implementations, but also enables them to concentrate on the essence of the referred problem, such as individual representation, decoding means and evaluation. Additionally, it provides new insights into the roles of individual delineations in phenotypes and semantic research of individuals.

Adaptive Optimal Discrete-Time Output-Feedback Using an Internal Model Principle and Adaptive Dynamic Programming

In order to address the output feedback issue for linear discrete-time systems, this work suggests a brand-new adaptive dynamic programming(ADP) technique based on the internal model principle(IMP). The proposed method, termed as IMP-ADP, does not require complete state feedback-merely the measurement of input and output data. More specifically, based on the IMP, the output control problem can first be converted into a stabilization problem. We then design an observer to reproduce the full state of the system by measuring the inputs and outputs. Moreover, this technique includes both a policy iteration algorithm and a value iteration algorithm to determine the optimal feedback gain without using a dynamic system model. It is important that with this concept one does not need to solve the regulator equation. Finally, this control method was tested on an inverter system of grid-connected LCLs to demonstrate that the proposed method provides the desired performance in terms of both tracking and disturbance rejection.

A Dimensional Reduction Approach Based on Essential Constraints in Linear Programming

This paper presents a new dimension reduction strategy for medium and large-scale linear programming problems. The proposed method uses a subset of the original constraints and combines two algorithms: the weighted average and the cosine simplex algorithm. The first approach identifies binding constraints by using the weighted average of each constraint, whereas the second algorithm is based on the cosine similarity between the vector of the objective function and the constraints. These two approaches are complementary, and when used together, they locate the essential subset of initial constraints required for solving medium and large-scale linear programming problems. After reducing the dimension of the linear programming problem using the subset of the essential constraints, the solution method can be chosen from any suitable method for linear programming. The proposed approach was applied to a set of well-known benchmarks as well as more than 2000 random medium and large-scale linear programming problems. The results are promising, indicating that the new approach contributes to the reduction of both the size of the problems and the total number of iterations required. A tree-based classification model also confirmed the need for combining the two approaches. A detailed numerical example, the general numerical results, and the statistical analysis for the decision tree procedure are presented.

Sequential quadratic programming-based non-cooperative target distributed hybrid processing optimization method

The distributed hybrid processing optimization problem of non-cooperative targets is an important research direction for future networked air-defense and anti-missile firepower systems. In this paper, the air-defense anti-missile targets defense problem is abstracted as a nonconvex constrained combinatorial optimization problem with the optimization objective of maximizing the degree of contribution of the processing scheme to non-cooperative targets, and the constraints mainly consider geographical conditions and anti-missile equipment resources. The grid discretization concept is used to partition the defense area into network nodes, and the overall defense strategy scheme is described as a nonlinear programming problem to solve the minimum defense cost within the maximum defense capability of the defense system network. In the solution of the minimum defense cost problem, the processing scheme, equipment coverage capability, constraints and node cost requirements are characterized, then a nonlinear mathematical model of the non-cooperative target distributed hybrid processing optimization problem is established, and a local optimal solution based on the sequential quadratic programming algorithm is constructed, and the optimal firepower processing scheme is given by using the sequential quadratic programming method containing non-convex quadratic equations and inequality constraints. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation examples.

A Length-Adaptive Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm for Bi-Objective High-Dimensional Feature Selection

As a crucial data preprocessing method in data mining,feature selection(FS)can be regarded as a bi-objective optimization problem that aims to maximize classification accuracy and minimize the number of selected features.Evolutionary computing(EC)is promising for FS owing to its powerful search capability.However,in traditional EC-based methods,feature subsets are represented via a length-fixed individual encoding.It is ineffective for high-dimensional data,because it results in a huge search space and prohibitive training time.This work proposes a length-adaptive non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm(LA-NSGA)with a length-variable individual encoding and a length-adaptive evolution mechanism for bi-objective highdimensional FS.In LA-NSGA,an initialization method based on correlation and redundancy is devised to initialize individuals of diverse lengths,and a Pareto dominance-based length change operator is introduced to guide individuals to explore in promising search space adaptively.Moreover,a dominance-based local search method is employed for further improvement.The experimental results based on 12 high-dimensional gene datasets show that the Pareto front of feature subsets produced by LA-NSGA is superior to those of existing algorithms.

Generating oligodendroglia from adult mesenchymal cells for transplantation:cell reprogramming or direct lineage conversion?

Cell replacement therapy has long been proposed as a treatment for the damaged nervous system.One of the most challenging aspects of such a strategy,however,is finding sources of donor cells for transplantation.Autologous neural cells are rarely an option as every cell in the nervous system has a defined function that would be lost if that cell was to be removed.One possibility would be sourcing precursor or differentiated cells from fetal tissues;however,aside from ethical issues,heterologous cells are at risk of immunological rejection in the long term.Methodological improvements over the past 15 years have led to the possibility that autologous non-neural cells could be used for cell transplantation through their conversion into neural derivatives.

Developmental exposure to thyroid disruptors:misprogramming of the brain's stem cells in later life?

Introduction:Ever since the discovery of neural stem cells(NSCs)in the adult mammalian brain,scientists have been trying to decipher which signals govern their turnover and lineage commitment to generate neurons and glia.Understanding their role in nervous tissue homeostasis can provide new insights into the etiology of several neurological disorders,and might one day be turned to our advantage to promote endogenous brain injury repair.Others and we have identified thyroid hormone(TH)as a key factor transcriptionally regulating NSC behavior in the largest niche of the adult mammalian brain:the subventricular zone(SVZ).

Promoter replacement of ANT1 induces anthocyanin accumulation and triggers the shade avoidance response through developmental, physiological and metabolic reprogramming in tomato

The accumulation of anthocyanins is a well-known response to abiotic stresses in many plant species.However,the effects of anthocyanin accumulation on light absorbance and photosynthesis are unknown.Here,we addressed this question using a promoter replacement line of tomato constitutively expressing a MYB transcription factor(ANTHOCYANIN1,ANT1)that leads to anthocyanin accumulation.ANT1-overexpressing plants displayed traits associated with shade avoidance response:thinner leaves,lower seed germination rate,suppressed side branching,increased chlorophyll concentration,and lower photosynthesis rates than the wild type.Anthocyanin-rich leaves exhibited higher absorbance of light in the blue and red ends of the spectrum,while higher anthocyanin content in leaves provided photoprotection to high irradiance.Analyses of gene expression and primary metabolites content showed that anthocyanin accumulation produces a reconfiguration of transcriptional and metabolic networks that is consistent with,but not identical to those described for the shade avoidance response.Our results provide novel insights about howanthocyanins accumulation affects the trade-off between photoprotection and growth.

Sustainable Learning of Computer Programming Languages Using Mind Mapping

In the current era of information technology,students need to learn modern programming languages efficiently.The art of teaching/learning program-ming requires many logical and conceptual skills.So it’s a challenging task for the instructors/learners to teach/learn these programming languages effectively and efficiently.Mind mapping is a useful visual tool for establishing ideas and connecting them to solve problems.This research proposed an effective way to teach programming languages through visual tools.This experimental study uses a mind mapping tool to teach two programming environments:Text-based Programming and Blocks-based Programming.We performed the experiments with one hundred and sixty undergraduate students of two public sector universities in the Asia Pacific region.Four different instructional approaches,including block-based language(BBL),text-based languages(TBL),mind map with text-based language(MMTBL)and mind mapping with block-based(MMBBL)are used for this purpose.The results show that instructional approaches using a mind mapping tool to help students solve given tasks in their critical thinking are more effective than other instructional techniques.

NewBee: Context-Free Grammar (CFG) of a New Programming Language for Novice Programmers

Learning programming and using programming languages are the essential aspects of computer science education.Students use programming languages to write their programs.These computer programs(students or practitioners written)make computers artificially intelligent and perform the tasks needed by the users.Without these programs,the computer may be visioned as a pointless machine.As the premise of writing programs is situated with specific programming languages,enormous efforts have been made to develop and create programming languages.However,each program-ming language is domain-specific and has its nuances,syntax and seman-tics,with specific pros and cons.These language-specific details,including syntax and semantics,are significant hurdles for novice programmers.Also,the instructors of introductory programming courses find these language specificities as the biggest hurdle in students learning,where more focus is on syntax than logic development and actual implementation of the program.Considering the conceptual difficulty of programming languages and novice students’struggles with the language syntax,this paper describes the design and development of a Context-Free Grammar(CFG)of a programming language for the novice,newcomers and students who do not have computer science as their major.Due to its syntax proximity to daily conversations,this paper hypothesizes that this language will be easy to use and understand by novice programmers.This paper systematically designed the language by identifying themes from various existing programming languages(e.g.,C,Python).Additionally,this paper surveyed computer science experts from industry and academia,where experts self-reported their satisfaction with the newly designed language.The results indicate that 93%of the experts reported satisfaction with the NewBee for novice,newcomer and non-Computer Sci-ence(CS)major students.

Rules Mining-Based Gene Expression Programming for the Multi-Skill Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

Themulti-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem(MS-RCPSP)is a significantmanagement science problem that extends from the resource-constrained project scheduling problem(RCPSP)and is integrated with a real project and production environment.To solve MS-RCPSP,it is an efficient method to use dispatching rules combined with a parallel scheduling mechanism to generate a scheduling scheme.This paper proposes an improved gene expression programming(IGEP)approach to explore newly dispatching rules that can broadly solve MS-RCPSP.A new backward traversal decoding mechanism,and several neighborhood operators are applied in IGEP.The backward traversal decoding mechanism dramatically reduces the space complexity in the decoding process,and improves the algorithm’s performance.Several neighborhood operators improve the exploration of the potential search space.The experiment takes the intelligent multi-objective project scheduling environment(iMOPSE)benchmark dataset as the training set and testing set of IGEP.Ten newly dispatching rules are discovered and extracted by IGEP,and eight out of ten are superior to other typical dispatching rules.

Stochastic programming based multi-arm bandit offloading strategy for internet of things

In order to solve the high latency of traditional cloud computing and the processing capacity limitation of Internet of Things(IoT)users,Multi-access Edge Computing(MEC)migrates computing and storage capabilities from the remote data center to the edge of network,providing users with computation services quickly and directly.In this paper,we investigate the impact of the randomness caused by the movement of the IoT user on decision-making for offloading,where the connection between the IoT user and the MEC servers is uncertain.This uncertainty would be the main obstacle to assign the task accurately.Consequently,if the assigned task cannot match well with the real connection time,a migration(connection time is not enough to process)would be caused.In order to address the impact of this uncertainty,we formulate the offloading decision as an optimization problem considering the transmission,computation and migration.With the help of Stochastic Programming(SP),we use the posteriori recourse to compensate for inaccurate predictions.Meanwhile,in heterogeneous networks,considering multiple candidate MEC servers could be selected simultaneously due to overlapping,we also introduce the Multi-Arm Bandit(MAB)theory for MEC selection.The extensive simulations validate the improvement and effectiveness of the proposed SP-based Multi-arm bandit Method(SMM)for offloading in terms of reward,cost,energy consumption and delay.The results showthat SMMcan achieve about 20%improvement compared with the traditional offloading method that does not consider the randomness,and it also outperforms the existing SP/MAB based method for offloading.

Stage-specific nutritional management and developmental programming to optimize meat production

Over the past few decades,genetic selection and refined nutritional management have extensively been used to increase the growth rate and lean meat production of livestock.However,the rapid growth rates of modern breeds are often accompanied by a reduction in intramuscular fat deposition and increased occurrences of muscle abnor‑malities,impairing meat quality and processing functionality.Early stages of animal development set the long‑term growth trajectory of offspring.However,due to the seasonal reproductive cycles of ruminant livestock,gestational nutrient deficiencies caused by seasonal variations,frequent droughts,and unfavorable geological locations nega‑tively affect fetal development and their subsequent production efficiency and meat quality.Therefore,enrolling live‑stock in nutritional intervention strategies during gestation is effective for improving the body composition and meat quality of the offspring at harvest.These crucial early developmental stages include embryonic,fetal,and postnatal stages,which have stage‑specific effects on subsequent offspring development,body composition,and meat quality.This review summarizes contemporary research in the embryonic,fetal,and neonatal development,and the impacts of maternal nutrition on the early development and programming effects on the long‑term growth performance of livestock.Understanding the developmental and metabolic characteristics of skeletal muscle,adipose,and fibrotic tissues will facilitate the development of stage‑specific nutritional management strategies to optimize production efficiency and meat quality.

Foreign exchange trading and management with the stochastic dual dynamic programming method

We present a novel tool for generating speculative and hedging foreign exchange(FX)trading policies.Our solution provides a schedule that determines trades in each rebalancing period based on future currency prices,net foreign account positions,and incoming(outgoing)flows from business operations.To obtain such policies,we construct a multistage stochastic programming(MSP)model and solve it using the stochastic dual dynamic programming(SDDP)numerical method,which specializes in solving high-dimensional MSP models.We construct our methodology within an open-source SDDP package,avoiding implementing the method from scratch.To measure the performance of our policies,we model FX prices as a mean-reverting stochastic process with random events that incorporate stochastic trends.We calibrate this price model on seven currency pairs,demonstrating that our trading policies not only outperform the benchmarks for each currency,but may also be close to ex-post optimal solutions.We also show how the tool can be used to generate more or less conservative strategies by adjusting the risk tolerance,and how it can be used in a vari-ety of contexts and time scales,ranging from intraday speculative trading to monthly hedging for business operations.Finally,we examine the impact of increasing trade policy uncertainty(TPU)levels on our findings.Our findings show that the volatility of currencies from emerging economies rises in comparison to currencies from devel-oped markets.We discover that an increase in the TPU level has no effect on the aver-age profit obtained by our method.However,the risk exposure of the policies increases(decreases)for the group of currencies from emerging(developed)markets.

A true triaxial strength criterion for rocks by gene expression programming

Rock strength is a crucial factor to consider when designing and constructing underground projects.This study utilizes a gene expression programming(GEP)algorithm-based model to predict the true triaxial strength of rocks,taking into account the influence of rock genesis on their mechanical behavior during the model building process.A true triaxial strength criterion based on the GEP model for igneous,metamorphic and magmatic rocks was obtained by training the model using collected data.Compared to the modified Weibols-Cook criterion,the modified Mohr-Coulomb criterion,and the modified Lade criterion,the strength criterion based on the GEP model exhibits superior prediction accuracy performance.The strength criterion based on the GEP model has better performance in R2,RMSE and MAPE for the data set used in this study.Furthermore,the strength criterion based on the GEP model shows greater stability in predicting the true triaxial strength of rocks across different types.Compared to the existing strength criterion based on the genetic programming(GP)model,the proposed criterion based on GEP model achieves more accurate predictions of the variation of true triaxial strength(s1)with intermediate principal stress(s2).Finally,based on the Sobol sensitivity analysis technique,the effects of the parameters of the three obtained strength criteria on the true triaxial strength of the rock are analysed.In general,the proposed strength criterion exhibits superior performance in terms of both accuracy and stability of prediction results.

Solving Multi-Objective Linear Programming Problem by Statistical Averaging Method with the Help of Fuzzy Programming Method

A multi-objective linear programming problem is made from fuzzy linear programming problem. It is due the fact that it is used fuzzy programming method during the solution. The Multi objective linear programming problem can be converted into the single objective function by various methods as Chandra Sen’s method, weighted sum method, ranking function method, statistical averaging method. In this paper, Chandra Sen’s method and statistical averaging method both are used here for making single objective function from multi-objective function. Two multi-objective programming problems are solved to verify the result. One is numerical example and the other is real life example. Then the problems are solved by ordinary simplex method and fuzzy programming method. It can be seen that fuzzy programming method gives better optimal values than the ordinary simplex method.