基于得分的扩散模型是一类生成模型，其动力学由将噪声映射到数据中的随机微分方程描述。尽管最近的作品已经开始为这些模型奠定理论基础，但仍缺乏对扩散时间t的作用的分析理解。当前的最佳实践提倡大型T，以确保正向动力学使扩散足够接近已知和简单的噪声分布。但是，对于更好的分数匹配目标和更高的计算效率，应优选较小的t值。从扩散模型的各种解释开始，在这项工作中，我们量化了这一权衡，并提出了一种新方法，通过采用较小的扩散时间来提高培训和采样的质量和效率。实际上，我们展示了如何使用辅助模型来弥合理想和模拟正向动力学之间的间隙，然后进行标准的反向扩散过程。经验结果支持我们的分析；对于图像数据，我们的方法是竞争性W.R.T.根据标准样本质量指标和对数可能的样本。

流量分类，即识别网络中流动的应用程序类型，是许多活动（例如，入侵检测，路由）的战略任务。这项任务面临当前深度学习方法无法解决的一些关键挑战。当前方法的设计没有考虑到网络硬件（例如路由器）通常以有限的计算资源运行的事实。此外，他们不满足监管机构强调的忠实解释性的需求。最后，这些流量分类器将在小型数据集上进行评估，这些数据集未能反映现实世界中应用程序的多样性。因此，本文引入了用于互联网交通分类的轻巧，高效且可解释的逐卷卷积神经网络（LEXNET），该网络依赖于新的残留块（用于轻巧和效率目的）和原型层（用于解释性）。基于商业级数据集，我们的评估表明，Lexnet成功地保持了与最佳性能最先进的神经网络相同的准确性，同时提供了前面提到的其他功能。此外，我们说明了方法的解释性特征，这源于检测到的应用程序原型与最终用户的交流，我们通过与事后方法的比较来强调Lexnet解释的忠诚。

虽然深入学习（DL）技术是解决映射到分类任务的网络问题的有前途的工具，但它们的计算复杂性仍然太高，而是相对于实时业务测量要求。为了降低DL推理成本，我们提出了一种新的缓存范例，我们命名为近似密钥缓存，这返回基于缓存的DL推断结果的所选输入的查找的近似结果。虽然近似缓存点击缓解DL推理工作负载并提高系统吞吐量，但是它们介绍了近似误差。因此，我们将近似密钥高速缓存以纠错原理算法，我们命名为Auto-Refresh。我们分析模拟了我们对经典LRU和理想高速缓存的缓存系统性能，我们对预期的绩效进行了跟踪驱动的评估，并比较了我们所提出的方法与最先进的相似性缓存的好处 - 作证我们提案的实际利益。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward signal, and subject to this constraint also maximises the second reward signal, and so on. We present a family of both action-value and policy gradient algorithms that can be used to solve such problems, and prove that they converge to policies that are lexicographically optimal. We evaluate the scalability and performance of these algorithms empirically, demonstrating their practical applicability. As a more specific application, we show how our algorithms can be used to impose safety constraints on the behaviour of an agent, and compare their performance in this context with that of other constrained reinforcement learning algorithms.

In contextual linear bandits, the reward function is assumed to be a linear combination of an unknown reward vector and a given embedding of context-arm pairs. In practice, the embedding is often learned at the same time as the reward vector, thus leading to an online representation learning problem. Existing approaches to representation learning in contextual bandits are either very generic (e.g., model-selection techniques or algorithms for learning with arbitrary function classes) or specialized to particular structures (e.g., nested features or representations with certain spectral properties). As a result, the understanding of the cost of representation learning in contextual linear bandit is still limited. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem and provide a comprehensive study through an instance-dependent perspective. We show that representation learning is fundamentally more complex than linear bandits (i.e., learning with a given representation). In particular, learning with a given set of representations is never simpler than learning with the worst realizable representation in the set, while we show cases where it can be arbitrarily harder. We complement this result with an extensive discussion of how it relates to existing literature and we illustrate positive instances where representation learning is as complex as learning with a fixed representation and where sub-logarithmic regret is achievable.

Relation extraction (RE) is a sub-discipline of information extraction (IE) which focuses on the prediction of a relational predicate from a natural-language input unit (such as a sentence, a clause, or even a short paragraph consisting of multiple sentences and/or clauses). Together with named-entity recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED), RE forms the basis for many advanced IE tasks such as knowledge-base (KB) population and verification. In this work, we explore how recent approaches for open information extraction (OpenIE) may help to improve the task of RE by encoding structured information about the sentences' principal units, such as subjects, objects, verbal phrases, and adverbials, into various forms of vectorized (and hence unstructured) representations of the sentences. Our main conjecture is that the decomposition of long and possibly convoluted sentences into multiple smaller clauses via OpenIE even helps to fine-tune context-sensitive language models such as BERT (and its plethora of variants) for RE. Our experiments over two annotated corpora, KnowledgeNet and FewRel, demonstrate the improved accuracy of our enriched models compared to existing RE approaches. Our best results reach 92% and 71% of F1 score for KnowledgeNet and FewRel, respectively, proving the effectiveness of our approach on competitive benchmarks.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.