The Age-of-Information (AoI) metric has been widely studied in the theoretical communication networks and queuing systems literature. However, experimental evaluation of its applicability to complex real-world time-sensitive systems is largely lacking. In this work, we develop, implement, and evaluate an AoI-based application layer middleware that enables the customization of WiFi networks to the needs of time-sensitive applications. By controlling the storage and flow of information in the underlying WiFi network, our middleware can: (i) prevent packet collisions; (ii) discard stale packets that are no longer useful; and (iii) dynamically prioritize the transmission of the most relevant information. To demonstrate the benefits of our middleware, we implement a mobility tracking application using a swarm of UAVs communicating with a central controller via WiFi. Our experimental results show that, when compared to WiFi-UDP/WiFi-TCP, the middleware can improve information freshness by a factor of 109x/48x and tracking accuracy by a factor of 4x/6x, respectively. Most importantly, our results also show that the performance gains of our approach increase as the system scales and/or the traffic load increases.

In the past years, deep learning has seen an increase of usage in the domain of histopathological applications. However, while these approaches have shown great potential, in high-risk environments deep learning models need to be able to judge their own uncertainty and be able to reject inputs when there is a significant chance of misclassification. In this work, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of the most commonly used uncertainty and robustness methods for the classification of Whole-Slide-Images under domain shift using the H\&E stained Camelyon17 breast cancer dataset. Although it is known that histopathological data can be subject to strong domain shift and label noise, to our knowledge this is the first work that compares the most common methods for uncertainty estimation under these aspects. In our experiments, we compare Stochastic Variational Inference, Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensembles, Test-Time Data Augmentation as well as combinations thereof. We observe that ensembles of methods generally lead to higher accuracies and better calibration and that Test-Time Data Augmentation can be a promising alternative when choosing an appropriate set of augmentations. Across methods, a rejection of the most uncertain tiles leads to a significant increase in classification accuracy on both in-distribution as well as out-of-distribution data. Furthermore, we conduct experiments comparing these methods under varying conditions of label noise. We observe that the border regions of the Camelyon17 dataset are subject to label noise and evaluate the robustness of the included methods against different noise levels. Lastly, we publish our code framework to facilitate further research on uncertainty estimation on histopathological data.

Charisma is considered as one's ability to attract and potentially also influence others. Clearly, there can be considerable interest from an artificial intelligence's (AI) perspective to provide it with such skill. Beyond, a plethora of use cases opens up for computational measurement of human charisma, such as for tutoring humans in the acquisition of charisma, mediating human-to-human conversation, or identifying charismatic individuals in big social data. A number of models exist that base charisma on various dimensions, often following the idea that charisma is given if someone could and would help others. Examples include influence (could help) and affability (would help) in scientific studies or power (could help), presence, and warmth (both would help) as a popular concept. Modelling high levels in these dimensions for humanoid robots or virtual agents, seems accomplishable. Beyond, also automatic measurement appears quite feasible with the recent advances in the related fields of Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing. Here, we, thereforem present a blueprint for building machines that can appear charismatic, but also analyse the charisma of others. To this end, we first provide the psychological perspective including different models of charisma and behavioural cues of it. We then switch to conversational charisma in spoken language as an exemplary modality that is essential for human-human and human-computer conversations. The computational perspective then deals with the recognition and generation of charismatic behaviour by AI. This includes an overview of the state of play in the field and the aforementioned blueprint. We then name exemplary use cases of computational charismatic skills before switching to ethical aspects and concluding this overview and perspective on building charisma-enabled AI.

Deep learning-based 3D human pose estimation performs best when trained on large amounts of labeled data, making combined learning from many datasets an important research direction. One obstacle to this endeavor are the different skeleton formats provided by different datasets, i.e., they do not label the same set of anatomical landmarks. There is little prior research on how to best supervise one model with such discrepant labels. We show that simply using separate output heads for different skeletons results in inconsistent depth estimates and insufficient information sharing across skeletons. As a remedy, we propose a novel affine-combining autoencoder (ACAE) method to perform dimensionality reduction on the number of landmarks. The discovered latent 3D points capture the redundancy among skeletons, enabling enhanced information sharing when used for consistency regularization. Our approach scales to an extreme multi-dataset regime, where we use 28 3D human pose datasets to supervise one model, which outperforms prior work on a range of benchmarks, including the challenging 3D Poses in the Wild (3DPW) dataset. Our code and models are available for research purposes.

This article concerns Bayesian inference using deep linear networks with output dimension one. In the interpolating (zero noise) regime we show that with Gaussian weight priors and MSE negative log-likelihood loss both the predictive posterior and the Bayesian model evidence can be written in closed form in terms of a class of meromorphic special functions called Meijer-G functions. These results are non-asymptotic and hold for any training dataset, network depth, and hidden layer widths, giving exact solutions to Bayesian interpolation using a deep Gaussian process with a Euclidean covariance at each layer. Through novel asymptotic expansions of Meijer-G functions, a rich new picture of the role of depth emerges. Specifically, we find that the posteriors in deep linear networks with data-independent priors are the same as in shallow networks with evidence maximizing data-dependent priors. In this sense, deep linear networks make provably optimal predictions. We also prove that, starting from data-agnostic priors, Bayesian model evidence in wide networks is only maximized at infinite depth. This gives a principled reason to prefer deeper networks (at least in the linear case). Finally, our results show that with data-agnostic priors a novel notion of effective depth given by \[\#\text{hidden layers}\times\frac{\#\text{training data}}{\text{network width}}\] determines the Bayesian posterior in wide linear networks, giving rigorous new scaling laws for generalization error.

In this paper we study the smooth strongly convex minimization problem $\min_{x}\min_y f(x,y)$. The existing optimal first-order methods require $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\max\{\kappa_x,\kappa_y\}} \log 1/\epsilon)$ of computations of both $\nabla_x f(x,y)$ and $\nabla_y f(x,y)$, where $\kappa_x$ and $\kappa_y$ are condition numbers with respect to variable blocks $x$ and $y$. We propose a new algorithm that only requires $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\kappa_x} \log 1/\epsilon)$ of computations of $\nabla_x f(x,y)$ and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\kappa_y} \log 1/\epsilon)$ computations of $\nabla_y f(x,y)$. In some applications $\kappa_x \gg \kappa_y$, and computation of $\nabla_y f(x,y)$ is significantly cheaper than computation of $\nabla_x f(x,y)$. In this case, our algorithm substantially outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

This paper presents a solution to the GenChal 2022 shared task dedicated to feedback comment generation for writing learning. In terms of this task given a text with an error and a span of the error, a system generates an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) to improve their writing skills. Our solution is based on fine-tuning the T5 model on the initial dataset augmented according to syntactical dependencies of the words located within indicated error span. The solution of our team "nigula" obtained second place according to manual evaluation by the organizers.

Autoencoders are a popular model in many branches of machine learning and lossy data compression. However, their fundamental limits, the performance of gradient methods and the features learnt during optimization remain poorly understood, even in the two-layer setting. In fact, earlier work has considered either linear autoencoders or specific training regimes (leading to vanishing or diverging compression rates). Our paper addresses this gap by focusing on non-linear two-layer autoencoders trained in the challenging proportional regime in which the input dimension scales linearly with the size of the representation. Our results characterize the minimizers of the population risk, and show that such minimizers are achieved by gradient methods; their structure is also unveiled, thus leading to a concise description of the features obtained via training. For the special case of a sign activation function, our analysis establishes the fundamental limits for the lossy compression of Gaussian sources via (shallow) autoencoders. Finally, while the results are proved for Gaussian data, numerical simulations on standard datasets display the universality of the theoretical predictions.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has gained a lot of attention in the field of model compression for edge devices thanks to its effectiveness in compressing large powerful networks into smaller lower-capacity models. Online distillation, in which both the teacher and the student are learning collaboratively, has also gained much interest due to its ability to improve on the performance of the networks involved. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence ensures the proper knowledge transfer between the teacher and student. However, most online KD techniques present some bottlenecks under the network capacity gap. By cooperatively and simultaneously training, the models the KL distance becomes incapable of properly minimizing the teacher's and student's distributions. Alongside accuracy, critical edge device applications are in need of well-calibrated compact networks. Confidence calibration provides a sensible way of getting trustworthy predictions. We propose BD-KD: Balancing of Divergences for online Knowledge Distillation. We show that adaptively balancing between the reverse and forward divergences shifts the focus of the training strategy to the compact student network without limiting the teacher network's learning process. We demonstrate that, by performing this balancing design at the level of the student distillation loss, we improve upon both performance accuracy and calibration of the compact student network. We conducted extensive experiments using a variety of network architectures and show improvements on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive comparisons and ablations with current state-of-the-art online and offline KD techniques.

We introduce a machine-learning (ML)-based weather simulator--called "GraphCast"--which outperforms the most accurate deterministic operational medium-range weather forecasting system in the world, as well as all previous ML baselines. GraphCast is an autoregressive model, based on graph neural networks and a novel high-resolution multi-scale mesh representation, which we trained on historical weather data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)'s ERA5 reanalysis archive. It can make 10-day forecasts, at 6-hour time intervals, of five surface variables and six atmospheric variables, each at 37 vertical pressure levels, on a 0.25-degree latitude-longitude grid, which corresponds to roughly 25 x 25 kilometer resolution at the equator. Our results show GraphCast is more accurate than ECMWF's deterministic operational forecasting system, HRES, on 90.0% of the 2760 variable and lead time combinations we evaluated. GraphCast also outperforms the most accurate previous ML-based weather forecasting model on 99.2% of the 252 targets it reported. GraphCast can generate a 10-day forecast (35 gigabytes of data) in under 60 seconds on Cloud TPU v4 hardware. Unlike traditional forecasting methods, ML-based forecasting scales well with data: by training on bigger, higher quality, and more recent data, the skill of the forecasts can improve. Together these results represent a key step forward in complementing and improving weather modeling with ML, open new opportunities for fast, accurate forecasting, and help realize the promise of ML-based simulation in the physical sciences.