因果发现已成为希望从观察数据中发现因果关系的科学家和从业者的重要工具。尽管大多数先前的因果发现方法都隐含地假设没有专家领域知识可用，但从业者通常可以从先前的经验中提供此类域知识。最近的工作已将域知识纳入基于约束的因果发现中。但是，大多数基于约束的方法都假定因果忠诚，这在实践中经常被违反。因此，人们对基于精确搜索得分的因果发现方法的重新关注，这些方法不假定因果关系，例如基于*基于*的方法。但是，在领域知识的背景下，没有考虑这些方法。在这项工作中，我们专注于有效地将几种类型的领域知识整合到基于*的因果发现中。在此过程中，我们讨论并解释了域知识如何减少图形搜索空间，然后对潜在的计算收益进行分析。我们通过有关合成和真实数据的实验来支持这些发现，表明即使少量领域知识也可以显着加快基于*基于*的因果关系并提高其绩效和实用性。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

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.

Autonomous vehicles are being deployed with a spectrum of capability, extending from driver assistance features for the highway in personal vehicles (SAE Level 2+) to fully autonomous fleet ride sharing services operating in complex city environments (SAE Level 4+). This spectrum of autonomy often operates in different physical environments with different degrees of assumed driver in-the-loop oversight and hence have very different system and subsystem requirements. At the heart of SAE Level 2 to 5 systems is localization and mapping, which ranges from road determination for feature geofencing or high-level routing, through lane determination for advanced driver assistance, to where-in-lane positioning for full vehicle control. We assess localization and mapping requirements for different levels of autonomy and supported features. This work provides a framework for system decomposition, including the level of redundancy needed to achieve the target level of safety. We examine several representative autonomous and assistance features and make recommendations on positioning requirements as well map georeferencing and information integrity.

Artificial neural networks that can recover latent dynamics from recorded neural activity may provide a powerful avenue for identifying and interpreting the dynamical motifs underlying biological computation. Given that neural variance alone does not uniquely determine a latent dynamical system, interpretable architectures should prioritize accurate and low-dimensional latent dynamics. In this work, we evaluated the performance of sequential autoencoders (SAEs) in recovering three latent chaotic attractors from simulated neural datasets. We found that SAEs with widely-used recurrent neural network (RNN)-based dynamics were unable to infer accurate rates at the true latent state dimensionality, and that larger RNNs relied upon dynamical features not present in the data. On the other hand, SAEs with neural ordinary differential equation (NODE)-based dynamics inferred accurate rates at the true latent state dimensionality, while also recovering latent trajectories and fixed point structure. We attribute this finding to the fact that NODEs allow use of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) of arbitrary capacity to model the vector field. Decoupling the expressivity of the dynamics model from its latent dimensionality enables NODEs to learn the requisite low-D dynamics where RNN cells fail. The suboptimal interpretability of widely-used RNN-based dynamics may motivate substitution for alternative architectures, such as NODE, that enable learning of accurate dynamics in low-dimensional latent spaces.

Recent research in clustering face embeddings has found that unsupervised, shallow, heuristic-based methods -- including $k$-means and hierarchical agglomerative clustering -- underperform supervised, deep, inductive methods. While the reported improvements are indeed impressive, experiments are mostly limited to face datasets, where the clustered embeddings are highly discriminative or well-separated by class (Recall@1 above 90% and often nearing ceiling), and the experimental methodology seemingly favors the deep methods. We conduct a large-scale empirical study of 17 clustering methods across three datasets and obtain several robust findings. Notably, deep methods are surprisingly fragile for embeddings with more uncertainty, where they match or even perform worse than shallow, heuristic-based methods. When embeddings are highly discriminative, deep methods do outperform the baselines, consistent with past results, but the margin between methods is much smaller than previously reported. We believe our benchmarks broaden the scope of supervised clustering methods beyond the face domain and can serve as a foundation on which these methods could be improved. To enable reproducibility, we include all necessary details in the appendices, and plan to release the code.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a tremendous impact across most areas of science. Applications of AI in healthcare have the potential to improve our ability to detect, diagnose, prognose, and intervene on human disease. For AI models to be used clinically, they need to be made safe, reproducible and robust, and the underlying software framework must be aware of the particularities (e.g. geometry, physiology, physics) of medical data being processed. This work introduces MONAI, a freely available, community-supported, and consortium-led PyTorch-based framework for deep learning in healthcare. MONAI extends PyTorch to support medical data, with a particular focus on imaging, and provide purpose-specific AI model architectures, transformations and utilities that streamline the development and deployment of medical AI models. MONAI follows best practices for software-development, providing an easy-to-use, robust, well-documented, and well-tested software framework. MONAI preserves the simple, additive, and compositional approach of its underlying PyTorch libraries. MONAI is being used by and receiving contributions from research, clinical and industrial teams from around the world, who are pursuing applications spanning nearly every aspect of healthcare.

Federated learning (FL) enables the building of robust and generalizable AI models by leveraging diverse datasets from multiple collaborators without centralizing the data. We created NVIDIA FLARE as an open-source software development kit (SDK) to make it easier for data scientists to use FL in their research and real-world applications. The SDK includes solutions for state-of-the-art FL algorithms and federated machine learning approaches, which facilitate building workflows for distributed learning across enterprises and enable platform developers to create a secure, privacy-preserving offering for multiparty collaboration utilizing homomorphic encryption or differential privacy. The SDK is a lightweight, flexible, and scalable Python package, and allows researchers to bring their data science workflows implemented in any training libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost, or even NumPy) and apply them in real-world FL settings. This paper introduces the key design principles of FLARE and illustrates some use cases (e.g., COVID analysis) with customizable FL workflows that implement different privacy-preserving algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/NVFlare.

在过去的十年中，我们看到了工业数据，计算能力的巨大改善以及机器学习的重大理论进步。这为在大规模非线性监控和控制问题上使用现代机器学习工具提供了机会。本文对过程行业的应用进行了对最新结果的调查。