本文介绍了用于回归任务的混合形态神经网络，称为线性扩张 - 渗透回归器（$ \ ell $ -der）。$ \ ell $ - 由线性和形态操作员组成的凸组合给出。它们产生连续的分段线性函数，因此是通用近似值。除了介绍$ \ ell $ - $德模型外，我们还将其培训作为凸（DC）编程问题的差异。确切地说，$ \ ell $ - 通过使用凸 - 孔隙过程（CCP）最小化最小二乘的培训。使用多个回归任务的计算实验证实了所提出的回归器的功效，表现优于其他混合形态模型和最先进的方法，例如多层感知器网络和Radial-BASIS支持矢量回归器。

Stress has a great effect on people's lives that can not be understated. While it can be good, since it helps humans to adapt to new and different situations, it can also be harmful when not dealt with properly, leading to chronic stress. The objective of this paper is developing a stress monitoring solution, that can be used in real life, while being able to tackle this challenge in a positive way. The SMILE data set was provided to team Anxolotl, and all it was needed was to develop a robust model. We developed a supervised learning model for classification in Python, presenting the final result of 64.1% in accuracy and a f1-score of 54.96%. The resulting solution stood the robustness test, presenting low variation between runs, which was a major point for it's possible integration in the Anxolotl app in the future.

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.

The widespread of false information is a rising concern worldwide with critical social impact, inspiring the emergence of fact-checking organizations to mitigate misinformation dissemination. However, human-driven verification leads to a time-consuming task and a bottleneck to have checked trustworthy information at the same pace they emerge. Since misinformation relates not only to the content itself but also to other social features, this paper addresses automatic misinformation checking in social networks from a multimodal perspective. Moreover, as simply naming a piece of news as incorrect may not convince the citizen and, even worse, strengthen confirmation bias, the proposal is a modality-level explainable-prone misinformation classifier framework. Our framework comprises a misinformation classifier assisted by explainable methods to generate modality-oriented explainable inferences. Preliminary findings show that the misinformation classifier does benefit from multimodal information encoding and the modality-oriented explainable mechanism increases both inferences' interpretability and completeness.

Some recent pieces of work in the Machine Learning (ML) literature have demonstrated the usefulness of assessing which observations are hardest to have their label predicted accurately. By identifying such instances, one may inspect whether they have any quality issues that should be addressed. Learning strategies based on the difficulty level of the observations can also be devised. This paper presents a set of meta-features that aim at characterizing which instances of a dataset are hardest to have their label predicted accurately and why they are so, aka instance hardness measures. Both classification and regression problems are considered. Synthetic datasets with different levels of complexity are built and analyzed. A Python package containing all implementations is also provided.

Text classification is a natural language processing (NLP) task relevant to many commercial applications, like e-commerce and customer service. Naturally, classifying such excerpts accurately often represents a challenge, due to intrinsic language aspects, like irony and nuance. To accomplish this task, one must provide a robust numerical representation for documents, a process known as embedding. Embedding represents a key NLP field nowadays, having faced a significant advance in the last decade, especially after the introduction of the word-to-vector concept and the popularization of Deep Learning models for solving NLP tasks, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformer-based Language Models (TLMs). Despite the impressive achievements in this field, the literature coverage regarding generating embeddings for Brazilian Portuguese texts is scarce, especially when considering commercial user reviews. Therefore, this work aims to provide a comprehensive experimental study of embedding approaches targeting a binary sentiment classification of user reviews in Brazilian Portuguese. This study includes from classical (Bag-of-Words) to state-of-the-art (Transformer-based) NLP models. The methods are evaluated with five open-source databases with pre-defined data partitions made available in an open digital repository to encourage reproducibility. The Fine-tuned TLMs achieved the best results for all cases, being followed by the Feature-based TLM, LSTM, and CNN, with alternate ranks, depending on the database under analysis.

Despite being responsible for state-of-the-art results in several computer vision and natural language processing tasks, neural networks have faced harsh criticism due to some of their current shortcomings. One of them is that neural networks are correlation machines prone to model biases within the data instead of focusing on actual useful causal relationships. This problem is particularly serious in application domains affected by aspects such as race, gender, and age. To prevent models from incurring on unfair decision-making, the AI community has concentrated efforts in correcting algorithmic biases, giving rise to the research area now widely known as fairness in AI. In this survey paper, we provide an in-depth overview of the main debiasing methods for fairness-aware neural networks in the context of vision and language research. We propose a novel taxonomy to better organize the literature on debiasing methods for fairness, and we discuss the current challenges, trends, and important future work directions for the interested researcher and practitioner.

Chronic pain is a multi-dimensional experience, and pain intensity plays an important part, impacting the patients emotional balance, psychology, and behaviour. Standard self-reporting tools, such as the Visual Analogue Scale for pain, fail to capture this burden. Moreover, this type of tools is susceptible to a degree of subjectivity, dependent on the patients clear understanding of how to use it, social biases, and their ability to translate a complex experience to a scale. To overcome these and other self-reporting challenges, pain intensity estimation has been previously studied based on facial expressions, electroencephalograms, brain imaging, and autonomic features. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been attempted to base this estimation on the patient narratives of the personal experience of chronic pain, which is what we propose in this work. Indeed, in the clinical assessment and management of chronic pain, verbal communication is essential to convey information to physicians that would otherwise not be easily accessible through standard reporting tools, since language, sociocultural, and psychosocial variables are intertwined. We show that language features from patient narratives indeed convey information relevant for pain intensity estimation, and that our computational models can take advantage of that. Specifically, our results show that patients with mild pain focus more on the use of verbs, whilst moderate and severe pain patients focus on adverbs, and nouns and adjectives, respectively, and that these differences allow for the distinction between these three pain classes.

Specular microscopy assessment of the human corneal endothelium (CE) in Fuchs' dystrophy is challenging due to the presence of dark image regions called guttae. This paper proposes a UNet-based segmentation approach that requires minimal post-processing and achieves reliable CE morphometric assessment and guttae identification across all degrees of Fuchs' dystrophy. We cast the segmentation problem as a regression task of the cell and gutta signed distance maps instead of a pixel-level classification task as typically done with UNets. Compared to the conventional UNet classification approach, the distance-map regression approach converges faster in clinically relevant parameters. It also produces morphometric parameters that agree with the manually-segmented ground-truth data, namely the average cell density difference of -41.9 cells/mm2 (95% confidence interval (CI) [-306.2, 222.5]) and the average difference of mean cell area of 14.8 um2 (95% CI [-41.9, 71.5]). These results suggest a promising alternative for CE assessment.

视觉变压器体系结构已显示在计算机视觉（CV）空间中具有竞争力，在该空间中，它在几个基准测试中剥夺了基于卷积的网络。然而，卷积神经网络（CNN）仍然是强化学习中表示模块的优先体系结构。在这项工作中，我们使用几种最先进的自我监督方法研究了视觉变压器预处理，并评估了该培训框架中的数据效率收益。我们提出了一种称为TOV-VICREG的新的自我监督的学习方法，该方法通过添加时间订单验证任务来扩展Vicreg，以更好地捕获观测值之间的时间关系。此外，我们在样本效率方面通过Atari游戏评估了所得编码器。我们的结果表明，当通过TOV-VICREG进行预估计时，视觉变压器的表现优于其他自我监督的方法，但仍在努力克服CNN。尽管如此，我们在十场比赛中的两场比赛中，我们能够胜过CNN，在我们执行100k台阶评估中。最终，我们认为，深入强化学习（DRL）中的这种方法可能是实现自然语言处理和计算机视觉中所见的新表现的关键。源代码将提供：https：//github.com/mgoulao/tov-vicreg