自我监督的对比表示学习提供了从未标记的医学数据集中学习有意义的视觉表示的优势，以进行转移学习。但是，将当前的对比度学习方法应用于医疗数据而不考虑其特定区域的解剖学特征可能会导致视觉表示，这些视觉表示在外观和语义上是不一致的。在本文中，我们建议通过解剖学对比度学习（AWCL）改善医学图像的视觉表示，该学习结合了解剖学信息，以以对比度学习方式增强正/阴性对采样。为自动化的胎儿超声成像任务展示了所提出的方法，从而使从解剖学上相似的相同或不同的超声扫描实现了正对，这些扫描在解剖学上相似，可以将其拉在一起，从而改善了表示的学习。我们从经验上研究了与粗粒和细粒度的粒度纳入解剖信息的效果，以进行对比学习，并发现使用细粒度的解剖学信息的学习能够保留阶层内差异比其对应物更有效。我们还分析了解剖比对我们的AWCL框架的影响，发现使用更独特但解剖学上的样品构成阳性对的影响会带来更好的质量表示。大规模胎儿超声数据集的实验表明，我们的方法对学习表征有效，可以很好地转移到三个临床下游任务，并且与受监督的Imagenet和当前的先进对比度学习方法相比，取得了优越的性能。特别是，在跨域分割任务上，AWCL的表现优于Imagenet监督方法，高于13.8％，基于最先进的对比度方法的方法为7.1％。

眼睛跟踪器可以在超声（US）扫描期间为超声检查员提供视觉指导。对于经验丰富的运营商来说，这种指导可能是有价值的，可以提高他们在操纵探测器以实现所需飞机方面的扫描技能。在本文中，提出了一种多模式的指导方法（多模式形式的指导方法）来捕获现实世界中的视频信号，同步注视和统一框架内的探测运动之间的逐步依赖性。为了了解目光运动与探测运动之间的因果关系，我们的模型利用多任务学习共同学习了两个相关任务：预测经验丰富的超声仪将在常规产科扫描中执行的凝视运动和探测信号。这两个任务通过模态感知的空间图关联，以检测多模式输入之间的共发生并共享有用的跨模式信息。多模式形式的扫描路径不是确定性的扫描路径，可以通过估计实际扫描的概率分布来扫描多样性。通过三个典型的产科扫描检查进行的实验表明，新方法在探针运动指导和凝视运动预测方面都优于单任务学习。多模态偏见还提供了一个视觉引导信号，对于224x288 US图像，错误率小于10像素。

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) captures cross-sectional data and is used for the screening, monitoring, and treatment planning of retinal diseases. Technological developments to increase the speed of acquisition often results in systems with a narrower spectral bandwidth, and hence a lower axial resolution. Traditionally, image-processing-based techniques have been utilized to reconstruct subsampled OCT data and more recently, deep-learning-based methods have been explored. In this study, we simulate reduced axial scan (A-scan) resolution by Gaussian windowing in the spectral domain and investigate the use of a learning-based approach for image feature reconstruction. In anticipation of the reduced resolution that accompanies wide-field OCT systems, we build upon super-resolution techniques to explore methods to better aid clinicians in their decision-making to improve patient outcomes, by reconstructing lost features using a pixel-to-pixel approach with an altered super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) architecture.

Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in the world, and early DR detection is necessary to prevent vision loss and support an appropriate treatment. In this work, we leverage interactive machine learning and introduce a joint learning framework, termed DRG-Net, to effectively learn both disease grading and multi-lesion segmentation. Our DRG-Net consists of two modules: (i) DRG-AI-System to classify DR Grading, localize lesion areas, and provide visual explanations; (ii) DRG-Expert-Interaction to receive feedback from user-expert and improve the DRG-AI-System. To deal with sparse data, we utilize transfer learning mechanisms to extract invariant feature representations by using Wasserstein distance and adversarial learning-based entropy minimization. Besides, we propose a novel attention strategy at both low- and high-level features to automatically select the most significant lesion information and provide explainable properties. In terms of human interaction, we further develop DRG-Net as a tool that enables expert users to correct the system's predictions, which may then be used to update the system as a whole. Moreover, thanks to the attention mechanism and loss functions constraint between lesion features and classification features, our approach can be robust given a certain level of noise in the feedback of users. We have benchmarked DRG-Net on the two largest DR datasets, i.e., IDRID and FGADR, and compared it to various state-of-the-art deep learning networks. In addition to outperforming other SOTA approaches, DRG-Net is effectively updated using user feedback, even in a weakly-supervised manner.

In this work a novel recommender system (RS) for Tourism is presented. The RS is context aware as is now the rule in the state-of-the-art for recommender systems and works on top of a tourism ontology which is used to group the different items being offered. The presented RS mixes different types of recommenders creating an ensemble which changes on the basis of the RS's maturity. Starting from simple content-based recommendations and iteratively adding popularity, demographic and collaborative filtering methods as rating density and user cardinality increases. The result is a RS that mutates during its lifetime and uses a tourism ontology and natural language processing (NLP) to correctly bin the items to specific item categories and meta categories in the ontology. This item classification facilitates the association between user preferences and items, as well as allowing to better classify and group the items being offered, which in turn is particularly useful for context-aware filtering.

Neural compression offers a domain-agnostic approach to creating codecs for lossy or lossless compression via deep generative models. For sequence compression, however, most deep sequence models have costs that scale with the sequence length rather than the sequence complexity. In this work, we instead treat data sequences as observations from an underlying continuous-time process and learn how to efficiently discretize while retaining information about the full sequence. As a consequence of decoupling sequential information from its temporal discretization, our approach allows for greater compression rates and smaller computational complexity. Moreover, the continuous-time approach naturally allows us to decode at different time intervals. We empirically verify our approach on multiple domains involving compression of video and motion capture sequences, showing that our approaches can automatically achieve reductions in bit rates by learning how to discretize.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.