小儿肌肉骨骼系统的临床诊断依赖于医学成像检查的分析。在医学图像处理管道中，使用深度学习算法的语义分割使人可以自动生成患者特定的三维解剖模型，这对于形态学评估至关重要。但是，小儿成像资源的稀缺性可能导致单个深层分割模型的准确性和泛化性能降低。在这项研究中，我们建议设计一个新型的多任务多任务多域学习框架，在该框架中，单个分割网络对由解剖学的不同部分产生的多个数据集进行了优化。与以前的方法不同，我们同时考虑多个强度域和分割任务来克服小儿数据的固有稀缺性，同时利用成像数据集之间的共享特征。为了进一步提高概括能力，我们从自然图像分类中采用了转移学习方案，以及旨在在共享表示中促进域特异性群集的多尺度对比正则化，以及多连接解剖学先验来执行解剖学上一致的预测。我们评估了使用脚踝，膝盖和肩关节的三个稀缺和小儿成像数据集进行骨分割的贡献。我们的结果表明，所提出的方法在骰子指标中的表现优于个人，转移和共享分割方案，并具有统计学上足够的利润。拟议的模型为智能使用成像资源和更好地管理小儿肌肉骨骼疾病提供了新的观点。

儿科肌肉骨骼系统的形态学和诊断评价在临床实践中至关重要。但是，大多数分段模型在稀缺的儿科成像数据上都不好。我们提出了一种新的预训练的正则化卷积编码器 - 解码器，用于分割异质儿科磁共振（MR）图像的具有挑战性的任务。在这方面，我们采用转移学习方法以及正规化策略来改善分段模型的概括。为此，我们已经构思了用于分割网络的新颖优化方案，其包括丢失函数的额外正则化术语。为了获得全局一致的预测，我们纳入了基于形状的正则化，从自动编码器学习的非线性形状表示来源。另外，通过鉴别器计算的对抗正规化是集成的，以鼓励合理的描绘。评估来自脚踝和肩部关节的两个稀缺的小儿摄像数据集的多骨分割任务的方法，包括病理和健康检查。所提出的方法与先前提出的骰子，灵敏度，特异性，最大对称表面距离，平均对称表面距离和相对绝对体积差异度量的方法更好或以前的方法进行更好或以前的方法进行比例。我们说明所提出的方法可以很容易地集成到各种骨骼分割策略中，并且可以提高在大型非医学图像数据库上预先培训的模型的预测准确性。获得的结果为小儿肌肉骨骼障碍的管理带来了新的视角。

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.

Recent developments of advanced driver-assistance systems necessitate an increasing number of tests to validate new technologies. These tests cannot be carried out on track in a reasonable amount of time and automotive groups rely on simulators to perform most tests. The reliability of these simulators for constantly refined tasks is becoming an issue and, to increase the number of tests, the industry is now developing surrogate models, that should mimic the behavior of the simulator while being much faster to run on specific tasks. In this paper we aim to construct a surrogate model to mimic and replace the simulator. We first test several classical methods such as random forests, ridge regression or convolutional neural networks. Then we build three hybrid models that use all these methods and combine them to obtain an efficient hybrid surrogate model.

Multi-object state estimation is a fundamental problem for robotic applications where a robot must interact with other moving objects. Typically, other objects' relevant state features are not directly observable, and must instead be inferred from observations. Particle filtering can perform such inference given approximate transition and observation models. However, these models are often unknown a priori, yielding a difficult parameter estimation problem since observations jointly carry transition and observation noise. In this work, we consider learning maximum-likelihood parameters using particle methods. Recent methods addressing this problem typically differentiate through time in a particle filter, which requires workarounds to the non-differentiable resampling step, that yield biased or high variance gradient estimates. By contrast, we exploit Fisher's identity to obtain a particle-based approximation of the score function (the gradient of the log likelihood) that yields a low variance estimate while only requiring stepwise differentiation through the transition and observation models. We apply our method to real data collected from autonomous vehicles (AVs) and show that it learns better models than existing techniques and is more stable in training, yielding an effective smoother for tracking the trajectories of vehicles around an AV.

Diffusion models have quickly become the go-to paradigm for generative modelling of perceptual signals (such as images and sound) through iterative refinement. Their success hinges on the fact that the underlying physical phenomena are continuous. For inherently discrete and categorical data such as language, various diffusion-inspired alternatives have been proposed. However, the continuous nature of diffusion models conveys many benefits, and in this work we endeavour to preserve it. We propose CDCD, a framework for modelling categorical data with diffusion models that are continuous both in time and input space. We demonstrate its efficacy on several language modelling tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Denoising diffusions are state-of-the-art generative models which exhibit remarkable empirical performance and come with theoretical guarantees. The core idea of these models is to progressively transform the empirical data distribution into a simple Gaussian distribution by adding noise using a diffusion. We obtain new samples whose distribution is close to the data distribution by simulating a "denoising" diffusion approximating the time reversal of this "noising" diffusion. This denoising diffusion relies on approximations of the logarithmic derivatives of the noised data densities, known as scores, obtained using score matching. Such models can be easily extended to perform approximate posterior simulation in high-dimensional scenarios where one can only sample from the prior and simulate synthetic observations from the likelihood. These methods have been primarily developed for data on $\mathbb{R}^d$ while extensions to more general spaces have been developed on a case-by-case basis. We propose here a general framework which not only unifies and generalizes this approach to a wide class of spaces but also leads to an original extension of score matching. We illustrate the resulting class of denoising Markov models on various applications.

Accurate high-altitude wind forecasting is important for air traffic control. And the large volume of data available for this task makes deep neural network-based models a possibility. However, special methods are required because the data is measured only sparsely: along the main aircraft trajectories and arranged sparsely in space, namely along the main air corridors. Several deep learning approaches have been proposed, and in this work, we show that Transformers can fit this data efficiently and are able to extrapolate coherently from a context set. We show this by an extensive comparison of Transformers to numerous existing deep learning-based baselines in the literature. Besides high-altitude wind forecasting, we compare competing models on other dynamical physical systems, namely those modelled by partial differential equations, in particular the Poisson equation and Darcy Flow equation. For these experiments, in the case where the data is arranged non-regularly in space, Transformers outperform all the other evaluated methods. We also compared them in a more standard setup where the data is arranged on a grid and show that the Transformers are competitive with state-of-the-art methods, even though it does not require regular spacing. The code and datasets of the different experiments will be made publicly available at publication time.

To apply federated learning to drug discovery we developed a novel platform in the context of European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project MELLODDY (grant n{\deg}831472), which was comprised of 10 pharmaceutical companies, academic research labs, large industrial companies and startups. The MELLODDY platform was the first industry-scale platform to enable the creation of a global federated model for drug discovery without sharing the confidential data sets of the individual partners. The federated model was trained on the platform by aggregating the gradients of all contributing partners in a cryptographic, secure way following each training iteration. The platform was deployed on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) multi-account architecture running Kubernetes clusters in private subnets. Organisationally, the roles of the different partners were codified as different rights and permissions on the platform and administrated in a decentralized way. The MELLODDY platform generated new scientific discoveries which are described in a companion paper.