在许多行业中，客户流失预测是一项宝贵的任务。在电信中，鉴于数据的高维度以及确定潜在的挫败感签名是多么困难，这可能代表了关于未来流失行为的重要驱动因素。在这里，我们提出了一个新颖的贝叶斯分层联合模型，该模型能够根据不同电视观看旅程中发生的事件以及事件之间需要多长时间来表征客户资料。该模型大幅度地将数据的维度从每个客户的数千个观察值降低到11个客户级参数估计和随机效果。我们使用来自40个BT客户（有20名活跃和20名最终取消订阅的20人）的数据测试我们的方法，他们的电视观看行为是从2019年10月到2019年12月的，总计约为半百万。使用贝叶斯分层模型的参数估计和随机效应采用不同的机器学习技术，作为在验证中与100 \％真实的正率和14 \％的假正率相关的最高92 \％精度可预测流失的精度放。我们提出的方法是降低数据维度的有效方法，同时保持了高描述性和预测能力。我们提供代码以在https://github.com/rafamoral/profiling_tv_watching_behaviour上实现贝叶斯模型。

This article formulates a generic representation of a path-following controller operating under contained motion, which was developed in the context of surgical robotics. It reports two types of constrained motion: i) Bilateral Constrained Motion, also called Remote Center Motion (RCM), and ii) Unilaterally Constrained Motion (UCM). In the first case, the incision hole has almost the same diameter as the robotic tool. In contrast, in the second state, the diameter of the incision orifice is larger than the tool diameter. The second case offers more space where the surgical instrument moves freely without constraints before touching the incision wall. The proposed method combines two tasks that must operate hierarchically: i) respect the RCM or UCM constraints formulated by equality or inequality, respectively, and ii) perform a surgical assignment, e.g., scanning or ablation expressed as a 3D path-following task. The proposed methods and materials were tested first on our simulator that mimics realistic conditions of middle ear surgery, and then on an experimental platform. Different validation scenarios were carried out experimentally to assess quantitatively and qualitatively each developed approach. Although ultimate precision was not the goal of this work, our concept is validated with enough accuracy (inferior to 100 micrometres) for ear surgery.

Deep reinforcement learning has considerable potential to improve irrigation scheduling in many cropping systems by applying adaptive amounts of water based on various measurements over time. The goal is to discover an intelligent decision rule that processes information available to growers and prescribes sensible irrigation amounts for the time steps considered. Due to the technical novelty, however, the research on the technique remains sparse and impractical. To accelerate the progress, the paper proposes a general framework and actionable procedure that allow researchers to formulate their own optimisation problems and implement solution algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning. The effectiveness of the framework was demonstrated using a case study of irrigated wheat grown in a productive region of Australia where profits were maximised. Specifically, the decision rule takes nine state variable inputs: crop phenological stage, leaf area index, extractable soil water for each of the five top layers, cumulative rainfall and cumulative irrigation. It returns a probabilistic prescription over five candidate irrigation amounts (0, 10, 20, 30 and 40 mm) every day. The production system was simulated at Goondiwindi using the APSIM-Wheat crop model. After training in the learning environment using 1981--2010 weather data, the learned decision rule was tested individually for each year of 2011--2020. The results were compared against the benchmark profits obtained using irrigation schedules optimised individually for each of the considered years. The discovered decision rule prescribed daily irrigation amounts that achieved more than 96% of the benchmark profits. The framework is general and applicable to a wide range of cropping systems with realistic optimisation problems.

Understanding why a model makes certain predictions is crucial when adapting it for real world decision making. LIME is a popular model-agnostic feature attribution method for the tasks of classification and regression. However, the task of learning to rank in information retrieval is more complex in comparison with either classification or regression. In this work, we extend LIME to propose Rank-LIME, a model-agnostic, local, post-hoc linear feature attribution method for the task of learning to rank that generates explanations for ranked lists. We employ novel correlation-based perturbations, differentiable ranking loss functions and introduce new metrics to evaluate ranking based additive feature attribution models. We compare Rank-LIME with a variety of competing systems, with models trained on the MS MARCO datasets and observe that Rank-LIME outperforms existing explanation algorithms in terms of Model Fidelity and Explain-NDCG. With this we propose one of the first algorithms to generate additive feature attributions for explaining ranked lists.

We present the Recurrent Interface Network (RIN), a neural net architecture that allocates computation adaptively to the input according to the distribution of information, allowing it to scale to iterative generation of high-dimensional data. Hidden units of RINs are partitioned into the interface, which is locally connected to inputs, and latents, which are decoupled from inputs and can exchange information globally. The RIN block selectively reads from the interface into latents for high-capacity processing, with incremental updates written back to the interface. Stacking multiple blocks enables effective routing across local and global levels. While routing adds overhead, the cost can be amortized in recurrent computation settings where inputs change gradually while more global context persists, such as iterative generation using diffusion models. To this end, we propose a latent self-conditioning technique that "warm-starts" the latents at each iteration of the generation process. When applied to diffusion models operating directly on pixels, RINs yield state-of-the-art image and video generation without cascades or guidance, while being domain-agnostic and up to 10$\times$ more efficient compared to specialized 2D and 3D U-Nets.

Online ride-hailing services have become a prevalent transportation system across the world. In this paper, we study a challenging problem of how to direct vacant taxis around a city such that supplies and demands can be balanced in online ride-hailing services. We design a new reward scheme that considers multiple performance metrics of online ride-hailing services. We also propose a novel deep reinforcement learning method named Deep-Q-Network with Action Mask (AM-DQN) masking off unnecessary actions in various locations such that agents can learn much faster and more efficiently. We conduct extensive experiments using a city-scale dataset from Chicago. Several popular heuristic and learning methods are also implemented as baselines for comparison. The results of the experiments show that the AM-DQN attains the best performances of all methods with respect to average failure rate, average waiting time for customers, and average idle search time for vacant taxis.

There is considerable interest in predicting the pathogenicity of protein variants in human genes. Due to the sparsity of high quality labels, recent approaches turn to \textit{unsupervised} learning, using Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) to train generative models of natural sequence variation within each gene. These generative models then predict variant likelihood as a proxy to evolutionary fitness. In this work we instead combine this evolutionary principle with pretrained protein language models (LMs), which have already shown promising results in predicting protein structure and function. Instead of training separate models per-gene, we find that a single protein LM trained on broad sequence datasets can score pathogenicity for any gene variant zero-shot, without MSAs or finetuning. We call this unsupervised approach \textbf{VELM} (Variant Effect via Language Models), and show that it achieves scoring performance comparable to the state of the art when evaluated on clinically labeled variants of disease-related genes.

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

基于各种非负矩阵分解（NMF）方法为成本函数添加了新术语，以使模型适应特定任务，例如聚类或保留减少空间中的某些结构属性（例如，局部不变性）。附加的术语主要由高参数加权，以控制整体公式的平衡，以指导优化过程实现目标。结果是一种参数化的NMF方法。但是，NMF方法采用了无监督的方法来估计分解矩阵。因此，不能保证使用新的特征执行预测（例如分类）的能力。这项工作的目的是设计一个进化框架，以学习参数化NMF的超参数，并以监督的方式估算分解矩阵，以更适合分类问题。此外，我们声称，将基于NMF的算法分别应用于不同的类对，而不是将其应用于整个数据集，从而提高了矩阵分解过程的有效性。这导致训练具有不同平衡参数值的多个参数化的NMF算法。采用了交叉验证组合学习框架，并使用遗传算法来识别最佳参数值集。我们对真实和合成数据集进行的实验证明了所提出的方法的有效性。

干眼症（DED）的患病率为5％至50％，是眼科医生咨询的主要原因之一。 DED的诊断和定量通常依赖于通过缝隙灯 - 检查的眼表面分析。但是，评估是主观的且不可再生的。为了改善诊断，我们建议1）使用考试期间获得的视频记录在3D中跟踪眼表面，以及2）使用注册框架对严重程度进行评分。我们的注册方法使用无监督的图像到深度学习。这些方法从灯光和阴影中学习深度，并根据深度图估算姿势。但是，DED考试经历尚未解决的挑战，包括移动的光源，透明的眼组织等。为了克服这些挑战，我们为这些挑战并估算了自我动机，我们实施了联合CNN体系结构，具有多种损失，包括先前的已知信息，即通过眼睛的形状，即通过语义分割以及球体拟合。所达到的跟踪误差优于最先进的，其平均欧几里得距离低至我们的测试集中图像宽度的0.48％。该注册将DED严重性分类提高了0.20 AUC差异。拟议的方法是第一个通过单眼视频监督来解决DED诊断的方法